The Alabama-Coushatta: Refuge in the Thicket

Two distinct peoples, the Alabama and the Coushatta, had lived in the forests of what is now Alabama and Mississippi for generations when the pressures of European colonization began pushing them west in the late seventeen hundreds. The Alabama crossed into East Texas in the seventeen eighties. The Coushatta followed, arriving in the Big Thicket country by seventeen ninety-five. By eighteen oh five, nearly a thousand Alabama had settled in Tyler County.

The Big Thicket was a refuge in the most literal sense. Its density and difficulty provided a margin of protection that more open country did not. The two peoples established communities in the Thicket, intermarried, and formed the combined Alabama-Coushatta identity that persists today.

The Texas Republic and then the State of Texas eventually formalized their presence. In February of eighteen fifty-four, the Texas Legislature approved twelve hundred eighty acres for an Alabama reservation in Polk County, about sixty miles northwest of Beaumont. A year later the state set aside land for the Coushatta, though it never fully followed through, and the Coushatta came to share the Alabama reservation.

The eighteen fifties brought a removal threat. Governor Hardin Runnels pushed legislation in eighteen fifty-eight to remove all remaining Texas Indians. The Alabama-Coushatta were exempted, conditionally, because they had not taken sides against Texas settlers and had built a reputation for peaceful coexistence. The reservation survived.

Federal recognition, however, did not come until nineteen eighty-seven, when Public Law one hundred hyphen eighty-nine restored the federal relationship. The reservation now encompasses four thousand five hundred ninety-three acres near Livingston and remains the land base of a nation that walked a very long way to find ground that would hold them. The Thicket was what stood between them and the erasure that found most other Gulf Coast peoples.