Holy Heritage

CHAPTER ONE - THE EXPLORERS

The First Dallasites

Dallas and its surrounds are not very old, only a dot, really, or maybe a blob on the scroll of geographic history. But if its cathedral did not descend full grown from the clouds, neither did what we now call the Metroplex. It has a past. It has one of the most remote prehistorical pasts in America. Go up to the Aubrey Site on the Elm Fork of the Trinity River below Lake Ray Roberts Dam and visit in your imagination the Stone Age people who lived there ten thousand years ago. True, we know almost nothing about them. They crossed into our continent during the Pleistocene Era on a land bridge from Siberia. They were omnivores, living on herbs, nuts, fruit, and roots, and (when they could get it) the meat of enormous animals - bison twice as large as the modern kind, extinct elephants, and mammoths, - which they killed with spears. (Bows and arrows had not yet been invented.)

Apart from these meager facts, history stumbles, but anthropologists tell us that these folk were physically just like us. They shivered when the blue northers descended and basked in the largess of spring. They were miserable. They were ecstatic. They were just as smart as we are. (Could any of us figure out how to kill a mammoth with a wooden spear and use his carcass to fulfill all our needs - food, clothing, shelter, the works?) They were fully human. They were us. Within them lurked the same spirit which animates all men, which animates us. History and science have concluded that they believed in an after-life. I believe that they had souls. What feeble creatures they were to carry so great a burden! But then, so are we. Primitive as they were, they must have had, as we do, an innate longing for an undefined infinite. They must have gazed in awe just as we do at the star-studded immensity of space, on their way to Tierra del Fuego, on their way to

Bethlehem. Maybe they took a wrong turn. Maybe they were looking on the wrong continent, dreaming that some day Bethlehem would come to them. It came. But it was a long time coming. Most histories shy away from pointing out that ancient man had a spiritual side, even that all men have a spiritual side, in the former case because the evidence is thin (although not completely lacking), in the latter case because faith is controversial and controversial has come to mean irrelevant. But this tale of St. Matthew’s is a religious tale. From the beginning, we have had a religious history. We have not forgotten you, old people.

Texas Enters Written History It is human nature to want to know what lies beyond the sunset. Maybe it is better hunting. More bison, maybe. More roots and berries. Maybe fame. Maybe gold. Maybe just the freedom to be alone. It has many names, but they all have the same root. SAINT AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO got it right. Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee, O Lord. Everyone feels it. Not everyone knows what it is. Everyone chases it. Not everyone finds it. In the fifteenth century it beckoned from across the Western Sea.

Texas began modern life in 1493 through what must have been one of the greatest real estate swindles of all time when POPE ALEXANDER VI divided the American discoveries of CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS between Spain and Portugal. Columbus, of course, was not the first European to chance upon and attempt to colonize North America. The Vikings’ and probably the Scots’ doomed attempts beat him by several hundred years. But this time, backed by the might of the world’s greatest political power, the spiritual strength of the papacy, and a bit of global warming, the discovery lasted. The area which would be known some day as Texas (derived from a Caddo word meaning friends) fell to the lot of Spain, which maintained sovereignty for three hundred and twenty-eight years, except for a brief five-year period when RENE ROBERT CAVALIER, SIEUR DE LA SALLE, flew the fleur-de-lys over Matagorda Bay.

The land called Texas was immense, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico (which the Spaniards called the North Sea) up to the Red River , reaching still farther north and west to include half of what is now New Mexico, one third of what is now Colorado, and substantial bites of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. At the time of conquest this gorgeous, massive, brutish dominion was inhabited by three principal races: the Pueblo in the upper Rio Grande area, the Mississippian mound builders in the middle, and the Mesoamericans of the south, their dozens of sub-tribes as distinct from one another as France is from Russia today. Believing that he had found a water route to the Asian subcontinent, Columbus called them all Indians. The name stuck. The Spaniards were not tardy in trying their luck in the vastness they called New Spain. America became not only a source of political power but also a mine of treasure both mineral and human. South of the Rio Grande (which the Spanish knew as the Rio Bravo), fantastic amounts of gold waited to be looted, some of which can still be seen by tourists today while visiting the Chapel Royal in Granada. The bones of thousands of native slaves dusted the splendor of Spanish America south of the Rio Bravo. Franciscan friars did their best to teach the surviving aborigines to settle down and become farmers, then converts, and to accept European-like ways. Many did. North of the Rio Bravo, not so many.