Handbook of Texas (original) (raw)
The Handbook of Texas is a digital state encyclopedia developed by the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) that is freely accessible for students, teachers, scholars, and the general public. The Handbook consists of overview, general, and biographical entries focused on the entire history of Texas from the indigenous Native Americans and the Prehistoric Era to the state's diverse population and the Modern Age. These entries emphasize the role Texans played in state, national, and world history.
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Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, an early explorer and first historian of Texas, was born in Jerez de la Frontera, an Andalusian province in the south of Spain near Cádiz. The precise year of Cabeza de Vaca’s birth cannot be determined, but it was within the “birth window” of 1487–92. The origin of his surname (“Cow’s Head” in Spanish) is not known, but it assuredly did not come from an alleged ancestor named Martín de Alhaja and his heroics at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in central Spain in 1212. That story, repeated by the author of this entry in The New Handbook of Texas (1996) and many others, is unquestionably apocryphal.
The Karankawa Indians are an American Indian cultural group whose traditional homelands are located along Texas’s Gulf Coast from Galveston Bay southwestwardly to Corpus Christi Bay. The name Karankawa became the accepted designation for several groups of coastal people who shared a common language and culture. Those groups, identified in early historic times, included the Carancahuas, Coapites, Cocos, Cujanes, and Copanes. All of these Indians spoke a language called Karankawan, of which around 500 words are preserved. The significance of the name Karankawa has not been definitely established, although it is generally believed to mean "dog-lovers" or "dog-raisers." That translation seems plausible, since the Karankawas reportedly kept dogs that were described as a fox-like or coyote-like breed. The Karankawas were a nomadic people who migrated seasonally between the barrier islands and the mainland. Their movements were dictated primarily by the availability of food. They obtained this food by a combination of hunting, fishing, and gathering. Bison, deer, and fish, were staples of the Karankawa diet, but a wide variety of animals and plants contributed to their sustenance.
Alonso Álvarez de Pineda commanded a Spanish expedition that sailed along the Gulf of Mexico coastline from Florida to Cabo Rojo, Mexico, in 1519. He and his men were the first Europeans to explore and map the Gulf littoral between the areas previously explored by Juan Ponce De León and Diego Velázquez. Álvarez de Pineda's voyage of "more than 300 leagues" ended when he encountered Hernán Cortés, who perceived him as a rival and arrested the messengers he sent ashore near Cortés's base at Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz on the Bay of Campeche. Álvarez de Pineda then withdrew back up the Mexican coast to the Río Pánuco, where he established a settlement of his own near the site of the future city of Tampico. Despite his pioneering exploration, however, Álvarez remains a shadowy figure. The only original source connecting his name with the reconnaissance ordered in 1519 by Francisco de Garay, Spanish governor of Jamaica, is Bernal Díaz del Castillo, historian of the Mexican conquest. Díaz was present when Cortés confronted Garay's four ships in late July or early August 1519 and relates that Álvarez de Pineda was in command of the vessels. Both Díaz and Cortés, who fails to mention the captain's name, reveal that Álvarez de Pineda already had been in contact with the native peoples on the Pánuco, and Díaz says that he was settling there.
The Comanches, exceptional horsemen who dominated the Southern Plains, played a prominent role in Texas frontier history throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anthropological evidence indicates that they were originally a mountain tribe, a branch of the Northern Shoshones, who roamed the Great Basin region of the western United States as crudely equipped hunters and gatherers. Both cultural and linguistic similarities confirm the Comanches' Shoshone origins. The Comanche language is derived from the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family and is virtually identical to the language of the Northern Shoshones. Sometime during the late seventeenth century, the Comanches acquired horses, and that acquisition drastically altered their culture. The life of the pedestrian tribe was revolutionized as they rapidly evolved into a mounted, well-equipped, and powerful people. Their new mobility allowed them to leave their mountain home and their Shoshone neighbors and move onto the plains of eastern Colorado and western Kansas, where game was plentiful.
René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, sailed from Rochefort, France, on August 1, 1684, to seek the mouth of the Mississippi River by sea. This new voyage of four ships and more than 300 people at the start was a follow-up to La Salle's 1682 exploration of the Mississippi from the mouth of the Illinois River to the Gulf of Mexico. Having first departed from La Rochelle on July 24, the fleet was forced to make port at Rochefort for repairs to the Royal Navy escort vessel Joly. With Spain and France at war, La Salle planned to establish a colony sixty leagues up the river as a base for striking Mexico, afflicting Spanish shipping, and blocking English expansion, while providing a warmwater port for the Mississippi valley fur trade. He planned to settle near the Taensa Indians, whose villages lined Lake St. Joseph in Tensas Parish, Louisiana. The war with Spain ended two weeks after La Salle sailed. The word did not reach him during his pause at Petit Goâve (Haiti), and he proceeded into the Gulf—historically an exclusively Spanish sea—believing that the war was still on.
Between 1500 and 1700 the name Jumanos was used to identify at least three distinct peoples of the Southwest and South Plains. They include the Tompiro-speaking Pueblo Indians in Salinas, a nomadic trading group based around the Rio Grande and Río Conchos, and the Caddoan-speaking Wichitas along the Arkansas River and Red River basins. Although they ranged over much of northern Mexico, New Mexico, and Texas, their most enduring territorial base was in central Texas between the lower Pecos River and the Colorado. The Jumanos were buffalo hunters and traders, and played an active role as middlemen between the Spanish colonies and various Indian tribes. Historical documents refer to Jumana, Humana, Sumana, Chouman, Xoman, and other variants of the name; but Jumano has been the standard form in twentieth-century scholarship. Other names mentioned in connection with the Jumanos, as closely allied or subordinate groups, include Cíbolos, Jediondos, and Caguates. Early scholars pondered the mystery of their virtual disappearance from the historical record around 1700. Further, the scattered distribution of the Jumanos, in bands, rancherías, and villages at widely separated locations led to disagreement about their identity. This has been termed the "Jumano problem." One solution, widely accepted since 1940, was to draw a distinction between "true" Jumanos-the nomadic bands in the South Plains-and other groups who also practiced facial painting and were therefore called Jumanos. However, this idea now appears simplistic, since many interconnections, suggestive of a shared cultural and linguistic identity, appear to link most, if not all, of the groups. There are no substantial records of the Jumanos' language, and their linguistic identity has been the subject of considerable debate. An early scholar believed that they were Caddoans, ancestral to the Wichitas. Others have suggested a Uto-Aztecan or Athabascan affiliation. A recent study has argued that the Jumanos spoke a Tanoan language. If they did, this would link them with the eastern Pueblos of New Mexico and would imply that their ancestral ties lay within or near the Rio Grande valley. Although few direct connections between historic and prehistoric sites have been demonstrated, clues of geographical distribution and cultural similarity suggest that the Jumanos were descendants of a prehistoric Jornada Mogollón population indigenous to this region.
The lowlands of northeastern Mexico and adjacent southern Texas were originally occupied by hundreds of small, autonomous, distinctively named Indian groups that lived by hunting and gathering. During the Spanish colonial period a majority of these natives were displaced from their traditional territories by Spaniards advancing from the south and Apaches retreating from the north. The Spaniards had little interest in describing the natives or classifying them into ethnic units. There was no obvious basis for classification, and major cultural contrasts and tribal organizations went unnoticed, as did similarities and differences in the native languages and dialects. Spaniards referred to an Indian group as a nación, and described them according to their association with major terrain features or with Spanish jurisdictional units. Only in Nuevo León did observers link Indian populations by cultural peculiarities, such as hairstyle and body decoration. Thus, modern scholars have found it difficult to identify these hunting and gathering groups by language and culture.
Quintanilla Perez, Selena [Selena]
Singer Selena Quintanilla Perez, known simply as Selena, the daughter of Abraham and Marcella (Perez) Quintanilla, Jr., was born on April 16, 1971, in Lake Jackson, Texas. She married Christopher Perez, guitarist and member of the band Selena y Los Dinos (slang for "the Boys") on April 2, 1992. They had no children. Selena attended Oran M. Roberts Elementary School in Lake Jackson and West Oso Junior High in Corpus Christi, where she completed the eighth grade. In 1989 she finished high school through the American School, a correspondence school for artists, and enrolled at Pacific Western University in business administration correspondence courses.
Before the middle of the nineteenth century the term Caddo denoted only one of at least twenty-five distinct but closely affiliated groups centered around the Red River in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. The term derives from the French abbreviation of Kadohadacho, a word meaning "real chief" or "real Caddo" in the Kadohadacho dialect. European chroniclers referred to the Caddo groups as the Hasinai, Kadohadacho, and Natchitoches confederacies, although the "confederacies" are better interpreted as kin-based affiliated groups or bands of Caddo communities. The Hasinai groups lived in the Neches and Angelina River valleys in East Texas, the Kadohadacho groups on the Red River in the Great Bend area, and the Natchitoches groups on the Red River in the vicinity of the French post of Natchitoches (Fort St. Jean Baptiste aux Natchitos), established in 1714. The first European description of the Caddo peoples came in 1542 from diarists traveling with the De Soto entrada, then led by Luis de Moscoso Alvarado (Hernando De Soto had died in the spring of 1542). The Spanish described several of the Caddo groups as having dense populations living in scattered settlements and having abundant food reserves of corn. Twentieth-century archeological investigations of many prehistoric Caddoan sites indicate that Caddo communities were widely dispersed throughout the major and minor stream valleys of the Caddoan area by around A.D. 800. The roots of these peoples can be traced to Fourche Maline or Woodland Period culture groups that began to settle down in small communities, to manufacture ceramics for cooking and storage of foodstuffs, and to develop a horticultural way of life based on the raising of tropical cultigens (corn, squash, and later beans) and certain native plants.
The Apache Indians belong to the southern branch of the Athabascan group, whose languages constitute a large family, with speakers in Alaska, western Canada, and the American Southwest. The several branches of Apache tribes occupied an area extending from the Arkansas River to Northern Mexico and from Central Texas to Central Arizona. Generally, the Apaches are divided into Eastern and Western, with the Rio Grande serving as the dividing line. Two groups, the Lipans and the Mescaleros, lived partially or entirely within the confines of Texas. The Apaches went by numerous names. Because of their nomadic nature, it seems probable that several names were used to identify the same band or tribe. Some names of Apache bands in Texas were Limita, Conejero, and Trementina (perhaps the same as Limita). But only the names Lipan and Mescalero survived into the nineteenth century. The name Apache most probably came from the Zuñi word apachu, meaning "enemy," or possibly Awa'tehe, the Ute name for Apaches. The Apaches referred to themselves as Inde or Diné, meaning "the people." The Apaches arrived in the Southwest between A.D. 1000 and 1400. After somehow being separated from their northern kinsmen, they carved out a home in the Southwest-apparently migrating south along the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, then spreading westward into New Mexico and Arizona. In time, pressure from the Comanches and other tribes pushed the Apaches farther south and west.
A Texas historical marker on State Highway 207 twenty-five miles east of Lubbock is all that remains to mark the site of Emma, the once thriving county seat of Crosby County. In the fall of 1890 R. L. Stringfellow and H. E. Hume, owners of a general store in Estacado, purchased a section of land in the central part of the county. In 1890 a post office opened, and in 1891 Stringfellow and Hume laid out a town on this site and named it Emma, after the woman that one of them later married.