Texas Coast Prairie

Houston is situated in the Gulf Coast Prairie, which once rimmed the northern Gulf of Mexico shore. The coastal area stretched 6.5 million acres along the shoreline and 75 miles inland—from southeast Louisiana west of the Mississippi River Delta—the Cajun Prairie, settled in the early 19th century by exiled Acadians—to Corpus Christi, including Galveston Island and the Laguna Madre estuaries.

The Texas Coast Prairie was mostly flat, treeless, and dominated by subtropical, coastal, mid- to tallgrasses. The prairie was interspersed with fringes of forest along streams like Buffalo Bayou and Willow Waterhole Bayou, a tributary of Brays Bayou.

How did prairies form?

Prairies were shaped over billions of years as a result of climate changes and geological shifts, including glacial action, soil erosion, sediment deposits, and the interaction of rivers and ocean with the land. The soil that resulted helped grasses and other prairie vegetation thrive. Over time, cycles of droughts and fires kept trees from growing, recycled nutrients into the soil, and helped seeds spread and grow. This combination of factors allowed a prairie habitat, with its hidden life underground, to flourish.

Early coastal inhabitants

For thousands of years before the Europeans arrived, the Texas Coast Prairie was inhabited by Native Americans, the Atakapas in the north part of the coast and the Karankawas in the south. They were semi-nomadic, living part of the year along the shore and with seasonal changes moving 30 or 40 miles inland.

These groups lived off the coastal waters and prairie flora and fauna. They used animal skins and Spanish moss to make their clothes. They smeared their bodies with a mix of dirt and alligator grease to ward off mosquitoes. Their portable huts were made from native grasses and palmetto, covered with thatched, rounded tops, and supported by a willow pole frame covered with animal skins and rush mats. They made baskets from the native grasses, often lining them with tar asphalt created by natural oil seeps found on the beaches. The oil seeps came from the underground oil deposits that later made Texas rich and famous Archaeologists have found evidence of distinctive Karankawa art on pottery that featured red paint and the naturally occurring asphalt.

For food, the groups hunted, fished, and gathered, moving with the seasons between the mainland and the barrier islands, which were cooler in the summer. In the winter, they sometimes traveled far inland along the bayous and rivers in their canoes to hunt buffalo. Besides freshwater channel catfish and other fish, they ate oysters, blue crabs, red and white crawfish, shrimp, alligators, turtles, ducks, and geese, as well as bird eggs. Their fruits and vegetables consisted of roots, dewberries, blackberries, mayhaw berries, persimmons, wild grapes, cattail, prickly pear cactus fruit, thistle, pecans, and occasional sweet drops of honeysuckle nectar.

In the mid-1800s, after 300 years of conflict with the Europeans and soon after Houston was founded, the Karankawa left the area and dispersed to the southwest. For many years, they were thought to have disappeared as a tribe. But today, the Karankawa Kadla (“mixed”) Tribe is more than 100 strong and has regrouped in an area near Corpus Christi Bay. They are fighting to preserve a stretch of land that was once a bustling tribal village and where archaeologists have found thousands of artifacts of their past—pottery sherds, arrowheads, and tools. The land was owned by the Port of Corpus Christi, and despite the Texas Historical Commission's agreement to protect the site, in 2012 the Port sold the property to an oil company, forcing the descendants to resume their struggle to maintain their ancestral heritage.