History
In 1519, when Spanish explorer Alonzo Alvarez de Pineda sailed through the pass to what he later named Corpus Christi Bay, the Karankawa Indians were likely the island's only residents. By the 18th century, as a result of grazing herds of horses, introduced by Spanish settlers, was first called "Wild Horse", then "Mustang Island". Up to the 1840s the island and pass (now the ship channel) were used by buccaneers, Mexican smugglers, merchants and immigrants seeking their fortune or someone else's fortune.
Captain Robert Mercer was the first settler to set up residence on the island with his family. His wife is said to have been the first white woman in the area. He built a house there in 1853 and named it El Mar Rancho.
Read more about this topic: Mustang Island
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“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)