 When people think about Texas history, they think about this place, the Alamo. And sometimes that's all they know about Texas history, but in this class we're going to cover a lot more information. And you'll know at the end that there's more to Texas history than what happened here. This first lecture is divided up into two sections, the land and the people. And what we're going to do is look in this first set at the general physical characteristics of Texas. In the next part of the lecture, we'll look at some of the early people of Texas. Texas, they say, is big. And if we all we have to do is look at road map to see that Texas is a large, large place. In this lecture, we're going to look at an overview of Texas, the various regions that make up Texas, the rivers, the major rivers, aquifers, and some mineral wealth in Texas. All you have to do is look at these statistics to tell you that there is a lot to the state. It is the largest state in the 48 contiguous states. 254 counties, 800 miles from Brownsville to the top of Texas, and almost 800 miles east and west from Beaumont to El Paso. Texas has mountains in it. The highest peak is Guadalupe Peak in far west Texas, and it's almost at 9,000 feet above sea level. Of course, on the other extreme, you do have the coastal area, which is at sea level. So Texas is big and it's diverse. We look at the growing population. People have been moving to Texas increasingly, and they've been doing it throughout Texas's history. We look here from 1960 to 2014, and this is just a guesstimate based upon the numbers of people moving into the state. You can see that, especially since 2000, there has been a large increase, a large jumps in the population. But the population has been steadily growing. We have something in the neighborhood of 27 million people living in the state now. In 1960, it was at 10 million, so we have a significant number of people moving to Texas on a regular basis, and that changes everything from demographics to wealth to political bent. Let's look at the demographics based upon the last census. The largest cities, of course, are Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas. But if we look at the ethnicity of the people moving into these places, Texas is now majority-minority. You have 38% Hispanics, 12% African-American or black, and so all together, that's over half of the population. The other half of the population is more traditional white Texans. The more traditional population of white Texans is now less than 50%. And it's a young population. A third are below the age of 18, and only 10% or 11% are over the age of 65. Most are homeowners, and the median income is about $51,500 per year. A lot of people don't speak English, and you do have a lot of high school graduation. That's great, but as far as college, only about 26% of the population has a college degree. Texas is made up of four regions. If we come up from the coast, of course, you have the coastal region. Then you have the coastal plains, followed by the north-central plains, the Great Plains, and the basin and mountain regions. So you see the wide variety of different types of physiographic features in Texas. It's a big state, and there's a lot of diversity in the land. And this is going to play an important role in the type of wealth, the mineral wealth, and the type of animals that populate Texas. Texas is host to many rivers. We tend to think of Texas as being hot and dry and full of cattle and cowboys. That's not always the case. Texas does have a good number of rivers besides the rivers that form the border, the Sabine on the east, the Red on the north, and the Rio Grande on the south. You also have some historic rivers. The San Antonio River, of course, the La Vaca River, the Nueces, and the San Jacinto River. Besides water on the ground that we can see in rivers, there's also water underneath the ground. And this is another thing that many people tend to ignore. Texas has nine major aquifers, and additionally another 21 minor aquifers, and they cover a good three-quarters of the land. And you see in the map here where some of these aquifers are, and these are the names of some of those aquifers. So there's plenty of water underneath the ground. Also from beneath the ground, probably what Texas is best known for is its oil and gas fields. And we've been exploring gas and oil here in Texas for many, many years. The largest field is in West Texas. It's the Permian Basin field, and it's that red, green, and yellow field you see there in West Texas. And some of the major gas fields you see here as well, they run all over the state as do the major oil fields. So there's oil and gas aplenty in Texas, and Texas has made quite a bit of money off of those natural resources we have. Some other minerals are found in the ground as well. Almost $3.4 billion in non-fuel minerals. Some of these are very common. You have cement, stone, sand, and gravel, but also a lot of salt, lime, and Portland cement used for cement as well as masonry cement. So we're using our minerals as well besides just the oil and gas. Coming up out of the ground is another major crop for Texas, and that's our agriculture. We produce one quarter of American cotton in the United States, and that's quite a bit. It's a big industry, although we don't tend to think about it quite so much. Corn is also a billion-dollar industry. Lumber, of course, in our trees we have forests here in Texas, and then we're also growing grain like sorghum and wheat, and then other crops too, peanuts, hay, which is just cut grass, rice, and soybeans grow in Texas. Finally, let's look at the livestock industry. Texas is known for livestock, and so let's look and see what we really do. It's a $19 billion industry, and it's not just in cattle but in cattle byproducts like milk. You also have chickens and pigs and horses, mules, donkeys, the sheep and goat industry, and much of that is for wool as well as milk. It is a big, big business. We don't think often about fishing. $82 million annually from agriculture, that's our fishing industry, and then another $80 million from other animals that we raise in Texas. So that's a look at Texas and its physical features and the payoff from those physical features. Now let's look at some of the people. In this part of the lecture, we're going to look at some Native American people up until about 1600, the time that Europeans are actually coming to Texas and recording history. In 1983, archaeologists just north of Austin found a remains of a woman who died thousands and thousands of years ago. This is only one of four full skeletal remains found from this period in history. We call her the Leanderthal Lady, and this is a representation of what she might have looked like based upon forensic evidence. And here you see a drawing of her grave site and the actual excavation in recent times on the grave site. And those excavations are still ongoing. We think she was one of the first human beings or from the first group of people to live here in Texas. Texas's population dates back thousands and thousands of years. We have first the Paleo or Old Indians, and this is roughly about 10,000 to 6,000 BC. That's about 10 to 12,000 years ago. One of the things that we know about these people is they were skilled at making spear points. And the Clovis Point, which you see a picture of above, roughly about 10,000, 12,000 years ago, has been found in mastodon bones. We know it was for hunting large animals. The next major shift in spear point production was that of the Folsom Point, both of these are named after New Mexican finds. But the Folsom Point, roughly about 10,000 years ago, we see these points have gotten smaller and much more thin. And what we believe is that this represents a change in the type of animals that people were hunting. The bison were starting to become more plentiful, and the larger animals were starting to die off. But we do, based upon these findings, have a way of setting a baseline of when we think humans were in North America and in Texas. In the archaic period, we see the domestication of plants and animals, especially of the dog and of plants like corn. Corn is, we believe, a plant that originated in far west Texas. And you see on the map there the area on the Rio Grande where we think it first started. It's near a town called Presidio, and that site is some of the oldest continually cultivated farmland in Texas, largely due to the river that passes through it. And we look at the way that human beings have changed a plant that eventually gave us corn. In the late prehistoric period, this is from roughly about 700 AD to about 1600. During that about 800 year period, 900 year period, we see the development of cultures that we probably recognize. The Mayan from Central America that were very advanced, they had riding and math and astronomical advances. We didn't see the rise of the Puebloan people. In the area we call the Four Corners are an example of some of these groups. And there are buffalo kill spots, and these are places where they killed buffalo by running them off cliffs. We also see the Rock Art. And this is in the area of southern Colorado, northern New Mexico, northeastern Arizona, and southern Utah in that region, the Four Corners. Then in closer to Texas we see mound builders. And this were a group of people, we call the Catoan people, that ranged from east Texas all the way up the eastern seaboard, the Ohio, the Mississippi rivers. And they were skilled at building mounds, and we still have many of these mounds that exist today. The end of the Native American period and the beginning of the European period comes about in the early 1500s. We know that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. We've done that since we were children. But what that resulted in was an interest in return visits by Spanish and other Europeans into this New World region. Columbus at first was only in the Caribbean, but by 1519 interest had moved into the mainland of North America. And you see people like Hernan Cortez, Alonzo Beniera, who come in and map the Gulf Coast region. Cortez, who 1519 had conquered the Aztec nation. And then you also see a few years later, other expeditions. Out of one of the expeditions that was set to map the Florida Gulf Coast, the Navalles expedition, there was a shipwreck. And the only remaining survivors of that shipwreck were a group led by Alvar Nunez Caves de Devaca. He was shipwrecked somewhere near Galveston, we think. And he was finally rescued towards Baja California, or actually towards Central Mexico around 1536. And he brought back tales of the people who lived in North America and in Texas. What we see, these people were the historic citizens of Texas. They lived in the historic period, the period where there was Europeans actually write down tales about these people. And so in the East Texas, you have the remnants of the Catawin people. In Central Texas, you have some Catawins known specifically as Wichita, Takawa. In South Texas, the Coel Tecans and the Dumano. In the Gulf Coast region, the Caranquo, the Plains, you have the Apache and the Comanche. And in Eastern Texas, you have these Catawin people again, the Alabama, Cassata and Cherokee. Now these groups are living in Texas. The Alabama, Cassata live in Texas, although they are not native to Texas. You also had some Cherokee they were here, and they were not native to Texas either. In fact, at this point, no native Texas tribe lives in Texas. And here's a picture of Catawin mounds. Zebulon Pike was arrested while he was exploring Colorado. And he was brought back into New Mexico and later taken towards Nacodotus and released. And as he passed by, he passed by Catawin mounds, which is just outside of Nacodotus. And it's today a historical site, and he wrote about seeing some of these Catawin people living there. And that concludes this lecture about the native people living in Texas at the time of European contact. And we'll return to some of these people later on.