“Texas: The False Origin of the Name”

William Soule

POSTED BY: CARDENAS.AE@GMAIL.COM APRIL 25, 2018

The Rambling Boy

By Lonn Taylor

I first learned about Texas history at the age of four from a book called Texas, Land of the Tejas. It was written by Siddie Joe Johnson, a Dallas children’s librarian, and was illustrated by Texas artist Fanita Lanier. It was a gift from my parents at Christmas of 1943, a reminder that we were Texans even though we were living in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where my father was stationed during the war. I learned to read from that book, and I learned the facts about the Lady in Blue, and Jean Lafitte, and Sam Houston and the Battle of San Jacinto. Those facts were made memorable by Lanier’s unforgettable color illustrations, which were scattered through the text like bright flower petals.

One of those facts, right there on page three, was that Texas took its name from a tribe of Indians called Tejas who “lived in villages of funny little-rounded houses, planted gardens, and had an interesting culture of their own.” Their name, Johnson said, meant “friends,” and thus “Friendship” was our state motto.  Johnson is not the only writer to tell this story; it is in every history of Texas that has been published during the last century. Some textbooks elaborate on it and explain that the Tejas Indians were first encountered in East Texas by a Franciscan missionary, Fray Damian Massanet, who accompanied Captain Alonso de Leon on his 1689 expedition into East Texas, and that they told him that their name, Tejas, meant “friends” in their language.

Jorge Luis García Ruiz

Now a scholar in San Antonio, Jorge Luis García Ruiz, has come forward to say in the most polite way possible that what Siddie Joe Johnson and all of the other Texas historians who have written about the origin and meaning of our state’s name have said is balderdash. García Ruiz made this statement in a paper provocatively entitled “Texas: The False Origin of the Name,” which he presented at a symposium organized by the Witte Museum a couple of weeks ago to celebrate the 300th anniversary of San Antonio’s founding in 1718.

García Ruiz is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Madrid who teaches at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in San Antonio, and he is clearly a man who gets to the bottom of things. In his paper he does what any good historian would do: he goes to the original source. Like a wildcatter drilling for oil, he drills down through the layers of historians who have told and retold the story of Father Massanet’s 1689 encounter with the Tejas Indians to get to the bottom of the heap and find out what Father Massanet really said.

Garcia Ruiz’s conclusion is that several generations of chroniclers and translators have badly garbled Father Massanet’s account of his meeting with the Tejas Indians and what was said. He starts with the first appearance of the story in English, which he says was in an article by the distinguished Borderlands historian Herbert E. Bolton in the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, published by the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1907. Bolton translated thousands of Spanish documents relating to the history of Texas and usually got things right, but in this case, García Ruiz says, Bolton took his account of Father Massanet’s meeting with the Tejas not from anything written by Massanet but from a history of Texas written in Spanish about 1780 by a Spanish priest, Fray Juan Agustín Morfi.  Morfi, Garcia Ruiz points out, was not an eye-witness to the encounter; in fact, he was not even born when it took place and was writing about it a century after it happened. Not only that, Morfi was simply repeating information he found in the works of another historian, Fray Isidro Felix de Espinosa, who wrote about the encounter in 1746, 57 years after it happened. Espinosa never met Massanet and had no first-hand knowledge of the encounter, either.

Neither Bolton, nor Morfi, nor Espinosa ever saw Father Massanet’s own account of the encounter, which is contained in a letter that Massanet wrote a fellow priest, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, in 1690, a year after the event happened.  The manuscript of this letter was removed from a Mexican archive during the breakup of Maximilian’s empire and was purchased by the Texas A&M library in 1885. A facsimile of it, along with a translation by Lilia M. Casis, was published in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly in April 1899.  García Ruiz has examined it, and in his paper shows that Espinosa, Morfi, and Bolton all garbled Massanet’s account. What Massanet wrote was that the Indians they met “embraced us and called us techas, techas, which means friends, friends.” In another sentence, he says that the Indians were the Tejas Indians. The two words, techas, and Tejas, are completely unrelated to Massanet’s letter. It is the word techas that he says means “friends,” not Tejas.

If Tejas does not mean friends, then what does it mean, and where does it come from? García Ruiz argues convincingly that it is not a Native American word at all but an archaic Spanish word that means a bald cypress tree (Taxodium distichum), a tree that was common along the rivers of East Texas in the 16th and 17th centuries, that it is derived from the Latin word taxus, and that it first appears in a Spanish dictionary as teja in 1585.  Furthermore, he shows that the Spanish were already using the word Tejas to designate a nation of Indians in East Texas in 1609, 80 years before Massanet’s meeting with the Hasinai. He reproduces a 1609 map of Texas in the Archivo General de la Nacion in Mexico City that has the words “Nación de Tejas” inscribed on it just northeast of the Trinity River, and he speculates that the name was probably given to the river that we now call the Neches and the people who lived along it by the 1542 Hernando de Soto expedition.

Jorge Luis García Ruiz’s paper is a perfect example of the way historians work. Nothing is ever set in stone. New evidence turns up, or old evidence is re-examined and yields new facts, and the story changes. Eventually, some historian will find a document confirming or disproving García Ruiz’s theory that the Rio de Tejas was named by the Hernando de Soto expedition. As Robert Earle Keen says in an entirely different context, “The road goes on forever and the party never ends.”

(Lonn Taylor is a writer and historian who lives in Fort Davis, Texas. He can be reached at taylorw@fortdavis.net.)

 

5 COMMENTSON "“TEXAS: THE FALSE ORIGIN OF THE NAME”"

1. Lucas A. Gamero | February 20, 2021 at 4:26 am | Reply (Edit)
   Very interesting story indeed. In fact much of the history that we learnt in school, mostly based on the work of 19th century historians, is now being redefined and rewritten due to the many omissions and political intentions behind it. Never stop learning.

• cardenas.ae@gmail.com | February 22, 2021 at 8:11 am | Reply (Edit)
  Thank you, Lucas. That is the problem with history; you think you got it right and then someone discovers something that changes what you thought you knew. But it’s all good; if you follow the rules and someone doing the same thing finds something that adds to your findings.

2. Richard | September 16, 2020 at 12:05 am | Reply (Edit)
   Maybe Jorge Luis García Ruiz can also comment on a possibly much older use of the word “tejas.”
   In Spanish that predates the colonization of the Americans by Europeans, “tejas” appears to have meant “tiles,” as in that beautiful roof style made of s-shaped overlapping ceramic or baked-clay “tejas.” That Spanish word appears to have derived from the Latin word “tegulas.”

• cardenas.ae@gmail.com | September 16, 2020 at 9:52 am | Reply (Edit)
  Thank you, Richard. Good observation. Tejas is not really the material used, but rather the method used to put them together. The more direct definition of tejas is to knit or sew. In the case of the roof, you are “knitting” it together. The material can also be wood or asphalt shingles. Of course, in the setting that Garcia Ruiz was referring to it was used by native Americans. Interestingly enough, the word appears to have originated in India. But I am not an etymologist so I probably shouldn’t go there. Good observation, though. I had forgotten the word so it took me back to my childhood when my mother used to tejar (knit) and the roof was made from tejas, which my experience told me wood shingles. But the proper word was the way they put the roof together not the material used. Stay safe. Jesse Duran Jr | April 30, 2018 at 3:45 pm | Reply (Edit) Interesting stories. Historical pieces which are educational….