Welcome to a new history of Old San Antonio.

Episode 5, Apaches.

I'm Brandon Seal.

I'm a city of San Antonio. tonight I'm looking at your lovely life.

On June 20th, 1745, the morning broke warm and humid, the moisture from May's rain still lingering in the air over the rolling hills a few miles north of San Antonio.

A boy from town,

only about 10 years old, wandered out into the countryside, tending his family's livestock,

which roamed unbranded and unfenced through the grassland that was greening up all around him.

Just a half decade before, no San Antonio would have dared to venture so far out of town unguarded.

Because the 1730s were marked by unceasing attacks by the Apaches against the humble

village along the San Antonio River. San Antonio's at the time couldn't understand the unique animosity

that the Apaches seemed to harbor toward them, chalking it up to their barbarism and deceitfulness.

As barbaric as the Apaches may have seemed to the Spaniards, however, they were the recognized

rulers of the Texas Plains in 1700, and it was the Spaniards who had intruded into their territory.

The Apaches had descended from the Northern Great Plains into Texas sometime in the 1400s and split into two groups.

The Miscalero Apaches drifted west toward New Mexico and Chihuahua.

The Lipana Apaches settled in central in southwest Texas, from the hill country down to the Rio Grande.

The Apaches weren't truly a nation in the European sense of the word, or even a confederation like the Hassanai in East Texas.

If they seemed deceitful to Europeans, it's because they lived and fought in bans with broad, loose allegiances,

which made it famously difficult for Europeans to negotiate with them, as no band felt obliged to respect the promises of another,

and warriors were free to come and go as they pleased.

The Apaches were quasi-agricultural,

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