The Indian tribes who possessed the fair land of Texas when the white
man first set foot on its soil were rapidly dying out. Some were already
extinct, having left hardly a trace to show where their villages and
wigwams had once stood. The Cenis, that noble nation which welcomed La
Salle and nursed him tenderly when he lay for months “sick of a fever”
in their midst, and who sheltered the fleeing fugitives from Fort St.
Louis,—these had entirely passed away. So had the kindly Coushattis, the
friends of Lallemand’s colonists; and the Orquisacas, the Nacogdoches,
and all those gentler tribes by whose help the Franciscan friars had
built the earliest missions. Gone were the music-loving Wacoes from the
banks of the Brazos; and from the Trinity the corn-growing Tehas.
The fierce Carankawaes, once the terror of the coast and long believed
to be cannibals, and the Kiowas, called the _red-eyed_, had melted
before the coming of the pale-faces, as the snow melts under the April
sun.
But remnants of the warlike western tribes remained. The Comanches, the
Apaches, and the Lipans still hovered like dark clouds about the
frontier. They called themselves _Nianis_ (live Indians); and though
they were taken away by the government from their hunting-grounds and
penned up in a Reservation (that is, upon lands reserved or set apart
for them), they continued every now and then to swoop down upon their
old haunts, where every rock and bush and hillock was familiar to them.
Even within the past twenty years the borderman dared not be too far
from his rifle.
But the Texas Indian was passing. His tribes were dying out, as the
Mohicans, the Powhatans, and the Alabamas had died out before them.
With the Red Man, another race, as wild, as noble, and as free as his,
was as slowly drifting to its end.
When La Salle sailed up a certain pleasant stream in 1685, he called it
_Les Vaches_ (the cows), from the number of buffalos grazing on its
banks. They roamed the vast prairies and the shaded timberland, from the
utmost verge of the country on the north and west to the salt waters of
the Gulf. The herds were so large that the thunder of their hoofs
startled the air and their trampling shook the ground.
As the Indian retreated westward, the shaggy buffalo followed his
moccasined foot; as the savage warriors, who were as the sands of the
seashore for numbers, dwindled away, so dwindled the buffalo herds.