Welcome to the Man for Texas.

Episode 4, Immigrants and Indians.

I'm Brandon Seal.

Jose Francisco Ruiz's break in the Mexican army came from a young, wonder-kind general who,

unlike so many other Mexican general officers, had actually

fought on the side of independence. General Manuel de Mier and Terran had risen through the

revolutionary ranks and become a 34-year-old brigadier general in newly independent Mexico,

eventually heading the Mexican Artillery Academy until his appointment in 1827 to lead a scientific and

military expedition to Texas. The expedition was part Lewis and Clark, part census taking,

and part alliance making. Since independence, East Texas had begun to fill up with the Indians

being pushed out of the United States, and ironically, also with

some of the same Anglo-Americans who were doing the pushing out. As many as 10,000 immigrant Indians

descended into Texas in that decade, Kickapoo's, Alabama, Kushadas, Delaware, Shawnee's, Cherokees,

and more. To the extent that these newcomers could be integrated into the Mexican economy, and accepted by long-term residents like the Lipanez and the Comanches, it voted well for the economy of the region, which had always been driven by trade with Native America.

For the same reason that he was open to new Indian immigrants, Ruiz and many of his Techano allies were in favor of these new Anglo

immigrants. Not just because he had lived amongst them for many years in his decade of exile after the

Battle of Medina, during which he had fought and bled alongside them, in fact, but because these

Anglos brought capital and access to the American economic juggernaut.

Mierry Tehran was much more alarmed than Ruiz by the growing Anglo-American population,

particularly by their lack of assimilation into Mexican society and their almost total lack of

appreciation that they were actually in another country.

His reports back to Mexico City would lead directly to the law of April 6, 1830,

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