Waco, TX news and local guide

Indigenous peoples lived along the Brazos for thousands of years, and in historic times the site of Waco was home to the Waco, a Wichita people, called Hueco or Huaco by the Spanish. In 1824, after violence between the Waco and settlers, Stephen F. Austin sent Thomas M. Duke to explore the area. Duke reported a village on the west bank with a spring "almost as cold as ice itself" and about 400 acres of corn, beans, pumpkins and melons, and he guessed it could raise no more than a hundred warriors. Austin stopped a plan to destroy the village and made a treaty with the Waco in 1825. A Cherokee invasion pushed them north toward present Fort Worth in 1830. In 1872 they were moved to a reservation in Oklahoma with other Wichita peoples, and in 1902 they received land allotments and citizenship.

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Neil McLennan settled near the South Bosque River in 1838. Jacob De Cordova bought his land and hired George B. Erath, a former Texas Ranger and surveyor, who laid out the first block of the city in 1849. The owners wanted to call it Lamartine, but Erath persuaded them to name it Waco Village after the people who had lived there. In March 1849 Shapley Prince Ross, father of the future governor Lawrence Sullivan Ross, built the first house, a double log cabin on a bluff above the springs, and his daughter Kate was the first settler child born in Waco. For this Ross is considered the city's founder. Sources Wikipedia: Waco, Texas