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Other "anglos" started to move into the area after Kirker's success. Some of these men were both Indian fighters and traders, and their goals were to succeed at making money in any of the areas wherein resources were available that could be somehow converted into capital. Kirker simply sold scalps to the Chihuahua and Durango governments. Other Americans and Irish did the same, although some of them discovered that it was impossible to distinguish between the scalp of an Apache warrior and that of a Mexican child, and this led to some serious bad blood that was never erased subsequently, between the locals and certain Anglos who actually settle in the region and whose offspring became thoroughly Mexican.
When the Spanish government allowed the American entrepreneur, Stephen F. Austin, to set up a colony of anglos in Texas at the beginning of the 19th century, it was soon inevitable that white settlers would reach the Ojinaga region, albeit that the Apaches and the Comanches and the territory that they held effectively formed a boundary. But it was men like Kirker and those who followed in the footsteps - Burgess, Ben Leaton, and Spencer - who bloke down that boundary, and initiated trade through Ojinaga on the Chihuahua trail. Thus, by the late 1820's and the 1830's, caravans of oxcarts were traveling through the region between Chihuahua and the American heartland, although this trade would be interrupted by hostilities on several occasions, and by Indian marauding. It would effectively end when a railroad was built which passed through El Paso, Texas, by now in US territory, following the Mexican war, and all trade going in and out of the state of Chihuahua would pass through that route. During the brief period of the Chihuahua trail, however, Ojinaga increased in importance, and it became both a bigger prize for marauding Indians in search of goods to steal, and in terms of defense on the part of the Mexican authorities, it became a topic of greater importance also.
Although the handful of Anglo (and Irish) operators in the Ojinaga region became a factor in the Mexican war in the 1840's, Ojinaga itself did not. Having had bad feelings both with the Mexican authorities over the non-payment of scalps they were turning in for bounty payments, and with the locals in Ojinaga and the region over accusations that they were scalping Mexican children, Kirker, Leaton, and the rest went into service with Colonel Alexander Doniphan, in 1847, helping him lead the Missouri Volunteers to a string of victories that led up to their occupation of the city of Chihuahua. Doniphan's forces marched south from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and took Chihuahua in February of that year, but when it was decided that this campaign had no practical effect on the outcome of the war effort, which was to conquer Mexico City and force the signing of a treaty, Doniphan's troops actually abandoned the state and went home. History now loses sight of Kirker, but the rest of the group - Leaton, Spencer, and Burgess - return to the Ojinaga region where they begin to trade in Mexican cattle stolen by the Apaches and Comanches. The move into abandoned Spanish forts, which they rebuild and re-fortify, and they use the power of the newly established United States legal authority to get their way in matters. |
