When Don Juan de Oñate crossed the Rio Grande in 1598 at a spot he called “El Paso del Rio del Norte,” he didn’t just bring with him the horses that would redraw the map of native Texas. He also brought over 500 colonists intent on establishing the Spanish model of self-governing city-states throughout the area.
The Spanish had already settled a string of municipalities through the central Mexican highlands to process the Sierra Madre’s mineral wealth. But in Spanish North America agriculture was the main industry, and the area’s agricultural output — particularly as Spaniards settled in the hot, arid north — depended on irrigation.
In Episode 2 of the Engines of Texanity podcast, we talk about how flood irrigation represents one of the great innovations in human history, and that Spaniards were able to construct and administer large, complex irrigation systems. This allowed societies more control of water, making farming far less of a gamble and providing a fantastic return on energy invested.
Roman and Arab engineering had established irrigation systems in the Iberian peninsula. Bringing this Old World legacy with them, the Spanish contracted the native Tlaxcalans as engineers to build the actual irrigation systems in the new world, due to their own legacy of constructing irrigation systems, dating back to as early as 800 B.C. This Spanish/Tlaxcalan irrigation society spread steadily north.
De Oñate’s expedition represented the spearhead of this colonization up through the inland route, continuing several hundred miles north to New Mexico by 1598.
After numerous hardships pushed settlers back to Texas in 1680, five different flood-irrigated communities sprang up along a 9-mile stretch of the Rio Grande running through the modern-day cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, irrigating something like 15,000 acres.
Settlement attempts in East Texas largely failed, as flood irrigation conferred no real competitive advantage in the subtropical region. But in between, at a spot known to the locals as Yanaguana — roughly translated as water place or refreshing waters — hundreds of springs bubbled up from the gently sloping soil deposited by millions of years of flash floods coming off the Balcones Escarpment. It was the “country of 1,100 springs”, as the old Pearl Beer commercial bragged. We’re talking about San Antonio, of course.
As they had in El Paso, the Spanish founded the San Antonio mission in 1718 by first building the canal system, even before they built houses. Within 50 years, the system would measure more than 50 miles, lifting the waters of the San Antonio River and San Pedro Creek by means of weir dams, diverting them through a 50 mile long system of canals; parts of it are still in service today, nearly 300 years later.
More than precision engineering, the irrigation system was a feat of human organization.
In 1731, Canary Islanders arrived in San Antonio, laying out the town by assigning lots along the canals and then holding the first European-style government election in Texas. One of six elected city officials, the mayordomo — Latin for “master of the house” — not only regulated the irrigation system, but also assessed and collected taxes for its use. It was already an obligation for anyone who used the canal systems to participate in annual maintenance, with non-contributors being fined and repeat offenders stripped of irrigation rights. Spanish law observed this resource as a “common good”.
With other goods, like cotton and oil, about to descend on Texas to again redraw political, economic and demographic lines, at the very least, we can definitely say that flood irrigation established European-style government in Texas.
Click below to listen to Episode 2 of Engines of Texanity.
