The government moved to Houston in May, 1837, before the building to house it was finished, and the city was incorporated in June. Houston remained the capital of the republic until January, 1840, and it was again the capital, briefly, in 1842. Muddy and beset by recurring yellow fever epidemics, it grew slowly after the capital was removed to Austin. [Illustration: _Looking south on Main Street in 1910, when the street still ended at Buffalo Bayou, from the point where the Main Street bridge now spans the bayou._] One of the best early descriptions of Houston is that of Mary Austin Holley, who saw the town in December, 1837: “The Main street of this city of a year extends from the landing foot of Main Street into the prairie.... On this main street are two large hotels, 2 stories, with galleries (crowded to overflowing) several stores 2 stories—painted white—one block of eleven stores (rent $500 each)—some 2 story dwelling houses—& then the capitol ... painted peach blossom about ¼ mile from the landing. Other streets, parallel, & at right angles, are built on here and there, but chiefly designated by stakes. One story dwellings are scattered in the edge of the timber which forms an amphitheatre round the prairie.” The early Houston seems to have been distinguished for its wickedness. In January, 1838, the diarist John Hunter Herndon called it “the greatest sink of disipation (_sic_) and vice that modern times have known.” After living in Houston two and a half months longer, he wrote. “What a den of villains must there not be here?” Francis C. Sheridan, a young Irishman in the British diplomatic service, saw Houston in 1840, when he wrote: “The most uncivilised place in Texas is I believe Houston the former Capital—I heard and read of more outrage and blackguardism in that town ... than throughout the whole of Texas.” However all that may have been, the early Houston shared one characteristic with the city of a century and a quarter later. Gustav Dresel, a young German who came to Texas in 1838, wrote in the autumn of 1839: “Nine months only had gone by since I had left Houston, but how different did it all look! I discovered more than twice the number of houses. Whole squares had been added, and I noticed new streets.” The population then numbered between two and three thousand. Early Houstonians had the good fortune to be spared the Indian raids and massacres that harassed some of frontier Texas. But Indians were no novelty in Houston. On March 18, 1838, Herndon wrote, “Many Indians in town who made much noise. A squaw drunk, the first I ever saw.” Muir has written, “To the best of the writer’s knowledge, there were never any Indian raids, battles or massacres in the Houston area during the time Anglo-Americans have lived here. Certainly there were Indians, however, for as late as 1846 a priest from St. Vincent’s [Roman Catholic] Church baptized a crowd of them.”