BANDERA — The mystery starts at the edge of town.
A green sign reads: "Bandera City Limit, Pop. 957."
Really? Fewer than 1,000 people live in this bustling cowboy town on the banks of the Medina River northwest of San Antonio?
A place that hosts at least two singular museums, a capacious and well-stocked library, a bounty of eateries — one of them, O.S.T., has been in business since 1921 — a modern supermarket, a downtown hotel, and a handsome county courthouse?
"Bandera itself is actually very small," says Mauri Guillén Fagan, director of the Bandera Library. "Bandera County, however, has 20,000 people. All of us on staff, for instance, live outside of town."
That solves part of the mystery. Consider, too, the tourists.
The rugged countryside near the town is flecked with tourist camps for snowbirds — winter visitors from up north. Further out in the hills, one finds the dude ranches that sprang up in the 1920s, decades after the decline of the Great Western Cattle Trail that stretched from this snug Texas valley to Ogallala, Nebraska.
And times are changing: Suburbs with grand entryways are crawling down from Greater San Antonio.
"We have broadband now," Fagan says. "People can work from home here."
Good point.
That technological breakthrough alone is destined to change many aspects of small-town Texas life and the rural West altogether.
Cattle, sheep, goats — and wood
A jagged crown of hills not only separates Bandera from the rest of the world — they cut the town off from the western part of Bandera County that includes the early settlement of Tarpley (pop. 30), where, during select hours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, one can dine al fresco at Mac and Ernie's Roadside Eatery, a gem that seats more people than reside in the hamlet.
This is gorgeous country.
It must have intimidated the Spanish, who followed Native American trails through the valley, as they encountered the Tonkawas, Lipan Apaches and Comanches, and supplied the doomed San Saba Mission.
The 1921 O.S.T. Restaurant, which serves deeply satisfying Duke Burgers on Bandera's Main Street, is named for the "Old Spanish Trail." In case you were wondering about the "Duke" reference, no, we did not dine in the eatery's John Wayne Room, lined with scores of images of the Western movie star.
The surrounding terrain must have looked fairly alarming, as well, to the mostly Polish and Anglo settlers who arrived in the 1850s.
The Polish people arrived from Panna Maria, located more than 100 miles away on the other side of San Antonio, to work in the sawmills that turned out cypress shingles for that booming city. They established the sturdy and atmospheric Saint Stanislaus Polish Catholic Church, the second oldest such parish in the U.S.
One can still spot bumper stickers that bear the slogan: "Keep Bandera Polish."
Watered by tributaries of the Medina, the county proved fantastic ranch land, first for cattle, then for sheep and goats. At one point, ranchers registered almost 1,000 cattle brands in the county.
Like the rest of the Hill Country, Bandera is subject to catastrophic flash floods, such as the one on July 17, 1973, that inundated much of this town strung along a bend in the Medina. One can find out more about that flood in a small exhibit at the library.
Besides the majestic cypress trees, which make gray-and-green cathedrals out of the narrow rivers and creeks, this is oak and juniper country. As I recently learned through Elmer Kelton's magnificent novel — set during the long Texas drought of the 1950s — those oaks provided a last line of defense, providing fodder for the browsing goats.
The 1813 Battle of Medina, the bloodiest battle on Texas soil and sometimes considered a preview of the Texas Revolution, did not take place on the Medina River here, but rather south of San Antonio. Interestingly, historians and history buffs have not been able to determine the exact location of the battle, although the historical marker has been planted in Atascosa County.
We have a better idea about the 1841 Battle of Bandera Pass, a skirmish between Texas Rangers under Capt. John Coffee "Jack" Hays and Comanches waiting in a high, narrow pass between the Medina and Guadalupe rivers. This encounter saw the introduction of the Colt revolver, often credited with giving the Texians the upper hand against Native Americans.
During the 1850s, Bandera witnessed a federal experiment that introduced pack camels to dry West Texas; they were quartered, along with imported camel drivers, at nearby Camp Verde located not far from Bandera Pass.
Bandera's golden age might have been the decades after the Civil War, when the legendary cattle drives helped establish the town's status as "Cowboy Capital of the World," a claim it generously shares with Stephenville up on the Bosque River.
The railroads skipped rugged Bandera County, as did the superhighways.
That left the spectacular land open for dude ranches, made popular in the cities by the first wave of silent Western movies. These resorts give city folk a comfortable taste of cowboy life with trail rides, rustic rodeos, time with livestock, Western dances and mounds of chuckwagon food.
(Someday, I'll tell you about my one experience at a Bandera County dude ranch, which included an extremely painful gastric response to an excess of bacon. Some foodstuff should never be offered buffet-style.)
During World War II, off-duty military personnel were bussed to the dude ranches from bases in San Antonio and Hondo.
Meanwhile, Bandera evolved into something of a party town. For some 70 years, dining, drinks and dancing could be had at the famed Cabaret Dance Hall and other roadside spots. The happy place hosted a live radio show during the 1940s and '50s.
And each year, the curious flock to the Bandera Stampede, a rodeo-based festival on Memorial Day weekend. One "Think, Texas" correspondent told me that he wrecked his car two years in a row at the rowdy Stampede.
Honky-tonks such as the untouched Arkey Blue's Silver Dollar on Main Street still draw fans from across the state. When, during this trip, I descended the stairs into the dark room to smiles from a quartet playing cards in the afternoon, a woman winced in pain, then walked behind the bar to take my order.
Me: "Sorry to make you get up."
Her, matter-of-factly: "That's my job."
Our time on the town
Despite its time in the spotlight, Bandera has managed to hang onto an air of authenticity.
This includes the improved but still unfinished project to make Main Street — and the nearby older town center — more friendly to pedestrians. While vacationing recently at a cabin perched above the Medina River in the nearby community of Highland Waters, I took several strolls around downtown. There are still places where friendly truck drivers must pause to make a narrow passage for walkers where no sidewalks exist.
Among the required downtown magnets is the Frontier Times Museum, established in 1927 and expanded in 1933 by J. Marvin Hunter Sr., editor of the Frontier Times magazine. It houses 30,000 items, including Hunter's collection of Old West memorabilia in a series of galleries inside a flagstone building — decorated with petrified wood, fossils and unusually shaped stones — that has been expanded over the years.
I've visited dozens of local history museums in small Texas towns, and this is one of the most thorough and well-documented. Informed by modern practices, but charmingly old-fashioned, it displays the physical remnants of daily life on the frontier and notates them with an unusual degree of precision.
At the Bandera Library, established in 1937, I browsed its large and up-to-date Texana section, then asked for assistance on printed local histories. Two in particular proved useful: "Pioneer History of Bandera County: 75 Years of Intrepid History" written by J. Marvin Hunter in 1922, and "A Pictorial History of Bandera County: 150 years of Challenges, Courage, Champions and Characters," edited by M.J. Schumacher in 2006.
Hunter wrote in a familiarly antiquated style about heroic pioneers and hostile American Indians. Schumacher's book, on the other hand, cleverly assigns different topics to experts on geology, early Native American life, cattle trails and so forth.
I learned a lot. For instance, that the R.B. Richards Circus made its summer home Bandera County's Pipe Creek community. Also, that the Medina Dam Project, which impounded the river and created Lake Medina, was proposed in the 1890s and completed in 1912, well before most other such Hill Country projects.
I didn't make it to the Bandera Natural History Museum, but Fagan told me that, in addition to traditional dioramas about dinosaurs and other exhibits, it recently acquired an excellent grouping of Spanish Colonial art.
Next week, I'll share more stories about the Texas rivers that, like the Medina, fall from the southern edge of the Edwards Plateau, as well as a hike in Hill Country State Natural Area, and an indulgent brunch at picnic tables in the hamlet of Tarpley.
Michael Barnes writes about the people, places, culture and history of Austin and Texas. He can be reached at [email protected].
An earlier version of this story had the incorrect date for the Medina Dam, which was proposed in the 1890s and built in 2012.
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