Corpus Christi History by Murphy Givens

Wednesday, June 14, 2000

Wheels of progress rolled on oxcarts

Heavy, crude, two-wheeled oxcarts were once a common sight in South Texas. After Henry Kinney built a trading post on the bluff overlooking Corpus Christi Bay, traders from Mexico arrived bringing saddles, beans, leather, Mexican blankets and silver bars molded in sand. They hauled away calico, hardware, and bales of tobacco. Corpus Christi was founded to take advantage of this trade.
   Some carts ("carreta" in Spanish) were pulled by one yoke of oxen and others by as many as six. The huge wheels, often cut from a single tree trunk, were high to make it easy to cross streams and marshlands. Some carts had hoops on which could be fitted cloth covers to protect goods and provide shelter.
   The oxcart caravans were frequently attacked by bandits. In 1842, near Victoria, a party of traders were slain and their goods plundered by a gang of killers led by "Mustang" Gray. One gang attacked a caravan coming to Corpus Christi, with the bandits taking goods, horses, and killing eight of the Mexican merchants. Kinney in a letter to the governor called them "robber Texians."
   Despite the dangers posed by bandits and Comanches, trade between Corpus Christi and northern Mexico continued until the Mexican War. After the war, Kinney wanted to re-establish trade ties, but there was competition from the new town of Brownsville. Trade now was funneled along the Rio Grande and, instead of oxcarts, goods were carried by the riverboats operated by Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy.
   Kinney looked west for a new market. He financed an effort to establish a trade route to El Paso and from there to Chihuahua, a distance of more than 1,000 miles. Kinney spent $10,000 to buy goods to take to Chihuahua. Wagons and oxcarts left Corpus Christi in July 1849 under the command of William Cazneau. The Corpus Christi Star reported:
   "On Tuesday last, Gen. Cazneau's great train took its final departure for Chihuahua. For more than a week previous the carts had been leaving, a few every day, for Casa Blanca (the site of the rendezvous) . . . The train is the largest that ever left this section of Texas, consisting of over 50 wagons, filled with valuable merchandise . . ."
   The plan was to set up trading posts at El Paso and Presidio del Norte. Like so many of Kinney's undertakings, the venture did not prove successful. The distance was too great and the route too dangerous.
   A few years later, in 1857, the "Cart War" broke out between Anglo and Hispanic freighters operating between old Indianola on Matagorda Bay and San Antonio. The main cause of this conflict was that Hispanic (called "Mexican" in the early histories) cart drivers charged lower rates than their Anglo competitors. Another complaint was that Hispanic cart drivers encouraged slave girls to escape to become their wives.
   Texas freighters began destroying the carts and killing "Mexican" cartmen. Most of the violence occurred around Goliad and in Karnes County along the Old Cart Road. The Cart War ended when sheriffs, pressured by the governor, began to arrest and hang the main culprits behind the violence.
   During the Civil War, wagons and oxcarts became important to the Confederacy. After the Union blockade closed off Southern ports, cotton was hauled down the "Cotton Road" from East Texas to Brownsville and Matamoros where foreign buyers paid for the cotton in gold.
   Banquete in Nueces County was a way station and watering stop. Long lines of wagons and carts driven by young boys and old men rolled through Banquete day and night. Cotton went down, piled high on wagons, and ammunition, gunpowder, medical supplies, and coffee went up. The Cotton Road was said to be marked by tufts of cotton that snagged on chaparral thorns.
   Corpus Christi's oxcart trade reached its apex during the sheep era in the 1870s. Hundreds of the big-sided, two-wheeled carts, loaded with bags of wool, rumbled along the roads and trails to Corpus Christi. Besides wool and hides, the carts brought lead, copper, and silver ore from Mexico. They carried manufactured goods back.
   Mary Sutherland in her history of Corpus Christi described the scene, viewed as a new arrival in 1876:
   "Walking up Chaparral Street I saw that thoroughfare literally filled with ox carts and wagons. Some of the vehicles had as many as six yokes of oxen, and the patient animals were lying down in a seeming tangle, reaching from curb to curb, chewing the cud and waiting the crack of the whip, the signal to begin the long, hot journey across the prairies to and beyond the Mexican border . . ."
   After the sheep era was over, the oxcart trade went into decline and then the coming of the railroads ended this chapter in the history of South Texas. It's a shame that just one of those old oxcarts, the freight-liners of their time, was not left behind for a museum piece.
   (Murphy Givens can be reached by phone at 886-4315 or by e-mail at givensm at caller.com.)
  

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