By Steve Hathcock
Special to the PARADE
TEXAS LONGHORNS JOIN THE REVOLUTION
How a few thousand cattle, determined vaqueros, and one very hungry Spanish general helped the American cause One Hoofbeat At A Time!
NEW ORLEANS/SAN ANTONIO DE BÉXAR, 1779–1782 — When Spain decided to declare war on Britain in 1779, Governor Bernardo de Gálvez of Louisiana faced a classic military problem: an army marches on its stomach, and those stomachs were growling. Fortunately, Gálvez remembered something from his earlier days on the frontier.
Out in Spanish Texas, near San Antonio de Béxar and La Bahía (today’s Goliad), the countryside was practically carpeted with cattle. In 1778, diplomat Athanase de Mézières had confirmed the obvious: thousands of the beasts were there, meals on the hoof. So Gálvez did the sensible thing. In June 1779 he sent a message to Texas Governor Domingo Cabello with a polite but firm request: “Send beef. Lots of it.”
By August, roughly 2,000 head of Texas cattle — rounded up from mission ranches and private ranchos — were on the move. History’s first official, government-authorized cattle drive out of Texas had begun. The route was no Sunday stroll.
The herds gathered at Presidio La Bahía, then plodded northeast through Nacogdoches, across to Natchitoches, and finally to Opelousas, Louisiana, where Gálvez’s quartermasters waited with open arms and empty cooking pots.
Between 1779 and 1782, Spanish records and later research by historian Robert H. Thonhoff show that somewhere between 9,000 and 15,000 cattle made the journey in herds of about a thousand at a time. A few hundred horses tagged along too, destined for cavalry and artillery duty.
Who supplied the walking steaks? Franciscan mission ranches and private ranchers — many of them Canary Island families or Tejanos — including the likes of Manuel Delgado, Ignacio Calvillo, Vizente Álvarez Travieso, and José Santiago Seguín.
The real heroes of the trail were the vaqueros, many of them mission Indians or local Tejanos. They pushed the herds while soldiers from the presidios at San Antonio, La Bahía, and El Fuerte del Cíbolo rode shotgun. Comanche raids and the usual frontier hazards made the trip lively, but enough cattle arrived to keep Gálvez’s men fed and fighting.
And fight they did. Powered in no small part by Texas beef, Gálvez’s forces rolled over British posts at Manchac, Baton Rouge, and Natchez in 1779, took Mobile in 1780, and finally captured Pensacola in 1781.
Suddenly Britain had a messy southern front to worry about. But cattle weren’t the only Texas contribution. Before Spain formally entered the war, Gálvez and American agent Oliver Pollock (the unofficial “financier of the Revolution in the West”) were quietly shipping weapons, gunpowder, ammunition, medicine, clothing, and hard cash up the Mississippi to the Continental Army and George Rogers Clark’s western campaigns.
Texas residents and soldiers chipped in with a special tax or personal donations — often a silver peso apiece — and a number of Tejanos even served in Gálvez’s ranks.
Spain’s help went further still. From 1776 onward, while officially neutral, the Spanish crown funneled muskets, bayonets, gunpowder, cannons, uniforms, blankets, tents, and medicine (including precious quinine) to the rebels through merchants like Diego de Gardoqui and the New Orleans pipeline.
One early and secret credit line alone was worth about 4 million reales — roughly half a million Continental dollars.
King Carlos III personally approved duty-free shipments of the good stuff. After 1779 the aid only increased. Spanish silver raised in places like Havana helped finance the Yorktown campaign that sealed British defeat.
Historians figure Spain’s direct financial and material assistance ran into the hundreds of thousands — possibly near a million — Spanish dollars, on top of the enormous cost of its own military operations. Combined with French support, it was a lifeline for a Continental Congress that was perpetually short of both money and muskets.
So, the next time someone tells the story of the American Revolution and leaves out the longhorns, the vaqueros, and a Spanish governor with a healthy appetite, feel free to clear your throat.
Remote Texas ranches didn’t just watch history happen. They fed it — one determined, dusty, occasionally ornery hoofbeat at a time!