Spanish Water, Anglo Water : Early Development in San Antonio [1 ed.] 9781603443258, 9781603441223

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Spanish Water, Anglo Water

Number 113: Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University

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S P A N I S H WA T E R ,

ANGLO WATER Early Development in San Antonio CHARLES R. PORTER JR.

te x a s a& m u ni v er sit y pr ess • College Station

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Texas A&M University Press College Station Copyright © 2009 by Charles R. Porter Jr. Manufactured in the United States of America All rights reserved First edition This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). Binding materials have been chosen for durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Porter, Charles R., 1952– Spanish water, Anglo water : early development in San Antonio / Charles R. Porter Jr. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Centennial series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University ; no. 113) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-1-60344-122-3 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 1-60344-122-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Water rights—Texas—San Antonio—History. 2. Water-supply—Social aspects— Texas—San Antonio—History. 3. Water-supply—Political aspects—Texas— San Antonio—History. 4. Water—Texas—San Antonio—Distribution— Management—History. 5. Land tenure—Texas—San Antonio—History. 6. Irrigation canals and flumes—Texas—San Antonio—History. 7. San Antonio (Tex.)—History. I. Title. hd1695.s35p676 2009 333.91009764′351—dc22 2009001516

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CON T EN T S

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii ix

Part One: god’s water 1. Droughts and Deluges 2. The Country of 1,100 Springs 3. Eyewitness Reports of God’s Water

3 8 15

Part Two: spain and mexico’s water, 1718–1836 4. Missions Settle San Antonio 5. Acequia Technology 6. Derecho Indiano—Law with Justice 7. Water, Land, and Work 8. Conflict, Cooperation, and Compromise

21 31 50 61 72

Part Three: republic of texas and united states water, 1836–1902 9. New People, Old Laws 10. Acequias Overwhelmed 11. The First Water Works Company 12. Water—Politicians’ “Gold”

87 96 99 114

Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index

123 141 159 171 v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT S

I appreciate the encouragement, guidance, and help of my family and colleagues over the course of my work on this book. My wife Connie gave me the confidence to write about and follow my passion for Spanish Colonial Texas history as it relates to water rights and management. She always supported my efforts, even when the work took me away from the family. Susan Gunn, Carol Walker, Joanne Rao Sanchez, Terry Newton, John Houghton, Ramsey Fowler, and Paula Marks at St. Edward’s University along with Patrick Cox at the University of Texas all supported my efforts. Others who helped were Frank Faulkner of the San Antonio Public Library Texana Collection, Frank de la Teja at Texas State University, David J. Weber at Southern Methodist University, Patrick Lamelle of the Institute of Texan Cultures, Thomas R. Monroe, Thomas Glick of Boston University, Texas House of Representatives Member Mark Strama, Kirk James, Scott Morse, and Andrés Tijerina at Austin Community College. I offer each and every one of them my sincerest appreciation.

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INTRODUC TION

Water helped ancient man learn those first difficult lessons about the rights of others and responsibility to a larger society. Even the most rudimentary irrigation system required organization, discipline, cooperation, and a measure of social cohesion. Mutual need begets mutual aid. Notions of sharing, of equity, of compromise, and of the common good first floated precariously on this liquid foundation to be later cemented in philosophical thought and codified law. michael c. meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest

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an Antonio, the seventh largest city in the United States, has thrived on its “liquid foundation” of water, the San Antonio River. Today the river, through its famed Riverwalk alone, contributes $1 billion to the economy annually. A large portion of the tourism and convention trade is based around the Riverwalk area, and the hospitality industry’s economic impact on the city was estimated to be $7.2 billion in 2006. San Antonio’s water has always been a significant factor in the city’s economy, and San Antonio itself has long been central in Texas history. “It has been said that every Texan has two cities: his own and San Antonio. The history of Texas for a century and a half was largely the history of San Antonio.”  These apt words were written in 1949 by prolific local historian and observer Boyce House. The Spanish chose the location of San Antonio to settle in 1718 because of its fresh water resources and its strategic position between the Rio Grande and their settlements in East Texas, the sole purpose of which was to defend Spanish lands from French incursions. Above all else, San Antonio owes its first century and a half of existence to the copious amount of pure water easily available to its earliest settlers from several major springs. The abundance of fresh water in itself did not ensure the establishment of a viable and lasting community; of equal importance was Spanish technological expertise in irrigation and water distribution systems, accompanied by fair management ix

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INTRODUCTION x

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practices along with the basic legal concept that the water was to be used in common by all settlers. From the very beginning of the settlement, the Spanish put into place water management systems that established methods of sharing the precious resource, which enabled the community to grow from an isolated frontier outpost with a tenuous foothold in a dangerous land into the largest city in Texas by 1920. The Spanish had a legal concept that water, while owned by the king, was held by the crown in trust for the benefit of all citizens and indigenous peoples with “justice.” This concept has been carried on, in part, into current Texas laws. My study of water in San Antonio is about life in the city using water as a mirror to reflect its history. The framework is in the historical perspective; the story is told through the lens of history. This overall historical perspective is informed by studying water sharing and management from the various disciplines of geography, engineering and technology, law, agriculture, sociology, religion, economics, politics, water conservation, the environment, and real estate transfer practices. I have grouped the discussion into four major sections. Part One is a detailed description of the water sources and waters of San Antonio. There are two hundred years of eyewitness reports on the springs and water; it is important to understand the early settlers’ wonder at this sparkling, clear, living water as we can never see it. Part Two analyzes management and sharing of the water under Spanish control from 1718 to 1836; water was shared for the benefit of everyone. Part Three examines water under Anglo control from 1836 to 1902: a private concept of ownership for the benefit of those who could afford it. An epilogue provides a summary of my observations and conclusions. The year 1718 is an obvious date with which to begin the study of water in San Antonio as it is the first year of settlement by any Europeans on the San Antonio River and marks the beginning of sharing and management of the precious resource of water among the settlers. The ending date of 1902 was chosen because it is the date of the publication of the single most important valuation of the first privately owned water company in San Antonio, the San Antonio Water Works Company. Beginning in 1878, the San Antonio Water Works Company was granted exclusive responsibility for the sharing and management of the municipal water resource under skittish and inconsistent direction of various city councils. After

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INTRODUCTION

almost twenty-five years of daily wrangling between the water company and the city council, in 1902 the parties had finally reached a mutual agreement that the city would purchase the water company intact. The only disagreement between the parties, after so many years of what seemed like nonagreement on everything, was a fair price. The basic question of public or private ownership of the water system was decided in 1902; the water system would become owned and operated by the city exclusively. There would be no more threats of the city competing with the water company by building their own system or taking the system via their condemnation rights under eminent domain. Why is the study of water in San Antonio important? First, nothing is more basic to successful human urban settlement than the management and sharing of scarce fresh water resources. As Nelson M. Blake, chairman of the history department of Syracuse University, said of water and cities in 1956, “Without it, cities simply could not exist.”  Second, San Antonio is the product of one of diminutive Spain’s most successful colonizing attempts. Little Iberian Spain settled vast areas indeed; its culture still dominates the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the Western Hemisphere. San Antonio’s first century reflects the culmination of hundreds of years of Spanish legal and technological expertise in colonization. In fact, San Antonio is arguably one of Spain’s two most successful settlements north of Mexico City, the other being Los Angeles, California. The key to Spain’s successful colonization of San Antonio was undeniably based upon its wise water management system, which required the settlers to share and conserve the water resources to benefit everyone. Of additional importance, the study of water in San Antonio illuminates Spanish legal concepts that form the theoretical basis of important portions of Texas laws still in effect today. The early Spanish legal concepts are alive in Texas law, especially concerning water; water was owned by the crown but shared by the public for the benefit of the public. Spanish law recognized flowing surface water as public; underground water and water collected on private land was owned in private. This concept still prevails in Texas law. Even the infamous “rule of capture,” which entered Texas case law in 1904 based upon a set of decisions in W. A. East v. Houston and Texas Central Railway Company, could have been supported by Spanish law. Under the rule of capture the landowner can generally take all the underground water to use and sell with

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INTRODUCTION xii

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no limit, regardless of the impact on neighbors. Even if the neighbor’s drinking water well dries up, the rule of capture declares that the neighbor has no claim for remedy or compensation. The colonial Spanish law stated that groundwater was propiedad perfecta, the property of the landowner. Spanish judges, if confronted with a complaint about groundwater, would more than likely have decided as the Sieta Partidas, Partida 3, Titulo 28, Ley 1 states: “man has the power to do as he sees fit with those things that belong to him according to the laws of God and man.”  My purpose is to describe water sharing and management in San Antonio as the community emerged from being an isolated frontier outpost in 1718 to become an important national urban center by the early twentieth century. I devote little time to the wars and battles in San Antonio, of which there were many. Instead, I focus on water as it related to the daily lives of the inhabitants. The work is intended for historians, readers with a desire to understand the history of water management in Texas, and governmental entities and their appointed or elected representatives. My aim is to inform the audience that the water management and sharing practices developed, learned, and implemented in the early years of San Antonio constitute the foundation of present Texas water law. In order to make prudent policy on water issues, it is imperative that the public gain an understanding of how the legal concepts of water management developed in Texas over time. Although the Spanish colonial founders of San Antonio constructed the first municipal water distribution system in Texas, and the Spanish sharing and management practices comprised the first water conservation plan in the state, the Spanish are rarely given the credit they deserve for their far-reaching impact on Texas life today. From 1718 to 1902, water was the deliverer of life itself to individual citizens, the provider of much of their livelihood, the transporter to them of death by disease and flood, the designer of much of their social and spatial organization, and the grantor of political power.

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Spanish Water, Anglo Water

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Part One God’s Water

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1 DROUGHTS AND DELUGES

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rom the perspective of climate, San Antonio is best described as semiarid with a tendency to long-term drought followed by short-term deluges; the only reliable trait of the rainfall is its unpredictability. The prevailing wind is from the southeast out of the Gulf of Mexico, carrying moisture and creating the discomfort of humidity almost year round. Geographically, the city is positioned at the bottom or southern base of the Balcones Escarpment, on the dividing line between humid subtropical East and Gulf Coast Texas and semiarid Central and West Texas. As to geographic regions, portions of San Antonio are in the Edwards Plateau, the Rio Grande Plain, and even a finger of the Prairies and Cross Timbers. Like a border town on a political boundary, where people from both sides mix, San Antonio is a border town between geographical regions; as a result of the mixture it enjoys—and at times suffers from—the climatic conditions, topography, fauna, and flora of each region. As James F. Peterson of the Department of Geography at Texas State University has observed: “San Antonio’s existence on the boundary between arid and humid zones does not necessarily mean that the city enjoys moderate weather and a balance between these climate types. In one year San Antonio may experience desert-like conditions and in the next year receive a deluge of precipitation.”  Relying on published annual averages and means of temperature, rainfall, and frost days can be deceptive in San Antonio. Mean monthly temperatures range from 50°F in winter to 80° in summer, but these statistics mask extremes by averaging daily highs and overnight lows. People who have visited San Antonio even for a short time in August would attest that 80° would not describe their memories of the outdoor temperature and humidity in summer. As another example of misleading statistics on temperature, weather charts 3

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CHAPTER ONE 4

say San Antonio averages 111 days a year with temperatures of 90°F or higher, seemingly usual for anywhere in the southern United States. In the modern air-conditioned era, hot weather is uncomfortable, but going indoors usually brings relief. Modern San Antonians do not drastically change their activities to adjust to the heat. However, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was little relief from heat and humidity. Cold weather was rare; there were “cold snaps,” but the discomfort people dreaded in San Antonio was the heat. The activity of daily life before air conditioning was arranged around the heat. San Antonio’s semiarid climate, simply put, is volatile, with recurring periods of drought often followed by extended periods of excessive rainfall. Weather extremes noticeable today merely as an inconvenience could be settlement-threatening events in the initial years, dramatically impacting the early settlers of San Antonio in the 1700s and 1800s. Bad weather at the wrong time wiped out food supplies, flooded large areas of the settlement, and caused hardship that threatened its viability from time to time. Figure 1 shows the severity of drought in the San Antonio area from 1700

Figure 1. Drought severity in San Antonio, 1700 to 1900. Zero is considered normal, and all points below it constitute drought (–0.50 to –0.99 = incipient drought; –1.00 to –1.99 = mild drought; –2.00 to –2.99 = moderate drought; –3.00 to –3.99 = severe drought; ⩽ –4.00 = extreme drought). Based on data from Mauldin, Exploring Drought in the San Antonio Area.

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DROUGHTS AND DELUGES

to 1900 based upon the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). The graph reveals that during the focal period of this study, there were times when it simply did not rain. The length of severe shortages in rainfall made dry-land farming or farming without irrigation risky at best and, during many periods, all but impossible as a reliable source of food for congregate human living. Alexander Edwin Sweet traveled through the San Antonio area in the 1880s, more than likely sometime in 1887. Co-author of On a Mexican Mustang through Texas, a compilation of articles he wrote in Texas Siftings, he commented about the current drought and an earlier one:

5

We started from Luling at six o’clock in the morning. By eleven it was so hot that we were compelled to seek shade and rest. There had been no rain for six weeks; and the natives were beginning to predict that this would be as bad a year as 1857, the dry year in Western Texas. In that year, the drought killed all the crops; and there was nothing to be raised, not even an umbrella, during the whole season. One man told us that we were bound to have rain sooner or later; and, when it did come, it would be a deluge, and there would be no telling when it would quit raining,—that it would be like unto a great dam broken loose. There had been many damns breaking loose from the exasperated farmer, he said; but they had no perceptible effect on the meteorological condition of Western Texas. The keystone to fixed human settlement is stabilized farming, which simply cannot succeed over the long run without steady, predictable, and timely moisture—or irrigation. The prolonged periods of drought in San Antonio and its surrounds made sedentary living difficult, risky, and sometimes miserable. Dry-land farming inevitably fails at times around San Antonio, not only because of lack of rainfall but also due to too much rain at the wrong time. Even if rains are ideal, a late spring frost or an early summer hailstorm can destroy the best crop. Water is the only strategic weapon to use against aridity; irrigation is the only tactical application of that weapon to stabilize agriculture to allow any population to expand. Even today, farming in the San Antonio area is still only given a chance to be successful when irrigation is practiced. The Spanish

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CHAPTER ONE 6

colonizers understood the importance of farming and sought for settlement only the lands that could be irrigated.

Spain’s Climate Similar to San Antonio San Antonio’s climate and weather are similar to the weather in parts of Spain, so the Spanish settlers were well equipped to meet the area’s moisture challenges. In the words of Betty Eakle Dobkins in The Spanish Element in Texas Water Law, “Drawn from Roman, Moorish, and Gothic sources, this body of [Spanish] law reflected its diverse origins, but it also showed the mark of the Spaniard himself, in whose bone was bred respect for water.”  Dobkins’s source for this idea was Edwin P. Arneson. An exact quote from Arneson is even more interesting: “The conquistadores, who exploited the Spanish Main, were, for the most part, recruited from that central plateau of Spain, endeared to the readers of Don Quixote as ‘La Mancha.’ ‘La Mancha’ means the Blot. It is an extremely dry country which is able to support its population only when the utmost care is exercised in the conservation and use of the scanty rainfall. Respect for water is bred in the bone of the Spaniard,

Figure 2. Map of Spain by Ortelius, 1588. “La Mancha,” or “the Blot,” is around Madrid. Original map in the private collection of the author.

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DROUGHTS AND DELUGES

and, while his profession may have been arms abroad, his occupation at home was agriculture” (emphasis added). The Spanish learned from the ancient conquerors of their own Iberian Peninsula how to use scarce water resources to irrigate their fields and distribute water, and from that education, regulations and laws developed to govern the use in common of water resources. As Arneson appropriately notes of Spaniards, their base occupation was farming. This also aptly describes the occupation of the Spanish in San Antonio for over a century and a half. Spanish settlers and friars sought water first, and their prayers were answered in San Antonio.

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2 T H E C O U N T R Y O F 1 ,1 0 0 S P R I N G S

Pearl Beer, from the country of 1,100 springs. . . . Watching this water, you’ll think: here’s purity at its best. But this flow is marked for real greatness, and nature has more work to do. It happens underground in the great slab of limestone this whole country rests on. One of earth’s purest limestones, it drinks in thousands of gallons of water from the streams that cross it. Never leaving this snow-white stone, the spring water makes its way south and east into the natural underground reservoir where Pearl’s own wells find it, a quarter mile beneath the brewery. Up comes one of the world’s few naturally perfect brewing waters, the pure spring water used to brew Pearl Beer since 1886. Fresh. Clear. Perfect for capturing all the life and good taste in Pearl’s grains and hops. . . . This water gives Pearl life you can see—the tiny bubbles that rise when you fill your glass. . . . Pour yourself a Pearl Beer today, and enjoy the extra goodness this famous water gives the beer. Every refreshing sip will take you back to the Country of 1,100 Springs. pearl brewing company brochure, San Antonio

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earl Beer, one of the few nationally marketed products made from the waters of the San Antonio River and its aquifer, was brewed in San Antonio from 1881 until 2001. The brewery’s famous jingle, “Pearl Beer: from the country of 1,100 springs,” was first announced in 1961. The Pearl brochure and jingle accurately describe the prolific water source for the San Antonio area, the Edwards Aquifer (see fig. 3). San Antonio lies atop the aquifer that is the rechargeable source of the city’s many springs. Millions of gallons of water filter through limestone strata from the Texas Hill Country watersheds to the west and north of the city and flow in a more 8

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T H E C O U N T R Y O F 1,1 0 0 S P R I N G S 9

Figure 3. The flow of the Edwards Aquifer runs from west to east (arrows). Courtesy of the Edwards Aquifer Authority, www.edwardsaquifer.net.

or less easterly direction through the aquifer to emerge and form the San Antonio River’s key springs along with hundreds of other smaller springs all over the basin. These springs flowed consistently with an abundant supply of pure water until the twentieth century, when a large number of deep water wells were drilled into the aquifer due to the growth of San Antonio and, to a lesser degree, that of surrounding communities; the drilling limited the ability of the aquifer to recharge quickly enough to keep the springs flowing. In order for the city’s springs to flow, the aquifer level must be at least 676 feet above sea level. In the summer of 2006 the surface of the aquifer was at 655 feet above sea level—20 feet or more below the level needed—and falling. However, typical of Texas weather, starting in the spring and continuing throughout the summer of 2007, rainfall was plentiful, and all the springs flowed again, some prolifically. In comparison to San Antonio’s springs, Comal Springs in Comal County cease to flow when the surface of the aquifer drops below 618 feet above sea level, and San Marcos Springs in Hays County cease when it drops below

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CHAPTER TWO 10

Figure 4. One of the springs at San Pedro Springs, April 2007. Photo by author.

574 feet above sea level. The Comal and San Marcos springs are massive and were flowing profusely in the fall of 2007, but the Spanish chose the San Antonio River valley to settle, probably because it was served by five or more flowing springs. An additional reason may be that these springs fed two parallel-running water courses, San Pedro Creek and the San Antonio River, and the land between them, having been created by alluvial soils through the millennia, was some of the richest farm land in North America. Although the springs of the city of New Braunfels (Comal) and the city of San Marcos (San Marcos) were then also strong sources of water, their lack of success as major cities when compared to San Antonio illustrates that abundant water alone does not guarantee growth for a community. It also takes a decision and commitment by settlers to distribute the water widely to support a larger population, along with commitments to construct and maintain good roads year-round for transport of citizens and goods; sources of capital

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T H E C O U N T R Y O F 1,1 0 0 S P R I N G S

to fuel economic growth; a supportive community that embraces new technology, like the railroads after the Civil War; and a myriad of other factors. But even the most supportive community cannot exist without fresh water in abundance. The Spanish knew that any water source had to be distributed through irrigation systems in order for a new community to sustain the numbers of colonists and settlers it would need to defend and sustain itself. The two major springs of San Antonio can be visited today. San Antonio Spring, also known as Worth’s Spring or Blue Hole, is on the grounds at the University of the Incarnate Word. San Pedro Springs are found at San Pedro Park in north-central San Antonio. The San Antonio River begins at its namesake spring and runs southward, parallel to San Pedro Creek. San Pedro Creek joins the San Antonio River just south of town, north of the lower river missions of Concepción, San José, San Juan, and Espada. Alex Sweet wrote of what he called San Antonio Spring, today’s Blue

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Figure 5. One of the San Pedro Springs. The ancient cypress tree is fifty-five paces around at its outermost base. Photo by author.

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Figure 6. San Antonio Spring, also known as Worth’s Spring or “Blue Hole,” is the headwater spring of the San Antonio River, April 2007. Photo by author.

Figure 7. The San Antonio River starting from Blue Hole, April 2007. Photo by author. 12

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T H E C O U N T R Y O F 1,1 0 0 S P R I N G S 13

Figure 8. An overall view of the springs and resulting creek and river in the city. San Pedro Springs (center left) gives rise to San Pedro Creek, and Worth’s Springs and others at the University of the Incarnate Word (top right corner) give rise to the San Antonio River. Downtown is where the creek and river run parallel; the “horseshoe” bend is the location of Mission Valero, today called the Alamo. Original City Map of San Antonio 1928, S.A. Map Company, in the private collection of the author.

Hole: “The San Antonio River has selected a lovely spot on the Brackenridge place, at which it bursts forth unexpectedly. . . . The spring is circular in shape, about six feet in diameter, and not less than fifteen feet deep. The water is so wondrous clear, that the movements of even the smallest fish can be discerned. No attempt to describe the beauty of the spring can succeed.”  The sign at San Antonio Spring today says: “At one time the volume from its spring shot up 9 feet into the air like a geyser.”  When San Antonio Spring began to flow again in the spring of 2007, small black guppylike fish appeared in the inner hole of the spring, now con-

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CHAPTER TWO 14

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creted with a three-foot circular wall and above the runoff level. Did these fish come from the bowels of the aquifer itself? It is difficult to imagine these tiny fish swimming uphill against the current from the resulting creek bed. Are these the same variety of fish Sweet observed in the 1880s? Frederick Law Olmsted likewise waxed lyrical about San Antonio Spring in 1853: “San Antonio Spring may be classed as the first water among the gems of the natural world. The whole river gushes up in one sparkling burst from the earth. . . . The effect is overpowering. It is beyond your possible conceptions of a spring. You cannot believe your eyes.”  The gentle topography of the river valley and the shallow depth of the banks made irrigation feasible with the help of small dams to lift the water a few feet through headgates into irrigation ditches that the Spanish called acequias (pronounced “ah-say-key-uhs,” meaning canals or ditches), which distribute the water all over the area.

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3 EYEWITNESS REPORTS O F G O D ’ S W AT E R

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he first European eyewitnesses to the beauty of the river and springs were more than likely the Spanish explorers, as currently extant documents indicate; “trespassing” Frenchmen may have enjoyed a cool dip of spring water, also. The San Antonio River was officially “discovered” and named by Father Damian Massanet in 1691 during the Domingo Terán de los Rios Expedition of 1691–92. In 1709, the Espinosa-Olivares-Aguirre Expedition returned to the valley and noted that the waters were ideal to support a major settlement. The Ramón Expedition of 1716 revisited the area and the chronicler of the expedition, Friar Félix Isidro Espinosa, described the beauty of the San Antonio River: It is surrounded by very tall nopales [prickly pear cactus], poplars, elms, grapevines, black mulberry trees, laurels, strawberry vines and genuine fan palms. . . . Merely in that part of the density of its grove which we penetrated, seven streams of water meet. Those, together with others concealed by the brushwood, form at a little distance its copious waters, which are clear, crystal and sweet. In these are found catfish, sea fish, pilonte, catan and alligators. Undoubtedly, there are also other kinds of fish that are most savory. . . . Its luxuriance is enticing for the founding of missions and villages, for both its plains and its waters encourage settlement. The springs described by the Spanish were not the only local sources of water that fed the river. Del Weniger notes in The Explorers’ Texas: “But these springs were not the whole of the outflow which formed the San Antonio River. The 15

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CHAPTER THREE 16

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whole basin in which the city grew up was once like a sponge leaking water from many pores.” He went on to observe: “The pristine purity of this stream and its perfect situation for irrigation had their predictable results.”  Like the first Spanish visitors who recognized and wrote about the beauty and usefulness of the waters, many others did so over the next 150 years. Their commentaries provide eyewitness descriptions of the springs and river before any deep drilling into the aquifer began. Visitors admired the beauty and abundance of the valley and its many springs, and they wondered at the irrigation system and its results. In 1782 and 1783 Father Juan Agustín Morfi wrote The History of Texas from his diaries of personal visits in the province on inspection tours, and he said of the San José mission acequias and the farm production there: “For its benefit water is taken by means of a beautiful irrigation ditch to all parts of the field, where corn, beans, lentils, cotton, sugar cane, watermelons, melons, and sweet potatoes were raised. It has also a patch of all kinds of vegetables and there are fruit trees, from among which the peaches stand out, their fruit weighing at times as much as a pound.”  Anglo visitors began to flock to San Antonio when the Republic of Mexico encouraged settlement via grants to Stephen F. Austin and other colonists from the north. In 1828 Joseph C. Clopper, a new settler in Texas, declared: “From this spot San Antonio has a striking resemblance to one of Uncle Sam’s handsomest and largest country villages. . . . The curious traveler . . . comes to a little canal which he beholds with rapture, extending itself o’er the thirsty land and watering beautifully verdant and flourishing fields of corn.”  Some described the river itself. An anonymous traveler to San Antonio in 1837 said: “The water is clear as crystal and runs through the valley with a current of not less than five or six miles an hour, over a bed of rocks.”  George W. Bonnell reported in 1840: “The San Antonio River is formed by about one hundred large springs in a beautiful valley four miles above the city. Many of these springs would singly form a river; and when they unite in the San Antonio, they form a bold and rapid stream of two hundred feet in width, and about four feet deep over the shoals.”  As Dr. Ferdinand Roemer noted in 1846: “No better opportunity for bathing could be found anywhere than the San Antonio River with its crystal clear water of equal volume and uniform temperature both in winter and summer.”  The springs continued to draw commentary. In 1850 John Russell Bartlett said the San Antonio River rose “about three miles from the town, from a

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E Y E W I T N E S S R E P O R T S O F G O D ’ S WAT E R

number of large springs, flowing, like those forming the San Pedro, from the solid rock. The largest of these is worth a visit. The water rises in a cavity some six or eight feet in diameter and twelve or fifteen feet deep, and rushes out in an immense volume. The water[s] of these springs unite with Olmos Creek, forming a river. By now the town had become quite substantial. Upon his first view of San Antonio in 1855, John Leonard Riddell said: “Some twenty minutes after my alarm had subsided, a broad verdant valley opened to sight in the midst of which appeared, as if created by enchantment, the city of San Antonio.”  Riddell had been on the lookout for Indians. The alarm was false; he heard rustling in the brush, which turned out to be a wild mustang. News reporter Richard Everett described the setting in 1859:

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Two rivers wind through the city, flowing from living springs only a short distance beyond the suburbs. One, the San Antonio, boils in vast volume from a rocky basin, which, environed by mossy stones and overhanging foliage, seems devised for the especial dwelling place of nymphs and naiads. The other, the San Pedro, runs from a little pond, formed by the out-gushing of five sparkling springs, which bear the same name. This miniature lake, embowered in a grove of stately elm and pecan trees, is one of the most beautiful natural sheets of pure water in the Union—so clear, that even the delicate roots of the water-lilies and the smallest pebbles may be distinctly seen. These descriptions of the river and springs are important reminders of nature’s beauty in San Antonio before population growth changed these features forever.

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Part Two Spain and Mexico’s Water, 1718–1836

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4 MISSIONS SE T TLE SAN ANTONIO

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n 1917 the noted Spanish borderlands scholar Herbert E. Bolton observed of Spain’s efforts as a colonizing nation: “One of the marvels in the history of the modern world is the way in which that little Iberian nation, Spain, when most of her blood and treasure were absorbed in European wars, with a handful of men, took possession of the Caribbean archipelago, and by rapid yet steady advance spread her culture, her religion, her law, and her language over more than half of the two American continents, where they are still dominant and secure.”  Spain simply did not have enough population at home to colonize the vast territories the king claimed under the authority of the papal bull of Alexander VI in 1493. Hence, the Spanish teamed up with the Catholic Church leadership from the mid-sixteenth century on to convert the native peoples of the New World into Catholic Christians, thus seeking to create colonists for Spain, who would secure the lands for the crown and, as a pleasing byproduct, would become tax-paying citizens. Spain utilized three institutions to establish San Antonio: the missions, the presidio, and the municipality. The missions provided training for Indian converts in religion, agriculture, and handicrafts. Through their collective large-scale farming practices, steadied and made successful by irrigation from the abundant water in San Antonio, the missions were able to generate the food needed to sustain themselves and the presidio. The presidio provided the critically needed defense for the missionaries, Indians living at the missions, and other settlers against the hostile Apaches and later Comanches. The presidio also provided the missionaries with the necessary show of force to gain respect and obedience from their congregated Indians. Without the courageous presidio soldiers, the missions never could 21

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have flourished, and the king would have been reticent and ill-advised to attempt to establish a municipality in San Antonio. The chartered municipality established the lawful permanent government that secured the long-term organization of the community. Although the coexistence of these institutions was occasionally stressful, with the distribution and management of water resources being a significant catalyst for this tension from time to time, all three institutions were vital raw elements in the permanent foundation of the community. In San Antonio, it was the Franciscan friars who would lead the way with a handful of soldiers and settlers to found its first settlement.

Franciscan Missionaries By the time Spain made any real effort to occupy Texas, the Spanish had been in the New World for more than two hundred years. In the words of John Leddy Phelan, “No colonial empire in modern times was built upon such an extensive philosophical and theological foundation as that empire which the Spaniards created for themselves in the New World.”  Phelan’s Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World is viewed as “one of the finest accounts of early Franciscan activity written in English.”  The friars were followers of St. Francis of Assisi, who founded the Order of Friars Minor in 1209 in Italy. The basic rule of his order required its members to live in the strictest poverty, prayer, humility, and self-denial. They did not live an isolated and monastic life, however. Their dedicated work was to recruit common people into Catholicism in order to save their souls for eternity. St. Francis established his order so that its members would not only be missionaries to the faithful at home in Europe but would also to journey to the most dangerous and hostile parts of the world to evangelize the indigenous people, whom they referred to as “pagan” or “heathen.” According to Bishop Hilarin Felder, “Francis regarded missionary activity among the heathens as the noblest and highest task of the Order. . . . For the Order is by its very nature a missionary Order. Francis, among all the founders of religious institutes, was the first to include foreign missions in his apostolic program.”  The friars were sent from the earliest days of the order by various Popes to convert pagans in Asia and other parts of the world. Spanish friars worked on conversions of Muslims in Spain and of the Canary Islanders, the in-

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habitants of Spain’s first nonpeninsular conquest. The friars firmly believed their primary duty was to follow absolutely and rigidly what is commonly known as the Great Commission of Christ: “Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever that I have commanded you.”  The friars tried zealously to fulfill this duty by delivering the message of Christ in person to pagans where the pagans lived, then baptizing as many as they could as quickly as reasonably possible. The original Spanish system of colonization in the New World was known as the encomienda, which was designed to convert, civilize, and exploit the Indians for use by the encomendero, or trustee of the government, for the ultimate economic benefit of the crown. The duties of the encomendero were to protect the Indians, instruct them in religion, and provide support to the impoverished friars who were to be their teachers. Unfortunately the system virtually enslaved the Indians, and atrocities were committed against them. As Bolton said, “the flesh is weak, and the system was abused.” The work of Catholic priests led by Bartolomé de Las Casas resulted in the eventual abolition of the encomienda system. The Royal Orders for New Discoveries of 1573 officially gave the missionaries the central role in the exploration and pacification of new lands, which laid another cornerstone for the development of the mission system that followed. The Orders said that “preaching the holy gospel . . . is the principal reason for which we order new discoveries and settlements to be made.” This empowered the friars and acted as a catalyst to their extraordinary zeal for missionary work among the Indians. The Royal Orders prohibited “conquest or violence” (emphasis added) against the Indians for any reason and confirmed that the missionaries would continue to be paid by the crown, and that the friars were to enter all new lands before anyone else. Strong legal and moral foundations were now firmly in place to allow the friars to expand the mission system across the vast Spanish American frontiers. They could depend upon financial support from the crown as long as Spain relied upon the missionaries to advance its colonization of the unknown wilds in its northern claims. As David Weber has observed:

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Although the rate of success varied with time and place, it seems remarkable in retrospect that a small number of Franciscans man-

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aged to direct changes in the external and internal lives of many Indians. How does one account for the steady expansion of the friars’ missionary programs in New Mexico and Florida? Perhaps, as Franciscans believed, divine intervention played a role, but more worldly explanations suggest themselves: the zeal and skill of the Franciscans, the powerful economic and bureaucratic apparatus of church and state that supported them, and the natives themselves, who decided when and how they would cooperate with the Christians. The friars who founded San Antonio in 1718 were trained at the missionary colleges of Querétaro and Zacatecas in Mexico. Querétaro’s was the first missionary college outside Iberian Spain and was founded in 1683. The Zacatecas college was founded shortly after in 1707. The main aim of the friars as zealots for Christ was to convert all Indians or other nonbelievers to Christianity. They prepared themselves in these colleges for the frightening hardships they would face all but alone in lands so hostile that each step would be fraught with life-threatening danger. The dedicated and zealous Franciscan missionaries were the driving force behind every attempt to settle anywhere in Texas from 1690 until secularization in 1793.

Indians For centuries prior to Spanish colonization, the earliest people of the San Antonio area, the nomadic Coahuiltecan groups, followed sources of food and water; their wanderings were wholly controlled by the stingy rainfall of South Texas. As W. W. Newcomb said of the Coahuiltecans and their environs in the San Antonio area in his 1961 classic The Indians of Texas, “Men had to rely mostly upon plant food to live here. And the uses to which the aborigines put various cacti, mesquite beans, nuts, stool, and agave, and other plants are the heart and soul of the story of the Coahuiltecans of south Texas. In short, for those who were wise to the possibilities of this land and catholic in their tastes, this was a livable and occasionally even a bountiful region.”  They did not practice fixed-site agriculture, as did other Native Americans in East Texas or to the south in Mexico in places where rainfall was more reliable. Their only survival strategy was to follow and harvest nature’s seasonal

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resources. This lifestyle successfully sustained them for years until the Spanish came to invade their world. The Coahuiltecan groups included the Jarames around the San Antonio area; a Jarame child was the first person baptized at Mission Valero. The Payaya and the Pampoas were other Coahuiltecans in the area. The Coahuiltecans were displaced by Spanish settlement, privatization of their lands, and the mission system of Indian recruitment for Christ. They were displaced from their traditional homelands during times of scarcity by competition for natural plant foods from the hundreds of thousands of wild Spanish cattle and horses. The Coahuiltecans also became “collateral damage” when the Apaches and Comanches raided the herds of domesticated Spanish cattle and horses, raids beginning in 1718 and increasing in the 1720s. The natives exercised what control they could after the arrival of the Spanish, but as Weber so aptly described the relationship between Franciscans and Indians: “Whatever skill, resources, and force the Franciscans brought to their struggle to extend Christianity to North American natives, they did not succeed unless Indians cooperated, and Indians cooperated only when they believed they had something to gain from the new religion and the material benefits that accompanied it, or too much to lose from resisting it.” 

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Settlement on the San Antonio Planned In 1709 the friars and Spanish government officials planned a meeting with the Tejas Indians at their supposed encampment on the San Marcos River for the purpose of using them to stop illicit trade in New Spain from the French settlements in Louisiana. The trip to the meeting is known as the Espinosa-Olivares-Aguirre Expedition of 1709. It was made up of Fray Antonio de Olivares, Fray Isidro de Espinosa, and Captain Pedro de Aguirre, along with fourteen soldiers. Along the way this expedition found springs in the San Antonio River area. As already mentioned, the river had been seen and named by Father Damian Massanet in 1691 during the Domingo Terán de los Rios Expedition of 1691–92. Upon reaching the San Antonio River area in 1709, Espinosa reported: “We crossed a large plain in the same direction, and after going through a mesquite flat and some holm-oak groves we came to an irrigation ditch, bordered by many trees and with water enough to supply a town. It was full

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of taps or sluices of water, the earth being terraced. We named it San Pedro Spring (agua de San Pedro).”  As they traveled past the newly named spring, they came upon another spring that formed a larger river, which they named the San Antonio de Padua. Espinosa erroneously described a spring flow as an irrigation ditch. He also described the springs and river as being able to supply not only a town or village, but a city, an observation he would reiterate in his diary of the Ramón Expedition of 1716. In the spring of 1716, Espinosa returned to the San Antonio River area with Captain Domingo Ramón, twenty-five soldiers, and twenty-two other men, eight of them with their wives to attend to the beasts of burden. On May 14 the group entered the San Antonio River valley, and Espinosa commented: “To it succeeds the water of the San Pedro; sufficient for a mission. Along the bank of the latter, which has a thicket of all kinds of wood, and by an open path we arrived at the River San Antonio. This river is very desirable for settlements and favorable for its pleasantness, location, abundance of water, and multitude of fish.”  Upon returning to Mexico City Father Olivares met with the new viceroy, the Marquis de Valero, to request formally that a mission be founded on the San Antonio River. Father Olivares proposed to move the few remaining Jarame Indians of the Mission San Francisco Solano to the new mission. The viceroy approved the mission in principle, not only because of the missionary’s zeal but also because he was convinced he had to stop French penetration into Texas to trade with the Indians. After written reports were processed, the viceroy appointed Don Martín de Alarcón to be governor of the Province of Texas, issued orders for a military expedition, and issued orders to furnish Father Olivares all that was needed for the founding of the first mission on the San Antonio River.

Arrival in San Antonio Father Olivares and Governor Alarcón did not get along with one another, and after a long delay on the Rio Grande that frustrated the eager Olivares, Alarcón left for the San Antonio River valley and reached it on April 25, 1718, arriving at San Pedro Springs. Alarcón’s diarist, Fray Francisco de Céliz, wrote of the location at which they stopped: “In this locality, in the very spot on which the Villa of Béjar was founded, it is easy to secure water, but no-

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where else.”  About three-fourths of a league down the creek, Father Olivares was granted possession of the site for the new Mission of San Antonio de Valero on May 5, 1718. The next day, “On the 6th of the said month, the governor, with twenty-five men and the father chaplain, left in search of the bay of Spiritu Santo,” Céliz reported, leaving forty-five people to start the mission and villa. The mission, presidio, and village made up the typical paramilitary settlement on the Spanish frontier; San Antonio was following the normal pattern. Jesús F. de la Teja has explained the way the Spanish went about the building of a frontier town: “During the eighteenth century San Antonio de Bexar existed as a proto-typical frontier community. Military post, civilian settlement, and missionary establishments coexisted, often in great tension with one another, but in undisputed interdependence.”  Father Olivares, along with the few Indians from other missions south of the Rio Grande who had come along on the trip, held prayers and mass, an action always taken by the friars upon arrival and each and every day thereafter. With the Indians, the settlers and soldiers plowed the ground around the mission site. These first crops were lost to an infestation of rodents. The next important step was to dig the first acequia. The entire month of January, 1719, was spent in the construction the acequias for the presidio and mission. The first site of Valero was on the west side of the San Antonio River, but it was moved to the east to its permanent location in 1724. The Alamo Madre Acequia was started to water the fields of Valero in 1724 and took four years to complete. In the words of Frederick Chabot, “President Father Joseph Gonzales was especially zealous, and was the one who worked the most, for he appreciated the importance of irrigation for his mission. The first mission, Valero, named for the viceroy, was followed by four other missions: San José in 1720 and in 1731 San Juan, Concepción, and Espada. Of all the reasons for establishing these communities, the abundance of water was primary. Distribution of the water via acequias sowed the first seed of sustainable life for the settlement. The river and springs represented “armies of water” awaiting their orders to defend the community from the semiarid climate and periodic droughts. Irrigation technology implemented cooperatively by the settlers kept the tiny settlement alive and gave it the opportunity to grow. Growth was elusive, however, due to the lack of interest shown by potential settlers in living under

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such dangerous and harsh conditions and also to the continuing weakness in Spain’s finances. Spain had planned to send more families to San Antonio over time, but it failed to do so; as a result little new Iberian Spanish blood came to increase the population. As the settlement grew in the middle part of the eighteenth century, an ever-present tension loomed over the valley. The people lived with the constant threat of raids from hostile Indians such as the Lipan Apaches and, by the end of the century, the Comanches. Even in the best years, it was all but impossible to expand the fields too far away from the relative safety of the missions and presidio. Herding cattle and sheep placed any herdsman at risk of attack. The hostile threat, always at the back of every settler’s mind, was one of the few unifying factors in the settlement. Another element of unrelenting tension was the periodic recurrence of epidemic diseases. While most of the European Spanish and Mexican settlers, soldiers, and friars had some immunity to the dreaded smallpox, the Indians in the mission did not. The major epidemics that continued to recur without relief over the seventy-five-year mission period in San Antonio regularly depleted the Indian convert population. At one time the life expectancy of an Indian child born in the missions was only 1.2 years. It seemed that every ox and mule train bringing supplies and goods from the interior of Mexico also carried with it and delivered another round of murderous diseases. There was also a very real tension among the inhabitants themselves: the soldiers, the Spaniards who were Canary Islanders, the friars, and the Indians. This tension continued throughout the entire mission era. The friars tried everything they could to keep “their” Indians away from all whom they considered bad influences. The record shows that the friars always tried to keep Indian converts from the “immoral and criminal” Spanish settlers and soldiers. The crown agreed to separation, as is documented by Captain Juan Valdéz in his account of the founding of Mission San José, dated March 13, 1720: “I command all persons, citizens, and settlers of the said province of whatever state, character, or condition not to disturb or interfere with the said Indians in their [the missions’] possession under penalty of 200 pesos.”  From the very beginning in San Antonio there were recurring conflicts between settlers and friars, usually over the monopoly the friars held over Indian labor but also including the preferential treatment given the mission for sale

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of agricultural and other products to the presidio. The government-funded presidio represented the only cash market for most goods in the area. Instruction no. 81 in the 1787 Guidelines for a Texas Mission (instructions for San Antonio’s Mission Purisima Concepción) is an example of the extent to which this problem had escalated politically and the means to which the friars would go to protect the Indians under their tutelage:

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Dealings and communications between the Indians and the Spaniards are not only allowed but are commanded by the commandant general. Nonetheless, the missionary must expel from the mission those Spaniards who come only to take from the Indians all they can, gambling with them and exchanging trifles for utensils and practicing evil. This cannot be tolerated, and the missionary should not permit them at the mission. If he asks them not to return and they persist in doing so, he is to order them tied to a stake and whipped. Thus they learn by experience. There are no records of whippings of Spaniards at Mission Concepción, and had this been ordered by the missionary under the 1787 instruction, the executioner of such punishment cannot be imagined; it certainly would not have been a friar or an Indian. However, the typical mission did include plans for a prison area. On March 13, 1720, Captain Juan Valdéz mentioned in his report on the founding of the San José mission that “allowance is made for the usual buildings such as the friary, the infirmary, the royal houses, the prison and all the other needed places.”  Apparently in the San Antonio River missions, physical punishment was meted out rarely, if ever. On May 28, 1758, Governor Barrios y Jauregui said of Mission San José: “Due to their teachers’ [the friars’] graciousness and kindness, the Indians are so contented that there have been no fugitives. Also, there are no fetters or stocks in the mission.”  There are two logical reasons for punishment being rare in the San Antonio missions. One was that the bulk of the Indians were cooperative Coahuiltecans who freely chose to stay at the missions of San Antonio because these settings offered them safety in the more dangerous world in which they found themselves in the eighteenth century. The other was that scarcity in

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the basics of daily survival, food and water, was generally unknown in San Antonio. Its abundant water was the key to both reasons. By the end of the eighteenth century the entire San Antonio River community barely numbered two thousand people, even though it was fast approaching having been in existence a hundred years. From 1777 growth in the community had stagnated at approximately two thousand inhabitants. Subsistence agriculture was still the main work of the people other than those who were soldiers or members of the military staff. The missions were in full decline. In 1793 official secularization, or the transfer of mission lands to any remaining Indians who still lived at their respective missions, was implemented. The mission era ended by 1800. The San Antonio River community was becoming more and more isolated by the end of the eighteenth century. Yet despite San Antonio’s struggling condition at that time, its Spanish settlers’ nearly century-old policies for sharing and managing water—locally unique and fully legal under Spanish law—and their technology for irrigation and water distribution, along with the resulting water conservation programs, would emerge as the foundation for all future water practice and law in the province of Texas.

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5 ACEQUIA TECHNOLOGY

Irrigation is man’s response to drought; by this means he reduces radically the uncertainty that nature presents to human settlement in an inhospitable environment. arthur maas and raymond l. anderson, . . . and the Desert Shall Rejoice

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he initial act of social cooperation in water management and distribution in San Antonio was the construction of the first irrigation ditch by settlers, soldiers, missionaries, and Indians, commencing in January 1719. Its construction was essential to the survival of all. The effort was typical of work at any new Spanish community in that before permanent structures were built, an initial acequia was completed. Confirming that this practice was the standard across New Spain, Michael C. Meyer wrote: “With amazing regularity, the construction of an irrigation system for the new communities of the north began even before the houses, public buildings, and churches were finished. Prior to the completion of the ditches, water had to be conveyed by aquadores, who carried heavy buckets hanging from yokes across their shoulders.”  The Spanish had learned from the ancient conquerors of their own Iberian Peninsula how to use scarce water resources to irrigate crops. From that education, technology and practices developed to share and distribute in common any available water resources. Areas of Spain have been irrigated for more than two thousand years. The Romans and the Visigoths established new irrigation practices, and these practices were modified and improved by the Moors who entered Spain in the eighth century. S. P. Scott commented on the transformational power of irrigation in his History of the Moorish Em31

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pire in Europe: “A considerable portion [of Spain] which had never been subjected to tillage because of its aridity became suddenly metamorphosed, as if by the wand of an enchanter. . . . In districts where, according to ancient tradition, no water had ever been seen, now flowed noisy rivulets and broad canals.”  The innovative Moors used every known device to water the land: reservoirs, wells, sluices, tunnels, siphons, and aqueducts. They improved the irrigation methods of the Egyptians; from the Persians they learned the use of a wheel with rows of jars to pump water to lands higher than the irrigation ditches. In Spanish these waterwheels were called norias. Since San Antonio’s climate is similar to that of Spain, the Spaniards who settled there understood the potential of the land if water were applied via an irrigation system. San Antonio would have never have become a major community without its irrigation system to distribute the water resources; the system allowed the Spanish settlers to establish their precarious foothold in the wilderness. When the Spanish arrived on the San Antonio River to settle in 1718, their irrigation systems had been implemented and adapted for more than two hundred years to meet the harsh conditions in northern New Spain and Mexico. An integral aspect of their irrigation technology were the social and political organizations they developed to manage and conserve the precious water resources. From an engineering perspective, Spanish expertise and experience in irrigation systems created the opportunity for settlers to live together to defend themselves better from hostile attack; the distribution system of the abundant waters of the San Antonio area allowed a larger more defensible and selfsustainable village to spring up virtually overnight from 1718. In the landmark Texas case San Antonio River Authority v. G. Garrett Lewis et al. in 1962, Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert W. Calvert described concisely the typical acequia system’s basic elements: “Water was diverted from the river by a dam, built in the bed of the river, which raised the water level and permitted water to enter the ditch by gravity flow through a headgate. Water from the river was thus made available to the mission and for irrigation of lands adjacent to the ditch.”  Eventually the Spanish in San Antonio built a lasting gravity flow irrigation system of over fifty miles. The water distribution system was built by the hand labor of mission Indians, citizen-soldiers, and other settlers. Most of the construction of the system was supervised by Franciscan missionaries who have historically been understood

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to have had little or no formal training in irrigation technology; that supposition is examined in this chapter. As the missions proved often in eighteenth-century San Antonio, when water was used with diligence and hard work, crop surpluses could be generated to fill the granaries and storehouses, providing stability during the inevitable hard times. Yet even with an irrigation system that reliably delivered fresh water, other problems in farming make it a risky enterprise. Crops can fail due to rodent attacks, insect swarms, late freezes, hail storms, too much rain at the wrong times, and a myriad of other nightmares that keep farmers awake at night. Irrigation at least eliminates the risk of too little water, and water is the only weapon against aridity.

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Indian Labor Builds Mission Acequias The mission acequias that made up the bulk of the fifty-mile system in San Antonio were built mainly by the hand labor of the Indians, always under the supervision of missionary friars. Sometimes the Indians volunteered to dig the ditches, and sometimes they were forced to, but at all times they worked under guard (fig. 9). Indicative of the attitude of the friars toward Indians and their labor on acequias, on October 17, 1750, while planning a system on the San Gabriel River, Fray Mariano gave orders “to send to each mission daily ‘enough soldiers to cause respect’ and to set the Indians at work at the proper time and keep them at it . . . that the soldiers keep guard at night to prevent nocturnal flights. When buffalo should appear in sight, soldiers must go with the Indians to pursue them, to insure the return of the Indians. Finally, the soldiers must be required to instruct the Indians in their work.”  The Indians must have been confused and resentful at times. In the friars’ determination to succeed in their work, it seems they acted contrary to the lessons of love taught by their savior, Jesus Christ. Although its romanticized subjects are portrayed in stereotypical dress, the message of the drawing shown in figure 9, Indians digging the mission acequia under guard by Spanish soldiers, is sound; armed soldiers did oversee and/or guard the Indians at work on mission acequias. Soldiers guarded the Indians in the fields and at any other work or activity. The Indians were guarded for protection but also to keep them from fleeing. Even when the Indians were at church services, armed guards were on hand.

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Figure 9. Indians working on an acequia at Mission San José under the guard of soldiers as they would have looked in 1720–30. Engraving by Welcker, 1883, captioned “Indians digging irrigation ditches,” from Alexander E. Sweet and J. Armory Knox, On a Mexican Mustang through Texas, London, 1905. Private collection of the author.

The missions absolutely required Indian labor; without working Indians, the mission could not be self-sustaining. A working acequia system was labor intensive. It had to be tended to on a daily basis. Gates had to be opened and closed, and lateral ditches to the fields had to be prepared every time water was sent to them, or the water would not get to the plants. Not only did it take strength and time to prepare a field; for the irrigation system to be effective, it also took both skill to coordinate gate openings and continual modification of the water’s path once in the field. Irrigating large fields required teamwork by many hands working together so as to distribute the water evenly. It is an art to irrigate a field of any size so that all plants can enjoy the moisture without some being overwatered while others are underwatered. Due to the death of neophyte Indians from epidemic diseases, the problem of Indians fleeing back to their old homes, and a lack of willing recruits from the remaining hostile tribes once Coahuiltecan sources were exhausted,

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the missionaries were sincerely worried in 1787 that their work in San Antonio was in jeopardy. The Indians who did survive and those who remained to work at the mission were subject to punishment for any disobedience to the missionary. Instruction No. 82 in the 1787 Guidelines for a Texas Mission said: “The missionary must so conduct himself towards the Indians that all will show him respect, submission, and obedience. He must punish the disobedient, the rebellious, and the arrogant without losing his usual gentleness, affability, and prudence in governing.”  The instructions use the word “must,” and the missionaries considered punishment of wayward Indians a duty. There is little evidence in the record of extreme punishment for disobedient Indians in the San Antonio missions, perhaps due to the general prosperity of the missions

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Figure 10. San Elazario in El Paso, Texas, home of the first irrigation activity in Texas around 1680. This photo suggests the bounty of irrigation when the acequias flowed in San Antonio, where the Espada acequia still flows but no fields are under cultivation at present. Photo by author.

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and the small neophyte population. However, in larger mission systems such as those in California, grievous punishment was much more the norm.

A Detailed Description of the System The most crucial nonspiritual task the missionaries had to perform in San Antonio was to build the acequia system as soon as possible after arrival. The typical acequia was from five to seven feet wide and two to eleven feet deep. Building the system itself was back-breaking work—digging up soil, rocks, and roots with hand tools such as wooden shovels, iron pry bars, and axes. Frederick Chabot said of the Alamo Madre Acequia: “They had worked four years in bringing the water from the river to the fields. All the work had been done with bars, and the missionaries had not lacked a single day of work.”  This first section was less than two miles in length, indicating the difficulty and time-consuming nature of digging an acequia in San Antonio’s rocky soil. The ditches were never straight but meandered to avoid trees, large rocks, and hills, following the natural topography to seek the easiest way possible to flow with gravity. San Antonio’s natural topography aided the successful construction and operation of the system. The elevation at the northernmost headwater spring, San Antonio Spring, is approximately 675 feet above sea level, at San Pedro Springs approximately 650 feet, and around 525 feet at the southernmost point of the acequia systems at Mission Espada, a drop of some 150 feet occurring over a distance of approximately 6.5 miles, or 5.25 inches every 100 feet, or a gradient of .05 percent. The topography therefore provided a sufficient grade for gravity flow ditches to work properly, but the difficult muscle work still had to be done skillfully and precisely. The grades of ditches had to be carefully planned and the plan carefully adhered to so as to avoid either eroding the banks by being too steep or creating stagnant “dead” water by being too shallow. Depth at the beginning of an acequia has to be “cognizant” of depth at the end, as the water eventually had to return to the river. This was the Spanish understanding based upon the concept gained from the Romans: “Aqua currit et debet currere ut currere solebat”—“water runs and ought to run as it used to run.”  To illustrate the accuracy of the gravity flow grade the Spaniards achieved

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Figure 11. The Acequias of San Antonio, 1973. Water Resources Center, Texas Tech University. Used by permission. 37

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without modern equipment in a typical acequia, the Texas Tech University Water Resources Center in 1973 created “as-built” field drawings and sections of the acequias of San Antonio for the National Parks Service and the Department of the Interior. One of the drawings consists of a site plan of the Espada and San Juan acequias, which includes a profile of the gradient of the portion of the Espada Acequia from the Espada Dam to the aqueduct on Six-Mile (Piedras) Creek, a distance of 7,500 feet or almost 1.5 miles. Over the first 5,000 feet, or approximately 1 mile, the grade was consistently maintained at .02 percent; the grade for the remaining 2,500 feet was consistently maintained at .07 percent, allowing the ditch to reach the aqueduct’s eastern ramp perfectly. The average of the slope is .037 percent, fitting under the overall gradient in the entire system from the highest feeder spring. The accuracy of the grade is even more striking when the length of this surviving acequia is walked and one observes the many snakelike twists and turns it takes over the entire distance. A local civil engineer noted that he cannot get his contractors to attain the same accuracy in grade as described by Texas Tech engineers (fig. 11) over much shorter distances today, using modern surveying tools.

Acueductos and Presas Throughout the Spanish colonization period dams and weirs were also constructed by hand labor, using rocks, logs, and debris to lift or divert water into the headgate of the acequia. At three places along the system, acueductos were constructed to carry a ditch over other water courses. There is no finer example of Spanish colonial engineering and construction that exists in its original state than the aqueduct that still carries the water of the Espada Ditch over Six-Mile or Piedras Creek (figs. 12, 13). This aqueduct was made of stones held together by ground limestone mortar traditionally made with “the whites of thousands of eggs and much goat milk.”  Dams or presas were placed along the river to lift the water into the headgate of the acequia. These dams were weir or diversion dams; they did not stop the flow of the entire river but merely siphoned off a portion of it to direct and lift the water into the ditch. The only dam that exists today is Espada Dam, one of the few stone and mortar dams. It continues to lift water into the Espada Ditch headgate today. Other dams were made of logs and loosely

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Figure 12. Aqueduct over Six-Mile Creek, also known as Piedras Creek, 1896. U.S. Department of the Interior, Water Supply and Irrigation Papers of the United States Geological Survey No. 13. Private collection of the author.

Figure 13. Aqueduct over Piedras Creek, June 2006. The water of the Espada Ditch still flows today. Photo by author. 39

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Figure 14. Espada Dam, June 2006. The dam continues to lift water into the Espada Ditch headgate. Photo by author.

Figure 15. Plan drawing of Espada Dam and the headgate of the acequia, 1973. Water Resources Center, Texas Tech University. Used by permission. 40

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Figure 16. Headgate of the Espada Ditch, June 2006. Photo by author.

stacked rocks and had to be rebuilt each time the river rose in even a modest flood. Again, maintenance of these dams was highly labor intensive.

Friars—Trained in Irrigation? In 1741, in a written response to a claim made by the Canary Islanders to the viceroy for the use of mission Indian laborers, the president of the Querétaran missions (Concepción, Valero, San Juan, and Espada), Friar Benito Fernández, explained: “The Fathers used effective means to teach the Indians how to use the axe and clear the lands, and also how to plow and plant and irrigate the fields, how to build houses, become carpenters and tailors; and this the Fathers also achieved and with greater effort; they have taught the Indians the mysteries of our holy Faith” (emphasis added). Friar Fernández wrote the truth; the friars taught the Indians every skill necessary at the missions. His statement is consistent with the writings of the scholars, and backed up in

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the primary sources, that the friars supervised the digging of irrigation ditches for their missions. The missionaries in New Spain were trained, after 1683, at the colleges of Querétaro and Zacatecas in the heart of Mexico, near Mexico City. A close examination of the curriculum of these colleges reveals no mention of temporal or practical training such as how to build irrigation system; only spiritual and humility training are specified. However, all that the Indians knew about agriculture—which included irrigation techniques and practices, planting, and tending crops—was taught to them by the friars and the friars alone. The friars also taught them about herding cattle and other domestic animals, weaving cloth and spinning thread, producing leatherwork, operating water-driven machinery to grind corn in the mill, manufacturing ironwork, and blacksmithing. The friars were the teachers of the Indians, but if the colleges did not teach the friars the techniques, then who did and how? So far, no manuals for or references to the friars’ training have been found. The most relevant document found so far is a guidelines manual for the missionary at Concepción written in 1787, documenting to the minutest details the managerial practices whereby the missionary should conduct a mission. Some of the instructions referred to duties of the friars in irrigation: When the time for planting nears, the irrigation ditches are cleaned, stopping the water where the river enters. The missionary also will see to it that the bridges and the dam are repaired, when needed. When the irrigation ditches are cleaned, the natives will mend the gaps in the fence around the field and repair what is in poor condition. . . . While some do repair work, others are busy preparing the soil for the planting of cotton, fruit, chile, the seedlings having already been prepared. . . . He [the missionary] must also provide for irrigation in due time, and for the hoeing and weeding. However, this manual does not mention how to determine where to dig a new ditch, how to set the grade properly, or how to place and build headgates. If there was no time allotted or available at Querétaro for training in temporalities, and no mention of any of this by Espinosa, the Chronicler of

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Querétaro, then where did the friars learn the skill of irrigation? Irrigation planning and construction techniques were obviously taught from friar to friar, at least; there is no dispute that they supervised and planned the irrigation systems. It seems reasonable to assume that there were written guidelines, but none have yet been found. Spaniards and friars documented almost everything; to assume that the most critical-to-survival skill, irrigation, was simply passed orally from friar to friar ignores the Spanish obsession for written documentation. The historical record is replete with information that friars from the earliest times in Mexico practiced and supervised the construction of irrigation systems. As Robert Ricard observes in his classic The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico:

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The development of agriculture is necessarily linked to irrigation. Indeed, it would have been astonishing if the Spaniards had not kept their veneration for water which is still today so striking on the Peninsula. The perpetual fruits and greenery of Uruapan were the work of Fray Juan de San Miguel, who captured and canalized the water of the nearby streams; and in the Mixteca, a dry country of scanty rainfall, the cultivation of the prickly pear for cochineal would have been impossible without the irrigation system directed by Fray Francisco Marín. Augustinian Fray Antonio de Aguilar . . . transformed the village of Epazoyuca . . . into a healthful and pleasant town by means of an abundance of irrigation water. The area and time period of Ricard’s focus was Mexico from 1523 to 1572. Without doubt, in later years, the Royal Corps of Engineers did assist in irrigation planning and implementation in some areas of Mexico and the northern frontier, but the corps was not founded until 1711 in Spain, at least 140 years after the latest date Ricard’s book covered. In 1718, when Mission San Antonio de Valero was founded in Texas, there was a Royal Corps of Engineers member named Álvarez Barriero along with the Alarcón Expedition. One historian has assumed he planned the placement of the acequias. But he left no diary that has yet been found, and no written mention of his help in the design of the acequia system in San Anto-

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nio was made anywhere. The record consistently mentions that much of the early irrigation system in San Antonio was accomplished “under supervision of the friars.”  The irrigation projects Ricard described were accomplished between 1523 and 1572 in Mexico and clearly show the success of missionary-built irrigation systems. Their efforts to turn barren, arid land into beautiful food-producing gardens and fields parallels perfectly their prime directive, which was “to spread the Faith, first, last, and always.”  The gift of living water to barren ground in order to give it a chance to become a garden runs hand in hand with the gift of the living spirit of Christ that the Friars brought to the native population, intending to give otherwise lost souls a chance to be with Christ in Heaven. If a professional engineer did not design the earliest system in San Antonio, then how did the friars, Indians, settlers, and soldiers accomplish the most important element of successful design of a gravity flow irrigation ditch of the proper grade or slope? Little specific documentation is known that describes exactly the technique used to accomplish the proper gradient. However, there are some indications of the manner in which it could have been accomplished in various works by scholars. Wells A. Hutchins gave a description in 1928 in Southwestern Historical Quarterly: Methods of Construction—Judged by present day methods, the early settlers undoubtedly expended great labor in building their acequias. In many places, owing to the absence of steel implements, digging was done with wooden spades, shaped with knives, the dirt being removed on rawhides drawn by a yoke of oxen or suspended from poles carried by two men. Surveying instruments were generally unknown, the procedure being to estimate the fall and to turn water into the ditch at frequent intervals during construction to test the grade. Consequently the ditches were frequently winding and complicated, for cuts and fills were avoided and a ditch would be brought close to a tree and carried around it rather than cut down the tree or alter the course of the ditch to keep it straight. While some of the work was being done guns were kept close at hand owing to the menace of hostile Indians. These settlers were usually very poor, and in those cases where livestock

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was their chief means of support and required much attention they could not work on the ditches for many days at a time, with the result that many of these ditches were years in the building.

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Edwin P. Arneson, another noted irrigation scholar, considered Herbert E. Bolton’s Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century to be correct in taking Fray Mariano’s work at San Xavier on the San Gabriel River as an example of the typical methods used for construction of the ditches. Arneson stated that since Fray Mariano had lived at the San Antonio missions as president during the twenty years when most of the acequias were dug there, his instructions Bolton found for building an irrigation system at the new San Xavier mission could mirror the way a typical acequia was dug. Fray Mariano determined the location and tools needed for the new ditch at San Xavier in 1750, as Bolton says: He proceeded to order the ministers to be prepared to assist in the work on the fifteenth, each mission providing as many yokes of oxen as it might have, seven bars, fifteen picks, four axes, and one cauldron. . . . He appointed Father Ganzabal superintendent of the work, with the duty of assigning the tasks and taking care of the tools and supplies. . . . With this preface Fray Mariano asked that one soldier be charged, during the work on the ditch, with caring for the tools, and another with looking after the oxen sent to work on the ditch and to haul stone for the dam. . . . Such were the preparations for opening the irrigating ditch and building the dam. Bolton says Fray Mariano “appointed Father Ganzabal superintendent of the work,” which gives proof, at least in this case, that the friar was to be personally involved at the site of the acequia system construction in the day-to-day work, in fact directing it. Bolton’s source was a letter from Fray Mariano to the missionaries dated October 17, 1750 in Diligencias practicadas parel R. P. Presid[en]te. The tools Fray Mariano required also match Hutchins’s description of methods. Modern verification of practical means of determining the grade comes from William Fannin of Floresville, Texas. A farmer, lifelong irrigator, and retired South San Antonio commercial construction company owner, he built

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buildings all around the mission area for forty years. In answer to a question about how an irrigation ditch with the proper grade could be built using hand tools only, Fannin said it would be “easy” to make the grade correct: You would pace off the distance the first segment of the ditch would run by sight, and estimate the total drop needed to reach the segment’s endpoint. Then you divide the total drop by the number of equal segments staked along the proposed ditch as checkpoints of depth. You would have to be very conservative with the grade at the beginning and gradually cut and check grade, turning water into the ditch as you went to check flow. Since digging would be extremely difficult at dry times in the year, the water would be very useful in loosening up the soil to make digging easier and faster. Although it would be difficult, slow, and time-consuming labor, hard on men even if supported by oxen or mules, the ditches could be dug successfully by hand and people could work efficiently using the water itself as a tool to loosen the typically rock-hard soil. The skill still lies in achieving the proper grade, and as Cox states of the Spanish settlers, “perhaps the basic principles of acequia building were considered common knowledge by those born in an environment where irrigation was ubiquitous.”  It is certainly possible that irrigation expertise was common knowledge to the friars from Spain, because many of them came from areas where food production was totally dependent upon irrigation. The earliest Franciscan to appear in Mexico was Friar Martín of Valencia in 1523. Friar Antonio Margil, founder of San José mission in San Antonio and president of the Zacatecas college after spending twenty-three years at the Querétaro college, was born in Valencia in 1657. Valencia, a key city and area in Spain, had depended upon irrigation for hundreds of years before the birth of either Friar Martin or Friar Margil; both could likely have observed the water distribution methods so critical in that province, so that the knowledge came with them in the form of experience, if not by training. This idea connects with the comment by irrigation scholar Thomas F. Glick that old irrigation practices “migrated from Spain to America in the minds of men and not in law treatises, as many students of water law appeared to believe.”  As already indicated, none of

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the known descriptions of the daily curriculum at the missionary colleges mentions any formal irrigation training. As Mardith Schuetz wrote in 1983, “studies in the missionary colleges were directed toward the inward spiritual development of the ministers, preaching and learning Indian languages, the better to reach those whom they had chosen to serve.”  The best indication that the friars had detailed knowledge of irrigation is found by examining closely the instructions given by Friar Francisco Mariano de los Dolores y Viana, known as Friar Mariano, in planning the system for the new San Xavier missions in 1745. Friar Mariano was stationed in San Antonio at Mission Valero starting in 1733, and since he served there for seventeen years, he witnessed the construction of much of the elaborate and extensive irrigation systems built by the missionaries, Indians, settlers, and soldiers on the San Antonio River. When he became president of the Querétaran missions in October, 1750, he had been in the process for several years of obtaining the approval of Missions San Francisco Xavier de Horcasitas, Nuestra Señora de la Candelaris, and San Ildefenso close to present-day Rockdale, Texas, on the San Gabriel River. He chose the location to build a dam and irrigation system on the river. As we have seen, he gave instructions to the very last detail on the techniques and tools each mission was to use for work on the system—down to numbers of oxen, pry bars, picks, and axes—and appointed Father Ganzabal as superintendent of the work.  A construction superintendent is ultimately the responsible party in the field in all construction jobs, with a more important role than that of an overseer. Friar Mariano ordered extra food to be gathered for the Indians who would dig the ditches and build the dam. As also mentioned, he asked the commander of the new presidio to provide soldiers to watch over the tools and oxen sent for the work; in addition he asked for a soldier to keep the Indian horses under guard, to be sure the Indians would not flee, and for enough other soldiers to command respect and keep the Indians at work. Thus the historical record clearly shows Friar Mariano to have had the technical expertise and skill to know how to determine the site of the mission fields, how to dam up river and creek, how to dig the irrigation ditches and build the associated flow gates required—no easy task, considering that the system at San Xavier watered hundreds of acres of crops and provided distribution of water for general use by settlers over many miles of rolling and difficult terrain. The achievement of the correct depth for a ditch covering several miles

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of varying ground required a skillful supervisor. The work on the frontier of Spanish America at this time was still done without the benefit of any professional surveying tool, such as a transit. Since the record is firm that the friars instructed the Indians on irrigation techniques, no doubt they were well trained by someone, somewhere. Perhaps someday a manual that the friars used to pass on the critical skill of irrigation will yet be found. Countering the likelihood that a manual teaching irrigation practices might have existed is a document that comes close to suggesting the opposite. In 1788 Friar José Rafael Oliva, president of the Texas missions at the time, wrote several long papers giving his opinion about the work the friars had to do to manage the missions, tasks commonly referred to as “temporalities.” He may have sent his opinions to Governor Pacheco. In his views may be found further proof that there was no formal training of the missionaries in any kind of nonspiritual realm, including irrigation. From twenty fathers there could be found only one who has the ability in managing temporalities, and if in the past there was anyone capable, it was for the reason perhaps that two missionaries were in each mission. One gave all his time to manage affairs, learning by experience and effort what he perhaps [did] not know. . . . It seems this is not good because the managing of temporalities was not studied from books, nor was it taught in the friary [missionary colleges], nor could it be learned without making many mistakes and running into difficulties. While this document does not refer specifically to irrigation and was written after all the mission acequias had been in operation for decades, it does point out that in Friar Oliva’s life, he was unaware of any written temporalities manuals that might have included irrigation construction and maintenance techniques. How this knowledge was conveyed is an intriguing question and should be further studied.

The First Municipal Water System The acequia system of San Antonio was more than just an irrigation system for agricultural use. The system distributed water for all uses by all the settlers, including personal consumption and other household use. It can therefore be

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said to have been the first municipal water system in the United States. Villa San Fernando de Béjar was formed as a municipality by authority of the viceroy in 1731, and the construction, operation, and management of the acequia system was foremost among the duties the municipal government owed the settlers. The American Public Works Association defines public works as “works developed by and for the benefit of people. Designed to protect and enhance the human environment, they represent investments in the future for the people who create them and for succeeding generations. . . . Government institutions, land, capital, labor, and public support are prerequisites for the development of virtually all public works facilities.”  The acequias of San Antonio meet this definition well; they were truly public works. The earliest public water system in the United States was in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and it consisted of a pump forcing spring water through bored hemlock logs into a wooden reservoir that provided the town with water. But this was not until 1754, more than thirty years after the settlers of the original Villa de Béjar completed their acequia from San Pedro Springs. The city of Boston saw no need for a publicly owned municipal water system until fire fighting in the city was clearly hampered by private water well companies and people fighting fires with bucket lines. When this makeshift system had resulted in the recent loss of fifty houses and stores, the city passed a resolution in 1825 to establish a public water system. Other cities found disease epidemics coming from contaminated public water wells or reservoirs but generally did not begin public systems until the nineteenth century. San Antonio’s water was “living” water, coming from pure springs renewing themselves continually, giving citizens better water than was to be had in most other places. The settlers of San Antonio enjoyed fresh, pure water without diseases such as cholera until the population grew to the point where people used the acequias as conduits to wash away refuse. One acequia was still flowing at the time of writing in the fall of 2007: the Espada Acequia, known today as Espada Ditch. The headgate of the Espada Ditch remains open at Espada Dam, and the water continues to run in the ditch system all the way past Mission Espada today, eventually reentering the San Antonio River farther south. A decade short of three hundred years of working service to the public is all the proof needed that San Antonio’s acequia system has been effective and is a national treasure. Since more than three quarters of the system was built under the sole direction of missionary friars, the friars were either very lucky or very well trained.

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6 DERECHO INDIANO—L AW WITH JUSTICE

The cornerstone of Spain’s colonial regime was a legal system rooted in medieval European tradition and modified by New World circumstances that provided the basis for the political and social ordering of the Indies . . . many in the eighteenth-century Hispanic world held dear the traditional notion that, above all else, the prime function of the monarchy was to dispense justice. charles r. cutter, The Legal Culture of Northern New Spain

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he combination of the fresh, living water and the wise Spanish concept of derecho, “right” or “justice,” formed the basic underpinnings of the new community in San Antonio. Derecho has no exact equivalent word in English; “justice” comes closest. The legal system of Spain that was applicable to its colonies was designed to be flexible to fit local needs, and therefore when adapted and modified it is referred to as derecho vulgar, and is a “legitimate expression of local self-government.”  Justice was considered in court first, not law. According to Charles Cutter, “one rarely argued that the ley, law, was on his or her side; instead a litigant approached the court seeking one’s justice or “su derecho.” Justice was found by the written law, local custom, and equidad, or a locally defined sense of fairness. Cutter writes: “Local usage and long-standing practice also carried the weight of authority under the Hispanic system.”  Today’s concept of estoppel in the laws of the United States is similar; estoppel is the legal theory that no matter what written terms outline conduct between parties in a contract, if the parties act contrary to 50

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the written conduct for a long period of time, the actual behavior between the parties overrules the written document; long-standing practice became the law. As Cutter goes on to say, “This respect for local particularism, even when contra legem, contrary to the law, has been perhaps the most overlooked dimension of the Spanish colonial legal system.”  The Laws of the Indies from inception said all the water in the New World was for everyone’s use, which also protected the native people’s rights. The Spanish concept of derecho vulgar allowed local regulations to be developed to meet local customs and to match the unique needs of a local population. From the arrival of the earliest settlers, rulings about water sharing in the new settlement were based on the admirable Spanish concept that water was to be used in common by everyone in the community. This idea is an example of the overall fairness in the legal and administrative system of the Spanish, for which they are rarely given due credit. Mutual dependence upon shared water forged a sense of community in the people; the methods they practiced in sharing this water formed one of the most basic principles in Texas community water law as we know it today; water is to be protected for community use and benefit and is to be shared fairly by all. From a legal perspective, Spanish ideas that water was a common resource to be used by everyone and administered with justice for everyone constituted an ethical cornerstone for development of the community in San Antonio. These just ideas, established almost three hundred years ago, live today in much of the water law in Texas. As Andrés Tijerina has said, “The public nature of water ownership is probably the most pervasive of the Hispanic traditions in Texas water law.”  The Spanish understood from hundreds of years of Iberian experience that “irrigation implies not only a sedentary existence but subjection to more stringent measures of social control.”  The managerial expertise and legal ideas of sharing, which had been learned and practiced for centuries in Iberian Spain and throughout the New World and which were put in place for public water distribution in San Antonio, were a prelude to the establishment of community life. However, competition for water was present from earliest settlement, and long-term settlement over the entire river basin was successful only because Spanish laws and concepts forced the competing groups of inhabitants to

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share the water and conserve it. These legal and fairness concepts and the management practices that stemmed from them resulted in the first water conservation program in Texas. The acequias built in San Antonio to distribute the water became the focal point, practice field, and classroom for diverse people with competing interests to learn how to live with one another in community. The Texas court system continues to recognize many elements of basic Spanish water law as key legal precedents that were adapted under a flexible system of Spanish laws to fit the needs of the early San Antonio community. The unique localized system of fair and equitable water distribution that was developed in the eighteenth century is an important example of the strong and lasting influence Spanish colonization had on Texas life and culture. The first decree involving water in the new community was issued by Viceroy Casafuerte, and it outlined the fairness doctrine under which the Spanish operated for the entire time they held San Antonio, one that echoes today in Texas law. The friars, like every other group of Spanish settlers, wanted to control as much precious water as they could to sustain the missions and their Indian neophytes so as to convert the Indians to Christ, which was their overriding duty. Shortly after the arrival on March 9, 1731, of the fifteen families of Canary Islanders or Isleños who were the first settlers sent officially from European Spain to San Antonio, Gabriel de Vergara of Mission Concepción wrote to the viceroy, Marques de Casafuerte. He wrote as spokesman for the five missions—at three of which the missionaries had arrived only four days before the Isleños—that there was simply not enough water for everyone’s use and the missions would suffer greatly. On December 25, 1731, Casafuerte responded to Fray Vergara. The response is worth recording in full because it proves that Spanish laws and the concept of derecho about water being shared and used in common by all settlers were implemented from the very first time a dispute arose in the new settlement. This letter set the legal precedent upon which the fair administration of water would be built for Spanish colonial times in San Antonio. The viceroy wrote to Fray Vergara: I am having in mind Your Reverence’s letter and the writing presented before by Don Juan Antonio Pérez de Almazán, captain of the presidio of San Antonio in the province of Texas, which relate

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to the resistance and the opposition introduced against the sharing of the waters of the Arroyo and the San Antonio River with the families of the Canary Islands who by order of His Majesty have gone to settle [there]. The reasons for this action were set forth by Your Reverence, the principal being that the supply of water scarcely meets the needs of the five missions in making their lands productive. In view of [this] I must say to Your Reverence that at this time I am sending a dispatch to the said Captain in order that in conformity with its provisions, he shall divide and distribute the water, giving both the missions and the Islander families a share of it; for although it might seem that the legal provisions stated by Your Reverence should be understood and applied solely in favor of the missions, [it] would be of no profit if the cause were lacking around which the difficulty centers, namely that of the water. Moreover, there is a royal law more decisive than all and applicable to the case. Therefore, since the [water] is sufficient for the use and benefit of all, it is just that its usefulness should be in common, especially when prudent management of its benefits will obviate the injury which Your Reverence points out. By rotating the apportionment, every interested party being assigned his days, the cause and the dispute shall cease without my giving consideration to the privileges the reductions [mission Indians] should enjoy, since they are not harmed by this measure. It would be a lamentable thing, that after His Majesty has spent a vast sum from His Royal Hacienda in bringing these families here from the Canaries, they should be abandoned and should be left without water which would be the same as having brought them to perish; besides the King appointed them to settle that place. Thus, harmony and agreement can overcome any difficulty that may be regarded as serious, and when the use of the water has been arranged, as ordered in this dispatch, there will be cooperation and conservation; and Your Reverence and your missions will not fail to experience many advantageous results from the proximity of the settlement. I am confidently expecting all to take the most orderly steps that may take advantage of the water at the proper

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time and in the proper manner, the families not being excluded. That God may guard Your Reverence many years is my desire. (Emphasis added)

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This early letter, which had the effect of a decree, follows the ancient concept in Spanish law that water is to be divided and shared among everyone fairly or with justice, derecho. Casafuerte declared there was a royal law more decisive than the provisions set out in the document the friar quoted to back up his claim for the missions, declaring that the water was sufficient for the use of all and that it was just (derecho) that its usefulness should be in common. He suggested that rotating the apportionment of water by assigned days would mean the dispute would cease and the Indians (reductions) would not be harmed. As mentioned earlier, the diaries of Franciscan visitors to the area in 1709 and 1716 had declared there was ample water for a city. Casafuerte said it would be a shame once the king has spent so much money to send the islanders to San Antonio if they were left without water to perish, hinting that it would anger the king and that leaving them without water to die would not be a Catholic thing to do. His coup de grace and most diverting comment is: “Besides, the King appointed them to settle that place.” He carefully supports his ruling such that there can be no doubt he is correct and undeniably just. Casafuerte, a Spaniard with respect for water bred into his bone, made it clear to the friar that: 1. 2. 3. 4.

The water was to be divided and distributed and shared. The water was sufficient for all. The water’s use was to be in common. Use of the water should be rotated via assignment of days to the interested parties. 5. There would be cooperation and conservation of the water. In this decree Casafuerte, whom Carlos Castañeda described as “one of the most able and energetic colonial officials that ever came to Mexico,” summarized the way in which the acequia system would be managed in San Antonio from then on. His ruling on rotation and assignment of days for use of the water and on cooperation with conservation survived into the twentieth cen-

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tury until the last ditch authority, the Espada Ditch Company, disbanded. His ruling delivered the justice and fairness indicative of the Spanish colonial legal system.

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Roots of San Antonio’s Spanish Water Law Another rarely recognized attribute of the Spanish kings was that they were recognized as ruling for the benefit and justice of their people. Lorenzo Guardiola y Saez wrote in 1785: “The true occupation of the king is to do justice in his kingdom.” The king’s main duty was to ensure justice and fairness for all his subjects, not only among themselves but also when dealing with the all-powerful sovereign crown. The laws of Spain stem from codes, regional laws, decrees of the king, and decisions of the Supreme Court of Spain. A royal order of the king is supreme law that supersedes and repeals all preceding laws inconsistent with it. The decrees of the king were codified and, as a new code repealed only a portion of an earlier code, it was important to search former codes as well as recent ones. Las Siete Partidas was first published in 1263 and became the recognized law of Iberian Spain after 1348. Water was addressed in Titles 28, 29, 31, and 32, Part 3. These stated that the waters of navigable streams for stated purposes may be used by all persons in common. Among those uses were navigation, mooring of boats, making repairs on ships or sails, landing merchandise, and fishing and drying nets. As to irrigation, Title 31 stated that there were restrictions upon mills and canals, “because it would not be wise that the benefit of all men be hindered by the interest of some individuals.” Title 28 stated that while common use of waters from navigable streams for stated purposes was the rule, springs and wells on a man’s premises were not for common use. Notice that in all these rules, only “use” of the water was consistently discussed, never ownership. The ownership of the water remained with the crown. Land transfer started by an initial grant from the king. Even if the land granted was “riparian” or adjacent to flowing water, the grantee did not have an automatic right to take irrigation water from the stream or river unless the king explicitly granted that right. This key concept is the basis of Texas surface water law as it pertains to streams and rivers today, yet it remains a source of confusion among the general public.

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Because of this requirement that use of water in a stream had to be granted by the king in each individual case, another important basic concept arose. Rights to water in times of scarcity were based upon the timing of grants: first in time granted, first in access. Later grants to water in the same stream were subservient to earlier grants. If water became scarce due to drought, upstream users had to be sure downstream users with prior or older grants were satisfied before taking their water. The idea of a turn to take water being based upon age of the grant still rules in Texas law, albeit encompassed in controversy and confusion through scores of lawsuits during more than a century after the confirming legislation of 1889.

Foundations of Spanish Authority In 1493 a papal bull decreed a line of demarcation establishing Spain’s absolute monopoly over the Indies, or New World. The lands in the Indies were the private property of the king of Spain, his royal patrimony. Colonial administration was the king’s exclusive prerogative and his will was law. Imagine the nightmare of administration by such a small country of such a huge claim in the New World; authority had to be delegated, with flexibility given to the viceroys and governors in the colonies to act on their own judgment. If every decision were sent to Spain for approval, the time required to get messages there and back would have prohibited any timely action in the field. In 1520, a mere twenty-eight years after discovery of the Indies, the king created the Council of the Indies to try to cope with the myriad of challenges in his colonies. Council of the Indies decrees governed New Spain, and the king transferred to the council “supreme jurisdiction over the Indies”; his will for the colonies was expressed through the council exclusively. Laws “poured” out from the Council in “profusion,” and finally, in 1680, all the decrees were codified into the Recopilación de las Leyes de las Indies. The decree that promulgated this compilation is important to note as it confirms the overall concept of justice in the Spanish world. It stated that “the laws contained in this book are given for good government and administration of justice by our Council of the Indies” (emphasis added). As subsequent orders from the Recopilación were made by the Council of the Indies, they were again controlling expressions of the absolute sovereign’s will. The intentions of the king being expressed through the Council of the

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Indies via the Recopilación were further expressed in individual grants of water rights and land. The Recopilación made it clear that the king intended the waters from rivers to be for the common use of all unless or until there was a title from the king via a royal grant. Don Felipe II in 1563 and Don Felipe IV in 1631 established a system of water judges for the colonies, similar to the ancient water judges of Spain. Water was to be apportioned “according to need,” and colonial officials were authorized to make grants in the king’s name, not merely of lands but also of lands and waters. The wording of the establishment of the judges in New Spain further shows the justice in the Spanish system and the concept of flexibility and faith in local administration to fit the unique need of any locality in the New World. It is a rare trait of kings to give away their absolute power to local administrations, and in this concept, Spanish kings showed their wisdom and pragmatism:

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We decree that the assembled audiencias name judges, unless a contrary custom shall exist, as nominated by the Viceroy or President City or Corporate Town who shall apportion waters to the Indians for irrigation of their farms, orchards, and seed beds, and to water their cattle. They are to be such as shall offend no one and shall apportion waters according to need. . . . We order the Viceroys to inform themselves as to the lands which there may be that are irrigable; and that they order the cattle to be taken therefrom, and that said lands be sown in wheat; unless the owners have titles to maintain this type of farm. This specific decree requiring cattle to be removed from crop lands was often used in San Antonio in the eighteenth century because one of the main kinds of disputes between settlers involved damage to farm land and crops by roaming cattle. Land classification was required to meet the duty of “according to need.” Land was classified into three categories. The first and most valuable was irrigable land or land with the “facilities of irrigation.” The second category was arable lands, or lands suitable for dry-land farming dependent upon rainfall for moisture; these had lesser value. The third category was agostadero or pasture lands. These were regarded as suited primarily for use as pasture for some type of livestock and were the least valuable lands. The special order already

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quoted that was sent to the viceroy to remove cattle from irrigable lands, as such areas were the most valuable to the community, is an example of the importance of these land classifications. In normal progression, the quantity of the land granted and its price depended upon the classification. Irrigable land cost more and was granted in lesser quantities than nonirrigable land or pasture land. This continues today in land market valuation in Texas as “water renders land its value,” especially in farm and ranch transactions. Law 9, Title 5, Book 4 of the Recopilación mentions taking turns to get water: “Each one shall be given the water he should have, alternating from one to another.” The idea of a turn or dula to use water gets its legality from this provision. The concept of a turn is in itself just and, coupled with the basic concept that “water runs and ought to run as it used to run,” helped ensure that everyone had a chance to share the water, especially when rainfall was scarce and the flow of springs and river was weak. During weak flow periods, the mayordomo (administrator) was responsible for reporting to the cabildo (town council) that it was time to place conservation limits on users. In 1761 the viceroy of New Spain authorized the publication of Reglamento General de la Medidas de Aguas, a commentary on water written by Lasso de la Vega. Key phrases of his commentary clarify further the rights the people have to personal and domestic use of water and underscore that using public water for irrigation requires a specific grant from the king: It needs to be said, for the right interpretation of this subject that all the waters of public rivers being, as they are, of public and common use, they are not so with reference to personal and domestic use, which is in accordance with the general freedom with which one can take the water he wants to succor his domestic needs. . . . It is a legitimate conclusion that no one without permission of the Prince can conduct public waters to his lands for irrigation, especially in New Spain, where, let it be known, His Majesty has conceded very ample powers to the most excellent and high Viceroys and Presidents of the Audiencia Real of this New Spain, so that in the aforementioned terms they may issue grants of lands and waters, as things appertaining to His Royal Crown, and for which today there is a special Court.

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The various grants made during the colonial period were:

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1. Grants of lands and waters, in which waters were not designated except in vague and general terms, such as “waters contained in these lands.” 2. Grants of lands and waters, in which waters were designated in less vague terms, such as “waters necessary to irrigate the lands granted.” 3. Grants of land without water, with later amendments that included the waters. 4. Grants of water and lands, or of waters alone, to sugar plantations, factories, metal mills, grain mills, etc. 5. Grants of water for the supply of towns. 6. Grants of water exclusively for irrigation. The primary title to land or water in Spanish colonial Texas was always the grant by the king or his authorized representatives. If the grant did not mention waters, a right to the water was never considered to exist solely by reason of proximity; hence location of streams did not give owners of riparian lands any right to the water. These most fundamental concepts live on in Texas law and are stringently enforced by the courts. Keep in mind that if one was granted flowing waters, the grant was only a usufruct right or right to use, never ownership. Again, this key concept is enforced in Texas water law today. The preference in the use of water for certain landholders over others originated not in the location of the tracts of land relative to water courses—low or high, near or far—but in the antiquity of the grant. The older grantees had first access to the water in times of scarcity, no matter what their location on the river or stream. Waters that were not granted remained in the ownership of the crown. In San Antonio in the eighteenth century, the Canary Islanders and the missions received their irrigation rights by express grants. Irrigation grants were made to persons who were granted land adjacent to the San Antonio River or San Pedro Creek or both, and other grants for irrigation were made to persons not adjacent to any water course. Land grants, riparian to both streams, were made “sin agua” (without water); water rights were sold and exchanged without regard to riparian status; water grants were made apart

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from lands; waters were mortgaged apart from land; and in case of dispute, the quarrel was determined by the title one could exhibit. Spanish colonial laws were also recognized by the Republic of Mexico in the 1824 Constitution and the Constitution of Coahuila and Texas in 1827, in the Constitution of the Republic of Texas, and by the State of Texas. The Texas courts have modified the early Spanish laws and the legislature has made changes that impacted them, but in general the courts to this day honor Spanish land grants and many portions of the Spanish water laws. Texas judges, including justices of the Texas Supreme Court, still use historical reviews of Spanish water law as a basis for their rulings in many court cases involving water disputes.

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rom its beginning, San Antonio’s human-water interface determined relationships between groups, the work people did, spatial boundaries of groups of people, and the shape of individual land grants. An integral part of the acequia system was the development of social and political organizations to manage and conserve the precious water resource. Donald Worster described the history of most of the American West as “one of people encountering difficult environments, of driving to overcome them through technological means, of creating the social organization to do so, of leading on and on to indigenous bureaucracy and corporatism.”  Most of Worster’s West in 1718 was claimed by Spain. Spanish settlers overcame the unpredictable climate in San Antonio through irrigation technology and brought with them the social organization to support a growing system. In 1731 the first municipality in San Antonio was formed, Villa San Fernando de Béjar. The first official government of the villa was appointed by Captain Juan Antonio de Almazán on July 20, 1731; the resulting cabildo, or town council, met on August 1, 1731. The rules and regulations developed locally, originating in the cabildo of the Villa San Fernando, which managed the shared use of the waters. Even though many land grants made to settlers had water rights, the ownership of the flowing water remained in the name of the crown.

Early Water Grants In the decree of December 1731, Viceroy Casafuerte did not grant ownership to the water to anyone, only the right to use the water. These rights are defined, as mentioned earlier, as usufruct rights. Use of the water was quickly divided into discrete segments of time that an individual’s headgate could 61

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be opened to let water from the acequia into that person’s field or lateral ditch. Division of access to the ditch required intense voluntary cooperation among the users; upstream irrigators had to be conscious of downstream irrigators, and all had to participate in overall maintenance of the canals. This consciousness is normal under reasonable times, but in times of scarcity, the older grants under Spanish law had first access, no matter what their location on the river or stream. Fortunately in early San Antonio, the abundant water meant periods of scarcity were limited, keeping conflicts among users relatively low. Viceroy Casafuerte’s declaration that water’s “usefulness should be in common” and his requirement of practicing turns or dulas to the water established the foundation for the eventual purchase and sale of the individual water rights in San Antonio. With this edict, he started water in San Antonio on the way to becoming a commodity to be bought and sold. It was not surprising the Canary Islanders who controlled Villa San Fernando de Béjar’s cabildo would allow individual rights to water to be bought and sold, since this had been the local practice in their home islands for many years after conquest by Spain in the 1490s. The king had issued a cedula or documentary order on February 14, 1729, that specifically mentioned the need for and his desire for a civil community to be established in the vicinity of the Presidio of San Antonio. Viceroy Casafuerte listened to the counsel of Oliván Robolledo, auditor de guerra, who recommended that the Isleño men be given the title of hijo dalgo and that they be allowed to establish a new town near the presidio and to create the first cabildo. On March 15, 1731, Captain Almazán gathered the heads of the Isleño families after they agreed to his apportionment of lands and waters among them without waiting for official individual possession, and he roughly distributed the land north and south of the presidio; Almazán wanted them to prepare the fields for planting immediately. Portions of this land had been cleared by the first settlers and soldiers starting in 1718, and they had also dug the acequia. Nonetheless, Almazán dispossessed the “first” settlers and soldiers of their lands, seemingly without regard to the years of work they had put into the land, and gave these lands to the Isleños. However, under Spanish law these lands had not been officially granted to these first settlers and soldiers, and the lands had thus never been officially “possessed.” This act

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of “dispossession” by Captain Alamazán was by no means the fault of the Isleños; nor was it strictly the fault of the captain himself. He was following the orders of Viceroy Casafuerte regarding the Isleños, which in turn fulfilled the orders of the crown to establish adjacent to the presidio the civil community led by the Isleños. The dispossession troubled Friar Fernández, president of the Querétaran missions. In his response to a later claim of the Isleños, he said of the dispossession:

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The statement that the families of the Canary Islanders are the first settlers of Villa San Fernando is not true, since (and it is a fact) the villa is joined to the Presidio of San Antonio and was settled fourteen years before by settlers and citizens who lived on plots of ground in the houses they built, with crops they planted, and the irrigation ditches they dug (these the [Canary Island] families now possess). . . . The land was fertilized already and a great supply of running water was ready to be drawn. This work had been done previously by the soldiers and settlers. During the time the Islanders were building their homes, they lived with the citizens and soldiers. This comment by Friar Fernández was no doubt included in a response to a claim against his missions by the Isleños, but it is no less true. Clearing land, digging ditches, and planting crops had been hard work, and the handful of earliest settlers must have been frustrated and disappointed, but the viceroy’s orders were for the Isleños to be granted land with water from the river and the creek. This action by the captain along with his appointment of some of the Isleños to lifelong positions of authority in the new cabildo indicated the political power of the Isleños in the settlement as conferred upon them by the viceroy. Their grip on the community continued throughout the eighteenth century. Formal distribution was carried out in July 1731, and exclusive ownership of land and water rights was granted to the Isleños. At this time Almazán publicly declared 20 percent of all lands in this distribution belonged to the Villa de San Fernando as propios to rent or sell to support the villa. Villa de San Fernando through its cabildo was granted its rights or aguas de propios to

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20 percent of the water in San Pedro Creek, of which it formally took possession on October 27, 1733. The cabildo within a short time rented its rights to turns to the water in its acequia to individuals, thereby generating revenue for the villa, a typical practice in Spanish villages in the New World as well as in the Canary Islands for many years. The division of access to water in the ditches required supervision by some authority, and in the early days of San Fernando it fell to the mayordomo de los bienes y propios de la republica. The water distribution system became a social organization, and its managers projected the power of the controlling group of the cabildo in the community. Throughout the eighteenth century the Canary Islanders held on tenaciously to their power in the villa through their control of the water in the San Pedro and the upper San Antonio River. The first mayordomo of San Antonio was an eighteen-year-old Canary Islander named Antonio Rodríguez Mederos, whose responsibilities included management of public funds and the general supervision of public works within the town, works which for many years consisted primarily of the acequias. He was authorized to police the use of the town acequia and perform inspections of the entire irrigation system. Since the local authority marketed its own water rights, there was no way to keep other citizens from trading or renting theirs, which led quickly to the severance of those water rights from the land to which they had originally been adscripted. The time allotments or dulas to the water were also sold or rented elsewhere throughout the Mexican north. Michael C. Meyer said: “Just as with any other commodity, the price of water was dictated by what the market would bear.”  A typical example of a sale of land and detailed water rights occurred on September 15, 1747. Antonio Rodríguez Mederos, the original mayordomo of San Fernando, sold two suertes of land to Miguel de Castro and one day of water every twenty days. An example of a sale of water rights without the land was a sale by Antonia Armas to Francisco Amangual and José Antonio Bustillos. Armas was owner of three hours of water and corresponding land and sold the three hours to Amangual and the land to Bustillos. Several examples of similar transactions survive in the Bexar Archives, indicative that it was a common practice then and formed the foundation for similar transactions in Texas today.

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Land and Water Transactions

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The Spanish granted lands from time to time to civilian settlers, soldiers of the presidio, and others who made formal application, also granting specific rights to use the acequia water, as land transfer documents in the Bexar archives show. In yet another example of fair play for all in the Spanish colonization system, these lands were at first distributed by way of a lottery drawing, and a drawn lot was referred to as a suerte (chance or luck). The way a lottery was held for land can be demonstrated by the way in which the Isleños’ land drawing was held. One lot or suerte was to be allotted for each of sixteen families; therefore sixteen tickets were numbered, and each family’s representative drew one to determine the exact location of their lot. An early example of a subsequent sale involved Joseph Padrón and his wife selling to Geronimo Flores on March 22, 1738, “two suertes or portions of irrigable land . . . and the water from San Pedro Creek to which we are entitled.”  Similarly Angel Navarro on June 8, 1789, acting for himself and his brother and sister, sold to José Salvador Díaz two suertes with four and a half hours of water rights for ten pesos in cash, one horse, stone for a house, and a pair of handmade spurs. Note that by 1789, water was being apportioned to the hour and even half hour, proving the extent of its value to the landowners. At times, transactions were trades of the water rights themselves, without any land attached, as in the case of the trade on March 23, 1782, between Juan Joseph Montes de Oca and Juachin Flores de Sandeja, whereby Montes traded straight up his twenty-three-hour water right to Flores for a sixteen-hour water right. As time went on the transactions became more complicated, such as the July 11, 1802, sale from “Bueno” to “Valle” of half a suerte and four hours of water plus three quarters of another suerte for one hundred pesos. Water rights were described in the land deeds and could be traded or sold separately. The purchase and sale of water rights, without title to the land above or adjacent to it, is done regularly today in Texas as a matter of course, and this concept comes from these kinds of Spanish precedents. The tracts of land were surveyed and staked out in long narrow rectangles or porciones, with the short side along the water course, so that more people could access the water. This, of course, aided colonization: the more access

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to water, the more settlers, hence the better collective defense against hostile Indians, such as the Apaches who raided the community from 1718 until the mid-1740s, followed later by the Comanches, who continued to raid the community and its surrounds throughout the century. Original grants of lots from the king were drawn by lottery so as to be fair to all, yet another example of the justice or derecho in the Spanish system. When the missions were secularized in the late eighteenth century, or turned over to the Diocesan clergy, their labores or farm lands were turned over the Indians and other settlers via the same fair lottery. Some historians have speculated that the reason most of the lots did not end up in the hands of the Indians was that the Indians had no interest in the lands, being more inclined to “return to the wild,” which is an unfair assessment. People in most native cultures were not attuned to individual ownership of specific tracts of earth,

Figure 17. The Lower Mission Irrigation System, 1896. U.S. Department of the Interior, Water Supply and Irrigation Papers of the United States Geological Survey No. 13. Private collection of the author.

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since all people walk on it, just as modern Texans would be confused if offered a piece of paper entitling us to ownership of delineated “lots” of air. Figure 17 is an example, from an 1896 map, of the post-secularization shape of the lots of the lower acequia system and also shows the acequias from Concepción to Espada. Notice the long narrow plots of land, which allowed access to the acequias by a maximum of landowners. Along Villamain Road even today, between the overpass of Loop 410 and Mission San Juan, several tracts are still noticeably in their elongated eighteenth-century configuration. The size of these lots when staked and granted was approximately 14 acres, or 200 varas by 400 varas. Their size today is approximately 11 acres, having lost 3 acres to the widening of the river channel in 1958, Villamain Road and its right-of-way, and the railroad and its right-of-way. Prior to that time, the land depicted was divided into four labores: the Labores de Concepción, Labores de San Juan Capistrano, Labores de San José, and Labores de Espada. The figure depicts only a portion of the system, but all over the entire system the lots with acequia access were similar in shape.

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A Typical Sale of an Express Grant The sale on March 22, 1738, of an original grant of land and water by Joseph Padrón and his wife María Sanavia to Geronimo Flores is typical of the manner in which property transactions were completed under Spanish law. The property description is “two suertes or portions of irrigable land” (emphasis added), clearly establishing the classification of the land as irrigable. Following immediately, the amount of the land is said to be “the amount in varas registered in the record of the partition of lands located within the pasture grounds formed by the San Antonio River and San Pedro Creek, which were given to us as settlers, and the water from said San Pedro Creek to which we are entitled.” The continued description of the land and water in the deed located the suertes or lots and detailed the source of the water right they were granted. Next the deed further located the four neighboring sides: San Pedro Creek, the San Antonio River, the land of Joseph Cavrera, and the land owned by Don Juan Leal Goras. “These lands and water are free from ground rent, entail, right of primogeniture, debenture, mortgage” (emphasis added). It is undeniable when reading this deed that the sellers owned the land and water

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right and were selling both to Geronimo Flores. The deed was witnessed by four settlers and notarized by one of them prior to being filed of record. The express grant of the land and water rights were sold. The land could have been sold separately and the water rights could have been sold separately, but Joseph Padrón and his wife chose to sell both.

Extra Protection for the Wife This deed contained another rarely recognized unique aspect of Spanish law illustrating both fairness and a concern for the rights of married women. In the first sentence of the deed, Joseph Padrón, “with the express permission of my wife, María Sanvia and with her consent, which I requested of my said wife, first and foremost . . . grant this contract and the contents thereof with her.” Spanish law required the husband to guarantee “express permission” of the wife, “with her consent” requested “first and foremost,” and the property sold was granted “with her,” which are all statements of respect for and protection of the rights of the wife. Later in the same deed, and typical of most transactions involving husband and wife in joint ownership sales, the wife had to make several more affirmative statements. She waived her protections under four separate laws, and then warranted (1) that she had been informed by the present notary of her rights under the four laws, (2) that the laws were repeated to her, (3) that the notary explained the laws to her, (4) that she understood them, and (5) that she renounced the laws “and all the others that may be in my favor and defense.” After those statements, she, and she alone, swore in the name of “Our Lord God and by the sign of the Holy Cross” that she would not make any further claims for the property after signing the deed. But she was not yet finished making representations. Next she agreed that “I shall not say or allege that I was influenced, much less, intimidated by my said husband in order to make this contract, for, I avow that I do make and grant it gladly of my own free will.” It appears from the wording in this deed and others similar that Spanish law was protective, even overprotective of the wife’s rights in a real estate transaction, indicating that the wife’s position was recognized and honored in Spanish society. However, a different question arises. Was this required wording really a commendable ahead-of-its-time Spanish reverence for women’s rights? Or was it an indication of an opposite motive in the law? Did the

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Spanish consider the wife to be fickle and incapable of honoring her decision to sell her property? Perhaps it was both protection and worry about challenges from wives. Nonetheless, in a male-dominated society, at least in the sale of real estate held by husband and wife, the wife’s rights were given more protection than the husband’s. A similar practice still occasionally occurs in real estate transactions in Texas when a husband and wife purchase or sell property, and it was the required practice of title closing officers in every transaction of this type until the last decade. After both had signed the documents, the title closing officer separated the husband and wife and asked this question of each: “Did you sign these documents for the purposes and consideration herein stated without being under duress?” If the wife responded that she signed the documents “under duress,” the title officers of old would not commit to their company to issuing the final title insurance policy, as they felt the “under duress” statement of the wife in this example risked clouding the title. This modern procedure in Texas real estate transactions involving title insurance is likely rooted in Spanish colonial law and real estate transfer practices.

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Work in the Settlement Throughout the eighteenth century the only cash market for the crops and goods of the missions and the area farmers and herders had been the local presidio. Certainly there were several merchants who traded goods with the routine mule trains from Mexico, but most of the people in San Antonio at the time were subsistence farmers, and there was little money in the city. The census of Spanish Texas published on December 31, 1783, by Domingo Cabello found that 2,819 people lived in all of the Province of Texas, including mission Indians and counting thirty-six slaves. Of this total, 1,802 lived in San Antonio. This is indicative of the population of San Antonio; it peaked at and remained at around 2,000 inhabitants throughout the eighteenth century. In the spring of 1834, Colonel Juan N. Almonte made a tour of Texas and reported that in 1806 there had been 5,000 “souls” living in San Antonio de Bexar (this seems unlikely), but by 1834 the population had declined to 2,400. The city remained impoverished in 1834; as Almonte said: “Extensive undertakings cannot be entered on in Bexar as there is no individual capital exceeding 10,000 dollars. All the provisions raised by the inhabitants are consumed in the district.” 

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The missions’ organized large-scale farms had grown and harvested most of the crop surpluses that had ever been produced in San Antonio. Almonte’s comments in 1834 show that there were no surplus crops grown in San Antonio at the time, which aligns with most of the observations made by visitors throughout the period from 1790 to 1836. The missions at one time had thousands of head of cattle and sheep, but by the end of the century their herds were all but gone. After Commandant General Teodoro de Croix’s decree of 1778 that all unbranded cattle were the property of the crown, the missions’ herds began to evaporate, severely damaging their economic stability. The Canary Islanders in particular were jealous of the missions’ exclusive Indian labor sources and continued to complain incessantly to the viceroy for access to them. Early on too, the Isleños whined for exclusive access to the presidio’s purchases of their farm products, but they were unable to compete with the crop production of the better organized forced-labor missions. The Isleños avoided working in the fields and found herding more to their liking. Friar Fernández wrote of the work habits of the Isleños in 1741: The attorneys [representing the Isleños] say that the only work the families have to maintain their livelihood is farming. If this is true, then the Islanders are lazy, for their fields are full of undergrowth. When the King our Lord gave them the land, it was clean and cleared. . . . It must be stated that the families do not have only one kind of work, that of farming, for many of them roam about. . . . It is a fact that one of the attorneys is not a farmer; he is the high constable; neither are Señor Francisco Arrocha, Señor Antonio Rodríguez. . . . The three Leales are more merchants than farmers. One of the Islanders is a carpenter and four are soldiers. The breeding of cattle, raising vegetables and fruit, and making cheese do not bring exceptional profit in these regions. And so the attorneys do not speak well in saying that the only work of the families is farming their lands. On January 4, 1745, the viceroy ordered the captains of the presidios in Texas to buy their corn from Spaniards or Indians at their discretion, answering once and for all the question of favorability to one group or the other. He went

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on to describe the work of other Isleños as traders exclusively, who “maintain themselves quite comfortably by trading.”  Even though the economy was primarily an agricultural one with a limited cash market, Friar Fernández’s statement gives evidence of other economic activities in the area. An additional cash market during the times of surpluses in agricultural production in San Antonio was the Presidio La Bahía on the lower San Antonio River (near present-day Goliad, Texas). Irrigation was not possible at La Bahía because the banks of the San Antonio River were forty to fifty feet high and the river was over a hundred yards wide in most places, making local crop production very limited. Captain Rafael Martínez Pacheco wrote to the viceroy on November 8, 1772, to ask for funds to purchase supplies from the San Antonio missions because Rosario and Espíritu Santo in the vicinity of the Presidio La Bahía lacked irrigation ditches. The missions of San Antonio seem to have been the only missions that could provide agricultural products to other missions because of their abundant water and the acequia system that allowed their farms to generate surpluses and stability. While the Espíritu Santo and La Bahía area settlers and missionaries were not large scale-farmers because of the lack of irrigable land, they enjoyed a high degree of success in cattle herding until de Croix’s cattle orders in 1778. By the end of the mission era, water had become a valuable commodity, the rights to which were legally bought, sold, rented, and inherited. Due mostly to inheritance, the dulas that were at first measured in a twenty-fourhour day were split into ever smaller time increments. Due to the stagnation of population growth and the resulting lack of demand, coupled with a reliable water supply, the community remained generally stable during the eighteenth century. The price of the individual water rights remained stable also. It continued to be dangerous to attempt to increase farming acreage outside the protection of the presidio because of the relentless hostility of the Apaches. The decline of the missions after secularization ended all large-scale organized farming activities in the area; demand for water in the lower mission fields declined significantly as less and less acreage was planted in crops. Portions of the irrigation system were beginning to fall into a state of disrepair due to lack of use by the end of the mission era and continued to decline into the mid-1830s.

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8 C O N F L I C T, C O O P E R AT I O N , AND COMPROMISE

Compromise and concern for the common good were not merely lofty goals rejected cavalierly in the courts of the Hispanic Southwest. They were not simply guises making possible the cohabitation of the judge with his conscience. They were fundamental principles brought to bear even in the most complex of water adjudications and even when the status of one of the litigants would have suggested that his opponent stood no chance in the impending case. michael c. meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest

T

o understand the role water played in the social history of the mission, civil, and presidial communities of San Antonio one must view water through the lens of those human-to-human relationships during situations of conflict, cooperation, and compromise over water. From San Antonio’s inception as a settlement, disputes arose between the missionary friars, the civil-military community, and especially the Canary Islander settlers who arrived in 1731; the disputes were over land, water, labor, and local markets. The earliest dispute, as we have seen, was over water rights on the San Antonio River. Casafuerte’s decree had calmed the water rights issue, but all the nonmission settlers wanted to “hire” Indians to work on their farm lands. The friars, though occasionally losing a skirmish here and there over “their” Indians and labor, eventually succeeded in keeping the Indians at work in mission fields more or less exclusively. Friar José Rafael Oliva, president of the Texas missions in 1788, said: “It is certain that if the missionaries had not been so concerned about the affairs of the Indians these past many years, the Span72

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iards would have subdued the Indians and made themselves masters of their work, their land, water, and cattle, as is clearly seen in the countless writings, litigations, and persecutions that are recorded in the archives of these missions. These attempts were overcome solely by the energy and activity of the missionary Fathers in defense of the Indians and their possessions.”  Friar Oliva’s observations were correct: had the friars not been successful over the decades in protecting the mission Indians, they surely would have been exploited by the settlers. This question is germane: whose exploitation of the Indians was less wrong, that of the friars or the settlers? The settlers argued from time to time, successfully, that the Indian labor in growing corn for sale to the presidio constituted an unfair advantage to the missions. The 1745 ruling by the viceroy mentioned earlier made it clear that the captains of the presidios could buy from anyone, but in reality no farms other than the missions generated much in the way of surpluses to sell. The other disputes were over livestock, mostly of a minor nature involving fencing. More major disputes between missions and settlers occurred when the missions appealed for more land for their ranching activities, but this became moot after de Croix’s ruling about unbranded cattle. Overall, the weakness in the mission Indian population due to death by disease eventually gave the settlers the edge in numbers by the 1780s. Following crown policy, the whole thrust of southwestern Spanish towns was to grow and assure the presence of the empire. San Antonio followed this policy as incoming civilian settlers outnumbered mission Indians by three to one. The disputes of the early eighteenth century between settlers and missionaries gradually ended as the mission Indians merged into the local community. The first nonmission acequia had been dug by the “citizen-soldiers” of the San Antonio presidio in the early 1720s. Later known as the San Pedro Ditch, it tapped directly into San Pedro Springs and ran between San Pedro Creek and the San Antonio River by the time the Canary Island families arrived in 1731. In 1731 the population at the presidio and in the settlement, not including the missions, had increased to three hundred people—forty-four soldiers, ten discharged soldiers with their families, and a few other settlers totaling about twenty-five civilian households. Upon arrival of the fifty-six Canary Islanders on March 9, 1731, conflict over access to and use of the water instantly intensified along with all kinds of other squabbles. As mentioned, water from the first acequia had been distributed to the Canary Islanders

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along with land that had been cleared by the first presidial soldiers and a handful of civilian settlers, setting the stage for hard feelings that continued for generations. Who actually were these new settlers who seemed to participate in conflicts of all kinds from their first steps in San Antonio? They were undoubtedly a brave and courageous group seeking a new life of opportunity in New Spain. A closer examination of their lives and background is merited as they were among the most significant groups of people in the early establishment of San Antonio. Their traditional Canary Island expertise in irrigation along with their establishment of the customary practices of water management and distribution in San Antonio while they controlled the initial cabildo make it necessary to understand their circumstances.

The Canary Islanders or Isleños The Canary Islanders who arrived on March 9, 1731, were chosen by the king to settle in San Antonio and numbered fifty-six people in fifteen families. The Isleños were from different islands in the Canaries, a group of seven islands located off the Atlantic coast of North Africa. Winds from the Sahara Desert make these islands an arid place to live, and the two islands closest to the African shore are Lanzarote and Fuertenventura. Of the fifteen families arriving in San Antonio, eight were from Lanzarote, where there was no irrigation at all. Gran Canaria, Tenerife, La Palma, and Gomera were and are irrigated. Of the remaining seven families who came to San Antonio, two were from Gran Canaria, three were from Tenerife, and two were from La Palma. The Isleños had a major impact on the community of San Antonio in many ways because they formed the first municipal government there, and that impact was highly noticeable in the realm of water management and distribution. In order to gain insight into these settlers, the history of immigration by Canary Islanders to the New World is important to consider. Spain’s first overseas attempt at colonization was begun in the Canary Islands in 1402. Spain used the Canaries as a “laboratory and testing ground for colonial administration, including relations with an aboriginal population that offered an irresistible attraction for enslavement and evangelization.”  From the time of Columbus, persistent rural poverty and high birth rates in the Canaries encouraged an “unbroken current” of migration to the New World.

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The bulk of the immigrants from the Canaries have historically been poor country folk and illiterate peasants. The Isleño immigrants to San Antonio in 1731 matched this description; only a few of the fifty-six could read or write. As early as 1547 the Isleños had the reputation of being “boisterous,” which would be a mild way to describe the cantankerous Isleño immigrants to San Antonio. By the second half of the sixteenth century the migration of the Isleños had intensified, and so many left that “it was feared that the Canaries would be left depopulated and defenseless against ‘the Lutheran and other enemies.’ ”  Some of the Canary Islanders went to Florida, where one governor soon described them as “shiftless vagabonds” and “a useless charge on the Royal Treasury.”  Spanish officials elsewhere seemed to dislike the Isleños too. In a report to the crown by Jacobo Bervegal, governor of Venezuela in 1749, he said of these settlers: “Among them are some 150 vagabonds at present. . . . [These and the other] Canarians who do not attend crops . . . are prejudicial to the quiet and tranquility of the province through the scandals, deaths, and harms that such a cast of abandoned men occasion. They defraud the Royal Treasury of large amounts and are generally . . . rebellious and insubordinate, as may be seen in the disturbances that they have caused in their [own] islands and in Havana.”  There is a consistent pattern in the record of frustration with the Isleños in the New World due to their contentious nature, apparently, and the Isleños of San Antonio certainly did not appear to change the reputation their compatriots held in other parts of the New World. Part of the frustration in San Antonio involved their control of the cabildo and their seemingly favorable treatment by the crown. The king gave male Isleños coming to San Antonio the title of hijo dalgo de solar conocido, or hidalgo, “lauded noblemen and knights of the Kingdoms of Castile,” as dispatched in a decree issued by Marquis Casafuerte, viceroy of Spain in Mexico City, on November 28, 1730. The fifteen families were given the right to settle a villa since they met the requirements, enabling them to form a settlement, be assigned lands, and have the right to elect from their own people alcaldes and other officers of the cabildo, which they promptly did on August 1, 1731. The viceroy issued a decree that the governor or the captain of the presidio could select nine men to fill the offices of government for life, yet free elections followed quickly. The control of water in the San Pedro acequia was an example of the

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considerable power the Isleños had from their control of all the offices of the cabildo. Captain Toribio Urrutia wrote to the viceroy on December 17, 1740, about their activities as cabildo officers: Anyone who is not an Islander owns no land, water, nor anything assigned to them to be able to subsist as a citizen in the town. . . . They conduct their own elections of the mayors without any approval of a superior since they maintain that they recognize none other in this district than that of the Governor. Those who do hold those offices do so most of the time. At the present time, they do not know how to read or write. . . . Whatever discord arises among them or with others is tolerated by those officials so much so that until [now] no disorder or scandal has been punished. Neither has equity been found by those who seek it. Even with this power, they still had to share the water with everyone else to comply with Spanish law. The Isleño mayordomo was responsible for enforcement of cooperative maintenance regulations. Maintenance of acequias by its nature required a team effort of many people.

Cooperation in Acequia Maintenance The maintenance of an acequia system was an example of cooperation between the diverse groups of settlers, even if it was required by local regulations. The canals had to be cleaned each year to remove leaves, fallen limbs, and other debris that would block normal flow and damage the sides of the ditches themselves. As the natural silt built up at the bottom of the ditch, it had to be shoveled out to keep the water flowing freely over the large system. Maintenance of the system was not voluntary; all users were forced to participate. A user who did not participate was subject to fine or loss of access to the water. This was strictly enforced by regulators and, more effectively, by all the users; a neighbor who did not show up on maintenance day needed a good excuse. The annual spring cleaning of acequias was a major community activity supervised by the local cabildo. The number of hours devoted to the cleaning and repair was prorated according to the number of hours for which each irrigator was entitled to water. All persons who used the acequia were required

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to participate under threat of fine. Wealthy men could hire others to work as substitutes for them. In 1823 the work of maintenance was very large in scope; almost fifty miles of ditches needed to be cleaned. The cleaning and repair of the community acequias required so much manpower that the men requested troops to guard the women and children remaining in town. Voluntary cooperation was desired, but in San Antonio participation was also “encouraged” by ordinance. An example of a municipal regulation pertaining to cleaning of the acequias is found in the 1829 City Ordinances for the Internal Management and Administration of the Municipal Government of San Antonio de Béjar. In chapter 5, “Regarding Public Health,” article 21 had two provisions on the cleanliness of the acequias. One said the individuals responsible for cleaning the acequias must do a “perfect” job by the last of February or else be fined. It additionally mandated that no new water could flow through the acequia until it had been examined by the chief of police. The other provision said citizens whose property bordered the acequia had to ensure that no dead animals, pelts, or “other type of corruptible refuse be cast into the acequia,” or they would be subject to a fine. This provision “especially” called upon the city attorney also to guard against refuse cast into the acequia. Article 40 called for public funds to be used to “construct necessary covering for the acequias at the place of public crossing, allowing for small bridges needed for public use.” Article 52 stated that a fine of “four reales shall be imposed on every citizen responsible for spoiling, obstructing, or polluting the water in the acequia, even when caused by his domestic animals.” If a citizen who was responsible for the sanitation and repairs of the acequia was found “delinquent” in his work, he was fined one peso. The cabildo had historically attempted to protect the quality of the water in the acequias, the result of the problems people caused by the irresponsible throwing of trash or other refuse into the shared water resource. In 1775 Amador Delgado, alcalde of Villa de San Fernando at the time, outlawed the washing of clothes in the town acequia because those living “down-ditch” were being denied clean drinking water. Delgado’s ruling stated: “Clothes will not be washed in the acequia of the city. Penalty for the woman or other person that violates the ordinance will be the confiscation of any clothes washed in the said acequia.”  This was a responsible ordinance on the part of the cabildo and a reasonable expectation of government.

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Figure 18. Mother and child cleaning clothes in the acequia. San Antonio Light Collection, UTSA’s Institute of Texan Cultures, L-2969-D, courtesy of the Hearst Corporation.

There were other conflicts over water, but little documentation remains as they were usually of a minor nature and were settled between the parties verbally by compromise. The record shows that most disputes were over fencing of fields to keep roaming livestock from damaging crops, and occasional disputes arose over who did damage to a bridge over a particular acequia. Possibly the cooperation shown in mutual aid and defense from hostile Indians helped to spread the spirit of cooperation in the community in their relations to the acequia system as a whole. Glick seems to concur: “The cohesiveness of the San Antonio irrigation communities was due not only to tradition, but also to the solidarity-inducing conditions of frontier environment where irrigators were obliged to request guards to protect them from marauding Indians while carrying out their labors. In this kind of situation stealing water from a neighbor would not be worth while in view of the potential loss of security provided by group solidarity.” 

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The water supply was adequate for everyone because demand was more or less constant. As noted, the population in San Antonio in the eighteenth century had remained fewer than two thousand people. The fact that water rights were “apportioned equally and equitably” by drawn lot or suerte and water was shared in supervised turn by users also helped to alleviate any serious disputes. The Canary Islanders were true to their reputation for contentiousness, and they exercised their right to debate water issues, as did other citizens. But gradually the Isleños lost their position of power in the cabildo; almost all their descendants had married outside their group by 1800. The Isleños, however, had successfully managed and promoted the best interests of their chartered town, and the cabildo continued to grow in effectiveness as new generations served the public. It is important to note that human nature seems to dictate frustration with city officials in any municipal government. Possibly the close proximity and personal relationships of the citizenry with town governments in day-to-day lives lends itself to a higher degree of direct conflict and voiced complaints than do other contexts. In a town as small as San Antonio was, and at a time when fair water distribution and management was a critical daily issue to everyone, those whose duty was to manage and lead were under great scrutiny; they were sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly criticized. Disputes over water issues did not cease during this period but remained of a minor nature and continued to be minor during the decline of Spain and through the Republic of Mexico’s claim to San Antonio. An example of a more serious dispute occurred with the 1819 flood. Most of the townspeople complained to the city council that the dam at the Concepción mission, the first mission south of the city at the confluence of San Pedro Creek and the San Antonio River, was partly to blame for the flood, and they were correct in their assessment. The complaints continued without resolution until 1828, when the provincial governor recommended that the Concepción dam be destroyed “because it was ruinous to the town at times of heavy rains.”  The city council did not act, however, and the dam, which continued to be a cause of periodic floods, was not destroyed until 1869. While there was abundant water for an almost unlimited number of settlers in the river valley had they been able to spread out, the ever-present threat from the hostile Indians of the eighteenth century, the Lipan Apaches, forced them to congregate and live close to the presidio. This desperate need

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for mutual defense resulted in greater concern about access to and use of the water resources. The settlers’ worry about future shortages and their response to actual droughts led to inevitable conflicts as the settlement grew.

Revolution Comes to San Antonio, 1800 to 1836 San Antonio entered the nineteenth century still an isolated frontier outpost. The period from 1800 to 1836 in San Antonio can aptly be called turbulent. Its population during this period ranged from a low of 1,330 in 1828 to a peak of 2,500 in 1803 and again in 1834. In 1807 a young Zebulon Pike, a lieutenant in the United States Army, visited San Antonio. He arrived on June 7 and was given a friendly welcome by the governors of both Coahuila and Texas and Nuevo León. He observed that the population of the city was about two thousand “souls,” most of whom lived in the squalor of jacales (huts). Pike asked the resident priest at Mission San José what had become of the natives. The priest, who had treated Pike kindly, replied that they just could not exist under the shadow of the whites. A greatly weakened Spain lost Texas to the Republic of Mexico beginning with revolution from 1810 to 1813 and ending with the 1821 official oath of allegiance to Mexican independence. Father Hidalgo’s revolution in Mexico that had started on September 16, 1810, finally spread to San Antonio in January 1811. An effort at revolt in the city failed. The revolution continued all over Mexico, and in March 1813, revolutionaries beat the Spaniards at Goliad and at Salado Creek, nine miles from San Antonio. San Antonio fell to the revolutionaries, and fourteen Spanish officers were butchered. On June 17, 1813, the revolutionaries routed a planned Spanish counterattack before it began. However, on August 18 at the Battle of Medina, the revolutionaries were slaughtered by General Joaquín de Arredondo’s army of four thousand men. Arredondo imprisoned those not killed and murdered many of his prisoners. He brutalized their bodies, “cutting off their arms and heads and placing them in public places,” according to John Villars, one of the prisoners. While there were Americans held, the Tejano inhabitants of Bexar who had participated in the revolt were more severely treated. The wives and female relatives of men involved in the revolution in San Antonio were held and forced to

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serve Arredondo’s soldiers. Villars wrote: “They were treated with great brutality, whipped, ravished and maltreated in every possible form; and they constituted the best portion of the population . . . [their overseer, Acosta, was a] black ferocious villain who violated some of the prisoners daily and whipped others for their resistance.”  The mistreatment went on for fifty-four days, and when released, the residents found themselves destitute as their homes and possessions had been confiscated. Ramsdell said: “For years San Antonio was a well-nigh deserted town. There was a long drouth, followed by pestilence, followed by a flood, in 1819, that nearly finished it off.”  On July 19, 1821, the entire citizenry of San Antonio took an oath of allegiance to Mexican independence and acknowledged Colonel Agustín de Iturbide as the new nation’s leader. At best, the people of San Antonio continued to exist in a terrible state of poverty, with the only employment being in agriculture, and that was at a minimum subsistence level only. The bulk of the population lived in jacales and a few adobe or stone houses, all with dirt floors and little if any furniture. Even after Anglos starting settling in Texas, the population in 1830 was “almost all Mexicans,” of whom more than 60 percent were farmers. Another 30 percent worked as artisans and laborers; the balance were merchants. The economy was weak due to the new national government’s decreased support of the presidio throughout the years from 1821 to 1836. Farming and ranching in the fields around the town did not grow past the subsistence level; there was no population growth. Undermanned and undersupplied, the presidio was unable to stave off the continual raids by hostile Indians. In 1828 Jean-Louis Berlandier, a botanist, joined General Manuel de Mier y Terán on an inspection tour of Texas. His diary reflects his observations on the condition of the four missions, Concepción, San Juan, San José, and Espada, and the decline of their once-abundant farms: “Formerly celebrated, they are today abandoned to the mercy of the weather and have become private properties, sold for the profit of the nation. Those who bought and maintain them are poor farmers, who live there in as great a state of misery as the indigenes whom the friars formerly shut up in them. At every moment warring tribes kill some laborer, and they come almost constantly to steal the animals.”  The missions were gone, and with them their irrigated fields. He observed that “the inhabitants are gay and not very hardworking” and that “most of the families are linked to the military of the presidial companies,” hence the lack

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of agricultural progress. “These soldiers, continually in the wilderness, or going from one presidio to another, cannot devote themselves to laboring in the field.” The military was overwhelmed with work all over Texas and remained undermanned. He went on to make comments about the “better off” citizens: The private citizens at the Mexican presidios are not lovers of farming. . . . When they are reproached for their indolence, they allege the Indians do not allow them to go out and cultivate the fields, which is partly true. But what I have never understood is why, although there are well-watered lands about the houses and the missions—even inside the presidio—one sees no planting there, whereas, moved by a principle of laziness, they go to sow de temporal [dry farming] fields of corn six or seven leagues from the dwellings (in localities truly exposed to attacks by the indigenes), solely in order not to have to take the trouble of watering the fields. The acequias in the lower river fields must have been all but abandoned since no planting was done; therefore no one opened their head gates to water the fields. (Emphasis added)  José María Sanchez came along as a draftsman. His diary agrees with Berlandier’s as to the sad state of agriculture, but he added: “The character of the people is care-free. . . . Doubtless, there are some individuals, out of the 1,425 that make up the total population, who are free from these failings, but they are very few.”  General Terán wrote to President Don Guadalupe Victoria on March 28, 1828: The Spanish placed exorbitant funds into the missionaries’ hands so that they might pursue unchecked their chief desire to construct buildings. . . . When the friars were established and the orderly and systematic spirit that controls all their activities produced some result from such costly nonsense, that fickle [Spanish] government removed the friars, and with them the sole reason for those clusters of inhabitants. They dispersed, and today not one of their descendants is known. After the friars were replaced by soldiers, there was nothing but expeditions and attacks

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on the savages, with little concern for what constitutes a stable settlement, which is the cultivation of land and the growth of its population.

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Terán’s firsthand account serves as an accurate summary of the conditions in San Antonio from 1800 to 1836. His and the other less than empathetic firsthand accounts must be tempered with the fact that the citizens of San Antonio had few resources and lived under adverse and, at times, dangerous circumstances. The citizenry as a whole should not be easily dismissed as “lazy” and “indolent.” The visible results of their labor may not have met with the expectations of some educated and aristocratic military visitors from more urban environments, but simple survival under the stress of daily life in this lonely frontier outpost precluded a lazy lifestyle. There was little growth in the community and there was declining agricultural production, which created a situation best described as a failing settlement, hanging on by its fingernails. The settlement had been victim of Spain’s decline and of horrible local atrocities in the revolution of 1810–13 and suffered further problems for the duration of the Mexican revolt until 1821. The general feeling among the weary populace during this difficult period was that they had been abandoned by whatever government there was. The crescendo of their frustration had to come when the city flooded and was all but destroyed in 1819. To add to the general feeling of distress in San Antonio there were cholera epidemics in 1833 and again in 1834, which so depopulated the town as its citizenry fled to the countryside that the annual census could not be conducted. Cholera comes from bad water, and the epidemics in 1833 and 1834 indicate that the acequias were under stress not from population demands but from lack of maintenance and managerial control to police their cleanliness. San Antonio entered the Texas Revolution a weak and weary town. Yet the fundamentals for a larger community were intact, including fresh spring water and a distribution system to deliver it to the populace. These two assets were still in place as cornerstones for the ultimate growth of the city. Add to these its ideal location as a crossroads for Texas and on the route to the west, and San Antonio was a success waiting to happen.

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Part Three Republic of Texas and United States Water, 1836–1902

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9 NE W PEOPLE , OLD L AW S

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y 1836, although San Antonio retained its identity as a Spanish city, its people were staggering from the effects of violence, economic weakness, and changing governments since 1800. The violence of war did not cease even after the Texas Revolution of 1836. Tensions between Texas and Mexico persisted, and the city would be invaded again for a short time by Mexico’s General Woll in 1842, destabilizing the population and dampening the growth that had begun in the late 1830s. The mustering of the United States Army for the Mexican War of 1846 made life in San Antonio at best uncomfortable and at times outright dangerous, especially for its mainly Mexican or Tejano population.

Conditions in the City An anonymous traveler to San Antonio in 1837 wrote Notes on Texas, which was published over a period of weeks in 1839 in the literary magazine Hesperian in Columbus, Ohio. He gave a detailed eyewitness account of the people in San Antonio, including what they did for a living, where they lived, and what they lived in. He described the homes and buildings he visited: The river divides the city into two parts, the larger division being on the west side. The public square contains about two acres and is built up of stone houses generally one story high. The walls are from four to five feet thick, with embrasures like the grates of a prison. They are generally twenty feet in height and plastered both in and outside with a rough coat of lime mortar. Joists, four or five feet from the tops of the walls, are laid from one to the other, and the space filled with earth beaten solid. The houses are 87

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inclosed with such thick walls and covered with such description of roof for the purpose of making them impervious to the heat of the sun; otherwise they would be insufferable. The interior is constructed with no reference to comfort or elegance. Many of them have no floor but the ground; some few are paved with brick or stone, but there are none that I saw, except the house of an American, that were covered with wood. Chimneys are awkwardly constructed in the corners of the houses, and sometimes the fire is built in the middle of the room, after the manner of the Indian wigwam. Some of the houses have sufficient depth as to admit of several apartments, by means of parallel walls, and when such was the case, they were divided off into small rooms and intricate mazes, which made the whole wear no bad resemblance to the gloom and terror of a prison. The houses in the suburbs, as well as many on the principal streets near the center of town, are constructed of logs ranged perpendicularly in the ground, the interstices daubed with clay and the tops covered with rushes or straw. They have the most shabby and ragged appearance and are not in respect superior to the temporary huts of the savage. His description indicated that dwellings had changed little since colonial times. The last paragraph is an apt description of a typical jacal. The San Antonio he saw in 1837 was still a Spanish town. He continued with a description of the water and acequias: The fertility and beauty of the valley is owing to the great fall in the river, which enables the farmer, by throwing a dam across the bed of the stream, to carry the water to a ditch along the upper part of his farm and, by such means, suffer it to run over every portion of it as upon an inclined plane. If nature had not made this provision, the soil, although rich, could never have been brought into successful cultivation, on account of the great drought. As a proof that the country is dependent upon irrigation, I would mention that improvements are confined to the banks of the river and that no settlements have yet been made either upon the Salado or Ci-

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bolo, neither of which possesses this facility, even if they had sufficient water for the purpose.

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He commented on the people of San Antonio: The people speak the Spanish language but so adulterated and corrupted that it grates on like harsh thunder upon the chaste ear of the polished Castilian. The life of the Mexican here is one of unconcerned indolence and ease. As long as he is satisfied with a bare living for the present, there is no reason that he should have himself much trouble about the future. The small quantity of corn which he requires demands but little labor, owing to the amount that may be produced from a little piece of ground, and as his animal food is easily procured, there is no necessity for much bodily exertion. . . . The inhabitants of San Antonio are yet a primitive people in their whole mode of life. No stream affords superior privileges for mills of all descriptions to the San Antonio River, yet along its whole course I never heard of any except one for grinding corn but which long since has suffered to go to ruin [at Mission San José after secularization in 1793]. . . . The absence of almost every kind of furniture in the most fashionable houses was either evidence of poverty or a total ignorance of such conveniences as civilized people deem indispensable to their comfort. . . . I know of no mechanical branches that are pursued by the citizens of San Antonio unless that of the cobbler. I did see one man engaged in this kind of work, and it was the only instance of mechanical exertion that fell under my observation. Merchandising is confined generally to Americans, who bring their goods from the coast and sell them at immense profits to the inhabitants. Articles of commerce are principally confined to cotton goods, which are generally sufficient protection to the body in a climate like this. . . . The Comanches, who inhabit the country immediately west of San Antonio and who claim to number forty thousand, while they admit the Americans to be their equal express the most decided contempt for the Mexicans.

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The anonymous author’s eyewitness view is invaluable to understanding the situation of people in San Antonio in 1837 and indicative of the period until after the Mexican War ended in 1848. The majority of the citizens did minimal work beyond subsistence farming, some cultivating only their own gardens. There was little industry; the only mill had been abandoned years before. Water was still abundant but was put mainly to household use. Farming appeared to have continued to decline as he mentioned that little was corn produced. The people were still under attack by hostile Indians. Since 1800, living conditions had not improved in San Antonio. Ferdinand Roemer toured the area in 1846 and reported similar conditions, except the city was by then almost completely abandoned due to the flight of the predominantly Mexican population to avoid becoming collateral damage in the Mexican War. Roemer said in February, 1846, that the city’s population had declined to as few as eight hundred people.

The Mexican War Transforms San Antonio The onset of the Mexican War in 1846, however, proved to be a blessing for San Antonio’s future. Frederick Law Olmsted toured Texas in 1853 and published his diary in 1856. He said the city’s growth had been steady after the Mexican War, recording that by 1850 the population had increased to 3,500. In 1853 it had grown to 6,000, and in 1856 he said there were 10,500 people, made up of 4,000 Mexicans, 3,000 Germans, and 3,500 Americans. The only money, which Olmsted called “money-capital,” was in the hands of the Americans and officers of the government. The mechanics and small shopkeepers were German, and the Mexicans were subsistence farmers, carters of cart goods, or working as hands on ranches in the area. Olmsted said: “Almost the entire transportation of the country is carried on by them [Mexicans], with oxen and two-wheeled carts.” He described the Mexicans’ livelihood as “exceedingly meager.”  Olmsted’s observation about the situation of Tejanos and Mexicans was correct; by 1853, they had been pushed to the margins of society in San Antonio as Anglo presence and power had grown. He pointed out an important stabilizing factor that had been in place during Spanish and Mexican rule but would become a key to San Antonio’s economy from then on: San Antonio was a military headquarters. Texas had entered the United States in 1845, and

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in 1846 the United States quartered and mustered troops in San Antonio for the Mexican War. This war started the rise of San Antonio to major city status, launching its change from being a far-away peripheral outpost to joining the core of the United States economy in the twentieth century. During the Mexican War, San Antonio became the single distribution center to pay and supply the troops. Most of the disbursements for supplies were made to local merchant-contractors, which provided the city with desperately needed money, its first real taste of Eastern capital. After the war San Antonio became an even more important military center and depot for the U.S. Army, thus establishing the foundation of the city’s twentieth-century economy. By the eve of the Civil War, San Antonio was the largest city in Texas, with more than eight thousand people living within the city limits. Its merchant elite were Irish; three of its four richest men, John Twohig (who would later own a private bank), James Vance, and B. M. McCarthy were Irish-born. The wealthiest woman in town was the widow of Irishman Edward Dwyer, who had also been a merchant. These merchants supplied the needs of the thriving immigrant communities of German Fredericksburg, New Braunfels, Comal, and Boerne; French Castroville; and Irish San Patricio. The majority of the population in San Antonio was then Mexican or German; neither group owned slaves, and both were in general firmly against the institution.

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Water during the Civil War The Civil War disturbed San Antonio’s growth again, when the U.S. Army yielded their facilities to the Confederate States of America in the spring of 1861. Because of its strategic location and its reliable sources of water, San Antonio was used as a staging area for the only major campaign originating in Texas, the Confederate Army of the West’s attack on New Mexico in 1861 and 1862. However, there was almost no money in anyone’s hands. The paper money of the Confederacy was considered worthless, as was its credit, and while hard currency or specie was always acceptable, there was precious little in the entire South. San Antonio had become the key farmer’s market for south and south-central Texas, and the Confederate quartermasters were able to fill their contracts for hay and corn as fodder for animals stabled in San Antonio. However, the area still did not produce its potential of crops, even though the acequia system gave the opportunity for a much more active

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agricultural industry. The Mexicans continued to farm on a subsistence basis, cart goods, and labor at lower paying jobs. Their trust for Americans had completely disappeared during and immediately after the Mexican War, and the worthless Confederate currency provided little incentive to farm for cash. During the Civil War, a few mills along the San Antonio River ground corn, and one industrious family made shoes for the military.

Anglos Take Over the Water, 1852 Water rights were still traded individually and the municipality kept its aguas de propios, which had been granted to it originally from San Pedro Creek. The villa additionally claimed the water rights of the “extinguished missions” as soon as it could. Some of the extinguished mission water rights and land were held in private hands, however. But the old way of water transfer would be abandoned to enrich one city council member in 1852, the single most crucial year in the history of water in San Antonio up to that time. Two highly significant events involving San Antonio’s water occurred in the 1850s, one of which led to the most visible and major water conflict after the Civil War, a conflict resolved only in 1927 when the city finally purchased the privately held water works company. First and most important, in 1852 the city sold at “public auction” the lots appurtenant to the headwater spring of the San Antonio River, lots that had been granted to the city by the Spanish. The buyer was James R. Sweet, an alderman at the time. This sale was highly controversial, but the city government was all but destitute, a condition that did not improve until well into the twentieth century. Yet if the sale was to aid a desperate city financially, why did the city agree to finance the transaction to Sweet for fifty years at 8 percent interest? Sweet purchased the two lots for $1,180, and the total amount of interest earned annually by the city would be a meager $94.40, for fifty years, or until 1902! A close examination of the deeds to lots 30 and 31—deeds that were not general warranty deeds secured by a deed of trust but what we refer to today as contracts for deed—reveals other oddities of the transfer. The city could have severed their water rights to the river and ownership of spring by selling to Sweet only the lots themselves, which would have been the prudent and responsible thing to do for the benefit of the entire population. What would lead a city to sell its primary water source, the San Antonio

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Spring, especially for less than a hundred dollars a year for fifty years? The deeds described the lot numbers and both said the transfers included “all the right, title, and interest of the said City of San Antonio in and to the above mentioned and described lot of land.”  Lot 31 also specifically added “it being understood this lot embraces the Worth Springs” (emphasis added).  Since the water rights and ownership of the spring granted to the municipality by the crown had never been severed from the land, there was no separate deed for the water rights, as had been normal practice in Spanish real estate transfer in San Antonio for more than a century by 1852. The deed to lot 31 made sure to say the land “embraced” the spring, indicating that someone understood Spanish law and the potential power conferred by ownership of the source of water for the entire community. Spanish law, as mentioned, was clear that the groundwater and springs located on any tract of land were the sole private property of the landowner. In this single deed, for almost no money—certainly not enough to help a financially ailing city in any way imaginable—San Antonio’s city council gave private ownership of the main source of their water supply to an individual; no Spanish-controlled cabildo would have ever done that. We can speculate that had it been conceivable earlier to auction off the spring, surely an Isleño would have tried to buy it when the Isleños had absolute control of San Pedro Springs through the cabildo of the Villa de San Fernando. However, it is equally likely that the bold and brash Isleños as a group did not want to see absolute ownership of the key spring transferred into one person’s hands; they would anyway have never agreed among themselves over who would get the opportunity to purchase it. The sale of the city’s headwater spring marked the single most significant event in the history of San Antonio’s water resources. The water in San Antonio was no longer Spanish water owned for the benefit of the people. It had become Anglo water, for the benefit of one individual, who just happened to be a member of the city council at the time. Bitterness and controversy surrounding the sale to Sweet intensified after George W. Brackenridge purchased the land from subsequent owner G. W. Barnes in 1867. Sweet sold the lots to Barnes on September 10, 1859, for three thousand dollars almost tripling his money in less than seven years. The sale continued to be a source of unending controversy not because of the land but because of the control and ownership of the water that came with the land. Subsequent city councils proposed any and all means conceivable to usurp

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Brackenridge’s ownership of the headwater spring, to no avail. They had no one to blame but their predecessors. The second major event happened in 1856 when the Texas Legislature officially incorporated the city, which marked the end of the last vestiges of Spanish local government; the Anglos had officially taken over San Antonio. An important part of the city charter, article 3, section 9, outlined the rights and duties of the city toward the acequia system. This section of the charter confirmed the former water rights, and the council was to “regulate all matters connected with the dams, water gates, and distribution of water for irrigation provided that their ordinances shall not conflict with private and former established rights. They may revise . . . the rules and regulations of the Spanish government.”  By confirming the former water rights, the charter also protected the city’s remaining rights to the water in the river and creeks. The city used this confirmation time and again, not only to enforce its claim to its remaining water rights but also to attempt to extend its claim to the water adjacent to the Sweet tract sold at the headwater spring in 1852. These two events in the 1850s changed matters forever. The charter of 1856 gave the city’s leaders the misguided notion that they had the power—if not in law, then in public opinion—to overrule their predecessors’ sale of the headwater springs of the San Antonio River. San Antonio after the Civil War could no longer depend upon an ancient acequia system for its drinking water. Some of the water for consumption could be found from aquadores, Mexican water carriers who supplied citizens by dipping buckets into the river and carrying them about town on shoulder yokes.  By 1870 the city had grown to more than 12,256 people. But the overall river system was already overwhelmed, as attested to by another cholera epidemic in 1866. The waters of the San Antonio River and San Pedro Creek had determined the spatial organization of the city. Recollections by journalist Alexander E. Sweet, son of James Sweet—the same James Sweet who once owned the headwater springs—underscore how water divided Mexican Americans from Anglo Americans: When I was nine years old I met the Mexican foe for the first time in deadly conflict. Between the Mexican boys, on the west bank

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of the San Pedro Creek, and the American boys, on the east side, there was war all the time. I was a San Antonio schoolboy then. The schoolhouse was a small adobe building on Commerce Street [downtown]. . . . During recess it was the custom of us overworked youths to repair to the shady groves that skirted the flowery banks of the San Antonio River to seek relaxation, and rest our weary brains. The relaxation consisted, for the most part, in bombarding with slings the residences of the peaceable citizens on the opposite bank. The rest of the time was completely taken up in carrying on an artillery duel with the seekers after knowledge who attended the opposition free school, also on the opposite bank of the classic stream. The San Antonio boy of that period was much more vivacious than his successors of the present day. He lived in a chronic state of warfare with the Mexican boys, the police, and other public enemies.

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San Pedro Creek still defines the spatial boundary of the city’s Hispanic and Anglo populations; generally the area immediately west of San Pedro Creek is predominantly Hispanic, while the area to the east is Anglo-American.

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10 ACEQUIA S OVERWHEL MED

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s San Antonio grew during the nineteenth century under Spanish, Mexican, Texan, and eventually United States sovereignty, the acequias became unable to supply the water needs for the community safely and eventually became a source of pestilence and disease. An incident on March 19, 1840, foretold how San Antonio’s growth would turn its acequia system dangerous and unsanitary. A Russian surgeon named Weideman, after the famed Council House Fight with the Comanches in downtown San Antonio that resulted in the death of several Indians, took the heads and bodies of two of the victims as specimens for “scientific” study. In his yard he boiled the heads and bodies to obtain skeletons, and he dumped the resulting liquid directly into the acequia behind his home on Acequia Street (now Main Street). This acequia supplied much of the drinking water for the town, as the river and San Pedro Creek were reserved for bathing and washing at this time. A city ordinance outlawed dumping trash in and defiling the acequias and imposed a heavy fine. Word of the Weideman incident caused a howling display of disgust in the city as the citizens realized that the last cup of water they had drunk downstream of Dr. Weideman’s home might have contained minute human remains. Weideman was brought to trial, found guilty, and fined; he supposedly walked away laughing. According to Bert McLean, author of a 1924 history of the water company written for its shareholders, it was highly probable Weideman’s escapade “started agitation in San Antonio for a method of water distribution which would do away with the possibility of contamination but it was not until a public calamity occurred—the cholera epidemic of 1866—that ways were actually sought for delivering water into the homes in a sanitary manner.”  Cholera epidemics had occurred in San Antonio in 1846 and again in 1849. In 1849 cholera claimed the life of General Worth, for whom Worth’s 96

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Spring is named—the headwater spring of the San Antonio River, and the same spring located on George W. Brackenridge’s homestead, Head-of-theRiver. Cholera spreads from the consumption of bad water and has an appalling mortality rate. Dr. Pat Ireland Nixon, a San Antonio physician, said in 1936, “Cholera is chiefly a water-borne disease and the organism must gain entrance through the gastro-intestinal tract.”  The overtaxed acequias were highly suspect as the chief culprits and source of cholera in San Antonio. The Texas Democrat described the effects of the 1849 cholera epidemic: “We are pained to hear, as we do by every arrival the most unfavorable accounts of the progress of the cholera at San Antonio. Our information is that there had been as many as thirty-five deaths in the space of twenty-four hours. . . . It is said that at least two thousand persons have quit the city, and scattered in the country in all directions. The cathedral bells are no longer permitted to toll for the departed.”  When it appeared, the dread disease spared no age or group; it was an equally horrific nightmare to citizens prominent and poor alike. Mary Maverick lost her only remaining daughter, Augusta, six years old at the time, to the disease on April 23, 1849. She was buried the next day, but Mary could not go as she had herself been stricken with cholera, as had her sons Lewis and George. Later, the first of many failed efforts to organize a company to build a water works system in San Antonio would be led by the same George Maverick in 1873. Cholera struck again in 1866. The epidemic started in mid-September and continued for two months; 198 deaths were recorded in the last twelve days of September and 112 for the month of October. The San Antonio Daily Herald declared on October 2: “We had thought to be able to report the cholera all gone by today, but it seems to have broken out with violence again west of San Pedro.”  The need for a better system of water than the acequias was obvious to the San Antonio Board of Health, which on September 30, 1866, issued recommendations to the city about the control of the disease’s source, no doubt standing water and floating filth in the irrigation ditches. The cholera epidemics took more than just a physical toll on San Antonians; these scourges also took away much of their spirit. Dr. Adolph Herff’s son, Ferdinand Peter Herff, also a doctor, would write of the San Antonio situation: “With its population of twelve-thousand people, San Antonio was in 1869 little more than a frontier village. Conditions so long deplored by social reformers still existed: muddy streets, filth-infested vacant lots, polluted river

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water, and grossly ineffectual methods of sanitation. There were no health inspections, few professional medical men and women, and no semblance of a hospital. The latest cholera epidemic, coming as it did so soon after the war, had thoroughly discouraged survivors. Many were financially destitute; others were destitute of spirit.”  Ferdinand Herff pressed for a sanitary system of water and discontinuance of use of shallow water wells and the acequias for domestic water supply. The stage was now set for a municipal water system that would guarantee pure water for the people to avoid disease. Yet, according to local historian Lewis F. Fisher, “it was not sanitation but the need for more water for fighting fires that in 1877 finally prompted the city to change directions and sign up with the new San Antonio Water Works Company, formed by immigrant Frenchman Jean Baptiste LaCoste.”  This mirrored attitudes in the history of other United States cities as well. “Boston began seriously considering the development of additional supplies after an 1825 fire destroyed fifty houses and stores,” noted Ellis Armstrong in his History of Public Works in the United States 1776–1976. David Weber observed in 1976: “There is a saying in the West that ‘water does not run downhill. It runs towards money.’”  Water in San Antonio, via the new privately held water works company’s contract, began in 1878 to run to the people who could afford it.

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11 T H E F I R S T W AT E R W O R K S C O M PA N Y

In 1790 American cities drew their water almost exclusively from springs, wells, and cisterns, sources that became steadily more inadequate in quantity and quality as the population grew. By 1860, most cities had learned a great lesson. No longer could they depend upon internal sources of supply; at whatever expense or difficulty they must impound the waters of outlying lakes and rivers and bring this lifegiving stream through aqueducts and pipes into the very homes of their citizens. nelson m. blake, Water for the Cities

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n November 19, 1879, banker George W. Brackenridge completed an inspection of several sections of land in Kimble County owned by his brother Thomas. He wrote: “We arrived on this place last evening from a survey of the Seventeen Sections [10,880 acres] of your land in the northern portion of this County and I found it to far exceed my expectations.” He described “an abundance of water” on several of the tracts, and he said tract 19 had “all the water there is in that section in [a] splendid spring.” His enthusiasm about the land was based upon its water. Toward the end of the letter, he made a prophetic statement: “You must be careful not to dispose of those sections on which the water is unless the other goes with it, as the water renders the land valuable” (emphasis added). Brackenridge would prove central to any discussion of San Antonio water in this period. His “hard-learned” respect for water and the consequences that the lack of it had on real estate values strongly influenced Brackenridge’s investment decisions after the Civil War. The failure of his first real estate venture in Seguin had been caused by the severe drought of the mid-1850s. Acquisition 99

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of water and protection of rights to the water became the overriding criteria for all his subsequent decisions in purchasing real estate. Certainly, availability and control of water were the main reasons he purchased his homestead lots and other lands at the head of the San Antonio River. Earlier in 1879, his investment in the fledgling San Antonio Water Works Company had become so substantial that by the time of his letter to Thomas, he was not only the majority shareholder but also its president. As president he would acquire more land on the San Antonio River to protect and secure supply for the company. Brackenridge knew water was the key to the growth of cities, and as cities grew, ownership of land with water frontage would deliver great power and influence along with a strong potential for profit at resale. By 1873 the mayor of San Antonio, Francois Giraud, was actively seeking a water works system for his growing city. John Lockwood, whose letterhead described him as “Gas and Hydraulic Engineer and Contractor for the Erection of Gas and Water Works,” wrote a letter on April 8, 1874, to the mayor of San Antonio (without addressing Mayor Giraud by name) and solicited information about the city’s plans for a water works system. Lockwood was, at the time, erecting gas works in Dallas. Mayor Giraud wrote back requesting some prices on pipe and answered some of Lockwood’s questions about San Antonio’s needs and topography. Lockwood responded on May 3 and quoted a price for ten-inch iron pipe; $1.25 per foot, shipped from New Orleans at shipping costs to be determined. He offered to send pipe, noting that “if you decide upon ordering . . . please give us timely notice.”  His statement is important as it indicated that Mayor Giraud was diligently investigating the construction and ownership of the water works system by the city itself. Giraud was a civil engineer by trade and was the original surveyor of Brackenridge’s Head-of-the-River lots when the city sold the lots at auction to Alderman James R. Sweet in 1852. Lockwood said he thought the proposed water works system would need to utilize steam-driven pumps to distribute the water; however, he now understood from the mayor’s letter that there was “sufficient elevation to supply by gravity,” an important aspect that was a significant influence on cost and design of the final system. In April, 1875, the city council invited the National Waterworks Company of New York to bid on a water works system, and the council went so far as to offer the company a contract, but the terms were not acceptable to the company.

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A closer look at the terms of the contract the New York company declined foretells problems for subsequent vendors. The contract proposed that the company have the right “to take pure and wholesome water from the San Antonio River, San Pedro Creek, or any other source of supply.” It further offered the company the equivalent of an open easement through “all of the streets, alleys, lanes, or public grounds, or across any bridge of the City.” The company’s obligation was “to erect and maintain all necessary engines, and machinery, or other appliances, necessary to such works for supplying said City, and its inhabitants with water.” The city reserved the right to purchase the company after five years and offered to rent fire hydrants at $150 per annum, payable quarterly. The city council would be in control exclusively of the location and number of hydrants. The New Yorkers more than likely declined the offer for its combination of low rent rates for hydrants and too much control by the council. Another failed attempt was made in September, 1875, by two other financially strong and influential local citizens, H. B. Adams and Francois Giraud, by then no longer mayor. William Corner in 1890 described the effort as having been undertaken “in spite of apathy and indifference prevailing,” a harbinger of future problems in the establishment of a paying citizen customer base for any water company in San Antonio. Finally, after all the years of investigation and public debate, the city granted a contract to Jean Batiste Lacoste’s newly formed San Antonio Water Company on April 3, 1877. Lacoste, a colorful Frenchman, had married into one of San Antonio’s oldest families, the Menchacas. The construction of the “works” pursuant to the contract was officially accepted by the city council on July 5, 1878, but not without problems that would eventually cost the Frenchman his control of the company. It must be kept in mind that the New Yorkers had not found the terms acceptable even though the main source of revenue offered to them, the rent on fire hydrants, had been $150 each per year—$50 a year more per hydrant than in the Lacoste contract. Lacoste’s company may have been doomed to hard times or failure before it laid one foot of pipe. Brackenridge was an original shareholder in Lacoste’s company, although at first a minor one. However, Brackenridge exerted heavy influence on the company’s prospects of success; he was an unavoidable force to deal with due to his control of the San Antonio River around its headwater springs. As

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owner of San Antonio National Bank, by 1877 the leading financial institution in South Texas, he was a likely source for capital for Lacoste. His positive endorsement or negative opinion of the venture would significantly influence other investors’ decisions about purchasing stock in the new company. Brackenridge’s aura brightened (or his shadow loomed over) every major business undertaking in San Antonio. Lacoste was a well-connected businessman who, by all indications from his past success, should have been able to make the water company succeed. Born in southern France, most likely in 1824, he came to the United States in 1847. Shortly after landing in New Orleans, he moved to San Antonio and became a United States citizen in 1858. He partnered with local politician James R. Sweet, aforementioned owner of the headwater spring to the San Antonio River, to form the firm of Sweet & Lacoste, a company described on their letterhead as “Dealers in dry goods, groceries, clothing, hats, caps, boots, shoes, hardware, etc., etc.,” apparently everything imaginable. The Sweet & Lacoste Company was most successful during the Civil War as cotton traders, with Lacoste working in Matamoros in the semi-illegal purchase of cotton grown in Texas and its sale to hungry European buyers and desperate Yankee textile mills. An invoice dated July 3, 1863, indicates the huge volume of business Sweet & Lacoste did as cotton buyers. They paid $62,001.30 to a grower in Wharton County, Texas, for 305,949 net pounds held in 600 bales, or 20 cents per pound. The price obtained when Sweet & Lacoste sold this one block of cotton is not of record, but other records of the period show that in April of 1863 the price received from supposedly “overseas” buyers in Matamoros was 36 cents per pound, and by November of the same year it had risen to 80 to 90 cents per pound. Calculations therefore indicate that Sweet & Lacoste could have achieved a gross sales price for this cotton ranging from $110,142 (36 cents/pound) to $244,760 (80 cents/pound) to as high as $275,354 (90 cents/pound), resulting in a profit ranging from $48,141 to $213,353; and payment would have been received in hard currency of gold or silver. By the end of the war cotton was trading for $1.25 per pound in Matamoros and in Boston for $1.90 per pound. It would appear that it would have taken only a few contracts of this size to make Sweet & Lacoste very wealthy for their time. Yet Lacoste would have trouble raising money for the water works company less than a dozen years later. He would

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eventually lose control of the company to Brackenridge, a man whose Civil War activities both paralleled and conflicted with Lacoste’s. Brackenridge was in and out of Matamoros during the Civil War, privately trading cotton in the early years and later in service to the Union as a federal treasury agent. Lacoste, as we have seen, resided there during the war to trade cotton and deal in other goods for Sweet & Lacoste. While there is no record that the two men knew each other at that time, it is reasonable to assume they did. Brackenridge was doing business with Charles Stillman, the famous cotton trader and founder of Brownsville, Texas, and could easily have come across Lacoste through him. Due to the volume of business Sweet & Lacoste were doing on the border in cotton, Stillman, who was actually Brackenridge’s mentor and had been for some time, doubtless knew Lacoste, and there are indications that Brackenridge may have known Lacoste quite well. On July 3, 1878, Brackenridge and his mother, Isabella, filed a lawsuit against the City of San Antonio in order to stop the city from building a street through their Head-of-the-River homestead property, which they had purchased in 1867 from George Barnes. Still filled with jealousy and dismay from the unwise sale of the land in 1852 at public auction, the city leaders continued to be determined to usurp some of Brackenridge’s control over it and especially his control over the water in the San Antonio River. The city’s tactic at this time was to attempt to condemn some of Brackenridge’s property in order to build a road to the river. For a lawsuit against a city to proceed at the time under Texas law, a Bond for Injunction had to be posted to cover the anticipated expenses of the city’s defense, should it be found not liable for damages to the plaintiff. The bond in this case was set in the amount of a thousand dollars, a substantial sum in 1878. The peculiar aspect of this bond that indicates an unusually strong relationship between Lacoste and Brackenridge was that Lacoste was one of the “securities,” or guarantors, for the Brackenridges’ obligation. The other “security” was Brackenridge’s brother J. T. (Thomas). Even though Brackenridge was a minority shareholder in Lacoste’s water company at the time, it is doubtful that a corporate business relationship would lead Lacoste to guarantee a bond on a personal lawsuit of Brackenridge’s unless he was a close associate or friend or had some other very good reason for doing so.

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There were other odd coincidences between these men in their past. Lacoste and Brackenridge had been on opposite sides of the war in Mexico between Benito Juárez and Emperor Maximilian. Lacoste was a close personal friend of the emperor. For several weeks in the spring of 1864, Brackenridge spent time with Juárez. He delivered to Juárez a message of support from President Abraham Lincoln, who had been a friend of his father John Brackenridge back in Indiana, for Juárez’s efforts against Maximilian so as to encourage Juárez to cut off the Mexican trade in cotton with the Confederates. A more unique and conflicting set of circumstances could not have been imagined for Brackenridge. Brackenridge was “inactive” as a cotton trader himself when he approached Juárez, but—potentially in conflict with the goal of his mission—he continued to be friends with the wealthiest trader of all, Stillman. Stillman was the closest of friends in that he became Brackenridge’s main investor when Brackenridge founded the San Antonio National Bank in 1866. Brackenridge by delivering this message ran the risk, if Juárez had the power and motivation, of drying up Stillman’s remaining business in the cotton trade in Matamoros. This did not happen, however, as Stillman traded cotton there until he left Matamoros forever in April, 1865. Had Brackenridge convinced Juárez to stop the cotton trade, it would have ended Lacoste’s career as a cotton trader for sure, or even cost him his life, as Juárez would certainly have considered Lacoste an enemy due to his support of Maximilian. Throughout his career, Brackenridge would face similar conflicts in the performance of a corporate or government duty somewhere that would negatively impact his personal interests elsewhere. Upon his return to San Antonio after the Civil War, Lacoste was elected Bexar County treasurer, indicating that even though he was a war profiteer, he was not blamed for it; his marriage to a Menchaca had apparently secured him an acceptable place in San Antonio society. When Brackenridge returned, he would be considered an outsider by San Antonians most of his life, labeled as and blamed for being a war profiteer, not only in San Antonio but all across Texas. Additionally, Lacoste acquired one of the first ice-making plants in the United States in 1869. Surviving stock certificates show that Lacoste purchased the San Antonio Ice Company, which had originally been established by Holden & Company in 1867, one year after Brackenridge formed the San

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Antonio National Bank. One of his investors in the ice company was Dr. Ferdinand Herff, who “became identified with the La Coste Ice Company, the first manufacturer of artificial ice in the United States,” yet another example of a tie between Lacoste and Brackenridge through Brackenridge’s dear friend, San Antonio National Bank shareholder and director Dr. Herff. Frenchmen led the world in ice machine making at this time and had made the first artificial ice in San Antonio in 1866. Remie Bergaire brought a patented machine from Matamoros, Mexico, to San Antonio and set up shop; however, he failed to purchase rights from the holders of the ice machine patent. In 1867 another Frenchman named Bujac came to San Antonio from New Orleans and began making ice under a valid patent. The Bujac machine was capable of making two tons of ice a day, and the San Antonio River was an ideal source for fresh spring water. C. H. Guenther, founder of Guenther’s Mill on the river, wrote home to his mother in Germany on July 5, 1867: “Ice is much used here. I now have two ice machines.”  Ice in hot San Antonio gave everyone relief. Guenther erected his “little” ice plant “to cool the drinks of thirsty males and to supply the single ‘elegant ice cream parlor’ for the special enjoyment of the ladies.”  It is likely that Guenther’s machine was French in manufacture and equally likely that Lacoste had some hand in the Guenther purchase of the equipment. Whether motivated by inside knowledge and preferred access to ice-making equipment from his French countrymen or solely by the prospect for success in the ice business in hot, dry San Antonio, Lacoste, like Brackenridge, had a keen eye for the potential profits of water and its byproducts in a growing city. The year the city awarded the water works contract to Lacoste’s San Antonio Water Company, 1877, was important for San Antonio for another key reason; it was the year the first railroad reached the city. Railroads to San Antonio meant transport for cattle, and more significant, for butchered meat. Safe transportation of butchered meat required refrigeration; refrigeration at that time required ice, and lots of it. Water was needed to make the ice. Since Lacoste had the ice company and now the water company, it should have added up to a winning combination for him, but the water company part of the equation did not work out the way he had planned. Lacoste’s contract with the city seemed simple enough. It was a twentyfive-year exclusive right to supply running water from the San Antonio River to the city. The council leased six acres to the company for a reservoir and

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also leased property at the head of the Upper Labor Ditch to give it access to the river. Contrary to the opinion that the city was more concerned with fire protection than with the quality of water, the contract mirrored the contract that had been proposed to the National Water Works Company in specifying the delivery of “pure” water. “Pure” water from the San Antonio River could be found only at the headwaters or springs upstream of the filthy, congested city. The unintended consequence of the lease on the San Antonio River in lieu of San Pedro Springs was to give Brackenridge a degree of control the city certainly never meant him to have, since he owned the ultimate source of the river, the headwater springs. One of the major potential problems with public works is acquisition of the needed right-of-way to run mains and lateral water pipes. The water works contract solved this problem. “The City shall concede to the said Lacoste and Associates the right and privilege for the purpose of laying pipes and making repairs of said works to enter upon any Street, Square, lane, or alley under the control of such City.”  Another key term in the contract was that the city had the right to purchase the works at some “appraised” value to be determined at the end of the initial term or later, the said term to be extended indefinitely until the city did purchase the works. This purchase option alone should have made the stock of the water company irresistible to investors. If the city did not exercise the purchase option at the end of the first twenty-five years, then it retained the right to do so at the end of each successive five-year period, with twelve months’ prior notice. The contract had a strict performance provision; the improvements had to be completed within fifteen months of the execution date of the contract. Possibly this short deadline scared investors away. The difficulty Lacoste had in raising capital could simply have been a sign of the times that still prevailed in most nineteenth-century corporate capital-raising efforts in the United States. Blake said of an original Philadelphia water company’s struggle to raise capital to fund its system: “The early difficulties of the company had a catastrophic effect upon its finances. Like most corporations of the day, this one had received only a small part of its needed capital at the time of the original stock subscription. Subsequent installments were to be paid by the stockholders as the work progressed. But nervous investors showed great reluctance to fulfill their subscriptions. Even at the hazard of forfeiting what they had al-

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ready paid in, many stockholders ceased their payments.”  Blake’s statement aptly described the headaches of Lacoste’s San Antonio Water Company. Even today, this is still typical of the difficulties startup corporations have in the funding of their needs. By the time of completion of construction and acceptance by the city, Lacoste’s position of control in the company was weakened because he had had to seek money more than once from Brackenridge. Then as it is now, each time a company went back to the investors for more money, the position of the controlling partner, in this case Lacoste, was diluted. Lacoste lost more and more control of his company with each new capital injection from Brackenridge. Early indications of trouble in raising funds to get started can be found in a letter W. R. Freeman, engineer and designer of the proposed water works system, wrote Lacoste from Austin on May 6, 1877, barely one month after the contract was granted. Freeman asked Lacoste how he found things when he returned to San Antonio and reported on his progress in attempts to raise money to build the system. He enclosed a copy of the “amended” contract with the city of San Antonio for Lacoste to read. Freeman reported that Mr. White, a potential investor, would not be “left in any condition to assist us.” He also mentioned that retired General Joseph E. Johnston was in Austin representing an insurance company in the “east” that had money to loan or invest in any secure manner. Freeman said Johnston’s company would not be able to “do anything in our case” and that he was not willing to confide their plans to the general. This letter indicates a fatal flaw in the city’s process of vendor selection; it failed to be sure Lacoste’s company was financially stable. He did complete the works on time, but today, bonds or other proof of performance are required up front from a new vendor such as Lacoste before any city will sign a contract for such an important utility. Ten days later, his anxiety growing, Freeman wrote to Lacoste again:

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I suppose you have got things straightened out in re this and that we shall soon be prepared for making some definite arrangements in regards to the construction of the San Antonio Water Works? I am in receipt of some very low figures on turbine wheels and hydrants and expect everyday to get some information on the cost of the other machinery and pipe. Not having heard from you for

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some time I am at a loss to know how matters stand with me and the City of San Antonio. Have met some RR [railroad] friends here of late who advise me variously on the best plan to pursue but have from a good businessman and reliable friend the advice that we can borrow all the money we need on the Contract by going north soon. But all this can only be arrived at by a careful rehearsal of the facts involved and a long talk between us two. Please let me hear from you soon. Mather left here for St. Louis on Tuesday to sell bonds. Brackenridge [Thomas] says we have a fine contract in San Antonio. Wants us to agree to buy his piece of land between the works and Lockwood’s piece (south to the gate). He says “Bro Geo” bought that of the City. The City sold with it all the water power also and we must not attempt to interfere with the power he has by reason of the fall from the ditch to the creek, which of course we shall not do. But it does seem as if he was worried badly by his inability to become damaged but of course this is only a straw in the wind to show the way it blows. Am still pegging away at the plumbing business trying to make bread and clothes hoping to hear from you soon. Freeman’s letter revealed much about the continued risky state of the new company’s ability to fund the costs of the construction of the water works system. Freeman was ready to go to work and was getting good bids for materials and equipment. Of more alarm, he alerted Lacoste that he had been warned by Brackenridge’s brother, more than likely Thomas, that “Brother George” was worried about the impact the Lacoste contract with the City of San Antonio might have on him and his property. Thomas Brackenridge presumably issued this subtle and indirect warning to remind Lacoste that Brother George had a variety of interests he expected Lacoste to address with him, or else. Not only did this letter reveal the continued problems that Lacoste faced in funding the construction costs of the contract; it also revealed the pressure Freeman felt considering that a month of the fifteen-month completion deadline had gone by without any work having begun. Likewise, it raised the specter that George Brackenridge’s prowess in the courts and in the financial world of San Antonio could become a thunderstorm over Lacoste’s project

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and that Brackenridge would have to be contacted, be dealt with, and have his interests considered. Lacoste’s company needed money, and Brackenridge was there to loan it to the struggling company, provided of course that the loan was accompanied with Lacoste’s personal guaranty. Brackenridge’s control of most of the water at the head of the river had from the beginning given him an influence on the success or failure of Lacoste’s venture. Brackenridge even leased a portion of his homestead land to the water works company on February 7, 1878, in return for a tap in his home. Freeman’s design and supervision delivered a simple and effective scheme to utilize the river’s own flow to power the pumps that lifted the water to a reservoir at a higher level. The water was then distributed by gravity flow to the entire city’s system. The reservoir was built east of the river, not on the contemplated location leased by the city to the company. Freeman’s design resulted in a “raceway” from the upper river straight to a pump house. The raceway was masterfully designed so as not to interfere “to any appreciable” degree with the supply of water to the irrigation ditches. The pumps lifted the water up River Street or Broadway to the top of the hill through Mahncke Park along Funston Street up to the Water Works Reservoir shown in figure 19. The water then had enough gravity flow power from the reservoir to service the entire system. Corner said the water-powered turbines in the pumphouse “did good service” for many years, further proof Freeman did a good job in design, supervision, and equipment selections. After extensive testing of the system, conducted under the control of the San Antonio Herald founder and former Texas secretary of state J. P. Newcomb, chair of the Committee on Water Works, the city council officially accepted the contract on July 5, 1878. By the time of this approval, Brackenridge had advanced substantial loans to assist the company in completing the improvements on time. Lacoste had successfully finished construction, yet his hopes of personal financial success with the water company were soon to be dashed. After fifteen months of hard work, Lacoste’s company would face a citizenry in San Antonio who were simply not interested in becoming customers. Surprisingly, citizens were ambivalent about the new opportunity. Lacoste predicted hundreds of customers, but not even one hundred signed up for service. The free water from the acequias and shallow wells owned by indi-

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Figure 19. City Map of San Antonio, 1946. The map shows the “raceway” in Brackenridge Park, the “Water Works Reservoir,” and the headwater springs of the San Antonio River on Brackenridge’s old homestead, now belonging to the University of the Incarnate Word. Original map by Southwell Map Company, in the private collection of the author.

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viduals was still the preferred source of water for most citizens at this time. Many still purchased their drinking water from water carriers or barrileros like the barefooted barrel roller in figure 20 or from aquadores who carried two buckets of water on a large limb across their shoulders. Both types of vendors delivered the water to their customers’ homes. The source of water for these entrepreneurs was usually the acequia if a buyer was unlucky; upstream from the San Antonio River or San Pedro Creek if a buyer was lucky. By the end of 1878 Lacoste’s company had invested $115,521 in the infrastructure of the system. In order to earn a return of 6 percent on this investment, a minimum acceptable return for the risk perceived in business enterprises at the time, the company needed to generate more than $6,931 per year, after expenses of administration. The handful of paying customers disheartened and frustrated the shareholders, especially Brackenridge. The company and its shareholders made little or no return on their investment then or for many years to come. Brackenridge said in September of 1890: “There has been paid to them [the shareholders] less than two per cent per annum upon the amount invested to the present time. For the first seven years the officers contented themselves to work without salaries. I traveled over the country at my own expense to make contracts for pipe and material.” 

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Figure 20. Water carrier or barrilero, photographed in Brownsville, ca. 1885. UTSA’s Institute of Texan Cultures, 076-0408.

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When the company fell upon hard times during construction and especially after opening for business, Brackenridge accepted stock in payment of Lacoste’s debts. By 1879 Brackenridge owned a majority of the stock and had become the president. Four years later in 1883, Lacoste and his shareholders, one of whom was the same J. P. Newcomb who had headed the city’s committee conducting and approving the performance tests, had “sold” (more accurately, had lost) the balance of their stock to Brackenridge and a few of his close friends. Newcomb and Lacoste were said to be angry that Brackenridge had gained control of “their” company. An indication as to whether any good feelings remained in the relationship between Brackenridge and Lacoste after Brackenridge had gained control is found in the county district records of 1886. On January 23, 1883, Lacoste borrowed $2,800 from Brackenridge’s San Antonio National Bank, a date that corresponds closely with the date of Lacoste’s last ownership in the water works company. Lacoste eventually defaulted on the loan. On November 29, 1886, the bank was forced to sue for collection. Judgment was rendered in favor of the bank, which indicates that the two men were no longer on friendly terms. If Brackenridge’s relationship with Lacoste ended roughly, his relationship with the city, at best rocky to this point, next took a turn down a twenty-yearlong road of water contract renegotiations, bitter complaints by both parties, unethical tactics by the city politicians, and of course lawsuits. Brackenridge was no stranger to lawsuits and conflicts with the City of San Antonio, having had problems with his homestead property and the city at various times from 1872 to 1878. The water works company was forced to file suit against the city on May 26, 1880, for recovery of rents due and default by the city on its obligations under the contract. It won a judgment against the city in the 1880 lawsuit in the amount of $4,384.49 plus interest plus costs of the lawsuit. Brackenridge would be forced to sue the city time and again, not only to honor its obligations under the water works contract but eventually also to collect loans his San Antonio National Bank had made to the city. Whereas Brackenridge was able to prevail easily over debtors like Lacoste, and the water company won the first lawsuit against the city, the City of San Antonio would prove to be a much more powerful adversary for Brackenridge in the years to come. The city’s greatest legal strength and threat to the water company came through its condemnation powers, which extended over ma-

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jor public services that were held in private hands, such as the water works company. Perhaps an even more potent strength of the city was the ability of its political leaders to “stump” Brackenridge into submission at the podium of public opinion. During the next twenty years two mayors, James H. French and Bryan Callaghan, along with an alderman, Nelson Mackey, dedicated themselves futilely to domination over Brackenridge. They portrayed him as a “monopolizer,” “rich banker,” and “war profiteer,” both to further their prospects in the continual battles against him and to feed their own political careers. The focal points of their declaration of war on Brackenridge were the water company and his riverfront homestead property. Mackey would prove to be the “yard dog” in the city’s war on Brackenridge. An example of what he said in just one of his campaigns against Brackenridge’s control of the head of the river appeared in the San Antonio Daily Express in 1886: “If Brackenridge owns the head of the river, he can govern the city by curtailing the supply of pure water. If the city owns it, we can govern him.”  Although Mackey’s statement completely distorted the truth, since he knew full well that Brackenridge had no rights under the law to “curtail the supply of pure water,” he and Mayor Bryan Callaghan would spend years attacking Brackenridge’s character and legitimate property, always to no avail.

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O

n July 5, 1878, with Lacoste’s completion and the city council’s acceptance of construction of the water works system and its acceptance by the city council, water took another step toward becoming a consumer commodity. It would be available for delivery by a private contractor to customers in their homes and places of business for a monthly fee, in pure and reliable quantity under pressure. In the predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods west of the river and San Pedro Creek, water was still drawn from shallow onsite wells, purchased from water carriers, or dipped directly by individuals from the river or creek. As noted, only a handful of customers received their water from the newly completed San Antonio Water Works Company. By 1880 the population of San Antonio had grown to 20,550, with little change in demographics and no new industry in town. The water works company was struggling to gain acceptance in the community. Water was the focus of never-ending and well-publicized conflicts between the water works company and the city. To make things worse for the fledging water works company, the city would not pay its rents on the public fire hydrants. In fact, the water works company, under the leadership of new president Brackenridge, had to sue to get them to pay anything at all. Purity of the water was important to Brackenridge and was an absolute requirement of the contract with the city. Brackenridge’s attitude toward this is described by Basil Young Neal in his 1939 master’s thesis. Neal was fortunate enough to interview M. C. Judson in person in 1937; Judson was a Brackenridge associate and gave a “fact witness statement” on the water works company’s search for pure water. Neal said of his interview with Judson: One of Mr. Brackenridge’s aims after obtaining control of the water works system was to obtain a source of pure water. The springs 114

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at the head of the river were pure at their source, but it was necessary to run the water through a raceway and then pump it into an open reservoir. In this reservoir and raceway grew a species of fresh water algae that got into the mains and discolored the water. Mr. Brackenridge and his associate, M. C. Judson, now one of the trustees of his assets, tried various means to prevent this growth from forming in the water, but with no permanent success. Finally they decided that the only permanent pure supply would have to be artesian in source. In 1888, Mr. Brackenridge and Judson drilled a well near the old reservoir at the head of the river, but the well failed to flow and was too deep to pump successfully. Three years later, after study of the conditions, Mr. Brackenridge bought land south of Market Street in San Antonio and drilled an eight inch well for artesian water. At 890 feet the water was struck with so much pressure that it flowed out of a pipe fifteen or twenty feet high and blew out pieces of rock “as large as a man’s head” according to witnesses.

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In 1891 technology moved San Antonio’s water supply and distribution further into the modern era. Over the past decade the city’s population had doubled to 37,653 people. The river and springs were simply not adequate to fulfill the demand of the new population. The well Brackenridge and Judson drilled provided 3 million gallons of water per day, which satisfied the city’s needs for several years. This well cost the company $6,751, a large sum in 1891. The company drilled six more artesian wells in the 1890s at a total cost of $39,725. Why was it so critical that the company drill these artesian wells? Their contract with the city required them to provide “all the pure water” the city needed. This broad and open-ended language placed a heavy duty on the water works company; to avoid being in default, they had to provide all the pure water without limitation or financial relief of any kind other than renegotiation of the terms of their contract. Pure water was no longer available from the river in reliable quantity to meet the city’s needs, and its needs were growing by leaps and bounds. The water works company was by no means a good investment for its shareholders. By September of 1890, paying customers of the water company

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Figure 21. The 3-million-gallon-a-day well drilled by Brackenridge and M. C. Judson in 1891. U.S. Department of the Interior, Water Supply and Irrigation Papers of the United States Geological Survey No. 13. Private collection of the author. 116

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had finally exceeded 4,300 in number, but at $12 per year for a nonmetered half-inch tap in a home, the total gross revenue generated was only $51,600. The city’s rental on some five hundred fire hydrants in 1890 earned the company around $30,000 a year, if and when the city paid its bills. Total gross revenue for the company was thus about $81,600 that year. The shareholders and company had spent $817,920 in capital improvements alone, not including any salaries, maintenance, or repair costs. To maintain a system such as this, little if any net income would result from operations with so few paying customers at such low fees. The $817,920 spent on infrastructure alone, when applied to the 4,300 customers, meant that each customer’s tap cost the company $190. Therefore, after adjustment for the cost of the fire hydrants but not the mains, and reducing the individual tap cost to $167, it would take almost fourteen years of annual water fees to pay back the cost of each customer’s tap; again, remember this does not include any costs for salaries, repairs, or maintenance. By the end of the century, when San Antonio’s population had reached 53,321, the water works company had approximately 8,500 contracts and had invested $1,265,569 or $149 per contract in infrastructure alone. Adjusted for fire hydrants but not mains, the cost drops to $131 per tap, but it still took eleven years per tap just to pay back the investment, without any return on investment and without inclusion of the costs of salaries, maintenance, or repair. In 1902 the water company hired Chester B. Davis to appraise its value so as arrive at a sales price for a pending sale to the city. The city wanted to buy the company, and Brackenridge and the shareholders wanted to sell it, but as usual they could not agree on anything, especially not upon what constituted a fair price. Davis pointed out in the 1902 report the legal dilemma the water company faced. Although Texas law was silent on the issue at the time, he opined that other U.S. law provided a precedent. Davis claimed the precedent required a private water company to “supply the public demand and [it] must take the risk of any falling off in that demand (or increase in same). . . . They have expended their money for the benefit of others and subjected it to the control of others.”  Another comment followed in the case: “As we have said, it is not the water of the distributing works which the company is said to own. . . . [The water was] acquired and contributed for the use of the public.”  Brackenridge and his shareholders drilled the wells so as to avoid being in

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Figure 22. Water Works Company contract for residence of San Antonio mayor Bryan Callaghan. Courtesy of the San Antonio Public Library, Texana Collection.

default on the contract; default would place their entire investment at risk. It is interesting to note that in his report Davis emphatically states: “As between the two the city has every point of vantage . . . therefore there is greater need of the exercise of fairness on the part of the city.”  Fairness on the part of the city would definitely be a new concept, as the city had never in the entire twenty-five-year history of the water works company contract treated the company fairly. On February 3, 1880, shortly before the company’s lawsuit for payment was filed against the city on May 26, a “Special Committee” of the city council declared that the water works contract was a “monopoly” and voted to “annul” it. They further declared the water works company in noncompliance with the contract. All of their accusations were unfounded, as the outcome of the lawsuit determined, but the city fathers had used typical tactics to avoid paying for the fire hydrants they ordered to be installed. Another city council attack on the water works company occurred on June 8, 1893. The city council again decided to propose repudiating the con-

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tract. On Friday, June 23, 1893, Mayor George Paschal claimed in a newspaper interview that the water works company did not provide adequate pressure in the water lines, did not put in a telegraph line for fire alarms from the fire department, put in fire hydrants where they were not necessary to cheat the taxpayers, and did not place standpipes for sprinkling streets at “convenient” distances. Brackenridge answered all the questions on Saturday, June 24, 1893, in a diplomatic manner. First, he thought the mayor had surely been misinformed that the water works company was in default of the contract. Regarding the telegraph line, Brackenridge said the people should remind the mayor to interview the city’s own electrician, who put in the line as required, and confirm that the water works company had paid for it. The pressure had always met the contract parameters, as daily test logs proved. As to fire hydrants, they numbered around 600 and were 1 to every 1,000 feet, not the 1 in every 350 feet the mayor had accused the company of installing in order to receive more rent. On the location of the fire hydrants and water mains, all had been placed by the city council water committee, and the water works company simply complied with their wishes. He said:

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Each administration for years has been begged by the water works company not to order extensions of mains or new hydrants unless the true interest of the city and her citizens demanded these extensions, and not to incur unnecessary expenses in this regard. . . . Whenever free hydrants for drinking purposes or for furnishing water in barrels or wagons or buckets for general house purposes have been ordered by the city and for which the city should have to pay the water works company has never made any charge for such hydrants whatever, and many poor people in our city are getting their water supply gratis. Brackenridge and the water works company placed hydrants, mains, and standpipes only where the Water Works Committee told them to do so. In fact, the Water Works Committee micromanaged the water contract. Individuals from time to time petitioned the city council about a variety of subjects pertaining to water. Things such as requests by individuals to use the fire hydrants to sprinkle the streets required a petition, referral to the Water

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Works Committee, a determination and recommendation by them back to city council, then a vote by council. The sprinkling of streets was always a sore spot for the water works company because their contract did not allow them to charge for it, and the citizens, when granted permission, watered the streets profusely. The Davis report of 1902 discussed waste of water from above ground leaks, street sprinkling, and breaks in underground pipes as one of the major problems faced by the water works company. “Like earlier officials in search of a scapegoat” aptly sums up the stormy water conflicts between the city and the water works company. The contract was always controversial and of interest to the citizenry since all revered fresh water. Scares about cholera came and went, sometimes conveniently for the politicians, as many San Antonians vividly remembered the last major outbreak of the dread disease in 1866. The mayors used Brackenridge and the water works company as focus in elections, to divert the citizenry’s attention from budget overruns and poor management, and whenever else it suited their personal or collective agendas. Water conflicts not related to the water company were beginning to die down, since the acequia system was all but finished. In 1899, the acequias were officially discontinued as a source of public water supply, and the few

Figure 23. In proof of Brackenridge’s point about free water to barrels and wagons, the water carrier here is filling up for free in 1905 from the standpipe used to sprinkle the streets. Original postcard in the private collection of the author.

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remaining in use for irrigation south of the city were placed under the overall supervision of the superintendent of sanitation. By 1900 the San Antonio River no longer provided the drinking water of the city. The water works company was completely supplied by artesian wells and had been for almost a decade. The population of the city was 53,321. Even with no major private industry other than brewing companies, the city still had the highest assessed taxable value in the state at $30,975,000.

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I have seen this bold, bubbling, and laughing river dwindle. This river is my child and it is dying and I cannot stay here to see its last gasps. It is probably the sinking of many artesian wells. I have paid thousands of dollars for legal opinions on the question of boring of wells, but they all say I have no remedy—and I must go. george brackenridge letter, 1897, quoted in Williams, “Recollections.”

T

he new drilling technology Brackenridge employed to meet the stringent terms of the water contract had disappointing consequences for his own homestead on the banks of the river. Brackenridge had also drilled other deep wells in the 1890s to meet his company’s contract obligations to the city. The success of these wells caused other San Antonians to drill similar wells. The effect was that the aquifer was not able to recharge quickly enough during droughts to keep the river flowing. In dismay, Brackenridge sold his beloved homestead to the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word in 1897. Due to the rapid growth of the city he had no choice but to find a more reliable and prolific source of water than the river alone to protect his and the other shareholders’ investment in the water company. They could not afford to risk a contract default by not providing enough “pure water” to meet the needs of the rapidly growing city. By 1920 more than 150 deep wells had been drilled into the Edwards Aquifer in Bexar County alone and were pumping feverishly. Other areas of the state, especially in the west, took notice and followed San Antonio’s lead. As more wells were drilled into the aquifer, the once abundant springs that fed the river dried up completely, sometimes for years. As the wells depleted the aquifer, groundwater use became a new issue, which remains unresolved in 2008. In 1902, the same year the Davis report was delivered to the city and 123

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Brackenridge, a lawsuit over groundwater use was filed in Denison, Texas. The Texas Supreme Court ruling in the case of W. A. East v. Houston and Texas Central Railway in 1904 established the still valid rule of capture in Texas groundwater law. Thereafter the rule of capture decision caused the “legitimate” death of springs, household water wells, aquifers, and creeks all over the state. The ruling in the East case went unnoticed by the general public until 1991, when the notorious “catfish farm” water well was drilled in Bexar County; the enormous amount of groundwater produced by that well was lawful based upon the precedent set in the East case. The amount of water harvested legally from this one well finally shocked the public and politicians into awareness of the impact of the rule of capture. In other areas of the state that had not enjoyed the kind of prolific abundance the San Antonio River offered, by 1904 there had been sixty years of hot dispute over claims of rights to use the surface or flowing water of rivers for irrigation purposes. The surface water disputes were caused by the Republic of Texas’ decision to honor simultaneously the pre-Independence irrigation rights deriving from Spanish and Republic of Mexico law and grants while also recognizing English Common Law as the basis for the new country’s legal system.

English Common Law and Spanish Civil Law, Texas Style In its exercise, “Spanish water law, if not representing the triumph of reason over will, was an ingenious system that provided the moral mechanism for bridging the gap between the self-interest of the individual and the larger concerns of society. It combined the reasonableness of private property with the justice of serving the common good.”  The Congress of the Republic of Texas decreed the common law of England effective as the law of the land on March 16, 1840. Water rights under English common law were different than under the civil law of Spain and the Republic of Mexico. From 1840 to the mid-1960s the Texas Legislature and the courts struggled with the conflict between the two legal systems over the rights to water of riparian lands, or lands adjacent to flowing water in rivers and streams. Under English common law, riparian landowners had the right to take water from flowing streams for irrigation based solely upon their adjacency to the water. That system is commonly referred to as a riparian system.

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Under Spanish and Republic of Mexico law, water could not be taken from a river or stream for irrigation without an explicit grant from the sovereign. The Spanish and Mexican system is commonly referred to as an appropriative system. San Antonio was not the first place within today’s Texas geographical boundaries where the Spanish dug acequias; the area south of El Paso was home to the first irrigation system in 1680. However, San Antonio was the first city in which Spain granted irrigation rights officially to flowing waters both in the river and from the acequias. Since 1840 the courts in Texas have relied upon the customary practices and application of Spanish laws in early San Antonio to support their rulings and set legal precedents on water issues. The laws relating to water rights in Texas, due to their confusing nature in the past, still send many attorneys and more than a few judges scurrying for cover even today. Federal Judge James V. Allred, former attorney general and governor of Texas, declared in 1955:

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For years it has been a matter of common knowledge that the Texas water laws and decisions are in hopeless confusion; that even if they are clear as some attorneys profess to believe them, their application and administration would be difficult . . . ; that the Board [Texas State Board of Water Engineers] has granted permits on many streams in the state, very few of which have been cancelled, in such numbers and for such quantities, that if riparian rights are given the full effect, practically every drop of water, normal flow or flood, is “bespoken.”  There have been and continue to be logic-defying and seemingly unfair judicial rulings on water issues in Texas. The same holds true for guidance from the legislatures. The lack of legislation on various important water issues stands out most noticeably. The two most controversial and confusing issues involving Texas water are rights to irrigate from a flowing stream and use of large volumes of groundwater in such quantity that neighboring water wells, springs, and creeks go dry. A primer in water uses and the types of legal “geological containers” in which water is held under the law helps to separate the issues that are in dispute. There are three basic ways Texas water is used under the law: for households

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and livestock, for irrigation, and for industry. There are three types of water containers under the law: surface water in streams and rivers; groundwater or water underground in aquifers or streams; and “diffused” surface water, or water runoff from rains that does not flow in a stream with a defined bed. Spanish, Republic of Mexico, and Texas law have always concurred on protection of household and livestock use of any type of water; on this there has been no dispute. The heated disputes have always been over irrigation use, whether from surface water or groundwater. Why? Irrigation of land requires huge amounts of water. For example, irrigation today accounts for almost two thirds of all groundwater use in Texas. Until the late nineteenth century, most irrigation water came from rivers and streams. By the end of the first decade of the new century, claims were made for more water than flowed in most of the rivers of Texas, even during periods of nondrought flow conditions. With late nineteenth-century technology in which deep drilling and large-scale pumping equipment were developed, irrigation by groundwater became increasingly popular. Groundwater irrigation began to deplete aquifers and streams all around the state during times of drought. A strong argument can be made that Brackenridge’s first deep well drilled at the site of today’s Arneson River Theater on the Riverwalk helped to bring on the modern era of exploitation of aquifers and groundwater in Texas. Since the law in Texas officially recognizes the mixed heritage of the state, the blending of our Spanish and Republic of Mexico legal heritage with English common law has caused confusion and frustration over irrigation water and riparian rights to use it. In fact it was not until the fine clarifying work of Justice Jack Pope in the State of Texas v. Valmont Plantations case in 1962 and the subsequent Water Rights Adjudication Act of 1967 that the issue of riparian irrigation rights was settled in Texas. The basic cause of the confusion and conflict was the application and misunderstanding of riparian rights under the blended legal concepts. “In its wisdom,” wrote water rights expert Garland F. Smith, “the Legislature adopted the Common Law of England, and the courts (with the aid of the Bar) for over a century tried to adapt the non-consumptive riparian doctrine to the consumptive use of irrigation.”  As noted, the word riparian simply means adjacent to a flowing river or stream. However, riparian rights under English common law are made up of a bundle of rights, which include the right to flow [for industries such as mills], to fish, to navigate, and to use the

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water for irrigation and for domestic purposes. Irrigation is but one right in this package of rights, but is a highly consumptive use of water and certainly the most controversial in arid climates. In England and on the eastern coast of the United States, naturally wellwatered lands with ample rainfall, riparian rights are rarely controversial; there is generally plenty of water for everyone. This is not true in the arid West, and especially in the western half of Texas, which includes the San Antonio area. Riparian rights of irrigation in Texas created serious water shortages during the recurring and, at times, lengthy periods of drought across the state. When water is ample, few disputes arise, but when it becomes scarce due to drought or excessive use by one party over another, conflict explodes. In his opinion in the case of the San Juan Ditch Company v. Cassin et al. on November 15, 1911, Justice Cobbs of the Court of Civil Appeals of Texas wrote: “This controversy would, perhaps, never have arisen but for the lessened flow of the San Antonio River in the last few years, and its failure to provide a sufficient flow to fill the ditches.”  The obvious reason the San Antonio River had “lessened flow” in 1911 was the number of deep water wells that had been successfully drilled into the aquifer since Brackenridge’s wells in the 1890s. The significance of Spanish impact on Texas law is indicated by the large amount of land held under Spanish and Republic of Mexico grants to this day. Grants to some 26.3 million acres of the total Texas land area of 172.7 million acres, or 15.5 percent of the state, were made by the Crown of Spain or the Republic of Mexico. The water rights attached to these grants are critical elements of their value. As Hans W. Baade observed in 1986 in a St. Mary’s Law Journal article on the historical background of Texas water law: “Therefore, while Spanish and Mexican water law is entirely unrelated to the substantive contents of the Texas Water Code, water rights based on the law of the pre-Independence sovereigns of Texas [Spain and the Republic of Mexico] not only continued to be valid, but indeed had to be ascertained, whenever and wherever there were Spanish or Mexican land grants within a stream or stream segment to be adjudicated.”  Baade continued: “Water rights arising under Spanish and Mexican era grants had to be ascertained, even at this late date [1967], in terms of the water law of Spain and Mexico at the time and place of the grant.”  A key precedent for the legal recognition of Spanish water laws in Texas was written

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in 1877 by Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court Oran Milo Roberts, who said it was the duty of the court “to know and follow the law existing in any part of the present limits of this State, at the time, and under which, a title to land was acquired.”  Texas law has traditionally honored and continues to honor the prior real property rights associated with and appurtenant to land tracing its roots to pre-Independence grants. After 120 years of disputes in the courts, legislature, and government agencies statewide, the Texas Legislature enacted the Water Rights Adjudication Act of 1967; it required that all claims to surface water for irrigation purposes had to be presented to the Texas Water Rights Commission for adjudication between July, 1967, and July, 1969. The goal was to verify the true claims with a certificate of adjudication to settle the years of costly conflict between parties claiming surface water rights. Another goal was to allocate the finite amount of Texas surface water fairly and responsibly. Since title to almost one sixth of all the land in the state was traced to valid pre-Independence grants, the question of the water rights associated with these claims was not merely one of historical interest but was and still is critical to the livelihood of the landowners and also to the market value of the property for both the owners and the various government taxing authorities, such as school districts. Some ten thousand claims were presented during this time, and most claims were adjudicated as confirmed or denied, but even today a few remain in dispute. Texas struggled for more than a century with the dual system of Anglo and Hispanic concepts of riparian rights. To make matters worse, controversial court rulings that began in Denison in 1902 over the use of groundwater further confused and frustrated the citizenry. While it is generally accepted that the adjudication of claims between 1967 and 1969 settled riparian irrigation issues around the state, groundwater issues are still as a whole unresolved after more than a century.

San Antonio Water in the Twentieth Century The history of water in San Antonio in the twentieth century, the subject of the forthcoming second volume of this book and highlighted in this section, is found in the conflicting and confusing legislation, agency regulations, and judicial rulings made in attempts to find equilibrium and resolution to

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the new water issues caused by the dramatic population increase around the state. In 1904 W. A. East v. Houston and Texas Central Railway Company was decided by the Texas Supreme Court, the ruling that in later years allowed the most notorious and infamous use of groundwater ever in Bexar County, or in the state for that matter: the “water-hogging” catfish farm of 1991. The East case is now better known as the “he who has the biggest pump wins” case. The Texas Supreme Court found that the H&TC Railway Company had no liability for drying up the domestic water wells of East and his neighbors with the railroad’s deeper and more heavily pumped industrial well used for its locomotive maintenance yard. The basis for the judgment in favor of the railroad company was an 1843 English case, Acton v. Blundell. The railroad’s wide and deep water well was the product of the new technology that Brackenridge first implemented successfully in San Antonio. The East case is one of the most intriguing legal stories in the history of Texas jurisprudence, to be discussed at length in the follow-up volume to this book. Acton v. Blundell was used to support the basis for the rule of capture, the nightmare that still rules in groundwater law in Texas, and is cited by the courts to this day. It has been a source of unending pain and consternation ever since 1904. The East precedent came home to haunt San Antonians in 1991. The rule of capture allowed the “catfish farmers” Ron Pucek and Louis Blumberg to pump enough water from the Edwards Aquifer to provide the annual needs of 250,000 San Antonians, or about one quarter of the water used in the city that year. The 1,600-foot-deep well they drilled originally for a proposed real estate venture was an artesian well, or a well flowing with natural pressure from the aquifer itself, capable of producing some 43 million gallons per day or 48,000 acre-feet per year. There was no need for any pump; the water flowed freely and powerfully to the surface, exploding some three stories into the air when the well was first completed. So powerfully did it flow that a neighbor said the “ground rumbled like a freight train” when the well first came in. Everyday citizens of San Antonio, people all across the state, and even people across the nation were shocked and astonished when they finally heard the wake-up call this well sent to everyone dependent upon the limited sources of groundwater. Pucek and Blumberg decided to raise catfish so as to use the massive amount of water “beneficially,” and under the rule of capture, they had the right to use all the water they could pump without liability to anyone.

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On December 5, 2000, the young city agency named the San Antonio Water System (SAWS) paid $9 million to purchase the catfish farmers’ groundwater. People across the state of Texas were incensed, but the rule of capture was the absolute law of Texas. The impact this single well had on the abundant waters of San Antonio was not only of immediate and critical concern to the city but also became a focal point of statewide and national outcry. The San Antonio City Council had created SAWS in 1992. It is a single utility with responsibility for water, wastewater, storm water, and reuse. SAWS also seeks out new water sources for the city as one of its major duties. Awakened by the catfish farm to the dangers of the rule of capture, the City Council of San Antonio created SAWS as a vehicle to prepare San Antonio for future water battles by consolidating power into one well-funded agency. Two other agencies had already been created by the legislature specifically to protect San Antonio’s river and water resources. The first agency authorized was the San Antonio River Authority in 1937: The San Antonio River Authority (SARA) was created by the 45th Texas Legislature on May 5, 1937, then reorganized in 1961 to plan, manage and implement water-related programs and projects within the San Antonio River Basin. The State of Texas empowered SARA to preserve, protect and manage the resources and the ecology of the San Antonio River and its tributaries. . . . As a result of the Act of the Texas Legislature which created the River Authority, the State of Texas granted to SARA such right, title, and interest as the State of Texas has to the entire bed and banks of the San Antonio River and its tributaries. SARA was involved in one of the most controversial cases in Texas history, San Antonio River Authority v. G. Garrett Lewis, et al., which went to the Texas Supreme Court in 1962. SARA “in the discharge of its normal duty of flood control and for the protection of lives, health and property of those living or owning property in the area” widened, straightened, and deepened the San Antonio River. In the process, the agency destroyed the ancient San Juan mission weir dam, which for more than two hundred years had raised the water from the river to feed

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the San Juan Acequia. When the river was deepened and the dam destroyed, the acequia immediately dried up, thereby eliminating irrigation water for downstream users. The downstream users sued for damages. Eventually, after multiple lawsuits with differing parties, a settlement was reached in which a new channel was reconstructed and fed with water that can be seen less than a hundred yards from San Juan mission today, even though it does not fill the acequia. For a while a set of pumps filled the ditch upstream from San Juan, but they were abandoned. For several years now the ditch has been dry. It has become a repository of all kinds of filth and trash. The Texas Legislature in 1993 established another agency more powerful in scope and with wider jurisdiction, also affecting San Antonio: the Edwards Aquifer Authority. Its mission statement sounds simple: “The Edwards Aquifer Authority manages, enhances, and protects the Edwards Aquifer system.” This concise sentence grossly understates the agency’s all but omnipotent power over groundwater in more than 5,400 square miles of drainage area, 1,250 square miles of recharge zone, and an artesian zone of 2,100 square miles. Its jurisdiction includes San Antonio and Bexar County. The authority’s website says: “The Edwards Aquifer Authority Act passed in 1993. However, legal challenges prevented the Authority from operating until June 1996. The Act created a 17 member board of directors that sets policy to manage, conserve, preserve, and protect the aquifer and works to increase recharge and prevent waste or pollution of the aquifer.”  The act creating the agency was challenged in the Texas courts for a number of years, and the case generally recognized as settling the matter was Barshop v. Medina County Underground Water Conservation District, 925 S.W. 2d 618 (Texas 1996). The ruling strongly recognized the legislature’s authority to regulate groundwater withdrawals in the Edwards Aquifer. The legislature had exercised its constitutional authority over conservation in 1949 to create groundwater conservation districts (GCDs), their first attempt to find a way to regulate groundwater use, which they hoped would indirectly offset the rule of capture. In late 2008 there were ninety-one GCDs in Texas with more to come in an attempt to manage groundwater resources at a local level. Many are not fully funded, but their impact on water rights has been significant and will continue to be so for years to come. The Edwards Aquifer Authority and a variety of GCDs have the power of eminent domain, the power to issue permits for drilling of water wells anywhere in the

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Edwards Aquifer jurisdiction, and the power to regulate the amount of water pumped; through their rulings, which change from time to time, they impact the development of land. Some GCDs have exercised their authority more fully than others, but the mechanism is in place for more and more stringent enforcement in the future statewide. The Edwards Aquifer Authority, for example, sets the boundaries of the aquifer recharge zone. If a tract of land lies inside the recharge zone, the allowable impervious cover (ground covering such as concrete, through which water cannot penetrate) is as low as 15 percent of the total square footage of the tract. This drastically lowers the development value of the land as it highly restricts the total size of impervious building pads and adjacent parking lots and driveways. The value of property is directly related to the amount of improvements that can be built and leased or sold. The value of farm and ranch land is also directly related to the quantity and quality of water available to the property, as water availability determines the types of crops that can be planted and the amount of livestock the land can support. The Edwards Aquifer Authority and GCDs, as they exercise their duties in limiting the amount of water to be taken from the ground and the amount of improvements that can be made, heavily impact the value of the underlying real estate. This creates a tension between the need to conserve and protect water resources and the source of funding for other desired political agencies, such as school districts. School districts raise tax revenues from ad valorem taxes or taxes based upon the value of the property in their district. When property values are lower, their revenues in turn are lower. This clash of interests between education and protection of the underlying aquifers and groundwater requires the people and governments of Texas to face difficult and often disappointing choices. While the legislature has tried to regulate groundwater with GCDs and entities like the Edwards Aquifer Authority, the rule of capture has been confirmed and continues to be confirmed a century after the East case, to the dismay of some judges over the years. Some of the rulings have simply defied all normal logic, as their outcome was so detrimental to many citizens and legitimate users of water. All have been significant in San Antonio’s water history. In 1954 a ruling was made in one of the cases most difficult to understand, Pecos County WCID No. 1 v. Clayton Williams, which severely harmed many

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people in the area of the west Texas community of Fort Stockton. The rule of capture was cited as the law that allowed the legal and total “drying up” of one of Texas’ most famous and historically prolific springs, Comanche Springs. The well-known horrific drought of the early 1950s was devastating to most of Texas, especially the area around Fort Stockton. Comanche Springs fed Comanche Creek, which served the Pecos County Water Control and Improvement District No. 1, a statutory senior appropriator of the surface water of the creek. Their official right to use the water of the creek for irrigation purposes was fully recognized by the state and stipulated by all parties in the lawsuit. When the farmers and ranchers drilled water wells into the Trinity Sands that fed the springs and began to pump water for their thirsty fields, the huge springs dried up completely, which in turn eliminated all the flow in Comanche Creek. This water had for decades been lawfully used by and relied upon by the downstream irrigators to support their livelihood. The ruling applied the East case and the principles of the rule of capture. The justices decided that the ranchers and farmers had no liability for depleting the water control district of its water. They ruled that the water in Comanche Creek did not become state water for appropriative use by the water control district until after it emerged from the spring. Prior to the water’s emergence it was groundwater and subject to the rule of capture. Since the water was lawfully taken “up dip” of the spring, and even though that taking completely eliminated all the water that could and would have emerged to fill the creek and assure its flow to the lawful users downstream, the downstream users had no claim for damages. The people of Fort Stockton to this day are frustrated since the fine park built around the six or more spring outlets is missing its key ingredient of joy, water. The legal destruction of these springs was influential in the legislature’s decision to expand the authority of the Edwards Aquifer Authority to protect its springs. A more recent case that yet again confirmed the rule of capture was Sipriano v. Great Spring Waters of America, Inc. in 1999. In this case the judges made a similar ruling based upon the East case. The bottling company purchased land neighboring Sipriano, constructed wells, and began producing groundwater for bottling purposes, which in turn depleted Sipriano’s water wells. The Texas Supreme Court found in favor of the bottling company and against Sipriano, even though his wells were ruined. In Sipriano as in other cases, including City of Corpus Christi v. City of

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Pleasanton in 1955, the Texas Supreme Court expressed strong comments in the record about the legislature’s reluctance to address the rule of capture, such as “but it [the legislature] has not seen fit to do so” and “I concur in the view that, for now—but I think only for now—East should not be overruled.”  Like it or not, all Texans and San Antonians in particular have to live with the threat of the rule of capture. The city through SAWS is reaching aggressively far and wide to find water resources for the future to lessen its dependence on the Edwards Aquifer. There are somewhat more pleasant elements in San Antonio’s twentiethcentury water history that are highly significant to the city. One of the most visible and enjoyable is the development of the world-famous Riverwalk located along the San Antonio River downtown. San Antonio’s Riverwalk is said to bring in as much as one third of the city’s total gross business revenue. It is being expanded northward in an ambitious project at the time of writing. The history of its construction on the river (or what some call destruction of the river) is a story of both success and disappointment. Another group of historical events in the story of San Antonio water centered around several projects on the Medina River, a key tributary in the watershed of the San Antonio River. Medina Lake was built between 1911 and 1912 as an irrigation reservoir financed by British investors. Planned by renowned engineer Fred Stark Pearson, the dam was completed in 1912 but at a cost of seventy lives lost to accidents and disease. The project had financial problems and, once completed, the intended lake sat dry for a year until rains finally filled it. The idea was to create an irrigation system to deliver water to thirty-four thousand acres of farm land; at the time of its construction it was the largest irrigation project in the West. Recurring droughts lowered the lake drastically from time to time. The major drought of 1996–98 brought a variety of land disputes to the property owners around the lake; public access, water ownership, and boundary issues led to heated conflict that filled the courthouses for years. Another controversial event on the Medina River was the failed Applewhite Reservoir project, planned by the city of San Antonio to serve as another source of water to take pressure off the Edwards Aquifer. SAWS purchased the land, but the project could not get the support of the citizens of San Antonio in two major referendum votes and was abandoned. Richard Beene discovered on the site of the reservoir one of the most important Late

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Paleo-Indian Angostura sites in the world, dating to around 6,800 b.c. Fortunately for archaeology and anthropology, the site was saved by the failure of the reservoir project. The land now is being protected as a permanent reserve. An exploration of the history of the Medina River projects and their relationship to water in San Antonio is another topic to be addressed in depth in the follow-up volume, covering land ownership, irrigation, water rights, and public finance issues. Water truly does render land its value and, as the state grows over the next fifty years, vast changes in Texas laws and relationship to water will occur— but not without great consternation, pain, and controversy. San Antonio’s long water history will continue to provide one of the key foundational sources of water law in Texas, and the city and its agencies will set the pace for water development statewide for years to come. What happens in water in San Antonio is noticed by and is a major influence on all of Texas.

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Fond Remembrances of Spanish and Simpler Times In summary, state ownership of all flowing streams with provision for explicit grants for use of the water, and allowing sale of those rights severed from the land itself, are but two of the Spanish concepts that survive today. Spanish law recognized and Texas law recognizes underground water, springs, and runoff water (or diffused surface water that does not flow in a stream or defined bed) as being owned by the private landowner. Spanish water law and current Texas law allow riparians to take water for irrigation from a publicly owned stream or river only by specific grant; there exists no automatic right to the water just because of proximity, as under typical English common law. The Texas courts still uphold these basic concepts, and the justices have used and will continue to use the history of colonial Spanish law in San Antonio to inform their decisions, with much of their legal research coming from documents held in the Bexar Archives. The flexible adaptability of the Spanish legal concepts derecho Indiano and derecho vulgar in local administration allowed settlers in far away new villages, such as San Antonio, to place into law locally designed regulations fitting their needs. The king served to be sure justice was done in his kingdom, an idea not found in most kingdoms in history, yet one the Spanish kings took as a their duty.

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The Spanish acequia systems were designed to follow the ancient Roman concept that “water runs and ought to run as it used to run.” All water that did not soak into the fields in the irrigation system was returned to the river or creek, an example of what we would refer to today as “environmental flows.” Even the dams they designed were weir dams that captured only a portion of the flow of the river or creek, allowing most of the natural flow to continue. It is impossible even to imagine the huge amount of spring water the uppermost section of the San Antonio River valley produced naturally when first seen by the early Spanish friars and soldiers. It may have been the largest grouping of springs in the world at that time. The eyewitness reports of visitors and settlers give only a tiny glimpse of what the glory of nature must have been like in eighteenth-century San Antonio. In 1984 Del Weniger of Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio wrote: This valley probably had as many springs as any place in the world. The city has always had to cope with these springs in the places where it has chosen, come hell or high water, to build its buildings. On the site of the Federal Land Bank there was a spring which flowed up through the slab of the building, and which it is reported it took six pumps six months to pump out. There was once a warm sulphur spring to which many used to come to get water, on the site of the Alameda Theatre, and under the National Theatre is a spring which has always required pumping out. There is a spring under Joske’s downtown store, and another under the new Hyatt Hotel. After a recent extremely wet year, one of these long-forgotten springs reasserted itself in the basement of a large Alamo Heights home, and the water, to the amount of hundreds of gallons an hour, had to be pumped out for months. A local real estate broker who is land manager of one of the oldest lumber companies in San Antonio said that during the 1920s and 1930s, when the Alamo Heights and Terrell Hills subdivisions were being built, it was standard practice for builders to pour concrete down the smaller springs so that new homes could be built over them.

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The friars supervised the construction, maintenance, and repair of the bulk of the fifty-mile acequia system. The record is consistent on this; however, there are no known manuals indicating that they were officially trained in the technology. The generally accepted idea that they simply had “in their minds” the way to build a large acequia system, without a transit, keeping the grade precise and building the associated dams, aqueducts, and headgates without any training defies logic. The system of ditches was complex to build and had to be completed in a precise manner in order to allow steady usable flow of the water. In the mid-nineteenth century the people of San Antonio, with the aid of engineers and tools, tried to build an acequia called the Alazan ditch, which failed to work due to their inability to get the grade correct— despite having professional builders, transits, and current civil engineering practices to guide them. Surely we can expect someone someday to find the instructions the friars used to plan and build an acequia system so successful that it still flows in part almost three hundred years later. In 1852 the city council ridiculously auctioned off not only the lots adjacent to the headwater spring of the San Antonio River but also sold the ownership of the spring to a sitting city councilman the very afternoon of the day the council voted approval for the sale! This ill-advised transaction echoed endlessly in the major dispute of the second half of the nineteenth century, that of the city versus the water company and its president, George W. Brackenridge. Whether the sale to Sweet was above board or not, it is highly suspect, and without doubt it was of little real financial benefit to the city. After the Civil War the politicians of San Antonio used water as a stepping stone to enhance their careers, at the expense of decent, dutiful citizens such as Brackenridge. Brackenridge not only sought to manage water fairly and economically but also engaged in long-lasting and highly significant philanthropies, most of which focused on education; yet even now he is negatively viewed as a civil war profiteer, including by the direct beneficiaries of his largess and generosity. The waters of San Antonio created spatial boundaries between Anglo Americans and Hispanics in the nineteenth century that survive today, although by now the Hispanic community has gained a voice in elections that they did not have, or chose not to exercise, in the nineteenth century. A portion of the Hispanic community in San Antonio remained without running water as late as the World War II era. Yet this was not the fault of the water

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works company under Brackenridge’s control. The company provided free water hydrants for the poor. The newspaper and photographic record clearly shows that the water carriers who carted barrels of water to the barrios took their water from the standpipes or fountains provided for free by the water works company. If there is any blame for the lack of water mains to the west side of San Pedro Creek, it falls on the city council, whose Water Works Committee micromanaged the system. Brackenridge followed their orders as to location of the mains, contrary to the continued lies told by aggressive politicians in the local newspapers. On August 6, 1878, for example, the Water Works Company presented to city council a letter that was noted in the minutes: “A Communication from the Water Works Company offering to erect at their own expense four (4) hydrants in such parts of the City where the Company’s mains are laid for the purpose of furnishing water from the same to the poor of the City—free of charge—was received.”  The water works company provided water to the poor and to the water carriers, yet history and the San Antonio mayors of the day wrongly portrayed Brackenridge and his water company as a monopoly run by a wealthy monopolizer. The Water Works Committee, which absolutely controlled the location of fire hydrants, mains, and other public outlets, selected one free hydrant per ward: in the first ward on Washington Square, in the second ward at the corner of Salinas and North Flores streets, in the third ward at the corner of Crockett and Bowie streets, and in the fourth ward at the corner of Goliad and Alamo streets. The water works company showed its civic responsibility by providing water to the poor at its own unreimbursed cost in more locations than the city required, yet this was rarely mentioned in the newspapers. In general, members of the Hispanic community lived in poverty. Even a tap in the front yard, which cost a subscriber to water services as little as nine dollars a year, was simply too expensive, considering that most of the people in the barrio made less than fifty dollars a year in the late nineteenth century. Perhaps tradition played a part, too. People remembered the day when water was free for everyone, before it became a commodity to be purchased from wealthy Anglos. The Hispanic community, honoring an extended family– based style of living, more than likely showed loyalty to the aquadores, the barrileros, and the other water carriers. Some people walked to the military plaza and filled their own jugs with water. Analysis of the water contracts from the

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beginning to 1900 proved that the water mains were placed all over the city, even in the neighborhoods west of the river and San Pedro Creek. The answer to the lack of participation in the city water system by the late nineteenthcentury Hispanic community may simply center on affordability. Interestingly, water mains then were tapped with half-inch pipes, which were much smaller than today’s normal three-quarter-inch or one-inch taps. The use of half-inch taps into the water mains provided an adequate amount of pressure in the lateral line to the user. The pressure in the mains, especially in the early years of water service when pressure was strictly gravity driven, was not strong enough to push three-quarter-inch lines and one-inch lines up into hilly yards and second floors. It could also be that half-inch taps were much more economical due to the cost of the cast-iron pipe itself. This unusual technical aspect is another subject to be pursued in greater detail in the upcoming second volume to this work. George W. Brackenridge did not lose his keen interest in water after selling his headwater lots to the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word. He built a large new home a mile or so to the east. Basil Young Neal said in his master’s thesis in 1939, which was fortunately based upon a few personal eyewitness interviews from late nineteenth-century participants, that Brackenridge “drilled the two largest artesian wells in the world and [ones that] remain so today according to M. C. Judson who drilled them. They are at present a part of Camp Travis [now Fort Sam Houston] and are owned by the United States Government, being included in the land Mr. Brackenridge sold the government at the beginning of the World War [World War I].”  Portions of the acequia system around Mission Espada are still in use today, though heavily silted up, restricting the flow to a trickle. The remaining system can be walked for several hundred yards on the eastern boundary of Mission Burial Park, located on the Military Highway in southeast San Antonio. Espada Dam is intact and delivers water to the acequia through its colonial era headgate, which is visible from above the dam on the western bank of the river channel. The marvelous aqueduct over Piedras Creek continues to carry water from the Espada acequia fifteen feet in the air over the creek bed. It has been standing since the mid-1730s and at times has survived floods where the water has submerged its entire structure to a depth of more than six feet. Fragments of the acequias have been uncovered in urban excavation proj-

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ects, both private and public, since the 1960s. One of the most unexpected fragments was found during the winter of 1965, when bulldozers were preparing for construction projects at the HemisFair site; a 125-foot section of the Alamo Madre Acequia was discovered and preserved. A fragment of the Upper Labor Acequia still carries water when the gate is opened to divert water from the San Antonio River in Brackenridge Park just below the Hildebrand Street Bridge and the bridge from the park into the City of San Antonio maintenance yard. Another fragment of the Upper Labor Acequia can be found in the Botanical Gardens of Brackenridge Park. Fragments of the San Pedro Acequia can be found near the Bexar County Justice Center and at the San Antonio Housing Authority. Recently a site was found on private property near the Downtown Hampton Inn, and what may be the headgate of the Alamo Madre Acequia has been found at the Alligator Gardens next to the Witte Museum. I. Waynne Cox notes in The Spanish Acequias of San Antonio that there are at least three other acueductos in the downtown area of San Antonio covered by parking lots, all which should someday be excavated. In the words of Betty Beuche, a local citizen who grew up near the San Juan acequia in the 1950s, “The ditch had not only been a means of irrigation of the land, it had also been a means of holding the community together, a real connecting thing, a unifying force.”  The acequia system and the pure spring waters of San Antonio unified the community from its earliest days and actually allowed its creation. Then as now, the water rendered the land its value. As we struggle with the complicated and critical water issues in the twenty-first century, we will continue to rely upon San Antonio’s water history to assist us in our efforts to share and conserve our most precious resource, water, for the benefit of all Texans.

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Introduction 1. Dallas Morning News, June 22, 2006. “San Antonio recently took over as the seventh largest city in the United States, passing San Diego, according to the United States Census Bureau.” Additional newspapers consulted for this study were the Texas Democrat (1849), San Antonio Evening Paper (1850–90), Semi-Weekly News (1862–80), San Antonio Herald (1872–90), San Antonio Daily Express (1872–96), San Antonio Express (1890–2007), RecorderTimes (1983), and Fredericksburg Standard–Radio Post (1986). 2. San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, San Antonio Facts, February, 2006. “The Riverwalk was the idea of architect Robert H. H. Hugman in 1921. He worked diligently with the City Council, the San Antonio Real Estate Board, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and other groups to create, expand, and improve the initial idea. In 1969 the Paseo Del Rio Association was established to further promote the attraction”; http://www .santonioriverwalk.com/history.html, accessed June 12, 2007. 3. San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, San Antonio Facts, February, 2006. 4. House, City of Flaming Adventure, 1. 5. Weniger, The Explorers’ Texas, 109. 6. Blake, Water for the Cities, 2. 7. W. A. East v. Houston and Texas Central Railway Company, 98 Tex. 146, 81 S.W. 279 (1904). 8. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest, 178–79. 9. Ibid., 179. Chapter 1 1. Richard Phelan, Texas Wild, 39, 123, 207. 2. In Miller, ed., On the Border, 21. 3. Ibid., 22. 4. Mauldin, Exploring Drought in the San Antonio Area, 6–9. 5. Sweet grew up at the Sweet Homestead in San Antonio, which included the headwater spring of the San Antonio River, San Antonio Spring. He was born in 1841 in St. John, New Brunswick, and moved with his family to San Antonio in 1849. His father, James Sweet, served as an alderman, was a partner in the firm of Sweet and Lacoste, and eventually became mayor of San Antonio. James Sweet acquired the headwater property in 1852. Alex attended private school in San Antonio until he was sixteen, whereupon he was sent to prep school in New York. Upon graduation from college in 1858, he went overseas to earn 141

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another college degree and fought in the Civil War for the Confederate States of America, like his father. After the war he studied and practiced law in San Antonio, and in 1869 he joined the San Antonio Express as a journalist, becoming editor. Alex began to write humorous columns about Texas life, and these were published regionally in the Galveston Daily News. He became associate editor of the Galveston Daily News in 1879. In 1881 he moved to Austin and bought the Austin Weekly Review, which he turned into Texas Siftings. He and partner John Armory Knox published humorous columns nationally. A commentator observed: “From 1886 to 1891, Texas Siftings was the most popular of all American illustrated comics. Its circulation built up to 150,000”; Linneman, “Colonel Bill Snort,” 187. 6. Sweet and Knox, On a Mexican Mustang, 267. 7. In “Rain Drowns Cotton Crop in the Valley,” Dallas Morning News, July 30, 2007, 4,” the negative impact of above average rainfall on cotton and other crops is discussed. Excess rain destroys crops by causing mildew, lowering oil content of cotton, and raising moisture content in grain sorghum, both of which destroy the crop’s market value. In periods of excessive rain at the wrong times, the ground itself is so saturated that crops cannot be harvested due to inaccessibility. 8. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest, 6. 9. The author’s dry-land farming operation has been crippled by drought in six of ten recent seasons, as has most of the area immediately south of San Antonio. 10. Dobkins, Spanish Element in Texas Water Law, 104. 11. Ibid., 84. 12. Arneson, “Early Irrigation in Texas,” provides a good description of de la Teja’s “citizen-soldier.” Chapter 2 1. www.edwardsaquifer.net, 2. 2. www.edwardsaquifer.org, 1. 3. The placard at Blue Hole says the spring flows when the aquifer level reaches 676 feet above sea level. 4. Blue Hole placard. 5. www.edwardsaquifer.net/sanmarcos.html and www.edwardsaquifer.net/comal/html. 6. Sweet and Knox, On a Mexican Mustang, 308–309. The Brackenridge place was Sweet’s boyhood home. 7. Visit to the site by the author and Paula Marks, July 14, 2006. 8. Olmsted, Journey through Texas, 156–57. Chapter 3 1. Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage, 1:365. 2. Espinosa’s Diary, quoted in de la Teja, ed., Preparing the Way, 74. 3. Weniger, The Explorers’ Texas, 109–10, 139. 4. Morfi, History of Texas, 97–98. 5. Clopper, “J. C. Clopper’s Journal.”

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6. Quoted in Muir, ed., Texas in 1837, 98. 7. Quoted in Weniger, The Explorers’ Texas, 109. 8. Roemer, Roemer’s Texas, 125. 9. Quoted in Weniger, The Explorers’ Texas, 109 10. Riddell, Long Ride in Texas, 52. 11. Quoted in Weniger, The Explorers’ Texas, 109.

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Chapter 4 1. Bolton, “The Mission as a Frontier Institution,” 42. 2. Ibid. 3. Moorhead, The Presidio, 270. “Perhaps the most lasting influence of the presidio, aside from guaranteeing the very existence of Spanish civilization on the frontier, was its attraction of civilian settlers. The lure of the presidial payroll, the promise of military protection, and, eventually, the offer of government subsidy and special privilege were all potent enticements. Thus, scores of towns developed in the shelter of these far-flung bastions. Most of them outlived by many decades the garrisoned forts which spawned them, and many of them still survive”; Naylor and Polzer, eds., Pedro de Rivera and the Military Regulations, 2–3. San Antonio owes its position as the seventh largest city in the United States today in no small degree to the presence of several major air force bases and Fort Sam Houston, all stalwarts of significance to the local economy and society; comments by Gilbert R. Cruz. 4. Phelan, Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans, 5. 5. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 394, n4. 6. Ibid., 93. 7. Manning, Catholic Truth, 99. 8. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 93–94. 9. Felder, The Ideals of Saint Francis of Assisi, 315. 10. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 94. 11. Matthew 28:18–20, Holy Bible (Philadelphia: John E. Potter & Company, 1883), 601. 12. Engelhardt, Missions and Missionaries of California, 3. 13. Bolton, “The Mission as a Frontier Institution,” 44; Porter, “Querétaro in Focus,” 13. 14. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 95. 15. Ibid., 106. 16. Porter, “Querétaro in Focus,” 8. 17. Newcomb, Indians of Texas, 14. 18. Ibid. 19. Céliz, Diary of the Alarcón Expedition, 34, fn 29. 20. Ibid., 34–35, fn 30 and 32. 21. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 115. 22. Ibid., 22. 23. De la Teja, Preparing the Way, 52. 24. Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage in Texas, 1:365.

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25. De la Teja, Preparing the Way, 55. 26. Ibid. This is the second naming of the river. 27. William E. Doolittle observes: “The Espinosa account is simply wrong. What Espinosa thought was an irrigation ditch is nothing more than the natural stream that heads at San Pedro Springs”; Cultivated Landscapes of Native North America, 353. 28. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 163. City or ciudad had a higher status than a pueblo or villa in the Spanish system and was an important designation as it set the type and number of government officials. “No community other than New Orleans or perhaps St. Augustine, Florida in North America enjoyed the rank of ciudad, or city”; ibid., 322. 29. De la Teja, Preparing the Way, 68. 30. Ibid., 74. It is interesting to note that seven years later he does not mention the Suipans continuing to live in the area, nor does he mention the irrigation ditches he saw before. It is possible he was describing another portion of the San Antonio River far enough away from San Pedro Springs for him not to have observed the situation there in 1716. 31. Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage in Texas, 2:72; Céliz, Diary of the Alarcón Expedition, 34, fn 29. 32. Céliz, Diary of the Alarcón Expedition, 79. 33. Ibid., 87–94, fn 41. Father Olivares was so disgusted with Alarcón that he left the Rio Grande nine days after Alarcón so as to travel alone, which was risky, but he arrived safely nonetheless. 34. Ibid., 48. 35. Ibid., 49. A league is approximately 25/8 miles. 36. Ibid. 37. De la Teja, San Antonio de Bexar, 3. 38. Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage in Texas, 2:92. I have used “Indians” to describe native groups purely to simplify the text. 39. De la Teja, San Antonio de Bexar, 8. 40. Ibid., 96. 41. I. Waynne Cox, Spanish Acequias of San Antonio, 22; Chabot, Makers of San Antonio, 148. 42. Chabot, Makers of San Antonio, 140. 43. Ibid. 44. O’Rourke, Franciscan Missions in Texas, 22. 45. Ramsdell, San Antonio: A Historical and Pictorial Guide, 21–22. The Marques de San Miguel de Aguayo proposed that an additional four hundred families be brought to settle San Antonio in 1721. The viceroy disagreed because he felt the marques only wanted to bolster his own estates in northern Mexico. 46. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 195–214. 47. Robert H. Jackson, Missions and the Frontiers of Spanish America, 364. 48. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 115. 49. Ibid. 50. Captain Juan Valdéz, trans. Fr. B. Leutenegger, San José Papers, Book 1, AGI, Aud.

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de Guad., 67–3-11, transcript found in the Bexar Archives at the Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. 51. Leutenegger, Documents Relating to the Old Spanish Missions of Texas, vol. 1: Guidelines for a Texas Mission, 43. 52. Captain Juan Valdéz, transcript, Bexar Archives. 53. “Governor Jacinto Barrios y Jauregui Report, May 28, 1758,” 74–76.

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Chapter 5 1. De la Teja, San Antonio de Bexar, 96. 2. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest, 37. 3. Dobkins, Spanish Element in Texas Water Law, 64. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. San Antonio River Authority, Petitioner, v. G. Garrett Lewis, et al., Respondents, no. 1–8304, Supreme Court of Texas, 363 S.W. 2d 444, 1962. 7. Jackson and Castillo, Indians, 13. 8. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest, 8. 9. Bolton, Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, 234–37. 10. Bolton, Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, 236–37. 11. Leutenegger, Guidelines, 43. 12. Water Resources Center, Texas Tech University, Acequias of San Antonio. 13. Chabot, Makers of San Antonio, 148. 14. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest, 41. 15. United States Geological Survey maps, “San Antonio East,” “San Antonio West,” “Terrell Wells,” and “Southton.” These maps are available at most architectural supply stores in San Antonio. Calculations made by author. 16. Cox, Spanish Acequias of San Antonio, 3. 17. San Antonio River Authority, Petitioner, v. G. Garrett Lewis et al., 3. 18. Water Resources Center, Texas Tech University, Acequias of San Antonio. 19. Ibid., drawing 2. Overall slope average calculation made by author. 20. Interview with Vince Musat, licensed civil engineer, June 19, 2006. The author walked most of the measured portion in July, 2006. 21. Cox, Spanish Acequias of San Antonio, 78. 22. Ibid., 32–33. 23. Tijerina, Tejanos and Texas, 53. 24. Leutenegger, trans., “Memorial of Father Benito Fernández,” 290. Friar Fernández swears to the friars teaching the Indians how to be farmers, irrigators, carpenters, and tailors. 25. Bolton, Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, 234–37. Arneson, “Early Irrigation in Texas,” 1. 26. Porter, “Querétaro in Focus”; Engelhardt, Missions and Missionaries of California, 729.

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27. Bolton, “The Mission as a Frontier Institution,” 57–58; Weber, Spanish Frontier, 106; Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage, 3:27–28. 28. Leutenegger, trans., “Memorial of Father Benito Fernández,” 290. 29. Leutenegger, Documents Relating to the Old Spanish Missions of Texas, vol. 1: Guidelines for a Texas Mission: Instructions for the Missionary of Mission Concepción in San Antonio. Originally written in 1787, this manual has eighty-three specific rules with ten additional supplementary rules for operating Mission Concepción. The detail is all but unbelievable. 30. Ibid., 33. Rules 60, 61, and 62 discuss irrigation ditch maintenance techniques. 31. Ricard, Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, 145. 32. Fireman, Spanish Royal Corps of Engineers, 54. 33. Cox, Spanish Acequias of San Antonio, 17. 34. Fireman, Spanish Royal Corps of Engineers, 54. 35. Jackson and Castillo, Indians, 13; Dobkins, Spanish Element in Texas Water Law, 105; Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage, 3:27. Meyer notes in Water in the Hispanic Southwest, 41: “In many cases, the local missionary, the best-educated man in the community, served as amateur engineer.” 36. Bolton, “The Mission as a Frontier Institution,” 47. 37. Hutchins, “The Community Acequia.” 38. Arneson, “Early Irrigation in Texas.” 39. Fray Mariano de los Dolores first came to Texas in 1733; Handbook of Texas Online, http:www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/DD/fd08.html, accessed July 29, 2006. He was working at Mission Valero by 1736; Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage, 3:53. He was president of the Querétaran missions from 1750 to 1763; Habig, Alamo Chain of Missions, 272. Many acequias were constructed in San Antonio during his work there, so it is reasonable to assume he witnessed the construction used. 40. Bolton, Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, 234–37. 41. Hutchins, “The Community Acequia,” 282. 42. Interview with William Fannin of Floresville, Texas, June 20, 2006. Fannin was born in Wilson County in 1921, moved to Hackberry Street in San Antonio in the mid1920s, and tells the story of climbing into the bell tower of Mission San José many times as a child as a normal part of daily play. During World War II Fannin was made an instructor pilot in the army air corps because he had completed two years of college at Southwest State Teachers College in San Marcos. He studied engineering there. Having served in the Pacific Theatre as an instructor pilot, he was ordered in the waning years of the war after the surrender of Japan to make as-built-to-scale architectural drawings of all improvements on Guam, Tinian, and other islands captured by the United States. He made a personal presentation of these drawings to General Douglas MacArthur. Following his return to San Antonio he became a farmer and rancher in Wilson County on his father’s homestead on the Cibolo. He also founded and owned a commercial construction company in Bexar County. His company built numerous industrial buildings in and around San Antonio, including D. W. White Seed Company, Vanderwalle Industries, and many others. He has a professional working knowledge of irrigation ditch

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construction and all types of engineering and architectural drawings. He likewise has a professional working knowledge of the soils of San Antonio, having constructed thousands of square feet of concrete slabs, driveways, and parking lots along with hundreds of feet of underground infrastructure all around South San Antonio, the area of the missions. 43. Cox, Spanish Acequias of San Antonio, 17. 44. O’Rourke, Franciscan Missions in Texas, 3. 45. Ibid., 44. 46. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain, 71–73. 47. Glick, Old World Background, 3. 48. Schuetz, “Professional Artisans,” 18. 49. Friar Mariano’s arrival date is from Leutenegger, trans., “Memorial of Father Benito Fernández,” 267, n7. 50. Habig, Alamo Chain of Missions, 272; Morfi, History of Texas, 301. 51. Bolton, Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, 235. Father Ganzabal was murdered by a Spanish soldier at Mission Candelaria in 1752; Arricivita, Cronica serfica y apostolica, 18. 52. An overseer is someone who watches to be sure work is done, as an assistant to the superintendent, who organizes, hires, manages, and carries out the work from the beginning to the end of a construction job. 53. Bolton, Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, 236. 54. Ibid., 236–37. 55. Leutenegger, trans., Fr. Jose Rafael Oliva’s Views, 19–20. 56. Armstrong, ed., History of Public Works, 1. 57. Ibid., 217; de la Teja, San Antonio de Bexar, 32. 58. Armstrong, ed., History of Public Works, 219. 59. Ibid., 218.

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Chapter 6 1. Cutter, “Community and the Law,” 467; Glick, “Irrigation Rights and the Limits of Civil Law,” 2. 2. Cutter, “Community and the Law,” 468. 3. Ibid., 467. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. El Marques de Casafuerte to Fray Gabriel de Vergara, December 25, 1731, Bexar Archives Translations, Series 1, General Manuscripts 1717–89, box 2C14, vol. 2: December 25, 1731–June 25, 1733, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. 8. Tijerina, Tejanos and Texas, 51. 9. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest, 18. 10. Casafuerte to Fray Gabriel de Vergara, December 25, 1731, 2. 11. San Antonio River Authority, Petitioner, v. G. Garrett Lewis, et al. 12. Casafuerte to Fray Gabriel de Vergara, December 25, 1731.

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13. Habig, Alamo Chain of Missions, 124; Austin, “Municipal Government of San Fernando de Bexar”; Glick, Old World Background, 32. 14. Casafuerte to Fray Gabriel de Vergara, December 25, 1731, and see also Bexar Archives Translations, vol. 1, page 250. 15. De la Teja, Preparing the Way, 55. 16. Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage, 2:211. 17. Quoted in Cutter, Legal Culture, 31. 18. State of Texas et al., Appellants, v. Valmont Plantations et al., Appellees, 346 S. W. 2d 853. 19. Ibid. 20. The ruling in the Valmont Plantations case in 1962 finally settled the nature of riparian rights in Texas as relating to use of irrigation water—Spanish and Republic of Mexico law, confirmed by Texas since 1840, required a specific grant to use water from streams for irrigation purposes, hence the law of Texas must be the same. 21. Smith, “Valley Water Suit,” 618–27. The Irrigation Act of 1889 perfected under Texas law prior appropriative rights to irrigation waters. “By 1913 claims against the Rio Grande to irrigate lands below the Falcon Reservoir site exceeded 2,000,000 acres against the capacity of the Rio Grande (as a running stream) to irrigate only 400,000 to 600,000 acres”; Smith “Valley Water Suit,” fn 8. “Irrigation engineers estimated that the Rio Grande could supply dependable irrigation for 432,000 to 600,000 acres from the American share”; Baade, “Historical Background of Texas Water Law,” 25. 22. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 112. 23. State of Texas et al., Appellants, v. Valmont Plantations et al., Appellees, 346 S. W. 2d 853. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. White and Wilson, “Flow and Underflow,” 389. 27. State of Texas et al., Appellants, v. Valmont Plantations et al., Appellees, 346 S. W. 2d 853. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. See, for example, The Adjudication of Water Rights in the Medina River Watershed of the San Antonio River Basin (Claim of O. R. Mitchell Estate) v. Alamo National Bank Independent Executor, Outcome Rendered December 31, 1982, 645 S.W. 2d, 596. This case is a good example of the extensive research the justices did into the terms of ancient Spanish and Republic of Mexico law. The case contains well-written debate on the continuing controversy and disagreements among the justices over interpretation of the laws. Associate Justice Blair Reeves wrote a compelling dissent to the ruling of the court in this case. Justice Reeves rightly concluded that use of surface water in a flowing stream came only from an explicit grant of the king of Spain or the Republic of Mexico. Spanish law and Republic of Texas law did not recognize a riparian right to use water from a stream for irrigation purposes. In numerous other cases the courts have researched extensively the historical precedents in ancient Spanish and Republic of Mexico law.

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Chapter 7 1. Worster, Rivers of Empire, 11. 2. Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage, 2:309. 3. “Usufruct” is defined as a right to use something but not own it. 4. Ostrom and Gardner, “Coping with Asymmetries in the Commons,” 96–97. Ostrom and Gardner provide an interesting discussion of the obvious opinion that “headenders” and “tailenders” are in very different positions, but if selfish headenders ignore the scarcity they generate for tailenders, it is understandable that those at the tail end have less reason to contribute to the continual maintenance of the common system. Allocation of the water (appropriation) and maintenance of the irrigation system (provision) are the two problems any common-pool resource faces. “In addition (to these problems) irrigation common-pool resources also have an asymmetry between ‘headenders’ and ‘tailenders,’ which increases the difficulty of providing irrigation systems over time.” The data in their studies come from current systems, but reading the article with Spanish colonial irrigation administration in mind, especially as it was practiced in San Antonio, brings the awareness that the Spanish were masters of the relationship between headenders and tailenders, as the cooperation shown among the parties in San Antonio helped parts of the system built there to operate more or less successfully for almost three hundred years. Possibly the cooperation shown in mutual aid and defense from hostile Indians helped to spread the spirit of cooperation to the acequia system. 5. Casteñada, Our Catholic Heritage, 2:307–10. “One of the signs of increasing patrimonialization of water in the latter middle ages was the tendency for municipalities to convert common water into municipally owned public property, or bienes de propios. The expropriation of such waters by the city of Las Palmas [a city on Gran Canaria Island] (and to a lesser extent, of Santa Cruz de La Palma) and their subsequent sale or rental was a characteristic feature of the Canarian irrigation scene”; Glick, Old World Background, 20–22. 6. Cruz, Let There Be Towns, 61–73. 7. Castaneda, Our Catholic Heritage, 2:279–81. 8. Ibid., 2:302. 9. De la Teja, San Antonio de Bexar, 76. 10. Leutenegger, trans., “Memorial of Father Benito Fernández,” 277–78. The first official settlement in San Antonio was not Villa San Fernando but Villa de Béjar, which existed 1718–31 but was not formally recognized. Even though Villa de Béjar never formed a cabildo, it consisted of thirty families by the time the Isleños arrived, or twice as many families; Habig, Alamo Chain of Missions, 38. 11. De la Teja, San Antonio de Bexar, 77. 12. Casteñada, Our Catholic Heritage, 2:306. 13. Glick, Old World Background, 37. 14. Ibid., 20–22. 15. The title is translated as “steward of assets owned by the ‘republic’ or town”; Austin, “Municipal Government of San Fernando de Bexar.” Casteñada, Our Catholic Heritage, 2:308, defines mayordomo as “administrator of public lands.”

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16. Glick, Old World Background, 39–40. 17. Jones, Texas Roots, 34. 18. “Adscripted” is defined as a right that is permanently attached to the land. 19. De la Teja, San Antonio de Bexar, 87. 20. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest, 91. 21. Bexar Archives Translations, Series 1, General Manuscripts 1717–1789, box 2C15, vol. 2, December 25, 1731–June 25, 1733, p. 17, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin; Glick, Old World Background, 39; Bexar Archives Translations, box 2C17, pp. 129–32. 22. De la Teja, San Antonio de Bexar, 87. 23. Leal, After the Secularization, 1–42; Castañeda, Report on the Spanish Archives, 48–100; Bexar Archives Translations, Series 1, General Manuscripts 1717–1789. 24. Austin, “Municipal Government of San Fernando de Bexar.” By the time of the drawing there were sixteen families since one Isleño family already in Mexico had joined the original fifteen. 25. Bexar Archives Translations, March 22, 1738, box 2C15, vol. 2, 45. 26. Castañeda, Report on the Spanish Archives, 48. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 52. 29. In his Historical Background of Texas Water Law Hans Baade referred to the long, thin lots as “bacon-strip” lots. On attacks, see de la Teja, San Antonio de Bexar, 8–14. The first period of Apache attacks began in 1720 and continued until 1726. After a few years of general peace, the attacks began again in 1731and lasted until 1749. De la Teja notes (10) that the new attacks “were the result of the growing ineffectiveness of the Apaches against their Comanche and other enemies. Although horses were the main target of the raiders, other livestock, guns and ammunition, and metal goods were soon added to their list of plunder. Efforts to deprive settlers of the latter items required closer contact with the Spanish and, therefore, produced greater loss of lives. Spanish settlements and Franciscan missions along the entire frontier were easy and necessary prey if the Apache were to acquire the means to defend themselves against their Plains enemies [the Comanches].” 30. De la Teja, “Land and Society in 18th Century San Antonio,” 172. 31. Ibid., 200. 32. Newcomb, “Harmony with Nature,” 48–49. 33. Department of the Interior, Water Supply and Irrigation Papers. 34. Detail is based on visits to the San Juan area by the author in 2006 and plats held at the Bexar Country Appraisal District office in San Antonio. 35. Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage, 5:53. A Castilian vara is 2.74167 feet; Taylor, Spanish Archives of the General Land Office, 70. Therefore 200 varas, or 548.354 feet, by 400 varas, or 1,096.668 feet, equal 601,340 square feet. An acre equals 43,560 square feet, making the suertes 13.8 acres each. The lots in the original configuration on Villamain Road—when adjusted for today’s road and its right-of-way, today’s railroad track and its right-of-way,

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and the movement of the original river bank by the Corps of Engineers in the 1960s—equal approximately 10 acres in size each. Thus these lots appear to be in the original July 14, 1794 configuration. Calculations made by the author. 36. Bexar Appraisal District. Lot 469567 is located at 9155 Villamain Road and is 10.79 acres. Lot 469568 is located at 9211 Villamain Road and is 10.508 acres; see Taylor, Spanish Archives of the General Land Office. 37. San Antonio Express, January 6, 1935, Society Page 1. The article on the front page of the Society section, titled “Franciscan Irrigation System, 200 Years Old, in Service Today,” displays an elaborate drawing of the small, narrow lots throughout the entire San Antonio River Valley. Sources named for the drawing are “old maps, and land titles furnished through the courtesy of Stewart Title Guaranty Company, and from data furnished by E. P. Arneson, engineer, who has made a study of these old irrigation systems.” The article opens: “Over 200 years ago the Franciscan Friars, who established the early missions, built one of the most remarkable systems of irrigating canals or acequias imaginable—considering the times and hardships under which they worked. When one stops to picture in the mind’s eye the wilderness in which they were located with hostile Indians trying to keep them from establishing their missions and farm lands there, it is nothing short of miraculous to see the very complete and well built system which they developed. Furthermore, they had no modern engineering instruments such as the level and transit.” 38. Wallace et al, Documents of Texas History, 28. 39. Quoted in Wallace et al., Documents of Texas History, 87–88. 40. Ibid. 41. Jack Jackson, Los Mesteños, 6, 31. 42. Leutenegger, trans., “Memorial of Father Benito Fernández,” 280. To be fair, however, it must be noted that Friar Fernández’s testimony was in response to a petition including complaints against the missions made by the Isleños. Dr. Gilbert R. Cruz reminded me that there were also skilled merchants, masons, artisans, and civil magistrates in the Isleño group by the time of the testimony. 43. Chabot, Makers of San Antonio, 148. 44. Leutenegger, trans., “Memorial of Father Benito Fernández,” 284. 45. The author’s own investigation and measurements in June, 2006; Bolton, Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, 322. Friar Solis wrote in his 1768 inspection report that “the mission has fields of crops which depend upon rainfall, for water cannot be got from the river since it has very high and steep banks, nor from anywhere else, since there is no place to get it.” 46. Leutenegger, trans., San José Papers, 179. Translated from original documents with unknown publisher, unbound, copied from the Institute of Texan Cultures, University of Texas at San Antonio, loose files. Captain Pacheco wrote: “Since they lack irrigation ditches, they cannot annually maintain themselves when the seasonal maize crop is a failure. Besides this, Mission Nuestra Señora de la Luz belonging to the Presidio San Augustín de Ahumada which is in my care does not have irrigation ditches. Thus the Indians living

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here as converts cannot maintain themselves except at great expense similar to what I incurred when I transported the maize from this Presidio of San Antonio de Béjar.” 47. Jones, Texas Roots, 34. Chapter 8 1. Leutenegger, trans., Fr. Jose Rafael Oliva’s Views, 17. 2. Per Gilbert R. Cruz comments to author. 3. Poyo, “Crown Policy.” 4. Leutenegger, trans., “Memorial of Father Benito Fernández,” 277–78. 5. De la Teja, San Antonio de Bexar, 18. 6. Glick, Old World Background, 27. Casteñada, Our Catholic Heritage, 2:302–307. The first official village was named the Villa de San Fernando and was founded by the Canary Islanders, confirmed by a grant from the king. 7. de la Teja, “Land and Society in 18th Century San Antonio,” n6, 175–76. At first glance, the usurpation of the land from the early soldiers seems to be contrary to Spanish fairness, but they were not officially granted the land, and it was their gamble to clear fields and build homes when they knew they might face transfer at any time, much like military families of today. 8. Habig, Alamo Chain of Missions, 257. 9. Glick, Old World Background, 27. 10. Ibid., 5. 11. Ibid., 27. 12. Ibid., 5. 13. Ibid., 27. 14. I. J. Cox, “The Early Settlers of San Fernando.” 15. Parsons, “Migration of Canary Islanders,” 448. 16. Ibid., 447. 17. Ibid., 449. 18. Ibid., 452. 19. I. J. Cox, “The Early Settlers of San Fernando.” 20. Parsons, “Migration of Canary Islanders,” 53, n17. 21. Ibid., 454. 22. Ibid., 461. 23. Ibid., 466. 24. Bexar Archives Translations, vol. 1, 250, translations. 25. Austin, “Municipal Government of San Fernando de Bexar.” 26. Ibid. 27. De la Teja, San Antonio de Bexar, 57. 28. Governor Lugo, who served from 1736 to 1737, was a native of the Canary Islands and acted at all times in favor of the Isleños over the missions. 29. Leutenegger, San José Papers, 83–84. 30. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest, 69–70.

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31. Cruz, ed. and tr., “City Ordinances of the Municipal Government of San Antonio.” 32. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest, 68. 33. De la Teja, San Antonio de Bexar, 89; and see 182, fn 63: “The small size of the farming population and the custom of settling all but major disputes through verbal proceedings has greatly contributed to the absence of documentary evidence on water disputes.” 34. Glick, Old World Background, 47. 35. Ibid. 36. Parsons, “Migration of Canary Islanders,” 463. In 1745 a viceregal auditor reported that “the 14 families of Canary Islanders complain against the reverend fathers of the missions, against the Indians that reside therein, against the captain of the presidio and against the other 49 families settled there so that it seems they desire to be left alone in undisputed possession. Perhaps even then they may not find enough room in the vast area of the province.” 37. Glick, Old World Background, 47. 38. Per comments by Gilbert R. Cruz. 39. Ramsdell, San Antonio: A Historical and Pictorial Guide, 32. 40. I. Waynne Cox, Spanish Acequias of San Antonio, 38. 41. Lomax, San Antonio’s Rive, 27. 42. Ramsdell, San Antonio: A Historical and Pictorial Guide, 31. 43. Ibid. 44. Quoted in Schwarz, Forgotten Battlefield, 109. 45. Ibid., 109–10. 46. Ramsdell, San Antonio: A Historical and Pictorial Guide, 32. 47. Matovina, Tejano Religion, 8. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Terán, Texas by Terán, 15. 51. Ibid., 15–16. 52. Ibid., 20. 53. Ibid., 36. 54. Matovina, Tejano Religion, 20.

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Chapter 9 1. Terán, Texas by Terán, xvi. 2. Ibid., 96–97. 3. Ibid., 98–99. 4. Ibid., 102–10. By 1837 the major threat was indeed from the Comanches, who had pushed the Lipan Apaches farther west. 5. Roemer, Roemer’s Texas, 120. 6. Olmsted, Journey through Texas, 160. 7. Wheeler, To Wear a City’s Crown, 111. 8. Ibid., 125.

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9. Ibid., 110–11. 10. Specie is gold or silver, precious metal as opposed to paper currency. 11. Porter, “Civil War San Antonio.” Newly commissioned Confederate general Henry Hopkins Sibley mustered an army of some 3,300 men in San Antonio in the fall of 1861 and led them into New Mexico to attempt to proceed west to California. They left San Antonio in three groups because of the sparseness of grass and water to the west. But the army was undersupplied on this journey to battle. My conclusion was that San Antonio could have supplied Sibley’s entire army with food and animal fodder for the campaign, but the lack of specie and his poor judgment in depending too heavily upon three powerful businessmen in El Paso resulted in Sibley’s army all but starving upon arrival in New Mexico. 12. A contract for deed is a document in which title to the land or property is not transferred until after the purchaser pays completely for the property. The risk the purchaser runs is that the seller would lose the land by not paying ad valorem taxes, to other judgments, or through other claims against the seller’s assets. 13. The use of the word severed here is as a legal term defined as “to separate, as one from another; to cut off from something; to divide.” The city could have held the water rights and sold only the land. 14. Deed of November 26, 1852, Bexar County Real Property Records, Book K2, 508–509. 15. Ibid. 16. Cox, Spanish Acequias of San Antonio, 50. 17. Lomax, San Antonio’s River, 30–31; McLean, Romance, 4. McLean said the aquadores dipped water in the river and San Pedro Creek and carried it to the houses in which their customers lived. 18. History of the San Antonio Police, loose files, Texana Collection, San Antonio Public Library. 19. Sweet and Knox, On a Mexican Mustang, 576. Chapter 10 1. Porter, “Prelude to Texas Community.” 2. Webb, ed., Handbook of Texas, 424. 3. Marks, Turn Your Eyes toward Texas, 92–93; McLean, Romance, 4–5. 4. McLean, Romance, 4–5. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 5. 7. Nixon, A Century of Medicine, 94–95, quote at 134. 8. Texas Democrat, April 28, 1849. 9. Marks, Turn Your Eyes toward Texas, 157–58. Maverick had lost her elder daughter, Agatha, the preceding year. 10. McLean, Romance, 5. 11. Nixon, A Century of Medicine, 136. 12. San Antonio Daily Herald, October 2, 1866.

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13. Nixon, A Century of Medicine, 134. 14. Herff, The Doctors Herff, 73. 15. Morgan, “George W. Brackenridge,” 55. 16. Fisher, Crown Jewel of Texas, 13. The correct spelling is Jean Batiste Lacoste, per his signature on all public records extant. 17. Armstrong, ed., History of Public Works, 218. 18. Weber, “Mexico’s Far Northern Frontier,” 282.

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Chapter 11 1. Letter from George W. Brackenridge to “Brother Tom,” November 19, 1879, Austin History Center, Robert Thomas Brackenridge Papers, La Prelle-Brackenridge Papers. 2. Letter from John Lockwood to You the Mayor of San Antonio, April 8, 1874, Lacoste Papers, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. 3. Letter from John Lockwood to Honorable F. Giraud, May 3, 1874, Lacoste Papers. 4. San Antonio Daily Express, December 7, 1886. 5. McLean, Romance, 5; Sibley, George W. Brackenridge: Maverick Philanthropist, 130; “An Ordinance Authorizing the National Water Works Company of New York to construct, operate, and maintain water works in the City of San Antonio,” Lacoste Papers. 6. Corner, ed., San Antonio de Bexar, 54. Giraud was mayor from November 13, 1872, until January 19, 1875. 7. Ibid., 54. 8. Chabot, Makers of San Antonio, 106. 9. San Antonio Express, July 10, 1878. 10. “An Ordinance Authorizing the National Water Works Company,” Lacoste Papers. 11. Chabot, Makers of San Antonio, 106. 12. Invoice dated June 12, 1861, to Mr. A. Laguerre, Lacoste Papers. 13. Invoice for the purchase of 600 bales of cotton, 305,949 net pounds, from R. H. D’Sorrel of Wharton County by Sweet & Lacoste, July 3, 1863, Lacoste Papers. 14. Ibid. 15. Lea, The King Ranch, 1:192, n445. 16. Calculations by author. 17. Lea, The King Ranch, 445 n; Sibley, George W. Brackenridge: Maverick Philanthropist, 61–62. 18. George W. Brackenridge and I. H. Brackenridge vs. The City of San Antonio, Cause No. 289, July 11, 1878, Bexar County District Clerk Records Storage, San Antonio, Texas, courtesy of Gary Gauntt, Records Storage Supervisor, Archivist. 19. Chabot, Makers of San Antonio, 106; Sibley, George W. Brackenridge: Maverick Philanthropist, 69. 20. Sibley, George W. Brackenridge: Maverick Philanthropist, 92–94. 21. Stillman, Charles Stillman, 30. 22. Courtesy of the Institute of Texan Cultures Library, vertical files, Water: Lacoste, San Antonio, Texas.

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23. As recently as Saturday, October 13, 2007, the Austin American-Statesman on page A17 quoted Larry Temple—a lawyer in private practice in Austin who led the University of Texas Board of Regents task force on determining the future of the large tract Brackenridge gifted to the school—as saying that “the panel of civic, business and academic leaders was guided by the wishes of Colonel George Washington Brackenridge (Brackenridge hated to be called Colonel), a civil war profiteer, regent and banker who donated the land in 1910” (emphasis added). No matter that Brackenridge was arguably the single major contributor to education in Texas in his lifetime; to this day he is remembered negatively as a civil war profiteer, even by those who benefited most from his benevolence. 24. Original stock certificate “issued to D. W. Porter for five shares of one hundred each in the Capital Stock of the ‘San Antonio Ice Company’ . . . in witness whereof . . . this 1st day of June, 1869,” Lacoste Papers; Morrison, San Antonio: Her Prosperity and Prospects, 136, courtesy of the Institute of Texan Cultures Library, vertical files; San Antonio National Bank, San Antonio and Your First National Bank, 2. 25. Quote in Herff, The Doctors Herff, 94; San Antonio National Bank, San Antonio and Your First National Bank, 2. Lacoste’s ice company was certainly one of the earliest in the United States, if not the first. 26. San Antonio Express News, November 17, 1954. 27. In Schughard, comp., 100th Anniversary of Pioneer Flour Mill, 7. 28. Ibid. Guenther’s ice company was operated under the name Southern Ice Company and was later merged into the Southern-Henke Ice Company, which in 1951 was one of the important institutions in San Antonio, according to Schughard. Southern Ice Company and Guenther’s Mill can be seen on the earliest Sanborn’s Fire Insurance maps. 29. City Council Minutes, April 3, 1877. 30. Blake, Water for the Cities, 19. 31. Letter from W. R. Freeman to J. B. Lacoste, May 6, 1877, Lacoste Papers. 32. Letter from W. R. Freeman to J. B. Lacoste, May 16, 1877, Lacoste Papers. 33. Corner, San Antonio de Bexar, 55. 34. Webb, ed., Handbook of Texas, 543; Morgan, “George W. Brackenridge,” 51; Corner, San Antonio de Bexar, 55. 35. McLean, Romance, 6; Corner, San Antonio de Bexar, 55. 36. De Leon, The Tejano Community, 91–92. 37. McLean, Romance, 4. 38. Davis, Report upon a Valuation of the Plant, 77. 39. McLean, Romance, 7; Corner, San Antonio de Bexar, 56–57; quote in Morgan, “George W. Brackenridge,” 81–82. 40. Sibley, George W. Brackenridge: Maverick Philanthropist, 132. 41. San Antonio National Bank v. J. B. Lacoste, Cause No. 2879. 42. San Antonio Water Works Company v. The City of San Antonio, Cause No. 559, filed May 26, 1880, judgment rendered June 3, 1880, Book J, 264–65, Bexar County District Clerk Records Storage, San Antonio, Texas, courtesy of Gary Gauntt, Records Storage Supervisor, Archivist. 43. San Antonio Daily Express, October 20, 1886.

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Chapter 12 1. City of San Antonio City Council Minutes, July 5, 1878, Journal G, 392. 2. Directory of the City of San Antonio, (1877), 37. 3. Neal, “George W. Brackenridge: Citizen and Philanthropist,” 21. 4. Porter, “George W. Brackenridge, the San Antonio Water Company, and the San Antonio River.” 5. James H. Newcomb Original Waterworks Company Contract Files 1878–1900, San Antonio Public Library Texana Collection, San Antonio, Texas. See also, Davis, Report upon a Valuation of the Plant, 77. All calculations made by the author. 6. San Diego Water Company v. San Diego, California, 118 Cal., pp. 568–69. 7. Ibid. 8. Davis, Report upon a Valuation of the Plant, 24. 9. Sibley, George W. Brackenridge: Maverick Philanthropist, 156–57. 10. San Antonio Daily Express, June 23, 1893. 11. San Antonio Daily Express, June 24, 1893. 12. Sibley, George W. Brackenridge: Maverick Philanthropist, 156. 13. Lomax, San Antonio’s River, 30. 14. General Directory of the City of San Antonio, 1899–1900, 3.

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Epilogue 1. Groundwater is water in pools, aquifers, and streams underground. 2. The unresolved groundwater disputes were caused by rulings with English common law precedents, even though Spanish and Republic of Mexico law were all but identical in reference to groundwater. 3. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest, 180. 4. Quoted in White and Wilson, “Flow and Underflow,” 2. 5. Smith, “Valley Water Suit,” 580. 6. White and Wilson, “Flow and Underflow,” fn 4, 379. 7. San Juan Ditch Company v. Cassin et al., 141 S.W. 815; 1911 Tex. App. Lexis 471. 8. Dobkins, Spanish Element in Texas Water Law, ix; White and Wilson, “Flow and Underflow,” 422. White, dean of the University of Houston School of Law in 1955, and Wilson, an associate justice of the Texas Supreme Court and later attorney general of Texas, clarified Dobkins’s calculations in detail. They estimated that 120 million acres of Texas’ 172,687,000 acres, or 69.4 percent, were “included originally in grants issuing from the Spanish and Mexican governments.” Some 100 million acres of these grants were made by the Republic of Mexico between 1821 and 1836. “Title to all of these lands under these grants could not be perfected under the laws of Texas, however, 26,280,000 acres of such lands are now being held under these grants.” This is the same Will Wilson who is given credit for “cleaning up” Galveston in the late 1950s by eliminating the very public illegal gambling houses and slot machines. 9. Baade, “Historical Background of Texas Water Law,” 3. 10. Ibid., 21. 11. Ibid.

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12. Interview with Russell Johnson, attorney and one of the foremost water rights experts in Texas, Austin, June 10, 2008. 13. Porter and Strama, “History of W. A. East v. Houston and Texas Central Railway Company.” 14. An acre-foot of water is the amount of water needed to cover one acre to the depth of one foot, or 325,851 gallons of water. 15. Kendall, “Fundamentals of Groundwater Law,” 15. 16. Glennon, Water Follies, 92–93. 17. www.saws.org. 18. http://www.sara-tx.org/site/about.html. It is more than coincidental that the reorganization took place during the heated Valmont Plantations water rights hearings of the early 1960s and also the dispute over the flood control work being done to rechannel and widen the San Antonio River just south of the city. 19. San Antonio River Authority v. G. Garrett Lewis et al., 1. 20. http://www.edwardsaquifer.org. 21. Pecos County WCID No. 1 v. Clayton Williams, 271 S.W. 2d 503 (Tex. Civ. App., El Paso 1954). In a personal interview on site in 2007, the author discovered from a workman who had labored for over thirty years at the site of the springs that they trickle now and then when rains have been so heavy that the “up dip” farmers and ranchers turn off their irrigation pumps for long periods of time. Even then, the springs only trickle and do not fill Comanche Creek. 22. Kendall, “Fundamentals of Groundwater Law,” 15–16. 23. City of Corpus Christi v. City of Pleasanton, 154 Tex. 289, 276 S.W. 2d 798 (Texas 1955); Justice Nathan Hecht in his concurring opinion in Sipriano. 24. Weniger, The Explorers’ Texas, 110. 25. Interview with Thomas R. Monroe, land manager for Alamo Lumber Company, founded in 1893 in San Antonio, June 7, 2006. 26. Brackenridge funded the first women’s dormitory at Columbia Medical School in New York and the first dorm for women at the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston. He tirelessly funded schools all over San Antonio, and his legacy to the University of Texas by land grants in Austin is legendary. 27. The Hispanics usually represented no less than 35 percent of the total population. For example, in an election held on January 13, 1879, there were only three Hispanicsurnamed candidates, and they gleaned less than 230 votes out of 3,058, or 7 percent. More telling of the lack of political power and voice in the control of the Mexican population was that the sole Mexican who ran for alderman in Ward 1 and Ward 2, predominantly Mexican wards, received only two votes. 28. City Council Minutes, August 6, 1878, Journal G, 397. 29. Neal, “George W. Brackenridge: Citizen and Philanthropist,” 24. 30. In Torres, Voices from the San Antonio Missions, 109.

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INDEX

Page numbers in bold type indicate illustrations. acequias Alamo Madre (Valero) Acequia, 27, 36 construction methods, 36–41, 44–45, 137 decline of system, 71, 82, 96–98, 120–21 definition, 14 in El Paso, 34, 125 Espada Acequia, 38, 49, 66, 139 eyewitness descriptions, 88–89 as first municipal water system, 48–49 friars’ knowledge of irrigation techniques, 41–48 Indian laborers, guarding of, 33–34, 47 maintenance of, 76–80, 83, 96 modern remnants of, 139–40 “non-mission,” 73 overview, 31–33, 37 San Antonio system, description of, 36–41 San Juan Acequia, 38, 66, 130–31, 140 See also engineering/technology of acequias; rule of capture; San Pedro Creek/Acequia Acton v. Blundell, 129 acueductos (aqueducts), 38–41, 139–40 Adams, H. B., 101 adjudication of water rights claims, 128, 148n 32 agostadero (pasture land), 57–58 agriculture and commerce in early San Antonio, 70–71 decline of in region, 30, 81–82, 88, 90–91 irrigation, advantages of, 33 of Native Americans of region, 24–25 and Spanish water management practices, 6–7 See also commerce and trade; farming; livestock aguas de propios, 63–64, 92 Aguilar, Antonio de, 43 Aguirre, Pedro de, 25

Alamo, 13, 25, 26–28, 47 Alamo Heights, 136 Alamo Madre Acequia, 27, 36, 140 Alarcón, Martin de, 26, 27 Alarcón Expedition, 43–44 Alazan ditch, 137 alcaldes (council members), 75 Alexander VI, Pope, 21 allowable impervious cover, 132 Allred, James V., 125 alluvial soil, 10 Almazán, Juan Antonio Pérez de, 52, 61, 62–64 Almonte, Juan N., 69–70 Amangual, Francisco, 64 American Indians. See Native Americans American Public Works Association, 49 Anderson, Raymond L., 31 And the Desert Shall Rejoice (Maas and Anderson), 31 Anglo settlers, influence of, 16, 81, 90, 92–95 Apache tribe, 21, 25, 28, 66, 71, 79 Applewhite Reservoir, 134–35 appropriative system of water rights, 125 aquadores, 31, 94, 111, 138 aqueducts, 38–41, 139–40 arable land, definition, 57 archaelogy sites, 134–35 Arenson River Theater, 126 Armas, Antonia, 64 Armstrong, Ellis, 98 Army, U. S., 87, 91 Arneson, Edwin P., 6–7, 45 Arredondo, Joaquín de, 80–81 Arrocha, Francisco, 70 artesian wells, 114–15, 116, 123, 127, 129, 139 Austin, Stephen F., 16 Baade, Hans W., 127–28, 148n 21 “bacon-strip” lots, 150n 29 Balcones Escarpment, 3 Barnes, George. W., 93, 103

171

16-A5077-IX.indd 171

5/18/09 2:17:03 PM

INDEX 172

Barriero, Álvarez, 43–44 barrileros, 111, 138 Barrios y Jáuregui, Jacinto de, 29 Barshop v. Medina County Underground Water Conservation District, 131 Bartlett, John Russell, 16–17 Beene, Richard, 134–35 Béjar, Villa of, 26–27 Bergaire, Remie, 105 Berlandier, Jean-Louis, 81–82 Bervegal, Jacobo, 75 Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 49 Beuche, Betty, 140 Bexar County, 123, 124, 129, 131 Blake, Nelson, M., xi, 99, 106–7 “the Blot,” 6 Blue Hole, 11–14 Blumberg, Louis, 129–30 Blundell, Acton v., 129 Boerne, 91 Bolton, Herbert E., 21, 23, 45 Bonnell, George W., 16 Boston, Massachusetts, 49, 98, 102 Brackenridge, George W., 93–94 adversarial relationship with City of San Antonio, 103, 113 and control of San Antonio Water Works, 112 and controversy over headwaters, 108–9 cotton trading activities, 103, 104 on decline of San Antonio River, 123 and drilling of wells for purity, 114–15, 116 and Mexican War of Independence, 104 overview and background, 99–100, 101–2, 137, 139 and water for poor, 138 Brackenridge, Isabella, 103 Brackenridge, John, 104 Brackenridge, Thomas, 103, 108 Brackenridge Park, 140 Brownsville, Texas, 103 Bujac (ice entrepreneur), 105 Bustillos, José Antonio, 64 Cabello, Domingo, 69 cabildo (town council), 58, 61, 62, 75–76, 79 Callaghan, Bryan, 113, 118 Calvert, Robert W., 32 Camp Travis, 139 Canary Islanders

16-A5077-IX.indd 172

and cabildo, control of, 62 conversion of, 22–23 decline of, 79 and dispossession of first settlers, 62–64 and friars, tension with, 28–29, 72–77 and Indian labor, competition for, 41, 70–71 and land lottery, 65 overview and background, 74–76 and water rights, competition for, 52–54, 79 Casafuerte, Marques de (Viceroy), 52–55, 61–63, 70–71, 75 Cassin et al., San Juan Ditch Company v., 127 Castañeda, Carlos, 54 Castro, Miguel de, 64 Castroville, Texas, 91 “catfish farm” well, 124, 129–30 Catholic Church, 21–22, 54 See also Franciscan friars Cavrera, Joseph, 67 cedula (documentary order), 62 Céliz, Francisco de, 26–27 Chabot, Frederick, 27, 36 cholera, 83, 94, 96–98, 120 Christ, Great Commission of, 23 Christianity. See Franciscan friars Cibolo Creek, 88–89 City of Corpus Christi v. City of Pleasanton, 134 City Ordinances for the Internal Management and Administration of the Municipal Government of San Antonio de Béjar, 77 Civil War, 91–92, 103–4 Clayton Williams, Pecos County WCID No. I v., 132–33 climate, 3–7, 32, 88, 105 See also rainfall Clopper, Joseph C., 16 Coahuila, 60, 80 Coahuiltecan tribes, 24, 29, 34–35 Cobbs, Thomas D., 127 Comal Springs/County, 9–10, 91 Comanche Creek, 133 Comanche Springs, 133 Comanche tribe, 21, 28, 66, 89, 96 commerce and trade in agriculture, 28–29, 69–70, 70–71, 72– 73, 91 Civil War era, 91–92, 102–3, 104 decline of, 89 French, activities of, ix, 15, 25, 26 See also selling of land and water rights

5/18/09 1:23:24 PM

INDEX

Committee on Water Works, 109 community solidarity in early settlements, 52, 53–54, 62, 76–78, 140 Concepción, Mission, 11, 27, 29, 42, 66–67, 79, 82 Confederate Army of the West, 91 Confederate States of America, 91 Congress of the Republic of Texas, 124 conservation of water programs, xii, 30, 52, 54, 58, 131 See also GCDs construction acequias, 36–41, 44–45 modern, and springs, 136 contamination of water, 77, 83, 96–98 contra legem (contrary to law), 51 conversion of indigenous peoples to Catholicism, 21, 22–24, 44, 52 Corner, William, 101, 109 Corpus Christi, Texas, 133–34 cotton, commerce in, 102–3, 104 Council House Fight, 96 Council of the Indies, 56–57 Court of Civil Appeals of Texas, 127 Cox, I. Wayne, 46, 140 Cross Timbers region, 3 Cutter, Charles R., 50–51 dams destruction of at San Juan mission, 130–31 Espada, 49, 139 and flooding, 79 Medina Lake, 134 as part of an acequia, 14, 32, 38–41, 45, 47 weir, 136, 139 Davis Chester B., 117–18, 120 debris in acequias, 76, 77, 96, 131 de Croix, Teodoro, 70, 71, 73 defense of settlements, 21–22, 66, 78, 80 See also Native Americans, hostility of de la Vega, Lasso, 58 Denison, Texas, 124 derecho Indiano/derecho vulgar, 50, 51–51, 54, 66, 135 Díaz, José Salvador, 65 “diffused” surface water, 126 Diligencias practicadas parel R. P. Presid[en]te, 45 disease and Native Americans, 28, 34, 73 and water quality, 49, 83, 94, 96–98, 120

16-A5077-IX.indd 173

disputes over water rights. See water rights ditches Alazan ditch, 137 decline of, 127 Espada Ditch, 38, 39, 41, 49 gravity flow, 14, 32, 36–41, 45–46 San Pedro Ditch, 73 Upper Labor Ditch, 106 See also acequias; irrigation diversion dams, 38 Dobkins, Betty Eakle, 6 Dolores y Viana, Mariano Francisco de los (Fray Mariano), 33 Domingo Terán del los Rios Expedition, 15, 25 Don Felipe II, 57 Don Felipe IV, 57 Doolittle, William E., 144n 27 “down-ditch,” 77 drought, 3–5, 81, 88, 99, 127, 133, 134 dry-land farming, 5–6 dulas (time allotments to water), 58, 64, 65, 71 dwellings, 80, 87–88, 136 Dwyer, Edward, 91

173

economy of early San Antonio, 69–71 impact of San Antonio River today, ix, 134 post Civil War, 92–94 post Mexican War of Independence, 80, 81 See also commerce and trade Edwards Aquifer dependence on, 134 effect of well drilling on, 123, 129 management of, 131–33 overview, 8–14 Edwards Aquifer Authority, 131–33 Edwards Plateau, 3 Egyptians, technology of, 32 El Paso, Texas, 34, 125 encomendero, 23 engineering/technology of acequias Franciscan friars, 41–48 and grade requirements, 36–38, 42–45 overview, 36, 44–45 Spanish technological expertise, ix–x, 31– 32, 38 English Common Law, 124, 126–28, 129 “environmental flows,” 136 Epazoyuca (Mexico), 43 equidad (fairness), 50

5/18/09 2:17:39 PM

INDEX 174

Espada, Mission, 11, 27, 36, 66–67, 81, 139 Espada Acequia, 38, 49, 66, 139 Espada Dam, 38, 40, 40, 49, 139 Espada Ditch, 38, 39, 41, 49 Espada Ditch Company, 55 Espinosa, Isidro Félix de, 15, 25–26, 42–43 Espinosa-Olivares-Aguirre Expedition, 15, 25–26 Espíritu, Santo, Mission, 71 estoppel, 50–51 Everett, Richard, 17 The Explorers’ Tale (Weniger), 15–16 eyewitness descriptions, historical, 15–17, 87–90 Falcon Reservoir, 148n 21 Fannin, William, 45–46, 146–47n 42 farming “catfish farm” well, 124, 129–30 decline of in region, 71, 81–82, 88, 90–91 and diversity of crops in region, 16 in early missions, 21, 27, 33 and importance of irrigation, 5–6 and land classification/value, 57–58, 132 and local commerce, 28–29, 69–70, 72– 73, 91 Native Americans hostilities, 17, 28, 44, 71, 78, 79–80, 81 return of lands to native peoples after secularization of missions, 66–67 and richness of regional alluvial soils, 10 subsistence (poor populace) v. large-scale (missions), 69–70 See also agriculture; irrigation Federal Land Bank, 136 Felder, Bishop Hilarin, 22 Fernández, Benito, 41–42, 63, 70–71 fines, acequia misuse, 76–77, 96 fire, and need for water, 49, 98 fire hydrants, 101, 114, 118, 119, 138 fish, 13–14, 15, 26 Fisher, Lewis F., 98 floods, 3–7, 41, 79, 81, 83, 130, 139 Flores, Geronimo, 65, 68 flow characteristics of drilled wells, 115, 129 and grade of acequia systems, 36–38, 42–45 of San Antonio acequia, 36 of San Antonio River, 16–17 of springs, 9–10, 13–14

16-A5077-IX.indd 174

Fort Sam Houston, 139 Fort Stockton, Texas, 133 Franciscan friars control of water, competition for, 51–55 conversion of indigenous peoples to Catholicism, 21, 22–24, 44, 52 Indian labor, competition for, 72–74 irrigation techniques, knowledge of, 41–48, 137 missions, establishment of, 22–24 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 22 Fredericksburg, Texas, 91 Freeman, W. R., 107–9 French and ice machine manufacture, 105 immigrants, 101, 102 settlements, 25, 91 Spanish territory, incursions nto, ix, 15 trade activities of, 26 French, James H., 113 friars. See Franciscan friars Friars Minor, Order of, 22 Fuertenventura (island), 74 Funston Street, 109 Galveston Daily News, 142n 5(ch1) Ganzabal, Father, 45, 47 GCDs (groundwater conservation districts), 131–32 geography. See topography of region “geological containers,” 125–26 German immigrants, 90, 91 Giraud, Francois, 100, 101 Glick, Thomas E., 46 Goliad, Texas, 80 Gomera (island), 74 Gonzales, Joseph, 27 Goras, Juan Leal, 67 government administration of water use in modern San Antonio, 124–35 cabildo (town council), 58, 61, 62, 75–76, 79 in early Spanish municipalities, 21–22, 61 and Province of Texas, 25–26 sovereign authority and actions (Spain), 55, 56–60 See also legal issues/actions; municipal water management; presidios grade of acequia systems, 36–38, 42–45, 137 Gran Canaria (island), 74

5/18/09 1:23:24 PM

INDEX

granting of land and water, 16, 55–60, 61–64, 66, 125, 127, 135 See also selling of land and water rights gravity flow ditches/irrigation, 14, 32, 36–41, 45–46 Great Commission of Christ, 23 Great Spring Waters of America, Inc., Sipriano v., 133 groundwater, rights to, 55–56, 93 See also rule of capture groundwater conservation districts (GCDs), 131–32 Guardiola y Saez, Lorenzo, 55 Guenther, C. H., 105 Guenther’s Mill, 105 Guidelines for a Texas Mission, 29, 35 Hays County, 9–10 “headenders,” 149n 4 Head-of-the-River (Brackenridge homestead), 13, 97, 103 heat and humidity, 4, 5, 88, 105 “heathens,” 22 HemisFair site, 140 Herff, Adolph, 97 Herff, Ferdinand Peter, 97–98, 105 Hesperian, 87–90 hidalgo, 62, 75 hijo dalgo de solar conocido, 62, 75 Hispanics. See Tejanos “Historical Background of Texas Water Law” (Baade), 148n 21 History of Public Works in the United States 1776–1976, 98 The History of Texas (Morfi), 16 History of the Moorish Empire in Europe (Scott), 32 Holden & Company, 104–5 House, Boyce, ix Houston and Texas Central Railway Company, W. A. East v., xi–xii, 124, 129, 133, 134 H&TC Railway Company, 129 Hugman, Robert H. H., 141n 2 (intro) Hutchins, Wells A., 44, 45 Hyatt Hotel, 136 hydrants. See fire hydrants ice-making, 104–5 Indians. See Native Americans The Indians of Texas (Newcomb), 24

16-A5077-IX.indd 175

industry, lack of, 89 Irish immigrants, 91 irrigable land, 57–58, 67 irrigation difficulty of at La Bahía, 71 early descriptions of in region, 16, 25–26 importance of, 5–7, 11 and large-scale farming of Spanish settlements, 21 lower mission system, 66 overview, 126 Spanish expertise in, ix–x, 31–32, 38 and use of public water, 58 See also acequias; groundwater, rights to Irrigation Act of 1889, 148n 21 Isleños. See Canary Islanders Iturbide, Agustín, 81

175

jacales (huts), 80, 88 Jarame tribe, 25, 26 Johnson, Russell, 158n 12 Johnston, Joseph E., 107 Joske’s, 136 Juárez, Benito, 104 judges (Spanish) for water system, 57 Judson, M. C., 114–15, 139 justice, as basis for Spanish legal system, 50–55, 55–57, 124, 135 Kimble County, 99 Knox, John Armory, 142n 5 (ch1) La Bahía, 71 labor division of among friars, 45, 47 Native Americans as labor force, 28–29, 33–36, 70–71, 72–74 labores (farm lands), 66–67 Lacoste, Jean Baptiste, 98, 101, 102–3, 104–5, 105–6, 112 See also San Antonio Water Works Company Lacoste Ice Company, 105 La Mancha region, 6 land, classification of, 57–58 land grants. See granting of land and water land value, 57–58, 99, 128, 132, 135 Lanzarote (island), 74 La Palma (island), 74 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 23

5/18/09 1:23:24 PM

INDEX 176

Las Siete Partidas, 55 Laws of the Indies, 51 The Legal Culture of Northern New Spain (Cutter), 50 legal issues/actions and acequia maintenance, 76–80 Acton v. Blundell, 129 Barshop v. Medina County Underground Water Conservation District, 131 Brackenridge v. City of San Antonio lawsuits, 103 City of Corpus Christi v. City of Pleasanton, 134 English Common Law, 124, 126–28 granting of land and water, 16, 55–60, 61–64, 66, 125, 127 incorporation of San Antonio, 94 isolation of converts by friars, 28–29 ownership of unbranded livestock, 70, 71, 73 Pecos County WCID No. I v. Clayton Williams, 132–33 and rule of capture, 124, 129–30, 132–34 San Antonio River Authority v. G. Garrett Lewis et al., 32, 130–31 San Antonio Water Works Company v. City of San Antonio lawsuits, 102, 114 San Juan Ditch Company v. Cassin et al., 127 selling of land and water rights, 64, 65–69, 92–95 Spanish legal system of water rights, x, xi–xii, 50–60, 93, 124–28, 135–36 and the Spanish mission system, 23 State of Texas v. Valmont Plantations, 126 W. A. East v. Houston and Texas Central Railway Company, xi–xii, 124, 129, 133, 134 wife’s rights, 68–69 See also government; Texas water laws Lewis et al., San Antonio River Authority v., 32, 130–31 ley (law), 50 lifestyle and character of settlers, 74–76, 82–83, 87–90 Lincoln, Abraham, 104 Lipan Apaches, 28, 79 livestock and acequia construction, 44–45 and land classification, 57–58

16-A5077-IX.indd 176

and meat industry, 105 and Native Americans, 25, 28, 57 number of in region, 70 unbranded cattle, issues regarding, 70, 71, 73 and water issues, 25, 126, 132 living conditions in settlements, 80, 81, 87– 90, 97–98 Lockwood, John, 100 lotteries for land, 65, 66 Louisiana, 25 Maas, Arthur, 31 Mackey, Nelson, 113 Mahncke Park, 109 Margil, Antonio, 46 Mariano, Fray, 33, 45, 47 Marín, Francisco, 43 Martín of Valencia, 46 Massanet, Damian, 15, 25 Matamoros, Mexico, 102–3, 105 Maverick family, 97 Maximilian, Emperor, 104 mayordomo de los bienes y propios de la republica, 58, 64 McCarthy, B. M., 91 McLean, Bert, 96 Mederos, Antonio Rodríguez, 64 Medina, Battle of, 80 Medina County Underground Water Conservation District, Barshop v., 131 Medina Lake, 134 Medina River, 134–35 Menchaca family, 101, 104 Mexican-Americans, 94–95 See also Tejanos Mexico and cotton trade, 104 irrigation systems in, 43–44 marginalization of Mexican people in settlements, 87–90, 92 missionaries in, 46 missionary colleges in, 24, 42 recognition of Spanish colonial law, 60 settlement grants from, 16 war with United States, 87, 90–91 See also Mexico, Republic of Mexico, Republic of land and water rights of, 124–25, 126, 127 and settlement grants, 16

5/18/09 2:18:11 PM

INDEX

Spanish law recognized by, 60 War of Independence of, 80–83 See also Mexico Meyer, Michael C., ix, 31, 64, 72 Mier y Terán, Manuel de, 81–83 military expeditions, 25, 26 importance as industry in San Antonio, 90–91 Texas Revolution, 83, 87 See also presidios Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (Phelan), 22 missions disputes with settlers, 73 establishment of San Antonio missions, 25–30 and Franciscans, 22–24 and Native Americans, 24–25 overview, 21–22 secularization of, 66–67, 71 See also Franciscan friars; individual establishments Mixteca (Mexico), 43 Moors, technology of, 31–32 Morfi, Juan Agustín, 16 municipalities, early Spanish, 21, 22, 61 municipal water management acequia maintenance regulations, 76–80, 96 acequias as public works, 48–49 sale of headwater lots of San Antonio River, 92–94, 100 v. private, x–xi See also San Antonio Water Works Company Muslims, conversion of, 22 National Theatre, 136 National Waterworks Company of New York, 100–101 Native Americans attitude toward land ownership, 66–67 conversion of to Catholicism, 21, 22–24, 44, 52 and disease, 28, 34, 73 exploitation of as labor force, 28–29, 33–36, 70–71, 72–74 hostility of, 17, 28, 44, 71, 78, 79–80, 81 indigenous groups in region, overview, 24–25

16-A5077-IX.indd 177

presidios as defense against, 21–22 as students of missionaries in irrigation techniques, 41–43 violence against, 23, 96 See also individual groups Navarro, Angel, 65 navigable streams, rights to, 55 Neal, Basil Young, 114–15, 139 New Braunfels, 10, 91 Newcomb, J. P., 109, 112 Newcomb, W. W., 24 New Mexico, 91 Nixon, Pat Ireland, 97 norias (waterwheels), 32 Notes on Texas, 87–90 Nuestra Señora del Candelaris, Mission, 47 Nuevo León, 80

177

Oca, Juan Joseph Montes de, 65 Oliva, José Rafael, 48, 72–73 Olivares, Antonio de, 25–27 Olmos Creek, 17 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 14, 90 On a Mexican Mustang through Texas (Sweet and Knox), 5 Order of Friars Minor, 22 Orders for New Discoveries, Royal, 23 Our Lady of the Lake University, 136 Pacheco, Rafael Martínez, 71 Padrón, Joseph, 65, 67–68 Padrón, María Sanavia, 65, 67–68 “pagans,” 22 Paleo-Indian Angostura site, Late, 135 Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), 5 Pampoa tribe, 25 Paschal, George, 119 Paseo Del Rio Association, 141n 2 (intro) pasture land, 57 Payaya tribe, 25 peaches, 16 Pearl Brewing Company, 8 Pearson, Fred Stark, 134 Pecos County, 132–33 Pecos County Water Control and Improvement District, 133 Pecos County WCID No. I v. Clayton Williams, 132–33 Persians, technology of, 32 Peterson, James F., 3

5/18/09 1:23:25 PM

INDEX 178

Phelan, John Leddy, 22 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 106–7 Piedras Creek, 38, 39, 139 Pike, Zebulon, 80 plants, indigenous, 15, 24, 25–26 Pleasonton, Texas, 133–34 politics and water, 114–21, 137 pollution and water quality, 77, 96–98 Pope, Jack, 126 population of City of San Antonio, 97, 114, 115, 117 growth of and need for water management, 5, 6, 10, 99, 114–15 growth of disease, 49 lack of in early settlements, 21, 27–28 Native Americans, decline in, 28, 34, 73 racial makeup of, 81, 90, 91 of San Antonio River community, 30, 69, 73, 80, 90 of Spanish colonists, 21, 28 stagnation of in region, 30, 71, 79, 81 porciones (of land), 65 Porter, D. W., 156n 24 poverty, 80, 81, 138–39 Praries region, 3 presas (dams), 38–41 Presidio La Bahía, 71 Presidio of San Antonio, 62–63, 73 presidios as commerce center, 28–29, 69–71, 73 decline of, 81–82 Indian laborers, guarding of, 33–34, 47 as integral part of settlement, 27 Native American hostilities, 17, 28, 44, 71, 78, 79–80, 81 overview, 21–22 and San Antonio, establishment of, 62–63 pressure, water of springs, 13, 17 of water lines, 119, 139 wells, 115, 129 prime directive of missionaries, 23, 44 prisons, 29 property value, 57–58, 99, 128, 132, 135 propiedad perfecta, xii Province of Texas, formation of, 25–26 public health issues, 77, 83, 96–98 See also disease public v. private ownership of water, x–xii See also rule of capture

16-A5077-IX.indd 178

public water systems, 48–49, 138–39 See also acequias public works, 49, 64, 106 Pucek, Ron, 129–30 punishment, civil, 29–30, 35–36, 76–77, 96 Purisima Concepción. See Concepción, Mission Querétaro missionary college, 24, 42–43, 46 Querétaran missions, 41, 47, 63 racial issues, 80–81, 89, 94–95, 137 railroads, 105, 124, 129 rainfall, 3–7, 9, 24, 79 Ramón, Domingo, 26 Ramón Expedition, 15, 26 Ramsdell, Charles W., 81 recharge zone, 9, 131, 132 Recollections of George W. Brackenridge (Williams), 123 Recopilación del las Leys del las Indies, 56–57, 58 Reeves, Blair, 148n 32 refrigeration, 105 Reglamento General de la Medidas de Aguas, 58 religion. See Franciscan friars Republic of Mexico land and water rights under, 124–25, 126, 127 and settlement grants, 16 Spanish law recognized by, 60 War of Independence of, 80–83 Republic of Texas recognition of Spanish colonial law, 60 San Antonio under, 87–90 water rights under, 124 Ricard, Robert, 43–44 Riddell, John Leonard, 17 Rio Grande, 148n 21 Rio Grande Plain, 3 riparian land and water rights, 55–56, 59, 124–25, 126–27, 135 River Street, 109 Riverwalk, ix, 126, 134, 141n 2(intro) roads, importance of, 10–11 Roberts, Oran Milo, 128 Robolledo, Oliván, 62 Rockdale, Texas, 47 Rodríguez, Antonio, 70 Roemer, Ferdinand, 16, 90 Romans, technology of, 31, 36, 136

5/18/09 2:18:52 PM

INDEX

Rosario, Mission, 71 Royal Corps of Engineers (Spain), 43 Royal Orders for New Discoveries, 23 rule of capture, xi–xii, 124, 129–30, 131, 132–35 See also riparian land and water rights; water, ownership of runoff, 36, 135–36 Salado Creek, 80, 88 San Antonio, city of (1800–1902) cholera and decline of acequias, 83, 94, 96–98, 120 and the Civil War, 91–92 eyewitness description 1837, 87–90 and the Mexican War of Independence, 80–83 modern water rights applications in, 128–35 post-Civil War, 92–95, 137 post-Mexican War, 90–91 See also San Antonio Water Works Company San Antonio Board of Health, 97 San Antonio City Council, 130 San Antonio County, 131 San Antonio Daily Express, 113 San Antonio Daily Herald, 97 San Antonio de Bexar, 27, 69 San Antonio de Padua, 26 San Antonio de Valero, Mission (Alamo), 13, 25, 26–28, 47 San Antonio Herald, 109 San Antonio Ice Company, 104–5 San Antonio National Bank, 102, 104, 112 San Antonio Presidio, 73 San Antonio River decline of, 123–24, 127 discontinuation of use for drinking water, 121 discovery of, 15 early descriptions of, 15–17, 16–17, 25–26 economic influence of, ix and first non-mission acequia, 73 geography of region, 3, 14 influence on soil quality, 10 modern administration of, 124–35 sale of headwater lots, 92–94, 100, 137 See also San Antonio Spring San Antonio River Authority (SARA), 130–31 San Antonio River Authority v. G. Garrett Lewis et al., 32, 130–31

16-A5077-IX.indd 179

San Antonio Spring, 11–14, 36, 92–93 See also San Antonio River San Antonio Water System (SAWS), 130, 134 San Antonio Water Works Company attempts by City of San Antonio to discredit, 117–21 background, x–xi contract for public water supply, 101, 106 design of water system, 109 formation of, 98 funding issues, 106–9 lack of customers for, 110–11, 114–15, 116 revenues from, 115, 117 Sanchez, José María, 82 Sandeja, Juachin Flores de, 65 San Elazario, 35 San Francisco Solano, Mission, 26 San Francisco Xavier de Horcasitas, Mission, 45, 47 San Gabriel River, 33, 45, 47 San Ildefenso, Mission, 47 sanitation, 96–98 San José, Mission, 11, 16, 27, 34, 46, 81 San Juan, Mission, 27, 66–67, 81, 130 San Juan Acequia, 38, 66, 130–31, 140 San Juan Ditch Company v. Cassin et al., 127 San Marcos, springs in, 10 San Marcos River, 25 San Marcos Springs, 9–10 San Miguel, Juan de, 43 San Patricio, 91 San Pedro Creek/Acequia, 10, 11 distribution of water rights to, 63–64, 75–76, 92 early descriptions of, 17 and first non-mission acequia, 73 land and water transactions on, 65 modern remnants of, 140 as racial border, 94–95 San Pedro Ditch, 73 San Pedro Park, 11 San Pedro Springs, 10, 11, 25–27, 36, 73 San Xavier, 45, 47 SARA (San Antonio River Authority), 130–31 SAWS (San Antonio Water System), 130, 134 Schuetz, Mardith, 47 Scott, S. P., 31–32 secularization of missions, 30, 66–67, 71, 82–83

179

5/18/09 1:23:25 PM

INDEX 180

selling of land and water rights, 64, 65–69, 92–95 See also granting of land and water settlement grants, 16 sexual discrimination in legal rights, 68–69 Sieta Partidas, xii silt in acequias, 76 “sin agua” (without water), 59 Sipriano, Bart, 133–34 Sipriano v. Great Spring Waters of America, Inc., 133 Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, 123 Six-Mile Creek, 38, 39 smallpox, 28 Smith, Garland F., 126, 148n 21 soil characteristics, regional, 10, 36, 46 Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 44 sovereign authority and actions (Spain), 55, 56–60, 62, 74 See also granting of land and water Spain Spain, climate of, 6–7, 32 The Spanish Element in Texas Water Law (Dobkins), 6 Spanish settlement and colonization and Canary Islanders, 74–76 cultural influences of, xi legal system of water rights, x, xi–xii, 50–60, 93, 124–28, 135–36 missions, establishment of, 21–30 overview, ix–x system of (encomienda), 23 technological expertise, ix–x, 31–32, 38 See also engineering/technology of acequias; missions The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, 43–44 Spiritu Santo, bay of, 27 springs of the Edwards Aquifer and construction issues, 132, 136 early map of San Antonio, 13 overview, 8–14, 16 See also rule of capture sprinkling of streets, 119–20 standpipes, public, 119–20 State of Texas v. Valmont Plantations, 126 Stillman, Charles, 103, 104 St Mary’s Law Journal, 127–28 street sprinkling, 119–20 “su derecho,” 50 suerte (drawn lot), 65, 79

16-A5077-IX.indd 180

surface v. underground water, rights to, xi–xii, 55–56, 93, 126 See also riparian land and water rights; rule of capture Sweet, Alexander Edwin, 5, 11, 14, 94–95 Sweet, James R., 92, 102, 141–42n 5 (ch1) Sweet & Lacoste, 102–3 “tailenders,” 149n 4 technological expertise of Spanish, ix–x, 31– 32, 38 See alsoo engineering/technology of acequias Teja, Jesús de la, 27 Tejanos, 80–81, 90, 137–38, 138–39 Tejas tribe, 25 telegraph lines (fire alarms), 119 temperature and humidity. See climate temperature of springs, 16 Temple, Larry, 156n 23 Tenerife (island), 74 Terán, Manuel de Mier y, 81–83 terrain of region, 25–26 Terrell Hills, 136 Texas, Province of (Spain), 26 Texas, Republic of recognition of Spanish colonial law, 60 San Antonio under, 87–90 water rights under, 124 Texas Democrat, 97 Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century (Bolton), 45 Texas Legislature, 94, 124, 128, 131 Texas Revolution, 83, 87 Texas Siftings, 5 Texas State Board of Water Engineers, 125 Texas Supreme Court, 127, 128, 129, 133–34 Texas Tech University Water Resources Center, 38 Texas Water Code, 127 Texas water laws adoption of English Common Law, 124, 126–27 modern application of, 125–35 Spanish basis of, x, xi–xii, 51, 56, 59–60, 69, 124–28, 135–36 Texas Water Rights Commission, 128 The Spanish Acequias of San Antonio (Cox), 140 Tijerina, Andrés, 51 tools and acequia construction, 36, 45–46, 47–48, 137

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INDEX

topography of region, 9–10, 14, 36 tourism, ix trade and commerce in agriculture, 28–29, 69–70, 70–71, 72– 73, 91 Civil War era, 91–92, 102–3, 104 decline of, 89 French, activities of, ix, 15, 25, 26 See also selling of land and water rights Trinity Sands, 133 Twohig, John, 91 University of the Incarnate Word, 11 “up dip,” 133 Upper Labor Ditch/acequia, 106, 140 Urrutia, Toribio, 76 Uruapan (Mexico), 43 usufruct rights, 59, 61 Valdéz, Juan, 28, 29 Valencia, Spain, 46 Valero, Mission (Alamo), 13, 25, 26–28, 47 “Valley Water Suit” (Smith), 148n 21 Valmont Plantation, 148n 20 Valmont Plantations, State of Texas v., 126 Vance, James, 91 varas, 67 Venezuela, 75 Vergara, Gabriel de, 52–54 Victoria, Guadalupe, 82 Villa de Béjar, 49, 61–64 Villars, John, 80–81 Villa San Fernando de Béjar, 49, 61–64 violence of Mexican War of Independence, 80–81, 83 against Native Americans, 23, 96 of Native Americans, 17, 28, 44, 71, 78, 79–80, 81 Visigoths, technology of, 31 W. A. East v. Houston and Texas Central Railway Company, xi–xii, 124, 129, 133, 134 water, ownership of granting of land and water rights, 16, 55–60, 61–64, 66, 125, 127 public v. private, x–xii selling of land and water rights, 64, 65–69, 92–95 Spanish legal concepts, x, xi–xii, 50–60, 93, 124–28, 135–36 See also rule of capture; water rights

16-A5077-IX.indd 181

water, politics of, 114–21, 137 water as a commodity, 62, 64, 114 water as a resource, importance of, xi, 6–7, 11, 51 water carriers, 31, 94, 111, 138 water distribution systems commitment to as basis for community, 10–11 description of acequias, 31–33 influence of Isleños on, 74 municipal v. private management, x–xi Spanish expertise in, ix–x, 31–32, 38 See also acequias; San Antonio Water Works Company Water for the Cities (Blake), 99 “water hogging” well, 129 Water in the Hispanic Southwest (Meyer), ix, 72 water management. See water distribution systems water quality, 77, 83, 96–98, 114–15 water rights granting of land and water, 16, 55–60, 61–64, 66, 125, 127 riparian land and, 55–56, 59, 124–25, 126–27, 135 selling of, 64, 65–69, 92–95 Spanish legal system of, x, xi–xii, 50–60, 93, 124–28, 135–36 Water Rights Adjudication Act of 1967, 126, 128 water use classifications, 125–26 waterwheels, 32 Water Works Committee, 119–20, 138 Water Works Reservoir, 109 weather. See climate Weber, David, 23–24, 25, 98 Weideman, Dr., 96 weir dams, 38, 130–31, 136 wells, xii, 114–15, 116, 123, 124, 127, 129, 139 Weniger, Del, 15–16, 136 wife’s rights, 68–69 Williams, Mason, 123 Witte Museum, 140 Woll, Adrian, 87 women’s issues in legal rights, 68–69 Worster, Donald, 61 Worth, William Jenkins, 96–97 Worth’s Spring, 11–14, 93

181

Zacatecas missionary college, 24, 42, 46

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