Replica of the 1690 Mission San Francisco de los Tejas constructed in 1935 by the Civilian Conservation Corps and located in the Mission Tejas State Park. A building in a wooded area, constructed of logs and mortar with a small steeple with a cross mounted on it.
11 February 2022
The name Texas comes from the Caddo word /táyšʔ/ meaning friend, ally. The terminal /s/ in the Spanish and English spelling represents the Spanish plural. The name was applied by the Spanish to the people of the Hasinai Confederacy, a Caddo-speaking nation, when the Spanish founded the Mission San Francisco de los Tejas near what is now Weches, Texas in 1690.
Other indigenous people who dwelled in what is now Texas prior to European contact included the Alabama, Apache, Atakapan, Bidai, Aranama, Comanche, Choctaw, Coushatta, Jumano, Karankawa, Kickapoo, Kiowa, Tonkawa, and Wichita.
The Spanish began exploring and claiming what is now Texas starting in 1528, but permanent European settlement did not begin until the closing years of the seventeenth century. Mexico, including Texas, gained independence from Spain in 1821. In 1836, Texas seceded from Mexico, and after a brief period of independence became the twenty-eighth state of the United States in 1845.
The earliest use of the name Texas that I have found in an English-language text is in a 1759 translation of Miguel Venegas’s A Natural and Civil History of California. The use here, however, is not yet Anglicized:
It is true, that this was in some measures impeded by two conquests, which the government of Mexico had undertaken with great vigour: the first was the garrison of Panzacola, on the Gulf of Mexico, in the province of Florida [...] The second was that of the province of Los Tezas, lying North of New Mexico, in 95 degrees west longitude, or in 265 eastern longitude, from the same common meridian; and in 38 degrees north latitude. In the first conquest, above a million of dollars was expended in the 1700, only Panzacola might not fall into the hands of other nations. Great advantages were also expected from the conquest of Los Texas, which was carried on without any regard to the expence.
The name is fully Anglicized by the end of the eighteenth century. For example, Texas appears in Jedidiah Morse’s 1797 The American Gazetteer, both on a frontispieces map and in an entry for San Antonio:
ANTONIO, ST. a town in New-Mexico, on the W. side of Rio Bravo River, below St. Gregoria. Also, the name of a town on the river Hondo, which falls into the Gulf of Mexico, N.E. of Rio de Brava; and on the eastern side of the river, S. by W. from Texas.
Sources:
Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004.
Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.
Morse, Jedidiah. The American Gazetteer. Boston: S. Hall, et al. 1797. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Venegas, Miguel. A Natural and Civil History of California, vol. 1 of 2. London: James Rivington and James Fletcher, 1759, 275–76. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Photo credit: Larry D. Moore, 2014. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.