The world of Harriet Ames was not the world of republican companionate marriage or of plantation patriarchy. She and Solomon Page arrived in Mexican Texas from New Orleans just before the Anglo-Texan War of Independence. In keeping with the customary way of dealing with the shortage of Catholic priests, required by law to perform weddings if they were to be valid, the couple married contractually, or by bond, in the District of Brazoria. Like so many southern women and men seeking a fresh start in Texas, no sooner had the two established this makeshift marital relation than Solomon obtained for...

A multiracial frontier provided novel mating choices for men who rebuilt their personal lives in the northernmost province of the new Republic of Mexico. In 1826, after four years of marriage, William Smith of Missouri abandoned his wife, Harriet Stone, and their three children and headed for Texas to start over. Converting nominally to Catholicism in order to become a Mexican citizen, the enterprising civil engineer first settled in Gonzales. After four years of rediscovered “bachelorhood” in this rough-and-tumble town, during which time he changed his name to John W. Smith, he moved to San Antonio. There he began a...

Had Sam Houston known that one day he would lead the Texas War of Independence, he might well have thought more carefully before reexploring his Indian roots as intimately as he did. After learning within days of his marriage to Eliza Allen that she loved another, the humiliated governor of Tennessee resigned his office and headed for the southwestern frontier. Following a packet trip down the Red River in the late spring of 1829, the thirty-six-year-old Houston traveled overland and reunited with the Cherokee at Tahlontuskee in Indian Territory. He wasted little time in ministering to his wounded pride. At...

Circumstances in early Texas prompted men to form complicated relationships with their slave women that white society in the more settled South would have considered at least highly unorthodox. Columbus R. “Kit” Patton of Kentucky and his brothers pulled up stakes and immigrated to Mexican Texas in the late 1820s. After obtaining an inexpensive tract of land along the Brazos River, young Kit and the few slaves he brought with him began carving a farm out of the wilderness. Amid the difficulties of establishing a new sugarcane and cotton-growing operation in a swampy coastal terrain, Kit began a sexual involvement...

Bold and free-spirited Texas frontiersmen made the best of things in a primitive situation—often in ways helping little to improve communal order. Raised in a Virginia slave-owning family, young Branch T. Archer studied medicine in Philadelphia, commanded a cavalry regiment in the War of 1812, and then returned home to serve several terms in the legislature. Having thus established himself, he married Eloisa Clark in the 1820s and had six children with her. After the successful politician and war veteran killed one of his cousins in a duel, however, he left Eloisa and their children in 1831 and headed...

Given the capricious mating habits of many immigrants, authorities in Mexican Texas were disinclined to deal with marriage as traditional law and custom prescribed. Having recently arrived in Gonzales, Frederick Roe was fortunate to strike up a relationship with a young woman like Sarah Grogan. Not only were attractive single women hard to come by in the fall of 1832, but crude living conditions, rising tensions with indigenous Mexicans, and even talk of revolt among the Anglo-Texan colonists made courtship difficult. Sarah found the adventurous young man appealing, however, and he seemed entirely capable of obtaining for them asitio...

Social disorder in early Texas produced unusual forms of marital misconduct and equally distinctive official responses. Having recently become a widower, and with his infant daughter, Eliza, in need of a mother, Sherwood Dover of Kentucky decided to find a new wife. After convincing a spirited young acquaintance named Frances to marry him in 1833, Sherwood began laying plans with her to establish their home in Texas. Regardless of the growing political turmoil in the Mexican province, they both appreciated the exceptional opportunities there to acquire cheap land and get ahead quickly. In the spring of 1834, the couple arrived...

Frederick Jackson Turner argued that antebellum southerners placed an incomparable value on the liberty to compete for the “public domain” and the natural resources abundantly available in the unsettled wilds further west. Freedom from class rule and elite-dominated institutions of law that might limit this prerogative, furthermore, was fundamental to the “squatter ideal.” From the perspective of settlers, government was an evil. Westering southerners regulated themselves with “extralegal, voluntary associations. . . . where settlement and society had gone in advance of the institutions and instrumentalities of organized society.” Only in time did courts and legislative halls appear and, even...