- STEVEN GONZALES: The Camino can definitely allow someone to
travel back in time.
The borderlands, the frontera, the frontier on the Rio Grande-
there are these worlds, these places coming together,
and that is what the Camino has always done.
The cultural imprints that the Spanish left in the 1700s are
still seen in many of these towns along the Camino.
The Camino Real has always been about interaction
between different cultures.
[upbeat music]
We see that happening today.
That trade and travel still takes place at these crossings.
There are still connections there that have lasted for
hundreds of years over time.
[thunder]
This actually might be it.
You can see the rapid right through here.
I'm Steven Gonzales.
This could very well be part of the historic crossing.
I'm executive director of El Camino Real de los Tejas
National Historic Trail Association.
We're here at Los Corralitos Ranch in South Texas,
right on the banks of the Rio Grande, still a working ranch,
dating to the Spanish colonial period, and we're scouting
around right now trying to see if we can find swales,
remnants of the road here on the landscape.
But it's so thick through here.
It is hard to tell right now.
El Camino Real de los Tejas is the old royal road that came up
from Mexico City to establish Texas in Spanish colonial times.
It's the road that led to the founding of Texas.
[music]
There are many caminos reales that make up the Camino Real.
In times past these roads have different names because of the
places that they were going to.
The Old San Antonio Road and the Nacogdoches Road,
La Bahia Road and the Laredo Road.
Every Texan of note that we can think of,
all the way from Spaniards such as Alonzo de Leon
to Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Sam Houston,
they all traveled along portions of the Camino Real
at one time or another, and it's really elemental
to the state's history.
We think about things like the battle of the Alamo and Goliad,
and we forget that those troops were actually traveling along
roadways, pathways, and those were largely the Camino Real
and segments of it.
[traffic passing]
So one of our goals is to make the public more aware of it.
Essentially, Spain was establishing this new kingdom
in what is now the U.S.A.
They saw the French as a threat.
[military march music]
In 1714, the French established Fort Saint Jean Baptiste in
Natchitoches, Louisiana.
That is the oldest settlement in Louisiana, and the easternmost
part of the Camino Real.
That French settlement alarmed the Spanish, so the Spanish
in turn established the first capital of Texas at Los Adaes,
in what is now Robeline, Louisiana.
No one could imagine that the first capital of Texas is
in present-day Louisiana.
It was essentially these two European powers standing off
in what they considered to be the wilderness.
But once that French threat subsided, there was no longer
a need for those missions and presidios to be out there.
And so those fortifications and settlements,
they fell back and back and back.
There is something about the South Texas landscape
that I think more easily evokes the Camino,
and travel by Spaniards in times past.
[Tejano music]
- Buenos dias.
- San Ygnacio is a very unique community along the Camino Real.
It's essentially an old Mexican village that was built in the
mid-1830s, which is being preserved and taken care of
by people like the River Pierce Foundation and others there in
the community to help protect it for future generations
to see and explore.
- This is more like a Mexican village than anything
because of course it was.
It is the last of its kind in this country.
- STEVEN: It's one of the best places anywhere along the trail
to kind of get that vicarious experience of the Camino
and what it may have been like in times past.
Another great place to go and experience the Camino
in South Texas is Goliad.
There's no better place to go and see what a Spanish presidio
would have looked like.
So these presidios stretched all the way from the Gulf of Mexico
to the Gulf of California, and Goliad was the eastern-most
presidio on northern line of defense in New Spain.
Goliad has two mission sites.
- Mission Espiritu Santo de Zuniga, dating back to 1749.
And we also have Mission Rosario on the other side of the river,
beginning in 1754.
[music]
Espiritu Santo was active here all the way up until 1830.
The majority of the restoration work took place in the 1930s,
but when you walk inside the chapel, you're getting
a really good idea what it would have looked like
during the 18th century.
[Gregorian chant music]
- The Karankawa didn't get along with the Aranama
that were already there, so they created another mission.
- STEVEN: Mission Rosario is not restored.
It has got the foundations and the remnants of the walls there,
so it gives you an idea of the architecture before
the restoration would have taken place.
There's a new visitors center that is being constructed,
and it will highlight the trail and show how those missions
are attached to it.
- El Camino Real went directly through the town of Goliad.
They would have needed to transport goods and people
back and forth between places like San Antonio,
as far north as Nacogdoches.
- STEVEN: When we think of things like Goliad
or the missions in San Antonio, we forget that there was
a road that connected those things.
If you look at the layout of San Antonio, with the Camino
connecting all the missions, you have the plaza at the core with
the Spanish Governor's Palace, the seat of government there,
and San Fernando Cathedral right there on the plaza,
it really does have the layout, it does fit that formula
that the Spanish prescribed way back when, and it's still
there on the landscape today.
[traffic passing]
Thirty-five really became the superhighway that it is because
of the travel along the Camino Real here in Central Texas.
[traffic]
[soft music]
Following the foot of the escarpment, they would have
come to these beautiful springs.
Unlike us flying down a modern highway, they were moving at a
much slower pace so they had parajes or campsites every
basically 10 to 20 miles.
The towns here in Central Texas essentially pop up
along the springs.
There are many archives in the state that have great maps
and other historical records related to the Camino Real,
one of them being the General Land Office in Austin.
[beep]
[door opens]
- ALEX CHIBA: This is the 1833 map of Austin's Colony.
- That is impressive.
They have great maps, property deeds
and other things that document the Camino,
like boundaries of the old Stephen F. Austin Colony.
- The Old San Antonio Road is pretty much the
northwestern boundary here.
- STEVEN: Yeah, so it almost looks like where it's
crossing the Colorado...
We know where the trail went through many
different kinds of evidence.
The Old San Antonio Road is clearly here along the top.
So we look at old maps.
This one right here.
That would indicate that it's somewhere up here
in the Austin area,
roughly around where McKinney Falls is nowadays.
There's the historical record, so we look at the written record
from the Spanish...
Hard to see what that is.
...From the French, from early Anglo settlers that refers
to the trail.
Where we have our archeological project going on
is right in here.
Another thing that we can do is discover the trail through
archeological efforts.
- SERGIO IRUEGAS: It's like peeling an onion, very slowly.
- STEVEN: Currently we're working on our Rancheria Grande
archeological project in Milam County,
near the community of Gause.
- SERGIO: These stones were purposely placed here,
they follow a semicircular arc.
- STEVEN: Working with private landowners, we've actually
been able to document numerous village sites...
- MELINDA IRUEGAS: There is another post.
- STEVEN: ...As well as an unbelievable amount of
Native American artifacts.
- So this would be a defining wall of the structure.
- So we know that in all probability, what we're
dealing with is one of the circular style homes.
- STEVEN: The Rancheria Grande was essentially a conglomeration
of 22 Native American tribes.
- Mission style points were found up on this area,
so right there we know these domestic structures date
to the Spanish colonial period.
- STEVEN: The Spanish documented it really early on.
Some of the earliest maps do depict the Rancheria Grande
and label it there in that general area of what
is now Milam County.
It's more extensive back in here, all these petroglyphs
within the rock.
It's just a place like no other I've seen in Texas.
- All these points here came off of this property here.
- STEVEN: Landowners have their own collections.
And we've found things all the way from the point of contact
to projectile points that are paleo Indian in nature
over 10,000 years old.
So it really is this place where there is this huge
human history that has occurred over centuries.
[traffic passing]
In East Texas there are some great places that are
publicly owned that you can see and experience the trail.
One of the best is Mission Tejas State Park.
It's still one of the rare places where you can go
and hike along the actual Camino and walk in the footsteps
of Spanish explorers and early American settlers
from the late 1600s to the 1800s as people were coming through
either way along the trail.
[crickets chirp]
Mission Tejas State Park also contains a commemorative
structure of the first mission in Texas, and that's mission
San Francisco de los Tejas, established in 1690
by the Spanish on their first expedition to East Texas.
So it's a great place to see and experience the trail.
[birds sing]
Right next door to Mission Tejas State Park
is Caddo Mounds State Historic Site.
The Caddo people built mounds there at the site,
ceremonial mounds.
[Native American drum music]
- TONY SOUTHER: This is the Caddo grass house.
It was built last summer.
- STEVEN: They have a new visitor's center there that does
a great job of interpreting that early Native American history.
Plus it has a great remnant of the trail there as well,
in the form of a swale, with some great signage,
I think it gives you that impression of distance
when you are standing there at the Caddo Mounds site.
- TONY: The Neches is only a mile and a half from
where we're standing.
Travelers coming west to east, they would want to try and cross
the Neches River at the end of the day, make it up to the
plateau here, and then camp on high ground.
El Camino Real was surely a Native American trail
before it was a Spanish royal road, and the Caddo in this area
were actually known to have taken the Spanish, guided them
across these roads, so they were well-traveled.
Some of these Caddo roads were actually deemed to be as good as
the roads leading into Paris.
- STEVEN: The word Tejas is a Caddoan Indian word the Spanish
took to mean as friend.
So we wouldn't have the name Texas without that Caddoan
Indian word Tejas.
Communities along the Camino are very proud of the trail
and its history.
Nacogdoches is one of the oldest communities in Texas.
The first mission in Nacogdoches was established in 1716.
You see on Main Street, it's called El Camino Real
just off the plaza.
[acoustic music]
We are the first national historic trail organization
to actually own a piece of a national historic trail.
And that is the Lobanillo Swales.
- We're here in Sabine County at the Lobanillo Swales.
The East Texas term for that is wagon tracks.
When it was wet, this would get boggy, so what they'd do,
they would just move over a few feet and start another one.
- We've got the northern edge of the property up here
which is highway 21, and then the red line indicates
the loop trail.
Right now it's in a raw form.
There's no development, there's all kinds of undergrowth.
[pounding]
- SURVEYOR: Right there, right there.
- STEVEN: We're working with the National Park Service,
Sabine County and others...
- JUDGE MELTON: Good morning Steven.
- STEVEN: ...to make the Lobanillo Swales accessible
to the public.
- Welcome to Sabine County.
- STEVEN: The county judge thinks it's one of their
best tourist resources within the county.
- Hey, this is a beautiful set of plans.
- STEVEN: We work with all kinds of partners, because it does
take a combined effort to help develop the trail.
- Just can't wait to see it open.
- Thank you, Judge.
- JUDGE MELTON: Appreciate it.
- STEVEN: In Sabine County, not far from our property,
the Gaines-Oliphint House is on the banks of the Sabine River.
- Gaines ended up here in 1812, here at the crossing.
In 1815, he bought the ferry.
He built this house down here, we can pretty well prove
that it was built in 1818.
- STEVEN: And is it true it's the oldest Anglo-American
structure in Texas?
- WELDON: Log structure, yeah, log structure.
- STEVEN: It's a place that is really deep in Texas history
and which essentially every Texan coming from the east
would have crossed through at one point or another
back in the 1800s.
[water lapping]
So we've traveled from the Rio Grande, and now we're
here on the Sabine River at the Texas-Louisiana border.
Historically, the trail would have continued on
to the first capital of Texas at Los Adaes,
which is in present-day Louisiana.
But here we stand on Toledo Bend.
This is the end of the road in modern-day Texas,
before heading on to Natchitoches, Louisiana
about 60 miles away.
The Camino has always been a place that has bridged borders.
It has brought together people, cultures, and places,
and helped to create the state of Texas that we know today.
And that's why it's worthy of its designation as a
National Historic Trail.