MINISTERIO DE SALUD

Before the 1880s, San Antonio was still largely a frontier town. It was accessible for visitors only by stagecoach, which was a long, grueling form of public transportation.

A seventy-mile trip “to or from Austin took seventeen hours, including meal stops.”162

Still, San Antonio served as a connecting point for immigrants, travelers, ranchers, the military, and speculators. Six stagecoach lines passed through the town, connecting San Antonio to most parts of the United States, with one of the routes connecting Monterrey, Mexico to San Antonio via Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande River.163

Military Plaza served as a stopping point for supply wagons heading to forts and garrisons further west as well as for cowboys and vaqueros driving cattle through the streets of San Antonio along the famous Chisholm Trail to points north. The plaza “served as a temporary holding station for small herds, a public lot for the trading of goods, and an ideal location for overnight stays of covered wagons.”164 San Antonio’s strategic location on the southwestern edge of the southern states, at the intersection of the Edwards Plateau and the Texas coastal plains, upon a primary north-south migration route that linked the Mexican central plateau with the U.S. Great Plains made it a stop on nearly every route passing through the Southwest.165 San Antonio was a frontier hub, acting as something of a gateway to Mexico and the American Southwest for much of the

162 Edward King, “Glimpses of Texas,” 306–308.

163“Stagecoach Routes in Texas in 1861. (Texas Almanac),” November 20, 2012, Texas Transportation Archive, http://www.ttarchive.com/Library/Lists/Stagecoach_Routes-1861.html; Daniel Arreola, “The Mexican American Cultural Capital,” Geographical Review 77, no. 1 (January 1987): 21.

164Flores, Remembering the Alamo, 43.

southern and eastern United States. Still, as late as 1877, the city remained unconnected to other parts of the Americas by railroad.166

Like Kirk Munroe’s fascination with San Antonio as an exotic locale in 1897, Anglo-American visitors to the city immediately after the Civil War, especially from the northeastern United States, marveled at its character. According to journalist Edward King, “San Antonio is the only town in the United States which [sic] has a thoroughly European aspect, and it is more, in its older quarters, like some remote and obscure town in Spain than like any bustling villages of France or Germany.”167 King was likely familiar with the history of town planning in Spanish colonial America, and that San Antonio’s spatial organization was heavily influenced by Spanish town-planning conventions in the decades after its founding in 1718.

Much like most mission towns throughout the Southwest, the original city plan of San Antonio was conceived using the 1573 Laws of the Indies issued by the Spanish

166 See Zlatkovich, Texas Railroads: A Record of Construction and Abandonment; Young, Tracks to the Sea; Garner, “The Saga of a Railroad Town”; Foley, The White Scourge, 1997; Potts, Railroad Transportation in Texas. For information on railroads in Texas. Before the Civil War, Galveston and Houston were the only major cities in Texas with any sort of railroad connection. The first transcontinental line connected the East and most of the South with San Francisco in 1869, granted a traveler would still need to change railroad companies several times during the trip. In Texas, Austin, Dallas, Longview, most of the Brazos Valley, Beaumont, Plano, Sherman, Texarkana, Tyler, Victoria, and Waco all had railroad connections at least four years prior to San Antonio.

crown, which among other very specific guidelines called for the construction of a Plaza Mayor, or main square, with approximately eight streets running at right angles and forming a grid with the plaza at its center.168 According to Setha Low, the Laws of the Indies are significantly influenced by “the ceremonial and commercial uses” as well as the “sacred and civil meanings and regular form” of the indigenous plazas that Cortes and company marched into during the conquest of the Aztecs.169

During the Spanish conquest of the New World, especially Tenochtitlan,

conquistadores and their armies razed existing indigenous structures and ceremonial sites and built entire Spanish cities over the ruins. Richard Flores notes an example “in

Tenochtitlan, or Mexico City, the Catholic cathedral was erected near the Templo Mayor

168 In addition to town layout as described above, the Laws of the Indies set out guidelines for such things as the location and elevation of the potential site, the potential for military

fortification, the quality and quantity of farmland, the availability of natural resources (fuel, food, etc.), the need for a native population, and advice on situating the layout of the town so that it is open to the north wind. For a more in-depth discussion as well as one of the only English translations of the Laws of the Indies, see Axel I. Mundigo and Dora P. Crouch, “The City Planning Ordinances of the Laws of the Indies Revisited. Part I: Their Philosophy and

Implications,” The Town Planning Review 48, no. 3 (July 1977): 247–68. One thing to note since many of the earliest towns in the Spanish colonies were built on the ruins of previous indigenous settlements (Mexico City for instance) with pre-existing grid structures is the potential indigenous influence in the organization of towns throughout the American southwest. Although San

Antonio was not built upon an indigenous settlement, elements of its spatial organization may well include influence from previously built Spanish cities (like Mexico City).

169Setha Low, “Indigenous Architecture and the Spanish American Plaza in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean,” American Antrhopologist 97, no. 4 (1995): 749.

and the National Palace was constructed atop the living quarters of Montezuma II. In the New World, as in San Antonio during the late nineteenth century, spatial dissolution and displacement was a key element of political conquest, as the subsequent respatialization of conquered terrains served to fortify the norms, values and cultural practices of the dominant group.”170 The trend continued in 1880s Anglo-controlled San Antonio for example, when the city built their main office in the center of Military Plaza, while landscaping Main Plaza for use as a park, both changes preventing gathering in the public space in the same way it had been used prior.