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The Destruction of the San Sabá Apache Mission: A Discussion of the Casualties*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Juan M. Romero de Terreros
Juan M. Romero de Terreros*
Affiliation:
Madrid, Spain
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Extract

The Lipan Apache mission on the banks of the San Sabá River was located on the northern boundary of Coahuila, New Spain, in the center of today’s state of Texas. On March 16, 1758, Norteño tribes, allied with the Comanches, attacked and destroyed the mission, demonstrating their hostility to what they saw as the Spaniards’ unjust support of their traditional enemy, the Apaches. The destruction of the mission contributed to the failure of the most far-reaching attempt by the Spanish Crown and the Franciscan Order to settle the Apaches in Texas. The Spanish believed that the mission was the only means to ensure a peaceful settlement of central Texas native tribes and simultaneously to check French illegal arms trade in the northern borderlands. Once the Lipan Apaches were pacified, the reasoning went, definitive settlement of all the Norteño tribes and their allies would follow. These settlements of pacified tribes would also provide the much-desired direct link between Spanish settlements in Texas and those of New Mexico.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , April 2004 , pp. 617 - 627
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2004 

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Footnotes

*

The author would like to thank Father Jose Luis Soto, director of the Archivo Misional de la Provincia de Michoacan in Celaya, Mexico, and architect Mark Wolf from San Antonio, Texas, for their help in developing the original idea for this article.

References

1 These three objectives are mentioned in the Royal Decree authorizing the San Sabá project on October 15, 1758. AGI, Guadalajara 235, pp 494–498.

2 “Testimonio de los autos hechos a pedimento de don Pedro Romero de Terreros…” AGI, Mexico 1933-B 1763, pp. 1–40.

3 Archivo del Colegio Apostólico de la Santa Cruz, K Celaya file 8, num.7.

4 Biblioteca Nacional de España, manuscript num. 18.759.

5 Lejarza, Fidel de, “Escenas de martirio en el rio San Sabá.” Archivo Ibero Americano, III, Madrid 1943 Google Scholar; Canedo, Lino Gomez, “La breve y trágica historia de la misión de los Apaches.” España Misionera, Madrid, abril-junio 1958 Google Scholar; de Terreros, Juan M. Romero y Castilla, . San Sabá, misión para los Apaches (Madrid: Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del País, 2000).Google Scholar

6 Ratcliffe, Sam D., “Escenas de Martirio. Notes on the destruction of Mission San Sabá,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, April 1991, pp. 507–535.Google Scholar

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9 Jiménez, Pedro Angeles, “La destrucción de la Misión de San Sabá y martirio de los Padres Fray Alonso Giraldo de Terreros y Fray José de Santiesteban. Una historia, una pintura,” Revista del Museo Nacional de Arte 5 (México, 1994).Google Scholar

10 Manuscript copy in the Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin.

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15 Simpson, Lesley and Nathan, Paul de, San Sabá Papers (San Francisco: J. Howell-Books, 1959)Google Scholar. See also the 2nd edition (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2000).

16 John, Elizabeth A. H., Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds (Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975). Second edition, 1996, p. 298.Google Scholar

17 The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 189.

18 “Franciscan Evangelization in Spanish Frontier Texas: Apex of Social Contract, Conflict and Confluence,” CLAHR, Summer 1993, 276.

19 The architect Mark Wolf had facilitated a microfilmed copy of the last cited letter from the Archive of the Franciscan Missions in the University Our Lady of the Lake of San Antonio, which could not be mentioned in my work San Sabá, Misión para los Apaches (see note 5 above), since it was received when that book was already in the press.

20 The documents can be found under letter K of the catalogue, docket 8, and numbers 11, 13, and 8.

21 Omaecheverría, Ignacio, “Mártires norteamericanos. Hacia un proceso colectivo de beatificación y canonización,” Missionary Spain V:17 (January-February, 1948), p. 64–77.Google Scholar

22 Terreros, Romero de, San Sabá, Misión para los Apaches, p. 91.Google Scholar