From the onset of European colonization, the Karankawa had violent encounters with the Spanish. After one attack by the Spanish, who ambushed the Karankawa after the establishment of Presidio La Bahía in 1722, the Karankawa allegedly felt "deeply betrayed viewed Spanish colonial settlement with hostility." By 1825, Stephen Austin commissioned a captain to lead volunteers to expel the Karankawa from the Austin land grant. The Karankawa were repeatedly attacked by Texan colonists, commanded by men like John H. Moore and Robert Kuykendoll, who massacred men, women, and children in stealthy attacks on their villages to drive them out of their homelands, scalping the dead while stealing their food and supplies. By the 1840s, the Karankawa, now exiled, split into two groups, one of which settled on Padre Island while the other fled into the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. During 1858, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina led a group of Texan colonists against the Karankawa's last refuge and killed the remaining members of the tribe. By 1891, colonists believed the Karankawa as an organized tribe had been disbanded.