The Lipan Apache: Defiant People of the Texas Borderlands

Three and a half centuries after the camp broke up, archaeologists dug its hearths out of the ground beside a shallow lake on the Llano Estacado and measured the blackened fire-ring stones in a laboratory in Austin. The woman who knelt there at dawn around 1600, scraping a bison hide with a tool of ground stone and antler, left no name in any record. Her scraper says more. It had reached her through four sets of hands, perhaps eight, from Coahuila or the Rio Grande pueblos or the Caddo towns of the piney woods.

Her people were the Lipan, an eastern Apache nation, kin to the Jicarilla and the Mescalero. They wintered in the cedar breaks and canyons of the Edwards Plateau and the Pecos country, walked out onto the plains each summer to hunt, and belonged to a trading world that reached across half a continent long before Texas had a name. The book follows them through three centuries of pressure: the Spanish missions, the Comanche pushing south on horseback, the retreat into the mountains of Coahuila, the years when Lipan scouts rode with the Texas Rangers and the years when the U.S. Army hunted them across the Rio Grande.

It stays with the families who made the border itself a home, through the decades when Texas histories wrote them out of the story, and on to the Lipan of today. History lost her name. Her people are still in Texas, and they have kept theirs.