Village of the Alabama and Coushatti Indians
Livingston, Polk County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Who came into Texas early in the 19th century and have always been friendly with the whites.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This marker commemorates the village of the Alabama and Coushatta peoples, related tribes who migrated into East Texas early in the nineteenth century. Displaced from their southeastern homelands, they settled in the pineywoods around present-day Polk County and maintained peaceful relations with the newcomers around them. Their descendants remain on a reservation in this area today, one of the oldest in Texas.
Why it matters
The Alabama-Coushatta represent the forced migrations of southeastern Native nations and a rare instance of a Texas tribe securing an enduring homeland within the state.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Confederate Service of Alabama and Coushatta Indians
Livingston, TX
As the Civil War opened in 1861, an Indian agent trained Alabama and Coushatta men of Polk County as cavalry, and in 1862 nineteen of them, including Chief John Scott, enlisted in the 24th Texas Cavalry. Reassigned as infantry and then briefly to naval duty, the company eventually numbered well over a hundred and spent much of the war building and running flat-bottomed scows to move Confederate supplies down the Trinity River. Wartime governors' correspondence recorded their service.
Chief John Scott
Livingston, TX
Reputed to have lived from 1805 to 1913, John Scott came to Texas in the 1830s and served most of his long life as a chief of the Alabama Indians in Polk County. He also served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. His story bridges the tribe's presence in Texas from the era of early Anglo settlement into the twentieth century.
Major Henry W. Augustine
Livingston, TX
Henry W. Augustine moved from Alabama to East Texas in 1827, in the years when the region was filling with Anglo settlers under Mexican rule. He fought in the 1832 Battle of Nacogdoches, served as a delegate to the 1835 Consultation that set Texas on the road to revolution, and took part in the Cherokee War of 1838. For his battle injuries and service to the Republic of Texas he received both a land grant and a wooden leg.
James Barclay Place, 1842
Woodville, TX
Raised of hand-hewn pine in 1842, this is remembered as the oldest home in Tyler County, built by the area's first Indian agent—a man appointed to that post by Sam Houston, the towering figure of the Republic of Texas. In the young Republic, an Indian agent stood at the fraught boundary between Anglo settlers pressing westward and the Native peoples already on the land. The house survives as a rare wooden witness to Texas's earliest days of statehood-in-waiting.