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HISTORY OF CORYELL COUNTYCHAPTER III THE TONKAWA INDIANS In Coryell County, along the Leon and Cowhouse rivers and their tributaries, the Tonkawa Indians had their home at the time of the coming of the white settlers. Their territory also included the Bosque watershed and extended down to Waco territory at the mouth of the Bosques. This nation of people also claimed the Lampasas, parts of Burnet, Williamson and Travis counties. Within this territory in the Bosque basin are three places that derived their names from this people. Tonkawa Spring on the Wittie farm a few miles above Crawford, in McLennan County; Tonkawa Creek, of which the spring is the source, flows near the town of Crawford, and -- 12 -- enters Middle Bosque a short distance below that town; and Tonkawa Park, a state park established on Tonkawa creek, near Crawford. This park was laid out and developed in 1933 and is a place of great scenic beauty. Within the park is a rock shelter that was once used as a burial place by the Indians. From this shelter several bodies were removed during the development of the park. On a flat limestone formation which lies above and near the rock shelter, are petroglyphs carved in the table like surface of the stone. One of these carvings seems to represent the adjacent water courses; however, the order of the flowing of the streams, according to the engraving, is up hill. This people had contacted Europeans before the coming of the white American explorers and settlers. For a hundred and fifty years, probably longer, they had been meeting Spaniards who came as explorers, conquerors or missionaries. They also had wandered as far south as the coast, where they claimed fishing grounds, and where they were known to the few rancheros who inhabited that country at the beginning of the 19th century. During the Spanish regime in Louisiana, French traders were commissioned to trade with the Tonkawa, thus a friendly commercial relation existed with those traders during the closing decades of the eighteenth and the beginning of the 19th centuries. They were thus prepared to form friendly relations with the new settlers. Archeological evidence points to the probability that cannibalism might have been practiced, in a small way, by this people; in that they sometimes may have eaten a ferocious enemy so that they might imbibe from the enemy's flesh the fighting spirit of that enemy. They were sometimes referred to as the stinking Indians, for the reason that they smeared their bodies with putrid flesh in order to keep off mosquitoes and other biting and stinging insects. With the establishing of Ft. Gates, in 1849, the Tonkawa, as a Nation, ceased to exist. Within four years they were entirely dispossessed and forcibly sent into an exile from which they never returned. Here, upon Coryell County soil, was enacted one of those dramas of life that have darkened the pages of history since before man begun scratching his meager records upon stone and bones --the complete obliteration of a defenseless nation of people. -- 13 -- Old chroniclers tell that this nation of people were peaceable, intelligent and easily controlled, and that their moral fear of the Kiowa and Comanche, at whose hands they had suffered a great deal, made them willing allies of the whites, with them they consorted for protection against their old enemies. This nation numbered between four and five hundred warriors. It was the Tonkawas boast that a white scalp was never lifted by a member of their tribe. The people were hunters and agriculturists. They grew corn, beans, pumpkins, melons, and gathered wild fruits and nuts, and wild herbs that are no longer known as human food. The old Tonkawa trail ran a northeast-southwest direction crossing from the Bosque territory to the southwest. This trail crosses old Highway 7 near Cox Spring, a few miles east of Gatesville. Along this trail are some petroglyph carvings. They are known as the "bowl and spoon carvings" because of the form--a circle with a line from the center running over the rim of the circle--thus reminding of a bowl and spoon. This was probably the totem or signature, of the tribe. This was probably the national highway used by wandering members of other peoples in crossing this country on war, or hunting expeditions. After Ft. Gates was established in 1849 the Indians made the settlement their main rendezvous. In 1852 the country becoming well settled by whites and upon the abandonment of the fort in that year, the entire Tonkawa nation was moved west to the reservation near Ft. Griffin and Ft. Phantom Hill. Many Tonkawa, however, wandered back among the settlements, where they could always be seen, for they were peaceable It is said they did some odd jobs about the settlements, for which they received little remuneration. In 1870-71 General McKinsie was ordered to force the Comanches westward to the high plains. He enlisted the Tonkawa warriors as scouts and history is replete with records of their bravery, and how they hung relentlessly upon the heels of the Comanche as the latter retreated back into the high plains country. There is at present a small remnant of this once honored race of Indians hemmed up on a reservation in Oklahoma. -- 14-- In this, the ancient land of the Tonkawa, are almost countless rock shelters, kitchen middens, flint quarries, and burial grounds. Archeologists have assiduously searched these remains for the stone age artifacts to be found here. There are a number of amateur archeologist in the county including the writer, G. R. Green, C. J. Shook, Mrs. Odessa Simpson and others who have elaborate collections of artifacts gathered in the county. The late Dr. Clyde Bailey of Gatesville served as vice-president of the Central Texas Archeology Society. Many universities have sent research expeditions here for excavating, collecting and classifying, the remnants of Indian arts to be found here. The range of the Tonkawa Indians embraced the famous "Burnt Rock Midden" area of Central Texas which extended over the drainage basins of the Bosque, the Leon, the Lampasas and large sections of the Colorado rivers and south as far as Comal and Guadaloupe counties. The Tonkawa culture was essentially a Burnt Rock Midden culture, which over a very long period of time evolved from a low savage culture or economy to the fairly advanced cultural stage in which whitemen first found them. They are probably descended from the oldest inhabitants of Texas, and were being gradually closed in upon from every direction, until they were threatened by extinction, even before the coming of the whiteman. To the east and northeast, the Caddoan races were pressing them, from the south, the Cohuilticans were giving pressure, to the west the Apache and Lipan were surging ever against them, and to the north, the relentless Comanche and Kiowa, who held all the eastern and southern Indians in contempt, were bearing down upon them. They consorted with the whites for protection; but that was poorly requited for the relentless land-grabbing Anglo-Saxon robbed them of their lands and sent them into exile, and final extinction to repay them for their good offices. Cultural intrusions, of an archeological nature, overlapping into the Tonkawa domain from every direction seem to indicate that this outward pressure had been going on for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. -- 15 -- |
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