Outstanding review of the old missions of San Antonio, Birdwatcher! I need to do more exploring in SA next time I'm down there.
Give me a heads up of course...
back to the thread...
Time constraints and the late hour do not permit quotes and photos on this one but one thing we oft forget in popular history is that, in the 1840's when Jack Hays and his men were hanging out there, San Antonio de Bexar as a community was already more than 100 years old.
Popular history has it that Bexarenos led a precarious, fugitive existence in thrall to the surrounding tribes, Lipan Apaches and then the Comanches.
Partly true.
By the late Eighteenth Century, feral cattle and horses had almost completely displaced the buffalo from the surrounding area, such that, as was true in the 1830's when Smithwick was in the area, San Antonio residents had to travel as far as the Pedernales and Colorado, seventy to one hundred miles north of town, to find buffalo herds.
Yet travel to these places they did, twice each year, spring and fall, to harvest buffalo in suficient numbers that this became a vital part of the annual domestic economy. By the year 1800 there were around 2,000 residents in San Antonio.
Harvesting buffalo on that scale by these people of course weren't supposed to be possibe, hostile Indians and all that, yet they did it, every year.
One thing that ain't changed is the mercurial Texas climate. In the 1840's, the Hay's years, the Rangers enjoyed the benefit of a wet period. Transportation in that era was powered by grass.
The decade AFTER Hays left a drought struck, severe enough to drive the central bands of Comanche to reservations after their economy evaporated.
So the fortunes of San Antonio in the century before Jack Hays rose and fell dramatically with the climate. Why San Antonio could survive drought at all was due to the 50 miles of irrigation canals from diversion dams along the river, irrigating (IIRC) about 2,000 acres.
In perennially cash-poor San Antonio there were two means of obtaining actual moneys (as opposed to local barter). One was agricultural exports south to Mexico, most often corn.
The other was from cattle. Actually being out on the plains working cattle was dangerous enough that a vaquero earned about three times the wage of a farm laborer, but people did it. The most common use of these feral cattle was slaughter on the spot for the production of tallow, hides and jerked beef. These products then traded in Mexico.
Alternatively, group of Bexarenos would organize for cooperative cattle drives, either south into Mexico or clear to New Orleans, 600 miles to the east. These drives being already an established practice by the time that George Washington, futher east again, was having a go at the British in the cause of Independence.
So, whatever their recurring losses to Indians, it aint like the original Bexarenos prior to the arrival of the White Texians were a bunch of shrinking violets when it came to crossing the plains.
What DID hammer the San Antonio economy was drought, even irrigated farmland produced less in dry years, such that the export of locally grown corn was actively forbidden so as to avoid general famine. The numbers of local wild cattle also plummetted, either due to starvation or emigration. Worse, trade and the associated travel of any sort became difficult as there was little grass to sustain pack or riding animals on long journeys.
Between 1800 and 1840 the San Antonio population more than tripled, mostly one assumes due to a greatly increased volume of trade between Mexicans to the south and Americans to the north and east.
The volume of routine trade from and to Mexico in these years absolutely dwarfs the military campaigns that we usually focus on.
Recall that, earlier in this thread, on the Great Raid the Comanches stole a herd of hundreds of horses outside of Victoria that belonged to a party of Mexican traders. Likewise when the Comanches approached Linnville driving as many as 1,500 horses and mules, it was initially assumed that they were Mexicans, come from the south to trade at this port.
The German naturalist Ferdinand Roemer in 1846 observed the arrival in San Antonio of a pack train from Mexico consisting of more than 100 mules laden with bundles of woven blankets. Roemer further observed that this caravan was but one of "several".
Ten years later Frederick Law Olmstead observed that the principal occupation of the Texano community in San Antonio was freighting goods from Mexico.
Needless to say there's a WHOLE lot of stories lost here. Somehow droves of Mexican traders were successfully dealing with the threat posed by the Indians, decade after decade, while travelling at least in groups pretty freely across the plains.
Against this major, long-established trade network, in place for decades prior to the Jack Hays years, and by the 1840's involving the routine movement of thousands of stock of different sorts....
...I'm just gonna juxtapose what our popular history focuses on from this period...
Jack Hays accompanied by maybe fifteen guys riding out to pick fights with Indians, exchanging fire in these expeditions with maybe one half of one percent of the total Comanche population of that era....
No flies on Hays and his men, and they cheerfully went up against long odds indeed, just gotta keep 'em in context is all.
Birdwatcher
