The History of Texas. Robert A. Calvert
epidemic diseases introduced by the Europeans, population losses, and climatic changes over which they had no control. For instance, the shortage of people to work garden plots, form effective hunting parties, and prepare products for home use and the trade circuit led to disaster for many tribes. Then, early in the eighteenth century, came another hardship to the plains people of Texas, one that posed dire consequences. Whereas buffalo had once roamed in great numbers throughout many parts of Texas, drought that plagued the plains during the early decades of the 1700s decimated the herds in South Texas as well as in the Jumano home bases in West Texas–or at least drove the animals northward. Without as many buffalo grazing traditional hunting grounds, the Indians faced starvation, sickness, and other hardships.
The Jumanos, among others, suffered from a combination of the above factors as well as from changing economic patterns. Their old trading partners, the Caddos, by the 1690s preferred instead to develop business ties with French Louisiana. In addition, incessant intertribal warfare (involving most if not all of the area’s Indian nations) throughout the course of the eighteenth century made conducting commerce across Texas a highly dangerous undertaking. By the late seventeenth century or the early eighteenth century, most of the Jumano people had been absorbed by the Apache.
The Karankawas, on the other hand, remained at odds with the Spaniards until the last decades of the eighteenth century–bitter toward the Europeans over the diseases they imported and the attacks the outsiders made upon Karankawa camps (in retaliation, it must be noted, for the cattle rustling undertaken by the Karankawas). The Karankawas made common cause with the Apaches by supplying them with arms acquired from Louisiana. During the last decades of the eighteenth century, the Karankawas came under constant attack by other tribes, namely the Comanches, and the former experienced rapid population losses because of warfare and pestilence. From 8000 in 1685, the Karankawa population had been whittled down to approximately 3000 by 1780. It was, therefore, in the 1790s and early 1800s that the Karankawas finally turned to the missions (at least to Nuestra Señora del Refugio Mission, in present‐day Calhoun County, established for them in 1793) and integrated the religious institutions into their survival patterns. Missions provided them shelter from the Comanches and extended them sustenance, at least during those seasons of the year when fishing and foraging throughout the coastal areas yielded insufficient foodstuffs to maintain the tribespeople.
The Caddo civilization in East Texas weathered the calamities of the colonial era better than the Coahuiltecans, Jumanos, and Karankawas did. Although suffering a decline in numbers due to the destructive forces mentioned previously, Caddo society remained stable. In the latter decades of the eighteenth century, the great chief Tinhiouen (the Elder) played an influential role in the international trade conducted in Caddo country, with Spanish, French, and Indian traders seeking his favor. Commercial links with the French became so intimate that they modified Caddo society during the eighteenth century. In exchange for their own farm goods as well as buffalo hides, bear fat, and mustangs acquired in bartering with nearby tribes, the Caddos received weapons, work tools, hunting equipment, blankets, and clothing from the French. This symbiotic relationship made the Caddos more successful hunters and improved their standard of living, but it had a downside. Old skills atrophied as tribe members no longer needed to produce bows and arrows, traditional crafts, or weave clothing. Their close relationship also brought the Caddos new diseases and an overreliance on the French for protection. When France turned Louisiana over to the Spanish after the conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763, the Caddos were left on their own to face hostile Indian tribes from the north, the encroachment of Spaniards from the west, and the threat of American settlers from the east. At the end of the colonial era, the Caddos struggled for their very survival, but they managed to remain in their homelands until the 1850s.
Many other tribes known to Europeans as out‐and‐out hostile, belligerent, and nomadic (whom the Spanish referred to collectively as the indios bárbaros) survived well into the latter years of the nineteenth century. They did so by pursuing several imaginative strategies, devising new tactics to combat European outsiders, engaging in protracted do‐or‐die struggles among themselves, and adapting to changing circumstances.
The Norteños (that is, the Wichitas, the Comanches, and the Caddos, whom Spaniards collectively called the Nations of the North), openly rejected the presence of the Europeans in their domains. Since the early eighteenth century the Caddos had come to regard the Spaniards as outsiders because kinship relations had not bonded the two peoples, as they had Caddo and French families, or for that matter, Caddo and Spanish families at Los Adaes. In addition, since that time, the Caddos had entered into an economic network that included the Wichitas, the Comanches, and French traders. For the Norteños, moreover, the Spanish–Apache alliance (evident in the establishment of the San Sabá mission in 1757) by default made the Spanish their bitter enemies. The Comanches and Wichitas, for their part, responded with vicious attacks on the foreign settlements. The Comanches stole livestock, horses, weapons, tools, and supplies–items useful for living off the land and waging war. With firearms and other supplies acquired from the Mississippi region, the Wichitas kept up their raids on enemy tribes, livestock ranches, and Spanish missions.
The Plains Indians also survived the colonial period by winning bloody turf fights with competitors. Most successful in defeating challengers in such territorial wars were the Comanches (Figure 2.5). Along with their allies, the Wichitas and the Caddos, the Comanches engaged in bitter disputes with their mortal enemies, the Apaches. At stake in these clashes were the buffalo‐hunting grounds, valuable assets that the enemy possessed (among them horses), and, equally important, control of the trade of an empire that stretched from East Texas to New Mexico and into the Great Plains.
Still another factor that contributed to the survival of Plains Indians was adaptation to a rapidly changing scene wrought by the effects of the European traffickers, fights over natural resources, ecological change, and the need to dominate the bartering network. Pressed by the Comanches and their Norteño allies, the Apaches, for one, suffered devastating losses in personnel and material belongings as they retreated deeper into South Texas and then into the wilderness of the trans‐Pecos. As a recourse strategy for survival, the Apaches in the last decades of the eighteenth century honed old economic practices, adapting them to their new circumstances. They turned to rustling livestock, having quickly learned that mules, horses, and cattle could be traded for finished products that the Spaniards possessed. At the same time, the Apaches turned to kidnapping and adopting individuals of other Indian tribes with whom they had trade contacts in order to replenish demographic losses. They brutally attacked vulnerable Native American groups (and even some Spanish/Mexican villages) and made off with captives, but they also employed more peaceful means. As stated earlier, Jumano population decline was due in part to their absorption by the Apaches, as marriage between the two groups became somewhat common by the mid‐1700s. Similarly, the Apaches used marriage between their women and Indian men in missions (such as the ones in San Antonio) to forge defensive pacts (through kinship associations) with Spanish officials responsible for security in Texas. This act of reshaping old survival methods and reconciling them to flux is referred to as ethnogenesis, something that all Indian peoples in Texas (not just the Apaches) practiced during the Spanish colonial period.
Figure 2.5 Buffalo Hump, Comanche Indian.
Source: Caldwell Papers, CN 10934, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
Furthermore, in their struggle for survival, the Plains Indians during the eighteenth century escalated their reliance on women to achieve the suspension of hostilities with the Spaniards (as well as with competing Indian nations). During the 1770s and 1780s, the Comanche, Wichita, and other bands used captive Mexican women as hostages in their efforts to extract supplies and horses from the Spaniards or to propose political truces–sometimes in return for native women whom the Spaniards held hostage. The Plains Indians further utilized the time‐tested custom of having women, the traditional representatives