On March 16, 1758, the turmoil sweeping North America came crashing down on the little log mission on the banks of the San Saba River. Allied northern tribes, pressed from all sides, attacked the Mission Santa Cruz de San Sab and burned it to the ground. In ""After the Massacre"", Robert S. Weddle chronicles with scholarly authority the events following the attack: the Spaniards expedition to the Red River to punish the offending Taovaya Indians and their allies; the villainous intrigue responsible for the erroneous view of the episode; the abortive effort to bring peace to the frontier; the ultimate fate of the Taovayas; and the archeology of recent times that has done much to complete the story. The narrative focuses on the relatively unknown diary of Juan ngel de Oyarzn, a captain on the 1759 expedition, and other documents from Spanish archives, all translated as appendices. Oyarzn, in addition to his day-to-day account of the march and the battle, illuminates the natural history of the Rolling Plains and the Western Cross Timbers. Robert S. Weddle, often referred to as the dean of Texas Colonial history, was knighted in 2001 by King Juan Carlos of Spain in the Order of Isabel la Catlica, Spains highest honor bestowed on a noncitizen. His 1964 book, ""The San Sab Mission: Spanish Pivot in Texas"", has been followed by many others, including ""The Wreck of the Belle"", and ""The Ruin of La Salle"". He lives near Bonham, Texas.

Three centuries after the French explorer La Salle was murdered in the Texas wilds, this volume presents translations of three obscure documents that broaden the view of the man and his exploits. The first non-Spanish effort to settle areas along the Gulf of Mexico is seen from the perspectives of La Salle's engineer; a Spanish pilot who searched for the French colony; and two French lads who, orphaned as a result of the Fort Saint-Louis massacre, lived first among the Texas Indians, then the Spaniards.
The engineer Minet relates both La Salle's 1682 exploration of the Mississippi River and his 1685 voyage to the Gulf of Mexico, from which Minet himself returned to France and prison rather than share the fate of the colonists.
The pilot Juan Enriquez Barroto recounts the Spaniards' 1687 circumnavigation of the Gulf, the finding of La Salle's wrecked ships, and the first close examination of Texas and Louisiana bays and rivers, including the Mississippi passes.
Among the few survivors of La Salle's venture, the two Talon brothers returned to France as adults to give information that was vital to a new undertaking, Iberville's Mississippi colony. In an unparalleled adventure narrative and exploration account, they describe the land, its flora and fauna, and the natives' lives and languages--data of incalculable historical value.
From all three documents, significant sidelights emerge: Minet's description of the English colony of Jamestown, Enriquez's finding of Spanish castaways among the Atakapa Indians, and the Talons' description of life in seventeenth-century Mexico.
With careful scholarly attention--historical introductions, annotation, and commentaries by noted authorities--the documents emphasize the tendency of modern observers to ascribe to La Salle a knowledge of geography that simply was not possible in his time. They lead the editors to a somewhat surprising conclusion about why the vaunted explorer landed in Texas when he was seeking the Mississippi.

When Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, landed on the Texas coast in 1685, bent on founding a French colony, his enterprise was doomed to failure. Not only was he hundreds of miles from his intended landfall-the mouth of the Mississippi-but his supply ship, Aimable, was wrecked at the mouth of Matagorda Bay, leaving the colonists with scant provisions and little protection against local Indian tribes. In anger and disgust, he struck out at the ship's captain, Claude Aigron, accusing him of wrecking the vessel purposely and maliciously. Captain Aigron and his crew escaped the doomed colony by returning to France on the warship that had escorted the expedition on its ocean crossing. Soon after reaching France, Aigron found himself defendant in a civil suit filed by two of his officers seeking recompense for lost salary and personal effects, and then imprisoned on order of King Louis XIV while La Salle's more serious accusations were being investigated. In this book, Robert Weddle meticulously recounts, through court documents, the known history of Aigron and the Aimable, and finds that despite La Salle's fervent accusations, the facts of the case offer no clear indictment. The court documents, deftly translated by Francois Lagarde, reveal Captain Aigron's successful defense and illuminate the circumstances of the wreck with Aigron's testimony. Much is also revealed about the French legal system and how the sea laws of the period were applied through the French government's L'Ordonnance de la Marine.

This careful study of eighteenth-century cartography along the Gulf Coast reveals a fascinating mix of cooperation and competition between Spain and France.Louis Juchereau de Saint-Denis explored much of the region around the Gulf and sent data to his homeland of France, but he also shared information with Spanish officials. Juan Manuel de Olivan Rebolledo used this information to create several maps, one of which was drawn to demonstrate how Spain might protect itself from the French threat in Louisiana and Canada.Information from the Olivan/Saint-Denis maps soon emerged on French maps. Guillaume Delisle's 1718 ""mother map"" of the Gulf Coast was made possible by Francois Le Maire, a virtually unknown French missionary in Mobile. Jack Jackson and Winston De Ville examine Le Maire's various memoirs and maps, which relied on Saint-Denis for their portrayal of the ""Western Country."" Le Maire's work explains how Delisle acquired the information to draw his profoundly influential map.This important book for cartographers will also be of interest to the lay historian and the Gulf Coast enthusiast.

Winner, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas, 1978 In their efforts to assert dominion over vast reaches of the (now U.S.) Southwest in the seventeenth century, the Spanish built a series of far-flung missions and presidios at strategic locations. One of the most important of these was San Juan Bautista del Rio Grande, located at the present-day site of Guerrero in Coahuila, Mexico. Despite its significance as the main entry point into Spanish Texas during the colonial period, San Juan Bautista was generally forgotten until the first publication of this book in 1968. Weddle's narrative is a fascinating chronicle of the many religious, military, colonial, and commerical expeditions that passed through San Juan and a valuable addition to knowledge of the Spanish borderlands. It won the Texas Institute of Letters Amon G. Carter Award for Best Southwest History in 1969.