The Tonkawa: People Between the Empires of Texas

Their neighbors the Waco called them Tonkawa, a name usually rendered as "they all stay together." It was not always meant kindly. Of everything friars, governors, generals and newspapermen would say about this people over the next four centuries, it may also have been the truest.

Their country was a range, not a territory: the prairies and river bottoms between the Colorado, the Brazos and the Guadalupe, roughly the middle third of what maps would later call Texas. A camp of four families might winter on a bend of the Colorado for the deer and move on when the mesquite leafed out. They knew when the prickly pear fruited and when the pecans were worth the walk, and before they had horses they hunted bison on foot, moving the herds into the draws with fire and lines of beaters. Their language belonged to no known family.

Then came the strangers in robes, then Mexico, then the Republic of Texas with its rations and its treaties made and broken. In 1859 Tonkawa families were removed north to Indian Territory. In October 1862, near the Wichita Agency, a war party of Delaware, Shawnee and others fell on their camp and killed more than a hundred people. The survivors went back to Texas, rebuilt what they could, and began the long road to a homeland and a government of their own in Oklahoma.

Every power that crossed their country found some use for them. None of them broke the habit the Waco had named them for.