Puesta del Colorado

Bastrop exists because of a shallow place in the Colorado River. A rock shoal downstream gave the crossing a firm bottom, and the Old San Antonio Road detoured about a quarter of a mile up Gills Branch to use the creek's gentle banks rather than scale the Colorado's steep east bank directly. Spanish soldiers built a small post at the ford and called it Puesta del Colorado. Governor Manuel Antonio Cordero y Bustamante ordered troops stationed there in 1805, when San Antonio and Nacogdoches were the only towns on the whole length of El Camino Real through Texas. It was never large. The garrison, counted with the posts on the Guadalupe and the San Marcos, came to thirty men. Zebulon Pike passed on 16 June 1807 and recorded a small Spanish station and several lodges of Tancards, whom he called tall, handsome men and the most naked people he had ever seen, and who complained to him about their situation. A supply claim filed that October, covering livestock lost while moving artillery from Nacogdoches to Bexar, suggests the post may already have been given up. The crossing outlived the garrison. Samuel T. Stone settled at Bastrop in 1839, and a ferry ran from the foot of Pine and Chestnut streets through the 1840s and 1850s. The Bastrop Bridge Company was organised in October 1889 and the first Chestnut Street bridge was finished on 1 September 1890. V. N. Zively surveyed the Camino Real in 1915 and presented his notes the year after, setting oak posts along the route; the pink granite markers followed in 1918, placed under a contract with the Daughters of the American Revolution. Marker sixty five stood at the crossing and has since been moved three blocks north, and marker sixty four still stands at Hill and Chestnut. Where the fort itself stood is not known.