San Antonio de Béxar

the long version

This history explores eighteenth-century San Antonio de Bexar, a northern Spanish colonial community from which modern San Antonio, Texas developed. Its early history was one of isolation and often of neglect, but many of the settlers, veterans of frontier colonies farther south, founded San Antonio on centuries-old Spanish institutions. These colonists often competed and feuded with one another in the early years, but frontier political and economic forces molded them into a single, cohesive community by the end of the eighteenth century.