James Monroe Hill left, after supper, to ride over to his home. He told Ernest he’d see him again; and he did.
The start for the fifty-mile ride to Gonzales was made at daybreak, with the hospitable Burnam family waving good-by from the block-house. The winding trace led across numerous streams, and past several isolated ranches; and near sunset Dick Carroll again pointed before.
“Gonzales—little old Gonzales,” he informed. “She’s the last of the white settlements, but she’s home, and it’s good to see her again.”
They entered another straggling town, smaller than San Felipe. Dick exchanged greetings with the people whom he passed; he turned his horse and Ernest’s into the public corral, for the night, and led the way, through the dusk, for supper and bed in his own cabin, which was to be Ernest’s also.
III
SANTA ANNA PROVES FALSE
Ernest awakened in the morning full of curiosity. While Dick Carroll was attending to some business matters, after breakfast, he himself had time to explore his new home. Gonzales was not much of a town, as yet, being smaller than San Felipe. However, it was lavishly laid out, six miles square, in blocks divided off by broad straight streets, which ran out into the open country, the majority indicated only by surveyor’s stakes and some indicated not at all. There were a Market Square, and a Military Plaza, and other public parks (as required by Mexican law); a hotel called Turner’s Inn; a sort of a fort, in case of Indian attacks; a store or two; and about twenty houses of logs and clapboards, and well scattered. On many of the squares there was only a single house; and on others none at all. The main residence section was the southwest corner of the tract, called the “inner” town. To north and east extended the “outer” town, sparsely occupied by ranches.
This Gonzales was located on a timbered prairie, from which trees had been cut for house building. The Guadalupe River flowed in a curve on the west edge of town, and a few families had settled across on the west side of the river. In the north of the “outer” town was a heavy timber patch, which Smith’s Creek separated from a green prairie to the south; and through the town wended Kerr’s Creek, along which the first cabins had been erected, in 1825, when Colonel Green DeWitt (who owned all the vast colony tract) and Major James Kerr, of the Missouri senate, brought in the first settlers.
In honor of Don Rafael Gonzales, governor of Coahuila and Texas, was the settlement named; in 1826 it had been destroyed by the Indians and was rebuilt in 1827.