Shoal Creek is where Austin began and the Hill Country begins. To the east is the flat, featureless coastal plan; to the west is the Texas Hill Country. Austin arose, like Shoal Creek, along this fault line. Shoal Creek is to Texas what Þingvellir is to Iceland.

People have gathered along Shoal Creek for centuries. For several hundred years before the arrival of European settlers, the area was inhabited by a variety of nomadic Native American tribes. These indigenous peoples fished and hunted along the creeks. At the time of the first permanent settlement of the area, the Tonkawa tribe was the most common, with the Comanches and Lipan Apaches also frequenting the area.

Wharton, in his book The Republic of Texas (1922), relates a story about the founding of Austin. According to A.W. Terrell (published in Volume 22 of the Texas Historical Association),

Lamar, then Vice-President of the Republic, came with a party of hunters in the autumn of 1837 and camped in an old fort in Fort Prairie, six miles below where Austin now stands.

Jacob Harrell was then the only settler living at the present site of Austin and no white man lived on the waters of the Colorado above him. His cabin and stockade, made of split logs, were built at the mouth of Shoal Creek, near the river ford. The hunters were awakened early in the morning by Jake Harrell’s little son, who told them the prairie was full of buffalo. Lamar and his companions were soon in the saddle, and after a successful hunt [Lamar reportedly killed a buffalo near the current intersection of Congress and 8th] were assembled by a call from the bugler on the very hill where the capitol now stands. General Lamar sat on his horse and looked up the river, and to the wonderful view to the south; and said to his companions, “This should be the seat of future empire.”

When Lamar approved the act appointing the commission which made the final location, he asked them to go to Jake Harrell’s cabin [which had become the town of Waterloo] and look carefully over the site, and they did.

Interestingly, Stephen F. Austin had dreamed of this same location for settlement. He directed the survey of land “five varas beyond the Big Springs [Barton Springs] at the foot of the mountain {now known as Mt Bonnel}. The survey was to include the “falls of the River.” He then wrote that “here I shall fix my residence on the foot of the mountain to live.” Austin never lived to see this through, but his name lives on in his city. On 16 February, 1845, the first Texas legislature met in the new capital of Austin, and from the capitol building Texans needed to walk only a short distance to the west to see the creek that began it all.