ABSTRACT
After further inquiries seemed to confirm Cabeza de Vaca’s claim, Mendoza dispatched the Conquistador Captain Francisco Vazquez de Coronado with a force of 1,500 Spanish and Indians to find the seven cities of Cibola and their riches. What Coronado found when he crossed out of what is now New Mexico and into Texas was terrifying to most of his men if not to the captain himself. In the spring of 1541, Coronado’s force descended onto the “stockade plain” of the Llano Estacado. The rimrock that marked the edge of the plain reminded the Spaniards of a stockade wall, but it was the 30,000 square miles of flat, virtually featureless, grasslands stretching out beyond the horizon that left them awestruck. Anglos later mistranslated Coronado’s descriptive phrase as “staked plains” and that name stuck. Once out on the plain, nothing but grass as far as the
eye could see in every direction, the Spaniards were reduced to navigating as if they were at sea. 1
For the next three centuries, Anglos, whether Europeans or eventually Americans, found traversing Texas a challenge. Indians had regular travel routes but these did not constitute what Anglos recognized as roads. At best, Indian routes might be footpaths “deepened somewhat by the poles dragged by the Indian’s canine beasts of burden. When the Indians acquired horses, the old footpaths became wider, deeper tracks routed through less dense timber and, in West Texas, running from water hole to water hole. The first American explorers and settlers followed these same tracks.” 2
When Moses Austin crossed the Sabine into Texas in the fall of 1820, there were few roads. The Camino Real, or King’s Road, began in Mexico City, passed through Monclova, crossed the Rio Grande at San Juan Bautista, ran north to San Antonio, and then northeast to Nacogdoches and Louisiana beyond. While the Camino Real was the most traveled route in Texas and Austin followed it into San Antonio, it was little more than a cart path across the prairie. The La Bahia road ran parallel to the Camino Real to the South. It ran from Monterrey, Mexico, crossing the Rio Grande at Laredo, then north and northeast through La Bahia to the Sabine. Most of the first settlers came overland by horse or wagon from Arkansas or Louisiana or they came by sea to Galveston. Those coming from the east by land, such as the planter Jared E. Groce from Alabama, guided their parties along the Camino Real before turning southwest across open land to the Austin colony. 3
William Ransom Hogan’s The Texas Republic includes a chapter on early roads entitled “Roads of Mud and Slush.” Hogan reports that in early 1838 the new republic’s distinguished president, Sam Houston, “wrote that he was unable to start on an intended trip from Houston to Nacogdoches because ‘at this time the roads are most terrible and impossible in this section of the country.’” 4 The Texas republic struggled financially throughout its decade-long history and so had no revenues to assist with road building or even improvement.
