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...

In the seventeenth century, South Texas and Northeastern Mexico formed El Nuevo Reino de Leon, a frontier province of New Spain where Spanish settlements were widely scattered and subject to clashes with the Native American inhabitants. In 1690, a resident Spanish official looked back over the eventful, sometimes tumultuous history of Nuevo Leon and penned a richly detailed account of the years 1630 to 1690. Although Juan Bautista Chapa's Historia...