McKinney Falls: The Ranch Home of Thomas F. McKinney, Pioneer Texas Entrepreneur
64
McKinney Falls: The Ranch Home of Thomas F. McKinney, Pioneer Texas Entrepreneur
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Overview
Born in Kentucky in 1801, McKinney led an adventuresome life on the early Texas frontier. In 1823, he and his cousin Phil Sublett left Missouri with a Santa Fe caravan. Finding the market there glutted, they took their goods on south to Chihuahua, Mexico. Returning through Saltillo and San Antonio, they stopped long enough in Stephen F. Austin's fledgling Texas colony for McKinney to claim a league of land. En route home, the men stopped in Nacogdoches where both young men settled and married.
McKinney became a successful trader, eventually moving to the Brazos River valley, a jumping off point for his pack trains of cotton to Saltillo. Handy with a Kentucky rifle and fluent in Spanish, he traveled in Texas and Mexico as a businessman and made valuable contacts for the commission business he founded at the mouth of the Brazos in 1834. His firm of McKinney and Williams prospered and helped supply the Texas revolution in 1835–36.
In 1837, McKinney and others founded the Galveston City Company. When he moved the McKinney & Williams commission house there, he became one of the wealthiest leaders of the new Republic. He was a power behind the political scenes, supporting Sam Houston, among others. After statehood, he served in the Texas House of Representatives. A Unionist like Houston in 1860, McKinney opposed secession, but when Texas left the Union, he reluctantly helped the struggling Confederacy. Eventually Confederate mismanagement and corruption ruined McKinney and he lost his fortune. When he died at McKinney Falls in 1871, after years of ranching and raising thoroughbred horses, Thomas F. McKinney had lived an eventful and influential life that spanned the entire early history of Texas.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781625110091 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Texas State Historical Assn |
| Publication date: | 01/30/2014 |
| Series: | Fred Rider Cotten Popular History Series , #12 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 64 |
| Sales rank: | 443,983 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Mckinney Falls
The Ranch Home of Thomas F. McKinney, Pioneer Texas Entrepreneur
By Margaret Swett Henson
Texas A&M University Press
Copyright © 1999 Texas Parks and Wildlife DepartmentAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62511-009-1
CHAPTER 1
THE PARK LAND BEFORE 1850
THE SOLID-ROCK FORD on Onion Creek in McKinney Falls State Park north of the landmark Pilot Knob attracted nomadic hunter-gatherers five thousand years ago, perhaps even earlier. Archeological evidence indicates the presence of ancient campsites in the rock shelters along the stream. A recent study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel routes between San Antonio and Nacogdoches reveals that the Spanish followed the ancient Indian trails along the south side of Onion Creek to its mouth and a crossing on the Colorado River. Nineteenth-century Texas natives continued to use this path until the Anglo Texans dominated the area in the 1840s.
The haunting ruins of Thomas Freeman McKinney's 1850s stone house overlook this ford and the scenic lower waterfall on Onion Creek. If the water in the creek is low, visitors can cross this volcanic outflow from the Pilot Knob and climb the hill to view the foundation and remaining walls of what was once a comfortable home. In 1974 before developing the park and opening it to the public, Texas Parks and Wildlife archeologists and members of the Texas Archaeological Society carefully excavated the homesite and other sites of interest. A few of the artifacts they found are displayed in the park's Smith Interpretive Center along with photgraphs of the McKinneys and exhibits explaining the unique geologic formations, the flora and fauna, and other material.
The 672 acres that now make up the state park represent only a small portion of the undeveloped nine leagues (39, 852 acres) that McKinney bought in the Santiago del Valle survey in 1839. While Del Valle was the the origninal patentee, he was a politician in the neighboring state of Coahuila and never even visited Texas. After Mexico won its independence from Spain, sparsely populated Texas and Coahuila were temporarily joined as a single state when the Mexican constitution was adopted in 1824. Hoping to increase the Hispanic presence in Texas and counter the growing Anglo Texan majority, Coahuila-Texas allowed native-born Mexicans to purchase unlocated eleven-league grants in Texas at low cost, expecting them to use the land to found new towns. Del Valle, however, like other Mexican speculators, defeated the government's intent by selling his unlocated Texas land grants to Anglo Texans.
The history of the Del Valle tract illustrates Texas land speculating fever in the 1830s among both native Mexicans and Anglo American newcomers. Stephen F. Austin bought three unlocated grants from Mexican politicians for $1,000 while he was in the state capital at Saltillo in 1832. He sent the necessary papers to his lieutenant, Samuel May Williams, for Williams to locate the huge tracts and have them surveyed. Austin intended one for his personal use to be on the north side of the Colorado River near Mount Bonnell. Another was to be surveyed on the south bank along Onion Creek and in 1833 Austin told Williams to locate the Santiago del Valle grant (now only ten leagues and apparently Williams's property) on that site if Williams so desired. The ten leagues may represent Austin's payment for Williams's services, while the other league (4,428 acres) paid for a survey. Austin warned his assistant to complete the paperwork because the expiration date on locating these grants was approaching and added that similar unlocated permits were then selling for huge sums—up to $10,000 each—at the state capital.
Williams, as agent for Del Valle, had the Anglo Texan alcalde in San Felipe, the capital of Austin's colony, complete the transaction. Using the same power of attorney from Del Valle, Williams then sold the undeveloped ten leagues (44, 280 acres) on the frontier to business associate Michel B. Menard for $2,500 (5.6 cents per acre) on July 16,1835. Four years later on February 8,1839, one month after the Republic of Texas Congress chose the land across the Colorado River for the new capital named Austin, McKinney, still in partnership with Williams, bought the Del Valle tract from Menard. McKinney paid $4,500 (11 cents an acre) for what was then a nine-league (39,852 acres) tract. Seemingly its location across the river from the new capital city increased the property's value. All of these amounts except Austin's first $1,000 most likely were debts owed on other business ventures in a frontier society dependent on scarce gold coins, personal IOUs, heavily discounted paper money, and barter.
McKinney regarded his nine leagues on the western edge of the settlements as a future project and postponed developing his ranch on Onion Creek until almost 1850. Economic hard times during the Republic of Texas between 1836 and 1845 forced him to remain cautious. Also, the frontier was vulnerable to raids by both Indians and Mexicans. Although the town of Austin was established in 1839 and Travis County was created the following year, the area around the infant capital remained a sparsely settled frontier. In fact, the remote village was temporarily abandoned as the capital in 1842 and moved to Washington on the Brazos River when Mexican military raiders briefly occupied San Antonio in March and again in September. The frontier capital was reborn in July 1845 when delegates held a convention there to approve the annexation of Texas to the United States. Following annexation, Austin remained the state capital and McKinney began to make plans for Onion Creek.
CHAPTER 2THOMAS F. MCKINNEY BEFORE MOVING TO ONION CREEK, 1801–1850
THOMAS FREEMAN MCKINNEY was born November 1, 1801, the eldest son of Abraham and Eleanor "Nelly" Prather McKinney. He had four sisters and three brothers. Neighbors recognized McKinney's father as a great hunter who took minimal interest in farming or raising horses like his father, Charles. Charles McKinney, an immigrant, arrived in Virginia in the 1750s and raised horses on the Virginia-North Carolina border in an area where neighbors raced thoroughbreds and quarter horses. In 1784 Charles moved his family and the horses through the Cumberland Gap into the Kentucky bluegrass region. Young "Freeman," as his mother called him in honor of her step-grandfather, adopted the skills of both his father and grandfather; he appreciated good horses and was an excellent marksman. Abraham moved his family west to Christian County, Kentucky, by 1811 and onward to Howard County, Missouri Territory, in 1819.
In 1823 at age twenty-two, and now known as "Mac" to his friends, McKinney took his horse and rifle to follow the Santa Fe trail with his distant cousin Philip Allen Sublett, kin to the mountain men of that name. The cousins joined Stephen Cooper's second expedition to Santa Fe that left Franklin, Missouri, in May 1823, with pack horses loaded with trading goods. The party suffered a serious Indian attack southwest of Fort Osage and some members suffered terrible thirst when the group lost its way between water holes taking the Cimarron Cutoff in southwestern Kansas. They finally reached Santa Fe in November, where they discovered that the townspeople had already spent their money on the goods of a group of Missouri traders that had arrived earlier. The two adventurers joined an armed group heading south through El Paso to Chihuahua, which was a major trading outpost. Its residents were eager for United States-made goods, and unlike Santa Fe residents dependent on the arrival of annual payrolls, had a ready silver supply with a mint and a thriving economy. The cousins may have even travelled south to Durango. During this journey, the pair learned sufficient Spanish for trading purposes.
McKinney was well suited to this lifestyle by temperament and training. In the 1870s his younger brother James P. McKinney described him thus: "He was about five feet ten inches tall, broad-shouldered, of muscular build, and weighed ordinarily about 170 pounds." He had a "fair common English education for the times, writing and spelling with grammatical correctness." Fond of adventure, he never knew fear, loved excitement and change, and generally remained firm, resolute, genial and warm hearted. Though a man of "strong prejudices" he was always just, liberal to a fault, and had both bitter enemies and many warm, ardent friends. However, his temper was quick and easily excited, "often unreasonably so," and his anger vehement. James added that his brother was a man of impulses who did things on the spur of the moment, often contrary to better judgment, but was usually hopeful and trusted that all things would come out right in the end.
McKinney and Sublett decided not to retrace their steps, but to return home by way of Texas. Mac's uncle Stephen Prather, his mother's brother, lived near Nacogdoches where he had an Indian trading post on Attoyac Bayou, the present-day boundary between Nacogdoches and San Augustine counties. He traded with the nearby Alabama and Coushatta villages, exchanging merchandise for livestock, which he forwarded to Louisiana. McKinney and Sublett's route to Texas led through Saltillo, the capital of Coahuila-Texas, where they most likely bought horses and pack animals, which were in demand in Texas. The pair stopped in San Felipe, the center of Stephen F. Austin's colony on the Brazos River, where a number of Missouri and Kentucky residents were settling. McKinney applied for and received a head-right league of land on August 16, 1824. This was the standard land grant of 4, 428 acres to a head of a family at the low cost of $192 in fees paid to the surveyor, the clerk, and the state land commissioner. He located his league close to the San Antonio-Nacogdoches road crossing of the Brazos River not far from the present-day campus of Texas A&M University, and hoped it would be an excellent site for resting livestock or travelers along the major road.
McKinney never developed the site, however, and instead he and Sublett settled in the Nacogdoches district and both were married by 1828. Mac and his wife, Nancy Watts, had a store and home on the square in the town of Nacogdoches and met Indian traders at a campground east of town. It was during this period that Mac met Michel B. Menard, a French Canadian trader who accompanied a band of Shawnee into eastern Texas. Menard had been their resident trader in Missouri and Arkansas while connected with his uncle Pierre Menard's trading house at Kaskaskia.
About 1829 Mac acquired a slave who could handle horses and accompany him on his travels. Cary McKinney, as he was known when he gained his freedom, became an express rider during the Texas Revolution in 1836. This meant that Cary knew Texas geography well enough to take messages almost anywhere and avoid capture. In November 1839 Cary, with his petition for emancipation, took a wagon load of supplies from Galveston to Austin, the new capital of the Republic. The certificate Thomas McKinney signed said, "Bearer, a man of color," had been his slave for ten years and was faithful, honest, had carried messages besides earning the money to buy himself, his wife, and child. Sam Williams, a member of Congress, was already in the new town and was waiting for his trunk, which was on the wagon.
McKinney seemed to have had a closer personal relationship with his few black bondsmen than did most slaveholders. He never was a planter or farmer who needed a large number of field hands. The most slaves he ever owned was twenty-one in 1860, which included seven under the age of ten; because they lived in five houses, small family groups appear to have been the norm. From the meager evidence in family letters and documents, it appears the McKinney blacks were house servants, horse handlers, and handymen who maintained the barns, the garden, planted oats, helped at the mill, and hauled water to the house overlooking Onion Creek. This was probably similar to the pattern of McKinney's father and grandfather. Abraham owned a maximum of nine slaves (three over age sixteen) between 1797 and 1817 according to tax records in Lincoln and Christian County, Kentucky. One family story mentioned a black majordomo who directed the Charles McKinney move through the Cumberland Gap. After Mac moved to Galveston in 1837, he helped Cary acquire town lots from the Galveston City Company and build the only livery stable in town. In 1846 Cary owned three lots, seven horses, and three carriages. He died soon after, but his wife and married daughter still lived there in 1850. One Galvestonian recalled that in 1838, Cary was the "best armed" among the twenty-seven men who rallied when the night sentry mistook a creaky oxcart for a Mexican invasion force.
By the end of 1830, Mac and Nancy left East Texas and moved to San Felipe, where McKinney entered a partnership with Jared E. Groce, whose cotton plantation, Bernardo, was near present-day Hempstead. McKinney, Groce, & Company experimented in taking Groce's cotton to Saltillo in 1830 and 1831 because of the high nine-cents-a-pound tariff levied in New Orleans on imported Mexican (Texas) cotton that only brought the seller eighteen cents per pound. In December 1830 Mac traveled to Saltillo with twelve mules laden with cotton, but he found the route difficult because of a lack of grass and water. The next year he chartered a schooner and took the cotton to Matamoros, where he hired carts to take the bales to Saltillo. That, too, proved expensive because the Saltillo mill was not in operation and he had to continue south to San Luis Potosi. On the return from that city, bandits attacked McKinney's silver-laden mule train. Mac's mule drivers cut loose the bags in case the animals stampeded and fired at the robbers killing three and wounding others. McKinney's skill with his rifle impressed the countryside, and the governor arrested the thieves, whose leader had been McKinney's host the previous evening. Mac's only loss was one mule.
The brief association with Groce was only one of McKinney's business ventures at this time. He helped Michel B. Menard build a sawmill on the lower Trinity River and gradually increased his land holdings by taking acreage to settle debts. At the end of 1833 McKinney forged a new partnership with Samuel May Williams to open a commission house at the mouth of the Brazos River. Mac was to handle the the physical side of buying and selling livestock and agricultural products while Williams was to keep the books and use his family's extensive mercantile connections in the United States for credit and contacts. Stephen F. Austin gave them land on the west side of the river near the mouth for a townsite they named Quintana, probably for a commercial associate in San Luis Potosi. During 1834 McKinney erected a warehouse and store and built homes for himself and Williams; he soon added a wharf, a boatways, and a cotton gin.
Trouble with the Mexican customs collector and troops stationed opposite Quintana at Velasco and at Anahuac on upper Galveston Bay took place while McKinney was absent in June 1832. The Anglo Texans forced the administration troops to withdraw and claimed that they were acting in concert with General Santa Anna, then a federalist reformer, who had led the successful civil war against the centralist administration.
In January 1835 the customs collectors and troops returned to Texas ports and in May a patrol boat seized and confiscated McKinney's new schooner, Columbia, as it arrived at the Brazos from New Orleans. He was on board and the cruiser's captain accused him of smuggling and having passengers without passports. McKinney and the passengers were released, but the cargo retained. This incident and a similar seizure in Galveston Bay angered Anglo Texans sufficiently to resist President Santa Anna's resumption of the despised tariff policy. With the aid of his New Orleans trading partners, McKinney acquired another schooner, the San Felipe, which he ordered armed before it left the Crescent City in July with Mexican patriot Lorenzo de Zavala. An opponent of Santa Anna and now a refugee, Zavala came to Texas to arouse resistance to the administration. Zavala stayed with the McKinneys at Quintana and Mac introduced him to political leaders at San Felipe, Brazoria, and Columbia.
The armed San Felipe brought Stephen F. Austin to Quintana from New Orleans on September 1, 1835. Austin had left Texas in April 1833 carrying petitions to Mexico City for reforms, including separate statehood for Texas. A hasty letter Austin wrote during a fit of despondency ended up in the hands of the authorities who considered it seditious and reason enough to arrest Austin and hold him until mid-1835. As the San Felipe approached the Brazos, the captain saw the Correo Mexicana about to seize the U.S. brig Tremont as it unloaded lumber at McKinney's wharf. Sending Austin and other passengers ashore, the captain prepared to attack, but adverse wind prevented immediate pursuit. McKinney and volunteers with rifles boarded McKinney's new steamboat Laura, which was already in the river, and headed into the Gulf to tow the San Felipe into firing position. The action could be seen from shore and the schooner's cannon forced the the Correo to surrender. The Texans sent the officers and crew of the Correo to New Orleans to be tried as pirates in the U. S. District Court.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mckinney Falls by Margaret Swett Henson. Copyright © 1999 Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Excerpted by permission of Texas A&M University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
INTRODUCTION,1. THE PARK LAND BEFORE 1850,
2. THOMAS F. MCKINNEY BEFORE MOVING TO ONION CREEK, 1801–1850,
3. MCKINNEY FALLS RANCH, 1847–1859: A GROWING FAMILY COMPOUND,
4. THE MCKINNEYS: WARTIME AND THE AFTERMATH, 1860–1896,
5. THE ONION CREEK COMMUNITY: A BRIEF LOOK,
NOTES,