Wanted to throw this cool link up before I lose it....

http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/gabrmetz/gabr000a.htm

At the Battle of Kadesh, Ramses II revolutionized Egyptian logistics by introducing the ox-drawn cart, which quickly became the standard mode of military logistical transport for almost a thousand years. Xenophon recorded that the normal pack load for a single ox-drawn cart in Greek armies was 25 talents, or approximately 1,450 pounds.

Studies from World War I by the British War Office note that a mule could carry about three hundred pounds, and the camel just slightly less. The Persians used teams of oxen to haul their large wooden siege and mobile towers. Xenophon noted that 16 oxen were required to pull the tower, which weighed approximately 13,920 pounds!


While the ox-cart allowed armies to move larger loads, it slowed their rate of movement to a crawl. It is important to remember that there were few packed roads and none of the paved roads that were later introduced by the Romans....

Under the best of conditions an ox-cart could travel two miles an hour for 5 hours before the animals became exhausted.


Even allowing for a perfect rate of travel of ten miles a day, just a trip to the nearest coastal ports from San Antonio would require a round-trip of about a month, two weeks or more either way. A similar time required for travel to Laredo on the Rio Grande, longer to points of commerce further south.

Had to be hard and exceedingly monotonous work, maybe explaining why Mexican Texans were able to stay in it in numbers for so long.

The railroad certainly killed off a lot of it, along with such events like the Cart War of the later 1850's...

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/jcc01

The so called "Cart War" erupted in 1857 and had national and international repercussions. The underlying causes of the event, historians believe, were ethnic and racial hostilities of Texans toward Mexican Texans, exacerbated by the ethnocentrism of the Know-Nothing party and the white anger over Mexican sympathy with black slaves.

By the mid-1850s, Mexicans and Tejanos had built a successful business of hauling food and merchandise from the port of Indianola to San Antonio and other towns in the interior of Texas. Using oxcarts, Mexicans moved freight more rapidly and cheaply than their Anglo competitors.

Some Anglos retaliated by destroying the Mexicans' oxcarts, stealing their freight, and reportedly killing and wounding a number of Mexican carters. An attack on Mexican carters occurred in 1855 near Seguin, but sustained violence did not begin until July 1857. Local authorities made no serious effort to apprehend the criminals, and violence increased so much that some feared that a "campaign of death" against Mexicans was under way.

Public opinion in some counties between San Antonio and the coast ran heavily against the carters, who were regarded as an "intolerable nuisance." Some newspapers, however, spoke out against the violence. The Austin Southern Intelligencer and the San Antonio Herald expressed concern that the "war" would raise prices. The Intelligencer also worried that if attacks on a "weak race" were permitted, the next victims would be the German Texans, and that finally "a war between the poor and the rich" might occur.

Some humanitarians also expressed concern for the Mexicans, notwithstanding "the fact of their being low in the scale of intelligence," as the Nueces Valley Weekly of Corpus Christi stated.

News of the violence in Texas soon reached the Mexican minister in Washington, Manuel Robles y Pezuela, who on October 14 protested the affair to Secretary of State Lewis Cass. Cass urged Texas governor Elisha M. Pease to end the hostilities. In a message to the state legislature of November 30, 1857, Pease declared: "It is now very evident that there is no security for the lives of citizens of Mexican origin engaged in the business of transportation, along the road from San Antonio to the Gulf."

Pease asked for a special appropriation for the militia, and the legislators approved the expenditure with little opposition. Though some citizens of Karnes County, who wanted the "peon Mexican teamsters" out of business, were angry at the arrival of armed escorts for Tejano carters, the "war" subsided in December of 1857.

Birdwatcher

"...if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we would take great care in their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them." Canasatego 1744