San Antonio, Texas

Historians aware of San Antonio's current status as the nation's ninth largest city might easily assume that the concerted efforts of a hardheaded business community assiduously practicing the familiar arts of civic boosterism and vigorous economic development were responsible for that success. They would, however, be wrong. Indeed, in San Antonio the business community's devotion to economic development, until recently, is the stuff of a different kind of legend—an urban legend which, like that genre, has practically no basis in fact.

The absence of a business community with a keen interest in and understanding of the city-building process is a striking oddity in a nation replete with examples of boosters who built magnificent cities from great expectations and great effort. San Antonio's inadvertent rise to its modern-day prominence therefore is of more than passing interest.

Military geography provides an important answer to the problem of how and why San Antonio grew without much attention from its business community. Initially, the city's site attracted the attention of Spanish imperialists worried about the potential threat of France's expanding colonial empire. In a region notable for a lack of city-building resources, the site of the future city did offer plentiful water for farming and livestock. It was also located far enough from the Texas coast to protect the earliest settlers from the ambitious French. Colonial Mexico's viceroy calculated that the future San Antonio de Bexar would be a suitable logistical base for the line of fortifications that Spain erected in East Texas to discourage French imperialism.

Thus began San Antonio's lifelong love affair with the military. From its beginnings in 1718 until the end of the Cold War, the military would be a pillar of the local economy. In the first decades of the 18th century, payments for food the first residents produced for the local presidio's troops sustained the settlement. After 1763, with Spain in control of the Mississippi Valley, New Orleans's demand for meat spurred the development of San Antonio's cattle industry, thereby intensifying the fledgling city's role as an agricultural center. Since cattle raising does not require a large labor force, however, San Antonio's economy lacked the sort of activity that would attract new residents, to say nothing of entrepreneurs.

Political unrest, culminating in the war for Texas's independence in 1836, prevented any significant urbanization in the early decades of the 19th century. For 10 years, the town remained a battleground between a Mexican government determined to recover its lost territory and a Texas Republic equally determined to hold it. In 1846, military geography reemerged as a dominating force in San Antonio's development. The United States Army, echoing the thinking of the Spanish viceroy, decided that the town—close, but not too close, to the fighting—would make a marvelous logistical center for its military operations against Mexico.

Shortly after the successful conclusion of the end of the Mexican War, Congress decided that the army needed to defend the Texas frontier from another enemy, the Commanches, and it authorized the creation of a line of frontier forts stretching from Ft. Worth in the north to Fort Bliss in the west. That decision not only confirmed San Antonio's importance as a logistical center; it also permanently shaped the character of the emerging business community.

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