By the summer of 1828, no census of the slaves in Texas had yet arrived in Saltillo, and the political head of Texas, Ramón Músquiz, forwarded a report to the governor of Coahuila-Texas detailing why. The report included two letters from Austin’s colony explaining that the slave census had not been collected because local slaveholders did not speak Spanish (and thus did not know that reporting their slaves to local authorities was necessary) and because the planters all lived too far from one another to make visiting each plantation practical.
