Welcome to the Man for Texas.

Episode 3, The Impossible Peace.

I'm Brandon Seal.

A European visitor to Mexico City in the early 19th century described it as the city of palaces,

a nod both to its role as the old Aztec capital, but also to

its spectacular concentration of wealth. One third of the wealth of all of New Spain, known formally

after 1822 as Mexico, was concentrated in this great cosmopolitan city. Then as now, the exact

limits of Mexico City were a bit fuzzy, but something like a million

people, a fifth of the new country, considered Mexico City the base of their daily lives.

Filipinos, Africans, and of course Spaniards and indigenous mingled in a near perfect rainbow of melanin,

speaking more languages than anyone even bothered to count.

It's tempting to imagine that a handful of dudes from 1820s, Texas, which had one 278th, the

wealth of Mexico City, and counted maybe 4,000 Tejanos and maybe 40,000 Indians as its total

population, it's tempting to imagine that these dudes would have been overwhelmed by the great metropolis? It's tempting to imagine that these dudes would have

been overwhelmed by the great metropolis. It's tempting to imagine that they were even awed by it.

But there's nothing in the records of Jose Francisco Ruiz's only ever trip to Mexico City

to suggest that it left any kind of impression on these free men of the plains. Ruiz was joined in Mexico by

at least two Lipon Apache captains. Quelgas de Castro and Yolka, Pocaropa, represented a significant

portion of the peoples that the Spanish grouped together as Lipon Apaches. Quelgas and Poceropa

represented the two particular groups of Lipanus that had most thoroughly integrated their lifeways with Tejanos.

After some convincing by Ruiz in April of 1822, they had agreed to make the almost 1,000-mile journey to Mexico City, alongside their on-again-off-again rivals for the Texas plains, the Comanches, in order to make peace with the newly proclaimed Mexican

empire. After two months of waiting for their Comanche frenemies, the Lipane has decided to go on

...