Welcome to the Republic of the Rio Grande.

Episode 6, order and disorder along the new border.

I'm Brandon Seal.

Antonio Zapata was hurting in 1838.

As if it wasn't hard enough to be a single father raising four daughters, the oldest of which was only 15 years old, he was also now bankrupt.

It's unclear if the government impounded his goods for violating their impossibly restrictive trade laws,

or whether they'd requisitioned them to support the 2,000-man strong army that had taken up

residents in the Rio Grande Vias following their defeat at the Battle of San Jacinto.

And then the French blockade began.

On April 16, 1838, French warships sailed into the ports of Tampico in Veracruz, demanding

the repayment of the losses endured by a pastry

chef near Mexico City during the instability of the previous decade. And the consequences of this war

certainly weren't trivial for the residents of the Rio Grande. First, the blockade threatened to cut off

their access to world markets. But second, and worse, the specter of war

and the loss of tariff revenue occasioned by the French blockade forced the Mexican

central government to levy new taxes in June of 1838, which hit the long-suffering residents

of the Rio Grande Viz particularly hard. If Antonio Zapata was like other people in the Rio Grande Viz at this time, he heard his

frustrations articulated most clearly by his former lawyer and surveyor, Antonio Canales.

Canales had been born to a family of some means in Monterey, and he'd come to Camargo to make his

name.

Now 36 years old in 1838, he was a charismatic leader with a, quote, magnetic personality, end quote.

Zapata had known Canales for 10 or 15 years by now, and had used him to purchase the nearly 20,000 acres worth of land that Zapata had acquired over the previous

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