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On the topic of flogging reluctant mules, this thread has some miles left on it

...got me to thinking on Noah Smithwick, in particular his account "from the winter of '37 or '38...

http://www.oldcardboard.com/lsj/olbooks/smithwic/otd15.htm

I can not just say when it was, but I think in the winter of 1837 or 1838, that Colonel Karnes, who was stationed at San Antonio, sent in for Captain Eastland to take his men out there, as the Indians were proposing to come in for a treaty, and Colonel Karnes, suspicious that it was a ruse, wanted to be prepared for any treacherous movement. Thinking it might have a good effect on my red friends, Captain Eastland invited me to go along as spokesman. Owing to the scarcity of money, the blacksmith business was not very remunerative, and one of the rangers, Isam M. Booth, offering to give me his time if I would take his place, I once more cast my lot with the Texas rangers.

The principal road in those days was the old Spanish Trail, the Camino Real, which ran from San Antonio through the present towns of New Braunfels, San Marcos and Bastrop, angling northeast to the old Spanish settlement of Nacodoches in far East Texas.

Smithwick at the time, enduring "the scarcity of money" was called to San Antonio as an interpreter. To get to San Antonio from Bastrop he would have decended the Camino Real.

Worth noting here that this was ghe exact same route travelled by Davy Crockett and his companions en route to martyrdom at the Alamo.

In all my years here I had never bothered to trace Smithwick's route, although the Camino Real remains today as Nacodoches Road, angling from above downtown off Broadway northeast along secluded roads to New Braunfels on the Guadalupe, thirty miles north from old San Antonio.

Took a long morning the other morning to set that right.

We went on out to San Antonio and struck camp, to wait for the Indians to come in. Several days elapsed and, nothing having been seen or heard of them, Captain Eastland, concluding that we were on a false scent, announced his intention of returning to Fort Coleman. On the day preceding that set for breaking camp I went into San Antonio, wearing a cloak with a gay lining in it, which so struck the fancy of a Mexican resident that he offered me a good mule for it.

I accepted the offer and, returning to camp with my prize, Francisco, a Mexican boy who was with us, warned me that the animal had probably been stolen, and pretty soon there would come a claimant who would prove it away from me, that being a practice among them. Determined to outwit them for once, I sought Captain Eastland and, explaining the situation to him, asked leave to depart at once, and await the company at some point between that and home.

My request being granted, I saddled up my mule and, leaving my horse with the boys to bring on, struck out for home.


The thing to understand about this region is that it overlies the huge Edward's Aquifer, an artiesian formation in porous limestone underlaying most of the southern edge of the Texas Hill Country from Del Rio, 150 miles west of San Antonio to Austin, one hundred miles north.

Springing up, or formerly springing up from this huge formation are/were a number of major springs, these springs giving rise to the major trails or roads through this area and what became our major communities and highways.

San Antonio grew up around the five Spanish Missions moved here after they failed further east. The missions were moved here on account of the San Antonio River, and the San Antonio River is here on account of two major springs, now reduced to a trickle; San Antonio Springs and San Pedro Springs.

Folks may note that the San Antonio River still has some water in it, this is because significant water is pumped up from the aquifer into the hippo enclosure at the San Antonio Zoo, them getting first crap at it, as it were. This water is then routed around the zoo through various enclosures before flowing into the river channel proper. Maybe three miles downstream part of this flow is dammed to form the riverwalk.

Heading out from Old San Antonio then on that slow mule, Smithwick would have first ascended either the east or the west side of the river to the San Antonio Springs just north of the present zoo, and then headed out on the Camino Real proper.

During their eighty years of operation, more than fifty miles of acequias (irrigation ditches) were dug to serve the mission fields, the oldest streets and property lines laid out along the lines of these acequias, even though in most cases the ditches have been filled in for about 100 years now. They were still all in use in the 1830s though the missions were all inactive by that time.

One the east bank of the river, one acequia ran more or less straight south to from the river headwaters to the Alamo mission, conforming more or less to the route of present-day Broadway...



OTOH, if Smithwick had come up the west side of the river, he would have taken the road that meandered along THAT acequia, said road later to become the equally meandering N. Saint Mary's Street...



Either route would have put him about here, yet another spectacularly uninformative pic showing the river just below the ingress point of all that zoo poop water...



From there the route moves north along present-day Broadway through the upscale Burg of Alamo Heights, climbing the low hills that would later be called Alamo Heights to cross over from the San Antonio River/Olmos Creek drainage to the Salado Creek drainage, the gentle meanders of the road along this stretch giving away its age; the route was laid out by use, not by surveyors.

Alamo Heights today is notoriously upscale (said residents locally known as the "09'ers" after the zip code ending). In Smithwick's day it would have been open country, oak-studded prairie...



Maybe three miles after leaving the springs, and about five miles as the crow flies from the Alamo, Smithwick woulda descended from the heights to a flatter, gently rolling area, this about the place where the modern North Loop 410 passes east-west over the route (seen here looking downslope, the 410 overpass visible in the far background)....



Birdwatcher