History

San Antonio's past is the stuff of legend, the Alamo being but the most famous episode. If it were a movie, the story of the city would be an epic with an improbably packed plot, encompassing the end of a great empire, the rise of a republic, and the rescue of the river with which the story began.

On a Mission -- Having already established an empire by the late 17th century -- the huge viceroyalty of New Spain, which included, at its high point, Mexico, Guatemala, and large parts of the southwestern United States -- Spain was engaged in the far less glamorous task of maintaining it. The remote regions of east Texas had been coming under attack by the native Apache and Comanche, and now with rumors flying of French forays into the Spanish territory, search parties were dispatched to investigate.

On one of these search parties in 1691, regional governor Domingo Teran de los Ríos and Father Damian Massenet came upon a wooded plain fed by a fast-flowing river. They named the river -- called Yanaguana by the native Coahuiltecan Indians -- San Antonio de Padua, after the saint's day on which they arrived. When, some decades later, the Spanish Franciscans proposed building a new mission halfway between the ones on the Rio Grande and those more recently established in east Texas, the abundant water and friendliness of the local population made the plain near the San Antonio River seem like a good choice.

And so it was that in 1718, Mission San Antonio de Valero -- later known as the Alamo -- was founded. To protect the religious complex from Apache attack, the presidio (fortress) of San Antonio de Béxar went up a few days later. In 1719, a second mission was built nearby, and in 1731, three ill-fated East Texas missions, nearly destroyed by French and Indian attacks, were moved hundreds of miles to the safer banks of the San Antonio River. Also, in March 1731, 15 weary families arrived from the Spanish Canary Islands with a royal dispensation from Philip V to help settle his far-flung New World kingdom. Near the protection of the presidio, they established the village of San Fernando de Béxar.

Thus, within little more than a decade, what is now downtown San Antonio became home to three distinct, though related, settlements: a mission complex, the military garrison designed to protect it, and the civilian town known as Béxar, which was officially renamed San Antonio in 1837. To irrigate their crops, the early settlers were given narrow strips of land stretching back from the river and from the nearby San Pedro Creek, and centuries later, the paths connecting these strips, which followed the winding waterways, were paved and became the city's streets.

Remember the Alamo -- As the 18th century wore on, the missions came continuously under siege by hostile Indians, the mission Indians fell victim to a host of European diseases against which they had no natural resistance, and by the end of the 1700s, the Spanish mission system itself was nearly dead. In 1794, Mission San Antonio de Valero was secularized, its rich farmlands redistributed. In 1810, recognizing the military potential of the thick walls of the complex, the Spanish authorities turned the former mission into a garrison. The men recruited to serve here all hailed from the Mexican town of San José y Santiago del Alamo de Parras. The name of their station was soon shortened to the Alamo (Spanish for "cottonwood tree").

By 1824, all five missions had been secularized and Mexico had gained its independence from Spain. Apache and Comanche roamed the territory freely, and, it was next to impossible to persuade Spaniards to live there. Although the political leaders of Mexico were rightly suspicious of Anglo-American designs on their land, when land agent Moses Austin arrived in San Antonio in 1820, the government reluctantly gave him permission to settle some 300 Anglo-American families in the region. But Austin died before he could see his plan carried out. But Moses's son Stephen convinced the government to honor the terms of the original agreement.

By 1830, however, the Mexicans were growing nervous about the large numbers of Anglos descending on their country from the north. Having already repealed many of the tax breaks they had initially granted the settlers, they now prohibited all further U.S. immigration to the territory. When, in 1835, General Antonio López de Santa Anna abolished Mexico's democratic 1824 constitution, Tejanos (Mexican Texans) and Anglos alike balked at his dictatorship, and a cry rose up for a separate republic.

The first battle for Texas independence fought on San Antonio soil fell to the rebels when Mexican general Martín Perfecto de Cós surrendered after a short, successful siege of the town in December 1835. But it was the return engagement, that glorious, doomed fight against all odds, that forever captured the American imagination. From February 23 through March 6, 1836, some 180 volunteers -- among them Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie -- serving under the command of William Travis, died trying to defend the Alamo fortress against a vastly greater number of Santa Anna's men. One month later, Sam Houston spurred his troops on to victory at the Battle of San Jacinto with the cry "Remember the Alamo," thus securing Texas's freedom.

After the Fall -- Ironically, few Americans came to live in San Antonio during Texas's stint as a republic (1836-45), but settlers came from overseas in droves: By 1850, 5 years after Texas joined the United States, Tejanos (Mexican Texans) and Americans were outnumbered by European, mostly German, immigrants. The Civil War put a temporary halt to the city's growth -- in part because Texas joined the Confederacy and most of the new settlers were Union sympathizers -- but expansion picked up again soon afterward. As elsewhere in the West, the coming of the railroad in 1877 set off a new wave of immigration. Riding hard on its crest, the King William district of the city, a residential suburb named for Kaiser Wilhelm, was developed by prosperous German merchants.

Some of the immigrants set up Southern-style plantations, others opened factories and shops, and more and more who arrived after the Civil War earned their keep by driving cattle. The Spanish had brought Longhorn cattle and vaqueros (cowboys) from Mexico into the area, and now Texas cowboys drove herds north on the Chisholm Trail from San Antonio to Kansas City, where they were shipped east. Others moved cattle west, for use as seed stock in the fledgling ranching industry.

Over the years, San Antonio had never abandoned its role as a military stronghold. As early as 1849, the Alamo was designated a quartermaster depot for the U.S. Army, and in 1876 the much larger Fort Sam Houston was built to take over those duties. Apache chief Geronimo was held at the clock tower in the fort's Quadrangle for 40 days in 1886, en route to exile in Florida, and Teddy Roosevelt outfitted his Rough Riders -- some of whom he recruited in San Antonio bars -- at Fort Sam 12 years later.

As the city marched into the 20th century, Fort Sam Houston continued to expand. In 1910, it witnessed the first military flight by an American, and early aviation stars like Charles Lindbergh honed their flying skills here. From 1917 to 1941, four Army air bases -- Kelly Field, Brooks Field, Randolph Field, and Lackland Army Air Base -- shot up, making San Antonio the largest military complex in the United States outside the Washington, D.C., area. Although Kelly was downsized and privatized, the military remains the city's major employer today.

A River Runs Through It -- As the city moved farther and farther from its agrarian roots, the San Antonio River became much less central to the economy and by the turn of the century, its constant flooding made it a downright nuisance. When a particularly severe storm caused it to overflow its banks in 1921, killing 50 people and destroying many downtown businesses, there was serious talk of cementing over the river.

In 1925, the newly formed San Antonio Conservation Society warned the city council against killing the goose that was laying the golden eggs of downtown economic growth. And in 1927, Robert H. H. Hugman, an architect who had lived in New Orleans and studied that city's Vieux Carré district, came up with a detailed plan for saving the waterway. His proposed River Walk, with shops, restaurants, and entertainment areas buttressed by a series of floodgates, would render the river profitable as well as safe, and also preserve its natural beauty. The Depression intervened, but in 1941, with the help of a federal Works Project Administration (WPA) grant, Hugman's vision became a reality.

Still, for some decades more, the River Walk remained just another pretty space and it was not until the 1968 HemisFair exposition drew record crowds to the rescued waterway that the city really began banking on its banks.