Austin, Texas

Austin is the capital of the state of Texas and the county seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas. The Central Texas city is the gateway to the Texas Hill Country with rolling hills and sparkling waterways abound in Austin, as described in the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Austin has a vibrant music scene. The official slogan promotes the city as "The Live Music Capital of the World." In recent years, many Austin residents have also adopted the unofficial slogan "Keep Austin Weird"; this refers partly to the eclectic and progressive lifestyle of many the city's residents but is also the slogan for a campaign to preserve smaller local businesses and reject commercialization.

History

Prior to the arrival of settlers from the United States, the area that is now known as Austin was inhabited by a variety of nomadic Native American tribes, including the Tonkawa tribe, the Comanches, and the Lipan Apaches.

When the Texas Congress formed a commission to pursue a site for a new capital to be named Austin, Mirabeau Lamar, second President of the newly formed Texas republic, advised the commissioners to investigate Waterloo, which was then indeed chosen.

The new capital prospered initially. However, Lamar's political enemy Sam Houston used two Mexican army incursions to San Antonio as an excuse to move the government to Washington-on-the-Brazos. The remaining Austin residents responded to the threat by forcibly keeping the national archives in their city in resistance of President Houston's attempts to bring them to Washington. Once the annexation of the Republic of Texas by the United States became official in 1845, delegates wrote a new state constitution in which Austin yet was again named the seat of state. The Texas State Capitol was completed in 1888.