Texas Geography & Natural Regions
Receiving the highest annual rainfall, this Texas region has the lowest elevation and is home to the most people.
What is the Coastal Plains?
Found in the High Plains of the Panhandle, this high, flat subregion relies on underground irrigation and features deep cuts like Palo Duro Canyon.
What is the High Plains?
Known for its dense pine forests, this East Texas subregion supported a massive historic lumber industry.
What is the Piney Woods?
Brought over by European explorers, this animal completely changed Plains tribes like the Comanche into expert hunters and mobile warriors.
What is the horse?
Native groups in West Texas built pit-houses or adobe homes and used river water for farming for this primary reason.
What is they adapted to the dry, desert climate and lack of rain?
Heading across the Texas Panhandle in 1540, this conquistador led a massive expedition searching for the legendary golden city of Cíbola.
Who is Francisco Vázquez de Coronado?
Claiming he saw a golden city in the distance, this priest's 1539 report sparked gold fever in Mexico City.
Who is Fray Marcos de Niza?
Located in Central Texas, this high plateau features limestone terrain, rolling hills, and underground aquifers.
What is the Edwards Plateau?
As you travel in a straight line from East Texas toward El Paso in West Texas, this double trend happens to elevation and annual rainfall.
What is elevation increases while rainfall decreases?
This cliff line in West Texas acts as a natural wall dividing the North Central Plains from the higher High Plains.
What is the Caprock Escarpment?
Living in the Piney Woods, this advanced farming tribe built large, dome-shaped beehive grass houses.
Who are the Caddo?
Forced to adapt to the dry scrublands of South Texas, this nomadic group survived by foraging for roots, cacti, and small desert animals.
Who are the Coahuiltecan?
Seeking a direct sea route to Asia, this Italian explorer made landfall in the Caribbean in 1492, beginning the Age of Contact.
Who is Christopher Columbus?
Taking command after Hernando de Soto died, this explorer led his party into East Texas in 1542.
Who is Luis de Moscoso Alvarado?
Spain began building missions and forts in East Texas during the late 1600s primarily to keep out this rival European country.
What is France?
Across Texas, Native American groups lived in completely different styles of homes and wore different clothing due to this primary factor.
What is adapting to different regional climates and natural resources?
In Central Texas, this steep cliff line separates the low Coastal Plains from the higher Great Plains.
What is the Balcones Escarpment?
Flowing along the entire southern border of Texas, this long river separates Texas from Mexico
What is the Rio Grande?
To survive along the coastal barrier islands, this nomadic tribe used dugout canoes to fish and rubbed alligator fat on their skin to repel mosquitoes.
Who are the Karankawa?
Adapted into Tejas by the Spanish, this Caddo word meaning "friend" or "ally" gave Texas its name.
What is Taysha?
Sailing along the Gulf Coast in 1519, this Spanish explorer created the first map showing the Texas coastline.
Who is Alonso Álvarez de Pineda?
Building Fort St. Louis in 1685, this French explorer panicked Spanish leaders into renewing their effort to occupy Texas.
Who is Sieur de La Salle?
Spanish explorers traveling through East Texas faced major physical challenges due to these two environmental features.
What are thick pine forests and flooded rivers?
To represent Texas's massive geographical size on paper, mapmakers use this map feature to show the ratio between a distance on a map and the actual distance on Earth.
What is a map scale?
Extreme day-to-night temperatures, high mountain peaks, and desert plants define this westernmost region of Texas.
What is the Mountains and Basins region?
This river acts as the eastern boundary line between Texas and Louisiana
What is the Sabine River?
Because timber was scarce in the West Texas desert, this Puebloan tribe built permanent homes out of mud and straw called adobe.
Who are the Jumano?
While Plains tribes had to move continuously to hunt buffalo, agricultural tribes like the Caddo built permanent homes for this main reason.
What is farming provided a steady local food supply?
These three words represent the main political, economic, and religious motives driving Spanish conquistadors.
What are Gold, God, and Glory?
Spanish exploration of Texas dropped off sharply in the late 1500s primarily because of this disappointing realization.
What is no gold or wealthy empires were found?
The reintroduction of this animal by Spanish settlers enabled Plains tribes to hunt buffalo far more efficiently.
What is the horse?
Running through Central Texas and flowing past Austin before emptying into Matagorda Bay, this major river gets its name from the Spanish word for "reddish" or "colored," though it is not the river that forms the Oklahoma border.
What is the Colorado River?
Featuring rolling hills and rich soil, this region contains major cities like Dallas, Fort Worth, and Wichita Falls.
What is the North Central Plains?
Located in the desert terrain of the Mountains and Basins, this city is the westernmost major city in Texas.
What is El Paso?
Moving constantly across the flat grasslands to follow buffalo herds, Plains tribes lived in these portable, hide-covered shelters.
What are tipis (tepees)?
Living near coastal swamps in southeastern Texas, this group adapted by hunting alligators and gathering shellfish.
Who are the Atakapa?
Shipwrecked on Galveston Island in 1528, this explorer lived among native tribes as a healer and later published his journal La Relación.
Who is Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca?
Unintentionally brought over on Spanish ships, these biological threats devastated native populations who lacked immunity.
What are European diseases (like smallpox)?
Local natural resources and climate dictated whether a Native Texan tribe did these three food-gathering activities.
What is farmed, hunted, or gathered?
Published in Spain in 1542, Cabeza de Vaca's written account, La Relación, serves modern historians as this type of historical evidence because it was recorded by a direct eyewitness.
What is a primary source?