Edwards Plateau

And, of course, now August has set in and is kind of kicking our tail a little bit with this hot, dry weather.

But really, all in all, I think the Edwards Plateau and Hill Country is in a really good place, you know, forage-wise, and the animals look good.

And, you know, I like to use the term everything's fat and happy right now, so I don't have to worry about them too much.

That's David Fisher of Sonora.

Fort Hood wasn't technically in the hill country.

It was just like right off the edge of the hill country in a region they called the Lampasas Cut Plains, which is kind of a transition zone between the Edwards Plateau and Cross Tempers and Blackland Prairie.

But it has a lot of the same... geologic and terrain, you know, topography characteristics in many ways as the hill country, a lot of the same species.

So from there, I ended up with the Nature Conservancy doing a lot of research and monitoring for quite some time.

Yeah, that's a good question.

So, you know, I came when I started with hill country conservancy, this question came up as they were doing some strategic planning and, uh, different things.

And, uh, you know, I'm like, I kind of, my first reaction was like, well, I don't, what, what do you mean? What's the hill country? Uh, so for some people, the hill country is synonymous, synonymous with the Edwards plateau of Texas.

So a big kind of the central part of the state, a big eco region, uh, And so sometimes, you know, Edwards Plateau and Hill Country Conservancy are, you know, kind of equated to each other.

Now, in Bexar County, we have four different types of soils.

And so for those living in the northwest part of San Antonio, 1604 out Bandera Road over to maybe 281 headed west-northwest, the Edwards Plateau, and we covered this soil in around February of 2026. it's thin and gravelly at my house which is on edward soil i've had to add four to six inches of compost on top of the soil that the builders left just to give the turf grass a fighting chance for those who live inside 1604 loop or maybe more specifically inside loop 410 loop There could easily be eight inches of soil, but it's a black land prairie soil that is a very heavy smectite clay, and that needs a significant amount of compost to open up aeration.

and stop it from compacting back into these hard dirt clods.

For those living in southwest Bexar County over the sandy clay pan soil, you have a dense clay pan right under the surface of the sandy soil that blocks drainage and stops root growth.

Uh, this is year three for me.

I'm, I'm at the eastern ridge of the, uh, Edwards Plateau.

As you know, that's the plateau you and I, in FEMA region number six.

That's right.

End footnote.

he traded his trophies to the camancheros for guns ammunition or other less practical adjuncts that might suit his fancy of the moment his mexican moon was then over and he returned to his portable village which he had left in some watered canyon that cut down eastward from the llano the route as followed by these indians was a well-marked trail and during the time of our westward migration it was well known and appears on the maps of the times another route into mexico broke off the western trail at the big spring and ran down the valley of the north concho river across the edwards plateau then through the passes of the balconies escarpment to cross the rio grande into mexico near the present city of eagle pass mr evats haley refers to these trails as the great comanche war trail and gives a wonderful description of the activity on them in his recent book fort concho and the texas frontier an old map from the army files in the national archives calls the western branch the grand comanche war trail but call the trails what you may they were still a stiff pain in the neck to anyone crossing them and for the wagon trains and cattle herds going west crossing was inevitable the greater raids into mexico appeared to have occurred rather regularly in september when the weather was most favorable and the chief objectives could be struck during the light of a full moon thus to the unhappy but fully expectant mexicans the september full moon was known as the comanche moon at this time mars the red god of war hangs low and molten in the late summer night sky and reflects a light that is as red as the sand and clay soils of the indian territory another favorite trick of these versatile middlemen was to raid the settlements down the rio grande valley south from santa fe and drive off the stock to a rendezvous with the camancheros who in turn traded them to unknowing mexican settlers at other points on the river during such raids it was deemed ethical but unprofitable to kill the settlers since without them there would be no stock to drive off in a later raid besides these mexican settlers did not seriously molest the buffalo such business sagacity however did not apply in later times to the republic of texas where each succeeding year saw new settlers break ground and homestead farther up the river valleys, whose streams had their origins in the motherland plains of the Comanche and Kiowa.

After its establishment in 1836, the infant republic found itself fighting a hot war on two fronts.

The settlers near the Rio Grande, from Del Rio to the mouth of that river near Brownsville, suffered from raids out of Mexico by both Mexicans and Indians, while the northern prongs of the new settlements were exposed to the Comanches and Kiowas.

My good friend David Cleaver had one of the most interesting, mysterious animal encounters that I've ever heard.

He encountered what he believes is a black jaguar in the Edwards Plateau region of Texas, and we'll let him take it from here.

I would do this hike, and I came up on this... and it's, there was a trail that went down to where I needed to hike.

And, you know, it was really the only place you could do it, but it was right over the top of this cave.

There are slave shacks and shanties, but there wasn't a plantation culture.

And then as soon as you went up onto the Edwards Plateau, which is the Texas Hill Country, the rocky drier bit that goes up west of Austin, the slave culture broke down.

It wasn't really there.

So where we were living was right where... that Western most bit of slave-owning culture was.