History of Buffalo Bayou continued

Anglo-Americans had explored the Buffalo Bayou and San Jacinto River area as members of the various filibustering expeditions launched from New Orleans between 1815 and 1820. Their purpose was to aid the Mexican Republicans rebelling against Spain. Using Galveston Island as a base, the men belonging to the expeditions and encampments of Louis Michel Aury, Francisco Xavier Mina, Jean Laffite, and James Long explored the mainland estuaries for future homesites; their expected reward for freeing Mexico from Spain. Some of these men were among the pioneer settlers arriving by boat from Louisiana in early 1822, just after the Mexican War for Independence.

Responding to Stephen F. Austin's advertisements, families wrongly assumed that the San Jacinto estuary was part of his empresarioqv grant. Merchants and boatmen remained to exploit what turned out to be the best transportation system in Texas and to petition successfully for inclusion in the Austin grant. Since Galveston Island and the Gulf shore were forbidden to Anglo settlement, Buffalo Bayou was established as part of the southeastern border for the colony.

In July, 1824 a state land commissioner, the Baron de Bastrop, arrived and spent two months issuing twenty-nine titles to settlers, even though surveys were incomplete. The pioneers, including Nathaniel Lynch, William Scott, and John R. Harris, chose sites along Buffalo Bayou, and the San Jacinto River estuary. Between 1828 and 1833, when Austin's colonization effort virtually ended, twenty-three more families secured titles elsewhere in the area, usually along watercourses.

In 1826, John R. Harris laid out Harrisburg where Brays Bayou joined Buffalo Bayou. He opened a store and built a saw and grist mill, while his brothers captained vessels between Harrisburg, New Orleans and even Tampico. By 1833, Harrisburg was an established port of entry for immigrants and freight destined for the upper Brazos River communities of San Felipe and Washington. Moreover, it was the hub for east-west roads. In 1830, travelers proceeding eastward from Harrisburg crossed the San Jacinto River on Lynch's Ferry on their way to Anahuac, Liberty, or Nacogdoches.

Steamboats also arrived along Buffalo Bayou in the 1830s. Early timber operations employed steamboats to haul lumber and firewood to the Gulf after floating the logs downriver. Oxen provided a method of transporting logs to the waterways. Two-wheeled ox-carts, with huge wheels measuring up to five feet high, moved logs, easily rolling over fallen trees and huge stumps. Rushing rivers then swept the logs downstream to sawmills on Buffalo Bayou.

Opposite Harrisburg, a road paralleled Buffalo Bayou heading northwest to a community on Spring Creek. It then forked for the Brazos villages. A third important road followed the south bank of Braes Bayou for fifteen miles to a community on Oyster Creek near the site of present-day Stafford in Fort Bend County.

The final stage of development under the established Mexican empressario system occurred on December 30, 1835, when the Mexican General Council set the boundaries of the Harrisburg Municipality. Amid the growing crisis that culminated in Texas independence, 264 voters scattered over five precincts elected Edward Wray as the alcalde on February 1, 1836. They also named Lorenzo de Zavala and Andrew Briscoe as delegates to the March convention. Harrisburg District was represented at the conventions of 1832 and 1833 and the Consultation in 1835. Some residents also participated in the Anahuac Disturbances in 1832 and 1835 and the call for volunteers in September 1835 to oppose Gen. Martín Perfecto de Cos. On March 12, the required one-third of the Harrisburg militia responded to the call to leave immediately for Gonzales.

Harrisburg Municipality was the home of both President David G. Burnet and Vice President Lorenzo de Zavala of the new Republic of Texas. They were elected by the delegates at Washington after midnight on March 16, 1836, and the next morning left for Harrisburg, where water transportation offered an escape if the Mexican army should win. On March 25 the group reached Harrisburg, where the president conducted business for the next two weeks.

Zavala, a refugee from Santa Antonio López de Santa Anna's wrath, acquired a house on the north side of Buffalo Bayou below Harrisburg in August 1835, and his New York-born second wife and three children joined him in December. The republic's officials evacuated Harrisburg by steamboat to Lynchburg on April 12, 1836, when word arrived that Santa Anna's troops were crossing the Brazos below Richmond. The steamboat Cayuga later took the officials and their families to Galveston Island. A constant stream of refugees from the upper Brazos settlements had been crossing Harrisburg Municipality since mid-March en route to the United States. Santa Anna and his advance units reached Harrisburg at midnight on April 14, 1836, and, after a day of looting, set fire to the settlement on the sixteenth. The general dispatched a cavalry troop to Morgan's Point on April 16 that almost captured the Burnet family. The battle of San Jacinto took place on April 20 and 21, 1836, opposite Zavala's house on widow Peggy McCormick's farm, where perhaps 600 dead soldiers remained unburied when neither commander ordered interment.

Texas became a nation in April of 1836. Mexican soldiers were quickly put to work planting crops and rebuilding homes that had been destroyed by their army. Others labored cutting wood for the steamboats.

Anglo settlers founded new private-venture towns because of strategic locations to steamboat landings. As more furs and crops were exported, more merchandise could be imported. Ships came loaded with passengers and departed laden with cotton bales. Slaves produced corn and cotton for the Galveston market; lowland plantations experimented with crops of sugar cane.

John J. Audubon came to Texas in 1837 and took a canoe trip up Buffalo Bayou to research wildlife in the region. Audubon met with Sam Houston at what was then the capital of Texas; a structure that served as a trading post on the banks of Buffalo Bayou.

John K. Allen designated Railroad Street in 1836 and stated: “This is the street which the great Texas railroad will traverse”. In the 1830's, Indians of various tribes (Coushattas, Bidais, Caddos, Alabamas, Lipans) camped in and around Houston to trade furs and venison for lead, powder, cottons and rugs. In 1837, several Indian tribes came to Houston and camped in the forest on the north bank of Buffalo Bayou. This camp was probably the area known as Beauchamps Springs, also known as Beauchampville, located on White Oak Bayou near Woodland Park. It was named for a man who camped in the forest near the springs with the Bidais Indians.

In 1838, riverboat companies regularly scheduled trips to Houston from Galveston Island, while larger steamboats operated between Galveston Island and New Orleans. Five distinct wagon trails led to and from Houston. All had an intersecting trail allowing wagons and teams to turn and cross Buffalo Bayou to the north and west of the city by way of the Washington Road. The Galveston and Red River Railroad began laying track westward from Railroad Street paralleling Washington Street/Road and following the proposed route shown on a map dated 1844.

By 1845, nearly twenty-five thousand acres of cotton were being grown in East Texas. Corn and sugar cane were important cash crops, and ranchers became successful. Schooners and sloops filled ports as towns continued to expand to meet the needs of exporters and burgeoning populations.

After Texas was annexed by the United States, shipping interests saw a chance for the federal government to provide dredging operations for Buffalo Bayou. Lumber companies established complete sawmill towns with thousands of employees. Steam powered sawmills were operating in strategic locations.

Many homesteaders moved from the coast to prime upland farms and ranches. Land was so cheap that farmers were unconcerned about soil conservation on their acreage. When soil was depleted, it was easy to move to new sites. Deserted lowland plantations were common, yet the overall coastal population was rapidly increasing. Every person that moved inland was replaced by three new residents. Farmland and the corn harvest more than quadrupled in Houston County in the 1850's; while cotton production increased almost ten times.

Farmers lacked proper knowledge of crop rotation and conservation; farm and plantation soils played out. Ranchers grazed too much livestock in the uplands. Topsoils were exposed and washed away, causing floods. In the bottomlands, native grasses also vanished to overgrazing, along with the extensive canebrakes and other vegetation. Once clear running waterways became muddied from eroded soils. Heavy brush plants invaded pastures, replacing grasses that livestock had depleted. Horsemen were unable to ride through thorn and thickets, which began filling previously open grasslands.

By 1853 the "iron horse" came to Buffalo Bayou. The Buffalo Bayou Railway crossed the area to facilitate the shipment of cotton and sugar. Other railroads followed before the Civil War. The Galveston, Houston and Henderson connected the island to the main land, while the Texas and New Orleans constructed tracks along the north side of Buffalo Bayou to Liberty and Orange. This enabled Confederate troops from Harris County to reach the Neches River on their way to Virginia. The Houston and Texas Central ran west from town to Cypress, Hockley, and Hempstead. The Houston Tap and Brazoria linked Houston with the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado south of town and had a line to Columbia to serve the Brazoria County sugar plantations.

After the Civil War other railways such as the Houston and Great Northern, the Trinity and Brazos Valley, the Houston East and West Texas, and the Burlington-Rock Island entered the region to converge on Houston. The lumbering and farming interests established small towns such as Spring and Tomball along the tracks. Commercial development included boatyards and a brick factory whose business later mushroomed to supply a building boom in Galveston.

In the decades after the Civil War, shippers began to send huge quantities of game birds to distant ports by rail. The grouse, turkey, quail and other upland game birds disappeared from many areas. Railroads and the eventual development of refrigeration opened up the state for people who had supplied local markets in Galveston, Houston and San Antonio with cheap game meat.

St. Louis, Chicago, and other northern cities became outlets for Texas game; dealers sold hundreds of thousands of game birds annually. In New York, for example, a federal official recorded a single consignment of 20,000 prairie chickens-totaling twenty tons.

Entrepreneurs purchased mammoth timber acreage of piney woods at rock-bottom prices from homesteaders who saw a chance to have their land cleared and make a little money. Before settlers realized the potential profit of their woodland properties, they often sold the timber rights as cheaply as fifty cents per acre. Texas was steadily rising in the ranks of timber-producing states in the 1880's.

Cutting practices of early loggers contributed to the rapid depletion of the Big Woods. Timber supplies were thought to be inexhaustible, so pioneer timber companies felt no obligation to reforest their land. The first conquest by timber magnates was the longleaf pine. This tree was the monarch of the Southeast Texas forests, reaching over 120 feet high and living hundreds of years. Its wood was prized for its great strength. Ancient upland longleaf pine forests originally had a thick "closed canopy" that heavily shaded the forest floor, allowing delicate shade-tolerant flora to evolve in areas of less undergrowth. Destruction of these "cathedral forests" led to the invasion of tangled thickets and heavy undergrowth, drastically altering the ecosystems.

Longleaf pine and mixed pine-hardwood forests provided excellent habitat for the red wolf, black bear, wood stork, and red cockaded woodpecker, ivory - billed woodpecker and many other birds and mammals that are now endangered. The vanishing alligator snapping turtle, paddlefish, bluehead shiner minnow, blackside darter, American burying beetle and numerous other threatened species once thrived in woodland streams and underbrush. Delicate plants such as the Texas trailing phlox and Navasota ladies'-tresses orchid grew in the shade of the forest canopy and have consequently almost completely disappeared.

Hunting continued to eradicate vast populations of Texas species. When species were over hunted and became scarce in one area, campsites were moved and hunting began again. With improvements in firearms, the large-scale hunting of wild animals led to increasing urban markets, further jeopardizing many species' existence.

Export of bird plumage for adornment on women's hats in Europe and in the eastern U.S. led to the decimation of great numbers of coastal bird species. According to Robin Doughty in Wildlife and Man In Texas, demand was so high that commercial hunters supplied tens of thousands of great egrets to traders. Vast flocks of water birds nested or wintered on the coast. A single gunman could shoot thousands of birds each week, with the huge kills going to dealers willing to pay up to forty cents apiece for herons and twenty cents for terns. Hunters eliminated enormous numbers of herons, gulls, egrets, skimmers, cranes, curlews, plovers and other shorebirds. Brilliantly colored songbirds went to market as well.

Legislators tended to shy away from measures restricting individual privileges, so the first laws regulating hunting had little practical impact. They did recognize that wild animals had become limited; unfortunately, the Civil War forced wildlife conservation to a low priority, effectively ending regulations for the remainder of the nineteenth century.