Texaswithall: All About Texas

Texas With All: Everything About Texas

Central Texas stretches from the prairies of the northeast through the green and fertile Hill Country into the chalky limestone landscape of the west, and includes two of Texas's most pleasant cities: San Antonio and Austin. Austin in particular, the capital city and home to the progressive University of Texas, helps to give the region an intellectual and political feel uncharacteristic of the rest of the state.

Agriculture has been the mainstay of the economy here ever since the resis-tant Comanche population was finally packed off to reservations in the 1840s. The slave-driven cotton plantations of the south and east have gone, but the small communities set up by Polish, Czech, Norwegian and Swedish immigrants in the Hill Country maintained, even until very recently, the traditions, architecture and languages of their homelands. Great cattle drives came trampling through after the Civil War and played a large part in the development of San Antonio.

 

Austin spreads about twenty miles north-south and eighteen miles east-west, severed by I-35 (between Dallas and San Antonio) to the east. The Colorado River runs south of downtown. Flights come in at the tasteful Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. Eight miles southeast of downtown at the intersection of highways 71 and 183, it takes about twenty minutes to get downtown by taxi or by SuperShuttle vans while the #100 bus runs approximately once an hour to the campus and downtown.

The Texas State Capitol, at 13th Street and Congress Avenue, is over 300ft high, taller than the national capitol in Washington, with a red sunset granite dome that dominates the downtown skyline. The chandeliers, carpets and even the door hinges of this colossal building are emblazoned with lone stars and other Texan motifs, a theme continued in the recent extension, a sleek maze of marble halls (daily 9am-5pm; public tours every 15min; free). Nearby, the antebellum Governor's Mansion, 1010 Colorado St, contains displays on Texan history (free tours Mon-Fri every 20min 10am-noon). Congress Avenue, a stretch of 1950s shops and muted office buildings that slopes south from the capitol down to the river, is worthy of a stroll; at dusk 1.5 million bats - the world's largest urban bat colony - emerge in a large cloud from their hangouts under the bridge. 6th Street, also known as Old Pecan Street, runs west from I-35 to Congress Street, and is the focus of much of the city's nightlife, as well as featuring many renovated buildings, galleries and hip shops. The elegant Romanesque Driskill Hotel, on the corner with Brazos Street, has its own self-guided walking tour, with a glossy leaflet recounting the hotel's many links with government since 1886. Between 5th and 6th streets, just west of Lamar Boulevard, the 600-year-old Treaty Oak is the last of the Council Oaks where treaties were signed with Native Americans; unfortunately, someone chose to poison the tree in 1989, and only one-third of it remains.

The rolling hills, lakes and valleys of the Hill Country, north and west of Austin and San Antonio, were inhabited mostly by Apache and Comanche until after statehood, when German and Scandinavian settlers arrived. Many of the log-cabin farming communities they established are still here, such as New Braunfels (famous for its sausages and pastries) and Luckenbach. You may still hear German spoken, and the German influence is also felt in local food and music; conjunto , for example, is a blend of Tex-Mex and accordion music. The whole region is a popular retreat and resort area, with some wonderful hill views and lake swimming, and a lot of good places to camp.

Fredericksburg, smack in the middle of the Hill Country, might at first glance look like a pastiche of a German village, overrun by Biergartens and gingerbread storefronts. In fact it's still pretty much the town founded by six hundred enterprising Germans in 1846. They managed to make - and, uniquely, keep - treaties with the local Comanche, and their community, based on hard work and perseverance, survived through epidemics and civil war.

Sixty-five miles west of Austin on US-290, the Lyndon B. Johnson State and National Historical Park preserves LBJ's birthplace (1908) and the ranch house where Lady Bird Johnson continued to live long after her husband's death in 1973.

With neither the modern skyline of an oil town, nor the tumbleweed-strewn landscape of the Wild West, attractive and festive San Antonio looks nothing like the stereotypical image of Texas - despite being pivotal in the state's history. Standing at a geographical crossroads, it encapsulates the complex social and ethnic mixes of all Texas. Although the Germans, among others, have made a strong contribution to its architecture, cuisine and music, today's San Antonio is predominantly Hispanic: abundant Tex-Mex restaurants, the prevalent Catholicism, the newly expanded Mexican Cultural Institute and advertising billboards in Spanish all attest to a long history of Texican culture.

Founded in 1691 by Spanish missionaries, San Antonio became a military garrison in 1718, and was settled by the Anglos in the 1720s and 1730s under Austin's colonization program. It is most famous for the legendary Battle of the Alamo in 1836, when the Mexican General Santa Anna, seeking to curb the aspirations of the Anglo-Americans, wiped out a band of Texan volunteers: hence San Antonio's claim to be the birthplace of the revolution, borne out by its role during Texas's ten subsequent years of independence. After the Civil War, it became a hard-drinking, hard-fighting sin city, at the heart of the Texas cattle and oil empires.

Drastic floods in the 1920s wiped out much of the downtown area, but the sensitive WPA program which revitalized two of the city's prettiest sites, La Villita and the River Walk , laid the foundations for its future as a major tourist destination. San Antonio is now the eighth largest city in the US, but it retains an unhurried, organic feel, thanks to a winning combination of small town warmth, respect for diversity and a self-confidence rooted in its own history.

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