Just south of Austin, if you look closely and don’t drive too fast, you can find a tiny piece of Texas’s first super highway wedged between a golf course and the massive airport. The El Camino Real de los Tejas ran between the big town of Monclova in Coahuila, crossed the shallow Rio Grande and headed northwest hundreds of miles across the Texas frontier, ending at remote Spanish outpost in north 
Louisiana on the Red River. The first Spanish settlements sprang up along El Camino – San Antonio, Bastrop and Nacogdoches among them. It was called a “royal road” after the king, like many pathways in New Spain. But El Camino Real was anything but regal.
Most of the route was laid over trails used by animals and native Americans for thousands of years, the tried and true method for choosing the best place to put a road. It’s no accident that today’s I-35 south of Austin lays on top of a long stretch of El Camino Real. There was nothing impressive or scenic about the frontier road, but it was practical. El Camino transported animals, people, their belongings and the news to different points in the Spanish colonial empire. No one back then came to far away Texas to vacation or for their health. The ancient path followed the smoother contours of the land, hitting every freshwater spring and salt lick close by. There were no bridges or ferries to be found in 17th century Texas. When El Camino met a river or creek, the path found the easiest, shallowest spot to trudge through the muddy water, sometimes detouring for days to find the right crossing point. Ideally, the best spots to cross water were found where the bank sloped gently and the riverbed was hard stone where wooden ox cart wheels, hooves and the feet of travelers would not get stuck in the mud. A spot just like that still can be found on Onion Creek in McKinney Falls State Park.
I went there Sunday morning to paint the creek near the spot where El Camino came closest to Austin. Of course, there wasn’t any Austin back when El Camino was getting it’s heaviest traffic from Spanish soldiers, merchants, government officials and clerics on their way into the Texas frontier. They traveled the rough road on foot, in a saddle or sitting behind an ox team in a loaded two-wheeled cart that must have been a bone-rattling ride. I set up with my paints on a high rock overlooking the slow-moving, green water. The creek there has two speeds: trickle and flood.
You can still make out a faint path worn smooth over the hard limestone bank leading down to the water. For over 150 years, travelers on El Camino took this route down to the creek, then up the bank on the opposite side, continuing north over the fairways and greens of the golf course but never yelling “fore!” That morning,
park visitors with young children and dogs scrambled over the rocks. Little kids sang out with excitement when they saw a turtle, like they had spotted a celebrity bobbing in the water. Some people splashed in the deeper, rock-bottomed pools of the creek. It was anything but quiet there, but it wasn’t supposed to be. This little green spot on the creek has buzzed with human activity for thousands of years.
Some people took photos and at least one other had a sketch pad. It’s hard to visit a spot like this and not make an effort to record it visually in some form. There wasn’t as great a variety of color as I had hoped. These were late summer colors,
more vibrant near the water, with about seven different shades of green under a blue Texas sky. My support was 8 x 10 hardboard, which doesn’t have the texture of canvas and won’t hang on well to the wet paint. My pallet had nine colors, including alizarin crimson to mix a rosy hue that would dull the chroma of the greens. The turtles moved too fast to paint.
