The Tonkawa: People Between the Empires of Texas
By Marcus Calloway
Length4h 31m
About this audiobook
Their neighbors the Waco called them Tonkawa, a name usually rendered as "they all stay together." It was not always meant kindly. Of everything friars, governors, generals and newspapermen would say about this people over the next four centuries, it may also have been the truest.
Their country was a range, not a territory: the prairies and river bottoms between the Colorado, the Brazos and the Guadalupe, roughly the middle third of what maps would later call Texas. A camp of four families might winter on a bend of the Colorado for the deer and move on when the mesquite leafed out. They knew when the prickly pear fruited and when the pecans were worth the walk, and before they had horses they hunted bison on foot, moving the herds into the draws with fire and lines of beaters. Their language belonged to no known family.
Then came the strangers in robes, then Mexico, then the Republic of Texas with its rations and its treaties made and broken. In 1859 Tonkawa families were removed north to Indian Territory. In October 1862, near the Wichita Agency, a war party of Delaware, Shawnee and others fell on their camp and killed more than a hundred people. The survivors went back to Texas, rebuilt what they could, and began the long road to a homeland and a government of their own in Oklahoma.
Every power that crossed their country found some use for them. None of them broke the habit the Waco had named them for.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 31 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The Land Between Rivers
2Chapter 2: The Horse and the Bison
3Chapter 3: Strangers in Robes
4Chapter 4: The Middle Ground
5Chapter 5: Mexico and the Fading Shield
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6Chapter 6: The Republic and the Rations
7Chapter 7: Treaties and Broken Promises
8Chapter 8: The 1859 Removal
9Chapter 9: The 1862 Massacre
10Chapter 10: Refuge and Rebuilding
11Chapter 11: The Long Road to Sovereignty
12Chapter 12: The People Who Stayed Together
13About the Author
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