Provides biographical sketches of the men and women who discovered, explored, and settled Spanish Texas from 1528 to 1821, including profiles of religious figures, governors, pioneers, Indian agents, and army captains.

In this book, readers take a look at Texas and the original explorers who first set eyes on this vast land hundreds of years ago. Featured adventurers include la Salle, Coronado, de Soto, and Cortés. Biographical sidebars give readers a more detailed understanding of Texas's most important explorers.

The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and of the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world. “I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.” Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea. Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.

In the 1500s, European explorers arrived in Texas in search of gold and glory. The Spanish were the first Europeans to arrive. Readers get to discover early Texas history in this fascinating nonfiction book that uses colorful images, intriguing facts, supportive text, and an accommodating glossary, index, and table of contents to introduce readers to various explorers such as Christopher Colombus, Cabeza de Vaca, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado, and La Salle. Children will be excited and engaged as they read through to also learn about the many American Indian tribes of the past. From the Caddo to the Apache, the Comanche to the Karankawa, readers will be captivated from beginning to end!

Mapping old trails has a romantic allure at least as great as the difficulty involved in doing it. In this book, William Foster produces the first highly accurate maps of the eleven Spanish expeditions from northeastern Mexico into what is now East Texas during the years 1689 to 1768. Foster draws upon the detailed diaries that each expedition kept of its route, cross-checking the journals among themselves and against previously unused eighteenth-century Spanish maps, modern detailed topographic maps, aerial photographs, and on-site inspections. From these sources emerges a clear picture of where the Spanish explorers actually passed through Texas. This information, which corrects many previous misinterpretations, will be widely valuable. Old names of rivers and landforms will be of interest to geographers. Anthropologists and archaeologists will find new information on encounters with some 139 named Indian tribes. Botanists and zoologists will see changes in the distribution of flora and fauna with increasing European habitation, and climatologists will learn more about the "Little Ice Age" along the Rio Grande.