"An Unborn Empire" - Robert E. Howard's Texas

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"This week they’re holding the formal opening of the Spanish governor’s palace, built 1749 and Cardinal Patrick Hayes came all the way from New York to bless it. I got a big kick out of going through the place – it looks just like scenes from swash-buckling movies. I wouldnt be surprized to see Douglas Fairbanks came bounding into the patio with his rapier and jack-boots."
        -Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, March 1931

I was in San Antonio earlier this summer and I thought I would visit, like Howard, the Spanish Governor's Palace. This place has gone through a number of transitions over time. It was first a small one-, then two-room affair, housing the territorial governor for Spain. It was later expanded, came under Mexican control, devolved into a merchant store, and eventually a saloon. It was rescued in 1929, restored, and somewhat expanded for the grand opening that Howard witnessed. In more recent times, it has been revamped to try to detail the structure's significance and how it has changed over time. 

As you can see from the entrance photo, it is not really much of a "palace," but that is what it was referred to as, and if you can imagine what the other kinds of structures surrounded it when it was originally built, you can probably imagine why it was considered a palace.

So, over a series of posts, I will give you a view of what the palace looked like. And, if you are ever in San Antonio . . .



Howard would have liked this statue out front of the Conquistador, had it been there. It was erected in 1977. 

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"This week they’re holding the formal opening of the Spanish governor’s palace, built 1749 . . ."
        -Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, March 1931

The above picture is the ornate front door, though you will note that before the remodeling (below), it was  not the same door. Though the above door is the one Howard would have seen after the 1929 remodeling, which took two years. Adina de Zavala is the lady who was instrumental in moving the restoration of the Spanish Governor's Palace forward. 



Here is the keystone today:

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Good to see some exposure for Adina de Zavala. This woman also saved the Alamo and its Long Barracks from demolition, and fought hard to save as many historic buildings in San Antonio as she could, and turn them into show places honoring their history. Some of the historic places Howard talks about in his letters on San Antonio are due to her saving them.

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Jun 30, 2021 14:05:35 GMT -5 bulbous said:

Good to see some exposure for Adina de Zavala. This woman also saved the Alamo and its Long Barracks from demolition, and fought hard to save as many historic buildings in San Antonio as she could, and turn them into show places honoring their history. Some of the historic places Howard talks about in his letters on San Antonio are due to her saving them.

Yep, she is responsible for saving the Alamo, which led to the saving of other missions around San Antonio and led to the creation of the Mission Trail. The preservation of the Spanish Governor's Palace led to the saving of the La Vallita neighborhood in San Antonio, which in turn led to the creation of the famous River Walk. And the neat little thing that never seems to be mentioned around this campus: she was a graduate of Sam Houston Normal School, today, Sam Houston State University.

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"This week they’re holding the formal opening of the Spanish governor’s palace, built 1749  . . . I got a big kick out of going through the place."
        -Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, March 1931

Today, when you enter, you come into the little room through that doorway. This room, however, was the original room--it was the first one built. Though, as I understand it, the current entryway into the palace is the same one Howard would have gone through in 1931. This would have been the first room to visit in his tour, but due to lots of laws, today, it is the last.

Here is the information plaque for the room:



You can also see the original adobe wall in this room, exposed from underneath the bricks:



And the information on the Adobe:

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"I got a big kick out of going through the place – it looks just like scenes from swash-buckling movies."
        -Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, March 1931

The lighting wasn't the best for my camera, but after entering through the front door and checking in, turning to the left, you can see the Ball Room, followed by the door to the small office. 

Here is the placard that Howard would have seen on the Ball Room:

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"This week they’re holding the formal opening of the Spanish governor’s palace, built 1749 . . . I got a big kick out of going through the place."
        -Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, March 1931

This would have been the door that people having business with the Spanish Governor would have entered to gain access to his office.

Here is the placard that Howard would have seen:




Compared with the modern day placard describing the room:



Note the diagram: the red marks the office, to the right is the ballroom, to the right of that is the small foyer (entryway to pay for the tour) and then to the right of that was the original bedroom. The foyer and bedroom were built first, then the ballroom and office. Not all of what you see in the diagram existed when Howard went on his tour; some of the back rooms were added on in more recent renovations to show what other Spanish structures from the time-period may have looked like. I'll stick to just what Howard saw in these posts (which is why I didn't bother with the furniture in the room). 

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"I got a big kick out of going through the place – it looks just like scenes from swash-buckling movies."
        -Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, March 1931

The Spanish Governor's Palace gets a bit confusing now in regards to the timeline. In looking through the door above, there is a bedroom. This is accessed from the office (through the door to the left) detailed in the last post. The room was shut-in, but had windows in the southwall and that was it. However, in the 1930 remodel, they added a children's bedroom (through the door to the right), which had never been there, to detail what other Spanish homes were like. So, Howard would have seen the bedroom, the children's room, and this newly installed door. According to the marker, "The door was originally in the house of Pedro Fuentes, the San Fernando Church parish priest," so it does have historic significance, just not to the Palace. The room the picture is taken from seems to have been at one time the covered veranda leading into the courtyard, a bedroom, and then remodeled to represent a formal dining room. 

Here is that room:



And the 1930 addition of the children's bedroom:

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"I got a big kick out of going through the place."

        -Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, March 1931

The kitchen, pictured above, was not the original kitchen in the Spanish Governor's Palace. It was added for the 1930 opening. However, Robert E. Howard would have seen this room, much as it appears above.

Here is the plaque he would have read about the room:



And here is the modern placard:

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"I got a big kick out of going through the place."
               -Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, March 1931

Above is the original dining room in the Spanish Governor's Palace in San Antonio with the kitchen through the entryway to the left and the original bedroom to the right. Below is the dining room looking in the other direction.




Here is the 1930 reconstruction placard that Howard would have read regarding the dining room:



And here is the modern information regarding the dining room:

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"I got a big kick out of going through the place."
        -Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, March 1931

And the last post on the Spanish Governor's Palace in San Antonio, Texas . . . 

The picture is looking at the back of the Palace with the fountain in the center. The kitchen (added on in 1930) is on the left side of the building and the children's room (also added on in 1930) is on the right side of the building, with the patio in-between.

If you ever find yourself in San Antonio, pay a visit to the Palace and walk where Robert E. Howard "got a big kick out of going through the place." It is not far from the RiverWalk and just beyond the Palace is the Spanish Market. If you make it that far, you MUST eat at Mi Tierra . . . the best Mexican food north of the equator! 

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"Personally, I wish I was rich so I could spend my life in travel. But I do very little of it. Since returning home I’ve been nowhere except to Brownwood a few times; to De Leon which lies forty-five miles east of here over the most damnable road in the state; and to Mineral Wells, which lies 107 miles to the east, a beautiful little health-resort town built among the Palo Pinto mountains, and its greenness and plentiful water refreshing after the dry bareness of New Mexico and the Trans-Pecos."
        -Robert E. Howard to August Derleth, July 4, 1935

I took the past two weeks off as a needed break between summer school and the fall semester. Things are now starting back up, so I thought I would post before I got too busy.

My wife and I traveled through west Texas and New Mexico. We stopped in Midland/Odessa, two cities we had never been to in Texas. We stopped at the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum as I had read in a number of places that there was a lot of Howard History in that museum. People like Mark Finn and Rob Roehm were certainly right about that. If you ever find yourself driving through Midland, Texas, stop in and have a look. 

I took the photo above as it reminded me of what I had read on a REH: Two-Gun Raconteur post by Damon Sasser: 

"There were plenty of folks in Mineral Wells that thought building a major hotel in a rural community 50-miles west of Ft. Worth in 1912 was just plain crazy. Nonetheless, the four story hotel was built by the city over a water well known as the Crazy Water Well No. 3, and heralded it as an early 20th century health resort . . ."

Read more here: web.archive.org/web/20111114105536/http://rehtwogunraconteur.com/?p=6917

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Robert E. Howard scholar John Bullard just posted an article titled, "Violence in the Streets of Waco!" over on the Adventures Fantastic blog about the Gerald-Harris Shooting. John is currently working on the second edition of The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard for the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press.

He also gives a nice plug for this little corner of The Swords of Robert E. Howard. Nice!

Link to it here: adventuresfantastic.com/violence-in-the-streets-of-waco/

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Thanks Linedfaced, for the shout-out! Your column here has become a great resource in looking for information on some of the more esoteric Texas topics Howard wrote about.
And a correction: Vols. 2 and 3 of the "REH Letters" have been finished since last Fall. The REHFP is just waiting on our new cover artist to free up the time in his schedule to create the covers for the books, as well as other books we have ready to go. Hopefully we'll have some stuff ready for Christmas/Hanukah/Festivus shopping...

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Sept 4, 2021 8:04:42 GMT -5 bulbous said:

Thanks Linedfaced, for the shout-out! Your column here has become a great resource in looking for information on some of the more esoteric Texas topics Howard wrote about.
And a correction: Vols. 2 and 3 of the "REH Letters" have been finished since last Fall. The REHFP is just waiting on our new cover artist to free up the time in his schedule to create the covers for the books, as well as other books we have ready to go. Hopefully we'll have some stuff ready for Christmas/Hanukah/Festivus shopping...

Thanks for the kind words and the update on the 2nd edition of The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard. I still have not figured out how to go about incorporating the second edition, but I realized I was definitely going to have to wait until all three volumes are available. I certainly appreciate the update to the Collected Letters, as I now how much work goes into a project like that.