The Rio Grande, jaundiced, erratic as an invalid,
wrings its saffron blood from the clay bluffs and gravel canons of
the hill country, but near its estuary winds quietly through a low
coastal plain which the very impurities of that blood have
richened. Here the river's banks are smothered in thickets of
huisache, ebony, mesquite, oak, and alamo.
Railroads, those vitalizing nerve-fibers of commerce, are so
scarce along this division of the border that even in this day
when we boast, or lament, that we no longer have a frontier, there
remain in Texas sections larger than some of our Eastern states
which hear the sound of iron wheels only on their boundaries. To
travel from Brownsville north along the international line one
must, for several hundred miles, avail oneself of horses, mules,
or motor-cars, since rail transportation is almost lacking. And on
his way the traveler will traverse whole counties where the houses
are jacals, where English is a foreign tongue, and where peons
plow their fields with crooked sticks as did the ancient
Egyptians.
That part of the state which lies below the Nueces River was for a
time disputed territory, and long after Texans had given their
lives to drive the Eagle of Mexico across the Rio Grande much of
it remained a forbidden land.
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