In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Prologue Borderlands The river we now call the Brazos has had many names. Native Americans reportedly referred to it as Tokonohono. La Salle called it La Maligne, or the wicked one. Other names include La Trinidad, Santa Teresa y Barroso, Espíritu Santo, Río Rojo, Río de Señor San Pablo, Jesús Nazareno, San Gerónimo, and Baatse. Exactly how the Brazos River got its present name remains a mystery. A number of tales exist, some more plausible than others. The most popular one is that Coronado named it “Los Brazos de Dios” (“the arms of God”) in 1541 when he encountered it near its source after crossing the arid Staked Plain of northwest Texas. Other tales involve sailors, lost at sea and in need of fresh water, tracing a muddy streak in the Gulf back to the river’s mouth and naming it in gratitude for their deliverance. Whatever its name, the Brazos is the third-largest river in Texas, behind both the Rio Grande and the Red rivers, flowing like most of the state’s major rivers in a northwest-southeast direction and emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. It winds its way slowly below the falls, which are located about three hundred miles from the mouth. Its muddy reddish-brown color is testament to its immense drainage area, some 41,700 square miles, which made its bottom and delta lands some of the most fertile in North America.1 To travelers approaching from the Gulf, the mouth of the Brazos was obscured by sandy barrier islands. Once past the beach, the land surrounding the mouth was table-flat for miles inland. Anglo settlers referred to this coastal plain as the Lower Country. At the start of the nineteenth century, the soil was covered with dense canebrakes, which towered over a man’s head, even when he was mounted on horseback. Moving through the cane was an arduous process, made easier with a blade to hack away the stalks. With the reeds towering fifteen or more feet above the ground, a person walking though the cane traveled in darkness, as if in a tunnel. Outside the river los br azos de dios 14 bottoms, which varied from two to twenty miles wide, was an open coastal prairie, virtually treeless and covered with tall grass. In some parts the prairie extended for miles in all directions, broken up by clumps of trees that struck foreign observers as islands in a sea of grass. The horizon was circumscribed by the forests that marched along the creeks and rivers. Travel was easier on the prairie, but people could also easily become disoriented without landmarks.2 About sixty miles from the coast, the flat surface gave way to the gently rolling hills of what Anglo settlers later called the Upper Country. Here the canebrakes were more sparse and were supplanted in the bottoms by a semitropical , moss-draped hardwood forest that provided a haven for a variety of wildlife, including alligators, poisonous snakes, and wildcats. Transit through the bottoms was just as difficult as through the cane due to the density and darkness, and for seven months of the year, the air was heavy, humid, and swarming with flies and mosquitoes. The various tributaries of the Brazos— the Navasota River and New Year’s, Mill, and Oyster creeks—supported a similar ecology, on a smaller scale. Between these streams, in the uplands outside the river bottoms, post-oak savannah dominated. The occasional herd of bison found its way onto these prairies, and sometime after the arrival of the Spanish, a large herd of wild mustangs took up residence. The Karankawa people had mastered the art of living in the Lower Country . Food was plentiful, but getting enough required expert knowledge of the seasonal patterns of fish and game as well as fruits, berries, and roots. The Karankawas had worked the coast and rivers much the same way for generations . During winter and spring, when redfish and black drum abounded in the estuaries and lagoons between the barrier islands and the coast, the Karankawas gathered in settlements numbering up to four hundred to fish. But during the summer, when the fish population decreased, the Karankawas broke into much smaller groups, dispersed, and moved up to twenty-five miles inland to hunt white-tailed deer and bison on the prairies and gather hackberries and mustang grapes from river bottoms. As the Karankawas migrated seasonally to and from the coast, Tonkawa Indians...

Share