Coahuiltecan

Coahuiltecan is a collective name for the many small hunter-gatherer peoples who lived in the dry brush country of southern Texas and north-eastern Mexico, astride the Rio Grande. They never formed a single nation: Spanish records name more than 1,000 bands, speaking several languages that may not have been related. Under Spanish rule, through epidemics and mission life, most of these groups were absorbed into the Hispanic and mestizo population by the early 19th century, but some families kept their heritage, and several organisations in Texas today claim Coahuiltecan descent.

The name was coined by the Spanish from the province of Coahuila, where they first met these peoples, and ultimately comes from Nahuatl. Their country lay mostly below an imagined line drawn from the mouth of the Guadalupe River through San Antonio to Del Rio, and southward towards Monclova, Monterrey and the Sierra de Tamaulipas. The Karankawa lived on the coast nearby, the Tonkawa to the north-east and the Jumanos to the north. Because fresh water was scarce near the Gulf, most bands lived inland.

At least seven languages are known, among them Coahuilteco or Pakawa, spoken by bands near San Antonio, and Comecrudo and Cotoname, spoken in the Rio Grande delta. An old proposal linked them to the Hokan languages of California, but most linguists now reject it for lack of evidence; the surviving word lists, collected by missionaries, are too short to show how the languages were related. All are extinct, though language revival projects exist.

One Texas historian has called Coahuiltecan culture the product of over 11,000 years of adaptation to the south Texas environment. Bands of usually 100 to 500 people moved through a regular round of campsites, carrying little and living in small huts of bent poles covered with mats. They did not farm. Plants supplied most of their food: pecans in autumn, prickly pear pads and fruit in summer, roots in winter, mesquite-bean flour, and the pit-baked hearts of maguey and sotol. They hunted deer, bison, peccary and small game, and fished along the Rio Grande. At times bands gathered by the hundreds for all-night dances, called mitotes, at which peyote was taken. Scarce resources brought frequent small-scale warfare. Scholars estimate the non-farming peoples of the region, Coahuiltecans included, at between 86,000 and 100,000 at first contact.

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his companions, castaways from a failed Spanish expedition, crossed Coahuiltecan lands in the early 1530s. From 1580 Luis de Carvajal, governor of Nuevo León, ran regular slave raids along the Rio Grande. The bands fought back, driving the Spanish out of Nuevo León in 1587, but could not stop the larger wave of settlers who returned in 1596. Epidemics, beginning with one recorded in 1636–1639, followed every few years; a 17th-century chronicler listed 161 bands near Monterrey that were no longer to be found. In 1718 the Spanish of New Spain founded Mission San Antonio de Valero, later the Alamo, and four more missions followed; many Coahuiltecans entered them for protection from Apache, Comanche and Wichita raiders, though desertions were frequent. Smallpox from 1739 cut the mission population further, and the missions were secularised in 1824.

By the 19th century most Coahuiltecans had merged into the Spanish-speaking population of Texas and Mexico. In 1886 the ethnologist Albert Gatschet found what he took to be the last survivors of three of these peoples, 25 Comecrudo, one Cotoname and two Pakawa, living near Reynosa. Families near the former Mission San Juan Capistrano later organised to protect burials there, and groups such as the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation, the Carrizo Comecrudo Nation of Texas and the Miakan-Garza Band identify as descendants, though none is federally or state recognised.

Our maps for 1492, 1530 and 1600 draw an approximate Coahuiltecan territory, labelled Coahuiltec on some maps, across southern Texas and north-eastern Mexico. On the 1492 map it borders the Atakapa, the Karankawa and the Lipan Apache, with the Tonkawa and Jumanos to the north.