Our Catlzolic H critage in T ezas
Estahlislement and development of Camargo, 1749-1757. Escandon appears to have lost no time in setting out to found the fourteen towns and missions he had proposed in his plan of October 26, 1747. By December, 1748, less than six months after he was commissioned to put it into operation, he was ready to start. His reputation for fairness and his success in the preliminary exploration of the new lands had fired the imagination of the frontier settlements of New Spain and his call for five hundred volunteer families to found the fourteen towns proposed was answered by more than seven hundred. As in the case of the pre- liminary explorations, the families descended into the new territory from different directions and in separate groups. \Ve are familiar with the successive rushes of immigrants and settlers into our great West during the nineteenth century. Here on the lower Rio Grande the first great land rush within the present limits of the United States took place in 1749. Each family was given from one hundred to two hundred pesos, free land, and exemption from taxes for ten years. No wonder they swept into the virgin territory like a mighty flood, breaking over the borders of the new land from Tampico to Coahuila and spreading over the country as far as the Nueces and the lower San Antonio Rivers beyond the Rio Grande. The first settlement to be founded on the Rio Grande was that of Nuestra Senora de Santa Ana de Camargo. After establishing several towns in the area between Queretaro and the Gulf coast, Escandon arrived on March 3, 1749, at the Paso de Azucar on the Rio Grande, about two leagues southeast of the present site of Camargo. Here he found Captain Blas Maria de la Garza Falcon already encamped with forty families and some soldiers, besides several others who had joined his party from Nuevo Leon, all of whom had already built temporary jacales (straw huts) and laid out the town on the eastern bank of the San Juan River, not far from the Rio Grande. With Escandon came Father Simon Hierro (spelled also Yerro), who had joined him at Padilla. Father Fray Hierro was a missionary from the college of Zacatecas. Thanks to his careful diary, we have many interesting details concerning the establishment of the first settlement in the valley of the lower Rio Grande. "There is a small wood, mostly brush, near the town. The river [San Juan] is well above the town and has deep pools in which the water stands without running. The town has its boat to cross the Rio Grande, where there are many small palm trees, very useful in thatching the houses.
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