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.
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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.
