The months had passed and stretched into a year and more. His mind went back often to the Colorado River, though he could not, to the land into which he had been given no time to sink his roots.

Someday.

THEY WERE uneasy partners, James Lewis and Sly Shipman, quarrelsome with one another over small things but usually together on matters of major import. Shipman, because of his much longer experience, expected to lay the plans and give the orders. James, a quick learner, soon decided he knew enough about the business to be a full partner in every respect. It became his habit to greet most of Shipman’s suggestions with vocal skepticism, though usually when he thought them through he found them to be of merit. It was not that he distrusted Shipman’s judgment; he simply did not want to be subordinate. He had not taken well to orders in Tennessee. As Travis had put it, James usually felt the same after crossing a river as he had felt on the other side, so he did not take well to orders in Louisiana or Texas either.

Though he and Shipman quarreled and sometimes seemed in danger of dividing the mules, they managed always to find a point of compromise and remain together. Shipman would say, “The way I figure, if I was to go off and leave you to your own devices, you’d probably get yourself killed. That good-lookin’ sister of yours would never speak to me again.”

“She wouldn’t speak to you now,” James would retort.

They found themselves in the spring of 1832 carrying goods down the coast near Galveston Bay, into a seething cauldron of trouble. James had heard rumblings about it but had taken only a passing interest in the reports except as they concerned a stringent effort by the authorities to extract tariffs on all goods brought into the region. Working there, he and Shipman took special precautions to be seen only when they wanted to be. The situation confirmed James’s feeling that Mexico had no business bossing Americans around.

It was ironic that the first big confrontation came not from a Mexican but from an arrogant and dictatorial transplanted American named John Bradburn, Kentuckyborn and a veteran of many years in service of the Mexican government as a soldier of fortune. He had begun going by the name Juan Bradburn, rather than John. For whatever reason, he was hostile to the American settlers moving into Mexican Texas and he harassed them whenever his office gave him the opportunity. He was assigned to command the garrison at Anahuac, near Galveston Bay. That afforded him ample occasion to vent his contempt for his former countrymen.

It happened that William Barret Travis had set up a law practice not far from Anahuac in a new town called Liberty, made up largely of newcomers like himself. Even the name of the town hinted at resistance to the government. Many of its residents, including Travis, were illegal in the eyes of Mexico. Like the other latecomers who had no legal status because of the immigration proclamation, Travis was not entitled to acquire land or other property under Mexican law. He had to live in a rented room and subsist on what small bits of legal practice he was able to stir up. He was not hesitant in expressing his opinion about that law, about the convict soldiers who served under Bradburn, and about Bradburn himself, considered a turncoat by most of the American Texans for having committed himself wholeheartedly to the cause of Mexico.