The large concrete structure beyond Fern's left shoulder is the concrete shaft of the Tower of the Americas that was a part of the 1968 World's Fair. The observation deck and revolving restaurant 500 plus feet above is open daily.
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I like the 3-D map of the world, particularly because it so well illustrates how in the very distance past the still plastic plate forming today's Indian sub-continent rear-ended Asia, creating the Himalayan Mountain chain.
The tepee is is 10 feet in diameter with a brain tanned buffalo skin cover. The many buffalo culture tribes chose the tepee as their principal shelter because it was portable allowing easy movement as they followed herds of buffalo. Many different buffalo culture tribes, lived in such tepees the year around from South Texas north through mid-North America to the prairie Provinces of Canada.
Click Here For Information on Caddo Pottery Firing Technique
The Caddo were a loose confederation of related tribes with a large population of about 30,000 in the early 1680's living in corners of four modern U.S. States, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas. They grew great quantities of corn, beans, squash, melons, and sunflowers. The men hunted forest animals, deer, bear and wild turkey, and sometimes traveled the 50 plus miles to where the forest thinned for buffalo.
In their language they had a word pronounced something like "techas." It meant friend or perhaps more properly ally since it is said it was used to refer to members of the other Caddo tribes. The early Spanish visitors heard the word and somehow began to apply their version to other friendly Indians and later it came to be used as the name of the geographic area. They spelled the word "Tejas," that still is the Spanish word for Texas. The English changed the "j" to "x" making the name, Texas.
In this picture, you see me sometime between 1100 and 1350 AD, visiting an obscure pueblo in what is now far West Texas near the modern city of El Paso. These people were farmers in what even then was a very inhospitable climate for farming. They grew corn, beans and squash and hunted rabbits almost the only game available. To supplement their larder they gather tidbits from the countryside such as the tuna, the fruit of the prickly pear cactus, mesquite beans, and grasshoppers. Some time after 1300 when the climate became too dry to support their agriculture they disappeared probably becoming a part or the wandering gathering cultures found in the area more than two centuries later when the first Europeans traveled the lands.
This wagon is and early "Studebaker.: It was built by Studebaker during the Civil War at their Indiana plant where a half century later they built automobiles. During the War the army used many war wagons of this type. After the war I suppose this one was war surplus and it ended up on a Texas ranch from where it made frequent annual trips up the Chrisom Trail to Dodge or one of the other Kansas rail towns catering to the Texas cattle trade.
The trail drives were of great economic importance to post Civil War Texas. This third world, cash poor economy greatly needed the income. One of these wild cattle valued at no more than a few dollars in San Antonio, generally sold for 20 to 30 dollars a head in Kansas. The money received formed the capital base that prepared the state for the new century.
