I was refering to the indigenous tribes of Texas. With few exceptions, they bore little resemblance to the farming, gathering tribes of the east.
Hard to know really, tho' one could draw a lot of analogies between the Caddo Confederation and the famous Eastern Tribes, this true of almost any agriculutural Texas group. Even tbe infamously cannibalistic Tonkawa might have eaten less people than the Mohawks did in their day.
Even though we know it is so, it is still hard to wrap one's mind around the impact and scale of the epidemics. From an estimated TWENTY MILLION deaths in Central America alone in the sixty years after Cortez, to the piles of bones encountered by the Pilgrims ("like a new Golgotha") up in Massachusetts.
Subsequent to the Florida-to-Tennessee De Soto Expedition in the Sixteenth Century it has been estmated that Native populations of entire Southeast at the time of our own Frontier 200 years later were still only about 20% of what they had been when De Soto arrived. The Cherokees and the Creeks both assembled themselves as identifiable Tribal entities from the remnants of the first epidemics, neither being present as "tribes" at first contact.
Add to that the exponential nature of the American population increase: That hypothetical 70 year-old Texas Delaware woman in 1820 could indeed have been born 1,400 miles away on the Delaware, just 80 miles as the crow flies from Manhattan. Most all 1,400 miles between there and Texas being occupied by White folk in that seventy year period.
HER hypothetical 70 year-old grandmother back on the Delaware (who would have been born in 1680) would have had the frontier move back about a mere 150 miles or so in her own lifetime.
Hard to say WHAT the Texas tribes would have been like compared to the Eastern, by that time they were decimated by a further 70-80 years of diseases and faced with a regular steamroller of White settlement.
Earlier in history, when the Frontier was more static, there was a huge amount of peaceful cultural exchange occurring between wars. Hence by the mid-18th Century the aforementioned Eastern tribes were living in wooden cabins, sometimes of sawn lumber, with actual glass in the windows and stone chimneys. Their tools, farming implements and weaponry too were about on a par with the White side of the Frontier.
All this as a result of decades of peaceable exchange and some degree of intermarriage.
This process resulting by the 1820's in such famously literate and organized Tribes as the Cherokees (between bouts of White baby tossing when Houston weren't around I mean). The most remarkable result of this process though I am aware of is a written pact of solidarity between the Onieda Indians of New York State and their Palatine German neighbors.
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/nyh/89.2/preston.htmlThe outcome of THAT relationship being the Oneida's actually splitting from their own League of the Iroquois and siding with their Colonial neighbors during the Rev War, largely on account of their by then 60-year bond of friendship with the Palatines.
By the 1830's however, the Frontier was moving at breakneck speed, an abrupt avalanch of settlement, crushing everthing in its path. And a bewildering array of tribal remants getting flattened here in Texas. In 1837 the Indian Affairs Commission of the fledgling Texas Republic identified the following Indian tribes as residing within East and Central Texas...
Abadache, Alabama, Anadarko, Ayish, Biloxi, Caddo, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Comanche, Coushatta, Delaware, Huawani, Ioni, Karankawa, Kichai, Kickapoo, Lipan, Menomini, Muscogee, Nacodoche, Pawnee, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Tawakoni, Tonkawa, Towash and Waco.
Good luck in weeding out the natives.
As for what is was like to be an Indian in East Texas in those years, the Sabine strip was long a famously lawless place, and with hordes of White folks on top of everything else moving in constantly, anything could and did happen, most of it awful.
Fer example what REALLY set off the Caddos was the killing of their prominent head man Canoma, who, while retrieving stolen horses for one Texas settlement, was tied to a tree and shot by the Ranging Company from another Texas settlement, one of these Rangers cutting a razor strap from the skin on his back.
No more surreal really that what came out of Parker's Fort. At least three expeditions by mounted Ranging Companies from that place, which at one time housed SEVENTY-SIX inhabitants. Reading up on these expeditions one gets the distinct impression the Ranging Companies basically shot whoever they ran into (see "
Savage Frontier: Volume 1 1835-1837" 2002). Pretty uch exactly as they would do in Mexico during that war.
Ordered at one point NOT to attack the Wacos, the Parker's Fort crew did attack at least one bunch and capture a Waco mother and child. That night the despairing mother killed her infant then stabbed herself. In the morning the Rangers, finding her still alive, cut her head off with a butcher knife. (Relevant to point out here that accounts have Wacos along with those Comanches that plundered Parker's Fort the following year).
Most surreal of all, one of the Ranging Company operating out of the Fort claimed he had a smallpox sample, so they captured a guy from some unidentified tribe, injected him as best they could, and let him go.
Like other putative or otherwise actually documented efforts towards that end along our Frontier, it is hard to tell if it took hold. Indians were dying so fast from diseases anyway it would be hard to beat Mother Nature on that score.
Anyhoo... funny how Fehrenbach and Gwynne both skip that part.
Birdwatcher
