Comanche, Karankawa, Tonkawa, Apache, Nations of the Plains and Coast

Texas was never empty. The peoples who lived here before colonization were as varied as the land itself, and four of them shaped the history of this state in ways that still echo. The Karankawa lived along the Gulf Coast from Galveston Bay south toward Corpus Christi.

They were tall, tattooed, skilled paddlers who knew the barrier islands and the shallow bays the way a mechanic knows an engine. Spanish shipwreck survivors who washed ashore in fifteen twenty-eight, including the explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, lived among the Karankawa for years and left behind accounts of their customs and their generosity. The Karankawa resisted Spanish missions and eventually Anglo settlement until they were effectively driven out by the eighteen forties.

The Tonkawa occupied central Texas, a smaller nation that traded and sometimes allied with Spanish authorities. The Apache, primarily the Lipan branch in Texas, ranged across the southern plains and into the Hill Country, and were among the first peoples to acquire horses from Spanish settlements in the late sixteen hundreds. On horseback, their world expanded dramatically.

But it was the Comanche who came to dominate the southern plains with a speed and completeness that astonished every other group in the region. Arriving from the north in the early seventeen hundreds, the Comanche built what historians now call the Comanche Empire, a political and economic network centered on the horse that controlled trade across an area larger than France. The Comanche called this territory Comancheria, and they defended it fiercely for over a century and a half against Spanish, Mexican, Texan, and American encroachment alike.

The Red River War of eighteen seventy-four, fought across the Panhandle, broke the last organized Comanche resistance. It was the end of an era that had lasted longer than the United States had existed.