GEOGRAPHY AND SETTLEMENT

The 267,277 square miles of Texas encompass a richly varied landscape of sea coasts, rivers, forests, high plains, deserts, and mountains. The area of Texas included in this book covers much of this landscape. The flat coastal plains along the broad bend of the Gulf Coast extend nearly one hundred miles inland, sloping barely one foot per mile. From the Sabine River on the eastern border with Louisiana and westward to the Trinity River are deep pine forests, the western edge of the once great Timber Belt on the Gulf. West of the Trinity, the blackland prairies feed south across the Red River into the heartland of Central Texas, with characteristics similar to the midwestern Corn Belt.

The picturesque rocky hills of the Edwards Plateau in Central Texas are known as the Hill Country. The semi-arid land is suited for agriculture only in the river basins, with grazing of scattered herds of sheep and cattle. The plentiful cream-colored limestone and red granite quarried by the earliest settlers has given buildings of the region a distinctive character.

The waves of immigration over the state's history have brought an equivalent diversity in cultures, and settlement has naturally followed geography for suitability for farming.

The Spanish, the first non-natives to claim the lands of Texas, initially used the territory as a buffer to counter the threat of French incursion into the higher-valued regions of Mexico by establishing a minimal presence with missions and forts to pacify and convert the native population. When France abandoned its claims in North America in 1763 following the French and Indian War, Spain reevaluated its goals in Texas and pulled its functional frontier back to the Rio Grande River.

Following independence from Spain in 1821, the Mexican government sought a similar protectionism from American expansion through controlled immigration. Mexico began a program of land grants to empresarios, contractors who agreed to colonize their lands with a certain number of families in exchange for land of their own. The colonists were required to profess the Catholic faith and support the laws of Mexico. The first empresario grant, to Moses Austin and his son, Stephen Fuller Austin, in 1823, initially brought 300 families to the Brazos and Colorado river basins. Substantial numbers of Anglos also entered the province outside of the sanctioned empresario system, in the open plains of the Red and Sabine rivers borderlands of the northeast.

While Spanish, European, and American newcomers encountered numerous indigenous Native American tribes throughout Texas, from the 1790s to the 1830s the northeast corner of Texas also received immigrant tribes that were relocated from the eastern United States. By 1840, however, all the Native Americans of northeast Texas had been killed or relocated to the Indian Territory of Oklahoma.

Anglo-Americans in Texas in the early nineteenth century, either brought by the empresarios or independently arrived, were largely from the Upper South, yeomen farmers from Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. Their heritage was a Middle Atlantic culture, the origin of many “American” cultural icons: the log cabin, long rifle, family farm, covered wagon, and a melting pot of ethnic backgrounds. They settled the inland regions, first along the rivers, practicing farming and herding on isolated farmsteads. The coastal areas, initially uninhabited under Spanish and later Mexican law, were, by contrast, largely acquired by planters from the Deep South, bringing the cash-crop plantation culture supported by slave labor. The flat, wet coastal prairie was well suited to sugar cane and cotton production.

By 1836, the year of Texas independence, the population had reached nearly 50,000. Immigration expanded rapidly up to the Civil War, with new cultural groups adding to the earlier mix. Germans came to the then-frontier of Central Texas as early as 1831 and continued to arrive for the rest of the century, leaving a strong heritage that is apparent from Houston westward to Fredericksburg. Also in the early 1830s, several small Irish colonies were established at San Patricio St. Patrick and Refugio on the Gulf Coast. At midcentury, Czechs settled on the Blackland Prairie of Central Texas, mixing with the Germans already there. In 1854, the first Polish communities in the United States took hold southeast of San Antonio. Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, and Italians arrived before and after the Civil War.

Railroad expansion following the Civil War and final removal of the Plains Indians by the mid-1870s opened the western half of the state to yet more land-hungry immigrants. Since the turn of the twentieth century, with most rural areas throughout the state under cultivation or ranching, immigration and population growth have concentrated in the urban areas with international infusions of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Indian cultures. Urban and agricultural labor markets have attracted Hispanic workers since the nineteenth century. In spite of the inevitable homogenization of modern society, there are still distinct regional cultures throughout Texas: Hispanic in the south, German/Czech in the center, Southern in the east, and midwestern in the Panhandle and west.