Why Are We Here?

How a Backcountry Backwater Became the Texas Capital

The solstice was only a week ago, but the highs in Austin are already flirting with 100 degrees. Though summer temperatures began in April, the official start of the season has many of the coastal elitists who flocked here from more hospitable climes wondering:

“Why are we here???”

Though probably with more expletives. 

Even ignoring recent trends, Texas has always been hot, so for those who failed to heed the warnings of seasoned locals, well, that’s on you and me. However, there’s another more existential aspect to the question: why are we here—as in, why is there a city in this spot in Texas at all…and not just any city, but the state capital?

To many, the city that would become Austin was far from an obvious choice for the capital of the then Republic of Texas. When the decision was announced in early 1839, the Houston Morning Star wrote a scathing editorial in which they expounded on the location’s many faults:

[I]t possesses none of the advantages of a city—timber being scarce, water not too abundant, the situation remote from the Gulf, and there being no navigable stream near it, at least at present, the immediate surrounding country not being fertile, and the town being at the end of the road, beyond which there is nothing to see.

Today, it’s the eleventh largest city in America, a fact that would astound the editors of the Morning Star. Whether their objections were objective was beside the point—the Republic of Texas already had a capital in their home city of Houston.

The history of civilization, according to

Tomas Pueyo

, suggests five reasons why cities emerge: as centers of administration, the military, markets, specialized production, and infrastructure. As he explains, humanity’s earliest cities emerged as agriculture developed around the fertile banks of rivers. Plentiful food fed growing populations, which in turn created other commercial needs for things like blacksmithing and pottery, which generated trade and wealth and the need to protect it all—which sometimes brought war, and thus the need for militaries. As cities grew in importance, they built themselves up with infrastructure projects, further solidifying their positions.

Houston was selected for its geography: it was at the (ostensible) head of navigation of the Buffalo Bayou and poised to benefit from trade between the nearby port of Galveston and various inland settlements. Conversely, the spot that would become Austin was not a logical choice for any geographic reasons.

So why did it happen? In Seat of Empire, Jeffrey Stuart Kerr explains how an unlikely spot on the prairie became the seat of government in Texas.

By 1837, the young republic was already on its seventh capital in its less than two years of existence. Houston, though geographically promising, had a few problems created by its geography. Founded by New York land speculators, it was a “desolate” city, “one of the muddiest and most disagreeable places on earth.” Visitors and officials decried streets that were “almost impassable in wet weather.” The surrounding water was hard to navigate, fetid, and filled with alligators. As Kerr sums it up: “Muddy streets, unhealthy drinking water, fear of contagion, and inadequate infrastructure combined to sow discontent for Houston throughout the government.”

By October 1837, members of that government were ready to get the hell out.

Demonstrating that nothing is new under the Texas sun, the government failed to make progress on a new location. While Congress dithered in humid Houston, Vice President Mirabeau Lamar went on a hunting trip—specifically, he went hunting for votes along the frontier. 

Running in 1838 to become President of the Republic, Lamar joined a small band of frontiersmen to hunt buffalo and curry favor in the ragtag settlement of Waterloo, along the Colorado River. After bagging a bull, Lamar rendezvoused with the frontiersmen on a hill overlooking the surrounding prairie. As he gazed down toward the river, he saw thickets of live oaks and elms crowning the hilltops and lining the water, with two clear streams flanking the view on either side. Struck by the beauty of the place, the future president declared to his companions, “This should be the seat of future empire!”

But…should it? 

Like many a visionary before him, Lamar could imagine something else there—a seat for himself. After he became president, in December 1838, a congressional commission was created to designate a new capital away from the “ugly and sickly” bayou to some place on the frontier. Lamar and his supporters argued that “a capital on the Colorado River would benefit all Texans by strengthening the frontier and encouraging immigration to what would one day be the center of population of the republic.”

It was a bold vision—but as a matter of geography, moving the government to Waterloo seemed like a logical leap.

The capital would be far from the existing population centers in the Republic—and the distance would only be increased by the lack of roads, making it a poor choice as an administrative center.

The capital would be at the edge of Texas civilization on the undefended frontier of Comanche country—and the plan did not call for building a defensible fort. 

Without roads, a non-navigable river, and only a few families to trade with in the existing settlement of Waterloo, the new capital wouldn’t be a likely market hub for the surrounding hinterland—it was the hinterland. 

While initially believed to be rich in fertile land, timber, and ore, it would turn out that the only thing Austin’s arid climate and rocky soil could reliably produce was legislation. 

Because the area didn’t have any of the geographical features that usually make a city thrive—it was “an exposed, distant location with so few settlers lying thirty miles beyond the last faint vestige of Anglo civilization”—there was no infrastructure, for there was nothing there to support. 

So perhaps the Houston Morning Star might have had a point. Nevertheless, Mirabeau and his supporters ignored it, and the decision was made to build a capital city named for the “Father of Texas” on the frontier. While the Houston editors sneered that “Austin, as a commercial city, can never come in competition with Houston,” others believed that Austin was “probably destined to become a considerable place.” 

Edwin Waller was charged with the task of making it one.

He laid out a 15-by-15 street grid between the two creeks that had framed Lamar’s vista. The east-west streets were named after Texas trees, with mellifluous names like Bois d’Arc and Pecan and Hickory, while the north-south avenues would be named for Texas’s mighty rivers—the Sabine, the San Jacinto, the Guadalupe. A central boulevard called Congress Avenue would point to a magnificent Capitol Square where one day a grand edifice would house the republican government.

And the President’s House would be situated on the site where Lamar first took in his beloved panoramic vista.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing from there, but by 1845, when Texas was admitted to the United States, Austin’s place in history was secure. By then, the President’s House was falling into ruin; it would burn down two years later, the hill would be leveled, and the panoramic vista would eventually be blocked by the skyscrapers that have risen in more recent years—testimony to the city’s evolution from a backwoods backwater into America’s eleventh largest city. 

Most of the great cities of the world evolved because of their auspicious geography, but for Austin, it was its topography. The Houston Morning Star may have found nothing to see here, but the Vice President of Texas saw potential where no one else did, and willed into existence what would become, if not the seat of empire, at the very least a considerable place.

Why are any of us here in Austin? Mostly because Mirabeau Lamar liked the view.