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Galveston Island
Even now, on a bleak November day, it needs little imagination to see the scene: the amusement arcades are closed, the rain lashing the ferry to the mainland, surf surging along the old breakwaters and thrashing the old legs of the piers. On the wide sandy beach, surfers struggle on their boards in all weathers, reminding me of the Spaniards who staggered out of the sea all those years before.
In the middle of the island, past the rainswept golf courses and weathered clapboard holiday houses, you can still see two little copses of live oaks shaking in the gale. They are one of those wonderfully precise topographical clues that we so often stumble on in these tales, for these copses are marked on the earliest maps of the island, 200 years ago… Here, the archaeologists have found scanty remains of the Indian camp where the Spanish must have stayed, and where Cabeza de Vaca says one of his friends climbed into a tall oak to discover that where they had landed was indeed an island…
At San Juan Mission, San Antonio River Valley
Like the Karankawas the Coahuiltecans disappeared as a group before the end of the eighteenth century, and they are often said to be gone now. But on our journey northwards from Galveston to the San Antonio river, we made contact with scattered Indian groups who still claim to represent the Coahuiltecan nation. [more]
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