The Spanish government, acting on the governor-general’s advice, ordered four hundred families to be sent out to the New Philippines from the Canary Islands. These islands, situated off the coast of Africa, belonged to Spain by right of conquest, and were settled by Spaniards of pure blood, noted for their honor and chastity, and for their devotion to the Catholic religion. Of the four hundred families only thirteen ever came. They reached San Antonio by way of Mexico in 1729, bringing with them their stores of clothing, silverware, and jewels. They built their dwellings around the present square of the Constitution, which they called Plaza de las Islas (Square of the Islands), in homesick memory of the sea-girt isles they had left behind.  
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Other colonists from Monterey and from Lake Teztuco, in Mexico, followed; houses sprung up beside the musical water-ways; vines were trained over the yellow adobe walls; semi-tropical vegetation made a paradise of the spreading fields and gardens. Finally, the newcomers, emulous of the growing walls of San José, laid on their plaza the foundation (1731) of San Fernando Church.
 
Enlarged and rebuilt on the same spot, San Fernando remains to this day the parish church of the Spanish-speaking Catholics of San Antonio.
 
But the settlers, or townspeople—as they may now be called—were full of anxiety in those troublous times. No more French soldiers, it is true, came riding across the border, chasing the Spanish troops to their very gates. But there were the Apaches and the Comanches. For in spite of the efforts of Spanish friars and Spanish soldiers............