By 1915 Texas was a booming state, and many started to become concerned that the historical route would be lost if preservation steps weren’t taken. The Texas state legislature ordered an official survey to study the original route, and the Daughters of the American Revolution endeavored to place markers every five miles to make sure it would never be lost. Almost a century later, in 2004, President George W. Bush
officially named the route a National Historic Trail. In 2007 the El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail Association was created to work managing the trail alongside the National Park Service. Now the association wants this trail to make Texas history again by working to create a walkable path between Austin and San Antonio that mirrors the original route.
Although this ambitious plan has a great deal of enthusi- astic support, as with many things, trails in Texas are compli- cated. Unlike many states, especially in the west, Texas has almost no public land. Although roughly 28 percent of the United States is publicly owned federal land, in Texas that number is less than 2 percent. This again goes back to Texas history. Unlike other states, when Texas joined the union it was its own country, and there-
fore had great bargaining power. Texas insisted on keeping its publicly owned land in state hands, rather than giving it to the United States government, and eventually sold almost all of that land to private owners. This has caused issues with lack of space for outdoor recreation, especially as the state population booms, growing at a rate of 12.6 percent since 2010. So what does this mean for the creation of a walking path
from San Antonio to Austin along the historical El Camino Real de los Tejas? Simply put, it means going slowly. Steven Gonzales, Executive Director of the association, estimates that this will be a 20-year project.
Gonzales and the association have faced this problem
before, and still come up with creative ways to grow and expand trails along the original El Camino Real de los Tejas route. One of the simplest solutions is to find trails that are already in place and may not even realize they also follow this historical route.
The association works to connect with those spaces, put up signs, and preserve any historical aspects on those trails. One example of this is the Medina River Greenway Trail in San Antonio. This seven-mile National Recreation Trail is the
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