Welcome to a new history of Old San Antonio.

Episode 6, The Comanches.

I'm Brandon Seale.

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

In March of 1759, San Antonio was a flurry of panic and activity.

The missions scrambled to finish their walls.

Vesinos fortified their humble homes as best they could, and an armed force that grew daily drilled in the Plaza de Armas. This hastily assembled

retaliatory force was comprised of Presidio soldiers from San Antonio, of course, but also from

the other presidios along the Rio Grande and Coahuila, and as far away as San Luis

Potosi. Yet the core of the force were San Antonioans themselves, some 330 San Antonio

Vecinos, Mission Indians, and their relatives from other towns along the new Spanish frontier.

San Antonioans, though, might have thought they were past this. Just a decade prior, they had won

peace from their old enemies, the Apaches, and presumed that they had finally secured their place

on this frontier. What they didn't realize was that the Apache piece had, in reality, been one not only by

Spanish arms, but by pressure from another, even more fearsome band of Indios Barbaros,

pressing down on the Apaches from the plains.

And in that March of 1759, when the sole survivor of a 20-man presidial outpost in the hill

country that had just been massacred stumbled into town, San Antonio's realized that nothing now stood between them and the Comanche menace.

The Comanches, or Nemerna, in their own language, were cousins to the Ute and Shoshone tribes much further north.

For centuries, they had lived hard, malnourished lives in the Rocky Mountains that left them physically smaller than many of the Native American tribes around them, until they, like the Apaches, had been ennobled by their discovery of the horse.

Yet the Apaches only used horses. The Comanches were horsemen. One observer would write that on foot, quote, they are heavy and ungraceful, but the moment they mount their horses, they seem at once metamorphosed, end quote.

No one who ever saw them ride failed to comment on their mastery of the art,

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