On the Border: an Environmental History of San Antonio.

Edited by Char Miller. (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xii], 291. $26.00, ISBN 0-8229-4163-5.)

On the Border is an interdisciplinary collection of eleven essays on the natural, human, and built environments of the San Antonio region from the end of the seventeenth century to the present. Rather than a single theme, place ties the chapters together, although the control and uses of water are the focus of several contributions. In the opening essay James E. Petersen sets the stage by situating San Antonio amid a string of settlements located on springs rising along the Balcones Escarpment, an outcropping that stretches south from Waco to San Antonio and then west to Del Rio on the Rio Grande River. Jesus F. de la Teja demonstrates how the abundance and novelty of the flora and fauna of the San Antonio River valley captured the imagination of Spanish adventurers and settlers during the eighteenth century. Spanish colonials decimated buffalo herds and forests. By the last quarter of the century the slaughter of wild cattle by settlers in the region had prompted Spanish colonial authorities to ban exports of breeding cattle.

In the nineteenth century, as editor Char Miller describes in his essay, non-Hispanic whites wrested control of the region and its resources from the hands of Spanish and Indian peoples. Anglo-Americans and the governments they controlled constructed railroads linking San Antonio to points north, west, and east, and to the Gulf of Mexico to the southeast. San Antonio thus emerged as a transit center, and the raising of commercial crops and domestic animals, from goats to cattle, expanded in the hinterlands around the city. While San Antonio flourished as a market town, local officials, blind to the needs of a modern city, failed to develop the city's infrastructure.

Political corruption, along with racial and ethnic discrimination, played major roles in the human environment of twentieth-century San Antonio and shaped developments such as the city's system of poorly maintained parks. Outside the city limits, lands were ravaged and water squandered, a scenario in which the military, alongside farmers and ranchers, played a major role, even as they stimulated San Antonio's economy and fed population growth through the first half of the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, health risks rose in the city because of inadequate sanitation facilities. Two essays--one by Heywood Sanders, the other by David R. Johnson, Derral Cheatwood, and Benjamin Bradshaw--make clear that San Antonio was one of the nation's most unhealthy urban centers in the early twentieth century and one of its most violent in the late twentieth century. By the 1960s other cities of the Southwest had addressed water management, but San Antonio had not acted to assure itself sufficient clean water. From the 1970s through the 1990s water issues dominated politics in the region. By the end of the century, though the sanitation crisis was long past and a decline in violent crime was discernible, water problems persisted. While federal authorities attempted to protect the Edwards Aquifer, Char Miller concludes that San Antonio's leaders have yet to determine how to manage the water it supplies to the city.

This book present no startling new findings, but it contributes significantly to the literature on San Antonio by linking race and politics to environmental issues, demonstrating how all three intertwined in the city's history and documenting how greed and indifference affected various aspects of public policy in the region. The book will be a valuable addition to course readings in Texas history, urban history, and public policy,

and it will also be of interest to students of the environment and San Antonio's past.

JULIA KIRK BLACKWELDER

Texas A&M University