INDIANS OF TEXAS

Humans have lived in the regions of what became the state of Texas for nearly thirteen thousand years. The earliest peoples, Paleo-Indians, were nomadic hunters and left a record in beads, grinding stones, flint points, and pictographs.

By the first century AD, a Woodland culture arose in east Texas with settled, hierarchical societies that were supported by farming, localized hunting, and trade. They made pottery and built burial and ceremonial mounds.

Before the arrival of European explorers in the sixteenth century, the lands of Texas were occupied by hundreds of groups of peoples with drastically diverse cultures, including the farming Caddo of east Texas, the seminomadic Wichita of the Red River region, and the Coahuiltecan and Jumano hunter-gatherer groups in the Rio Grande and Big Bend areas. The Karankawa of the Gulf Coast were the first natives to encounter Europeans in 1528.

The horses brought to the New World by the Spanish proved eminently useful and brought dramatic change to the lifestyle of many tribes. When abandoned at Spanish missions or settlements, the horses became feral. The seminomadic Apache and Comanche from the southern Rockies assimilated the horse within a generation or two, quickly developing its potential for hunting, trade, travel, and war.

Part of the role of the Spanish missions in Central and east Texas in the mid-eighteenth century was to stabilize this mobile threat to more peaceful Indian groups and to protect against French incursion into the province.

The first decades of the nineteenth century brought Anglo immigrants to Texas and new tribes. Pushed west by American expansion, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Alabama, and Coushatta settled into the district between the Sabine and Neches rivers of northeast Texas, peaceably sharing lands with the Caddo. The Kickapoo, Shawnee, and Delaware relocated from the northeast and Great Lakes region to east Texas. Before and after the Texas Revolution, Anglos feared that the east Texas tribes might side with the Mexicans, and many, including Stephen F. Austin, worked for their removal to Anglo-designated Indian territories north of the Red River.

The Indian policy of the Republic of Texas was largely determined by its first presidents: Sam Houston favored friendship and treaties to secure land for the indigenous groups, while Mira-beau B. Lamar believed in total expulsion, if not outright extermination.

Several incidents changed the climate from intermittent skirmishes to all-out warfare on the frontier. In 1839, Texas offered to pay the Cherokee, Shawnee, and Delaware for their land improvements, but not for the land itself, if they would move to Indian Territory. The Cherokee, wishing to remain long enough to harvest their corn crop, declined the offer. The Texans attacked and destroyed the Cherokees' town and crops and removed the survivors to Indian Territory. The other tribes took the offer and relocated. By 1841, east Texas was effectively cleared of Indians and open to white settlement.

The Comanche maintained the strongest resistance to Anglo expansion into their lands. The Council House Fight of 1840 irreparably destroyed any hope of Texan-Comanche peace. In this incident in San Antonio, 35 Comanche and 7 whites were killed and 29 Indian women and children taken prisoner. The Comanche retaliated with the largest raid in more than eighty years: 500 warriors raided all the way to the coast and sacked Victoria. On their return inland, they were intercepted by a Texan militia and defeated at the battle of Plum Creek near present-day Lockhart.

The frontier was relatively stable for the decade before the Civil War. With secession, however, federal troops were pulled out of the frontier forts, and various tribes took advantage of the power vacuum to push the frontier back to San Antonio and into the Blackland Prairie of Central Texas.

The decade after the Civil War was a period of intense conflict as intensified military and economic means were used to remove the Indians from Texas. With army support and encouragement, buffalo hunters effectively killed the vast bison herds of the South Plains in less than a decade, eliminating the Indians' staff of life. By 1875, the Panhandle and South Plains had been cleared of bison and Indians, to be taken over by large-scale cattle ranching and farming, supported by the rapidly expanding railroad network.

Today there are only three small Indian reservations in Texas. There would be no federally granted reservations as found in other states because, with statehood, Texas retained possession of its public lands.