Dispelling some Recurring El Rrun Rrun Myths

 AI dismantles El Rrun Rrun's latest fallacies:

Here’s a calm historical assessment of what El Rrun Rrun is doing and why it reads the way it does by separating (1) what the sources actually say, (2) what El Rrun Rrun is doing rhetorically, and (3) what historians generally conclude about the issue.

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1. What the government document actually shows

The document El Rrun Rrun cites is a U.S. House Committee on War Claims report (1890) concerning the heirs of Miguel Salinas.

What it confirms:

• In 1846, the U.S. Army under Zachary Taylor camped on Salinas’s plantation near the Rio Grande.
• Army quartermaster G. H. Crossman rented seven houses from Salinas for $1.50 per day each.
• Buildings and crops were later destroyed during the construction and defense of Fort Brown.
• The Salinas heirs later petitioned Congress for compensation decades later. (El Rrun Rrun)

This type of claim was extremely common after the Mexican-American War. Thousands of civilians across Texas, California, and Mexico filed similar claims when armies occupied private property.

Important point:

➡️ This document is about compensation for wartime damage — not proof that Charles Stillman stole the land.

The report itself even mentions title disputes involving Cavazos, meaning the legal ownership question was already complex and unresolved at the time. (El Rrun Rrun)

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2. Where El Rrun Rrun stretches the argument

The blog makes a leap that historians would consider unsupported.

The chain of claims goes like this:

1. The U.S. Army rented buildings from Salinas.
2. Buildings were destroyed during the war.
3. Salinas heirs later sought compensation.
4. Therefore Stillman stole the land.

That leap skips a lot of legal and historical steps.

The actual issues historians debate are:

• Spanish/Mexican land grant boundaries
• Sales and transfers after 1848
• The role of Charles Stillman and Sabas Cavazos in purchasing disputed tracts
• How American courts adjudicated Mexican titles after the war

Those are complicated land-law issues, not simple theft narratives.

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3. The Fort Brown land question (what historians generally say)

The core historical points usually accepted:

A. A ranch existed there before the U.S. Army

Yes — the lower Rio Grande had ranches before the war.
That part of the El Rrun Rrun’s blog is correct.

The area near the future fort had:

• ranch structures
• crops
• fencing
• agricultural activity

This is documented in multiple sources.

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B. The army occupied land during wartime

When the U.S. Army arrived in 1846 it:

• occupied the site
• rented some buildings
• destroyed others for military reasons

This was standard wartime practice in the 19th century.

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C. The ownership question became tangled afterward

After the war several overlapping claims existed:

• Salinas interests
• Cavazos claims
• later purchases
• federal military reservation

Many Mexican-era titles were poorly documented or disputed.

That is where Stillman enters the story.

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D. Stillman’s role

Stillman’s involvement historically was:

• purchasing land claims
• developing the town site
• organizing the Brownsville Town Company
• financing the trade network of the region

He did not arrive as a military occupier — he was already a merchant operating in Matamoros since the 1820s.

The El Rrun Rrun narrative reverses the chronology to create a villain.

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4. The Cortina connection

El Rrun Rrun often uses the land narrative to justify Juan Cortina.

But historians distinguish between:

• real land disputes after 1848
• Cortina’s armed raids and executions

Even scholars sympathetic to Mexican landowners generally acknowledge:

• Cortina killed civilians
• he attacked Brownsville
• he initiated two violent uprisings

These events are documented in both U.S. and Mexican sources.

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5. El Rrun Rrun's comments section

The comments illustrate why serious historians avoid blogs as sources.

They include:

• racial insults
• political arguments unrelated to the topic
• invented calculations about rent over 175 years

Example:
The commenter multiplying the 1846 rent contract to modern times is not a historical calculation. The rental agreement ended when the buildings were destroyed or the army vacated.

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6. The rhetorical pattern of the blog

The writing style follows a common activist-history formula:

1. Find a real document.
2. Remove the legal context.
3. Insert a moral conclusion.
4. Use modern political language (“theft”, “corruption”).
5. Reinforce it with comment-section outrage.

This produces compelling storytelling, but not careful scholarship.

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7. The irony for the Stillman Papers project

The Stillman Papers series actually undermines that narrative.

The documents show:

• day-to-day trade
• credit networks
• shipping logistics
• regional commerce

That is the real economic history of the Rio Grande frontier.

Those letters reveal a merchant building infrastructure, not a cartoon villain.

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My honest assessment

The post is not entirely wrong, but it is highly selective.

True elements:

• the army used land belonging to Mexican residents
• compensation disputes existed
• land titles after 1848 were messy

Misleading elements:

• implying Stillman personally seized the land
• presenting a wartime compensation claim as proof of theft
• ignoring decades of legal transactions afterward

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To dismantle the argument publicly, the best response would be something like:

The 1890 War Claims document confirms that the U.S. Army rented houses from Miguel Salinas in 1846 and later destroyed them during construction of Fort Brown. This is a wartime compensation dispute. It does not demonstrate that Charles Stillman seized the land. The later land titles involved multiple parties, including Cavazos claimants, and were litigated for decades.

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The Case Behind the Myth: The Espíritu Santo Land Grant

1. The original Spanish/Mexican land grant

The Espíritu Santo Grant was issued during the Spanish colonial period to families in the lower Rio Grande region.

Important facts:

• It covered a huge area of land north of the Rio Grande.
• The grant was held by members of the Cavazos family.
• Over decades the land was subdivided, inherited, and sold among relatives.

By the 1830s–1840s the grant had become fragmented into many claims.

This is very typical of Spanish colonial land systems.

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2. The 1848 problem: sovereignty changed

After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848):

• The United States took control of the north bank of the Rio Grande.
• Mexican land titles were supposed to be recognized and adjudicated by U.S. courts.

But several problems appeared immediately:

1. Many titles were vague or incomplete.
2. Surveys were inconsistent.
3. Boundaries relied on natural landmarks that moved or disappeared.
4. Multiple heirs claimed the same parcels.

This created decades of litigation across South Texas.

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3. The Cavazos–Stillman transactions

This is where Charles Stillman enters the story.

Stillman did not simply “take land.”

What he actually did was common frontier business practice:

• He purchased land claims from Mexican landowners.
• He financed transactions for heirs who needed cash.
• He consolidated tracts in order to establish the Brownsville town site.

One of the key people involved in these transfers was:

• Sabas Cavazos

Cavazos was part of the family that controlled large portions of the grant.

Stillman purchased interests from Cavazos and others.

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4. Why lawsuits erupted

Later heirs began challenging earlier sales.

Common arguments were:

• heirs did not understand the contracts
• land values later became much higher
• family members sold more land than they owned
• American courts favored English-language documents

These lawsuits appeared in Texas courts and federal courts for decades.

None of this is unusual in land-grant regions.

The same thing happened in:

• California
• New Mexico
• Arizona

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5. The key court rulings

Several late-19th-century cases examined the titles.

The courts generally concluded:

• Many of the sales to Stillman and associates were legally valid purchases.
• Some boundaries of the original grant were uncertain or exaggerated.
• The Cavazos heirs did not retain exclusive ownership of the entire grant.

In other words:

The courts rejected the idea that the entire region was still legally owned by the original grant holders.

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6. Why the myth persists

The myth survives because of three overlapping narratives.

A. Mexican land-loss narrative

After 1848 many Tejano families genuinely lost land due to:

• legal costs
• unclear documentation
• Anglo-American legal systems

This happened across Texas.

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B. Cortina mythology

Supporters of Juan Cortina portray him as a defender of Mexican land rights.

But historians note that Cortina:

• attacked towns
• executed prisoners
• conducted raids unrelated to land cases

His movement became political and violent.

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C. modern reinterpretation

Late-20th-century writers reinterpreted the disputes as systematic Anglo land theft.

Some elements of that interpretation are legitimate.

But in Brownsville’s case the evidence is far more complicated.

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7. The overlooked reality: Stillman built the economic system

What gets ignored in the El Rrun Rrun narrative is something the Stillman letters clearly show.

Stillman was responsible for:

• organizing the Rio Grande cotton trade
• building warehouses and shipping networks
• financing merchants
• connecting the frontier to New York capital

Without that infrastructure Brownsville would likely have remained a small ranch settlement.

Instead it became:

• a trade hub
• a customs port
• a commercial center

The Stillman documents show that process unfolding.

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8. The Cortina reality

Historians today usually place Cortina somewhere between:

• regional caudillo
• political insurgent
• bandit leader

His first raid in 1859 involved the killing of Marshal Robert Shears.

The conflict escalated into the Cortina Wars.

Even Mexican officials eventually distanced themselves from him.

Later Porfirio Díaz exiled Cortina to Mexico City, removing him from power.

That outcome alone tells you how the Mexican government ultimately viewed him.

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9. Why this work matters

The Stillman Papers do something extremely valuable:

They show primary evidence.

Not ideology.

Not retrospective interpretation.

But the actual letters of the people building the frontier economy.

That material is the strongest antidote to historical mythmaking.

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⭐ A fascinating twist

One of the most ironic facts about the Cortina legend:

Many of the merchants Cortina targeted were Mexican-born traders in Matamoros, not just Anglo Americans.

The violence disrupted the entire border economy, including Mexican merchants.

The Cavazos Land Litigation (late 1800s)

These cases revolved around a simple question:

Did the Cavazos family still legally own the entire Espíritu Santo Grant after earlier sales?

Several heirs claimed that:

• earlier sales were invalid
• purchasers had taken advantage of them
• the entire grant still belonged to the original heirs

If those claims had been upheld, Brownsville itself would have been sitting on land whose title could be voided.

That is why these cases mattered enormously.

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What the courts examined

The courts had to analyze:

1. Spanish and Mexican grant documents
2. inheritance records
3. sales contracts made before and after 1848
4. the chain of title to parcels around Brownsville

This required reconstructing decades of transactions.

Texas courts were already accustomed to this kind of work because similar disputes were happening across the state.

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The central legal finding

The courts generally concluded that:

members of the Cavazos family had already sold portions of the grant long before the lawsuits were filed.

Those sales were considered:

• voluntary transactions
• legally binding
• recognized under Texas property law

In other words:

➡️ Later heirs could not reclaim land that earlier family members had sold.

This is the legal principle known as chain of title.

Once property passes through valid transfers, later descendants cannot simply undo them.

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Why this matters for the Stillman narrative

Stillman appears in the record primarily as:

• a purchaser of land interests
• a town developer
• a commercial investor

The litigation never established that he illegally seized the property.

Instead the courts treated the transactions as ordinary land purchases, even if they occurred under frontier conditions.

That is a very different picture from the one presented in polemical writing.

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The Fort Brown land question

Another issue often blended into the story is the land used for Fort Brown.

Ft Brown Cemetery 

The military occupation of land during the Mexican-American War produced many compensation claims.

The government sometimes paid them, sometimes not.

But those claims were directed against the U.S. government, not against Charles Stillman.

That distinction often disappears in modern storytelling.

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The Cortina factor

The legal disputes also intersect with the rise of Juan Cortina.

Cortina framed his movement as a defense of Mexican landowners.

However historians point out that:

• many of the disputes he referenced were civil court matters
• his raids targeted towns and merchants
• his forces killed civilians, including law enforcement officers

The first major incident involved the shooting of Brownsville marshal Robert Shears in 1859.

The conflict escalated rapidly from there.

Even Mexican authorities later treated Cortina as a regional strongman rather than a legitimate land reformer.

Eventually the Mexican government removed him from the border and confined him to Mexico City.

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Why this debate never dies

The argument persists because it sits at the intersection of several emotional historical themes:

• Mexican land loss after 1848
• Anglo economic dominance
• border violence
• regional identity politics

Each side of the story contains elements of truth.

But the documentary record — especially court decisions and primary business papers like the ones we are studying — usually shows a far more complicated frontier reality.

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Why the Stillman Papers project is valuable

The letters do something extremely important.

They show the everyday mechanics of frontier commerce:

• shipments
• credit
• river transport
• cotton trade
• merchant networks

That material helps historians understand how the region actually functioned economically.

It moves the discussion away from simplified villains and heroes and back toward the real complexity of the 19th-century borderlands.

[EDITED FOR LENGTH]

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Why ideological narratives persist

El Rrun Rrun’s contrived Stillman–Cortina debate survives because both figures can be used to represent larger historical themes:

Stillman becomes a symbol of:

• American expansion
• capitalist development
• Anglo dominance in Texas

Cortina becomes a symbol of:

• resistance
• Mexican land rights
• regional identity

Once historical figures become symbols, their real lives often get simplified.

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The historian’s approach

Professional historians usually try to do something different:

They reconstruct the structures behind the personalities.

In the Rio Grande case those structures include:

• land grant systems
• merchant credit networks
• river and coastal shipping
• border politics

When you look at those structures, the story becomes much richer and more complex than the hero-versus-villain narrative.

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The value of the Stillman papers work

The letters being organized are especially valuable because they show the day-to-day mechanics of that system.

They reveal things that rarely appear in later histories:

• the uncertainty
• the negotiations
• the dependence on distant investors
• the logistical challenges of the Rio Grande frontier

Those details allow historians to understand how the border economy actually functioned.