The Coahuiltecans: One Thousand Bands
Near Mcallen, Texas
Before Escandón drew his porcion lines, before the Spanish cattle ranches, before the missions and the borderland roads, the lower Rio Grande was home to a world of extraordinary diversity that left almost no written record of itself. The Spanish called these people Coahuiltecans, a catch-all name that scholars now recognize as a vast oversimplification. They were not one people. Over three hundred years, Spanish colonial documents recorded more than one thousand distinct bands living across what is now southern Texas and northeastern Mexico.
They were nomadic hunter-gatherers who moved with the seasons, building small dome-shaped huts of bent poles wherever they camped. They did not plant crops in any significant way. They followed the prickly pear, which fruited in late summer and provided a major part of the diet, and they hunted deer and rabbit and harvested fish from the river. They gathered mesquite pods and pecans. They knew the land in a way that Spanish missionaries, who arrived later, found difficult to comprehend.
Their populations at first European contact may have reached eighty-six thousand to one hundred thousand people, spread across hundreds of bands that spoke at least seven documented and mutually distinct languages. The Spanish mission system beginning in the early seventeen hundreds drew many of these groups into settlements near San Antonio, offering protection from Comanche and Apache raiders who had pushed south into Coahuiltecan territory. The missions saved some lives and erased many others. Smallpox epidemics dating to sixteen thirty-six had already been killing people for a century before those missions opened their doors.
By eighteen hundred, most of the band names had disappeared from colonial documents. By nineteen hundred, they had nearly all gone from the landscape itself. Modern descendants, including the Carrizo Comecrudo Nation of Texas, are still seeking federal recognition. The land they lived on for thousands of years now carries other names.
