Lone Star (3 page)

Though Amerinds tamed the llama, alpaca, turkey, duck, guinea pig, and dog, again in one crucial field—animal domestication—they fell behind. They had good reason; in the New World the horse, pig, cow, and sheep did not exist.

Between 2500 b.c. and Columbian times, the use of corn spread northward. When the first white men came, the planting of maize had reached its geographic limits. But this great cultural revolution bypassed Texas, or rather, surrounded it on each side. The cause was geophysical, and obvious. For several hundred miles on either side of the Rio Grande the country was virtual desert—not "true" desert, like the Sahara or Kalahari, but Lower Sonoran plain, dry, dusty, almost waterless, with less than twenty inches of annual rainfall. When the tremendous Amerind invasion went north, it could have more easily marched through the southern part of Hell than crossed South Texas.

But agriculture crept up the spine of Mexico and created a pallid reflection of Aztec splendor among the Uto-Aztecan peoples of the Rocky Mountain system. On the high plateaus of New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado the Puebloan culture evolved, one of the two true barbaric civilizations of North America. The Puebloans—again, there was a series of tribes and peoples, at different times and over a wide area—farmed cotton and corn, beans, tobacco, and squash. They also ate sunflower seeds. They built spacious houses out of slabs of stone, which they chinked with adobe and covered with hides or thatch. They made beautiful ornaments and garments and pottery. They discovered social organization; both men and women worked in the fields. The practice and notion of war declined in their culture, and the peaceful farmer, rather than the savage warrior, became the nucleus of society. They organized colorful pageants and ceremonials; the Puebloans rose out of savagery to barbaric civilization.

About a.d. 1000 the Pueblo (the word comes from the Spanish for "village") culture seemed to expand. Versions of it spread into the High Plains of Texas, and a Puebloan tribe built fine stone dwellings along the Canadian in the Panhandle. Other feelers of civilization inched down the Rio Grande into the Trans-Pecos region. Here, on the ruins of other semiagricultural tribes, such as the cave-living Basket Makers, the Jumanos put together a definite, though struggling, Amerind nation. But here, as on the edge of the Great Plains far to the north, the agricultural advance stopped. The Puebloan remained a civilization of the upper Rio Grande.

Meantime, far to the east, certain events still clouded in mystery were taking place. The archeology of the American Southeast is much less advanced than that of the Southwest; the wet climate and the inundation of the white man destroyed sites and ancient evidence still preserved in the thinly settled, arid High Plains. But around the year 500 of the Christian Era, a vital new Amerind culture was spreading up from the Mississippi basin. It began on the Gulf of Mexico, reached the Great Lakes, and followed the curve of the sea so far as the forests ran. Thus, it spilled over into Texas, crossing the Sabine with the western edge of the great Southern pine forest. This barbaric civilization has been called the Mound Builder, from the eroding remnants of the immense earthen pyramids they left behind.

The Mount Builders showed strong Mexican cultural influences. Otherwise, they were a Circum-Caribbean Amerind culture, building pole houses not unlike those found on the islands or the coasts of Venezuela. It seems likely they entered the present United States by water, though archeologists dispute this. No evidence of their passage across Texas has yet been found. The Mount Builders raised dirt pyramids fifty feet high, faced them with log stairs, and erected temples—presumably to a sun-god—at the top. The similarity to the Mexic culture is unmistakable; the Mound Builders used mud and logs because they lived in a country with little stone. The Amerinds also wore feathered robes, and they were divided sharply by class; their chieftains were borne about on litters, like Aztec or Mayan lords. The smell of the Middle
 

American civilization lies all across this Mississippi pattern, as archeologists have described it.

Although this new culture spread widely along the Gulf and up the Mississippi, something happened to it long before the Europeans came. This reinforces the idea of invasion; the Mound Builder culture was foreign, and it did not quite take root in a vastly different land. But in modern times it left behind a barbarian civilization within the borders of historic Texas, the Caddo Confederacies of the Piney Woods, once the most numerous and powerful Indians within the state.

A haunting feeling of having descended from something greater still pervaded the Caddo nation when the first Europeans arrived. It was not truly indigenous to Texas; it faced East rather than West, and it halted abruptly where the pine woods ended, far short of the central plains. The Caddoan language, even, was linguistically bound not to the prairies, but to the lower Yazoo. Caddos resembled Choctaws, Cherokees, and Creeks; they unquestionably had a common cultural ancestor.

The Caddoan peoples—there were two great confederacies, the Hasinai and the Kadohadacho, and more than two dozen tribes—still maintained the forms not of a blood kinship but of a former political ascendancy. There was a genuine bureaucracy: minor officials, subchiefs, tribal chiefs, who reported to each other, and finally, to the great chief of all the tribes, the Grand Caddi. They had a priesthood, which outranked the secular officialdom in standing.

The high priest, or Xinesi, was responsible for the eternal flame in the central Caddo temple. All the various tribal temple fires had to be lit from this central, holy flame, a pontifical organization with recognizable manifestations.

The Caddoans lived in a country of abundant rain, with rich soils. They enjoyed complete economic self-sufficiency; they hunted game much as the Anglo-Saxon settlers did, more as a supplement than a staple. They grew two varieties of corn and a whole assortment of vegetables, including pole beans. They lived in small villages, made up of large timbered houses, domed and thatched. These houses were airy and comfortable, furnished with colored rugs, baskets, and pottery. The villages were organized on a communal-kinship basis; both men and women worked the soil, and house-raisings were public affairs.

The Caddoans made bows of a superior wood, Osage orange or bois d'arc, which was greatly in demand on the plains and in the far west. They must have carried on an extensive commerce with the west, because Puebloan cottons and pottery, as well as Plains buffalo hides, were often found in their houses. In this commerce the Jumanos of the Trans-Pecos acted as middlemen. Caddos occasionally hunted the bison, but they had no great enthusiasm for moving out on the plains. War had declined among the confederacies, and society no longer revolved about the cult of the warrior, as it had in the Archaic Age. The village official, the priest, or the peaceful husband had become the social ideal. These had developed into hereditary classes.

These peaceful Amerinds had developed other traits, or had degenerated them, showing civilized origin. Though they no longer built temples or pyramids to the sun-god—or even knew why these once were built—they practiced a ritual torture unknown to North American tribes. Captives were stretched on racks to face the morning and evening sun; the ritual, and torture, was carried on for days, before the prisoners were killed and eaten, not for food, but ceremonially. The Caddos had torments far more exquisite, and lengthy, than the fiendish, savage, but relatively quick executions of the Plains Indians.

Unlike other Amerinds, the Caddoans shed tears easily. They wept and wailed on almost every occasion, especially meeting or parting. White enemies were often warned of an impending massacre, in historic times, by the fact that the Caddos went into sobs and fits of weeping. Uniquely, the Caddos mourned their victims while they prepared to kill them.

The cult of courage, at the base of most Amerind culture, was not important to the Caddos. A warrior who triumphed, or gained loot by treachery or stealth, or who fled the scene of battle with some gain, was still a hero. The Caddoan practice of war, however, was not really sophisticated: it was replete with moves, actions, delays, and ceremonials that no longer made sense even to the participants; they were fixed by custom. All war preparations, for example, required eight days, and ended with a ceremonial burning of a house. In all this can be sensed the dead hand of a former military tradition—much as the love of close-order drill has persisted in European armies in the Atomic Age.

Because they were agricultural and war was no longer a central part of their culture, the Caddoan tribes were remarkably amiable to white men in the first years of contact, with disastrous results to themselves. It was not accidental, though ironic, that the first French and Spanish who encountered Caddos appreciated them more, found their culture more related to theirs than that of any other Texas Amerind, and also destroyed them most easily.

Between the Puebloan civilization of the upper Rio Grande and the decadent barbaric grandeur of the Sabine Hasinai Confederacy, the vast reaches of Texas remained what anthropologists call with some justice a cultural sink. Mexic and Circum-Caribbean influences reached Texas, but only on the fringes. On the hot, dry, harsh sweeps of the high mesas, the limestone plateaus, and the rolling coastal savannah, the numerous tribes never culturally left the Amerind Archaic Age.

Racially all Texas Indians were quite similar, except for minor differences of height and skin shade. In their tribal customs, habits, and economies, however, they were as differentiated as Frenchmen and Chinese. Nor were the land and peoples stable.

It is impossible to reconstruct the history of these peoples with any accuracy, and since a majority of the Texas tribes died out or had decayed to impotency by early historic times, their history had little importance to what came after. Its pattern merely suggests a continuing, endless rhythm of periodic aggression from the north, with sporadic internecine warfare at all times.

South of the Caddo Confederacies, along the Gulf Coast, lived a number of small Atakapan tribes. These were a wretched reflection of the Caddos in some respects; their name was a Choctaw word for "man-eater."

Further south along the coast, from Galveston to Corpus Christi bays, the Karankawa tribes had a more formidable reputation as cannibals—though their man-eating seems to have been as much of a ritual nature as for dietary benefit. This people early acquired a name for peculiar savagery, as well as bestiality. An early Spanish traveler wrote: "They are cruel, inhuman, and ferocious. When one nation makes war with another, the one that conquers puts all the old men and old women to the knife and carries off the little children for food to eat on the way; the other children are sold . . . "

Several Spaniards described Karankawa tortures and cannibal feasts—though naturally none of these men were eyewitnesses. The most notable fact about the Karankawas was that they avoided all contact with Europeans; they refused to cooperate with them in any way, and attacked any incursion of their territory with fury. In return, no Amerind tribe was ever described in worse terms or exterminated with greater relish or sense of justification.

West of Karankawa country, on a line ranging through San Antonio to Del Rio and south to the mouth of the Rio Grande, was the territory of a great number of small bands of Coahuiltecans. This was cactus and brush country, arid, rolling stretches of semidesert, dry savannah at its best, which the Spanish called
brasada
or
monte
. The bison did not come below the Balcones Scarp because of the heat, and there were no large game animals in sufficient numbers to support a true hunting economy. Few regions of America were less bountiful for primitive man, without irrigation techniques or the use of domesticated cattle. The Coahuiltecan culture was one of digging and grubbing, with an occasional economic windfall such as a jackrabbit in the pot.

Yet, such is human ingenuity that no other species ever used the resources of a country more fully: the Coahuiltecans consumed spiders, ant eggs, lizards, rattlesnakes, worms, insects, rotting wood, and deer dung. They caught fish when they were beside a stream, roasted them whole, then set them in the sun for several days, collecting flies and maggots. The enriched food was eaten with gusto. They utilized almost every plant that grew in South Texas. They made flour from agave bulbs, sotol, lechuguilla, and maguey. They roasted mesquite beans, and ate these with side orders of earth. One peculiar source of food—which a Spaniard Cabeza de Vaca described as "indescribable"—was the Second Harvest: whole seeds and similar items picked out of human feces, cooked and chewed.

The Coahuiltecans also discovered uses for local plants not wholly scorned by civilized man. They concocted a drink, mescal, from maguey leaves. This was intoxicating, and, in a slightly refined form, is the principal intoxicant of the Mexican peasantry today. The Coahuiltecans also dissolved ground red Texas laurel beans in mescal, and produced real firewater. They ate the fruit of the prickly pear, and from another cactus, peyote, they produced what can only be called a very unusual tea.

These tribes were all completely nomadic, moving constantly, erecting only temporary shelters of mud, skins, or brush. They did not seek war, but fought if their territory was violated. The tribes or bands were all patrilineal, but band fought band. They frequently killed female or girl-child captives, and practiced infanticide, because, in their eyes, the land was already overpopulated.

Inhabiting, for the Amerinds, the least fruitful part of Texas, the Coahuiltecans perhaps had a more glorious history in former times. They were of Hokan linguistic stock, and the only other Hokan, or Yuma, tribes in modern centuries lived in California. Paleontologists have envisioned a broad band of Hokan peoples, stretching from Pacific to Gulf at one time, split by waves of hardier Uto-Aztecans, who appropriated the southern sierras and poured into Mexico in prehistoric eras. The Hokan-speaking tribes, perhaps, were driven into brutal, inhospitable country—South Texas and the similar Arizona-California border. Certainly, no Amerind people would have settled there by choice.