The Coahuiltecan were various small, autonomous bands of Native Americans who inhabited the Rio Grande valley in what is now northeastern Mexico and southern Texas.

[2] The Coahuiltecan lived in the flat, brushy, dry country of northern Mexico and southern Texas, roughly south of a line from the Gulf Coast at the mouth of the Guadalupe River to San Antonio and westward to around Del Rio.

[9] Over more than 300 years of Spanish colonial history, their explorers and missionary priests recorded the names of more than one thousand bands or ethnic groups.

The total population of non-agricultural Indians, including the Coahuiltecan, in northeastern Mexico and neighboring Texas at the time of first contact with the Spanish has been estimated by two different scholars as 86,000 and 100,000.

[11] Due to their remoteness from the major areas of Spanish expansion, the Coahuiltecan in Texas may have suffered less from introduced European diseases and slave raids than did the indigenous populations in northern Mexico.

After a Franciscan Roman Catholic Mission was established in 1718 at San Antonio, the indigenous population declined rapidly, especially from smallpox epidemics beginning in 1739.

[1] Texas historian Jennifer Logan wrote that Coahuiltecan culture represents "the culmination of more than 11,000 years of a way of life that had successfully adapted to the climate and resources of south Texas.”[13] The peoples shared the common traits of not farming, living in small autonomous bands, and having no political unity above the level of the band and extended family.

[15] Coahuiltecan peoples hunted deer, bison, peccary, armadillos, rabbits, rats, mice, snakes, lizards, frogs, salamanders, and snails for meat.

They cooked the bulbs and root crowns of the maguey, sotol, and lechuguilla in pits, and ground mesquite beans to make flour.

[19] In the early 1530s Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions, survivors of a failed Spanish expedition to Florida, were the first Europeans known to have lived among and passed through Coahuiltecan lands.

[20] In the early 1570s the Spaniard Luis de Carvajal y Cueva campaigned near the Rio Grande, ostensibly to punish the Indians for their 1554 attack on the shipwrecked sailors, more likely to capture enslaved people.

In 1580, Carvajal, governor of Nuevo Leon, and a gang of "renegades who acknowledged neither God nor King", began conducting regular slave raids to capture Coahuiltecans along the Rio Grande.

But they lacked the organization and political unity to mount an effective defense when a larger number of Spanish settlers returned in 1596.

A 17th-century historian of Nuevo Leon, Juan Bautista Chapa, predicted that all Indian and tribes would soon be "annihilated" by disease; he listed 161 bands that had once lived near Monterrey but had disappeared.

[23] Spanish expeditions continued to find large settlements of Coahuiltecan in the Rio Grande delta and large-multi-tribal encampments along the rivers of southern Texas, especially near San Antonio.

[24] The Spanish established Mission San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo) in 1718 to evangelize among the Coahuiltecan and other Indians of the region, especially the Jumano.

The Coahuiltecan supported the missions to some extent, seeking protection with the Spanish from a new menace, Apache, Comanche, and Wichita raiders from the north.

In the community of Berg's Mill, near the former San Juan Capistrano Mission, a few families retained memories and elements of their Coahuiltecan heritage.

[citation needed] In the late 20th century, these families united in public opposition to the excavation of Indian remains buried in the graveyard of the former Mission.