Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Comancheria

Found it! My copy of Olmstead's "A Journey Through Texas"

One of the absolute must-reads for anyone interested in Texas history. Here's his description of San Antonio, albeit ten years after the Hays era...

The street life of San Antonio is more varied than might be supposed. Hardly a day passes without some noise. If there is no personal affray to talk about, there is some government train to be seen, with the hundreds of mules, on its way from the coast to the fort above; or a Mexican ox-train from the coast, with an interesting supply of ice, flour, or matches, or of whatever the shops find themselves short.

Hard to imagine carrying ice in the Texas heat, even on wagons, but especially the notoriously slow ox-drawn wagons.

A government express clatters off, or news arrives from from some exposed outpost... An Indian in his finery appears on some shaggy horse, in search of blankets, powder and lead. Or at the least, a stagecoach with the "States" or the Austin mail, rolls into the plaza and discharges its load of passengers and newspapers.

Street affrays are numerous and characteristic, I have seen, for a year or more, a San Antonio weekly, and hardly a number fails to have its fight or its murder. More often than otherwise, the parties meet upon the plaza by chance, and each, on catching sight of his enemy, draws a revolver, and fires away.

As the actors are under more or less excitement, their aim is not apt to be of the most careful or sure, consequently it is not seldom, the passers-by who suffer. Sometimes it is a young man at a quiet dinner in a restaurant, who receives a ball in the head; sometimes an old negro woman, returning from market, who gets winged...

Where borderers and idle soldiers are hanging about drinking-places, and where two different races mingle upon unequal terms, assassinations must be expected. Murders, from avarice or revenge, are common here. Most are charged upon Mexicans, whose passionate motives are not rare, and to whom escape over the border is easiest and most natural....

...in 1856... [the population of San Antonio] is estimated at 10,500. Of these, about 4,000 are Mexican, 3,500 Germans, and 3,500 Americans. The money-capital is in the hands of the Americans, as well as te officers and the government. Most of the mechanics and the smaller shopkeepers are German.

The Mexicans appear to have almost no other business than that of carting goods. Almost the entire transportation of the country is carried on by them, with oxen and two-wheeled carts. Some of them have small shops for the supply of their own countrymen, and some live upon the produce of farms and cattle ranches owned in the neighborhood....

Their tools are of the rudest sort. The old Mexican wheel, of hewn blocks of wood is still constantly in use, though supplanted, to some extent, by Yankee wheels, sent in pairs from New York. The carts are always hewn of heavy wood, and are covered with white cotton stretched over hoops. In these they live, on the road, as independently as in their own house. The cattle are yoked by the horns, with raw-hide thongs, or which they make great use.

Their livelyhood is, for the most part, exceedingly meagre, made up chiefly of corn and beans.

Point of interest, it was travelling Mexicans like this who found and carried the wounded and mortally infected Oliver Loving to Fort Stanton (??) after Loving's fight on the Pecos against Comanches while he and a companion were scouting ahead of a cattle drive. The companion took off on foot for help in the night, Loving also commencing to walk the next morning when it became apparent the Comanches had left.

A similar incident of course being woven into the fictional narrative of "Lonesome Dove", though I believe Loving was hit in the arm by an arrow rather than his thigh.

The only place in popular Texas lore such big-wheeled Mexian ox-drawn carts figure is with the Comancheros, Mexican traders out of New Mexico. Completely overlooking the fact that these carts must have turned up all over, and that by those years (1870's) the Comanches were mostly selling herds of rustled Texas cattle.

In Hays' time, ten years earlier than Olmstead's journey, a total population estimate from San Antonio of around 7,000. Proporionately more Mexicans, few established Germans yet (they were just arriving in those years), no regular stages or mail yet that I have heard of.

Fewer revlovers yet too, but perhaps almost as much lead flying around the bars and main plaza.

IIRC, as with the case of Jake Spoon in "Lonesome Dove", accidental shootings were not considered murder, and the responsible parties were rarely charged as such. One imagines revenge by the kin of the dead or maimed might be a whole different matter tho.

And of the women (a vitally important consideration for young men)...

The complexion of the girls is clear, and sometimes fair, usually a blushing olive. The variety of feature and color is very striking, and is naturally referred to three sources - the old Spanish, the Creole Mexican, and the Indian, with sometimes a suspicion of Anglo-Saxon or Teuton. The hair is coarse, but glossy, and very luxuriant, the eye, deep, dark, liquid and well-set.

Their modesty, though real, was not proof against a long courtship of flattering attentions and rich presents. The constancy of the married women was made very light of, not that their favors were purchasable, but they are sometime siezed by a strong penchant for some other than their lord.

Which might account for some of that lead flying around....

Birdwatcher