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CHAPTER 1

San Antonio Missions

SOUTH AND DOWNTOWN SAN ANTONIO

WHILE THE ALAMO is certainly the most famous site in Texas, it is amazing how many people do not know that it was originally just one of several Spanish missions established along the banks of the San Antonio River. Originally called Mission San Antonio de Valero, it was the first and northernmost of six religious settlements defended by the garrison from the presidio of San Antonio de Bexar. Over the next 13 years, four other significant church communities were established: Mission San José, Mission Espada, Mission San Juan, Mission Najera, and Mission Concepción.

All of these missions were part of a broader colonial network of frontier outposts established by Roman Catholic religious orders that stretched across the Southwest from the 1600s through the 1800s. Their main purpose was to facilitate conversion of local Indian populations and to reinforce New Spain against incursions by France. A number of the San Antonio missions had originally been established in other places a decade or two earlier, but after they failed—in part because of ambivalence or even hostility from the native peoples to whom they were trying to minister—they were relocated.

“A Spanish mission was much more than a religious institution,” the Alamo says in its official history. “Its purpose was to take an indigenous population and convert them not only to Catholicism but also to the Spanish way of life. In establishing the missions in Texas, the Spanish hoped to create a self-sufficient population that would continue to exist and grow as loyal Spanish subjects, thereby staving off any involvement of foreign powers like France. Indian converts were taught farming, livestock raising, blacksmithing, carpentry, stone work, and weaving.”

Missionaries and Indians alike also found protection and the means of defending themselves at the missions. But, while the missions themselves were virtual fortresses, men working in the fields and livestock were vulnerable.

“Encroachment by warlike Apaches from the west and Comanches from the north meant local Coahuiltecan tribes were under constant threat,” the history continues. “Mission life brought protection from other indigenous people as well as shelter and a more stable food supply. It also gave them access to two important technological developments of the period: firearms and horses.”

Over all, building, maintaining, and running the settlements and the infrastructure associated with them proved an impressive architectural and logistical feat. One aspect of this was the construction of acequias, water management systems originally introduced into arid regions of Spain by the Romans and Moors and which were carried into the deserts of the New World by the Franciscan missionaries. In order to distribute water to their missions along the San Antonio River, they oversaw construction of a network of gravity-flow ditches, dams, and at least one aqueduct, comprising a 15-mile system used to irrigate some 3,500 acres of land.

By the end of the 18th century, the Indian populations had greatly diminished on the missions for a combination of reasons, including discontent and mortality caused by European diseases to which the natives had little resistance. This reduced the viability and need for the missions, so, with more settlers moving into the area and looking covetously at the holdings of the religious communities, government authorities forced them to divest most of their assets. In 1793–94, all of the San Antonio missions were secularized and their lands and other property turned over to the families still residing on them or to Spanish locals. Some of the churches continued to remain active after this point, but others were closed and many of the missions fell into disrepair or were largely abandoned.

Over their centuries of existence, what are now collectively known as the San Antonio missions were the starting points of quests north and west in search of gold and souls, locations of raids and battles, places of births and deaths. They were crucibles of human emotion—those of fervent proselytes spreading the word of God, native peoples being stripped of their own cultures and faiths, greedy and bloodthirsty fortune hunters, and those who fell in battle at their gates or succumbed to disease within their walls. All were also established in an abundant area that had been occupied by ancient peoples since time immemorial and used by them for hunting and gathering. It should thus not be surprising that these missions are widely considered to be haunted and that people have reported every sort of paranormal phenomena at them, including anomalies in photographs and recordings and apparitions of conquistadores, monks, Indians, settlers, and soldiers.

MISSION SAN ANTONIO DE VALERO (A.K.A. THE ALAMO)

IN 1718, after Mission San Francisco de Solano in the Rio Grande Valley became unviable because so many of its resident Coahuiltecan Indians had left it, Father Antonio de San Buenaventura y Olivares relocated it to a spot near the headwaters of the San Antonio River. He had passed through the area a decade earlier and been impressed with its suitability for a religious community. He named the new mission in honor of Saint Anthony of Padua and San Antonio de Valero, the Spanish viceroy who had approved his plan.

Location of the mission changed several times for the first few years until 1724, when the present site was chosen, and the foundation of its stone church was laid 20 years later, in 1744. It eventually included a walled compound containing the church, a convento where the clergymen lived, and a number of adobe buildings.

While the Alamo is almost synonymous with the battle that bears its name, it was by no means the first time the mission or its residents were exposed to violence or dangers. On June 30, 1745, for example, Apaches attacked the nearby civil town of San Fernando. One hundred mission converts from the Alamo sallied out and, reinforced by European arms and tactics, helped drive them off.

Mission San Antonio de Valero was the first of the local missions to be secularized and was taken over by Spanish authorities in 1793. They established the first hospital in Texas in it. Its central location and infrastructure also made it ideal for use as a barracks and, by 1803, a company of 100 heavily armed cavalrymen, along with their families, had moved into it. They remained there for 32 years, battling Indians, the military adventurers known as filibusters, and revolutionaries. When Mexico became independent of Spain in 1821, they shifted their allegiance to the new nation. And when they skirmished with Anglo-American revolutionaries near the town of Gonzales on October 2, 1835, the Texas Revolution began.

Texian forces counterattacked toward the end of that month and laid siege to San Antonio. Then, on December 5, they attacked the town directly and, after fighting the Mexican troops toe-to-toe in brutal street fighting for five days, forced the military authorities to surrender. Thus it was that the Texians took control of the city. When General Antonio López de Santa Anna arrived at the head of a Mexican army on February 23, 1836, the Texians withdrew to the east bank of the San Antonio River and occupied the Alamo. Santa Anna raised the red flag of no quarter over San Fernando church, and a siege of the mission began.

On March 6, Santa Anna launched his final attack on the Alamo and, after a fierce 90-minute battle, captured it and slew all 189 of its defenders, at a cost of about 600 killed and wounded among his own men. Commanders William Barret Travis, James Bowie, and David Crockett were among those who fell in battle. Santa Anna ordered all the bodies burned on at least two common pyres and left to smolder for days (although that of one defender, Tejano Gregorio Esparza, whose brother was one of the Mexican officers, received a proper burial).

Six weeks later, on April 21, Texian forces led by Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna and the Mexican army in the Battle of San Jacinto, about 200 miles to the east. The following month, the Mexican garrison in San Antonio was ordered to destroy the Alamo and then withdraw. They did manage to tear down some of the outer walls, and their commander, Juan José Andrade, sent a detachment of men to blow up the church where the defenders had made their final stand. These men were reportedly prevented from doing so, however, by a party of what they identified as diablos. They were described by paranormal researcher Docia Schultz Williams in her book Spirits of San Antonio and South Texas as “six ghostly forms standing in a semicircle holding swords, not of steel but of fire, blocking their entry to the building.”

“They were terrified and fearful of the consequences if they should destroy the building, they reported back to their commander,” Williams continues. “It is said General Andrade went himself to the place and was also confronted by the same figures. And so it was that the building was left intact as the Mexican army marched out of San Antonio.”

Apparitions were reported again at the site in 1871—which at that point was being used as a police station—when the city tore down part of the surviving mission complex, a pair of rooms that had been located to either side of the main gate in the south wall. Guests at the Menger Hotel across the street were among those who claimed to see spectral soldiers marching along the perimeter of the old mission compound as if trying to defend it from further desecration.

Many people, too, have striven to protect the legacy of the Alamo. In the 1930s, as the centennial of the Battle of the Alamo approached, the entire complex was renovated, expanded, and converted into a parklike memorial, and a Centennial Museum was built behind the church (and currently serves as the gift shop for the site). Then, in 1968, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas opened a new museum in the convento, or “long barrack,” finally putting the oldest building on the mission grounds back into use.

MISSION SAN JOSÉ

MISSION SAN JOSÉ Y SAN MIGUEL DE AGUAYO, more commonly known simply as Mission San José, was founded on February 23, 1720, because Mission San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo) had, soon after its establishment, become overcrowded with refugees from missions shut down in East Texas. Franciscan priest Antonio Margil received permission from the Marquis de San Miguel de Aguayo, the governor of Coahuila y Texas, to build a new mission 5 miles south of the presidio of San Antonio de Bexar. Like a number of other missions in the area, it ministered to the local Coahuiltecan Indians.

Initially made of brush, straw, and mud, Mission San José’s first buildings were soon replaced by large stone structures that included offices, a dining room, a pantry, and guest rooms. The main portion of the compound was enclosed in a thick outer wall that had built into it rooms for 350 native residents. Its impressive limestone church—which stands to this day and was distinguished by a dome, two towers, and an elaborately carved facade—was completed in 1768. The remarkable complex reached its full extent by 1782. It was the largest and most elaborate of the San Antonio religious communities, dubbed “Queen of the Missions.”

“It is, in truth, the first mission in America,” friar Juan Agustín Morfí wrote in his journal. “In point of beauty, plan, and strength … there is not a presidio along the entire frontier line that can compare with it.” Two soldiers from the nearby presidio of San Antonio de Bexar helped provide security for the complex and trained its residents in the use of firearms and artillery.

Like the other local missions, Mission San José turned over its lands to its resident Indians in 1794, and religious activities at the site were officially ended in 1824. In the years that followed, the mission fell into disrepair and its buildings were variously abandoned or occupied by soldiers, vagabonds, and bandits. It was restored in the 1920s and 1930s, much of it by the federal government’s Works Progress Administration; declared a State Historical Site in 1941; and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

On the night of July 31–August 1, 2000, thieves stole three Spanish Colonial–era statues that sat at the altar of the church at Mission San José. These painted, carved wooden statues, each of which stood 3 and 4 feet in height, are considered priceless because of their age and profound historical and religious significance, but their fate remains unknown.

MISSION ESPADA

MISSION ESPADA WAS ESTABLISHED on a spot near the San Antonio River in 1731, having been moved from its original location in what is now Augusta, Texas—about 150 miles north of present-day Houston—where it had enjoyed a tumultuous and bloody history since 1690. Its Franciscan founders built a friary in 1745 and completed the church in 1756.

Missionaries at the site converted the resident Coahuiltecan Indians to Christianity and instructed them in the principles of architecture and masonry, blacksmithing, brick and tile making, farming and ranching, and spinning and weaving.

By the time secularization of the San Antonio missions began in 1794, Mission Espada was impoverished, had declined badly, and had just 15 families still associated with it, each of which was granted a parcel of land. It functioned communally for a time, with the residents sharing supplies and equipment. Misfortune befell the community in 1826, first when a band of Comanches raided the cornfields and slaughtered all the livestock, and later when a kitchen fire destroyed most of its buildings.

During the period 1858–1907, a Claretian priest named Francis Bouchu resided at the mission and restored many of the collapsing buildings inside the compound, but progress slowed when he departed and the church was temporarily closed for repairs. It was reopened in 1915 by priests from the Diocese of San Antonio, and a school was established inside the compound by nuns from the Order of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament. They ran the school for more than five decades until 1967, when it was shut down and the Franciscans once again took charge of Mission Espada.

Today, visitors to the mission can see the best-preserved example of a historic Spanish Colonial acequia, which includes the still-working Espada aqueduct and dam. Its main ditch continues to carry water to the mission and its former farmlands and is still used by residents of the local area.

MISSION SAN JUAN

ORIGINALLY FOUNDED IN 1716 as La Misión San José de los Nazonis in East Texas, Mission San Juan Capistrano also was established by Spanish Franciscans on the eastern banks of the San Antonio River in 1731. It was named for Saint John of Capistrano, a 15th-century theologian and warrior priest who resided in the Abruzzo region of Italy.

The missionaries constructed San Juan’s first chapel from mud and brush and eventually added to it a tower containing two bells. Then, around 1756, they replaced this primitive building with a long hall with a flat roof and a more substantial belfry that remains on the site to this day. They also constructed a dam in order to provide water for the mission’s acequia irrigation system.

“San Juan was a self-sustaining community. Within the compound, Indian artisans produced iron tools, cloth, and prepared hides,” Kathy Weiser writes in her Legends of America online magazine. “Orchards and gardens outside the walls provided melons, pumpkins, grapes, and peppers. Beyond the mission complex, Indian farmers cultivated corn, beans, squash, sweet potatoes, and sugar cane in irrigated fields …. By the mid-1700s, San Juan, with its rich farm and pasturelands, was a regional supplier of agricultural produce. With its surplus, San Juan established a trade network stretching east to Louisiana and south to Coahuila, Mexico. This thriving economy helped the mission to survive epidemics and Indian attacks in its final years.”

Despite its prosperity, however, Mission San Juan was not able to maintain a large native population, and that affected its viability. At its height in 1756, for example, some 265 Coahuiltecan Indian neophytes lived at the mission, but 34 years later only 58 lived there. It was then that the missionaries broke ground on a larger church building on the east side of the complex, but they were never able to complete it. Work on it was abandoned and, eventually, it was used as a crypt for native residents.

Mission San Juan was secularized in 1794 and had a decreasing level of religious activity until 1824, when it ended altogether. The site was largely abandoned until 1840, when priests from the Diocese of San Antonio resumed conducting mass at it.

In 1934, some of the Indian quarters and the foundations of the unfinished church were unearthed as part of a public works project. Then, in the 1960s, the chapel, priests’ quarters, and other structures were reconstructed. Today most of the original plaza remains within the courtyard walls and authentically depicts the floor plan and layout. Members of the Claretian and Redemptorist orders also held services at the site until 1967, when the Franciscans once again took control of the mission.

MISSION CONCEPCIÓN

FRANCISCAN FRIARS ESTABLISHED Misión Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Acuña, more commonly referred to simply as Mission Concepción, near the San Antonio River in 1731. Most of the native people in the mission were Pajalats, a local tribe that used to live in the area south of San Antonio, and their chiefs served as governors of the affiliated Indian community.

At least one large battle took place between Spanish settlers and Indians here, resulting in great loss of life, in the 1700s. Then, on October 28, 1835, the first significant battle of the Texas Revolution was fought between Texian insurgents, led by James Bowie and James Fannin, and Mexican soldiers under the command of Colonel Domingo Ugartechea. About 90 of the Texians had encamped near the mission while searching for a suitable and relatively safe place for the remainder of the army to rest when they were attacked by a mixed force of about 275 Mexican infantry, cavalry, and artillery. The Texians took cover in a U-shaped gully and, between their defensive position and superior small arms, drove off the Mexican troops in the ensuing 30-minute battle, winning the Battle of Concepción. One Texian and as many as 76 Mexican troops were slain during the skirmish.

On October 31, 1984, the San Antonio Express-News ran a story that described activity experienced in the area around Mission Concepción and some of the possible reasons for it. “Some 300 soldiers died in that area during an 18th-century battle near the mission. A Dr. Navarro, who lived there around the turn of the century, is said to have murdered Juana, who was either his live-in maid or his lover. Nobody knows for sure,” this account reads. It goes on to describe how, while saying a rosary, a local resident “saw a plume of smoke waft in from a back room. Forming a column in front of him, it didn’t take on masculine or feminine features … but simply stood and watched him. He moved towards the apparition and it disappeared. Going back to his rosary, the column of smoke reappeared.”

Mission Concepción is the best preserved of the Texas missions, remains active as a church with a congregation that attends Sunday mass there to this day, and in 2009–2010 had its interior completely restored.

With their strange, turbulent, and violent histories, and events that have included abandonment, violence, death, fervent passions, theft of holy relics, and the full range of human emotions, it is not surprising that the San Antonio missions would be haunted. People have reported paranormal phenomena of all sorts at them, including relatively prosaic things like inexplicable cold spots and a feeling of melancholy on the one hand, to full-blown apparitions on the other, and everything from anomalies like EVPs to orbs in between. There are perhaps no better places to get a sense for the history of San Antonio, mundane and paranormal alike.