Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

To drive blue highway 21 is to follow Texas history. Older than the mind of man, it started as a bison trail (buffalo walk in surprisingly straight lines); then Indians came up it to hunt the buffalo. In 1691, Spain established a thousand-mile camino real, a royal road, that would link San Antonio with Mexico, French Louisiana, and Spanish Florida; the Spaniards figured the Indians knew best and marked their course over the old track (often the camino was only a direction). Up it came adventurers, padres, traders, smugglers, armies, settlers. And so it was that wandering bison, in a time even before red men came to east Texas, laid down a route that a nation whose explorers steer tangents past the planetary arcs still follow.