Route of El Camino Real

Helotes, TX

This corridor of the Scenic Loop, Boerne Stage, and Toutant-Beauregard roads carries more than ten thousand years of history: burned-rock middens and stone tools mark Paleo-Indian life here, and Jumano, Coahuiltecan, later Lipan Apache and Comanche peoples held the land into the mid-1800s. Prussian settlers arrived at Leon Springs in 1851 near the Boerne Stage Road, which ran from San Antonio toward California; the Great Western Cattle Trail and, in the 1920s, the transcontinental Old Spanish Trail highway followed the same route. A 46-mile scenic loop laid out in the late 1920s survives in part today through Helotes, Grey Forest, and Leon Springs.

Boerne, TX

The Pinta Trail was a natural Hill Country pathway used first by Native Americans and later by the Spanish, running some 180 miles from San Antonio to the 1750s presidio at Menard. In the 1780s pathfinder José Mares folded it into a shorter Santa Fe–San Antonio route, and in 1839 Jack Hays surveyed its Guadalupe River crossing as the "Paint Road." German Adelsverein colonists used the trail in the 1840s to reach their new Hill Country settlements, and it appears in the era's maps, surveys, and even landscape paintings.

San Antonio, TX

In 1871, nine-year-old Jeff Davis Smith and his eleven-year-old brother Clint were seized by Lipan and Comanche raiders while herding sheep near their Kendall County home—a fate that befell many settler children on the Texas frontier. By tradition Jeff was bought by the Apache leader Geronimo and made to live among the tribe until Mexican bandits captured him around 1878 to claim a $1,000 reward for his return. He later married and settled in San Antonio, living until 1940.

San Antonio, TX

This Neo-Classical Revival residence was completed in 1909 for Gen. John Lapham Bullis, a New Yorker who spent much of his career on the Southwestern frontier. In 1873 Bullis took command of a company of Seminole Scouts whose skill at tracking raiders on the Texas border drew national attention. He lived in the house, designed by San Antonio architect Harvey Page, until his death in 1911; nearby Camp Bullis bears his name.