For the Love of Texas: Tell Me about the Colonists!

By Betsy Christian, George Christian and Chris A. Gruszka

Before Texas was Texas, it was a lot of things to a lot of different people. Comanche, Choctaw, French, Spanish, Mexican and more laid claim to Texas soil as their own, and no one wanted to share. The fights and alliances that arose out of the colonization of Texas shaped the state's future. Find out all about the beginning of the state and the colonists who helped pave the way for the Texas we now know. Saddle up with Betsy and George Christian for an interactive, fun chapter in Texas history for kids that challenges them to ask questions about the history they're told and the world in which they live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jul 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781625846143

Betsy Christian

Betsy Christian is a writer, consultant and public relations professional living in Austin, Texas. Her writing has been mentioned in USA Today and The Irish Independent. She is a member of the Docents of the Governor's Mansion, the former executive director of the Keep Texas Beautiful Network and has worked with Preservation Austin Inherit Austin. George Christian, PhD is a sixth-generation Texan who teaches at the University of Texas. Additionally he is a practicing political consultant, lawyer and member of the Friends of Washington on the Brazos. He is the President of the Texas Civil Justice League and is the recipient of a 2009 Teaching Award from the University of Texas. Chris A. Gruszka is an artist and illustrator with SeeGru Ink and Animation. H.W. Brands is an historian and professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of 25 books, and his 2008 book TRAITOR TO HIS CLASS was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009.

Book preview

discoveries.

Chapter 1

THE OLD AMERICANS—AND WE MEAN OLD!

It’s not a trick—this book really is about the Texas colonists, the group of people who left their native countries and came to the land that is now called Texas to establish a new settlement. But to understand the full picture, you need to know about the Paleoamericans, the Amerinds and the Native Americans who first inhabited Texas. The good news is that the story of the Native Americans is full of action and quirky facts.

To get started understanding Texas history, take your mind back tens of thousands of years ago and imagine the first hunter-gatherers making their way to North America. Archaeologists once thought that the first Americans arrived via the land bridge between Asia and present-day Alaska. You read that right—Asia used to be connected to North America by a narrow stretch of land.¹ A person could walk from Asia to Alaska—go figure that one. These immigrants, who filtered down the unglaciated valleys into the High Plains, lived in the Pleistocene era, or the last Ice Age, which ended almost twelve thousand years ago. They are called the Paleoamericans, or Old Americans. Recent evidence suggests that other Paleoamericans came to America the same way many modern immigrants did: by boat. Some made their way down the Pacific coast into South America, while others may have landed on the Atlantic coast. All of this started happening as far back as fifteen thousand years ago, about one thousand years earlier than scientists used to think. So, while all the later colonists mentioned in the rest of this book mostly came from Europe, the first American dwellers originated for the most part in Asia. In fact, scientists working with DNA evidence have linked most (but not all) of today’s Native Americans to people living in Siberia and Asia.² Maybe in the future, scientists will be able to figure out if all Native Americans had the same origin, and when and where that might have been. Who knows, maybe that’s your future job—the archaeologist who will make that discovery.

We know that a lot of these Old Americans hunted for food because their tools and bones have been found from Abilene to the Pedernales River banks. The Llano Estacado (make a note that Estacado rhymes with avocado and that Llano starts like yawn), which is the southern end of North America’s Great Plains, was one of the great hunting grounds for the Old Americans.³ You have probably seen pictures of tall, swaying grass where Native Americans hunted buffalo, maybe in movies like Dances with Wolves. Don’t hop in a car and head out to Lubbock or Amarillo to try and see that grass because it’s long gone. Most of it has been mowed down and the land farmed or paved over. In fact, South Plains Mall sits right where our Paleoamerican friends hunted the ancient American elephant, along with the mastodon, ground sloth (think humongous snail) and ancient bison, an ancestor of the modern buffalo but twice as big and four times heavier. Can you picture a herd of elephants with long, shaggy hair and enormous tusks charging through the local mall? The Paleoamericans killed these mammoth beasts with flint-tipped spears, and they roasted the meat over open hearths, leaving their refuse in middens in the limestone.⁴ A midden is like a garbage dump. Modern day archaeologists get real excited when they discover a midden filled with animal bone, feces, shell, botanical material and bits of tools from ancient cultures. Scientists can learn a lot from those findings about how ancient peoples lived. If ten thousand years from now a scientist picks through your trash, what do you think he or she might learn about you?

FREE FLIGHT TO BERINGIA! SIGN UP HERE

There once was a place called Beringia—no joke. Back in the Pleistocene ice ages, the Bering land bridge joined Alaska and Siberia and was about one thousand miles long. Because the winds from the southwest had already lost their moisture over Alaska, there was little snowfall over the Bering Strait. As a result, a grassy land, sort of like a prairie, formed. Around twenty thousand years ago, small groups of people crossed the bridge into a new land. For about five thousand years, these people hung out on the grassy land, and when the glaciers over Alaska melted enough, they walked on over to North America—simple as that.

If anyone offers you a free flight to Beringia, do not accept it. Beringia is far, far under water these days (although if you go to Alaska today and visit the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, you can see what Beringia might have looked like!).

The life expectancy of the Paleoamerican was something less than twenty years—not even enough time to finish college. Little evidence of their culture and religion survives.⁵ From the few remains found by archaeologists, we understand these guys had long heads—as in, their heads were longer from back to front than from side to side.⁶ The Old Americans disappeared at the end of the Ice Age, when the glaciers retreated to the north, the climate warmed and the lush plains dried out. The mammoth and the elephant disappeared, and so did the Paleoamericans.⁷ Buh-bye.

THREE WAYS A LITTLE HUMAN BEING CAN KILL A REALLY BIG BUFFALO

1. Drive a herd of buffalo over a cliff, breaking their legs and rendering them immobile. (This creates a good deal of waste and generates way more buffalo than a tribe can eat.)

2. Craft a tiny flint arrow, tie it to the end of a stick and stab the enormous beast.

3. Give the buffalo a long, boring speech and wait for him to fall asleep.

Chapter 2

HERE COME THE NATIVE AMERICANS

Fast-forward thousands of years. Other migrations, whether across the land bridge from Asia to Alaska or by sea, brought different immigrants to the Americas. Scientists have used the term Amerinds to describe these new settlers. Sometimes the Amerinds are called the American Indians, or Native Americans.

The Amerinds—let’s agree to call them the Native Americans in this book—infiltrated what is now North America, hunting and gathering seeds and edible plants. Apparently, the word got out that North America was the place to be. By the time 5,000 BC rolled around, America rocked with migrants who had flooded the continent and populated every part of it.⁸ North America wasn’t jam-packed like Houston or Dallas is these days, but it was certainly more crowded than it had been in the days of the Old Americans.

The Native Americans brought dogs to North America for the first time.⁹ These weren’t Yorkies or Poodles wearing rhinestones collars and being toted in plaid pet carriers. It was the opposite. The dogs carried the luggage! These wolf-like dogs were workers, and the Native Americans strapped as much luggage on their dogs as they could carry.¹⁰