During an excavation in the 1950s, the bones of a prehistoric woman were discovered in Midland County, Texas. Archaeologists dubbed the woman “Midland Minnie”. Some believed her age to be between 20,000 and 37,000 years, making her remains the oldest ever found in the Western Hemisphere. While the accuracy of this date remains disputed, the find, along with countless others, demonstrates the wealth of human history that is buried beneath Texas soil. By the time the Europeans arrived in Texas in 1528, Native Texans included the mound-building Caddos of East Texas; Karankawas and Atakapas who fished the Texas coast; town-dwelling Jumanos along the Rio Grande; hunting-gathering Coahuiltecans in South Texas; and corn-growing Wichitas in the Panhandle. All of these native peoples had developed structures, traditions, governments, religions, and economies enabling them to take advantage of the land’s many resources. The arrival of Europeans brought horses, metal tools and weapons, new diseases and new ideas, all of which began to reshape the lives of Texas Indians. Over time, Texas became a home to horse-mounted, buffalo-hunting Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowas and a refuge for Puebloan Tiguas, Alabama-Coushattas, Kickapoos and many others. These groups traded, shared ideas, fought and made peace with one another as well as peoples outside of Texas. This book tells the story of all of these groups, their societies and cultures, and how they changed over the years. Author David La Vere offers a complete chronological and cultural history of Texas Indians from 12,000 years ago to the present day. He presents a unique view of their cultural history before and after European arrival, examining their interactions—both peaceful and violent—with Europeans, Mexicans, Texans, and Americans. This book is the first full examination of the history of Texas Indians in over forty years and will appeal to all of those with an interest in Native Americans and the history of Texas.

"How an ancient North American civilization was plundered in the twentieth century"

When a group of relic hunters drove their picks into a lost Indian burial crypt in eastern Oklahoma in 1935, they unearthed a vast treasure trove of Mississippian art--considered by many at the time to be America's answer to King Tut's Tomb. They also ignited a controversy that continues to have repercussions throughout archaeological and American Indian communities.

The Spiro Mounds contained some of the most impressive pre-Columbian Indian art ever found. In "Looting Spiro Mounds," David La Vere takes readers behind the scenes of this discovery to re-create a Great Depression-era archaeological adventure worthy of Indiana Jones.

The looting of the mounds is considered one of the major archaeological tragedies of all time. Today Spiro artifacts are scattered among the world's museums, with some still circulating in the antiquities market and eagerly snatched up by collectors. La Vere weaves a compelling story of grave robbers and lost treasures as he pieces together the puzzle of the civilization that thrived at Spiro from A.D. 800 to 1450. He plumbs the mystery of why the people of Spiro abandoned the site, leaving behind their treasures but no forwarding address.

"Looting Spiro Mounds" explains what the continuing mystique of Spiro artifacts is all about as the book uncovers a controversy--and a mystery--that lives on to this day.

What if the 1587 Lost Colony of Roanoke was not lost? What if the survivors left Roanoke Island, North Carolina and found their way to Georgia? That is the scenario scholars contemplated when a series of engraved stones were found in the 1930's. The first, found near the Chowan River in North Carolina, claimed that Eleanor Dare and six other settlers had survived a horrible Indian attack which wiped out the rest of the colony. Among the dead were Eleanor's daughter, Virginia Dare, the first English child born in North America, and Eleanor's husband Ananias. The remaining Dare Stones, more than forty in number, told a fantastic tale of how Eleanor and the survivors made their way overland, first to South Carolina, and then to Georgia. If true, North Carolina stood to lose one of its most cherished historical legends. Author David La Vere weaves the story of the Dare Stones with that of the Lost Colony of Roanoke in a tale that will fire your imagination and give you pause at the same time. In this true story that shook the world during the 1930s and early 1940s, the question on everyone's mind was: Had the greatest mystery in American history -- the Lost Colony -- finally been solved?

In the depths of the Depression, a man stopped along Highway 17 north of Edenton, North Carolina, and in the woods there found a stone that seemed to be carved with Elizabethan english. The man took the stone to scholars at Emory University, who were shocked to find the inscription purported to solve one of the greatest mysteries in American history: What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke? Seeking more stones, the professors in Georgia offered a reward for any others that might be found. Lo and behold, a dirt-poor Georgian began finding them virtually everywhere. From South Carolina to just outside Atlanta, Bill Eberhardt kept the scholars of Brenau College provided with a steady supply of the stones. They seemed to say that Elizabeth Dare, mother to Virginia and wife of Ananias Dare, had escaped with a handful of her fellow Roanoke colonists and made her way to live with friendly Indians in the interior. The sensational part of the story the stones told was that those Indians were located in what is now the state of Georgia But were the stones real, or were they clever fakes? David La Vere weaves the mesmerizing tale of the Dare Stones in with the equally dramatic and mysterious tale of Raleigh's lost settlers on Roanoke, to make a book that will have you completely absorbed.

examines relations between Southeastern Indians who were removed to Indian Territory in the early nineteenth century and Southern Plains Indians who claimed this area as their own.

These two Indian groups viewed the world in different ways. The Southeastern Indians, primarily Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Seminoles, were agricultural peoples. By the nineteenth century they were adopting American "civilization": codified laws, Christianity, market-driven farming, and a formal, Euroamerican style of education. By contrast, the hunter-gathers of the Southern Plains-the Comanches, Kiowas, Wichitas, and Osages-had a culture based on the buffalo. They actively resisted the Removed Indians' "invasion" of their homelands.

The Removed Indians hoped to lessen Plains Indian raids into Indian Territory by "civilizing" the Plains peoples through diplomatic councils and trade. But the Southern Plains Indians were not interested in "civilization" and saw no use in farming. Even their defeat by the U.S. government could not bridge the cultural gap between the Plains and Removed Indians, a gulf that remains to this day.

For centuries, the Caddos occupied the southern prairies and woodlands across portions of Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Organized into powerful chiefdoms during the Mississippian period, Caddo society was highly ceremonial, revolving around priest-chiefs, trade in exotic items, and the periodic construction of mounds. Their distinctive heritage helped the Caddos to adapt after the European invasion and to remain the dominant political and economic power in the region. New ideas, peoples, and commodities were incorporated into their cultural framework. The Caddos persisted and for a time even thrived, despite continual raids by the Osages and Choctaws, decimation by diseases, and escalating pressures from the French and Spanish.
"The Caddo Chiefdoms" offers the most complete accounting available of early Caddo culture and history. Weaving together French and Spanish archival sources, Caddo oral history, and archaeological evidence, David La Vere presents a fascinating look at the political, social, economic, and religious forces that molded Caddo culture over time. Special attention is given to the relationship between kinship and trade and to the political impulses driving the successive rise and decline of Caddo chiefdoms.

Distinguished by thorough scholarship and an interpretive vision that is both theoretically astute and culturally sensitive, this study enhances our understanding of a remarkable southeastern Native people.

At dawn on September 22, 1711, more than 500 Tuscarora, Core, Neuse, Pamlico, Weetock, Machapunga, and Bear River Indian warriors swept down on the unsuspecting European settlers living along the Neuse and Pamlico Rivers of North Carolina. Over the following days, they destroyed hundreds of farms, killed at least 140 men, women, and children, and took about 40 captives. So began the Tuscarora War, North Carolina's bloodiest colonial war and surely one of its most brutal. In his gripping account, David La Vere examines the war through the lens of key players in the conflict, reveals the events that led to it, and traces its far-reaching consequences. La Vere details the innovative fortifications produced by the Tuscaroras, chronicles the colony's new practice of enslaving all captives and selling them out of country, and shows how both sides drew support from forces far outside the colony's borders. In these ways and others, La Vere concludes, this merciless war pointed a new direction in the development of the future state of North Carolina.

Historian David La Vere has culled from the Indian-Pioneer Histories housed in the Indian Archives of the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City a wealth of vivid detail about life among the former Texas Indian peoples. The oral histories that make up this collection were gathered during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration. From the 112 bound volumes that resulted, Dr. La Vere has gathered all the material pertinent to the Indians who came from Texas into an exceptional picture of the details of daily life-war and raiding, hunting and planting, foodways dress, parties and spiritual practices, education, health, and housing. La Vere has edited the narratives to group excerpts topically. Under farming, for example, he gives this report from a Wichita man: "We raise corn, pumpkin, sweet potato. I don't know where we got corn, probably given to my people four hundred years ago. Other Indians didn't know how to work, to raise corn and pumpkins. They would have to get this from Wichitas." A Caddo woman describes in great detail the three general styles of dress for Caddo women, and a Caddo-Delaware woman tells about the different woods and dyes used in making baskets. A white man living in Comanche Territory details how the Comanches tanned hides by "working the animal's] brains over them." Children's games and adults' dance rituals all are described in the words of those who played, danced, and watched them. La Vere sets the stage for this ethnographic detail with a lively, readable history of the succession of peoples who lived in Texas from the Paleo-Indians until the present. It is a clear overview of the basic social structures of the tribes and the relations among tribes and, later, of the Indians with the Europeans who came to the region. Accompanied by dramatic and poignant photographs from Oklahoma archives, the gift that comes through these pages is an immediacy of observation and impression that re-inspires the historical imagination about life among the first Texans. DAVID LA VERE is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He has published a previous book on the Caddo Indians. His Ph.D. is from Texas A&M University.