Everything is bigger in Texas! That’s what Texans say, and they might be right. The state itself is huge. It covers more than 260,000 square miles. Alaska is the largest state in area, and Texas comes in second. It’s about two times the size of Germany and bigger than France and England put together!

Texans brag about a thirty-five-foot-high statue of cowboy boots and a state capitol building almost fifteen feet higher than the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.!

Over the years, Texas has belonged to six different nations. One of those was when it was its own separate country.

Before they became states, Hawaii and Vermont were also separate countries.

Texas has a long history. Spanish explorers sailed from Europe and arrived there in 1519. That is about a hundred years before English people settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Jamestown, Virginia.

Texas Today

Texas is in the southwestern part of the United States. It shares a 2,000-mile border with Mexico and has 367 miles of coastline along the Gulf of Mexico. Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas, and Louisiana are its neighbors.

Because Texas is so huge, the land and climate are different throughout the state. The west is flat with hot, dry deserts and very little rain. People there raise cattle and cotton.

On March 27, 1984, Amarillo had a low temperature of 33 degrees Fahrenheit, while in south Texas, Brownsville reached a high temperature of 106 degrees.

The Gulf Coast has miles of sandy beaches, but it also has a high risk of hurricanes. East Texas is lush and green with large pine forests and fields. It gets enough rain for farmers to grow crops like fruits, nuts, and vegetables.

This grapefruit grove is in South Texas.

Rivers and Mountains

Texas has ninety-one mountain peaks that are over a mile high. The Rio Grande River runs almost 2,000 miles from Colorado down to the Gulf of Mexico and marks the border between Texas and Mexico. It’s the fourth-longest river in the United States.

Rio Grande means “big river” in Spanish.

The First Texans

The first people to come to what is now Texas arrived about 15,500 years ago. Their ancestors probably walked over a land bridge joining Asia to Alaska.

In 1982, Texas highway workers uncovered the fossils of a woman who lived between 10,000 and 13,000 years ago.

These early people couldn’t write, but we know things about them. They made stone tools and hunted with spears. There are fossils in caves of some of the animals they killed. Many—like mammoths, giant ground sloths, dire wolves, and huge buffalo—no longer exist.

Much of the art is beautiful and colorful.

We’ve also learned about them from rocks that they painted or carved. The rocks have pictures of humans, buffalo, mountain lions, deer, and birds. Some rocks have simple handprints as if to say, “Look! I was here!”

Tribes in Texas

The Spanish called them Indians, as Christopher Columbus had.

When the Spanish came in the 1500s, Native Americans were already living in what is now Texas. These included the Lipan Apache, Karankawa, and Caddo. During the next 300 years, Comanche, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Kickapoo tribes began living there as well.

The name Texas comes from a Caddoan word, taysha (TAY-shaw), which means “friends.”

Each tribe had its own language and way of life. Some moved around, hunting buffalo and other animals. Others lived in villages, where they fished and grew crops.

The Caddo lived and farmed in East Texas.

Millions of years ago, amazing animals, including T. rex, lived in Texas. They existed before humans were on earth. Here are some you might not know about:

Deinonychus

(dy-NON-ih-kus) lived 110 million years ago. They hunted in packs and had a five-inch claw on their back feet that they probably used to kill prey or defend themselves. Deinonychus were about eleven feet long and had about seventy super-sharp teeth!

Torosaurus

(TOR-uh-SAW-rus) had a skull over nine feet long, one of the largest skulls of any animal that has ever lived! Torosaurus were around twenty-four feet long and munched on leaves and other plants. They lived 66 million years ago.

Quetzalcoatlus

(KET-zul-koh-AHT-lus) were not dinosaurs. They were flying reptiles the size of a small airplane! Quetzalcoatlus had a huge wingspan that could reach thirty-six feet. Their beaks were up to eight feet long! Yikes!