The Nueces Strip was the frontier region between the Rio Grande River and the Nueces River along the Gulf of Mexico. While mountain ranges and rivers like those in northern Mexico often make for definable borders, a frontier is an undefined borderland and the Nueces Strip proved both useful and highly contested in the succession of numerous empires, governments, revolutions, and countries following the dissolution of New Spain in 1821.
For centuries, travelers of many nations detailed that the least desirable land on the western Gulf coast lies between modern Brownsville and Corpus Christi, Texas. No permanent settlements survived, and the earliest Spanish cartographers marked the area as Sandy, Mustang or Wild Horse Desert. It stretched over 300 miles from the coast to the thousand-foot heights of the Edwards Plateau along the Balcones Escarpment.
Even without settlements, the land was traversed, claimed, divided or occupied by successive Coahuiltecan, Karankawa and Lipan Apache tribes. The region was also the subject of Spanish land grants, Mexican land grants, Texas land grants and deeds from successive governments of each. Often with multiple allocations of claims to the same lands.
The semi-arid land proved desirable only in pockets where artesian springs existed or when rain replenished seasonal ponds. On the west side of the Strip the Fierce River of the North (Rio Bravo del Norte in Spanish) or Rio Grande River runs down past Del Rio/Ciudad Acuña to the sea. To the east the Nueces River runs past Uvalde at the upper end of the region to the gulf.
The Strip proved useful to anyone seeking to avoid the law while crossing the frontier. Armies provided scattered authority, Mexican Rangers and later Texas Rangers proved able mobile law agents. The Nueces Strip provided clandestine passage for escaped slaves. The Strip was a place where wild herds of horses and cattle could be rounded up for sale in nearby cities either north or south.
It seems, goods of all kinds have long traversed the Strip. During Prohibition in the U.S. the Border Patrol was formed to interdict illegal alcohol crossing the border. Today, people and goods continue to make their passage through the borderland, both legally and unobserved. Even with modern recognized borders, there still remains an open frontier called the Nueces Strip.