Background
In 1790, Moses Austin, an American businessman who had taken Spanish citizenship in order to start a small colony in Missouri, traveled to San Antonio de Bexar to request an empresarial grant in Spanish Texas. The governor, Antonio María Martínez, refused to listen to Austin's proposal and ordered him to leave the territory immediately. While departing, Austin encountered an acquaintance he had met years earlier at an inn in Spanish Missouri, Felipe Enrique Neri, Baron de Bastrop. Bastrop listened to Austin's plan, and, using his influence, persuaded the governor to approve the request. Austin's plan was approved, and in January 1821 he left for Missouri with a grant to bring 300 colonists into Texas. On his way home he was attacked by highwaymen and badly beaten. Soon after he made his way back to Missouri, Austin died, leaving his empresarial grant to his son, Stephen Fuller Austin.
Read more about this topic: Old Three Hundred
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)