Europeans, discovering the huge linked continents of North and South America, called the natives by several names. Christopher Columbus used the name “Indians” to support the rigorously held idea that he had found parts of Asia, perhaps the East Indies. This name stuck.

European and United States history, government reports, and narrative fiction has, until recent times, spoken of “Indians,” “Indian affairs,” or “natives.” “Indians” or “Native Americans” are terms now accepted by many of the people themselves..

Native Americans are not and never were a single culture; they were much more diverse than the peoples of Europe.

The early natives passed on their stories and traditions orally and through such means as rock art. Recorded historical accounts of Native Americans have been interpreted by anthropologists and archaeologists in contemporary times and in European terms and not usually by the natives themselves.

More is known about some cultures than about others; certain regions of Texas such as the lower Pecos and the trans-Pecos provide more to the story because of well-preserved artifacts such as potsherds, sandals, arrow points, scrapers, needles, ornaments, basket shreds, grinding stones, and even the bones of the people themselves. Other areas provide fewer clues. Still, much is known.

The actual number of Indians in the Texas area was never great, estimated at 45,000 before written history to only a few thousand in the mid-19th century.

In Texas at least four cultural areas of the Indian met and, to some degree, blended: Western Gulf, Southeast, Southwest, and Plains. Within these huge categories defined by Europeans were groups with wide variety in cultural patterns and languages. All were linked by trade and competition, commonalities and conflicts. They were as diverse as the lands they occupied.

The groups, called bands or tribes by outsiders, were known by names which were approximations of what the people called themselves or, on occasion, location names transliterated into Spanish and French and English.

Indians of the Western Gulf—northeastern Mexico and the Texas coastal plains south of San Antonio—were people who hunted and foraged for a living. . .as far as we know. Men wore little or no clothing much of the year; women wore simple skirts of buckskin. Homes were small domes of bent saplings or cane with skin or woven covers. Their possessions—tools, containers, storage vessels, bedding, weapons, packs, toys—seem to have been minimal.

Fish and game animals provided food, supplemented by wild plants. Along the coast these people were known as the Karankawas and were perhaps the first natives encountered by the Spanish in present Texas. Other nomadic groups lived inland to the west and north as far as present San Antonio.

The cultural area of Southeastern natives stretched from the Atlantic Coast past the Trinity River in Texas. The Caddos and Atakapans were the most numerous in the part that was to become Texas. From the Caddos Spanish explorers recorded a word perhaps pronounced “tayshas,” which referred to friends or allies. The Spanish made reference to “los Texas” and probably first used the word as an area name.

The Caddos had the most complex culture of Texas natives, although their civilization was in decline even before the arrival of Europeans. They built efficient and durable wood-framed, thatched homes and ceremonial centers, constructed impressive burial mounds, and created professional work areas. They were farmers with ranked social orders and elaborate belief systems.

The natives of the present trans-Pecos area were certainly on the edge of the influence of the huge Southwest Pueblo centers. Most lived near rivers and farmed; some built one-story thatched mud-and-river-cane buildings. Their crops of beans, corn, peppers, and squash were adopted by the Spanish. More is known about the peoples of the lower Pecos, who lived in dry rock shelters, in a climate which helped preserve their belongings for centuries.

Yet, group names in the Southwest remain uncertain. For one reason, the Spanish did not explore the area in detail and often applied the same name to different groups. The word “Jumano,” for example, referred to several groups in Texas's trans-Pecos and in Arizona and New Mexico. One Jumano group in Texas hunted buffalo on the Southern Plains and was Plains Indian in nature. Another Jumano group—or the same people at different times—lived in a cluster of villages centered on the confluence of the Rio Grande and Rio Concho and was distantly Puebloan in culture.

Although the Spanish were wide-ranging enough not to stereotype the natives, except as natives, Plains Indians became “The Indians” to many Anglo-American Texans.

Plains cultures extended fully across the Llano Estacado and Edwards Plateau...and into other areas when the Plains Inians wished. These groups, including Apaches, Kiowas, Kiowa-Apaches, Comanches, Wichitas, and Tonkawas, were hunters and warriors by way of life and reputation.

These groups, having acquired horses and firearms, became mounted warrior societies. For a time, they excelled against both Europeans and other native groups. Although some bands did farm, most were highly mobile and very dependent on the main natural resource—buffalo. Not always friendly among themselves, intertribal warfare changed their boundaries often. But the main pressure to move came from Spanish settlement to the south and Anglo occupation from the east.

Thus, overlapping native cultures of the Plains were driven together and displaced, often shifted more than a thousand miles. With the arrival of the Spanish and, later, the relatively immense number of Anglo-American settlers, the native story changes to one of reaction. European settlement, intentionally and unintentionally, literally exterminated native cultures. “European settlement” meant land ownership, more efficient forms of farming and hunting, large numbers of people, the introduction of new, often fatal diseases, and the ability to use technology and religion to their advantage in attempts to usurp the land—backed by the cavalry and Texas Rangers. Indians were neither technologically equipped nor numerous enough to oppose the Europeans. They tried.

The Spanish, never as effective as Anglos against Indians in a military sense, nevertheless brought in the mission system in an attempt to alter native cultures. To some degree, this succeeded. Anglos were more pure conquerors who pushed the Indians out or killed them. Many exceptions exist; the generality was the rule.

From the early 19th century, Texas became a crossroads for Indians as well as Europeans. Tribal groups and shattered remnants of cultures crossed the land: Cheyennes, Osages, Pawnees, Kickapoos, Navajos, Pueblos, Apaches, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, Cherokees, Delawares, Shawnees, Biloxis, Quapaws, Yaquis, mixed heritages such as the black Seminoles, and scores of others.

Texas became a battlefield many a time—not always native versus European—but, during the Mexican and Civil Wars and in the late 19th century, Indian raids against the newcomers became almost common. To settlers on a night of the Comanche Moon, the western frontier was as close as ten miles west of Austin. With firearms and the horse, the Plains Indians, in particular, became formidable. But, ultimately, the struggle was one-sided.

Texas set up reserves for a short time, reservations under state jurisdiction because Texas retained all public land when joining the United States as an independent nation. The desirability of the land soon brought the effort to an end. Natives who remained in Texas were taken into Indian Territory (future Oklahoma), driven into northern Mexico, or killed. A few adopted a profile low enough for survival. Fewer still served as Army scouts and Ranger guides, but their allegiance made little difference in the long run.

Three small groups stayed in Texas, at first on private land, then on donated or purchased land later expanded into “reservations.” None originally lived in the area of modern Texas. Fragments of Alabama and Coushatta groups still live near Woodville, and a group of Tiguas lives southeast of downtown El Paso in Ysleta. The latter are descendants of Pueblos who followed the Spaniards south from New Mexico over three centuries ago. These groups have a strong tribal organization and welcome tourists to displays, activities, and museums. Recently, remnants of the Kickapoo tribe have been recognized as a native group and have been granted land near the Rio Grande at El Indio.

Other dispersed groups and descendants remain in Texas, a few trying to carry on the traditions of their ancestors: black Seminoles can still be found, especially in South Texas; some Cherokees are in rural East Texas, descendants of those few who successfully hid for several generations; Caddos also live in East Texas; and Yaquis still live on both sides of the Rio Grande since an earlier deportation from northwestern Mexico.

In modern times the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs brought Indians from all over the continent to Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Programs of the Field Employment Assistance Office, now discarded, placed them in urban centers with the goal of their entering the world that had surrounded them.

In Texas today some 18,000 people are listed as Native American; many of these are not "native" to the immediate area. Perhaps 200,000 claim mixed blood. Earlier, few individuals would admit to mixed blood. In recent years the status has become more socially acceptable, even a source of pride.

For the past two or three generations in Texas, the older— and for the most part destroyed—native cultures have been studied as well as they can be. Native Americans have entered all forms of modern employment, some giving up what remains of their heritage and others trying to incorporate that heritage, if not the totally lost ways of life. Many have succeeded in this transition.

A few things yet remain. Native American oral (and, lately, written) literatures are now seen as worthwhile creations. In some Indian literature, this story is told from the native viewpoint, not in the cadences of European scholarship. But both versions are true.