We have written since late January about the corona virus that appeared in November-December in Wuhan, China and its spread across the world and particularly the impact in Texas. This week 53 million cases have been reported worldwide with 1.2 million deaths. In the United States the current reports are 10.6 million cases and 250,000 deaths. Texas has had over 1 million cases and 20,000 deaths. Infection rates are rising sharply in northern states as cooler weather forces people inside and increases the risk of infection. The risk of death is about 2 cases out of a hundred; 2-2.5%. But deaths are much more likely in older persons and those with other health problems such as overweight, diabetic, lung and circulatory disorders. Early identification and treatment are important in reducing the impact and knowledge is improving both for the layman and the health professional. Here is a protocol summary from a medical school in Virginia. Several vaccine trials are underway and promising. We can be hopeful that broad immunization activity will be occurring in 2021.
By March efforts were underway nationally and in Texas to reduce social interaction and thereby reduce infections. For Austin this effort was marked by the City cancelling South By Southwest in the second week of March. Since then travel, dining out, going to bars, sending children to school, closing college classrooms, using social distancing and masks in shopping all have been efforts to control the spread and efforts to keep from overwhelming hospitals.
These efforts to control the pandemic have had other effects that will prove to be more far reaching than the pandemic. For Texas it is triggering an economic depression that is accompanied by increased unemployment, homelessness and crime. It means much of the Texas economy based upon oil, agriculture, exporting and electronics will be challenged and changed.
There have been several cycles of prosperity and depression in Texas. The cycles are created by forces including population migration, climate conditions and scientific innovations.
Examining Some History For Answers
Several thousand years ago, Texas experienced population migrations from the north and west. There were several waves of migrations of people and cultures from Asia moving across the Bering Straits of the Artic seas during periods of lower ocean levels. Archaeological findings and theorizing and more recent genetic data offer evidence that first human presence occurred in North America 33,000 years ago.[i] Colder global temperatures resulting in ice buildups that lowered sea levels made a land bridge available. There were several periods when this occurred from Asia into what is now Alaska. Over the centuries groups would cross the land bridge and populate first, North America and then South America. These human inhabitants would have found lands filled with both animal and plant species proving food including deer, bison, abundant fish, grains particularly corn and edible plants like potatoes, squash, chilies, tomatoes, and beans that would permit large populations.
First Kingdoms
4,000 years ago the Maya and Inca kingdoms were established in Central and South America. Other smaller cultures developed in the Americas but the largest were in the temperate lands beginning in southern California and central Texas extending south of the current countries of Brazil and Argentina.
About 1200 AD a large drought lasting a hundred years occurred in western North America and caused sharp population declines and migrations south. Abandoned cliff dwellings exist today in the Four Corners region of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado presumed to be left from that era. Some view the consequence migration to the central lakes of Mexico City and the creation of the Aztec Empire as the result of this Four Corners’ century-long drought.
European Contact
By 1500 AD Europeans began to appear in North America with Spanish and Portuguese in Central and South America, the Caribbean and on the Gulf Coast of North America. French, English, Dutch and other immigrants began to come to North America but unlike the Spanish and Portuguese came as farm families rather than military units. They brought farm animals including cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, dogs and cats as well as plants native to Europe and England. Some contact with native populations was peaceful but much was violent and the wars along with diseases unknown to the Native Americas devastated the indigenous populations. The population in what is now Mexico is estimated at 1500 AD of 20 million people with the population in the United States estimated then as 18 million. Two centuries later Mexico had an estimated indigenous population of 1 million and the 48 contiguous states of the United States estimated at 600,000. Disease far more than warfare caused the greatest loss of life but conflict and forced migration added to the disaster for indigenous populations.
Texas Frontier Times
Frontier times in Texas from 1800 to 1880 consisted of American migration from the states of the South like Louisiana, Alabama, the Carolinas, Georgia and the West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee mountain areas into east Texas, with Spanish-Mexican missions in El Paso, San Antonio and the lower Rio Grande Valley. Limiting Spanish and Mexican settlements expanding north were roving Indian bands of mainly Comanche from Kansas, south into the Mexican states of Nuevo Leon and east to Austin. The Comanche quickly adapted to runaway horses from Mexican ranches and then rifles, obtained through trade and conflicts, to both harvest native bison and to raid Hispanic missions and Texan farms and ranches.
The Comanche domain ended by 1880 as railroads extending west hired buffalo hunters to remove the bison and 60 million, almost all, were destroyed. That and wars with Texans reduced the Comanche population from an estimated 90,000 to less than 10,000 persons. The most powerful band under Quanah Parker was captured in north Texas in 1875 in the Red River War and forced into a reservation in Indian territory(Oklahoma).
With the removal of the Comanche, the driving of large herds of range cattle from south and central Texas to railheads in western Kansas accelerated and created a surge of wealth to Texas. In time the railroads were extended to Ft. Worth and its stockyards and connection to the railroads created a first wave of prosperity from cattle.
The Empire of Oil
Even as the railroads were being extended, another far greater resource was appearing in Texas: the discovery of oil. 1894 in Corsicana is the date and location of the first oil well in the state when a driller seeking water hit oil. Initially oil was used for home heating and then fueling trains on the railroads, but the explosive demand came with the automobile particularly the car for everyone, the Ford Model T. Its price made it a car for the masses leading to passable roads, paved highways, gasoline stations in networks of one for every 100 miles or so and an explosive demand for oil.
Saudi Arabia’s Destruction of the Texas Oil Economy in 1986
Rising oil demand in Texas, the United States and the world continued through the 20th Century even in the Great Depression of the 1930’s without a break until 1986. Prices peaked in 1980 at over $30 a barrel ($109.00 in current dollars!) but fell to $8.50 in 1986-88! The cause of the crash was increased production from Saudi Arabia to punish members of OPEC that were producing beyond the agreed on levels. Texas was not a member of OPEC but affected by its production.
The remainder of that decade and much of the 1990’s were a difficult time for Texas. Oil demand was low, banks and savings and loans that had loaned heavily on real estate became bankrupt as business activity nosedived. Unemployment grew as the Texas boom ended. Crime exploded and reached a peak in the middle years of the decade of 1990’s. In that decade during the administration of Governor Ann Richards, Texas created a huge increase in its number of prisons and prison cells! The chart is annual Uniform Crime Reports Indexes from the 1960’s through 2019.
[i] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-first-americans/