Sea to Shining Sea 127receiving development land grants. By the time Texas became a US
state in 1845, Anglo settlers numbered 160,000.18 Mexico abol
ished slavery in 1829, which affected the Anglo-American settlers'
quest for wealth in building plantations worked by enslaved Afri
cans. They lobbied the Mexican government for a reversal of the ban
and gained only a one-year extension to settle their affairs and free
their bonded workers-the government refused to legalize slavery.
The settlers decided to secede from Mexico, initiating the fa mous
and mythologized 1836 Battle of the Alamo, where the mercenaries
James Bowie and Davy Crockett and slave owner William Travis
were killed. Although technically an Anglo-American loss, the siege
of the Alamo served to stir Anglo patriotic passions, and within a
month at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto, Mexico handed over the
province. This was a great victory for the Andrew Jackson admin
istration, for Jackson's brother, Mason, who was one of the Texas
planters, and especially for the alcoholic settler-warrior hero Sam
Houston: The former governor of Te nnessee, Houston was made
commander in chief of the Texas army and president of the new
"Texas republic," which he helped guide to US statehood in 1845.
One of the first acts of the pro-slavery independent government was
to establish a counterinsurgency force that-as its name, the Texas
Rangers, suggests-followed the "American way of war" in destroy
ing Indigenous towns, eliminating Native nations in Texas, pursu
ing ethnic cleansing, and suppressing protest from Tejanos, former
Mexican citizens.19
Mission San Francisco de Asis, also called Mission Dolores, was
a Spanish Franciscan mission established on the Pacific Coast at the
same time as the Presidio (military base) at San Francisco-1776,
the year that Anglo-Americans declared independence from Brit
ain. The purpose of the garrison was twofold: to protect the mis
sion from Indigenous inhabitants whose territory the Spanish were
usurping and to round up those same people and force them to live
and work for the Franciscan friars at the mission. Mission Dolores
was the sixth of the twenty-one Franciscan missions established be
tween 1769 and 1823, when Mexico disbanded the missions. The
establishment of the missions and presidios from San Diego and
Los Angeles and Santa Barbara to Carmel, San Francisco, and So-