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WesteiTn Texas 
k. A 
Band, McNally & Co., Printers and Engravers, Chicago. WESTERN TEXAS 
AS A 
Winter- Resort. 
VIA THE 
“SUNSET ROUTE.” 
CHICAGO: 
Rand, McNally & Co., Printers and Engravers. 
1878. WESTERN TEXAS 
AS A 
WINTER RESORT. 
® HIS small pamphlet is addressed to invalids, convalescents, and 
persons of delicate organization, who desire to escape the 
rigors of a northern winter, and pass the inclement months in 
a mild climate, amidst pleasant surroundings, and in the 
company of a refined society. To such the quaint old city 
of San Antonio presents attractions superior to those of the Bermudas, 
and of Florida. 
It is not enough that a place shall possess a mild climate, to make it a 
desirable winter resort. It must also have beautiful scenery and facilities 
for sport and recreation. It must present features which shall interest 
educated and refined persons. The society must be such as wdll be agree- 
able to ladies and gentlemen of culture. The medical faculty must be of 
superior attainments, and the churches those in which the worship of the 
God of beauty is rendered with eloquence and musical harmony. In short, 
a winter resort must possess, besides a genial climate and perfect health- 
fulness, all the advantages of advanced civilization. 
That portion of Western Texas which we commend to invalids is 
located between the 97th and 99th degrees of longitude, and between the 
29tli and 31st parallels of latitude. In none other can those features which 
are desirable for a winter resort be found in greater profusion. 
IT IS OF EASY AND PLEASANT ACCESS. 
The Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railway, or*as it is perhaps 
better known by its poetic name, “The Sunset Route,” has for its eastern 
terminus, Houston, the railroad centre of Texas, which is forty-three hours 
distant from St. Louis, and is reached by two lines of exctiUent roads, one 4 
WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
of which is the St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern, connecting with the 
International & Great Northern, the other the Missouri, Kansas & Texas, 
connecting with the Houston & Texas Central. Both roads run “through 
sleepers ” from St. Louis to Houston, and one, the M., K. & T., runs two 
daily trains with a through sleeper from Hannibal to the same depot, thus 
enabling the most aged and infirm to make the trip with comfort and pleas- 
ure. The cars of the Sunset Route start from the Union Depot at Houston, 
in which the others arrive, so that there is no transfer. Throughout the 
entire route there are excellent restaurants and dining stations, and every 
comfort and convenience is provided for the traveler. The train for San 
Antonio starts from Houston at 9.30 a.m., the entire trip being made through 
this lovely region by daylight, and in palace cars, which for luxury and 
beauty are surpassed by none. Each car is provided with an open air ve- 
randah, in which the traveler can enjoy the invigorating and balmy breeze, 
while viewing a scenery of surpassing loveliness, so poetically described in 
Harper's Magazine by that charming writer, Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spalford. 
“ At the moment that you start westward on the “ Sunset Route,’’ the 
landscape salutes you in all the loveliness- of a blossoming prairie in its 
first luxuriance of green under the tender early sun. The flowers are num- 
berless. When you have counted a couple of dozen varieiies, you find 
you have only begun. Here the painted-cup makes the great reaches gay; 
here yellow indigo stars them, and presently lends fhem its color, leading 
away into the boundless horizon a Field of the Cloth of Gold; here it is 
scarlet with the scarlet phlox, here blue with the verbena; here the lilies, 
with their long snowy filaments wondrously alive, whiten all the windings 
of an unseen brook; here, clothed in the priceless small clover, and greener 
than Dante’s freshly broken emeralds, beneath vast and hollow heavens, 
and “ moulded in colossal calm,” the naked prairie rolls away, league after 
league, unbroken to the Gulf. 
Oh, (the glory of a Texas prairie under a vertical sun ! the light, the 
color, the distance, the vast solitude and silence, the limitless level, the 
everlasting rest! A flock of white cranes rise flashing in the light and 
soar away; a mirage lifts the lofty timber that outlines a distant river, and 
shows you the stream shining beneath, shaking silver vapor at its feet; in 
the creek beside you, fearless blue ducks dip and dive and skim away, 
scattering the water-drops; a drove of horses, rising from beds of sun- 
flowers, with flying manes and tails, go bounding into space; vast herds 
of cattle crop the clover without lifting their heads as you sweep by; 
riders are rounding up their droves, hawks are hovering, birds are sing- 
ing, winds are blowing, and what seemed only solitude and silence is full 
of life and action and music. Now the forests of the Brazos begin to 
rustle; cypress and magnolia, linden and locust, ash and beech and elm, 
hickory and black-jack, dense to darkness, yet trembling with dew and 
sun, laced with gay vines of trumpet and passion flowers, and with huge 
ropes of blossoming grape slung from tree to tree, thick with undergrowth 
of dogwood and redbud, wild peach and cane, and their great dark live- 
oaks wrapped in the fantastic shadows of a thousand gray swaying cob- 
webs, and standing weird and awful in their Druidical beards. And out 
on what bottom-lands you come—the Nile-rich bottoms of the Brazos and 
of the Colorado; the black mould and the chocolate of an unmeasured WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
5 
Forest Scene on the Guadalupe. 6 
WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
depth; the cotton springing in endless rows of opening, bean-like leaves; 
the delicate sugar-cane just shaking out its ribbons! Here in the Brazos 
we dash by a sugar plantation, the low house with its broad verandas and 
wide-open doors under huge trees, in the distance the great sugar mills, 
and all around it the two thousand acres tbat make it a yearly return of 
one hundred thousand dollars. In the old times it was worked by a couple 
of hundred slaves; now seventy convicts under an armed and mounted 
guard do as-well. 
There is, however, let us say in passing, no trouble about work in Texas. 
Political difficulties were over there sooner than elsewhere in the South, 
and the affairs of labor equalized themselves to the laws of supply and 
demand. Throughout the State the freedmen are industrious and quiet, 
securing a good livelihood and laying up money. 
Not far away, and still in the Brazos bottoms, by Oyster Lake, a 
Massachusetts colony is setting up its tents; and here land maybe had for 
five dollars an acre, better than lands on the Illinois alluvial for fifty dol- 
lars an acre, and quite as healthy. 
Still we roll on, slowly mounting the six hundred feet of altitude at 
which San Antonio lies above the sea, out upon other prairies, where a 
single pasture of one hundred thousand acres fences in its tremendous 
herds. Flocks of birds darken the air like clouds of leaves, and vanish; 
a deer, perhaps, bounds by; a great buzzard is spreading his ragged wings 
over his unseen quarry; a carriage and pair go gently along the springing 
sod—strange anomaly, so far it seems just then from usual life. We roll 
past Bernard, whence, with but one house in sight, nearly ten thousand 
bales of cotton are dispatched; past the young city of New Philadelphia; 
past the lovely Eagle Lake, with its fish and game; past Scliulenberg, 
whose former owner, annoyed by the approach of civilization with the 
railroad, refused to sell a right of way, but disposed of his whole estate, 
and moved on where no one could elbow him—six years ago a homestead, 
to-day a town with mills and workshops, and daily paper; past Luling, 
with its neighboring Sour Springs, working cures by repute wonderful as 
the Pool of Bethesda, the gate to the San Marcos, whose fairy-like beauty 
has been so fitly sung by Mrs. Davis, the sweetest singer of the South; 
past a score of neat villages, under their live-oaks and pecans; and so on 
and up and out on the great grain region of the world, where the tender 
wheat is springing in long stretches vanishing from sight, the rye is already 
high, the corn is up two feet—a vast rolling region of plains and sun- 
bathed slopes, before which Mesopotamia is a fable, and the wealth of 
Odessa is but dust. Over the Guadalupe then, the three Santa Claras, the 
Cibolo, the Salado, straight into the sunset that casts out its long beams 
and reddens sky and prairie, and wells up in a flood of lustre suddenly 
extinguished by the quick-descending night. Lights begin to twinkle 
below, and you descend into San Antonio. There is a crowd of dark faces 
at the station, a confusion of strange tongues. As the carriage goes along, 
soft wafts of balmiest fragrance salute you; you are conscious of being in 
a world of flowers. As you alight at the Menger, enter a narrow, unevenly 
stoned passage, and come out upon a broad flagged court-yard, surrounded 
on three sides by open galleries, with the stars overhead, and the lamp- 
light flaring on a big mulberry-tree growing in it below, you feel that you 
are in the heart of Old Spain. 
San Antonio is like nothing so much as the little African town of 
Blidali that Eugbne Fromentin comes upon in the midst of the desert, set 
behind jalousies, among gardens and fountains, smothered in roses, and WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
7 
sung to by nightingales. On a more enchanting spot the eye of poet never 
rested. There is probably nothing like it in America. Four days ago you 
left snow under the windows at home, now your room is full of roses; 
and as you go out and about, you tind the town one wilderness of roses, a 
very Vale of Cashmere. Blush and creamy and blood-red; the delicate little 
Scotch rose; the superb Marshal Niel; the shining Lamarque; the beau- 
tiful great tea-rose, hundred-leaved and full, spotless, waxen-white, and 
damask; the heavy-headed Persian rose itself—they hedge gardens by the 
Commerce Street, San Antonio. 
quarter of a mile together, lattice every veranda, climb and lie in masses 
of bud and blossom on every roof. It is a long red roof usually, that, 
bending slightly, forms also the roof of the veranda. Most of the houses 
beneath it are long and low and narrow, of a single story, and but one 
step from the ground, built of a cream-colored stone that wTorks easily and 
hardens in the air, and so placed that the south wind or the east shall blow 
in every room—the wind that blows all day long from the Gulf, and makes 8 
WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
the fervent heat itself a joy. There is no vestibule; you enter the saloon 
from the door, and the other rooms open on either side of that, and as they 
all open on the veranda, that is used as a hall. Over them rise the tall 
cottonwoods and the huge spreading pecans, and before them or behind 
them, almost invariably, flows a swift, clear, artificial stream of water some 
four or five feet wide, the banks now stoned in, now covered with a lush 
growth of the blooming cannas and immense arrow-headed leaves the size 
of an African warrior’s shield, and now bridged beneath honeysuckle 
arbors. 
These charming dwellings stand with little regularity or uniformity, 
but here and there, facing this way and that, just as the winding roads 
wind with the winding river, and always half buried in a sweet seclusion 
of leaf and blossom. Not roses only, but all the other flowers under 
heaven: lilies and myrtles and geraniums make the air a bliss to breathe; 
aloes sit drawing in the sunshine, suddenly to shoot it out in one long 
spike of yellow bloom higher than the house itself; the Spanisli-dagger 
lifts its thick palm-like trunk, and bristles at a thousand points around its 
great cone of creamy bells; the euphorbia clothes its strange and lofty 
stem with a downy green, and then flowers with a blossom like a redbird 
just alit; in every vacant space the acacia “waves her yellow hair ’’—the 
very acacia, it is said, with whose long scarlet silken stamens tumbling 
out of their yellow hood Moore has taken such poetic license. There are 
groups of bananas, too, the arch of whose huge leaves reminds you only of 
Paul and Virginia’s home; there are walls of the scarlet pomegranate, one 
blaze of glory; lanes lined with the lovely-leaved fig-tree, where the fig is 
already large; and the comely mulberry-tree, grown to an enormous size, 
is dripping with its blackening and delicious fruit. Sometimes there are 
summer-houses at the gate almost half the size of the dwelling, entirely 
covered with vines, and the whole spot so sequestered behind mimosa and 
cacti and huge-leaved plants that it seems only a tropical tangle that you 
might hesitate to enter; but, pushing your way through which, you will 
find, behind broad porches, lofty rooms with polished floors and rugs, 
books and pictures and vases and costly furniture, inhabited by lovely 
wliite-clad women whose manners have peculiar grace. 
In and out among thejse houses slips the San Antonio river, clear as crystal, 
swifter than a mill-race; now narrow and foaming along between steep 
banks rich with luxuriant semi-tropical growth, and with the tall pecans 
on either side meeting above them in vaulting shadow; now spreading in 
sunny shallows between long grassy swards starred with flowers, twisting 
and turning and doubling on itself, so tortuous that the three miles of the 
straight line from its head to the market-place it makes only in fourteen 
miles of caprices and surprises, rapids and eddies and falls and arrowy 
curves, reach after reach of soft green gloom and flickering sunshine, each 
more exquisitely beautiful than the other. Around every lane it takes a 
loop; here it is just a pebbly ford, there, although so perfectly transparent 
that you can see every flint in its bed, it is of a profound depth, and every- 
where it is of a color whose loveliness is past belief. It flows by the Mexican 
jacal, and through the wealthy garden, around the churches, across the 
business streets with its delightful glimpses. You can not escape it; you 
think you have left it behind you, and there it is before you, hurrying 
along to the forests on its two hundred miles to the Gulf. It is a happy 
course this river runs, but a hard fate is in store for the lovely iSan 
Antonio. All its pretty, boisterous play is presently to become the groan- 
ing labor of a slave, for the sixty feet of its fall, if it is something to delight WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
9 
the heart of a poet, is something also to dilate the bapk account of the 
manufacturer. 
The San Antonio is joined in the valley by the San Pedro, another 
limpid stream, that pours from the rock and winds through some pretty 
public gardens before making itself more useful. 
The town lies in its valley in the broad basin of the great hills, and 
upon both sides of the river, and the serpentine course of the river, 
crossed by a score of bridges and as many fords, is such a confusion 
and a snare that you never know upon which side of it you are. 
View of San Peeku SpkiNus, san Antonio. 
The streets in the old part of the city are exceedingly narrow, and by 
no means clean, and tire sidewalks are narrower yet, and worn in 
ruts by the tread of many feet. Many of the buildings on these 
streets are of adobe, all of them a single story in height, most of them with 
galleries, as the veranda and piazza and porch are called. Some of them 
have a curious front, the wall projecting a couple of feet above the line 
where eaves should be, and pierced by rain-spouts, forming a breastwork 
behind which the defender lay protected, while through the rain-spouts 
firing down into the streets, which, in the furious old times that this town 
has known, with now one master and now another, were wont to run with 
blood. 10 
WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
Narrow as the streets are, they are incumbered in every way and made 
still narrower. Here the incumbrance is carts full of huge blocks of un- 
hewn stone, which are handled by brawny Mexicans and negroes, without 
derricks, and which the citizens patiently submit to see cut in the streets 
day by day instead of in the stone-cutter’s yard; here it is trains of clumsy 
Mexican wagons covered with canvas and drawn by oxen whose yokes are 
bound upon their horns, thus occasioning every jolt to jar the brain, and 
shortening the term of service of the stoutest beast. Often the main plaza 
is entirely covered with these teams, the great oxen lying all day in the 
sun there, and from under the canvas of the wagons protrude a crowd of 
little dark faces that make one fancy all Mexico is on the move. Some- 
times the incumbrance is a string of donkeys that trot through the streets, 
each one with a single fagot on his back, oddly contrasted by another 
where each one is so hidden by his load of straw, hay, fresh grass, sugar- 
cane, or corn, according to the season, whose long blades and stems trail 
upon the ground, that only his head and ears show how the bundle moves. 
Low it is a Mexican family transferring their altar—the Lares and Penates 
—on a cart, the father leading it, the mother and grandmother totally ob- 
scured by the things they lug along, an infinity of children round their 
heels, dirty and ragged and with tangled hair, but with the blackest eyes 
and whitest teeth, the ruddiest dark cheek and most roguish smile ever 
seen, and with the baby all but bare, strapped on a blanket on a mule’s 
back, sound asleep in the sun, as sweet a little morsel as the first baby ever 
born in paradise. If it is a Mexican family in a cart encountered thus, 
the mother is always on the front seat, while the father sits behind and 
holds the baby. Here it is an army train that stops the way, and makes a 
prominent feature of the streets—huge covered wagons drawn by mules 
four abreast, with an armed and mounted escort, whose rifles and broad 
cartridge belts mean business—on its way to the yet distant frontier, be- 
tween which and the town a train is almost always moving, as supplies 
are being dispatched, or officers’ families are taking their long ambulance 
journeys. These streets afford a good deal of interest, and add much 
variety and vivacity to life for the invalids who visit San Antonio 
seeking health, the number of whom is large, since the air there and in the 
surrounding region seems to have peculiar properties that render it almost 
a specific for consumption and diseases of the throat; and the invalids 
who have come down there simply to prolong life have in uncounted cases 
gone away entirely cured. You will see these reborn people, themselves 
a sight, strolling and driving about in all the pleased surprise of their 
return to life, and that in a town of such strange and foreign sights to 
them. Here comes a gay Mexican rider, too, who, if he is in full dress, 
wears his dark trousers buttoned up the outside of his leg with silver bells, 
his jacket rich with dollars, and his belt, his great light felt sombrero stiff 
with embroidery of gold and silver, and his bridle and saddle, stirrup and 
spurs, shining and clattering again with silver. , Or perhaps it is a party 
of ladies bounding along, for every woman in San Antonio is a fine and 
fearless rider; or some heavy cavalry riders, superb in blue and gold; or 
else it is a mounted beggar, who, if he does not have a servant to carry his 
bag, as the Fayal beggar does, yet rejoices in a stout little burro of his 
own. Here on the sidewalks, beneath an umbrella-tree that sheds abroad 
powerful fragrance, little tables are spread, where the market people get 
their roll and chocolate and bit of pastry, sitting where the gutter would 
run if there was one. Here, too, are the venders of strange dark candies, 
from which the flies are brushed with a cow’s tail; of porcupine-work; WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
11 
of bunches of magnolias, and great, ineffably sweet Cape jasmines from 
the coast; and Mexican women crouch upon the hot stones, their 
dark sad faces half veiled by their ragged ribosas, surrounded by wicker 
cages full of mocking-birds, vivid cardinals with their red crests, and 
lively little canarios on whose plumage every color under the sun glistens, 
making the tiny creatures marvels of emerald and gold and ruby and tur- 
quois. These Mexican faces are a great part of the little town; there are 
portions of it, called Chihuahua and Laredo, where you see nothing else. 
There, tumbling in the dirt, are the Mexican babies, than whom nothing 
can be lovelier; there, too, are the Mexican grandmothers, than whom 
nothing can he uglier. Here you can buy skins of leopards and ocelots, 
which the Indian women dress with the brains of the beast till they are as 
supple as silk; here are the little Chihuahua dogs that can nestle in the 
sleeve of your coat; here is wonderful Mexican needle-work, made on 
the drawn thread, rivaling the Old-World laces; here are .earthen pip- 
kins or jarritos prettily ornamented, with, their molinillos, or curious 
wooden sticks, set in many rings, which, rolled upright between the 
palms, make the chocolate foam in the pipkin. Whatever you buy, pelon 
will be given you; and whatever the Mexican buys himself, be it but five 
cents worth, he expects pelon, or something thrown into the bargain, which 
renders him not too profitable a customer. Here, in these old regions of 
the town, you can still see the women patiently crushing the corn on the 
matata; and here, at almost any hut, you can get Mexican refreshment, 
if you wish it, that will make you odorous for days. 
Everywhere about the outskirts of the town are innumerable low huts 
built of sticks and mud and straw and any old drift, roofed with thatch 
coming almost to the ground, and presenting an appearance of the utmost 
squalor. These are the Mexican jacals. The chimney and its ovens are 
usually in a cone of baked and blackened mud a little removed, and under 
a rude awning or a tree the whole family is usually to be seen, with mules, 
donkeys, chickens, and a horde of dogs, among the latter a hideous, hairless 
animal, promiscuously intermixed. Dogs are largely in the majority of the 
population in San Antonio, and their baying divides the noises of the night 
with the cock-crowing that resounds from house to jacal, from farm to 
ranch, and rises on the ear in broad surges of sound like the waves of the 
sea. If you should glance into one of these jacals, you would find an 
earthen floor cleanly swept, a bed neatly made and brightly covered, and 
the place garnished after its sort; and although the general idea is that it 
is a nest of filth, to the casual eye it seems clean and orderly, but poor to 
the last degree of poverty. Yet the Mexican here can live on less than 
any. In the summer the corn and onion and peppers of his garden patch 
meet his needs; in the winter, even when he owns his bit of land, a five- 
penny soup bone and one sweet potato comprise his usual marketing. 
But poor as he may be, his daughters do not go out to service; his mother 
wraps her ribosa—that remnant of the Spanish mantilla—about her with 
the grand air; and he himself, although in rags, salutes you on the street 
with the grave courtesy of a Spanish don. Making exception of the proud 
old Mexican families of lineage and repute, who live in seclusion, it is not 
possible to feel that these people who are known as Mexicans have any 
claim to the name as we use it. They are simply a gentler Indian, accept- 
ing a sort of civilization, now and then with a fairer tint, now and then 
with a wave in the hair that tells of darker blood, and always with a high 
qheek-hone, following them to the tenth generation. The proud Castilian 
has but small part in them, the gentle Montezuma race perhaps has less. 12 
WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
One having those two strains in his veins—the Spaniard, with his hemi- 
sphere of poetry behind him; the Montezuman, representing ancient and 
rightful empire of the continent—should wear, it would seem, other than 
these low-browed faces stamped in their dumb and sullen ignorance, 
whether you see them on the women squatting on the brick floor of the 
cathedral, or on the men lounging in the plazas against anything which 
will uphold them, darker and more sullen for the shadow of their huge 
sombreros. 
San Antonio is, in fact, a Spanish town to-day, and the only one where 
any considerable remnant of Spanish life exists in the United States. In 
The Alamo. 
its old archives much interesting information is held concerning the early 
Spanish rule in this country, and here also, by-the-way, are some papers 
going very far to prove the utter innocence of Aaron Burr of the treason 
under the charge of which he suffered. Many of the people proudly call 
themselves Spanish, and most of the Americans of the region find it 
necessary to speak their tongue easily; a lawyer, indeed, could hardly 
practice his profession without knowledge of the language, which he 
needs in examining witnesses, in pleading, and in recourse to the docu- 
ments in the matter of land titles, many of which are in the Spanish, while 
most of the local laws are founded on old Spanish usage. Land is still 
measured here by the vara, and the town has its alameda, its plazas, its WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
13 
acequias, the houses have their jalousies,'and the stranger never loses a 
foreign feeling while he stays. It is true that there are large numbers of 
Germans, French, and Poles here, that*no shopkeeper employs a clerk 
who can not deal with at least two of these nationalities besides his own, 
and the place is in a manner cosmopolitan; but Spain is at the foundation 
of the whole of it. The secular buildings are such as those which the 
earthquakes had forced on the Spaniard in Mexico, and which, from habit, 
he brought with him—and wherever the modern bqilder varies the design, 
he ornaments the galleries with a light wood-work, cut, doubtless uncon- 
sciously, in a Moorish pattern—and the church buildings are such as those 
which the Spaniard venerated in his mother-land. The Cathedral of San 
Fernando has, indeed, been rebuilt, retaining only a small fragment of the 
old building at the back; but the other ancient church buildings, quainter 
and more picturesque, known as missions, although in ruins, have endured 
no alteration of design. 
San Antonio was itself a mission. A poor little village called San 
Fernandez in 169S, it was deemed best to remove thither from the Rio 
Grande the mission of San Antonio de Valero, in execution of a plan still 
further to settle and civilize Texas, and thus to repress the encroachments 
of the French, who, under the pretensions of La Salle’s brief occupancy, 
were always laying claim to it. Thenceforth the mission was known as 
that of San Antonio de Bexar, from the name of the province, Bexar 
being an immense section of territory then comprising nearly all of South- 
western Texas, attached to the Intendancy of San Luis Potosi. The 
population of the town was increased by a royal importation of families 
from the Canary Islands and from Tlaxcala, and during the following 
half century the missions of La Purisima Concepcion, of San Jose, San 
Juan and La Espada were built down the river, each a few miles from 
the other, and the Alamo was begun on the left bank just behind the 
town. These were posts partly religious, partly defensive, founded by the 
Franciscans, to whom some five square leagues were given for the purpose, 
and who induced the milder Indians to cultivate the rich lands, improve 
their own condition, and enlarge the revenues of the Church, without any 
doubt performing a great work of civilization. The buildings of the 
missions usually consisted of a noble church at one end of the square, a 
fort at the other, the apartments of the friars, the buts of the laborers, 
the granaries and storehouses distributed between, all of massive stone, 
and inclosed behind a high wall completing the whole as a fortress, which 
was, indeed, necessary, subject as it was to the incursions of the fierce 
northern Indians. 
These missions have an interest for us quite apart from their beauty, 
for they stand up in their solitude and decay, still giving silent testimony 
to the immense debt that we, as a people, owe to-day to the old conquis- 
tadores of Spain. They are a part of the visible romance of our country, 
too ; for they met the iine of that chain of forts which followed in the 
adventurous path of the Sieur de la Salle and the intrepid Father Henne- 
pin from the Great Lakes to the Red River, and they also were the out- 
posts of civilization in the wilderness. The monks of these missions, 
moreover, were those who opened to the world the resources of this great 
empire of the West ; with their patience and labor, they were the first 
pioneers of the region, and but for the riches which the soil displayed at 
their touch, the colonist might not have been tempted here for a century 
later. They cleared the way for a new power among the peoples of the 
earth, and in the annexation of that to our own in the war that 14 
WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
followed, and the consequent acquisition of all the northern half of Mex- 
ican territory, and the great train of circumstances resulting, one sees 
that, like all the other conscientious workers of the world, they “ builded 
better than they knew.” 
Every one of these missions is now a ruin ; the grass grows on so 
much of the roof as is left, the mesquite starts up in the long cloisters 
where the fathers used to pace, the cactus sprouts and blossoms in the 
crannies of the outer wall, the wild thyme hangs in bunches there, and 
Mission be t.a Concepcion. 
sweetens all the lonesome summer air. Nothing can describe the solitary 
grandeur and beauty of the Concepcion, and the marvelous piece of color 
that it makes, as you drive over the prairie, first approaching it when, a 
mile and a half from the town, its twin towers and dome darkly rise on 
the luminous sky. It is the first religious ruin you have seen in America— 
indeed, these ruins are, we think, the only things of the sort i i the coun- 
try ; its existence is a romance, its condition a mystery, and a vague pathos 
haunts its broken arches and disused cells. The "mission of San Jose, 
some four miles below the first, $s, however, both finer and more interest- WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
15 
ing. This is really, it is said, the mission of San Juan, hut through a 
transmutation of names peculiar to Texas, in which, for instance, the 
original Brazos became the Colorado, and the Colorado tlje Brazos, the 
place is now always known as San Jose. The buildings of this, the second 
mission, were not only,of finer design and workmanship, but they were 
those of a scholastic as well as of a religious institution, inclosed a much 
larger space, and are left in much more detail. The church was built in 
the style introduced in Europe by the Jesuits when the Renaissance had 
become wearying—the style from which subsequently the Louis Quatorze 
developed itself. But although a meretricious style, its effect, judging 
from these ruins, must have been very fine, particularly in the dazzling 
light of this latitude, and the execution of its details was of the best. 
The stone, although now lichen-eaten and weather-stained, is the soft 
cream-colored stone of the district, which is easily wrought, the surface 
walls frescoed with a diaper of vermilion and blue, of which only faint 
lines remain. All the lofty fa£ade is a mass of superb sculpture of colos- 
sal figures, with cherubs, scrolls and flowers ; similar noble work sur- 
rounds one of the exquisitely beautiful windows ; but for the rest, the 
great halls are roofless, the long arcades are crumbling into mounds of 
dust, and even the fine statuary has been defaced by wanton wretches who 
have enriched themselves with the hand of a St. Joseph or the head of an 
infant Jesus. Such as the carving is, it is regarded with superstitious 
idolatry by the simple Mexicans whose village surrounds the ruin, and 
the priesthood itself would not dare to take any measures for its preserva- 
tion that should remove it from their daily sight. The chapel attached 
to the mission is still in use, a weekly service being held there. In spite 
of its pretty font and of the groined arches of its vaulted roof, it is a sad 
spot. Two or three old paintings adorn it, a sacred image stands in the 
lofty niche of the only window, which, lined with scarlet, surrounds the 
image in a blazing aureole, while the walls all about the altars are strung 
with the votive offerings of the poor worshipers, who, since they can not 
give lace and jewels, and gold-wrought altar cloths, give curious patch- 
work hangings which are inexpressibly touching to see. There are said 
to be great under-ground chambers attached to this mission building, ca- 
pable of holding two years’ provision of wheat, together with secret 
passages to the river, so that the water supply could never be cut off; and 
owing to this, the mission was able once to endure triumphantly, accord- 
ing to tradition, a siege of eighteen months’ duration from those warlike 
Indians who never ceased their hostility to the undertaking of the Span- 
iard and the Franciscan. Of the other missions, down the river, there is 
scarcely enough left to mention; but take them by moonlight, the efful- 
gent moonlight of San Antonio, and they are worth a journey to see, the 
front of La Espada towering above the dark foliage, a melancholy haunt 
of poetry and dreams. Why all these buildings have been allowed to fall 
into such a condition it is not easy to say. it was that the secu- 
larization of the missions crippled them beyond their strength, \yhether 
the Indian service was no longer able to maintain them, whether the dry 
climate had any particularly injurious effect upon them, whether the 
depredations of marauders have been equal to such destruction, or whether 
it is judged that they are most effective as they are—whatever the reason, 
the lover of the picturesque may Well be thankful for the result. 
The drive to these missions, in deep woods, across all the fords at all 
the windings of the rivers, through the forsaken avenues of pecans that 
the good friars planted, and up the open prairie-side, is as wide and de- 16 
WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
lightful a contrast with the ruins as it is possible to imagine, and accents 
a great deal of their charm. Here is no decay, no disrepair. Nature is 
alive and throbbing through every leaf and blade; the mesquite is waving 
all light and feathery grace on every ripple of the air, a thing of beauty, 
half sunshine and half verdure; the mustang grape, with a stem the size 
of a baby’s waist, twists itself in long, loose ropes and festoons from tree 
to tree, and spices the wood; the great ratamma, with its yellow primrose 
flower set in a radiation of slender green spike-like leaves, shines with 
all its lamps .against the dark masses of the magnificent pecan; and ear- 
lier in the year the wisache, each spray of which, strung with downy 
golden balls, is precious in the Northern conservatory, soars like an illu- 
Mission or San Jose, San Antonio, 1720. 
mination beside the way, and the thickets of the lovely frijo-lio clothe 
themselves in purple with the narcissus at their feet. " All around the 
Concepcion mission, where one of the deadliest lights of the Texan rev- 
olution once reddened the grass, sheets of the white prickly-poppy wave 
in the wind, the Texas star sprinkles the sod, and the delicate little white 
rain-lilies that spring after a shower, scatter their delicious odor; every- 
where over the broad slopes the prickly-pear blazes up in the sun with its 
big red and yellow cups full of flame; jn the same colors, native to the 
soil, scarlet and orange lantanas and abutilons grow beside the slender 
swaying mountain heliotrope with its white blossom and vanilla scent, 
while violet and verbena, morning-glory, marandia, convolvulus, and cle- 
matis, greet the familiar eye, and unknown blossoms flaunt in every copse. WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
17 
The music of the mocking-bird, which tilts on countless topmost boughs, 
is pouring over you in floods of ecstacy; the cardinal-bird’s note pipes 
clear as he darts from the shadow of one bush to another like a winged 
coal of fire; the little finches warble and trill; the turtle doves coo on the 
low boughs, or go skipping together across the grass; the scyssors-tail and 
the chacalaca skim over the tops of the thorny chaparral; a flock of 
blackbirds that seem to have lit on the knoll in a patch of yellow blos- 
soms fly away at your approach, and take the blossoms with them; the 
rabbits bound along the ground; the splendid wings of butterflies brush 
your face. Just below the second mission you come to the falls of the San 
Antonio. Although the falls themselves, divided into many, are of no 
great height, yet the volume of tumbling foam, the wondrous color of the 
waters, and all the harmony of the world of verdure that in every shade 
of mighty oak, dipping willow, and feathery fern swings over the stream 
which slips so smoothly to the fall, and with such jewel-like polish that 
its very swiftness seems stillness, make a picture of green and silver that 
it would take a West Indian wilderness to rival. 
The Alamo, the last of the missions, and one never quite completed, is 
but a few steps from your inn, on a dusty plaza that is a reproach to all 
San Antonio. Its wall is overthrown and removed, its dormitories are 
piled with military stores, its battle-scarred front has been revamped and 
repainted, and market carts roll to and fro on the spot where the flames 
ascended at the touch of the torch of an insolent foe over the funeral pyre 
of heroes. But yet the Texan visits it as a shrine, and thrills with pride 
in a history that is more to him than all the Monmouths and Lexingtons 
and Cowpens and Yorktowns of the Revolution; for, after all, Texas is a 
domain by itself, writh a past of its own, and although long a voluntary 
member of our federation, yet, like Hungary or like Scotland, it is hardly 
to be absorbed. 
The sword years since usurped the gown in men’s thoughts when they 
spoke of the church of the Alamo, that fortress of the church militant. 
Yet many a stout contest, to be sure, was waged in and around the little 
town of Bexar before the walls of the Alamo were ready for the banner 
poles from which such various flags have tossed defiance : to-day the 
French, under St. Denis and La Harpe, driving back into it all the Span- 
iards of the outlying country, to-morrow the Comanches and the Tahua- 
canos harrying it, and even after it was garrisoned, the Apache riding 
boldly in and bidding the soldier there tether his horses. But with the 
building of the Alamo the struggles for its possession became fierce and 
frequent, and all the peaceful nestling beauty of the town was, until within 
the last thirty years, only the background for successive scenes of blood- 
shed. Now Salcedo and Herrera surrender it to the Americans—that 
Salcedo whose keen insight saw the ruin of Spain in her colonies, and 
wrould have forbidden the birds to fly across our border and bring back 
any whisper of liberty ; now Elisondo threatens it, one sunrise, from the 
distant heights of the Alazan ; out of it eagerly marches a band to meet 
Arredondo at the Medina, and lay their bones to bleach on the old San 
Antonio road ; now, again, a raw army of 500 men hold Perfecto de Cos, 
the brother-in-law of Santa Anna, and his force of nearly three times 
their number, prisoners within the walls for two months, till the assault 
is ordered, when, while one party divert attention by an attack on the 
Alamo, from which, as well as from the cathedral, waves the merciless 
black and red flag, two columns march up Soledad and Acequia streets, 
the one pushing through De la Garza’s house, the other through Vera- 18 
WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
mendi’s—eacli house, with its walls three and four feet in thickness, 
being- a little fort—push slowly on day by day through the houses, not 
through the streets, which were raked by Mexican guns, through 
Navarro’s house, into the priest’s house, into the square, when the black 
and red flags come down and a white one goes up—a bitterly contested 
fight, where on the second day the magnificent Milan fell, long lying 
buried where he fell. Although, some years afterward, the ashes of this 
hero were removed to a cemetery, yet the scarcity of land in Texas 
recently created the necessity of running a highway through the ceme- 
tery ; and while he has his monument in the Capitol, yet Milan, who so 
loved Liberty for Liberty’s sake—lay in canebrakes, slept in dungeons, 
starved and bled and died for her—lies to-day in an unmarked grave 
where every hoof insults him. 
But the great fight of the Alamo, that which has immortalized it with 
the battles of the world, took place when Santa Anna advanced upon it 
with all the machinery of war at Mexico’s command. From the outset 
there was no hope within the walls,and the little garrison there made up 
their minds to their fate ; indeed, one of them, Colonel Bonham, sent out 
to seek rfe-enforcements, came back alone, although he knew it was to die, 
heroically as Regulus returned to Carthage. There were 144 men in 
the Alamo ; Santa Anna’s troops, at first estimated at 1,500, were presently- 
increased to 4,000 ; they were the flower of the Mexican soldiery, com- 
manded by officers of matchless skill and daring, many of whom loathed 
the work required of them. But Santa Anna, who styled himself the 
Napoleon of the West, left no foes to rise behind him : his policy was the 
policy of extermination. The town of San Antonio was already his ; the 
blood-red flag flapped from the cathedral, and the fortress was summoned 
to surrender and throw itself upon Mexican mercy. What that mercy was 
can be imagined from the subsequent fate of those who capitulated with 
the brave, impetuous Fannin at Goliad under all the forms and articles of 
war, and with promise of speedy release, only to receive orders, one Sun- 
day when they were singing “ Sweet Home,” to march out in double file 
under guard, suddenly halted when half a mile from the fort, the guard 
wheeling and firing upon them till they fell, betrayed and butchered in 
cold blood. “ This day, Palm-Sunday,” writes a Mexican officer of the 
massacre, “ has been to me a day of most heart-felt sorrow. At six in the 
morning the execution of 412 American prisoners was commenced, and 
continued till eight, when the last of the number was shot. At eleven 
commenced the operation of burning their bodies. But what an awful 
scene did the field present, when the prisoners were executed and fell 
dead in heaps, and what spectator could view it without horror ! They 
were all young, the oldest not more than thirty, and of fine florid com- 
plexions. When the unfortunate youths were brought to the place of 
death, their lamentations, and the appeals which they uttered to Heaven 
in their own language, with extended arms, kneeling or prostrate on the 
earth, were such as might have caused the very stones to cry out in com- 
passion.” 
Travis and his men had no mind for such mercy. Shut up in the 
Alamo, this was the proclamation of that superb leader : “ I am deter- 
mined to sustain myself as long as possible, and die like a soldier who 
never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country. Vic- 
tory or death ! ” 
Tim splendid death-cry was unheard. The call was neglected. No 
help came. Santa Anna surrounded the place on all sides with intrenched WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
19 
■an Antonio River tei.ow Bowen's Bend. 20 
WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
encampments, and kept up a cannonade for ten days, many times attempt- 
ing to scale the walls, but always repulsed with slaughter—1,50J of his 
men, it is said, falling before the unerring Texas rifle. At midnight of 
the thirteenth day the storming party was ordered to the assault for the 
last time, the reluctant infantry, pricked on by cavalry in the rear, 
amidst the roar of artillery and the volleys of musketry, the trumpet 
sounding the dreadful notes of the dequelo. signifying no quarter. Twice 
they made the attempt in vain, and recoiled only to be urged on lor tin- 
third time by the irresistible cordon behind them; the third time they 
mounted the walls and fell to their bloody work. It was short and terri- 
ble. As Travis stood on an angle of the northern wall, cheering the fear- 
less spirits behind him, a ball struck his forehead, and he fell ; a Mexican 
officer rushed forward to dispatch him, but he died on the point of Tra- 
vis’s sw<9rd as that hero breathed his last. And with that the indiscrimi- 
nate slaughter began, man to man, of the little force that, worn out with 
the task of repelling attacks and manning works that required five times 
their number, with sleeplessness and thirst, and without time to' reload 
their pieces, fought with their knives and the stocks of their rifles till no 
soul of the desperate band was left alive. Death and Santa Anna held 
the place. The Alcalde of San Anjtonio, summoned before the con- 
queror, pointed out to him Travis on the wall with the bullet in his fore- 
head, Bowie butchered in his cell where he lay on his sick-bed, Evans 
shot in the act of blowing up the magazine, and David Crockett lying 
dead with a circle of his slaughtered foes around him. On the shaft 
erected to the heroes runs a legend whose eloquence makes the heart 
stand still : “ Thermopylae had its messenger of defeat, the Alamo had 
none.” 
San Antonio has always had more or less to do with warlike operations. 
It is now again a military department, under the control of General 
Ord, a brave and accomplished soldier, who from this station directs the 
frontier movements between those forts that constitute our wall against 
the Mexican and the Apache ; and in the event of a new Mexican war, it 
will be, as it is now, owing both to its situation and to its railway con- 
m ction with the coast, the base of military operations. It has an arsenal, 
with picturesque grounds and buildings, on Flores street, and a military 
depot on one of the side hills, whose stone walls inclose sufficient accom- 
modation for all the stores needed in time of war, while its tower over- 
looks the country for many miles. There are several regiments perma- 
nently stationed here, while officers of other regiments are frequently go- 
ing and coming to and from other posts ; and there is almost a pathetic 
contrast between the young officer with liis unfleshed swrord, who arrives 
smooth and fresh and fine in San Antonio, and the bronzed and roughened 
fellow who rides back from the frontier after a couple of years of service 
there. San Antonio is held to be quite a desirable post in the army, and 
the army life adds a great deal to the pleasure of society in the place, 
with the high tone of its brilliant men and lovely women of varied expe- 
rience and graceful manners. But the society proper to the place itself is 
of a superior order, having something of the old Spanish base of courtesy 
and gravity with the polish born of contact with the world. For the 
San Antonians are by no means a stay-gt-liome people, nor do they con- 
fine their rambles to Mexico and the South ; you will find many of those 
in comfortable circumstances who have made the European tour, and 
several who have crossed the ocean half a dozen times. Besides the 
school of the convent, there are several fine private schools, and there lias WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
21 
long been a system of free schools in operation there, and those for whom 
these facilities are insufficient send their children sometimes to the North 
and sometimes to Europe. Of the young ladies there—who, by-the-way, 
are rather remarkable for their beauty—there are many who speak Span- 
ish or German, and many are mistresses of four tongues ; while several of 
the matrons have 
an acquaintance 
with the dead 
languages which 
would allow them 
to fit their own 
boys for college, 
are well read "in 
general literature 
too, and proud of 
the fact that Texas 
has no lack of lit- 
erature of her 
own. A good deal 
of the quality of 
this society is ow- 
ing to the fact that 
its members de- 
pend so largely 
for entertainment 
upon themselves, 
and while dancing 
and music have 
received great at- 
tention, the art of 
conversation has had an uncon- 
scious cultivation that it does not 
so generally receive where opera 
and concert and theatre spare the 
trouble Yet this society is a growth 
of the present century. When the first 
American lady went to San Antonio, 
the Mexican women would beg per- 
mission to come in and admire 
her, and after sitting in 
silence a space, would go 
away lisping many thanks 
in their sweet syllables, 
and saying that she was very white 
and very lovely. 
This soft lisp of the Mexican, we 
may say, has somewhat infected the speech of the 
average Sail Antonian, who calls acequias isakers, 
and speaks of the Salado and the Cibolo as the 
Slough and the Seewiller. Perhaps, also, he has been infected by 
something more than the Mexican lisp, in a certain enervation and 
lack of public spirit which cause him to allow his lovely town still 
to retain its fantastic charm, instead of joining the march of improve- 
ment : he does not wish to see things other than they always have 
San Pedro River. 22 
WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
been ; it is no paradox for him to say that although they he better, 
they are not so good. This is the square where Baron de Bastrop 
met Moses Austin turning away in disgrace and despair, and changed the 
fortunes of Texas ; is the public crossing of the river where old 
Delgado’s head was set up on a pole ; there is the brook that once ran red 
with the blood of Salcedo, Herrera, and twelve other good knights and true 
to pay for that head ; and yonder is the plaza where the famous Comanche 
fight took place not forty years ago, when threescore Indian warriors, 
squaws and papooses came into San Antonio by appointment to surrender 
their white prisoners, and, failing to keep faith, wTere told they should be 
held as hostages, upon which, in an instant, bows were strung and knives 
unsheathed, and in the fearful struggle which followed, the squaws them- 
selves fighting like tiger-cats, not one of the warriors was left alive. The 
old San Antonian wishes to keep these places unaltered, nor would he 
have the honored names of Manchaca, Navarro, Zavala, Sequin, and their 
sort, superseded by those of enterprising emigrants. From the point of 
view of the picturesque he is certainly right ; but otherwise one is re- 
minded of the saying, now become a proverb, that the enemy of Texas is 
the old Texan. In spite of him, though, certain changes will be wrought 
by time ; enterprise has already crept into the place. It has a Historical 
Society and a Board of Trade ; it is talking of a new system of sewerage 
it has a gas house, much whose gas is made of cotton seed ; it has 
a railroad which has already improved its market, and it is bound to have 
others yet. . 
There is a sort of romance attaching to the road that brings into daily 
communication with the world this city, one of that lonely trio, San An- 
tonio, Nacogdoches, and Santa Fe, that for nearly two centuries have 
stood on their long untraveled trails, unknown and remote in their silent 
solitudes upon the outposts. This road was built, single-handed, by its 
owner, Mr. Peirce, who is said to be the largest land-holder in the world. 
The bed in all its length is broad and firm, much of it made of the solid 
concrete deposits which are found on the line, the ties are laid with an 
exact precision, the rails are steel, and the bridges are of iron, with piers 
of solid masonry that defy the floods. On the occasion of its opening the 
San Antonians displayed a unique hospitality. To every guest that came 
over the road they gave literally the freedom of the city—the they 
had to offer. Bed and board and fruit and flower were his ; any garden 
where he wished to stroll was his ; any carriage that he chose to stop 
upon the street and enter was his ; any bar across which he wished to 
drink—and their name is legion—any cigar he chose to take. For three 
days the three hundred guests were entertained as kings and princes 
entertain, and were dismissed without having been allowed to pay a bill. 
It has always been a long and fatiguing stage-coach ride thither ; but now 
the Texan is pouring in to visit its sanctuaries. He calls it almost 
invariab y “ Santone,” and it is as full of novelty and delight to him as to 
the rest of the world. He goes to the Alamo and is weighed, congratulat- 
ing himself on those that were weighed in the balance and not found 
wanting there once before :.he climbs to the top of the mission tower, 
and recalls yet earlier days ; he visits the springs ; and he spends his 
evening at Wolfram’s Garden, where the cups of colored, light, among all 
the greenery reflected in the river, make an elfin place of strange contrast 
to those rude earlier scenes. He goes to the bee caves outside the city, 
to the bat caves some twenty miles away, where the scent of ammonia is 
stifling, the accumulations of guano are tremendous, and where the bats WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
23 
flying out just at sunset in long streams, like the never-ceasing smoke of 
a volcano, darken all the air, while the transparent membranes of their 
outstretched wings, catching the sidelong sunlight, make an unintermitting 
dazzle of prismatic lustre. Or perhaps he is on the fortunate party that 
unearths the skeleton in armor of one of those Spanish knights sent out 
by Cortez to find the seven treasure cities and never returning—wonderful 
bronze armor, finished in the perfection of art. Within the town he sees 
the long emigrant train threading the streets, with homesick women and 
determined men ; he sees the great supply trains going out full and heavy 
to the markets of Saltillo, Monterey, and Chihuahua, and returning with 
hides and silver and wool ; he sees the hunters coming home laden with 
Comal River, near New Braunfels. 
game, and the gay party of young roughs pushing forth, with their six- 
shooters on the saddle, to seek for the lost mines of San Saba, or for those 
of Uvalde and the remoter west. lie sees, too, the group of Mexican 
officers meeting here, perhaps for refuge, perhaps for safer conspiracy, 
perhaps to act with that Escobedo who put an end to Maximilian’s pretty 
romance, and served notice on Europe to send no more kings to America ; 
he sees the pld banker, who, an American prisoner, has cleaned the streets 
of Mexico with ball and chain on his foot, the old physician who holds 
the diploma of all the learned societies in Europe, and who came to this 
country with that scion of royalty, the prince who colonized New Braun 
fels, bringing with him letters from Humboldt ; or possibly he may meet, 24 
WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
a still stately dame who wears the diamonds given to her by her old 
partner in the dance, the pirate Lafitte, hero of Byron’s “ Corsair.” He 
sees, vvith these, this and that veteran of Houston’s men, still full of the 
old fire, as interesting to him, and almost as ancient, as if just stepped 
out of Joshua’s army before Jericho; or, as possibly, one of the “bean 
men,” a sort of Sacred character, being the survivor of the famous Mier 
expedition. 
But her own surrounding hills and prairies are wealth enough for her 
as it is. The yield of the cereals there is simply enormous. The’ corn is 
twice as high as your head in May, and the grass has twice been cut by 
that; every known vegetable has long been in the market then. The sweet 
and luscious tigs are ripe, and pears and apples, apricots, plums, and 
peaches, are ready to gather ; while, later in the year, bananas, pomegran- 
ates and persimmons come in, and the pecans drop big and sweet as one 
finds them nowhere else. There are fields about San Antonio where four 
hundred dollars an acre have been realized out of sugar-cane, although 
that is an extremely exceptional yield, the proceeds being partly due to the 
sale of cane in the streets, it being a choice morsel in its season. Large 
quantities of it are fed to cattle also; and for them, as another delicacy, 
the prickly-pear is raked into heaps, and scorched of its thorns by fire. 
The Spanish moss is found in immense quantities on the trees in certain 
portions of country round San Antonio, as well as all the way to the coast. 
It is an epiphyte, not a parasite, drawing its sustenance from the air, and 
not the tree, to which it does no injury< and it is already forming a good 
branch of commerce, as, being well rotted and dried, it makes a valuable 
substitute for curled hair in upholstery. Cotton, too, is almost equally 
prolific with everything else. In fact, there is nothing which the rich 
earth does not seem capable of producing, and producing at its best. As 
you see it freshly turned up, clean, dark, and glistening as though it held 
hidden sunbeams, it seems, according to the old saying, fairly good enough 
to eat. It would excuse the clay-eaters themselves if it were on such sub- 
stance that they fed; and one would well wish that, having the traditional 
peck bf dirt to eat, it might be eaten in San Antonio. One does not won- 
der to see this sod break into blossom the day after it is cut. 
“A footfall there 
Suffices to upturn to the warm air 
Half-germinating spices; mere decay 
Produces richer life; and day by day 
New pollen on the lily j)etal grows, 
And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.” 
And San Antonio in this matter is but the type of all Western Texas—a 
land of promise and of plenty; a land flowing in milk and honey (if, with 
the cattle roaming in multitudes, one were not obliged to use condensed 
milk in one’s coffee); a land -where the vagrant can sleep in comfort under 
a tent in open air all his lifetime, and may live in luxury, scarcely lifting 
his hands to labor, and where the energetic and intelligent bind fortune 
hand and foot, and compel her to their service. Nearly three hundred 
thousand people entered it in the last year, and sought permanent homes; 
many more, we understand, contemplate the same movement in the coming 
year. And their success is entirely in the measure of their endeavor; for 
with eggs selling at from six to ten cents a dozen, and beef at from five 
to eight cents a pound, the cost of living is at its minimum. Rents are 
the only expensive item, and the climate, as we have said, makes a tent WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
25 
sufficient shelter till a house can be built. And never was any place more 
full of opportunity to those who can seize occasion by the forelock—oppor- 
tunity, too, quite outside of the farming industries. Wonderful water- 
powers that could spin and weave all the cotton on earth compass the 
cotton belt there, while the machinery of woolen mills could run without 
steam beside the ranch where the wool is shorn; the huge heaps of bones, 
gathered from the prairies where the cattle of two hundred years have 
laid them, and that are transported at great cost, could be ground into 
dust, or made into combs and buttons on the spot; acres of blooming 
wild white poppies tell what is yet to be done there in opium; tons of 
indigo are ready to the hand; and the mesquite is able to tan the hides 
that travel some five thousand miles before they come back in saddles and 
harnesses and shoes. This mesquite, by the way, could be to the Texan 
almost as much as the palm is to the Arab—an object of pleasure to the 
eye of man. Cattle browse upon its foliage, sheep eagerly eat its beans; 
its gnarled wood, when grown to any size, is as fine as old mahogany for 
furniture; its abundant gum is the gum-arabic of the East, and its bark 
tans leather as quickly and thoroughly as any other substance known. 
Forbidden by Spain, in that narrow policy which has reacted in ruin on 
herself, to grow flax, hemp, saffron, olives, grapes, and mulberries, the 
country blossoms with them all to-day. And, in truth, there is nothing 
which she does not bring forth, from the wines of El Paso to the camels 
raised and sold to traveling menageries, for confiding parents to exhibit to 
marveling children as the ship of the desert, and the product of the 
Scriptural East. 
It is the Scriptural East that the region round about San Antonio, and 
all this Western Texas, indeed, constantly presents to the mind in the lay 
of the land and all its characteristics. The irrigating ditches, the shep- 
herds and their flocks, the cattle on a thousand hills, the wild asses snuffing 
the breeze, the wheat, the vineyard, the lilies of the field, the smell of the 
grape, the voice of the turtle-dove, the fig and the pomegranate—they are 
all there; the very atmosphere, and the high clear heavens recall the skies 
of Palestine; one feels what the burden and heat of the day means, and 
recalls the Lord walking in His garden in the cool of the evening. At 
every step some memory or association concerning the Holy Land arises; 
and the dweller, sitting on his gallery, and overlooking his green pastures, 
as the sweet and sudden dusk follows sunset without twilight there, can 
well give thanks, saying, ‘‘For the Lord thy God hringeth thee into a 
good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring 
out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig- 
trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey; a land wherein 
thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack anything in 
it; a land 'whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig 
brass.” 
This beautiful description, which is as truthful as it is poetic, is copied 
by the courteous permission of Harper & Bros., from their magazine for 
November, 1877, where it will be found complete and illustrated in that 
high style of art for which all their publications are celebrated. San An- 
tonio daily presents to the stranger new features of interest, of romance 
and of poetry. That ennui which weighs so heavily in the orange-laden 
groves of Florida and on the sea-girt shore of the Bermudas, is unknown 
in San Antonio. 26 
WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
HEALTHFULNESS. 
The elevation of San Antonio is 625 feet above the sea. Its atmosphere 
is as pure and balmy as that of Italy, and the water so pure and sparkling 
that fishes may be seen sporting at the bottom of deep streams. These 
are the elements of healthfulness. They are the essentials which a winter 
resort must have to be of value. 
The reader who desires to be assured of these facts, has only to consult 
the United States Census Reports, those of Signal Service observations, 
or any scientific work on climatology, to be convinced that the climate of 
Western Texas is the equal in salubrity and healthfulness of any in the 
world. We give the mean standard thermometer, as observed for the six 
winter months: November, 58.73; December, 55.76; January, 49.59; Feb- 
ruary,58.72; March, 64.50; April,.67.67. Almost any desired temperature 
may he secured by the change of a few miles from the valley to hill 
country. 
PULMONARY AFFECTIONS. 
The entire freedom of Western Texas from pulmonary diseases, has 
been noted ever since its first settlement in the seventeenth century. No 
such affections have ever originated in this country, while all who go 
there, suffering from them, either experience a perfect cure, or prolong 
their lives in comfort. Marked instances of this have become current 
anecdotes. The case of the Rev. Benj. Rogers is one that is full of inter- 
est. This distinguished divine removed from New York to Western 
Texas, before the war, hoping, at the most, to prolong for a brief space a 
life that the physicians thought hopeless. He is still alive and in com- 
parative health Although he has made attempts to remove to northern 
cities, where his eloquence always secures for him the largest and most 
desirable parishes, he has, in every case, been compelled to return to the 
healthful climate of Western Texas, where he now resides. Another 
marked case in point is that of the Hon. H. C. King, now editor of the 
San Antonio Express. This gentleman came to Western Texas a confirmed 
consumptive, without the hope of enjoying health, and content if he 
might but prolong his life for a few years. Now, he is robust as most 
men, and daily pursues the arduous and exacting profession of journal- 
ism, and finds himself fully equal to the performance of the severe night 
labor which that profession requires. Application to the officers and 
agents of the road will be answered with the names of numerous others 
who have experienced like benefit—not those of Joe Williams and Mrs. 
Melinda Brown, which have done gallant service in vouching for the mi- 
raculous cures of Dr. Pillgarlic’s Elixir of Life and a thousand other 
nostrums, but those of people whose intellectual and social standing are WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
27 
widely known; ladies and gentlemen of acknowledged wealth, culture 
and responsibility. 
While San Antonio is surpassingly healthy, invalids in an advanced stage 
of consumption may find the higher altitudes of Boerne, Bandera, Fort 
Concho, Castroville and other cities even more beneficial. All these will 
receive from the medical practitioners of San Antonio the most reliable 
and trustworthy advice. 
The invalid can not be too strongly impressed with the advantage of a 
little heroism, for while it is true that great and manifest advantage is 
derived by a residence among the refinements and luxuries of any of 
these cities, it is also true that far greater benefits accrue from an open 
air life in the country. Unless the patient is so far reduced as to be una- 
ble to make the exertion, the physicians almost invariably advise camp 
life, sleeping in tent, and the pursuit of outdoor sport. It requires con- 
siderable heroism for the consumptive lady or even gentleman accustomed 
to the elegant luxuries and tempting viands of a sick chamber to take up 
with frontier life, but such as do almost invariably find vigor qf arm and 
bloom of cheek returning. They soon enjoy a bear steak and a venison 
stew though rudely prepared by the camp fire or on the kitchen hearth, 
with a zest and an appetite which the most epicurean pete foi de gras 
never provoked. 
OUTDOOR SPORTS. 
The lover of hunting and fishing can find abundant use for both rod 
and gun in Western Texas. The San Antonio, the rralado, and the Guada- 
lupe, with other streams more distant from the city, are filled with fish 
of many kinds, and a day’s sport may always be had by those who love 
the pursuit of Izak Walton. Deer, turkeys and almost every variety of 
smaller game birds are foynd in abundance. The true sportsman will have 
no lack in the variety of his game, and if he is inclined to more exciting 
contests than those of skill he can find ample opportunity for the display 
of courage and hardihood in hunting the puma, the ocelot, the leopard, 
the bear and the buffalo, within a few days’ ride of the antique city. 
THE CHURCHES. 
San Antonio is twice a cathedral city. The Bishops of the Catholic 
and Episcopal churches have their cathedrals here, where the worship 
according to their rituals is performed by eloquent clergy and talented 
choirs. Each denomination of Christians has an elegant church. That 
of St. Mary’s, where the sermons are in English by the Rev. Father John- 
son, one of the most eloquent of the Catholic clergy, and the EpI opal 
cathedral of St. Mark’s of which the Rev. Mr. Richardson is Dean, are 
models of architectural beauty. The churches of the other denomina- 
tions, though smaller, are all that, the devout Christian can desire. 28 
WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
THE MEDICAL FACULTY. 
The physicians of San Antonio have long been noted for their high 
attainments and scientific skill. They number several who carry the 
highest European iionors,—gentlemen who would secure fame and distinc- 
tion in any city. It is not necessary to suggest that no place is wrorthy 
the name of a winter resort unless the medical faculty is of a high order. 
Breakfast in Market Square, San Antonio. 
THE HOTELS. 
Mrs Spafford, in her delightful sketch, so freely quoted, nas alluded 
to the unique “ Menger House,” the chief hotel of the city. Its spacious 
and delightful court-yard is always suggestive of Continental life. It does WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
29 
not require a vigorous imagination to fancy onesself in sunny Spain. 
Hourds Hotel, on the main plaza, is also an excellent home for travelers. 
The view from its balcony, which we present in the cut of the breakfast 
scene, is unique and curious. At the Vance on Houston street, the invalid 
and traveler will meet that courtesy and kindness which is so much appre- 
ciated by those far from home. Other hotels offer all the advantages of 
comfort at a less price ; while in private houses and rented cottages the 
invalid and sojourner may secure all the comforts of home and all the 
privacy he desires, at a very reasonable cost. 
CARRIAGES. 
The many beautiful drives and objects of interest which surround San 
Antonio have developed the “ hack business ” to unusual proportions. 
There are nearly one hundred carriages licensed for hire. Their superior 
character, beauty and comfort, with their excellent teams, are themes for 
the commendation of all strangers. The convenience afforded by these 
vehicles will be appreciated by those who have suffered the deprivation 
at other winter resorts. 
SCHOOLS. 
Many fathers and mothers hesitate to seek the benefits of a winter 
resort because they dislike to be separated from their children at a time 
when they must be receiving an education. Such will be glad to know 
that San Antonio offers superior opportunities for education. The public 
schools are of a superior character, while there are numerous private 
professors in languages, music and the fine arts. The great number of 
wealthy families in San Antonio has developed a corps of instructors of 
exceptional ability. There is no place in the country which excells San 
Antonio in opportunities for studying music, drawing, painting, em- 
broidery and the languages. 
CALDWELL SPRINGS, HARWOOD AND LULING WELLS. 
The country has been so deluged with mineral waters whose only bene- 
fit was their exceeding unpleasantness, that we hesitate to speak of these 
two wells of natural water which are so much sought after by Texans 
suffering from Bright’s and other diseases of the kidneys. These waters 
have been used for years and have given benefit where all others failed. 
The water was first taken from Burditt’s well where there is a Sanitarium 
for sick persons, but is now found at Harwood and it is supposed to be in 
other localities. This well is situated just to the left of the stage road 
from Lading to Austin, eight miles from the railroad. It was discovered 
about twenty-seven years ago, and even then became famous for the won- 
derful cures its waters effected. But it grew to be an annoyance to its 30 
WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
■original owner, for people flocked to it to be healed of their afflictions, 
and gave him no reward. So he closed it up, in which condition it re- 
mained about a decade, for it was not reopened until the month of March, 
1873, when the land upon which it is situated was purchased by Dr. H. 
1ST. Burditt. Being cognizant of the virtues of the water of this well, the 
Doctor at once invited the patronage of all sufferers from diseases, and 
Fishing in the San Marcos. 
inaugurated such improvements from time to time as his limited means 
would admit of. First, he employed Dr. George H. Kalteyer, of San 
Antonio, to make a qualitative analysis of the sour water, which analysis 
proved the water to possess the following as its medicinal properties : 
Sulphate of lime, sulphate of magnesia in large quantities, chloride of 
sodium, chloride of potassium, carbonate of iron, phosphate and chloride WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
of lime, sulphate of alumina, baryta, strontia, also free sulphuric acid in 
large quantity. This water is acid and astringent in taste, and acts on 
the liver, kidneys, bowels and skin, increasing the blood, appetite and 
digestion. 
The Well is located in a valley about two hundred yards from the 
hotel buildings, which stand upon the plateau, at the edge of a post-oak 
grove and among the oaks. There are a half dozen buildings, the ladies’ 
quarters being separate from those of the gentlemen, and there is a store 
and a barber shop upon the premises. The accommodations are as good 
as could be expected, and the table is furnished with the best the country 
aff'ords. 
The Burditt Well and Caldwell Springs are two distinct places. The 
Well and the Springs are about two and a half miles apart, and the waters 
differ in color, taste and medicinal effect. The water of the Well has the 
taste of iron, and that of the Springs the taste of alum. 
The names of numerous prominent and well-known citizens who have 
received benefit from these waters, might be given, had we space. 
We have thus in a cursory manner stated some of the advantages which 
Western Texas has as a place of winter resort; and with an abounding 
faith that those who avail themselves of these providential means of re- 
covery will receive the expected benefit, and have cause to rejoice in 
renewed health and vigor, we invite all who are interested for themselves 
or their friends to open correspondence with any of the following 
gentlemen : 
Col. H. B. ANDREWS, Land Commissioner, 
Sax Antonio, Texas. 
Gex. J. B. ROBERTSON, Immigration Agent, 
St. Louis, Mo. 
Dr. AM MI BROWN, Immigration Agent, 
58 Sears Building, Boston. 
M. WHILLD1N. Tmmir■ atioi Agent. 
818 Walnut slreet, PiiiL.vu.-i.^ui\. 32 
WESTERN TEXAS AS A WINTER RESORT. 
MEDICAL OPINION. 
The following extracts are made from a paper read at the 9th Annu- 
al Session of the Texas State Medical Association, by Dr. J.B. Robertson, 
one of the oldest and most highly esteemed physicians of the State: 
“ That portion of West and Southwest Texas lying west of the 98th meridian of longi- 
tude, and north of the 29th degree of latitude, has an elevation above the sea, beginning 
fifty miles south of San Antonio, of 500 feet, and gradually rising, as the line is traced 
north, to 2,000 feet. This region is drained by the following rivers and their numerous 
tributaries : Brazos, Colorado, Guadalupe, San Antonio, Nueces and Rio Grande, all of 
which find their outlets into the Gulf of Mexico. The rapidly decreasing elevation of the 
country, through which these streams pass in their course to the sea, secures to the sec- 
tion named the most perfect and thorough drainage. In addition to this fact, this vast 
area of territory is entirely free from ponds, marshes, lakes or stagnant bodies of water, 
to disturb, with their contaminating effluvia, the purity of the atmosphere. Here are 
also found the principal mountain ranges, of which the Guadalupe is the largest, and has 
the greatest elevation. These mountains, with their intervening valleys and plains, with 
their springs of pure and limpid water, which for beauty and picturesqueness, are rarely 
equaled and never surpassed, are beginning to attract the attention of the professional 
man in search of a locality for the climatic treatment of diseases of the respiratory or- 
gans, especially phthisis. 
It is a source of much regret that I have not been able to get satisfactory reports ol 
the range of the thermometer and the barometer, with the humidity of the atmosphere. 
I am only able to give the mean temperature for the seasons and year (means obtained 
from six years’ observation at San Antonio), ending with the year ISIS, which is, Spring, 
69.94°; Summer, 85.56°; Autumn, 68.95°; Winter, 52.94°; for the year, 68.85°. The mean 
average rainfall for the same period was 36.90 inches. For these figures I am indebted 
to Dr. Fred. Peterson of San Antonio. 
The pressure of vapor, its weight, the absolute humidity, have, as far as I know, never 
been measured, but the observations of daily life, by all who have lived in any part of this 
section, or traveled through it, concur in attesting the astonishing rapidity with which 
the roads dry after a fall of rain, and the perfect preservation of meats for days, hanging 
in the open air, indicating unmistakably a small amount of moisture suspended in the air. 
That eminent English author, Dr. James Henry Bennet, in the second edition of his 
valuable work on the “Treatment of Pulmonary Consumption by Hygiene, Climate and 
Medicine, in its connection with Modern Doctrines,’’ after demonstrating the error of 
sending consumptive patients to all the points, both in Europe and America, that have 
been selected, and are now being used for the climatic treatment of consumption, con- 
cludes thus: “ We are always, however, at a loss to find a cool summer residence in the 
States, where the minimum in July and August would be between 50° and 60° Far., and 
the maximum between 60° and 70°. I wish, therefore, my American colleagues would 
try to find out some such locality in their mountain ranges at an accessible distance from 
New York.” 
While the range of the thermometer in the region here treated of, as far as record has 
been kept, is higher than that indicated by this experienced author, the known dryness 
of the air, together with the cool and refreshing breeze, which is universally prevalent, 
may more than' compensate the consumptive patient for the difference in the range 
of the thermometer. The beneficial effects of the climate, in the area treated of, is not 
simply a matter of opinion on the part of the writer on purely theoretical grounds. Dur- 
ing a practice of over thirty years in Central Texas he has seen many patients sent there 
with clearly marked indications of consumption, and at a time in the history of the 
country when s.ich patients had to rely almost entirely upon the climate for the benefit 
they received. In all cases the change gave marked relief, with, he believes, a prolonga- 
tion of life for years with some, and a perfect cure with others.” Calyesto n,Ha rrisbukg* San Antonio 
RandtMcNa|]y Engravers,Chicago. 
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