Connect the past with the present in Texas Indian Trails and appreciated this state's rich heritage by visiting the landmarks and campsites used by the Indians of Texas. This guidebook allows Texas natives and visitors to experience the Texas landscape as the Indians once knew it. Through local history and folklore, Texans will grow a new appreciation for their rich heritage, and visitors can learn to know Texas as the natives do.

NOTE: for book to these maps see CCF 434092, call number US/CAN 976.4 E3w.

In this unprecedented effort to gather and share knowledge of the Native American practice of creating, designating, and making use of marker trees, an arborist, an anthropologist, and a Comanche tribal officer have merged their wisdom, research, and years of personal experience to create Comanche Marker Trees of Texas. A genuine marker tree is a rare find—only six of these natural and cultural treasures have been officially documented in Texas and recognized by the Comanche Nation. The latter third of the book highlights the characteristics of these six marker trees and gives an up-to-date history of each, displaying beautiful photographs of these long-standing, misshapen, controversial symbols that have withstood the tests of time and human activity. Thoroughly researched and richly illustrated with maps, drawings, and photographs of trees, this book offers a close look at the unique cultural significance of these living witnesses to our history and provides detailed guidelines on how to recognize, research, and report potential marker tree candidates.

An incredibly detailed account of Indigenous lifeways during the initial rounds of European exploration in south-central North America. Several hundred tribes of Native Americans were living within or hunting and trading across the present-day borders of Texas when Cabeza de Vaca and his shipwrecked companions washed up on a Gulf Coast beach in 1528. Over the next two centuries, as Spanish and French expeditions explored the state, they recorded detailed information about the locations and lifeways of Texas’s Native peoples. Using recent translations of these expedition diaries and journals, along with discoveries from ongoing archaeological investigations, William C. Foster here assembles the most complete account ever published of Texas’s Native peoples during the early historic period (AD 1528 to 1722). Foster describes the historic Native peoples of Texas by geographic regions. His chronological narrative records the interactions of Native groups with European explorers and with Native trading partners across a wide network that extended into Louisiana, the Great Plains, New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Foster provides extensive ethnohistorical information about Texas’s Native peoples, as well as data on the various regions’ animals, plants, and climate. Accompanying each regional account is an annotated list of named Indigenous tribes in that region and maps that show tribal territories and European expedition routes. “A very useful encyclopedic regional account of the Europeans and Native peoples of Texas who encountered one another during the relatively unexamined two hundred years before the Spanish occupation of Texas and the French establishment of Louisiana.” —Southwestern Historical Quarterly

This text explores the natural history of Texas and more than 2900 springs in 183 Texas counties. It also includes an in-depth discussion of the general characteristics of springs - their physical and prehistoric settings, their historical significance, and their associated flora and fauna.