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Popular lore has long depicted the Karankawa Indians as primitive scavengers (perhaps even cannibals) who eked out a meager subsistence from fishing, hunting and gathering on the Texas coastal plains. That caricature, according to Robert Ricklis, hides the reality of a people who were well-adapted to their environment, skillful in using its resources, and successful in maintaining their culture until the arrival of Anglo-American settlers. The Karankawa Indians of Texas is the first modern, well-researched history of the Karankawa from prehistoric times until their extinction in the nineteenth century. Blending archaeological and ethnohistorical data into a lively narrative history, Ricklis reveals the basic lifeway of the Karankawa, a seasonal pattern that took them from large coastal fishing camps in winter to small, dispersed hunting and gathering parties in summer. In a most important finding, he shows how, after initial hostilities, the Karankawa incorporated the Spanish missions into their subsistence pattern during the colonial period and coexisted peacefully with Euroamericans until the arrival of Anglo settlers in the 1820s and 1830s. These findings will be of wide interest to everyone studying the interactions of Native American and European peoples.
In 1885, along the Gulf Coast of Texas, the once-numerous Karankawa Indians had all but disappeared. The story unfolds as an orphan Indian boy, Kola, finds that he is the last living member of his people. Kola is taken in by W. S. and Jane Deats and their family, after their son, Sparkman, finds him floating in a canoe in Dickinson Bay. The Deats family soon realizes that Kola is extremely smart and more than willing to do his part in becoming a member of their family. After W. S. Deats gives Kola a gray filly as his own to ride, for the daily ranch work that is expected of the boys, an unusual bond develops between horse and boy. Kola soon becomes one of the best cowboys on the open prairies of the Gulf Coast. His roping skills soon become legendary. Many of the white settlers still had memories of problems with the nomadic Karankawa tribes as they roamed along the coast line of Texas. The embellished tales of these conflicts, over the years, had been passed on to new arrivals in Galveston County. When the Deats family enrolled Kola in school, there was an outcry from many of the citizens of Dickinson. An Indian boy in the classroom with white children was unacceptable in their eyes. How WS and Jane handle the violence that erupts makes for an intriguing story.
In the late seventeenth century, General Alonso de León led five military expeditions from northern New Spain into what is now Texas in search of French intruders who had settled on lands claimed by the Spanish crown. Lola Orellano Norris has identified sixteen manuscript copies of de León’s meticulously kept expedition diaries. These documents hold major importance for early Texas scholarship. Some of these early manuscripts have been known to historians, but never before have all sixteen manuscripts been studied. In this interdisciplinary study, Norris transcribes, translates, and analyzes the diaries from two different perspectives. The historical analysis reveals that frequent misinterpretations of the Spanish source documents have led to substantial factual errors that have persisted in historical interpretation for more than a century. General Alonso de León’s Expeditions into Texas is the first presentation of these important early documents and provides new vistas on Spanish Texas.
Academic Texas history falls short from the Native American perspective. With only oral traditions, for historic Native people caught up in a rapidly crumbling world, priorities shifted to self-preservation rather than the keeping of stories, belief systems, tribal affiliations, and language. The Native language records of the Texas missions and other sources in the 1800s are sparse, but had it not been for them, even the few surviving words of the Karankawa, Chitimacha, Atakapa, Coahuilteco, Cotoname, Comecrudo and other groups in this volume would have been lost forever. The first part of this fascinating book is a short but compelling memoir which chronicles Alexander Joseph Perez's journey as he discovers and uncovers his ancestors' languages, unspoken since the 1880s, then undertakes the monumental task of resurrecting and collecting them into this volume.