Henry Kinney's Outpost and the Birth of a City

In eighteen thirty-nine, a twenty-five-year-old land speculator from Pennsylvania named Henry Lawrence Kinney climbed a bluff overlooking Corpus Christi Bay and decided this was where he would make his fortune. He built a fortified trading post, part store, part boarding house, part armed camp, and called it Kinney's Ranch. Three years after Texas had declared independence from Mexico, Kinney was selling supplies to a Mexican Federalist army camped twenty-five miles to the west, trading with both Americans and Mexicans, and dealing in goods that were, by most accounts, being smuggled past Mexican customs.

The trading post became a landmark on a frontier that barely had any landmarks. The surrounding country was controlled by Comanche raiders moving south from the plains, which kept most Anglo settlers away and made Kinney's fortified compound the logical gathering place for anyone who needed supplies and a bed. Business was steady enough.

Then in the summer of eighteen forty-five, General Zachary Taylor arrived with nearly four thousand soldiers, under orders from President James Polk to occupy the disputed territory at the mouth of the Nueces River. Taylor set up camp on Kinney's beachfront and called it Camp Marcy. The soldiers stretched in tents for more than a mile along the bay. Kinney distributed handbills in England advertising South Texas farmland, and settlers came. By eighteen forty-six, the army had moved south toward the Rio Grande, and the Mexican-American War had begun. By eighteen fifty-two, the settlement that had grown around Kinney's trading post officially incorporated as the city of Corpus Christi.

Kinney himself did not last. He lost his land to debts, went to Nicaragua to pursue a colonization scheme, and was later killed in a gunfight in Matamoros, Mexico, in eighteen sixty-two. The city he had inadvertently founded would outlast him by more than a century and a half.