For the Americans were among an alien people, in a country overrun
by fourteen different tribes of Indians; some of them, as the
Comanches, Apaches, and Lipans, peculiarly fierce and cruel. Besides,
many families were dependent upon the game and birds which they shot
for daily food. To be without their rifles meant starvation. They
refused to surrender them.
At Gonzales the people of Dewitt's Colony had a little four-pounder,
which they used to protect themselves from the Indians. Colonel
Ugartchea, a Mexican, was sent to take it away from them. Every
colonist hastened to its rescue. It was retaken, and the Mexicans
pursued to Bexar. Just at this time Austin returned from his Mexican
dungeon. No hearing had been granted him. Every man was now well aware
that Mexico intended to enslave them, and they rose for their rights
and freedom. The land they were on they had bought with their labor
or with their gold; and how could they be expected to lay down their
rifles, surrounded by an armed hostile race, by a bitter and powerful
priesthood, and by tribes of Indians, some of whom were cannibals?
They would hardly have been the sons of the men who defied King John,
Charles I., and George III., if they had.
Then came an invading army with the order "to lay waste the American
colonies, and slaughter all their inhabitants.
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