So far we’ve talked about the state of the world in the 1500s, the first Spanish expedition in Texas in the 1520s, and we’ve touched a little on the geography and the people who were living in Texas at that time. Today I want to delve deeper into “The First People”, after all Indians were here long before the Spanish and any other Europeans, (even my ancestors the Vikings who landed in Newfoundland around 1100 AD, 400 years before Columbus, but that’s a story for another time). Now allow me to try and clear up something, and that is the term “Indians”. The people Europeans encountered when they first reached the shores of the continent where misnamed, because the explorers thought they had reached India and as we know, they were wrong. They thought they had made a grand trip that would help them earn riches. The inhabitants themselves did not refer to themselves in any specific way, other than often using the term “the people”, they did refer to other tribes with names. For example, the early Spanish encountered a group of nomadic buffalo hunters, they called Querechos. That group was later named Apache, which came from the Zuni word for enemy “apachu” which is what they called the Navajo.