The El Camino Real Chapter Meeting on February 13 really filled our meeting space. It was great to have to go upstairs and fetch more chairs for all the members, 2020 class students, and guests that came to hear Dr. Alston Thoms talk about the indigenous people who lived in the Milam County area from the time of the Mastodons until the present.
He had a LOT of content to cover, and an hour definitely wasn’t enough to take in all there is to know about this topic. Luckily, the website at Texas Beyond History has lots and lots of additional information.
We learned about the Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Atakapa (Bedi) people who made their lives moving from place to place to follow the food spots they knew of. They primarily ate deer, which have been the primary food source for people in this area since people showed up. They were able to get many types of prey using spears, adl-adl, arrows and such, and they also ate lots of our native plants, even ones we don’t normally eat (like false garlic/crow poison, which is good roasted a long time).
Later on, other groups moved in, but there are still descendants of the Coahuiltecan people in central Texas, after many of them moved to the missions, like the Alamo (bear in mind, its main historical significance is being an early Spanish mission).
Want to learn a little more? I summarized his previous talk on my personal blog, and we even had a newspaper article on his talk.
At the Chapter Meeting
We had a lively Chapter Meeting after the talk. Our first recertification award of 2020 went out to Donna Lewis, who is the first to sport a bumblebee pin on her shirt! Donna does so much work for our chapter, including bringing in our guest speakers and leading meetings when the President is unavailable (like next month, when I have the nerve to have scheduled a vacation at meeting time!).
Liz Lewis (no relation), a member if the 2018 class, also got an exciting milestone award, as she received her initial certification. She’s now working on setting up the graduation dinner for our 2020 students.
And finally, Linda Jo Conn presented Debbie Harris with the WOW iNaturalist award of the month for her photo of a Texas spiny lizard. Get those photos in, because Linda Jo is watching out for good ones!
We have lots of activities this month, so be on the lookout for more blog posts in the next couple of weeks!
Nature Along the El Camino Real 