When the Bosque Ran Clear: Life Along the River from Prehistory to the Civil War

When the Bosque Ran Clear: Life Along the River from Prehistory to the Civil War presents a history of early people and their environments along the Bosque River valley in North Central Texas. Spanning from the Pleistocene, thousands of years ago when the earliest peoples arrived in the cool and rainy river valley, to the time of the Comanche in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Dan Young describes how peoples’ lives were shaped by climate-driven changes in the landscape. Global fluctuations in climate brought changes to the river’s environment, forcing new lifestyles to develop in response to new environmental conditions, impacting foodstuffs and the presence or absence of bison.

In response to centuries of alternating climates, lifeways successfully adapted in the Bosque Valley. Evidence of these inhabitants is found in the soil; stone tools and weapons, pollen, chemical signatures, and other organic matter, as discussed in archaeological and paleoclimatological studies, provide scientific evidence to support Young’s insights on climate change, human occupation, and folk botany.

Presented in ten chapters with thirty-eight original black and white illustrations, the book begins with the natural history of the river that flows through the Western Cross Timbers, the Blackland Prairies, and into the Brazos River at Waco. Beginning with the Pleistocene, Young’s narrative then continues through the Early Archaic (8,000–6,000 years ago), Middle Archaic (6,000–4,000 years ago), and the Wet Centuries (5,000–2,150 years ago), with the climate-induced disappearance of bison and the arrival of the Spanish and their horses. Young concludes with a chapter on the establishment of Scots-Irish settlements in 1854 and the destruction of the Native American communities and lifeways through the new settlers’ farming and ranching practices.