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Well, I'll get back to the main stream Texas story eventually, meanwhile I'm mining all the minor back stories, usually glossed over or skipped over entire....

To REALLY understand the History of Texas you have to understand that demographics, sheer numbers, trumps all else. The driving force behind the creation of Texas was the hordes of American immigrants swamping all else.

A brief recap of the non-Indian Texas population....

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ulc01

1807 ~ 7,000
1830 - 20,000
1836 ~ 50,000
1845 - 125,000
1850 - 200,000+
1860 - 600,000+

Total Indian population? I'm gonna float a WAG of about 30,000 in 1830 (of which about 20,000 of which were Comanches), dwindling rapidly thereafter.

If we are talking the Eastern Tribes wandering around the state, a 1,000 total of any one tribe is a lot, so I suppose they ARE insignificant in the main flow of Texas history, but along with several smaller local groups and along with maybe 7-10,000 Tejanos they WERE here, and were moving pretty freely all over Texas. In short, the Texians did not arrive to find a vaccuum, nor an untrammelled, unknown wilderness.

Turns out an invaluable source for those interested in stuff like this are the writings of one Jean Louis Berlandier, a Frenchman in Mexican service who travelled extensively in Texas in the late 1820's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Berlandier

Specifically, what he left us are drawings of what Indians in Texas looked like in 1828. Berlandier also did get to go on a Comanche-guided buffalo and bear hunt in the unspoiled Texas Hill Country of that day (geeze, what would folks here pay to go on that hunt today if it were possible? )

Here are two of his drawings of Comanches, no word of the significance of the feathery outfits of the second two...







On the coast in the Corpus region, the Cocos, a subgroup of the fierce Karankawa (although sources other than Texian describe them in more benevolent terms)...




..and Karankawas on the coast further east. They had a long tradition of trade with the French and others by this time, note the powder horn, pouch and probable firearm in the case on the ground...



..and just to indicate Berlandier was not averse to painting women as bare breasted, here's his Tonkawa portrait...



He also painted one of the reclusive Kickapoo, perhaps typically retro in his old-style Eastern Woodland head pluck and roach, and note the firearm, likely a rifle....




And one of the more obscure groups, the Carizo, from along the Lower Rio Grande Valley and points south, long associated with the Mexican settlements. Browsing around you'll find that these guys were always ready to go out against their Comanche enemies.

Interesting that the Comanches never succeeded in wiping guys like this out, not even the Tonkawas, who were a tremendous thorn in their side up until the very end, this despite the fact that Comanche musta outnumbered Tonk by at least ten to one.

Here's Brlandier's Carizo's, said Indians trading game to the Rio Grande settlements as well as scouting services againt their mutual Comanche enemies....

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v148/Sharpshin/frontierfolk/berlandier-carrizo-164.jpg[/img]

...and from the illustration it appears that Carizo women were much like those of modern times

Speaking of providing protection, here's Berlandier's painting of a Cherokee couple, much less retro than the Kickapoos....

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v148/Sharpshin/frontierfolk/6858268_5_l.jpg[/img]

Here's the interesting part, this from a remarkably well-referenced and comprehensive link provided by the National Park Service (specific to the Del Rio, Lake Amistad area)....

http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/amis/aspr-34/chap3.htm

As early as 1807, the Cherokee visited Nachitoches, and by 1813, several large Cherokee groups were camped on the Trinity River below Nacogdoches. A few years later, they occupied a series of villages on the upper Neches and Angelina Rivers and by 1833 those villages held a population of ca. 800.

That same year, Duwali (a prominent Cherokee chief) traveled to San Antonio and later to Monclova to cement the Texas Cherokee's already warm relationship with the Mexican government.

Indians called Chiraquies and Cariticas were found in the vicinity of Laredo (1826) and along the Colorado River (Berlandier 1828) during the early nineteenth century.

Little information is provided in either account, although, in the former, Gutierrez de Lara stated that the Chiraquis were assisting the Mexicans by fighting hostile Indians around the Laredo area.


So, about fifteen years years before their formal removal from Georgia on the Trail of Tears, and a full ten years before the Alamo, Cherokees in Texas (and Shawnees also) were already providing protection to the inhabitants of distant Laredo against raiding Comanches.

A tradition of contracted services that would still be in effect thirty years later when the Seminoles, Black Seminoles and Kickapoos relocated from Oklahoma to the region south of Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras.

Birdwatcher