The Karankawa peoples lived on the Texas coast from Galveston Bay to Corpus Christi Bay: the Carancahuas, Coapites, Cocos, Cujanes and Copanes, who shared one language, Karankawan, of which around 500 words are preserved. Historians describe a people who moved with the seasons between the barrier islands and the mainland. For most of the year they traveled in bands of around fifty kin. Around winter, when food was most plentiful, the bands gathered by the hundreds, called together by smoke signals.
A year in 1528
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, shipwrecked in November 1528 on an island whose location is still argued over, wrote down part of that calendar. The people who kept him left the island in canoes for the mainland and went to bays full of oysters. For three months, he wrote, they ate nothing else. He stayed until the end of April, then went with them to the shore, where they ate blackberries for a month and danced and celebrated. The Coco are usually identified with his Capoque, though that cannot be established beyond question.
A mission on their schedule
In 1754 Father Juan de Dios Camberos founded Nuestra Señora del Rosario on the San Antonio River, four miles west of Goliad, for the Cujanes and other Karankawan peoples. The record shows they came in winter and mostly left in spring, when they could feed themselves. In 1779 Joseph María freed about ten Karankawa families from Rosario, and a war began that lasted more than a decade. A ceasefire around 1790 left the Karankawas in control of their land. Refugio mission was built in 1793, closer to their homes, as they had asked.
The Anglo colonists who came after 1821 offered no such bargain. In 1824 Stephen F. Austin led some fifteen men against the Karankawas and urged the colonists to attack them. The people sought sanctuary at La Bahía, where a priest arranged an armistice confining the bands to the country west of the Lavaca River, renewed in 1827 by Green DeWitt and the chiefs Antonito and Delgado. A people whose year ran across bays and islands now had a boundary. Port towns, ranches and roads followed. Colonists justified the killing with a charge of cannibalism that the Karankawas had seemingly given up in the eighteenth century.
Not the last band
Many Karankawas joined settler society or other nations, or went south to Tamaulipas. By the late 1850s a small band had been pushed back into Texas near Rio Grande City, where in 1858 a force led by Juan Nepomuceno Cortina attacked it. The people were then considered extinct. The historian Tim Seiter says many had already gone to Mexico or been absorbed, and that women and children usually survived.
Their descendants are still here. The Karankawa Kadla, mixed Karankawa, organized in this century, and Seiter credits its members with the revival. They have revitalized the language, and Alex Perez published a book on it in 2021. The Karankawa Tribe of Texas, with clans in Corpus Christi and Galveston Bay, works with local authorities to protect burial sites.
The Rosario ruins are a unit of Goliad State Park, open only by guided tour. The Museum of the Coastal Bend in Victoria tells the coast's long record.