History of Texas

In 1685, Robert de La Salle (1643–1687), established a French colony at Fort Saint Louis, after sailing down and exploring the Mississippi River from New France (modern Canada) and the Great Lakes.

He planted this early French presence at Fort Saint Louis near Matagorda Bay, along the Gulf of Mexico coast (near modern Inez, Texas), even before the establishment of New Orleans.

Spain signed agreements with colonists from the United States, bordering the province to the northeast ever since their Louisiana Purchase from the Emperor Napoleon I and his French Empire (France) in 1803.

Later on, White Democrats gained political dominance and passed laws in the late 19th century creating second-class status for blacks in a Jim Crow system of segregation which included disenfranchising them from voting in 1901 through passage of a poll tax.

Texas lies at the juncture of several major cultural areas of Pre-Columbian North America: the Southwestern, Southern Plains, Southeastern Woodlands, and Aridoamerica.

Caddoan language-speaking peoples occupied the area surrounding the entire length of the Red River, and at the time of European contact, they formed four collective confederacies of the Wichita, Natchitoches, the Hasinai, and the Kadohadocho.

The Puebloan peoples,[13] situated largely between the Rio Grande & Pecos river were part of an extensive civilization of tribes that lived in what are now the states of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado & Utah.

[18] Between 1528 and 1535, four survivors of the Narváez expedition, including Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Estevanico, spent six and a half years in Texas as slaves and traders among various native groups.

Searching for an overland path to Mexico, the expedition turned back to the Mississippi River after leaving Caddo territory and finding nomadic tribes without food stores to sustain the Spanish.

Feeling that the French colony was a threat to Spanish mines and shipping routes, King Carlos II's Council of war recommended the removal of "this thorn which has been thrust into the heart of America.

[36] After a failed attempt to convince Spanish authorities to reestablish missions in Texas, in 1711 Franciscan missionary Francisco Hidalgo approached the French governor of Louisiana for help.

He then ordered the building of a new Spanish fort Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Los Adaes, located near present-day Robeline, Louisiana, only 12 mi (19 km) from Natchitoches.

[55] In 1762, France finally relinquished their claim to Texas by ceding all of Louisiana west of the Mississippi River to Spain as part of the treaty to end the Seven Years' War.

[64] Thomas Jefferson claimed that Louisiana stretched west to the Rocky Mountains and included the entire watershed of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and their tributaries, and that the southern border was the Rio Grande.

[80] Their empire collapsed when their camps and villages were repeatedly decimated by epidemics of smallpox and cholera in the late 1840s, and in bloody conflict with settlers, the Texas Rangers, and the U.S. Army.

[92] Mexico granted Texas a one-year exemption from the national edict of 1829 outlawing slavery, but Mexican president Anastasio Bustamante ordered that all slaves be freed in 1830.

[110] The remaining troops were largely recently arrived adventurers from the United States; according to historian Alwyn Barr, the numerous American volunteers "contributed to the Mexican view that Texan opposition stemmed from outside influences.

[128] Texas in its Wild West days, attracted settlers who could shoot straight and possessed the zest for adventure, "for masculine renown, patriotic service, martial glory and meaningful deaths.

With few battles in its territory, Texas was mainly a "supply state" for the Confederate forces until mid-1863, when the Union capture of the Mississippi River made large movements of men, horses or cattle impossible.

Since the 1970s, scholars have shifted their attention to South Texas, exploring how its relations with Mexico and Mexican Americans affected both Confederate and Union Civil War military operations.

[152] Governor Lawrence Sullivan Ross had to personally intervene to resolve the Jaybird-Woodpecker War (1888–1889) among factions of Democrats in Fort Bend County; at bottom, it was a racial conflict.

The city had reached 260,000 population by 1929 when the effects of the Stock Market Crash hit Texas, causing a sharp drop in the prices of oil, cotton and cattle; growth came to a standstill.

On the morning of January 10, 1901, Anthony F. Lucas, an experienced mining engineer, drilled the first major oil well at Spindletop, a small hill south of Beaumont, Texas.

Beginning in 1934 and lasting until 1939, the Dust Bowl, an ecological disaster of severe wind and drought, caused an exodus from Texas and the surrounding plains, in which over 500,000 Americans were homeless, hungry and jobless.

For the majority of farmers who remained, the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Act was a crash program started in 1933 that in two weeks signed up cotton growers, even as agents and committeemen faced poor roads, bureaucratic delays, inadequate supplies, balking mules, and language barriers.

[170] World War II had a dramatic effect on Texas, as federal money poured in to build military bases, munitions factories, POW detention camps and Army hospitals.

[174] Fred Allison in a study of Majors Field, the Army Air Forces Basic Flying School, at Greenville during 1942–45, shows that the base—like most military bases in rural Texas—invigorated the local economy, but also changed the cultural climate of the conservative Christian town, especially around unprecedented freedom regarding alcohol, dating and dancing, and race relations.

[180] Baylor University, like most schools, was successful in the multiple missions of aiding national defense, recruiting soldiers, and keeping the institution operational while the war continued.

[186] On Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 pm Central Standard Time (18:30 UTC), Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President John F. Kennedy.

Career attorneys and analysts at the Department of Justice objected to the plan as diluting the votes of African American and Hispanic voters, but political appointees overrode them and approved it.