An ancient trail runs from the Rio Grande to the Sabine River. For centuries, buffalo herds, Indian tribes, Spanish missionaries, Anglo insurgents, and Mexican troops have been traversing. Camino Real is the road that made Texas.
This story comes from the archives of Texas Monthly. We keep it as originally released without updates to maintain a clear historical record. Some language in this archive story on issues such as race and gender may not meet contemporary standards.
After a week of heavy rain, on this still cloudy day, the countryside outside of Ring Road 1604 was lush and the light was suppressed. Here, at the forefront of suburban expansion in San Antonio, this land retains hints of the original Texas. Large swaths of wild flowers have taken over the bushy landscape, and at the bottom of the creek, thick hardwoods are woven together with stretched loops of vines.
The tree I was looking for was an old oak tree that stood alone in a field of white poppies on the edge of the road. There was a scar from an old wound in the center of its trunk. As time passed, it became so smooth and weathered that it now only showed faint gray spots on the bark. If I hadn't been looking for it, I wouldn't recognize what it was, nor would I see the wound in a cross shape. Someone carved a cross on this tree hundreds of years ago. It may be a Franciscan priest who accompanied one of the Spanish expeditions through Camino Real, Texas, from San Juan. Bautista started the failed mission of the "Road to the Royal" or the Kings Highway to the Grande River to the scattered west of the Sabine River. Once upon a time, along the various rugged trails that make up Camino Real, there must have been many crosses like this marking the road, signs of praying for the presence of God in the wilderness, letters of thanks for a safe crossing of the river, or a violent storm. . There are only a few left today. Where do you find them, you will find your way.
In front of this tree, I can recognize the eroded remains of Camino Real, which are shallow cracks in the underground that meander, and it does not look more spectacular than the drainage system of the creek. However, this almost imperceptible ditch used to be the orbit of New Spain's intermittent march into the wilderness beyond the Rio Grande. This is the basic line to determine the history of Texas. Although many of the missions and missions established by the Spaniards along Camino Real Madrid rotted in the wet jungle of the East Texas Forest, others took root and grew up in cities such as Nacogdoches and San Antonio. As early as the Spanish colonial period, this road served as the border of land grant. It was used by French smugglers and British and American obstructors. Camino Real is the way to the Alamo from Davy Crockett and Santa Anna from different directions.
No one knows exactly how long this road has existed. Before it became the Spanish Avenue, it might have been an Indian trail, and the Indian trail itself might follow a route first defined by the hooves of migrating bison. According to the Texas legislature that issued a Senate resolution last year to commemorate this road, Camino Real will have a history of 300 years in 1991. "This road," the resolution read, "was officially established under the authorization of the first provincial government. The governor of Texas under Spanish rule in 1691."
However, since historical records do not have ribbon cutting or other ceremonies to commemorate the official inauguration of Camino Real Madrid, however, the legislature announced the 300th anniversary of its establishment is somewhat arbitrary. The governor mentioned in the resolution-a man named Tran de los Rios-did use this road into the interior of Texas in 1691, but Camino Real's route It has been planned to be led by Alonso de Leon during the first two expeditions.
Almost everything related to Camino Real—its origin, its exact route, and even its name—is vague. In the days when Texas was part of Spain, "Camino Real" referred to an official highway that—no matter how rugged—connected the king’s property and helped advance imperial policies. On the King’s Road, you travel under the protection of the King.
The Camino Real that passes through Texas is called the Old San Antonio Road, which is what the legislature mentioned in its anniversary resolution. As a name, "Old San Antonio Road" is a relic from the 19th century: when the Camino Real was first lit in the late 17th century, San Antonio did not yet exist. The original direction of the road was eastward, from the Rio Grande to the Sabine River to Louisiana. Later, as the Spanish control of Texas became faltering, settlers and provocateurs from the United States came along this road from the opposite direction.
Finding exactly where the road runs-from any direction-is a complex task. Although the traces of Camino Real are still visible here and there, for most of its length, the road is a ghost, paved above or below, disappearing between established reference points. Its existence can only be inferred. In 1915, the Texas State Assembly hired a civil engineer named VN Zivley to locate and mark roads. Zivley devoted himself to this task with ancient patriotic enthusiasm. "This is the way," he wrote. "Most of the'heroic men' who later established and established the Republic of Texas entered their land through this way. Choice."
Zivley effortlessly positioned the basic route of the "Anglo" part of Camino Real, the east to west part. The route marked by Zivley follows Texas Highway 21, passing through St. Augustine, Nacogdoches, Aalto, Crockett, and Bastrop, into San Antonio-the "Alamo City" , The engineer pointed out, "That altar was dedicated to the God of Freedom by the blood of Anglo-Saxons."
To the south of San Antonio, Zifley found the road more difficult to trace. The physical evidence is ambiguous, and the only thing Ziffle could find to record the route of the road was a diary written by a priest named Juan Agustín Morfi in 1778 ("To the old priest "," Zifley wrote with a sigh of relief, "Although I am the Protestant with the most blue stockings type, I want to take off my hat").
Considering that he was obviously biased towards the part of the road traversed by Anglo-Saxon feet, Zifflet's estimate of the route was sufficiently accurate at the time. A few years after his investigation, the daughters of the American Revolution commemorated his designated route by erecting hundreds of pink granite markers, one every five miles. The markers were carefully placed along the actual route marked by Zivley, but since this is a remote place in many cases, citizens dug them out and moved them to more prominent locations, such as court lawns or highway rest stops ( In some counties, every mark has been transferred). Over the past few decades, as more and more archival records from the Spanish colonial period have been exposed, Zifley's confident description of the road route has become less and less clear.
On the occasion of the 300th anniversary of Camino Real, the legislature instructed the State Department of Highways and Public Transport to essentially rediscover roads. The Highway Department and the Texas History Commission will submit a history preservation plan to the state legislature. They have a year to do this, and there are five employees. One day in April, when I went to their Austin office, they had already completed about half of it.
"This is a booger," archaeologist and project director Al McGraw told me. He was smoking a pipe in a windowless storage room, and various archaeological artifacts were placed on the long bookshelf. In other rooms, staff are carefully studying copies of old land grants, deeds, historical maps, and survey reports. The entire wall is covered with a chart that lists the details of each Spanish expedition diary: date, start and end, league traveled (the Spanish league is 2.6 miles), directions and comments ("passed the point The oak grove ends on a hill 1/2 league from the camp"; "crossing 2 creeks; the hickory and oak forests are 5 leagues long"). From these jigsaw pieces, a coherent road map is slowly emerging.
But the clearer the data, the more fragmented and diverse Camino Real becomes. McGraw and his staff are discovering the basic path of Texas history. Strictly speaking, it is not a path at all. "You have to realize," McGraw said, pointing to a map of Texas with a series of intertwined lines marked in different colors. "It's Camino Real-the old San Antonio Road, whatever you want to call it. It's not just a trail. It's a network."
The lines on the map reminded me of an unstable riverbed, constantly winding and moving, and a series of woven channels eventually lead to the same destination. Each variant of this road has its own name: Upper Presidio, Lower Presidio, Camino Pita, Camino de Los Tejas, Camino Aliba. The reason for this route network is easy to understand. In its early existence, this road was a weak track, but a suggestion. Almost all expeditions using it have found a way to improve it. Over time, travelers discovered more efficient river crossings or routes that could help them avoid natural obstacles, such as El Atascosa, the swampy alluvial plains of southern San Antonio, or dense forests—El Monte—close to today. Bastrop (Bastrop). Spanish soldiers often become anxious and disoriented. It is believed that when the Apaches, under pressure from the Comanche to the north, began to attack the hilly area below, the road detoured south into the less hospitable bushes to avoid them.
But all the routes start from the same place, at a border post called San Juan Bautista, nestled in a pecan forest on the south bank of the Rio Grande. When Camino Real was founded, San Juan Bautista was nothing more than a remote settlement, built around a mission and a fortress to protect it. However, over time, it became the main gathering place for royal expeditions, which entered from the interior of Mexico to the unknown state of Texas. The town that grew up around San Juan Bautista is called Guererro, and it is ancient and charming. I drove there one day in late spring, crossed the border at Eagle Pass, drove through Piedras Negras, and drove about 30 miles east into the Mexican state of Coahuila. In the afternoon, the streets and squares of Guerrero were empty, and the town had the reverberating silence of the clock. Except for the sounds that might have been heard here three hundred years ago, there was no sound—the squeak of a chihuahua crow, the rooster of a rooster, the sound of the wind blowing over the hickory leaves above the head.
The parade ground of the old Presidio has become a town square, and many ancient Spanish colonial buildings-Captain Presidio's residence and cashier's residence-not only stand still, but are still in use. Nowadays, the facades of some houses are made of modern plaster, but along their sides, I can see the exposed stone walls. The plaster has already been eroded away.
The other buildings were vacant and half collapsed. I chose one and walked in. Most of the roof collapsed, and on the floor was a pile of weedy rubble and broken bottles. The house has been idle for a long time, and there is a big tree growing inside, although in the adjacent room, the old roof beams are still in place, supporting several pieces of crisp turf overgrown with cacti.
Coming out of a low doorway, I stood in the sun for a while, gazing at the square opposite, which used to be the Plaza of Arms of the Presidential Palace. The occupants of this house may stand in the same place, watching the various Entradas gather together and happily walk towards the Rio Grande, which is what they crossed among the many rivers in what is now Texas. Article one.
Those early expeditions crossed the Rio Grande River at a place a few miles away, which was called Paso Francia-"the French crossroads." There is a reason for it. Towards the end of the 17th century, Spain's claim that it owned land beyond the Rio Grande was just rhetoric. In fact, the advance of Spanish civilization has almost stalled in the deserts of northern Mexico. Texas is a looming wilderness on the farthest edge of Spain's furthest frontier. There is no compelling reason to venture into it, so no kingly way is needed.
But when the Spaniards heard that the French had invaded Texas from the Gulf of Mexico and established a colony somewhere along the coast, they acted immediately. These rumors gained incredible credibility in 1688, when Alonso de León, the governor of Coahuila, stumbled upon a man living in the Rio Grande north of the Rio Grande River. Miles, a Frenchman in an Indian village west of present-day Uvalde. The man was about fifty years old and crazy, but he managed to induce the Indians to treat him as a monarch. De Leon found him sitting on a cushion made of buffalo leather, while his court members used feather fans to cool him down. He was surrounded by forty samurai bodyguards.
When he saw his guest, he jumped off the mat, waved, kissed the priest's shoulder blade, and happily announced in his fragmented Spanish: "¡Yo frances!" ("I am French!").
"I intend to convene many Indian countries," he told De Leon, "let them be my friends; those who do not want to join me, I will attack and destroy with the help of my Indian followers."
No one really knows who he is, what he is doing, where he comes from-let alone the confused Frenchman himself. But what he told De Leon changed the course of history. He said that “a French settlement with a fortress and a town was established on the bank of a large river to the east, and it has been there for 15 years.”
There is indeed a French fortress. De León was looking for it for the next year and in the process opened up the route of Camino Real. But what he found was not a powerful Frenchman, but a destroyed and ransacked stockade, scattered with pig carcasses, rotten leather-bound books, and a woman's skeleton, still wearing a torn skirt. This is all that remains of Fort St. Louis, the colony that French explorer Sieur de la Salle tried to establish in the Gulf of Matagorda. Lassalle himself has been killed by his own people, and the rest of the desperate colonists have been taken by Karan Kavas.
The French threat seems to have been resolved, but because of this, Spain’s road to Texas has been opened, and De Leon’s next discovery helps ensure that it will continue to do so. He traveled north and east, pursuing rumors about French survivors, and entered the country of Hasina, a tribal alliance with various names-Tayshas, Taychas, Tehas, Teias, Texia, Teisa , Teyans, Teyens, Tejas. "Friends." De Leon found the "Texas Kingdom", which is indeed a land full of friendship and welcome. These Caddoan people settled and became wealthy-skilled farmers kept surplus corn and beans in waterproof cribs in huge conical houses. To the surprise of the Spaniards, they were even visited by women in blue.
The woman in blue is a strange spiritual phenomenon in Spain in the 17th century. In physical reality, she is a Castilian convent named Maria de Jesus de Agreda. María de Agreda has never left her monastery in Spain-but she is known for claiming that she can transport herself to the faraway state of Texas. There, she appeared to the Indians as a beautiful woman in a blue cloak, making them believe in Christianity.
So far, the woman in blue has only shown herself to the Indians living along the Rio Grande, but now there is evidence that her soul is going deep into the unknown land of the East. According to reports, the Hasinai chief that De Leon met even had a portable altar filled with images of Christ and saints, and a lamp was always burning in front of the altar for eternal reverence. The chief told the priest Damian Massane who accompanied De Leon that he welcomed further spiritual guidance.
So all of a sudden, New Spain had an eye-catching business in the remote state of Texas. It will establish presidios to protect its borders from the French and missions, turning the Indians into servants of God and Spain. To do all this, it needs a path.
The road slowly formed, one by one, one by one across the river. It was never really "built", it was only improved, and almost all expeditions that used it modified its route. Calling it the road is misleading. For example, Camino Real is not as spectacular as the wide roadside roads built by the Anasazi Indians hundreds of years ago. It is located in the western part of the New Mexico desert. The road in Spain is a trail, rarely wider than an ox cart, and often illegible, so that professional explorers who follow it often get lost.
When I left Guerrero and headed northeast for San Antonio, I followed the general trend of Camino Real, but there was hardly any physical evidence to mark the actual route of the old road. I crossed the Niuesis River, the Hondo River, and the Medina River. While galloping, I looked down on the river from the highway bridge. I remembered the Spanish horses churning wildly in the water, and the soldiers and Indians transporting sheep across the river again and again. Scene.
Border crossing points are usually dangerous. During Domingo Ramón's 1716 expedition, 82 horses were drowned while trying to reach the far shore of Medina. Ramon felt the hand of the devil in this disaster and ordered the crowd to "smash him" the next day. Don Domingo de Terán started his first expedition to set up a mission in East Texas. He lost 49 pommel horses in Rio Grande. "However, with the mighty power of the Polaris and Our Lady of Guadalupe, the protector of this cause, our weak efforts in this task have come to a successful conclusion."
Day after day, these entradas hobbled along the rude roads of Camino Real—soldiers dressed in deerskin or quilted cotton, struggling under the weight of their spearmen and leather shields; monks and laity The brothers wore brown robes, some of them bravely barefoot, others wrapped their knotty swollen feet in sandals; missionary Indians driving goats and sheep; ox carts filled with trade goods and religious utensils, including holy water fonts and The oven used to bake communion cakes; and the banner above the head with the image of Our Lady of Pilar or Our Lady of Guadalupe or the Killer of the Swamp of St. James.
When I arrived in San Antonio, I walked along Mission Road, more or less along the old road, passing ice storage, auto repair shops and Pig Stands, and almost incidentally passing San Juan Capistrano, San Francisco de la Espada, San Jose and de la Purisima Concepción. These tasks were started by the Spaniards in the early 18th century, when those in East Texas were abandoned and the priests were ordered to retreat along the San Antonio River. It turns out that the local Indians were ultimately friendlier than the Hasinas.
In 1716, Domingo Ramón's expedition described the San Antonio Springs, the glorious source of the San Antonio River, for the first time. Two years later, the village of San Antonio de Béxar was established there. The first mission built in the town-San Antonio de Valero-moved twice, left it to ruins, and finally secularized in 1793. For a while it was used as the headquarters of the Spanish cavalry, most of which came from a small town in Mexico called Alamo de las Parras.
I parked my car in many places along the San Antonio River, and then walked through the lobby of the Hyatt Hotel to the Alamo Plaza. Standing in front of the chapel, I estimated that Camino Real would pass a few hundred yards east, and I tried to imagine that Santa Ana's troops were entering the siege position. In 1836, Santa Ana launched an attack from Mexico to suppress the rebellion in Texas and drove his army on the road in a cold-blooded forced march. Many of them were buried on the road. He puzzled the conscripts of the Yucatan tropical jungle. The fall was exposed from the blizzard.
This is where Camino Real leads him. The battle of the Alamo is not accidental. By 1836, Anglo-American immigrants had been in conflict with the Spanish and Mexican governments that controlled Texas for decades. Now these two cultures collide with each other from both ends of Camino Real, like a locomotive on a monorail. Same. The shipwreck must happen somewhere, and that place—sit in the middle of the road—is the Alamo.
Leaving San Antonio, I headed north along Interstate 35, which made me roughly parallel to the old Camino route. Near San Marcos, I met Stephen L. Hardin, a historian who worked in the highway department of the Old San Antonio Road Project. Harding has a tall beard, a hat with the symbol of the son of the Republic of Texas and a belt buckle with the state emblem. For the past four months, he and other researchers have been reading and annotating old diaries, searching maps and land records, interviewing farmers and ranchers, driving from one end of Texas to the other, trying to find archives or Physical clues to find out the road.
"John Ford's movie is the opposite," he told me when we drove his dilapidated Subaru, "a group of people just can't cross the prairie. You must have a road. It goes without saying that the road follows the road. The new road follows the old road where possible. For example, I-35—from the south of the York River to San Antonio—is the lower reaches of Camino. The road we are walking on now"—we are at US 183 Driving on a dirt road near the highway, Lockhart Expressway-"Follow the original route of the later Camino Real. I think it forms an arc here and connects to Highway 21. If you are a volunteer Or, from Louisiana to the Texas Revolution, this is your way to the Alamo.
"Now, I'm told," Harding said, stopping a few miles east of San Marcos, near the intersection of Highway 80 and Highway 21. "You can see cards on this golf course. The depression of Minorreal."
When the golfer teeed under the tree, he went out to take a look, squinting to study the outline of the fairway, but he couldn't find the trace of the old road. However, a few miles further south, on Old Bastrop Road, he stopped and pointed to a deep ditch on the other side of the barbed wire.
"In terms of physical evidence," Harding said, climbing on the fragile roof of Subaru to get a better view. "This is one of the best places to see the road in Texas."
Of course, it doesn't look like a road at all. One of the unexpected features of Camino Real is that it is not only preserved in shallow ruts, but also in obvious gully, because hundreds of years of rain channeled water into the original roadbed and washed it deeper. The gully here is overgrown with cornflowers. It went straight for hundreds of yards, and then at the top of a shallow mountain, it bends and closes like a seam.
We spent the rest of the afternoon in San Marcos, where Harding thought about where Domingo Ramon’s expedition in 1716 would cross the river. Hopkins Street, but he wondered if Ramon had crossed the river where the Hopkins Street Bridge was now. The water there is too deep, the bottom is too sandy, and the river bank is too steep.
"Espinoza provides the best clue," Harding said. (Espinoza was a priest and diary writer on the Ramon expedition.) "He said they crossed the San Marcos River twice from the source. A harquebus shot usually does not exceed a hundred yards."
This brings us to the Sewell Park Bridge, just below the Aquarena Springs tourist attraction. Here the river bank is low, and through the clear shallow water, we can see the bottom of the gravel.
"All this became clear to me," Harding said, becoming more and more excited. "They probably came in from Hopkins Street, found it was a bad place, and walked up the bank for a short distance.
"It's obvious," he said, and as we drove past the entrance to Aquarena Springs, he thumped the steering wheel with his fist. Above us, on the left, the balcony cliff rises with a sharp perspective. "What they did was obvious! After crossing the river, they followed the mountain! It is now clear. It becomes clear! This is the ideal place for the road. You know, sometimes it just bites your ass!"
After breaking up with Harding, I drove east, through Bastrop, and followed the ghostly route of Camino Real as much as I could along Highway 21 from the edge of the mountain to the idyllic grassland and the grassland. The deforested forest replaces the pine tree veneer on the side of the road. This is the section where Zivley's "brave warrior" crossed into Texas. The success of this Anglo-Saxon Avenue was commemorated on the asphalt road under my tires. Highway signs and 1918 pink granite markings on the side of the road proudly declare this to be the Old San Antonio Road. In Crockett, at the bottom of the railway overpass next to the gas station, I noticed a billboard-sized sign that read "David Crockett Spring." The sign depicts Crockett drinking in a boiling pool, with deer, rabbit, and armadillo watching respectfully. "David Crockett Spring," the sign read, "It marks the famous Texan [don’t say he’s a Tennessee!] camp on his historic journey to the Alamo, where He paid the highest price for Texas freedom."
Going further, outside Alto, I stopped at the roadside grave of Helena Kimbell Dill Nelson—"The child’s mother is believed to be born in Dirk in 1804. The first Anglo-American in Saskatchewan." The vault was reburied in concrete, and the writing on the inscription has been eroded, and it looks like it was carved with salt instead of marble. But the fact that this simple tomb has become a monument only emphasizes the core irony of Camino Real. The path that the Spaniards originally opened to ensure that no foreigners could enter their borders eventually became the path of conquest.
Highway 21 leads to Nacogdoches, where it becomes a red brick street that runs through the center of the town. Indisputably, Main Street grew up on the exact route of Camino Real. There is no need to look for river intersections or depressions to infer the existence of roads. That's it, it's still in use, and it's still the main street of this ancient city. Nacogdoches was originally a Hasinai village, only one block away from the city center. I found a small tomb, covered with grass, standing on the side of someone’s front yard, so pragmatic, that my initial reaction was to know this How difficult it is to trim.
Over the years, Nacogdoches’ strategic location exposed it to every wind that swept the Camino Royale—from those first Spanish expeditions that angered the French and set up missions to the British-Americans six attempts to take Dexa Si pried away from Spain and Mexico.
Nacogdoches merchant Adolphus Sterne was one of the main funders of the decisive Texas Revolution in the 1836 British Uprising. When the opposition to Mexican authority reached its peak, Stern went to New Orleans and formed a volunteer company, which he called the New Orleans Greys. Stern equipped the Greys with the extra muskets and uniforms he found in an armory on Magazine Street-gray overalls, white belts, wooden canteens and ridiculous looks made of seal skins U.S. Army feed cap.
The Greys are doomed to fail. Few of them survived the revolution. But they happily marched into Texas along Camino Real, and were enshrined by the settlers as heroes and saviors along the way. Among them was a young German named Herman Ehrenberg, who later recalled Adolphus Sterne's banquet for the Greys in a clearing in front of his house.
The house of Adolphus Sterne still stands in Nacogdoches, just a few yards from Camino Real. And in front of it is the fandango venue that was held a long time ago. Ehrenberg remembered clearly that the main course of dinner was a roasted bear named Mr. Petz.
"This huge creature," Ehrenberg wrote, "worn very cleverly with fur, and seems to be alive; his mouth is open, grinning, showing sharp white teeth, and clinging to the true colors of the 1824 Constitution. Raccoon , Possums, squirrels and turkey surround Mr. Petz, and two large lamb legs roasted into a beautiful brown and a large piece of beef complete the decoration of our board."
Most of the Greys from Nacogdoches continued to fight and died in the Alamo or executed in Goliad. Herman Ehrenberg is one of the few people who survived the Goliard massacre. Slashed to the head and blinded by gunpowder, he jumped into the river and shouted-he would make us believe-"The Republic of Texas will always exist!" After many other adventures, he managed to return to Germany. Texas army. After that, he returned to Germany to write a memoir to pay for university tuition.
I walked east from Nacogdoches and stopped at Mission Nuestra Señora Dolores de los Ais in San Agustin, which was founded by Father Antonio Margil de Jesús in 1716. Fray Margil is the most respected person ever to set foot on Camino Real-a restless, fearless, almost sick saint. He sleeps for three hours a night, hardly eats anything, and is so humble that he is in all his The letters are all signed La Misma Nada, "like nothingness."
Magill was born in Valencia, Spain. His favorite activity as a child was to build miniature altars. When he started to learn the priesthood, he humiliated his body so passionately that the novice master panicked and took away his hair shirt.
Arriving in the New World as a missionary, he threw away his sandals, sometimes wore a crown of thorns, and trudged under the weight of a heavy cross, leaving a deep impression on the Indians. He wandered barefoot in all the wastelands of Central America, established missionaries and apostolic academies, and escaped the martyrdom he longed for time and time again. He became so famous that sometimes when he approached a village, he would find an arch built for him, and hundreds of people were waiting to plant flowers on his way. This of course frightened him. He just wanted to forget the ecstasy. Before he died, he insisted that he was not even worthy of a Christian funeral and that he should be thrown into "the wilderness, where wild beasts can devour me". The priest who heard his last brief confession believed that he had never lost his "baptismal innocence."
But even Margill could not make East Texas Missionaries a successful business. They were a disaster almost from the beginning. The Hasinais may be fascinated by this exotic new religion at first, but they are so accomplished farmers that it makes no sense to abandon the idea of planting missionary crops in the fields. In some areas, smallpox killed half of the Hasinais. The priest mobilized to baptize the dying, but when the Indians watched the saint pouring water on the victim's head, they concluded that the baptism itself was fatal. They also didn't care about the lamb soup the pastor gave the patient. They call it "dirty water".
Mission Dolores de los Ais was abandoned in 1719, and its wooden churches and buildings slowly disintegrated in the humid air. Now, apart from some pottery fragments and ancient pillar pits discovered by archaeologists, and historical markers on the overgrown cliffs above the stream platform, nothing remains of it.
In Miram on the Texas side of the Sabine River, I turned around to visit Earl and Ingrid Morris. Earle was a local construction contractor, and his ancestor Shadrack Morris founded the town of Sabine, a once prosperous settlement along the river. His wife Ingrid was appointed by the governor as a member of the protection committee. One of her areas of concern is how to commemorate the road once the route is determined.
The Morriss proposed to show me a cabin built by James Gaines around 1819. James Gaines operated a ferry on the Sabine River that the New Orleans Greys used to cross to Texas. "There used to be two thousand people here," Ingrid said as we drove through the highway intersection in Miram. "They even have a permanent gallows."
She pointed to a place on the side of the road that looked like a bar ditch. "Did you see the groove on the back of that old truck? That's Camino Real Madrid. It just crossed behind the tree line and entered the Old Town Square." "This special place," Earl said. When we walked for a few more miles, "This road may be a detour. This may not be a real swamp, but it is full of mud. It is not a real swamp, but needle oak ponds and baygalls. At that time, you will Want to go beyond the swamp. If you have a wide cart with big wheels and a cow pulling it, you might pass through the donkey grass, but if you have a narrow-wheeled carriage full of pianos, that’s another matter. Up."
The cottage is located in a densely forested area. Near its original site, a hollow sweet gum tree exists independently. Earle said it was the home of a lynx family.
The hut is more magnificent and stronger than I thought. It has a one-and-a-half-story structure and two floors have doghouses made of solid, square-notched long-leaf pine wood. The light came in from the gaps between the logs. The gaps between the logs were repaired with cotton batting removed, but the house was solid.
"At the time, this was a well-trimmed house," Earle said as we walked in. "And the floors are planed by hand." He knelt down and rubbed the floor with his palms. "The people who planned this are very good. It's too cautious. You don't feel the particles."
This is an unforgettable place, and its solidity is unforgettable because it makes the world of Camino Real suddenly vivid and eternal. On a wall upstairs, there was a reminder about the steamboat’s departure — "The Buffalo will leave Hamilton at 4 o'clock on Thursday for the pass" — written in chalk 150 years ago.
When we left the hut, we wandered into the woods on the edge of the clearing, leaving the bright sunlight to the dark shade of the trees. When we were only a few yards away, Earle turned to me and announced: "We are standing on it."
We are in a narrow ditch half full of leaves: Camino Real. On the left, the trough continues to the river and the point where the Gaines Ferry is now flooded. Besides that is Louisiana. If it were 300 years ago, I could have turned right, started walking, paying close attention to the trails, and finally reached San Juan Bautista a few months later.
But it is impossible to take this path now, unless you are one of those people who only feel complete when facing the remains and traces of a disappearing world that they will never know. As we stood on the roadbed, those anecdotes from Camino Real’s diary kept coming to my mind: the mule ignored the rough pasture by the roadside and ate the moss on the trees; a sudden storm would bring one by one. The horse and rider rolled up and blew them a few yards away; the little boy who wandered around the camp but never found it; Father Hasina took off his eyes to enhance his spiritual vision.
Parts of the old Camino Real—such as Highway 21—are still open, but the days when it was a great highway in Texas are long gone. After Texas became independent from Mexico in 1836, Camino Real Madrid quickly lost its meaning. The New Republic looks eastward at America, not its old enemies southward. When goods flow in from St. Louis and New Orleans, the road to the Rio Grande is not needed. In this new Texas state, Camino Real found nothing. By 1850, ranchers requested and obtained permission to erect fences on them.
However, it is still here, still inscribed in this soft soil-a road of empire conquest in the past, people once walked under the official protection of the Spanish king. Near where we were standing, I noticed a collapsed embankment with rotting wood scattered on it and overgrown with vines.
"Do you know what that is?" Earle asked. "As early as the early 1960s, someone dug up some dirt from the road here and built an atomic bomb shelter for themselves."
He smiled and kicked the dirt lightly with his feet. "Look," he said, "the old Camino Real is still useful."
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