Brandon Seale has spent the last 20 years rambling across South Texas and northern Mexico,

installing solar panels, laying pipelines, and occasionally punching cattle.

Brandon is the proud father of four and husband of one.

His podcast, a new history of Old Texas, has been downloaded more than 500,000 times

and may have helped discover the biggest battlefield in Texas history. Folks,

Brandon Seal.

Thank you.

So my podcast, a new history of old San Antonio, came out of my struggles to articulate what it is that makes our city so special. An obvious answer is our history, but I think most of us kind of cringe at the idea of being defined by a touristy river walk or a crumbling mission or even the Alamo.

But there's more to these symbols than we realize. The river walk, we walk, birthed our city after all.

The sacred waters, the spirit waters of the San

Antonio River, the Yanwana sat at the crossroads of the Mesoamerican, Mississippian, and

plains Indian worlds. In the 1600s, a Native American refugee community formed along

its banks fleeing the dual pressures of epidemic disease and imperial conquest. The

Spanish arrived just in time to help host

a great native rebirth in the cultural Molcahetes

that were the San Antonio Mission communities.

And more so than any other community in North America,

perhaps, Native Americans in San Antonio

passed their bloodlines into the new settler societies,

often hidden behind Hispanic

baptismal names, but present in the records nonetheless. From the beginning, it was a

mixed community bound together by the shared struggle of the frontier, a struggle

...