The Texas Periphery, ca. 1600

I want to write about Central Texas, but before I do that I need to fill in some of the peripheral areas of Texas—the central part of the state will be the next post.  For now, here's an updated version of the in-progress Texas map:

As you can see I've added several borders in the southern, eastern, and coastal regions of Texas.  These are mostly uncontroversial, taken more-or-less intact from maps of aboriginal territory in the Handbook of North American Indians and a few other places—I haven't done much research on these tribes, yet, so I may make changes if and when I learn more about them.  For various reasons, however, I don't think their territories changed very much, at least until the 1800's.  The only real change I've made from the Handbook map is that I've drawn the Bidai out as a separate group (see below).

The Caddo were a late, western carrier of the Mississippian culture pattern.  If you know anything about Cahokia and the grand old Mississippian chieftaincies of yore (sun kings and all that), then picture that in miniature and you have something of an idea of what the protohistoric Caddo were like.  Unlike Cahokia (and Wichita Etzanoa), however, the Caddo evidently never had any major urban city centers, and lived in smaller-scale villages (Perttula 2012).

The early Caddo are known mostly from the accounts of French explorers from the Upper Country and later the colony of Louisiana, and from no earlier than the 1680's, so suppositions about the Caddos' range (aside from archaeology) prior to that date have to be projected backwards.  Of the half-dozen-or-so Caddo confederacies, the one of most significance for Texan history was centered around the Neches and Angelina river basins in the eastern part of the state—the Spaniards knew these Caddos by reputation only via other Indian tribes, and called them the Tejas (from the Caddo táyshaʔ meaning 'friend'), from which the name "Texas" is derived.  The French called them the Cenis, and in modern English they are usually referred to the Hasinai—both names come from their own self-designation, Hasí:nay (Chafe 2004).

The Atakapans are one of those people whose history and Kultur-type has made absolutely zero impression upon the popular consciousness, even among the highly educated, meaning you're unlikely to ever see an Atakapan depicted in any historical film or tv show, ever.  These people were famous early for being cannibals—the name "Atakapa" comes from a Choctaw expression meaning "man eaters", and several old-timey maps (including the one I'm currently using as background for this blog) label the Atakapa country as either (Latin) Indi errantes et Antropophagi or (French) Indiens errans et Antropophages.  This reputation is a little unfair—not because it's false (it isn't), but because the Atakapans were hardly the only people around at the time practicing cannibalism.  For example, in 1712 the French explorer Louis Juchereau de Saint-Denis witnessed a Hasinai war party ritually execute and then eat two Kitsai war captives (the first members of the Kitsai nation ever seen by white men)—allegedly, the party had already killed and eaten four other Kitsais before making it back to camp (Parks 2001).

The "Atakapans" comprised a number of different groups, most of them very poorly-known: in addition to the Atakapa proper, there were the Akokisa, the Patiri, the Bidai, the Deadose, and probably others we don't know about (other groups, like the Eyeish and the Adai, may have been Atakapan as well, but are usually considered Caddoan—I don't think anybody knows for sure, though).  I've demarcated the Bidai territory out from the rest of the Atakapans because the linguistic evidence (very meagre as it is) suggests that the Bidai spoke a language unrelated to Atakapa.  The Deadose were probably Bidaian rather than Atakapan as well, but they weren't a distinct geographical entity until the 1700's (Sjoberg 1951).  As for the Patiri, whether they were Bidaian or Atakapan is anybody's guess, and I'm not going to worry about it.

Comparison of Bidai with the attested Atakapan languages (Grant n.d.)

I don't know much about the Karankawas yet, but their territory at least seems to be uncontroversial.

"Coahuiltecan" is an externally-applied label to refer to a specific cultural region for which, in the first centuries of European contact, very little is known other than that it encompassed a large number of distinct tribal groups.  These tribes seem to have been simple hunter-gatherers, with an emphasis on "gatherer" as the region they inhabited—called the "Brush Country"—was an awful, barren wasteland possessing very few game animals...  edible plant life was hard enough on its own to come by (you know you've lost the birth lottery when prickly pear cactus is a mainstay of your diet).  According to historian William Newcomb, it was all the Coahuiltecans could do to simply scratch out a living:

"[T]his type of habitat limits and narrows the cultural patterns that are possible, once one method of survival has been worked out, the possibility that another and strikingly different mode of existence will be developed is remote.  The people in such a culture are constantly busy supplying minimum needs; they cannot hazard the experiment of trying to find some new way of life.  And in difficult habitats, such as the semideserts of south Texas, external influences which might stimulate cultural change are apt to be minimal.  Outsiders are not attracted to such regions and its inhabitants are not likely to have surplus products to trade.  But even on the basis of fragmentary evidence, south Texas has the appearance of a relict region, an isolated backwash in which cultures remained virtually unchanged for long periods...

... Few areas in North America were more difficult for hunters and gatherers to exploit or yielded more stubbornly its niggardly harvest than the brush and cactus country of South Texas.  But the Coahuiltecans made an admirable adjustment to the restrictions and privations of their land with but crude and primitive tools and exploitative techniques.  Their success, in the last analysis, was compounded of a willingness to utilize virtually everything in their environment that the human organism could digest, which in turn depended upon an intimate knowledge of their land—what each plant was good for, when fruits in certain places would be ripe, where elusive game could be taken." (Newcomb 1961, 32-56)

Unlike the Atakapans, there's an outside chance you might actually see the Coahuiltecans portrayed on film or television one day, assuming they ever get around to making a movie based on the story of Cabeza de Vaca (although, if they ever did make that movie, I'm certain the depictions would be entirely historically inaccurate, because... that's just how these things are).  Most of our ethnographic information on the Coahuiltecans comes from the account of de Vaca, who spent 7 years among them (as a slave, a trader, and allegedly a shaman) from 1528 to 1535.  What information doesn't come from de Vaca (or from his fellow naufragios) comes from the records of Spanish missions established among the Coahuiltecans in the late-17th and 18 centuries.  More immediately, the vast majority of the best published data on the Coahuiltecan Indians comes from the work of Thomas Nolan Campbell—a guy who, evidently, spent practically his entire career combing through the vast records of these Spanish missions, extracting any and all information there was concerning each and every one of the literally hundreds of tribes mentioned in the documents.  Rumor has it that he wrote his 20-page monograph on the Payaya Indians just because someone said the Payaya were too elusive and it was impossible to write a description of them.  So he was pretty cool.

I mentioned that "Coahuiltecan" is an externally-applied and somewhat arbitrary cultural (and for my purposes, cartographical) label.  This is by necessity: subdividing the "Coahuiltecan" zone by mapping individual tribes, or groups of tribes, would be impossible.  There are two reasons for this, one epistemological and one ontological.  The first is the fact that despite the efforts of the inexhaustible (and probably incredibly handsome) T. N. Campbell, we still know very very little about the Coahuiltecans.  The second is that, even if we knew everything there was to know about them, mapping the Coahuiltecans would be impractical.  The tribes in question were incredibly small (the very largest had only a few hundred people), incredibly numerous (at least 800 tribes, according to Campbell, and possibly as many as a thousand), and quite nomadic—a map would be an illegible, chaotic mess:

"It appears naive to assume that each of the Indian groups of this region once had an exclusive foraging territory and that, after prolonged research, it will eventually be possible to compile a map showing the mosaic of territorial ranges... The Mariames, for example, ranged over two areas separated by a distance of at least 80 miles.  If drawn on a map, the Mariame territorial range might be described as bilobate in form, the two lobes being connected by a narrow corridor of leisurely travel of foot.  Cartographers will find it frustrating to show such oddly shaped, overlapping territories on a map." (Campbell 1983)

This disunity, combined with the primitive level of development described in the Newcomb quotation earlier, rendered the Coahuiltecans militarily weak and therefore vulnerable to attack from abroad.  From the latter 17th century on, this came in the form of two waves of invaders: the Spanish advancing from the south, and the Apache advancing from the north.  Many Coahuiltecans, caught within this pincer maneuver, relocated toward the northeast—this is an important fact to remember.

Texas, late 17th and early 18th centuries

We don't know how many languages were spoken by the Coahuiltecans.  At least 7 are known: Coahuilteco, Comecrudo, Cotoname, Aranama, Quinigua, Sanan, and Garza.  All of them presumably were extinct by the end of the 18th century, if not much earlier.  It's worth reflecting on how far-gone this is.  Beothuk and Powhatan are both famous among linguists as "lost languages" of America, about which almost nothing is known because of how long ago they went extinct, and yet both of them were still being spoken after the Coahuiltecan languages had disappeared.  Or take California: it's often considered the language graveyard of North America... and it is... but even the first Californian language to go extinct, Esselen, was still spoken as late as 1870 or so—a century after most Coahuiltecan languages (Shaul 1995).  Even Timucua and Calusa might have outlived some Coahuiltecan languages, although I'm not certain of this.  The point is that these languages all died out long ago, well before linguists and anthropologists started taking an interest in recording them.

Yet despite all that, we actually know a decent amount about one of the Coahuiltecan languages, Coahuilteco.  This is due largely to the efforts of one Fray Bartolomé García, a Franciscan missionary from the 1700's who authored a bilingual confessor's manual [whatever that is—sorry, I'm not Catholic] in the Spanish and Coahuilteco languages, published in 1760.  According to linguist Rudolph Troike, who has extensively studied the material, García's text is a remarkably accurate record for the language—both in its phonology ("The fact that García carefully distinguishes types of sounds that are not found in Spanish or that are only allophonic in Spanish gives considerable confidence in his analysis, as does his remarkably consistent spelling." (Troike 1996)) and in its grammar ("This confidence is heightened by the recognition of the extensive syntactic differences between the two languages as found in the text, which suggest that no effort was made to force Coahuilteco into a Spanish mold." (Troike 1981)).  García's orthography of Coahuilteco is also possibly the first known example of the apostrophe being used to mark glottalized consonants, now a standard practice among linguists.  The language itself is pretty interesting, too: center-embedded relative clauses,  subject-agreement on object noun phrases, etc.

People spend a lot of time wishing that prehistoric animals were still around while not spending much time appreciating the fact that we still have crocodiles, sharks, etc.  Things like García's Coahuilteco manuscripts (or the Pareja manuscripts for Timucua) don't get as much attention as they deserve, and I for one am grateful we have them.

Left: Watercolor (ca. 1830's) of a man and woman from the Carrizo (Comecrudo) Coahuiltecan tribe.  While the man is wearing an authentic breechclout, the woman is clearly wearing a European-style dress.  The image on the right, from the same collection, depicts two members of the Tonkawa tribe, and is probably more representative of pre-Contact female clothing from the area (with body tattoos indicating tribal affiliation).

That leaves one more area of the periphery to investigate.  If you look at the map at the beginning of this post, you'll see an empty region in between the Coahuiltecans and the Bidai-Atakapans, inland from the Karankawas.  This gap corresponds very closely to a territory labeled "the Bastrop Area" by T. N. Campbell.  In an article from 1986, Campbell enumerated 60 separate Native tribes that are known to have resided within the Bastrop Area at one point or another in its history.  Of these, most are known to be immigrants who moved into the Bastrop Area from elsewhere (mostly in the 1700's)—these include Coahuiltecans from the southwest fleeing the dual Apache-Spanish incursion mentioned earlier, Caddoans and Plains-based horselords from the north, and northeastern Algonquian-speakers displaced during the Removal-era.  However, Campbell also (and somewhat hesitantly) names 18 of these tribes as being possibly indigenous to the Bastrop region--  the Apayxam, Caisquetebana, Cantona, Catqueza, Cava, Chaguantapam, Cumercai, Emet, Mayeye, Menanquen, Panasiu, Sana, Tohaha, Toho, Camai, Tenu, Tueienzum, and Zorquan.

This list of tribes is interesting, and useful, because it overlaps significantly with a list of tribes given in another Campbell publication (1992): the list of tribes known to have spoken the Sanan language.  This overlap is not overwhelming, but may be sufficient to name the Bastrop area as Sanan territory, especially considering how circumstantial and inferential the evidence is for where these tribes originally hailed from.  There is another hitch, however, which is that the Bastrop area is specifically the homeland of the Eastern Sanans—there was another, "Western Sanan" region in Coahuila on the opposite end of Coahuiltecan territory:

Sanan-speakers, ca. 1700 A.D.

This would seem to imply that the Sanans were also autochthonous to Coahuila and fled northeast along with the other Coahuiltecans.  This seems especially plausible given that our information for the Eastern Sanans mostly comes from the 1700's, after the Coahuiltecan migration was already well underway.  Campbell addresses this concern, however, and still considers it plausible that the Eastern and Western territories were both aboriginal and separate.  This is entirely reasonable given the nomadic nature of Coahuiltecan (and para-Coahuiltecan) tribes and the overlapping nature of their home ranges.

Texas (hopefully), ca. 1600 A.D.

As you can see, the Sanan territory as I've drawn it leaves an empty strip of land just east of the Brazos River.  The best source of information on these tribes is the Handbook of Texas, but I can't find any article on a Texan tribe—Coahuiltecan, Sanan, Bidaian, Atakapan, or otherwise—that indicates they lived east of the Brazos or west of the Bidai-Atakapan territory as shown.  It might be that this region is utterly inaccessible to us for the period of 1600 A.D., or perhaps it was a no-man's-land in between the Sanans and the Bidai-Atakapans.  Who knows?  My sources are also vague on the northern limit to Sanan territory—for now, I've drawn it to correspond to the Balcones Escarpment which seems like a natural geographical barrier.  I may revise this later.

Sources

T. N. Campbell, "The Coahuiltecans and Their Neighbors". In Alfonso Ortiz ed., Handbook of North American Indians, Vol 10: Southwest (1983).

— "Name All the Indians of the Bastrop Area" (1986).

Wallace Chafe, The History and Geography of the Caddo Language (2004).

Anthony P. Grant, A Note on Bidai (n.d.).

LeRoy Johnson and T. N. Campbell, "Sanan: Traces of a Previously Unknown Aboriginal Language in Colonial Coahuila and Texas" (1992).

W. W. Newcomb, Jr., The Indians of Texas: From Prehistoric to Modern Times (1961).

Douglas R. Parks, "Kitsai".  In Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, Vol 13: Plains, Pt 1 (2001).

Timothy K. Perttula, "How Texas Historians Write about the Pre-A.D. 1685 Caddo Peoples of Texas" (2012).

David Leedom Shaul, "The Huelel (Esselen) Language" (1995).

Andrée F. Sjoberg, "The Bidai Indians of Southeastern Texas" (1951).

Rudolph C. Troike, "Subject-Object Concord in Coahuilteco" (1981).

— "Sketch of Coahuilteco, a Language Isolate of Texas".  In Ives Goddard ed., Handbook of North American Indians, Vol 17: Languages (1996).

(and various articles in the Handbook of Texas)