Mistaking Matagorda Bay for the mouth of the Mississippi, the French ran their ship ashore on the Texas coast before establishing a pitiful and doomed colony and then traveling in the wrong direction, first west, then east, searching for a route to Canada. They died in a number of ways, from rattlesnake bite and drowning, from eating cactus and from fights with the natives and one another, and within three years they were gone: dead, kidnapped, or deserted. When the Spaniards arrived they buried the bodies along with the cannons and burned the fort to the ground, declaring the destruction of French Texas to be God's just punishment for disputing Spanish territory, seeing His hand in the cactus thorn, the rattlesnake's fang, the Karankawa's arrow, and the shallow Texas rivers that would allow no ship to enter.
* * *
The last Karankawa lives in Brownsville now: at least he says he is the last, that his family fled here from the coast, their numbers diminished by French pirates and Texians to just a handful and now just him, giving interviews from a booth in McDonald's after being honorably discharged from service in the disputed territories of Yugoslavia and having observed first-hand how French, Spanish, and American generals established forts and divided the territory among themselves.
* * *
A hundred miles from the buried and forgotten Fort Saint Louis a French pirate established an island kingdom called Campeche and ruled for five years from a house painted red, directing attacks against the Karankawa and settlers of every nation, and issuing letters of transit from a country that no one recognized.
He was finally persuaded to leave, but not before one of those famous Galveston floods had already wiped away most of what he'd made. Being a pirate, he could see which way the wind was blowing, and, burning the remains of Campeche to the ground, he left nearly no trace in Texas, the coast a blank slate once more so that it could be reclaimed after him again and again.