On the outskirts of a golf course in Floresville, thirty miles southeast of San Antonio, Steven Gonzales meanders off a dusty trail into the woods. He’s looking for evidence of wagon swales, or ruts, dating back to the time of Spanish settlers in the 1700s. It’s an obsession that has occasionally earned the nonprofit director and history enthusiast the nickname “rut nut.” To the untrained eye, swales aren’t that impressive. They’re just sloped mounds of earth that end in flattened makeshift roads, compacted by centuries of travel. But this particular road, whether it runs behind the nearest Walmart or the local outlet mall, is important because it’s the road that led to the founding of Texas. Most of us drive right by it.
Many great trails have captivated the American imagination throughout the years: the Oregon Trail, the Appalachian Trail, and the Lewis & Clark trail, for example. But the story of El Camino Real de los Tejas, a historic, 2,580-mile route extending across the entirety of what we now know as Texas and into Louisiana, hasn’t gained nearly that level of traction. Based on Indigenous trade routes, the trail originated in Mexico City and was a vital pathway for trade, especially during the Spanish colonial period. On October 19, twenty historic sites across Texas will celebrate the inaugural El Camino Real Day in an effort to boost awareness of the national historic trail (which is managed by the National Park Service) with activities such as public tours, a 5K caminata (hike), and an arts and crafts show. A private ranch, Ranchería Grande, in Milam County, is allowing a limited number of invited guests to tour a section of the trail. New signs, with QR codes and maps orienting visitors to the history and their locations on the network of sprawling routes of the Caminos Reales (including two other routes, one in modern California and one that ran from Mexico City up through New Mexico), are being installed.
Will it be enough to stir up interest in the trail? Gonzales, executive director of El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail Association, hopes so—because he’s literally losing ground every year. The level of general awareness and appreciation of the trail is so low that in 2022, a San Marcos developer bulldozed one of those historic swales to install a drainage pipe, leaving a placard as the only reminder of what had stood there for centuries. The development was christened Trace, a nod to the old road—perhaps with an unintended double meaning.
This is an especially Texan problem, given that more than 96 percent of the state’s land is privately owned. As a result, public access to the Camino Real trail is limited to a series of broken segments across the state. Though Congress passed an act in 2004 to recognize El Camino Real de los Tejas as a National Historic Trail, there are no special provisions in place to preserve any of the land along the trail. Any access to privately owned portions of the trail is at the discretion of landowners. In cases of things like vacant railroad land, which he’s eyeing near Floresville, Gonzales tries to wield his powers of persuasion for the public good. The land is part of a vision for an eventual 33-mile hike-and-bike trail from Mission Espada, in San Antonio, to Rancho de las Cabras, outside Floresville.
Several landmarks along El Camino Real de los Tejas may already be familiar to Texans: the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park; the Caddo Mounds, in East Texas; the San Marcos Springs; Treviño-Uribe Rancho, in San Ygnacio; and McKinney Falls State Park, in Austin. At Lobanillo Swales, in East Texas, owned by El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail Association, fellow rut nuts can marvel at the largest concentration of swales associated with the trail anywhere. But most portions of the trail (if they are free of roadways, railways, or other developments), are pretty nondescript and require you to travel back in time in your imagination. Close your eyes and think about walking these dirt trails as a member of one of many Indigenous communities following animals to cool springs thousands of years ago. Later, you might follow those same footpaths as a representative of the Spanish king with the help of ox-led carts, or as a Texian soldier fighting in the Texas Revolution for independence from Mexico, or as an enslaved person headed toward freedom on the Underground Railroad.
These wildly diverse histories converge on the trail, which is why Gonzales argues that it deserves a more significant place in Texas history. “The Camino Real ties people and places together, and it has always done that. It’s brought different cultures together in different spots along the trail, across different spaces of time,” he says. “And so I think that everybody, if they understand what the Camino Real is, can see a little bit of themselves in it, and their place in Texas.”
Not everyone’s story has been equally represented in the telling of El Camino Real de los Tejas, though. I ask Maria Rocha, cofounder of the Indigenous Cultures Institute—a San Marcos–based nonprofit that preserves the histories of Indigenous peoples from Texas and northern Mexico—what her Coahuiltecan and Comanche ancestors would have called the trail. The Spanish word Tejas is widely believed to be derived from the Caddo word taysha, for “friend,” I note. Rocha gently pushes back against the idea of focusing on the name at all. “That’s not something that’s relevant to an Indigenous perspective of the land,” she says. “Even the people who lived here didn’t have names—most of the communities considered themselves ‘the people.’ The Europeans who lived here wanted to force names so that they could find trees, take land, and have a signature on a piece of paper. So if you talk about naming the land and naming Mother Earth, it creates this ownership or this control of the land. We say all the land is sacred. Those trails that we walk are sacred trails. They go back to the beginning of time for humans and animals and the earth.”
Rocha and her colleagues believe that the Camino Real narrative has mainly centered Spanish history dating back 500 years, giving short shrift to the 16,000-year presence of Native Americans in Texas. This is starting to change, though. Along the trail at spots such as San Marcos, whose area springs were foundational to the local Indigenous community’s creation story, and Caddo Mounds State Historic Site, interpretive panels will be installed by the National Park Service to provide more context and perspective on the original footpaths. Additionally, signage created through the Texas Historical Commission’s Undertold Markers program will provide more context about Indigenous communities and their relationship to the trail.
Another site, Red Mountain, in Milam County, was purchased by the Tonkawa Tribe late last year. Gonzales says his organization, along with the National Park Service, is partnering with the tribe to assist with historic research and archaeology. Their efforts will eventually support opportunities for the public to learn more about the history of the land and its importance as a landmark on El Camino Real de los Tejas.
“The roots of our family are in South Texas and in Mexico,” says Anita Azenet Collins, treasurer and founding member of the Council for the Indigenous and Tejano Community, in Hays County. “They were not brought up to be proud of their Indigenous roots, and so it wasn’t until later in life . . . coming here to San Marcos that I found this resurgence of pride in being Indigenous, and what our roots were here. And I’m sure that my ancestors traveled these routes at some point. Walking the same steps that my ancestors did, it’s very meaningful to me.”
