Odds are you’ve seen one or two partial solar eclipses in your lifetime. In fact, we saw an annular eclipse in 2023 and a partial eclipse in 2017. But a total solar eclipse? That’s a rarity. In fact, the last time the path of a total solar eclipse passed through the area we know as “San Antonio” was back in May of 1397 — 627 years ago!
Think of San Antonio’s history. What do you think about? Probably the Alamo and other Spanish missions. But this last total eclipse happened hundreds of years before the Spanish colonized the area. What did life look like more than 600 years ago in the Alamo City, long before the Alamo even existed?
A Nature-Lovers’ Paradise
First and foremost, things would have been a lot greener. With no development and fewer people requiring resources, our natural springs would flow more often.
Check out this video below of Honey Creek Spring Ranch - an area recently protected through conservation efforts. You’ll get an idea of what the land was like 600 years ago:
“Texas was a great place to live. It wasn’t called Texas at the time, but it would have been a beautiful natural area,” says Lesli Hicks, assistant professor of history at UTSA.
Hicks adds, “We have talked about Historic Texas as having 11,000 streams, so the water would have been plentiful, a little bit different from today. We’re struggling with that in drought [now], but water would have been plentiful. It would have been a bit greener.”
San Antonio’s Indigenous People: The Coahuiltecans
The area we now know as northeastern Mexico and southern Texas, including San Antonio, was home to the Coahuiltecan Native Americans. When the Spanish first colonized the region in the late 1600s and early 1700s, the Payaya, Papanac, Tilijae, and Pampopa were names associated to the bands and clans of the different families that lived in the area.
A common misconception about the Coahuiltecans is that they were hunter/gatherers, aimlessly wandering around.
However, Ramón Vásquez, executive director of the American Indians in Texas at Spanish Colonial Missions says, “What we’re learning today is that it was just the opposite. It was a very high level of sophistication that just wasn’t understood at the time.”
And it’s with that level of sophistication that the Coahuiltecans would be experiencing the eclipse in 1397. We can speculate that it would have been a spiritual event, too.
“All the celestial beings were faces of God,” says Vásquez. “It would have just been a moment of validation of their belief system of two becoming one.”
In fact, there’s evidence of the Spanish using these beliefs in converting locals at Mission Concepción. In one of the rooms at the Mission, there is a fresco that shows the sun and the moon together. In the middle of the two is a very Spanish face — complete with a fancy mustache and goatee. In this way, the Franciscan friars were symbolizing that their god - Jesus - was the true God, more important than the sun and moon.
It was at Mission Concepción that much of the local Coahuiltecan’s language and culture was changed as they were assimilated by the Spanish. So who and where are the Coahuiltecans now?
“Well, one’s being interviewed by KSAT 12 right now,” laughs Vásquez. “There are over 100,000 lineal descendants in San Antonio. They’re politicians. They sit on our City Council. They’re doctors. They’re delivering children right now. They’re teachers. They’re teaching our children. They’re priests. They’re ministering to our people, our families. They’re legislators.”
And although we have no record of what the Native Americans who witnessed the 1397 solar eclipse were feeling, Vasquez imagines, “it probably drew fear or probably drew love — every emotion that human beings would have today.”
On April 8, it’ll be through those human emotions that we will be connected to the people who viewed a similar total solar eclipse — 627 years ago.
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