Texas Gulf Coast Stories

Author

INTRODUCTION

I use the word stories in the title of this book in the sense of short, evocative sketches or episodes in a larger work. The larger work is the story of the Texas Gulf Coast from its days as a Spanish colony in the 1700s through its joining the United States in the 1800s. My geographical focus has been on the region of the middle Texas coast known, at least locally, as the Coastal Bend. My historical focus has been on the episodes in the experiences of the people who lived here or came here, sometimes by way of a shipwreck.

I have tried to discover the stories less often told or those that are different from the commonly accepted version. I have not attempted to be a revisionist of textbook Texas history but rather have looked at some of the details that were once known but have more or less been forgotten. The choice of stories presented here represents only my own interests and my fascination with the rich history of this area. I have made no attempt at being comprehensive, but I have made an effort at being factual, especially with regard to dates. All of the stories presented here have a basis in the historical records of the Coastal Bend, although a few have been identified as tales or legends. My intent is to pique interest, inform and, in a few cases, surprise my readers.

The first part deals with stories of the Karankawa Indians and their neighbors, while the second part treats the early Spanish and French explorers and the Anglo-European colonists. The early Spanish missions and the first Coastal Bend ports and towns are the subjects of the third part. The fourth part treats some aspects of the Texas War for Independence. The fifth part deals with a variety of subjects, including shipwrecked and buried treasures and the domino game called Texas 42.

PART 1

KARANKAWA AND OTHER INDIANS

THE KARANKAWA WERE TALL, TATTOOED AND PIERCED

The Karankawa Indians were quite an apparition when first encountered by the Spanish and French explorers in the 1500s–1700s and by the Anglo-European immigrants in the 1800s. The first European to see the Karankawa was Cabeza de Vaca in 1528. Shipwrecked on the Gulf Coast, he lived among them for six years and described their appearance in his retrospective account when he returned to Spain in 1542. Subsequently, they were described in a succession of first encounters by La Salle’s lieutenant, Henri Joutel, in 1687, Fray Gaspar Jose de Solis in 1767, Stephen F. Austin in 1822 and Jean Louis Berlandier in 1830.

The first thing noticeable was how tall the Karankawa males were, between six and seven feet tall, with beautiful musculature. By contrast, the women were short and stout. The second thing that hit the observers was their sickening stench. The Karankawa coated themselves with an evil-smelling mix of alligator fat, shark oil and dirt to ward off mosquitoes. You might be able to smell a Karankawa before you saw him. The men wore little or nothing in the way of clothing, a breechcloth at most, and no moccasins. The women were clad in skirts of Spanish moss or deerskin, with no tops. The children went naked.

The scant coverings allowed their tattoos and body piercing to be very evident. Cabeza De Vaca said, They [the men] had a piece of cane inserted through their lower lip and reeds through their nipples from side to side about one foot long. They had multicolored splotches on their faces and wild tattoos on other parts of their bodies. The facial tattoos were described as consisting of a blue circle over each cheekbone, a single line at the corner of each eye, double lines at the corners of the mouth and three vertical lines on the chin. The women were marked like the men with the addition of concentric circles around the breasts. A girl also received additional tattoos when she married.

Drawing of the tribal male Karankawa pattern of tattoos and piercings. Original artwork by Jeannie Massey Woods, Bayside, Texas.

Karankawa children were tattooed soon after birth. Six French children were spared when all of the adult colonists were massacred at La Salle’s Fort St. Louis in 1689. Four of these children belonged to the Talon family. They lived with the Karankawa until their ransom in 1690. They were tattooed with the Karankawa tribal pattern soon after their capture in a painful process carried out with a quill or a thorn and soot. These marks stayed with them for life, but the Talon children held no ill will toward the Karankawa. Their accounts provided much firsthand information about the life ways of the Karankawa and their neighbors.

The hair of the Karankawa women was long and tied in the back, with care being taken to part it carefully on the head. The Karankawa men shaved their heads except for a patch of hair long enough to be braided on the top according to Joutel. For a festival, the men might put feathers or red-tinted goose down in their hair. Jewelry was worn in the form of bracelets and necklaces of shells, glass beads and discs of metal. Still, the total effect was powerful, as an early Texas settler, Noah Smithwick, said: They were the most savage looking human beings I ever saw.

SCALPING, WAR TROPHIES AND RITUAL CANNIBALISM

The Karankawa were vilified in their time as being cannibals, and there were several firsthand accounts of this by Europeans. The Karankawa and many other Indian tribes in America were known to scalp their dead or incapacitated enemies, although the scalping itself did not always prove fatal. These practices terrified and repulsed the early European settlers in America and perhaps seemed an aberration of human nature—or, at the least, barbaric behavior.

Scalping has a very long history. The first account of scalping was written in 440 BC by the Greek historian Herodotus about the practice among the Scythians. Later, scalping was noted in Europe in wars between the Visigoths, Franks and Anglo-Saxons in the 800s. Scalping was practiced by the indigenes in North America before the arrival of the Europeans. A recent osteological study for evidence of prehistoric scalping in Texas examined eight hundred skulls from all regions of Texas. Only three of the skulls showed evidence of scalping, and all were from the prehistoric period and pre-European period of AD 700 to 1500. Therefore, scalping existed but was not widely practiced in prehistoric Texas.

Scalping was also present in other areas of North America when the early explorers arrived. However, the practice may have been encouraged by the European colonists in the early colonial wars. For example, in the French and Indian War of the 1750s, the French Canadians paid a bounty for scalps whether from white or native enemies. In 1744, the government of Massachusetts Colony paid for the scalps of Indian men, women and children. So the scalpers included both Indians and American frontiersmen.

Trophy-taking in war from a defeated enemy also has a long history, and while it was not universal, it was very widespread. Early on, decapitation was the preferred practice, and the head was often cured or mummified to be used in rituals. A quicker way was to scalp: the knee was placed between the shoulder blades of the person on the ground, a long arc was cut in the front of the scalp and the hair was pulled straight back. While the scalp was usually processed and used in displays or rituals, other body parts such as ears and fingers were also taken.

Ritual cannibalism was practiced in the same way as trophy-taking; it was a way of expressing power over a defeated enemy. Ritual cannibalism is distinguished from cannibalism for sustenance because it is always practiced on a person outside your group. When Cabeza de Vaca and the other shipwrecked Spaniards resorted to cannibalism of their dead comrades in order to survive the winter of 1528, the Karankawa were repulsed. Yet the Karankawa had no problem with eating their enemies in a victory ceremony. But they were not unique in this. The historian T.R. Fehrenbach in Lone Star notes, All Texas tribes…except the Comanche, practiced at least some form of ritual cannibalism.

CULTURE CLASH QUASI COMPLETE

The clash of cultures between the European immigrants and the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas was so wide and deep as to be certain to cause conflict. The cultural differences between the English, French, Spanish and Dutch seemed large to the Europeans but paled by comparison with those of the Indians. Between the various Indian groups, the differences were also great but mostly invisible to the Europeans. However, what did become readily apparent to the Europeans was the rivalry and hatred that existed between most of the Indian bands, which were used advantageously by the European (e.g., the use of the Apache as scouts in punitive raids against their enemy, the Comanche).

One huge source of trouble were the different concepts of the individual’s private ownership of land. The desire to own their own piece of land was a primary motivator for the Europeans, coming from a crowded agrarian culture. The Indians belonged to a hunter-gatherer way of life, with limited and rudimentary agriculture. The Indians thought of land and its resources as being held in common by their band. While a settler might build his house next to a spring and consider it his, an Indian would think of the spring as belonging to everyone. However, an Indian band’s territory (e.g., the Comancheria) would be defended to the death against any intruders. The Indians might share a part of their territory, but the idea of selling the land was not a part of their worldview.

The social organization of the Indians was based on the extended family, a group of fifteen to twenty-five people. This is the group with which an individual would identify. The family groups might camp or hunt with other family groups with whom they shared language and customs. Each family group would have its own elders or leader, but an assembly of groups would not generally have a primary leader. There was certainly no sense of identity with other Indian groups. Indian names for themselves would usually translate to the people, and the name for others often translated to enemy. Being used to only small groups, the Indians could not imagine the numbers of Europeans who would want to settle in their territory. Because of their small numbers, Indians were much more sensitive to casualties in battle.

Indian society was fairly egalitarian, but the division of labor between men and women was very clear. Men were the warriors and hunters, and the women did everything else. The reward system for the men was based on their prowess as warriors and hunters, and