Becoming Texas

The first floor gallery, Becoming Texas, is a hands-on, immersive environment that uncovers Texas history with the most contemporary research on our past.

This one-of-a-kind journey through more than 16,000 years of Texas history documents the rise and fall of nations up to Mexican Independence in 1821.

• Learn about the men and women who established vast trade networks across the Americas. View weapons, jewelry, tools, and imagery representing the diversity of early Indigenous civilizations who cultivated the lands in what we now call Texas.
• Test the strength needed to provide food for your family as you pull back a bow and imagine releasing an arrow.
• Understand European ambitions to colonize North America by exploring early European maps of North America, weapons, armor, and gold from a 1554 sunken treasure fleet that never returned to Spain.
• Discover French explorer La Salle's failed 1684 attempt to establish a colony in the Gulf of Mexico. Examine the expedition's 300-year-old ship, La Belle, excavated off the Texas coast by the Texas Historical Commission, and interact with the 17th century ship through augmented reality. See thousands of items of cargo found in the hull, including colonial household items, a bronze cannon, navigation tools, weapons, and trade goods.
• See what life was like beyond the frontier in Spanish Catholic missions, military forts, and settlements. Examine rare artifacts and documents that tell of the trials, hopes, and dreams of the people of New Spain.
• Touch replica objects and reveal the innovative uses of natural resources by Native American peoples. A large graphic element places you in the middle of cultural interactions that occurred between Nations and Tribes.
• Learn how Native American artists are passing on their cultures' traditions to future generations through films, stories, and artifacts made exclusively for Bullock Museum visitors to experience.
• Immerse yourself in the different Texas landscapes with a multisensory environmental experience to hear the languages that existed in pre-1821 Texas.
• Witness how global politics influenced the growth of Texas in its earliest days through original maps, documents, and artifacts.
• Find out how communities and families who were shaping Texas history before 1821 continue to celebrate and share their legacies today.

The Bullock Museum, a division of the Texas State Preservation Board, is funded by Museum Members, donors, and patrons, the Texas State History Museum Foundation, and the State of Texas.

Major support for Becoming Texas provided by Bobbie Nau, John L. Nau III, the Joan and Herb Kelleher Charitable Foundation, the Mays Family Foundation, the Albert and Ethel Herzstein Charitable Foundation, Joan and Bruce Blakemore, H-E-B, the Dan L Duncan Foundation, the Houston Endowment, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ed Rachal Foundation, the Stedman West Foundation, the West Endowment, and the Woody and Gayle Hunt Family Foundation.