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These were the years when young men out of San Antonio were being knocked off by the scores, Smithwick musta really wanted to hang on to that mule. He made about twelve miles the next day, finally clearing the bounds of modern San Antonio...

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



North of the Salado, the rout runs more or less straight north, nowadays a major throughofare running through the North Side, climbing gently over what once was open rolling prairie...



About seventeen miles from downtown, the route passes right by a prominent hill variously known as "Comanche Hill" or today as "Comanche Lookout", a city park. The whole hill now choked with brush as this area gets when it ain't allowed to burn.

Its only about two hundred yards up a moderate slope from the road (which passes along the east side), hard to believe that anyone passing this way in those times wouldn't pause here to scout out the country, watch their back trail, or look fer signs of people who had been watching THEM.

Here's the view from the top looking south towards downtown (tall buidlings barely visible on the horizon)...



Heck, EVERYBODY passing that way must in those times must have stopped there, that goes double for folks rushing to the Alamo. My money says that Smithwick lingered there for a good bit too, watching for his friends to catch up.

Mostly power walkers and families up there nowadays, tho in the past I'm given to understand it was a notorious teen hangout.

I woulda like to check out the route northbound too but the city has not seen fit to clear the brush in that direction.

Another mile and you pass the outer loop (1604) and top over into the Cibolo Creek drainage, the creek crossing point about half a mile past the Rolling Oaks Mall.



Note the new housing development signs by the bridge, the expansion continues....



The Cibolo (Spanish for "buffalo") describes a wide arc north and east of Old San Antonio, forming the present county line for much of that distance. The first twenty or thirty miles of that arc run directly over limestone recharge features feeding into our aquifer such that the creek bed itself basically has two modes... bone dry and rocky as seen here, or raging flood after a tropical storm or some such fills it faster than it can escape underground.




The wispy greener trees in the pic are retama and mesquite, most of the grey stuff that has already lost its leaves is cedar elm. The green trees like in te middle of the creekbed just begining to brown off are Eastern Sycamores. Always a puzzle to me that this tree will grow in these places, must be that they have their feet wet.

Smithwick likely made camp somewhere in this area, maybe on the bank by a rain pool on the rocky creek bed.

Birdwatcher