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this trip. “Here I found myself at the distance of many hundred miles from any white settlement, surrounded by thousands of Indians, with nearly two thousand dollars worth of merchandise and a large drove of horses and mules fatting away in flesh, and no assistance but Young and Lucas [his two partners].” Why didn’t the Indians simply kill him and take his goods and horses? Glass knew the answer, though he often wondered if it would keep him whole till his return to civilization. The Comanches and other Indians suffered Glass—and traders like him—to enter Texas because they wanted the merchandise the traders brought; if they killed the traders, they’d have to travel to Louisiana themselves. They preferred to have their purchases delivered.
    Yet Glass discovered something else about the Comanches that constantly vexed relations between them and the whites. A group of Comanches stole two dozen of Glass’s horses. Several weeks later he received some of the lost animals back, courtesy of the chiefs he had met earlier. “The principal chief told me he was truly sorry but that there were bad men in all nations, and amongst them they have no laws to punish stealing.” In fact the Comanches had no laws to punish much of anything, for they had next to nothing in the way of government. The separate bands of Comanches were laws unto themselves, and what one band pledged—with respect to the whites, for instance—often had no effect on the actions of other bands. Nor, for that matter, did commitments made by the chief of a band necessarily bind the other members of that band, who followed whom they wanted when it struck their fancy. Natural anarchists, the Comanches recognized very little in the way of human authority, either among themselves or with regard to those other invaders who vied with them for control of Texas.

C h a p t e r   4
    Don Estevan
    I n certain respects Stephen Austin could not have been less like his father. Moses was innately audacious, a gambler who crossed half a continent to build a business empire in the wilderness, who rode the western boom to become the richest man in the district, only to ride the bust into bankruptcy and disgrace, and then turned to Texas to try it all again. Stephen, on the other hand, was cautious, diffident, self-doubting. His caution owed much to his father’s failure, but his diffidence and doubting were his own. He never possessed the can-do optimism that characterized his father (and the frontier generally); he constantly questioned himself and his actions. His appearance suggested a poet rather than a pioneer. Five feet eight inches tall and slight of build, he had brown ringlets for hair, an aquiline nose, hazel eyes, and skin that burned far too easily for a trailblazer and colonizer. Where the Texas project came naturally to Moses, Stephen, left to himself, would never have dreamed of anything so bold. If not for his father’s deathbed request, he likely would have pursued a career of solid innocuousness. He would have become a lawyer, perhaps a state judge, and spent his life pondering the perplexities of human nature, his own included.
    After his Virginia birth and the harrowing trek across the Mississippi, Stephen Austin grew up among the Frenchmen, Spaniards, Indians, and African slaves that inhabited the neighborhood of Mine à Breton. Moses and Maria educated Stephen as best they could, but Moses insisted, as the lad approached eleven, that he be sent east to receive real schooling. A suitable place was found at an academy for young men in Connecticut. Stephen suffered the homesickness that has tested boarding-schoolers since parents first shipped their children away; he also received the traditional remonstrances from home. “I hope and pray you will improve every moment of time to the utmost advantage and that I shall have the satisfaction of seeing that my expectations are not