MILITARY HIGHWAY SKIRTS PRESENT

We depart Brownsville and plunge into a setting sun, past fields of sorghum, cotton and sugar cane, past battlefields where blood ran and wars raged, past mesquites, ebonies and retamas, past shaded cemeteries with names on tombstones like Cortez, Mendez and Sanchez, past ranchitos christened Carmen, Cavazos and Calabaza, past stands of mangos, watermelons and strawberries, past abandoned houses and forgotten churches until the historical highway empties into the present.

Before the railroad arrived in the Rio Grande Valley at the beginning of the 20th century, the riverboats plied the Rio Grande from the gulf to Roma, the cavalry and the rangers patrolled the brushland from Brownsville to Laredo and the Oblate missionaries ministered from horseback to the poor along the sun-blistered frontier.

Military Highway was the most dependable lifeline connecting forts, towns and outposts clinging to civilization in a land ruled by the ruthless, whether they be white men, brown men or red men, in a land ravaged by hurricanes, droughts and diseases, in a land where murderers, bandits and rustlers hung like rotting fruit from the nearest branches.

By its very nature the past is destined to disappear and the Military Highway isn't immune to this phenomenon as development first denudes and then consumes the wide open spaces, but there are glimpses of yesterday that will have vanished tomorrow.