History
Founded in 1577 by Alberto del Canto and Spanish colonists, Saltillo is the oldest post-conquest settlement in northern Mexico. Fourteen years later in 1591 the Spanish resettled a community of their Tlaxcaltec allies in a separate nearby village (San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala), in order to cultivate the land and aid colonization efforts that had stalled in the face of local hostility to the Spanish presence.
In 1824, Saltillo was made the capital of the State of Coahuila y Tejas and included the area which is now the US State of Texas until the Texas War of Independence and the founding of the independent Texas Republic.
On 23 October 1840 the Battle of Saltillo took place when 110 Texans crossed the Rio Grande and attacked the city, which was defended by 1000 Mexicans. The Texans killed about 400 of them before retreating.
Saltillo became the site of the first same-sex civil union in Mexico on 31 January 2007.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)