In the most enchanting city of Texas the future novelist was surrounded by the romantic myths of Indian lore.  On a day long past, the miracle of the San Antonio River and its valley had burst upon the enraptured eyes of Tremanos, the young Apache brave, from the hilltop to which he had climbed with weary footsteps, followed by the gaunt shadow of death, dazed by the phantoms on the distant horizon, lured on by mystic spirit music brought to him on the wings of the scorching winds; and he had gone with glad heart down into the rich and verdant plains of “Tejas, the Beautiful.”

Not far from the picturesque old city of San Antonio was the Huisache, one of the three springs which join to form the San Antonio River.  Along its banks the gray dove’s sad note was heard.  When the two Indian sisters, “Flower of Gladness” and “Flower of Pity,” used to come down to drink from the Spring of the Huisache the song of the dove was all of joy.  A youthful Indian brave of rare enchantment came into their lives and brought love and treachery, and the assassin’s knife felled the Indian youth on the brink of the Huisache.  “Flower of Pity,” coming to the spring, found the lifeless form of the young warrior and snatched the knife from the wound and plunged it into her own heart.  A little later “Flower of Gladness” found her sister and the Indian brave dead by the water’s edge and straightway went mad.  Manitou graciously allowed the poor lost soul to find a voice for its woes in the note of the dove and henceforth she was the mourning dove.  The lives of the youth and maiden, floating out in white clouds of mist, descended into the earth and became two living springs which united with the Huisache to form the San Antonio River.

In her story of “Inez,” founded upon the most tragic event in the history of the Lone Star State, the defence of the Alamo, Miss Evans thus described the scene from the viewpoint of the newly arrived immigrant: 

The river wound around the town like an azure girdle, gliding along the surface and reflecting in its deep blue waters the rustling tule which fringed the margin.  An occasional pecan or live-oak flung a majestic shadow athwart its azure bosom.  Now and then a clump of willows sigh low in the evening breeze.  Far away to the north stretched a mountain range, blue in the distance; to the south lay the luxuriant valley of the stream.  The streets were narrow and laid out with a total disregard of the points of the compass.

By this river of romantic beauty and old-time myth Augusta Evans spent two of youth’s impressionable years.  On Main Plaza, near the Alamo, where the Frost National Bank now stands, was the Evans store, where she, the daughter of the store-keeper, lived.  Almost under the shadow of the tragically historic old mission, by the park near which Santa Ana had his headquarters, she received the incentive and gathered the material for her first novel, “Inez,”