Summary of the cultural history of the Texas Hill Country and the lands of Guadalupe River State Park and Honey Creek State Natural Area

Indigenous peoples have lived in Texas for over 12,000 years.  The earliest groups were small traveling bands of hunter-gatherers.  Around 6500 BCE, as the region grew more arid, the many springs and greater rainfall in the eastern and southern portions of the Edwards Plateau attracted increasing numbers of these small family bands.  With greater population density around water sources, the indigenous groups developed new technologies that allowed them better to exploit the large diversity of edible plants and animals that were thriving in the live oak savannas of the Central Texas Hill Country.  The Hill Country became one of the major resource and refuge zones in the region for the early human inhabitants during periods of extended drought.  

The predominant social organization of the prehistoric Hill Country natives remained that of nomadic hunter-gatherers until the arrival of Europeans in the 1500s.  The introduction of the horse into Texas by the Spanish in the sixteenth century was to radically transform the cultural and economic way of life of the indigenous bands, who quickly embraced the lifestyle of equestrian nomads.  The introduction of other domestic animals, along with metal goods, attracted indigenous peoples from throughout the Midwest and other surrounding regions.  Among these groups were the Comanches and Apaches, who sustained themselves in large part by raiding for horses and livestock, as well as by trading for metal goods, fabrics, food, and guns. They were to play a significant role in the European settlement of the Texas Hill Country.  But by the end of the nineteenth century, the indigenous groups suffered major decline, brought about by newly introduced diseases, hostilities with European immigrants, high infant mortality, and forcible removal from ancestral lands.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, few Europeans were interested in the Texas Hill Country with the exception of the Spanish who, in the 1700s, explored as far north and west as San Saba in search of precious metals.   During the years of the Texas Republic (1836-1945), however, the new nation was deep in debt and also desperate to secure its new borders.  Seeking colonists to settle and protect the western frontier against the Mexicans and Comanches, and to stabilize the state financially, the Texas government was eager to attract immigrants, including Europeans, offering free public lands on the frontier.  Given the economic and political situation Germany, the lure of freedom and free land was enticing for impoverished farmers and laborers displaced by the industrial revolution.  And enterprising investors, unfortunately woefully ignorant of Texas conditions, devised severely underfunded plans to send immigrants to the Texas frontier.