Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/562

554 ; but when I awoke, next morning, the beautiful plains, with vast herds of cattle feeding on them, and covered with flowers of every color, proclaimed our entrance into Texas. Diagonally across this grandest of States we drew a southward-trending line, and the thousand pictures that danced before our eyes—that appeared, vanished, and were replaced by others, which in turn waltzed away into space—were seen through the crystal plate of a hotel-car window. We ate, we played, we slept; we awoke refreshed, to renew the blissful experience of the day that had passed, with an ever-recurring change of scene.

And so, as I said at the beginning, we reached the Rio Grande, where I opened my eyes from my fourth night's restful repose, and left with keen regret the shelter of my temporary house on wheels.

It is at San Antonio, one hundred and fifty miles from the Rio Grande, that one first enters a really Mexican settlement. Beyond San Antonio, running south, the great inclined plane of Texas, which slopes to the Gulf of Mexico, and which is fertile in the northern and central portions of the State, becomes more sterile, and is covered with chaparral, of cactus, yucca, and mesquit,—vegetation anything but attractive, though shading a peculiarly sweet and nutritious grass, which renders this region desirable for the cow-boy and ranger. It is not my purpose to describe other country than that pertaining to Mexico; yet in Texas we find ourselves in a former province of New Spain, and at San Antonio in an ancient Mexican town, set down in the centre of a very pleasant and fruitful region.

The scenery of this section, though of the finest, is less attractive to me than its history; for here were established, as early as 1690, by monks coming up from Queretaro and Zacatecas, those frontier missions of Mexico. The "Mission Period" lasted from 1690 to 1820, or so long as the Spaniards held possession of Mexico; but at the opening of this century, Texas, although a province of New Spain for one hundred and fifty years, was almost unknown to Americans. Austin's bold project of colonization opened it to the North, and in a few short years it became more populous and prosperous than any State of the