The Six Flags and the Land That Held Them All

Six flags have flown over this land. Six distinct governments, each claiming sovereignty over a place so enormous it defied the imagination of whoever tried to hold it. Spain was first, claiming the coast in fifteen nineteen and later sending expeditions, like the one in sixteen eighty-nine under Alonso de León, that crossed the Rio Grande to find French rivals on the frontier.

France came next, building forts along the Red River and the Gulf coast before Spain pushed them out. Then Mexico, born of revolution in eighteen twenty-one, inherited the whole northern frontier and tried to fill it with settlers from the United States. Texas itself flew its own flag for nearly a decade, a lone star republic from eighteen thirty-six to eighteen forty-five.

The United States took over, then the Confederacy claimed it during four years of war, and finally the Union flag returned in eighteen sixty-five for good. What links all six is the sheer size of the place. Texas covers two hundred sixty-eight thousand square miles.

You can drive eight hundred miles from Texarkana in the northeast to El Paso in the far west and never leave the state. The distance from Beaumont on the Louisiana border to the Panhandle town of Dalhart is roughly the same as Boston to Chicago. There are mountain ranges here, pine forests, subtropical coast, high desert, and fertile blackland prairie.

Four of the country's principal river systems drain through this one state. Each flag brought a different idea about who this land was for and how it should be governed. The Caddo confederacies had their own answer long before any European raised a pole.

Their word for friend, taysha, is what Spanish soldiers heard and recorded, and that word became the name of the place itself. Texas. The land of friends.