"}\n\n\n\n\nSo the most important thing in understanding the development of Texas is that there are basically no rivers navigable further inland than Houston. That means it was mostly unsettled for so long not because it was unlivable or unfarmable but because there was no point to farming it, since you had no way of getting your crops to a demanding market.
\nThis as much as the scrubland ecology is why the early economy was based on cattle, livestock being the only product that could move overland under its own power. Originally to Galveston for export to Caribbean slave plantations on land too valuable for cash crops to waste growing protein, later to the furthest south railhead for shipment to the stockyards of Chicago (which, built to connect the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River system, was and still is the linchpin of the American transportation network)
\nAnd this still matters! Like, one theory of modern American politics comes down to Texas and other \u201cSun Belt\u201d cities offering better \u201caffordable family formation\u201d, in turn because they can sprawl outward 360\u00b0 over the empty plains, as compared to other cities constrained by geography.
\nBut that\u2019s because those cities only grew in the Industrial Age past when cities had to be located around a water feature (or OK, maybe a mountain pass) in order to matter. Dallas grew up where it did because it was at the intersection of two railroads. Compare to the original Texas power city of Galveston, which (until a devastating hurricane) was not only on the coast but a Manhattan-style island
\ncorrection livestock is not the only product that could be transported overland under its own power, also human slaves, and in fact the cattle drive economy in a lot of ways depended on a mirror African economy gathering slaves inland and driving them to the coast for export
\n(\u201dchattel\u201d and \u201ccattle\u201d come from the same source, which further back is the same source of \u201ccapital\u201d)
\nThis isn\u2019t quite right, and the ways in which it\u2019s not right are revealing when you look at internal Texas dynamics.
First, there are in fact at least two rivers in Texas that were navigable to 19th-century flat-bottomed river steamers: the Red and the Sabine (edit: yeah, quite a few more, even the relatively minor Angelina River was navigable by steamboat).\u00a0 The former left a recognizable mark on history a little further east in the form of a midsized American city name: Shreveport, LA was originally Shreve\u2019s Port, named after the Captain Shreve who founded the town back in the nineteenth century.\u00a0 The latter is why Jefferson, TX was a major town back in the nineteenth century, as it was one of the best port sites on the Sabine.\u00a0 (As I\u2019ve noted before, Jefferson ceased to be a major town later after it rejected having a rail line come through the city; IIRC there was also a decade-long logjam (now you know where that word comes from!) on the Sabine that didn\u2019t help matters at all.)\u00a0 As such, the eastern parts of the state had a relatively easy time shipping cotton, and they also had climate much more similar to Louisiana and the rest of the Deep South and were also directly adjacent to existing Southern territory; they were settled early and to this day remain more Confederate than the rest of the state.\u00a0 (When I was in the region the LSU fandom* was the second-largest or at least second-loudest college sports fandom around, behind only Texas A&M; UT Austin was roughly viewed as being too Yankee.)\u00a0 Note: AFAIK Texarkana and some other parts of the northeastern Piney Woods were settled from the Ozarks (read: by Borderers) instead.
There\u2019s also the other elephant in the room, namely the Rio Grande; I can\u2019t remember if it was permanently navigable prior to 20th century levels of water usage (edit: parts of it could be traveled by steamers, but not all the way up to El Paso), but it was navigable often enough that settlers saw fit to build Brownsville as a port city after the Mexican-American War.\u00a0 That watershed, along with some of the southern coastal areas with access to some of the other smaller Texas rivers, were settled by Hispanic colonists long before anglos ever got there; you can spot the legacy by noting which places have Spanish names (San Antonio, San Angelo, El Paso, Laredo, San Jacinto - and yes, all the major battles of the Texan War of Independence were fought in this part of the state.\u00a0 Weird fact from double-checking: while Corpus Christi is around this part of the state and has a Spanish name, it is in fact much younger than you would expect from a Spanish-named Texas city, and postdates the Republic of Texas.)
Texas Hill Country had the Brazos - which, double-checking this post, was in fact navigable and even saw a naval skirmish during the Texas War of Independence! - and was settled by people who just wanted a homestead during the middle of the nineteenth century, which meant Borderers and also a bunch of European immigrants in the wake of the 1848 revolutions; in particular, quite a few Germans settled in the region, and German is still a surprisingly common offering as a language elective in Texas schools.\u00a0 (Considering that the German liberals lost the 1848 revolutions, this is also probably why the Hill Country is so notoriously liberal.)\u00a0 The Hill Country is currently undergoing swamped by the expansion of Austin, much like Maryland and northern Virginia got swallowed by DC, so we\u2019ll see how long that lasts.\u00a0 The North Central Plain and Great Plains proper, meanwhile, remained largely unsettled until the Indian Wars pushed back the Apaches and Comanches (and IIRC the Kiowa?); it then got converted to ranchland and then farmland as new irrigation techniques opened up the Great Plains to settlement.\u00a0 Dallas\u2019s original settlement is actually slightly older than this, which can probably be attributed to the combination of freshwater from the Trinity and the presence of a bunch of military forts near what\u2019s now known as Fort Worth - another city whose name remains as vestigial evidence of its origin.
(Side note from double-checking: according to Wiki, the aforementioned Captain Shreve is also responsible for a legal precedent that you can\u2019t monopolize rights of navigation on US waterways.\u00a0 Huh.)