The varied geography of Texas has helped to shape its history. The eastern third of the state's 266,807 square miles is mostly humid woodlands, much like Louisiana and Arkansas. A broad coastal plain borders the Gulf of Mexico. Much of southwest and far-west Texas is semiarid or arid desert, and west-central Texas northward through the Panhandle marks the southernmost part of the Great Plains. The central and north-central regions of the state are mostly gently rolling prairies with moderate rainfall. Moving from northeast to southwest, the major rivers are the Red, Sabine, Trinity, Brazos, Colorado, Guadalupe, Nueces, and Rio Grande; none has ever proven very suitable for navigation. The state is generally flat, with the exception of the Hill Country region west of the Austin–San Antonio area and the Davis Mountains of far west Texas.
The First Texans
Prior to the arrival of Europeans, Texas was home to a diverse collection of native peoples. Most numerous of these were the Hasinai branch of the Caddo Indians in east Texas, an agricultural society related to the mound-building cultures of the Mississippi Valley. Along the upper and central Gulf Coast ranged the nomadic Karankawas, and south Texas was home to various hunter-gatherers collectively known as Coahuiltecans. The Apaches were the dominant Plains nation, following the great herds of bison. Numerous small groups, including the Jumanos of southwest Texas and the Tonkawas of central Texas, lived in various parts of the state.
Spanish Texas
Europeans first viewed Texas in 1519, when an expedition led by the Spaniard Alonso Álvarez de Pineda mapped the Gulf Coast from Florida to Mexico. In 1528 survivors of the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition, which had previously explored parts of Florida, washed ashore in the vicinity of Galveston Island during a storm. Only four men survived the first few months, including Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, whose memoir became the first published account of Texas. After more than seven years of harrowing adventure, the castaways finally made their way back to Mexico in 1536.
The tales of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions inspired the expedition of Francisco Vázquez De Coronado, who entered the Texas Panhandle from New Mexico in 1541. Although he failed in his search for gold, Coronado was the first European to see Palo Duro Canyon and to encounter the Apache Indians. In 1542, while Coronado was crossing the Panhandle, an expedition led by Luis de Moscoso Alvarado was entering east Texas from Louisiana. Moscoso perhaps reached as far as the Brazos River before returning to the Mississippi. When Coronado and Moscoso failed to find riches in Texas, Spain abandoned its efforts to explore or exploit Texas. For the next 140 years, Spain would claim the vast region, but only when the French suddenly appeared on the scene did Texas again become a priority.
In 1684 René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, sailed from France with the intention of establishing a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Overshooting his target by 400 miles, he landed instead at Matagorda Bay. At a well-concealed point at the head of the bay, he built a crude camp commonly known as Fort Saint Louis. Beset by disease, disunity, and hostile Indians, the settlement lasted only four years, with La Salle being killed by his own men in 1687. But the ill-fated French venture alerted the Spanish to the dangers of losing Texas, and La Salle unintentionally became the impetus for the creation of a permanent Spanish presence in Texas.
Between 1684 and 1689 Spain dispatched five sea and six land expeditions to locate and expel La Salle. Finally, in 1689 a party led by Alonso de León found the ruins of La Salle's settlement. The French were gone, but Spain was now determined to establish a presence in east Texas among the Hasinai. The following year the Spanish established Mission San Francisco de los Tejas in present-day Houston County. However, floods, disease, and poor relations with the Indians caused the Franciscan missionaries to abandon the effort in 1693.
Spain tried to move back into east Texas beginning in 1716, eventually founding six missions and a presidio there. In 1718 Martín de Alarcón, the governor of Coahuila and Texas, founded a mission and presidio on the San Antonio River in south central Texas to serve as a halfway station between the east Texas missions and the Rio Grande. In time, the San Antonio complex would become the capital and principal settlement of Spanish Texas.
Spain's second effort in east Texas proved little more successful than the first, and by 1731 most of the missions in the east had been abandoned, leaving Spain with only a token presence in the area. Missions and presidios founded in other parts of Texas in the mid-1700s, such as the Mission San Sabá near present-day Menard, met with disease, Indian attack, or other problems and were all short-lived. In 1773, following an inspection tour by the Marqués de Rubí, the crown ordered the abandonment of the remaining east Texas settlements. Spain had acquired Louisiana from France in 1763 and no longer needed Texas as a buffer to French expansion. Some of the east Texas settlers resisted being resettled in San Antonio and eventually returned to east Texas, founding the town of Nacogdoches. By the late eighteenth century, then, Spanish Texas essentially consisted of San Antonio, Nacogdoches, and La Bahía (later renamed Goliad), which had been founded on the lower Texas coast in 1722. At its height around 1800, the non-Indian population of Spanish Texas numbered perhaps 4,000.
When the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory in 1803, Spain found itself with an aggressive new neighbor on its northern frontier. Over the next two decades Anglo-American adventurers known as "filibusters" launched repeated expeditions into Texas, with the intention of detaching it from New Spain. Two filibusters, Augustus Magee (1813) and James Long (1819, 1821), joined with Mexican revolutionary José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara to invade Texas from the United States. A Spanish royalist army crushed the rebels near San Antonio at the battle of Medina River and unleashed a reign of terror across Texas. By the time Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, the non-Indian population of Texas stood at no more than 3,000.
Mexican Texas
Hispanic Texans, or Tejanos, had supported the movement for Mexican independence, and they likewise endorsed the creation of a federal republic in the 1820s. Long neglected by Mexico City, many of these hardy settlers realized that trade with the United States held the best promise for prosperity. Therefore, when a bankrupt American businessman named Moses Austin proposed establishing a colony of 300 American families in 1821, his plan met with widespread support and gained the approval of Spanish authorities. Austin died before launching his colony, but his son, Stephen F. Austin, inherited the project and became Texas's first Empresario (colonization agent). Austin's colony encompassed parts of nearly forty present-day Texas counties along the lower watersheds of the Brazos and Colorado Rivers. By 1834 some 15,000 Anglos lived in Texas, along with 4,000 Tejanos and 2,000 African American slaves.
The Texas Revolution
Relations between the Texan settlers and the Mexican government began to sour in 1830, when the Mexican congress passed a law intended to weaken Anglo influence in the state. Among other provisions, the Law of 6 April, 1830 placed Mexican troops in East Texas and canceled all empresario contracts, although Austin and one other empresario were later exempted from the ban. Over the next five years, clashes between settlers and Mexican soldiers occurred repeatedly, often over customs regulations. Anglos demanded free trade, repeal of the 1830 law, and separate statehood for Texas apart from Coahuila, to which it had been joined for administrative purposes since 1824. Matters came to a head in 1835, when President Antonio López de Santa Anna abandoned federalism altogether, abolished the 1824 constitution, and centralized power in his own hands. Anglo Texans, joined by some Tejanos, resisted Santa Anna; hostilities commenced at Gonzales on 2 October 1835. One month later, the Texans declared a provisional state government loyal to the 1824 constitution.
In February 1836 a Mexican army of several thousand commanded by Santa Anna arrived in San Antonio, where they found the old Alamo mission held by approximately 200 defenders. After a thirteen-day siege, Santa Anna's soldiers stormed the mission on March 6, killing all the defenders, including James Bowie, William Barret Travis, and David Crockett. Shortly thereafter, James Fannin surrendered a force of about 400 volunteers at Goliad, who were subsequently executed at Santa Anna's order. On March 2 a convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos declared independence and authorized Sam Houston to take command of all remaining troops in Texas. On 21 April 1836, following a six-week retreat across Texas, Houston's army attacked one division of the Mexican army at San Jacinto and won a stunning victory. Some 800 Mexican troops were killed or wounded and that many more captured, while Texan deaths numbered fewer than ten. Santa Anna was captured the next day and ordered his remaining troops from Texas. Independence was won.
The Republic of Texas
In September 1836 Sam Houston was elected president of the Republic of Texas. He faced a daunting task in rebuilding the war-torn country, securing it against re-invasion from Mexico and hostile Indians, achieving diplomatic recognition from the world community, and developing the economy. Over the next decade the record on all of these matters was mixed at best. Twice in 1842 Mexican armies invaded and briefly occupied San Antonio. On the western frontier the Comanche Indians (immigrants to Texas in the mid-1700s) terrorized settlers with their brilliant horsemanship and fierce warrior code. In east Texas the Republic waged a brutal war of extermination against the Cherokees (also recent immigrants), driving the survivors into what is now Oklahoma. The Republic also undertook imprudent ventures such as the 1841 Santa Fe Expedition, intended to open a trade route between Texas and New Mexico, which resulted instead in the capture and imprisonment of nearly 300 Texans by Mexico. The wars against the Indians and the Santa Fe Expedition can largely be laid at the doorstep of Mirabeau B. Lamar, who replaced Houston as president in 1838 and believed in a sort of Texan version of Manifest Destiny. Under Lamar, the national debt rose from $1 million to $7 million and the currency depreciated drastically. Typical of Lamar's grandiose thinking was his action in moving the capital to Austin, a new village on the far western frontier. Exposed to Indian and Mexican attacks and difficult to reach, the new capital was a luxury that the republic could scarcely afford, but Lamar envisioned its future as the centrally located seat of a vast Texan empire.
By the time Houston returned to office in 1841, the financial condition of the republic made annexation by the United States critically important. Texans almost unanimously desired annexation, but concerns about slavery effectively prevented American action. In 1844, though, pro-annexation candidate James K. Polk captured the Democratic presidential nomination. When Polk won the election, the outgoing president, John Tyler, viewed it as a mandate for annexation. Having previously failed to gain Senate approval for a treaty of annexation, Tyler resorted to the tactic of annexing Texas by means of a congressional joint resolution requiring only simple majorities in both houses of Congress. It succeeded, and Texas officially entered the Union on 29 December 1845. The new state retained ownership of its vast public domain; it also retained its massive public debt. The new constitution reflected the strong Jacksonian political leanings of most Texans, creating a government with limited powers.
The Republic had enjoyed considerable success on one front: In a decade the population had grown from about 40,000 to nearly 140,000. The Republic had made land available practically free to immigrants from the United States, and it also resurrected the empresario system to attract immigrants from the United States and Europe. In the last years of the Republic, some 10,000 colonists from Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio settled in the E. S. Peters colony in northeast Texas; about 7,000 Germans came to a grant in the Hill Country; and approximately 2,000 French Alsatians settled in Henri Castro's colony southwest of San Antonio. These immigrants gave Texas a more ethnically diverse population than most other southern states.
Statehood, Disunion, and Reconstruction
Immigration notwithstanding, after annexation Texas drew closer to the states of the Deep South, primarily due to the growth of Slavery and the Cotton economy. The enslaved population grew from 38,753 in 1847 to 182,566 in 1860. Cotton production increased from 58,000 bales in 1849 to 431,000 bales in 1859. As part of the Compromise of 1850, Texas surrendered its claims to parts of what are now New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming (thus assuming its modern boundaries) in return for federal assumption of its public debt. Texas thus enjoyed its most prosperous decade of the nineteenth century.
By 1860 Texas mirrored its fellow southern states economically and politically. Following Lincoln's election and the secession of the Deep South states, the state legislature called a secession convention and, over the strong opposition of Governor Sam Houston, voted to secede from the Union. Texas voters ratified the convention's decision by a three-to-one margin. About 60,000 Texans served the Confederacy, many of them in the eastern theatre of the war. Hood's Brigade and Terry's Rangers were among the better-known Texas units. On 19 June 1865, a date celebrated by black Texans as "Juneteenth," Union occupation troops under Gen. Gordon Granger landed at Galveston and declared the state's slaves free.
Texas' experiences in Reconstruction were typically southern. The state underwent Presidential Reconstruction in 1865 through 1866, resulting in the election of state and local governments dominated by former rebels, including Governor James Throckmorton, a former Confederate general. Black Codes returned African Americans to a condition of quasi-servitude.
When Congress took over the Reconstruction process in 1867, black males were enfranchised, many former Confederate office holders were removed (including Governor Throckmorton), and the Reconstruction process began anew. With African Americans voting, the Republican Party rose to power. The Republican Constitution of 1869 gave the new governor, Edmund J. Davis, and the legislature sweeping new authority. Davis, a former judge who had lived in Texas since the 1840s, had served in the Union Army and championed the rights of blacks. His administration created a system of public education for children of both races; established a state police force to help protect the lives and property of all citizens; and worked to attract railroads to Texas using government subsidies. The measures galvanized the Democratic opposition, and in 1872 the Democrats recaptured the state legislature. In December 1873 the Democrat Richard Coke, a former Confederate officer, defeated Davis and "redeemed" Texas from Republican rule. The triumphant Democrats undid virtually all of the Republican programs, and in 1876 they ratified a new state constitution that returned the state to its Jacksonian, limited-government, white-supremacist roots.
Texas in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era
The 1870s marked the beginning of the longest agricultural depression in the state's history. Cotton prices declined steadily through the 1880s and 1890s; land prices and interest rates rose. By century's end a majority of white farmers had joined African Americans in the ranks of tenants and sharecroppers, trapped in a vicious spiral of debt and dependence. In 1900 half of Texas farmers worked on rented farms.
Railroads finally came to Texas. The Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad connected Texas to northern markets in 1872; by 1882 the Texas and Pacific and the Southern Pacific gave Texas east-west transcontinental connections. But the transportation revolution had come at a heavy price: The legislature had lured rail companies to Texas by granting them 32 million acres of the public domain.
One bright spot in the mostly bleak economic picture of the late nineteenth century was the growth of the Cattle industry. The Spanish had first brought hardy longhorns to Texas in the 1700s. By the end of the Civil War millions of the animals roamed wild across the open grasslands south of San Antonio. Between 1866 and 1885, five million of these cattle were driven northward, first to Sedalia, Missouri, and later to a succession of railheads in Kansas. Thereafter the cattle industry declined precipitously. The arrival of railroads and the advance of the farming frontier ended the great overland cattle drives, confining cattle raising to ranches large and small. By this time, years of overgrazing had damaged the range and weakened herds. Then, in 1885 through 1886, two years of severe drought and an unprecedented blizzard killed thousands of cattle and drove many small operators out of business. Only the largest and most efficient ranches, such as the million-acre King Ranch in South Texas, survived.
As the farmers' depression deepened, complaints mounted against the established political parties, the rail-roads, and foreign capitalists. Many ordinary farmers sought relief from self-help organizations such as the Patrons of Husbandry (popularly called the Grange) and the Farmers' Alliance. In 1891 Alliancemen founded the People's, or Populist, party. Between 1892 and 1896 the Populists competed vigorously with the Democrats, promising to rein in the monopolistic practices of railroads and large corporations, reform the nation's monetary system, and provide affordable credit for struggling farmers. The rise of Populism spurred the state Democrats to embrace limited reforms such as a railroad commission, which became a reality under Governor James S. Hogg (1891–1895). But Populism required far more government action than most Texans could stomach, and the party's willingness to appeal for African American votes further tainted it in the eyes of many whites. After 1896 Populism faded, but many of its ideas would resurface in progressivism and the New Deal.
In the aftermath of Populism, the Democratic Party sponsored electoral "reforms" that largely disfranchised blacks. Foremost among these, the 1902 poll tax also effectively eliminated large numbers of poor whites from politics. Middle-class white Texans embraced certain progressive reforms, such as woman's suffrage, prohibition, prison reform, and the commission plan of city government, but many elements of Texas progressivism were aimed at limiting the influence of northern and foreign capital in the state's economy. Changes in banking and insurance laws, designed to give Texas-owned companies competitive advantages, constituted much of what passed for progressivism in the state.
The Emergence of Modern Texas
The twentieth century began with two history-altering events. The first, a massive hurricane, devastated Galveston in September 1900, costing 6,000 lives in one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. But the other event ultimately overshadowed even that tragedy. On 10 January 1901 the greatest oil gusher in history blew in at Spindletop, near Beaumont. Texas immediately became the center of the world's Petroleum Industry. Hundreds of new oil firms came into existence; some, like Texaco, became huge. Perhaps more important than the oil itself was the subsequent growth of the refining, pipeline, oiltool, and petrochemical industries, which transformed the Gulf Coast into a manufacturing center, creating jobs and capital for investment. Growth of these industries, along with the discovery of massive new oil fields in east and west Texas, caused the Texas economy to modernize and begin diverging from the southern pattern of poverty and rurality.
As the economy modernized, however, Texas politics lagged behind. Governor James Ferguson, elected in 1914, three years later faced charges of corruption and suffered impeachment and a ban from future office holding. Undeterred, Ferguson ran his wife, Miriam, successfully twice, in 1924 and 1932, promising "two governors for the price of one." Most historians consider the Fergusons demagogues and an embarrassment to the state, characterizations that likewise applied to Governor W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel, a Fort Worth flour merchant who was elected governor in 1938 on a platform based on "the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule." Progressive Democrats, such as the New Dealer James V. Allred (governor from 1935 to 1939), were rare in Texas.
World War II transformed Texas. In 1940 a majority of Texans still lived in rural areas, and sharecroppers plowing cotton fields behind mules were still everyday sights. But the war drew hundreds of thousands of rural Texans into the military or into good-paying manufacturing jobs. By 1950 a majority of Texans lived in urban areas. Farms had mechanized and modernized. Much of this prosperity was due to federal spending, and for the first time the U.S. government was spending more in Texas than the state's citizens paid in federal taxes. Texas cities, which had always been relatively small, began to grow rapidly. By 1960 Houston boasted a population of 938,219, followed by Dallas's 679,684 and San Antonio's 587,718.
The Texas economy boomed in the 1970s, when world oil prices skyrocketed. The boom ended in 1983 and bottomed out in 1986. The oil "bust" plunged the state into a near-depression, as thousands of oil companies and financial institutions failed. Unemployment soared, and state tax revenues declined by 16 percent. But in the long run the crisis may have benefited the state, for it forced the economy to diversify and become less oil-dependent. In the 1990s Texas became a center of the "high-tech" revolution, with dramatic growth in electronics, communications, and health care–related industries. Population growth resumed. The 2000 census revealed that Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio had grown respectively to about 2 million, 1.2 million, and 1.1 million people. Even more dramatic was suburban growth; the greater Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area grew faster than any other large metropolitan area in the nation in the 1990s, with 5.2 million people by 2000, larger than 31 states. Overall, Texas passed New York to become the country's second-largest state, with a population of nearly 21 million. Much of this growth was fueled by Hispanic immigrants, who made up 32 percent of the Texas population in 2000.
As the economy modernized, so did Texas politics. The Civil Rights Movement enfranchised African Americans and Hispanics, who heavily favored liberal Democrats, including Texan Lyndon B. Johnson. This drove many conservative white voters into the Republican Party. In 1978, William P. Clements, Jr., became the first Republican elected to the governorship since Reconstruction. Two other Texas Republicans, George H. W. Bush and his son, George W. Bush, claimed the nation's highest office in 1988 and 2000, respectively. Democrats continued to dominate politics in the large cities, but at the state level the Republican revolution was completed in 1998, when Republicans held every statewide elective office.
Texas, then, entered the twenty-first century very much in the mainstream of American life and culture. Texans continued to take pride in their state's colorful history, and many non-Texans persisted in thinking of Texas as the land of cowboys and oil tycoons. But as a modern, diverse, urban, industrial state, Texas had become more like the rest of the nation and less like the rough-and-tumble frontier of its legendary past.
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