There is no grand climatic or latitudinal division of the State but offers its peculiar and special inducements to immigrants. Wheat, the finest in the world, and other cereals, with fruits, etc., of all kinds, in the north, cotton and sugar in the southern-central and southeast, pine lumber and cypress in the east, and stock in the west.
Southwestern Texas is a very peculiar portion of the State, and may be geographically described as lying between the San Antonio River on the east, and the Rio Grande on the west, and south and southeast of the road running from San Antonio to Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande, containing about thirty thousand square miles.
After the establishment of San Antonio, which we believe was in the year that Philadelphia was settled--called Bexar by the Spaniards and Mexicans--many years passed before any settlements were attempted between that post and the garrisons and towns west of the Rio Grande. The first in point of time was that of Senor Barrego, who in the forepart of the seventeenth century established a stock-raising hacienda at a place called "Dolores," on the Rio Grande, twenty-five miles below the present site of Loredo. He received a grant from the King of Spain, of seventy leagues of land. This hacienda was afterward destroyed.
In 1757 the town of Laredo was founded. This place was a sort of "Presidio" (Fort) where the inhabitants were armed occupants of the soil. And it proved the only permanent settlement of the Spaniards on the lower Rio Grande. After this ranches and haciendas were gradually extended over the country, between the Nueces River and Rio Grande. And during the first quarter of the present century extensive herds of horses and cattle, and flocks of sheep, were pastured between the two rivers. The remains of the stone buildings, water tanks and wells, are still to be seen. The troubles attending the attempt of the Mexicans to separate from Spain invited the savage hordes from the north, which had been kept in better subjection under the system of Spain than they have ever been since, to make raids upon the frontier settlements, which caused the country to be nearly vacated again.
The Texas revolution and subsequent border warfare gave the finishing touch to this country. And when the United States troops under General Taylor marched from Corpus Christi to the Rio Grande, in 1846, not an inhabitant was to be found between the Nueces and that river. It had the appearance of an immense desert to the army, unused as they were to such treeless pampas. The immense herds of cattle and horses, left to take care of themselves, had become wild, and had greatly increased; and as "mustangs" grazed over those plains in almost countless hosts, it was entirely dangerous for a man to approach them, particularly on foot, and much more so even on horseback. The old king mustang, and his male subordinates, would first drive the herd into corral by making a rushing, neighing circuit around them, and then make a fearful dash at the human intruder, striking, kicking and biting him to death.