East Texas is a distinct geographic and ecological area in the U.S. state of Texas.
According to the Handbook of Texas, the East Texas area "may be separated from the rest of Texas roughly by a line extending from the Red River in north central Lamar County southwestward to east central Limestone County and then southeastward to Galveston Bay", though some separate the Gulf Coast area into a separate region.
This area includes all or parts of 49 counties, totaling almost 40,000 square miles (100,000 km2) and a population of almost 6 million. Another popular, somewhat simpler, definition defines East Texas as the region between Interstate 45 as the western border linking Dallas and Houston, the Louisiana border as the eastern border, the Oklahoma border as the northern border, and Galveston Bay shores as the southern border.
Most of the region consists of the Piney Woods ecoregion, and East Texas can sometimes be reduced to include only the Piney Woods. Houston is rarely regarded as a part of East Texas and is more closely associated with the Coastal Bend along the Gulf of Mexico; as has been the case for most of the city's recent history. At the fringes, towards Central Texas, the forests expand outward toward sparser trees and eventually into open plains.
Famous quotes containing the words east and/or texas:
“If the east wind doesn’t prevail over the west wind, then the west wind will prevail over the east wind.”
—Chinese proverb.
“Worn down by the hoofs of millions of half-wild Texas cattle driven along it to the railheads in Kansas, the trail was a bare, brown, dusty strip hundreds of miles long, lined with the bleaching bones of longhorns and cow ponies. Here and there a broken-down chuck wagon or a small mound marking the grave of some cowhand buried by his partners “on the lone prairie” gave evidence to the hardships of the journey.”
—For the State of Kansas, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)