ONCE Texas was a great empty land, a world of animals and birds and insects and fish and Nature. And then, slowly, people came into that land. They learned to bend copper and bone into fishhooks, and they learned to chase and surround and exhaust and stake out, and they learned to scavenge, and they learned to live with the forests and the mountains and the deserts and the prairies.
The first Texans spanned out over an area the size of modern France. They didn’t farm nor apartment-dwell in pueblos nor cling to the sides of cliffs. They walked from bush to bush, while basically pursuing a feral existence barely above the level of carrion-eating animals. These Indians did not weave intricate baskets or leave behind geometrically prized shards of pottery. Instead, they left a huge sense of vacuum for the archaeologist, who has had to piece together second-hand from those soldiers, missionaries, explorers, and travelers who first came to Texas most of what has been learned about the prehistoric Texan. To reconstruct from the remains of the Indians in Texas would be to build an anthill of knowledge in the presence of the mountain of facts gathered from the other Indian groups who preceded the coming of the European to the shores of North America. To the Maya, Aztec, Hopi, Navajo, Iroquois, Pequot, Cherokee, the Indians of Texas would have been simple and savage.
The earliest of these peoples, having long since learned to make and use fire, to clothe himself, and to use some stone and maybe bone tools, showed up in Texas as the Llano man. He was a specialist in hunting an extinct species of elephant with a Clovis fluted point—a primitive flint spear or dart point. Although there has been some published evidence that a site near Lewisville in Denton County contains artifacts dating earlier than the 37,000-year range of radiocarbon dating, the generally accepted limit of the Llano civilization is about 12,000 years old.
Without attempting to write a millennium-by-millennium account of the progress of primal man in Texas, we can skip down quickly to a period when the Europeans arrived to find the Texas Indian, still a hunter, still aboriginal, still going his own elemental way, apparently untouched by and unreceptive to the cultural advancements of other Indians in Mexico, New Mexico, or the southeastern United States. Anthropologists agree that the reason must have been environment.
Anyway, the first Europeans found Texas a meeting ground for four distinctive cultural types, much as Texas today represents a crossroads for the Old South, the Spanish Southwest, and the Midwest. Along the coast and lapping across into northeastern Mexico were the Coahuiltecan and Karankawa tribes, living in their “cultural sink,” so-called because anthropologists know so little about their original antecedents and because of the backwardness of the culture. They were a primitive people, somehow keeping starvation at arm’s length while downing a bill of fare that included such exotic foods as berries (in season), animal dung, spiders, and an occasional—very occasional—deer, bison, or javelina which had given up its own chase or been encircled by fire. These two bands had any number of sub-bands with names known only to the specialist—the Payayas, the Katuhanos, the Capoques, and the Malaguites, to identify only an exotic quartet out of scores.
Theirs was largely a static culture, dedicated to supplying minimum needs. They did a little communal hunting, surrounding rabbits and an occasional bison; they dug pitfalls for javelinas, and they built traps of sharpened stakes, along which deer might impale themselves as they jumped the stakes. They also shot fish with bow and arrow and learned to seine. Evidently too they had discovered mescal, which mixed with ground red beans could make a poor man feel opulent. So could peyote, from which they obtained visions of well-being long before such hallucinating was fashionable.
In the center of Texas roamed the Tonkawas. Comparatively they were a superior people, hunting buffalo, sleeping in teepees, and otherwise behaving like uptown Plains Indians. Their name was derived from a Waco term meaning “they all stay together.” The Tonkawas called themselves tickanwatic, which means “most human of people.” As a group they were southern Plains Indians, closely similar to Lipan Apaches. Like other Plains Indians, they used dogs to pack buffalo hides. They also supposedly used poisoned arrows dipped in mistletoe on their opponents, who were not the last Texans to be poisoned by this omnipresent parasite.
Unlike the Karankawas, who were tall, they seem to have been ordinary sized, though quite slender and fleet. They tattooed, particularly the male torso, and the men wore extremely long breechclouts. About all the women wore were short skin skirts, and in warm weather the little children did not even wear that much. The men liked ornamentation, and the women too decorated their bodies with black stripes. Once the European arrived, they went downhill fast as a tribe, partly from introduced diseases. Unable to sustain themselves in an increasingly European world, they even resorted to requesting missions from the Spaniards, though the white man’s religion was the least of their concerns. They wanted alliances, not Franciscan instruction.
In east and northeast Texas lived about two dozen tribes of Caddo Indians, who also spilled over into Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma and were really members of a southeast culture area. They tended to confederate, and the Kadohadacho and Hasinai confederacies undoubtedly provided the most advanced culture of all Texas Indians. Although, like the other early Indians, they were unable to sustain their culture into the era of Texas statehood, they were in today’s term achievers. They practiced agriculture with some competence, probably the only aboriginal Texas group that did. Since they could be sure of food supply, they developed a relatively stable population and a cultural structure that is quite remarkable.
The Caddos would have been novel if for no other reason than they gave the state its name. The Hasinai confederation called each other Tayshas, a term that meant “allies” or “friends.” When the Spanish came, the Hasinai let these wanderers know that they too were Tayshas, which the Spanish wrote as Tejas and which time has transformed into Texas.
Anthropologists believe that Caddo civilization may well stretch back a thousand years into prehistory, and that they may well have been going downhill in their civilization instead of forward when the white man encountered them. They had the good fortune, or the good sense, to live in the genteel part of Texas, the “piney woods” which support prime and hardwood forests (or did till the white exploiters began to clean out much of them), wild-plant foods, and black bear, deer, and buffalo. It was to the Hasinais that some of LaSalle’s sad Texas explorers deserted because they were so much friendlier than fellow Frenchmen. But when shortly afterwards the Spanish moved into east Texas to establish missions among the Caddos, they found that the Tejanos were hostile to being taught what they didn’t want to know. The result was that in March 1694 the viceroy of Mexico formally ordered abandonment of the province in Tejas. But at least the name of Tejas was beginning to stand up.
Some Caddos practiced artificial cranial deformation by making their heads taper toward the top, a practice tracing to prehistoric times. Like the Tonkawas, they also practiced a primitive form of tattooing. The men frequently tattooed plant and animal designs about their bodies, while the women placed tattooes at the corner of their eyes, not unlike today’s well-turned out Texas lovely. When they met strangers, they wept and wailed. Both men and women practiced this public weeping, which required a bit of getting used to for Europeans. Both French and Spanish learned that Caddo women also wept in the face of impending death, so that if they caught a woman weeping, they wondered whether it was for their own imminent death that the tears were being shed.
When Henri de Tonti came looking for LaSalle’s survivors, not only did the Caddos weep over him, but he ran into another avant-garde situation. The chief was a woman, whose husband had died at the hands of the Osages. To this extent the Caddos were more than three hundred years ahead of other Americans, though Texas with its Governor Ma Ferguson is not so much a sinner in this respect.
Even their religion provided a top role for a woman, instead of making her something of a tagalong in man’s afterworld, the way that Christians and Jews and Mohammedans and Buddhists see the supernatural. Along with other southeastern Indians the Caddos believed in a deity who had created the universe and was omnipotent in directing its creatures. But unlike the Biblical statement that in the beginning was God, in the Caddo beginning there were first three women, a mother and two daughters.
The Caddos also showed certain other flourishes of modernity. They not only made two crops of corn each growing season, but they kept seed corn for at least two years ahead, they grew several varieties of beans, and wonder of wonders, the men worked alongside the women in the gardens, handling the heavier tasks. Only the leader was excused from productive labor.
Away out west, in trans-Pecos Texas, lived a fourth culture type of prehistoric Texan. Most commonly these people are known as Jumanos. Just as today the trans-Pecos is remote from the remainder of Texas, so are the Jumanos a remote people historically. Probably a part of the pueblo culture that wandered into Texas, the Jumanos have not been well delineated. They also disintegrated early enough following the European advent that anthropologists speak of them with more hesitation than of any other Texas group. They seem to have subdivided, one group living as settled gardeners, like their possible New Mexico cousins, in the valleys of the Rio Grande and the lower Rio Conchos. The other subgroup was comprised of hunters, in and beyond the Chisos and Davis mountains. Whether we are talking of two people, one nomadic and one sedentary, or whether we are talking of one people, some of whom were nomadic and some sedentary, is uncertain. But we do know that they were present when the first Spaniards came through and that they ranged from El Paso to the Pecos and even up the Rio Conchos in Chihuahua.
Where the Jumanos farmed, they raised good crops of corn, beans, squash, and possibly cotton. Beyond the range of the buffalo, they could only haul their dried meat from away off. They did seem to value buffalo hides. They owned some pottery, but Cabeza de Vaca noted that though the pottery could be used over fire, they still dropped heated rocks into pots to cook food. Why a people who owned pottery would cook by this method is another mystery.
What probably happened to the Jumanos was that they were caught up in time by the coming of the Spaniards. Theirs possibly had been a better civilization; but just as the Indians of another land abandoned great cities such as Tikal to move on to Chichén Itzá or Uxmal, to name the more obvious tourist visitations, or even as the cliff dwellers abandoned Mesa Verde, the Jumanos may have been caught by too many drouths, had been constricting for two hundred years when the Europeans arrived, and would have been gone from the area even if the Spanish had delayed their own arrival another century or two.
In their suffering from frequent drouth, the Jumanos strike a responsive chord with most old settlers of West Texas. Evidently the Indians had prolonged drouths over a period of three hundred years. West Texans have had prolonged drouths since they first pushed into the area in the latter part of the nineteenth century. They look for rain, and they pray for rain, and they even employ cloud seeders. But God answers prayers for rain only when the thunderheads are already building on the horizon. And how do you seed a cloud when you have no clouds? At times Texans feel that this country should be turned back to lizards and horny toads and scorpions and rattlesnakes—yes, and Jumanos—that if God had wanted human beings on the land, he would have invented rain. And undoubtedly like the Jumano many a Texan has migrated, his hopes seared and withered by the unending West Texas sun and his future clouded by eternally blue skies. Not all the Okies heading for California came from Oklahoma. In seeming ready to abandon the trans-Pecos to its steady heredity, the Jumanos were acting in the best Texas tradition.
These then are the principal people in Texas when the next wave of nationalities broke upon its shores. Other groups of Indians made their mark, some earlier, some later. To proceed doggedly from one native tribe to another—to include the Comanches, Kiowas, Wichitas, and Apakapans—could be justified, but basically they belong in a later time. The groups discussed here were the first Texans. Although less picturesque than other Indians scattered about the future United States, and although they left little mark on the road toward modern civilization, they were the best that Texas had to offer. Certainly other tribes in other areas influenced other future states to a greater degree. The first Texans did not even make the regional imprint that later Indians, such as the Comanches, left.
Nonetheless they were the first, the ones who gave the region a name, the ones who first wrestled with its vastness and its formidable geography and climate, the ones who first knew what Texas was all about. In them we discern the start of the Texas tradition.
Texas then has a strong Indian heritage from the standpoint of sheer chronology, one of the older within the continental United States. But Texas had almost no Indian tradition until the Spanish pushed their military-missionary activities after officials in Mexico and Madrid had been scared unreasonably by rumors that the French were about to take over the region. If LaSalle and his pathetic colony had never been blown off course onto the Texas coastline, the Indians might have been ignored until the Anglo-American thrust at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For all the tremendous conversion efforts back in Mexico proper and for all the exploitation of native labor in Montezuma’s old empire, the Spanish treated the Texas Indian as if he did not exist and for nearly two centuries neither used nor abused him.