The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 62, July 1958 - April, 1959 Page: 53

Secular Life in the San Antonio Missions 53
fruit trees. San Jose could boast peaches which weighed a pound.82
Bolton wrote: "The missionaries transplanted to the frontier
and made known to the natives almost every conceivable domestic
plant and animal of Europe."33
Tilling the soil was not the most primitive. For example, in
1762, Valero had forty yokes of oxen, thirty plows with plow-
shares and harrows, twelve carts, fifty axes, forty hoes, and twenty-
five scythes.a4
Each pueblo owned a ranch which was often located some dis-
tance away. It is significant that Spain modified her pueblo
system somewhat when she came to Texas. She switched em-
phasis from field crops to ranches. Needs for grazing, rather than
tilling, determined the size of the land grant. J. Evetts Haley,
the historian of cattle and cattlemen, concluded the Spanish "evi-
dently regarded the province as a more suitable grazing than agri-
cultural country and this liberality in the disposition of lands un-
doubtedly stimulated the development of the industry."3"
In 1785 Father L6pez wrote that sheep did not increase so
readily as cattle because wild animals destroyed the sheep; some
sheep got lost in the brush; and the herders were indolent and
unreliable.36 Cattle multiplied rapidly, but Texas was not nearly
so successful as California in this respect. The hostile Indian raids
in Texas cut down the number of stock, while the Indians of
California became adept at handling cattle."
By 1762 the San Antonio missions each had ranches with
corrals, equipment for tending cattle, and one or more stone
houses occupied by workers and their families. At the four
Quer6taran missions there were about 4,897 head of cattle, 1,600
horses, 12,00o sheep and goats. San Francisco raised the most
stock, with 2,262 cattle and 4,000 sheep and goats. San Juan,
32Chabot, Morfi Excerpts, 64.
3sBolton, Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, 58.
34Castafieda, Our Catholic Heritage, IV, 5.
35J. Evetts Haley, A Survey of Texas Cattle Drives to the North, 1866-1895
(Master's thesis, University of Texas, 1926), 3o.
83Dabbs, "Texas Missions in 1785," Preliminary Studies of the Texas Catholic
Historical Society, III, 18.
37Haley, Survey of Texas Cattle Drives North (Master's thesis, University of
Texas, 1926), 31.