TXTexas History

The state's name is a Caddo greeting. Spanish scribes writing down the speech of the Hasinai in the 1680s rendered taysha, meaning friend or ally, as tejas, and the word traveled from a province to a republic to a state whose official motto is still the single word Friendship. Almost nothing else about Texas arrived that peacefully.

Caddo farmers, the Gulf coast, and the Comanche plains

The Caddo confederacies of the eastern piney woods lived in permanent villages with mound centers, grew maize on a scale that impressed every European who saw it, and ran trade routes toward the Mississippi. The Karankawa and Atakapa worked the bays and barrier islands, Coahuiltecan bands moved through the brush country of the south, and Jumano traders linked the Rio Grande pueblos to the plains. Then the balance of power shifted on horseback. The Comanche came south out of the Rockies in the early 1700s, mastered the horse faster than anyone around them, and by mid century controlled a southern plains empire that Spanish officials called the Comanchería. For roughly 150 years the Comanche, and the Lipan Apache they had displaced, set the practical northern limit of Spanish, then Mexican, then Anglo settlement.

Missions built because of a French mistake

Alonso Álvarez de Pineda charted the Gulf shoreline in 1519, and Cabeza de Vaca washed up near Galveston Island in 1528 and spent eight years walking to Mexico. For a century and a half after that, Spain saw no reason to occupy Texas. What changed its mind was La Salle, who sailed for the mouth of the Mississippi in 1685, missed it by 400 miles, and planted Fort St. Louis on Matagorda Bay. Disease and the Karankawa destroyed the colony within three years, but the scare was enough. Spain answered with missions and presidios: the East Texas missions from 1690, then in 1718 the presidio of San Antonio de Béxar and Mission San Antonio de Valero, the compound later known as the Alamo. The capital of Spanish Texas from 1729 to 1770 was Los Adaes, which sits today in Louisiana.

Empresarios, revolution, and nine years as a country

Mexico won independence in 1821 and inherited a province with a few thousand non-Native residents. It tried to fill it by granting empresario contracts, and Stephen F. Austin settled the families remembered as the Old Three Hundred on the lower Brazos and Colorado. Cheap land drew cotton planters, and cotton drew slavery, which Mexico abolished in 1829 with a specific exemption for Texas before closing the border to further American immigration on April 6, 1830. When Santa Anna set aside the federalist constitution of 1824, the colonists and many Tejano federalists revolted. Fighting opened at Gonzales on October 2, 1835. Independence was declared at Washington-on-the-Brazos on March 2, 1836, the Alamo fell four days later after a thirteen day siege, the Goliad prisoners were executed on March 27, and on April 21 Sam Houston's army overran the Mexican camp at San Jacinto in a battle that lasted about eighteen minutes and ended with Santa Anna a prisoner. The Republic of Texas lasted from 1836 to 1845, was recognized by the United States, France, Britain and the Netherlands, moved its capital repeatedly, and never solved its debts.

Annexed by resolution, then a war and a sale

A treaty of annexation failed in the United States Senate in 1844 because admitting an enormous slave republic would wreck the sectional balance. John Tyler went around the two thirds requirement with a joint resolution needing only simple majorities in both houses, signed it on March 1, 1845, a Texas convention accepted, and Texas entered as the 28th state on December 29, 1845. Two unusual terms came with it. Texas kept its own public lands rather than surrendering them to the federal government, which is why the Permanent University Fund exists, and it retained the option to divide itself into as many as five states. Annexation also triggered the Mexican War of 1846 to 1848. The Compromise of 1850 then paid Texas $10 million to give up its claim to Santa Fe and to territory now inside five other states, and that transaction is where the familiar outline on the map comes from.

Secession, Juneteenth, and the trail years

A convention voted to secede on February 1, 1861 and voters ratified it three weeks later. Sam Houston, then governor, refused to swear allegiance to the Confederacy and was removed from office in March. Little of the fighting happened on Texas soil; the state sent men east and shipped cotton out through Matamoros to evade the blockade. Word of emancipation traveled slowly. On June 19, 1865, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation and two months after Appomattox, General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3 at Galveston announcing that all enslaved people in Texas were free. Juneteenth became a Texas state holiday in 1980 and a federal one in 2021. The postwar decades belonged to cattle. Millions of longhorns had gone feral during the war, and from 1867 drovers pushed them up the Chisholm Trail to Kansas railheads until barbed wire, railroads reaching Texas itself, and the brutal drought and freezes of the 1880s closed the open range.

Spindletop, the seawall, and the century oil paid for

Two events four months apart remade the state. On September 8, 1900 a hurricane crossed Galveston and killed at least 6,000 people, still the deadliest natural disaster in American history. The city built a seawall and jacked its surviving buildings up onto fill, but Houston took its commerce for good once the ship channel opened in 1914. Then on January 10, 1901 the Lucas well at Spindletop near Beaumont blew in at something like 100,000 barrels a day, more than every other producing well in the country combined, and the modern oil industry started. Gulf and Texaco grew out of that field. When Columbus Joiner's Daisy Bradford No. 3 opened the East Texas field in 1930 the glut collapsed prices, and the Railroad Commission was handed the job of rationing output, a power that effectively set the world oil price until the 1970s. The revenue paid for a university system, and the industrial base attracted what followed: Jack Kilby demonstrated the integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in Dallas in 1958, and NASA chose Houston for its manned spaceflight center in 1961. Two presidents were born in the state, Dwight Eisenhower at Denison in 1890 and Lyndon Johnson near Stonewall in 1908.

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