A Texas Pioneer: Staging & Freighting on the Texas Frontier

As a teen August Santleben blew like a leaf, back and forth, across the border, going wherever the magnet of opportunity pulled him.

August Santleben was just seventeen when Civil War came. He enlisted at Brownsville and was elected corporal of the First Texas Cavalry. That was a Union regiment. Isn't history full of surprises? But what August Santleben is best known for is founding the first stagecoach line between Texas and Mexico.

For three decades he moved people and freight through some of the most dangerous and inhospitable country to be found. Dealing with hostile Indians, Mexican bandits and American stage robbers was just part of doing business.

A beautiful thing about August Santleben is he names names. Hundreds of the them. Seems he knew just about everyone from San Antonio to the border and across it. In one section he gives the names of 392 people and the dates they were killed by Indians. He said those were just the ones he could remember.

This is 342 pages of "dirt under your nails" storytelling and detail after detail about how life was actually lived in the Texas borderlands.