A Lone Star giant leads America in export dollars
Texas covers 268,596 square miles and held an estimated 31.7 million people in 2025, ranking second among U.S. states on both counts. Its economy, spanning energy, farming, technology and aerospace, is the country's second-largest by state output, and no state has earned more from exports since 2002.
The name comes from the Caddo word for friend, which the Spanish applied as Tejas to the Hasinai Confederacy. In the eighteenth century Spanish officials also called the province the New Philippines. The English pronunciation with a ks sound ignores the older Spanish value of x, and a map from the 1760s marks a village called Teijas on the Trinity River near today's Crockett.
Before Europeans came, the land sat between Southwestern and Plains cultures, with Ancestral Puebloans to the west, Mississippian mound builders to the east and Mesoamerica to the south. Caddo farmers held the northeast river basins, Karankawa lived on the central coast and Apache bands roamed the interior. Álvarez de Pineda mapped the Gulf Coast in 1519, and in 1528 the shipwrecked Cabeza de Vaca became the first European ashore, reporting that half the local people died of a bowel disease and blamed the Spanish.
France arrived by accident in 1685 when La Salle, missing the Mississippi, planted Fort Saint Louis on Matagorda Bay; it lasted four years, and his own men killed him. Spain answered with missions among the Caddo and in 1718 founded San Antonio, its first civilian settlement there. The 1819 treaty fixed the border with the United States at the Sabine River, and after 1821 the core of Texas became part of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas.
The lone star first flew in 1819 on the Long Expedition and later on the flag of the 1836 republic born after the Alamo. Sam Houston, its first president, sought peace with Native nations, but Mirabeau Lamar's hostility drove most of them north of the Red River. Texas joined the Union as the 28th state in 1845, helping ignite war with Mexico, and later seceded to join the Confederacy.
Source: Texas
