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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)