Juan Bautista Elguézabal

Juan Bautista Elguezabal (1741–1805) was governor of Texas from 1800 to 1805. He also ruled this state temporarily in 1797, and Louisiana (1803).

Biography

Juan Bautista Elguezabal, was born in 1741, but it is not know the place where he was born or what he lived until he turned sixty-five years. In 1795, he was appointed assistant inspector of Presidio in the Mexican state of Coahuila and Texas. A year later, in 1796, he was appointed assistant of governor of Texas Manuel Muñoz, who was very sick and he became Acting governor in August the following year (1797). In this year, he made an inspection of the Bay. In 1800, Elguezabal took the government of the province of Texas, in the absence of his governor José Irigoyen. In 1803, however, he also became acting governor of Louisiana, after the state was sold to the United States. In this moment, many immigrants living in Louisiana sent petitions calling for his transfer to Texas and his neglect of Louisiana. After returning to Texas, he developed a more liberal policy that had been the province until then, mired by a high poverty that caught most of its population. Under his administration in the province, the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas and Native American Choctaw, with the more autonomy they had acquired with the government of Manuel Munoz, obtained permission to settle east of the Trinity River (Texas). The government of Elguezabal should have been temporary, since, as mentioned above, the provincial government actually belonged to José Irigoyen, appointed by the king, who had governed Texas between 1798 and 1800. However he never returned to the province to claim its government, and Elguezabal, continued to serve as governor until his death in San Antonio on October 5, 1805.^[1]

Personal life

He had four children, one of whom was Juan José Elguézabal, governor of Mexican Texas between 1834 and 35.^[1]

References