The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 71, July 1967 - April, 1968 Page: 567
686 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Notes and Documents
forced to smile. The General was a poet, a polite and brave gentleman
and first rate conversationalist-but he did not dance well.""
At the same ball one of the young Arciniega girls attracted un-
favorable comment by her haughty ways. She wore, although it was
June, a dress of maroon cashmere with her hair dressed with plumes.
Mrs. Yturri had a new silk dress which fitted so tightly she had to
wear corsets and occasionally had to leave the ball to seek relief from
her discomfort. "She was very pretty, waltzed beautifully and was
much sought as a partner.""
The rancheros [Plate 5] were another class; they spent the greater
part of their lives in the saddle, working their cattle and horses. Their
houses were of stone or adobe washed with lime," very often consist-
ing of but one sparsely furnished room. The kitchen was a separate
structure outside the house. A stake fence often surrounded the house,
kitchen, and lot. "To bake," Seth Eastman noted, "they build a semi-
dome of mud twenty or thirty feet from the house-when dry they
build a fire inside until sufficiently heated-then put in the bread and
stop up the door.""
Bollaert observed the inhabitants' adherence to the "Tortilla
[Plate 3], bread made of Indian corn . . . each family had its metate
for grinding it into a pulp, from which they make their bread in the
form of thin cakes, something like a pancake which is baked on a
heated piece of flat iron." "Both sexes," he said, "indulge largely in
the tobacco in the delicate form of cigarrito, of finely divided tobacco,
rolled up in a shuck or leaf which envelopes the head of the Indian
corn."1
The poorest and least energetic of the Mexicans occupied the worst
houses, jacals, made of ". . . posts stuck upright in the earth-leaving
an opening for a door and window-A Thatched roof is then put on,
and the crevices stopped up with mud-and behold a Mexican
home.""' The men and women of this class lived "free and easy"
"3Rena Maverick Green (ed.), Memoirs of Mary A. Maverick (San Antonio, 1921), 55.
Hereafter cited as Maverick Memoirs. Mrs. Samuel Maverick was one of the earliest
American women in San Antonio. The record of the first years of her residence contains
the most valuable information.
lalbid., 56. There were two Arciniega girls, daughters of Miguel and Alejandra Ar-
ciniega; Jesusa, born in 1826, and Maria Petra, born in 1824. Chabot, With the Makers
of San Antonio, 234.
14Hollon and Butler (eds.), William Bollaert's Texas, 214; Seth Eastman Sketchbook,
xxii.
"Ibid.
"1Hollon and Butler (eds.), William Bollaert's Texas, 218-219.
"Seth Eastman Sketchbook, xxii.567
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 71, July 1967 - April, 1968, periodical, 1968; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117145/m1/633/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.