This story was originally part of KUT’s ATXplained Live show at Bass Concert Hall on October 29, 2025. Get tickets to our next show on May 21 here.

Anyone who knows me, knows I love Barton Springs. It feels like the water has magical properties. Even sacred properties.

So when Brendan Cavanagh asked about the it, I knew I needed to look into it.

“Why were the springs sacred before Uncle Billy showed up?” he asked. “And what was the Indigenous population’s relationship with them?”

By Uncle Billy, he means William Barton, the man who laid claim to the springs in 1837 when he settled there with his family and the people he enslaved.

I assumed Brendan’s question came from a place of love for the springs and general curiosity. But when I talked to him about his question, he mentioned the White Shaman mural, a piece of rock art that sits in the desert about 220 miles west of Austin.  Archaeologists say the White Shaman was painted around 400 B.C. It’s really big — 26 feet long and 13 feet high.

“I learned that the springs are actually part of that mural,” Cavanagh said. “Which was astonishing to me.”

Archeologists think the mural shows a creation story. But some people think it’s even more than that.  

Gary Perez is the chief of the  Coahuiltecan/Pakahua Nation. He has come to believe that it not only tells a creation story, but that it’s also an ancient map of Central Texas.

A pictograph on the mural shows a curved line with four matching symbols that look like knives with gray handles and white blades coming off of it at regular intervals.

Chester Leeds

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Witte Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Perez says that this pictograph represents four sacred springs: San Antonio Springs, San Marcos Springs, Comal Springs and Barton Springs. All of these springs are connected to the Edwards Aquifer, an underground network of caves and porous limestone.

Perez overlaid this part of the White Shaman mural out on a modern map with the help of a mapping expert.

“Then they did. And that was it,” Perez said. “Then we knew we were looking at a map for sure.”

Perez doesn’t think the White Shaman mural just a map, but also a calendar. He said it’s like the Mayan calendar, but for hunter-gatherers.

“These calendars exist everywhere, but this particular one is specific to Central Texas,” he said.

Perez sees the mural as a scientific tool.

There are people who agree with that interpretation of the White Shaman mural. But there are people who disagree, including Harry Shafer, a former curator of archeology at the Witte Museum, which manages the White Shaman site.

“We have a really good handle on the archeology of the Lower Pecos region and Central Texas,” Shafer said. “There’s no tie in Lower Pecos to Central Texas.”

So does the White Shaman mural depict four springs in Central Texas — including Barton Springs? Depends on whose science you believe.

Ancient history

What we do know for sure is that people have lived around Barton Springs for millennia. The archaeological record at Barton Springs goes back 13,000 years.

People were drawn to the area for its abundant water and the plant and animal life. But the people who lived around the springs back then weren’t the same people who lived at the springs when William Barton arrived.

We don’t even know the names of these ancient peoples. Did they have a sacred relationship with the springs? Maybe. We may never know the exact details.

But we do know something about the Indigenous people who came later.

In 1837, we know there were the Comanche, Tonkawa, Caddo, Lipan Apache and Coahuiltecan people in the area, among others. We know some of those people had a sacred relationship with the springs, but the accounts we have are from colonists.

These were all very different cultures who spoke different languages and believed different things.

By the time William Barton showed up, Europeans had already been in the area for 100 years. The Spanish had missions near Barton Springs in the 1700s. Their arrival brought sickness and death to the Indigenous population.

Barton lived in Austin during the Texas Republic, when many of the tribes that lived here were killed or forcibly removed.

Then, there were other ways that Native Americans were erased. At one point, a law was passed legally redesignating Native people as Mexican.

This campaign to erase Indigenous people in Texas worked, at least in our collective imagination as a state.

“In Texas there’s this sort of as assumption there’s no more Indians here,” said Craig Campbell, an anthropology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “When, in fact, we have this absolutely huge population of Indigenous people that rarely gets recognized.”

Texas has the fifth-largest population of Indigenous people in the country. According to the U.S. Census, there are over 700,000 people in Texas who identity, at least in part, as Indigenous.

Barton Springs are still sacred

Some modern-day Indigenous Texans have their own sacred relationship with Barton Springs. Every August, a group of mostly women makes a pilgrimage to the four sacred springs, led by Gary Perez’s wife, Matilde Torres.

At each site, they commune with the water and offer prayers. They start at San Antonio Springs at dawn and end up at Barton Springs in the afternoon.

Diana Dos Santos has gone on the pilgrimage for the last three years.

She said it’s a long day, but it doesn’t really feel long.

“The whole day feels like it just merges into a short moment,” she said. “It’s like the whole world — the past, the present, everything — just merges into one moment. And when you’re present there — with your prayer, with your medicine, with the other sisters — it’s incredible. It’s magical.”

As the Alabama Legislature convened Monday for another special session, it marks the tenth time in the past decade that a governor has called lawmakers back to Montgomery outside the regular calendar.

Here’s a look at what brought them back each time.

2015: General Fund budget crisis

Governor Robert Bentley called lawmakers back after vetoing a cut-heavy General Fund budget that would have slashed roughly $200 million from state agencies. The rainy day borrowing from the Alabama Trust Fund that had propped up state government since 2012 had finally run dry. Bentley proposed a $310 million tax increase package. Legislative leaders recessed for three weeks and then resurrected the same budget he had already vetoed. Nothing passed.

2015: Budget, take two

With the fiscal year starting October 1 and still no budget, Bentley called a second session. Lawmakers hammered out a patchwork compromise that averted a government shutdown but fell well short of the structural revenue fix Bentley had pushed for.

2016 — Medicaid funding and the lottery

Medicaid faced an $85 million shortfall. Bentley called lawmakers back and pushed a lottery bill that would have sent $100 million annually to Medicaid. The Senate passed it 21-12, but the House couldn’t get there. The fallback was a $640 million bond issue backed by Alabama’s BP Deepwater Horizon settlement, which kept Medicaid funded for two more fiscal years. The lottery died again.

2019 — Rebuild Alabama gas tax

Ivey called a special session the day after her State of the State address to pass a 10-cent gas tax increase, the state’s first in 27 years. The three-bill package passed quickly.

2021 — First Special Session: Prison construction

Facing a federal DOJ lawsuit over unconstitutional prison conditions, Ivey called lawmakers back to authorize a $1.3 billion prison construction plan funded by state bonds, General Fund dollars, and $400 million in federal COVID relief money.

2021 — Second Special Session: Post-census redistricting

Delayed census data pushed redistricting into a special session. Lawmakers drew new congressional, state legislative, and school board maps in five days. The congressional map was immediately challenged as a Voting Rights Act violation, launching the Allen v. Milligan litigation that continues today.

2022 — ARPA funds, first tranche

Ivey called lawmakers back to appropriate $772 million in remaining federal relief funds. The session produced over $276 million for broadband expansion, plus major investments in water and sewer infrastructure.

2023 — First Special Session: ARPA funds, second tranche

Another $1.06 billion in federal funds needed appropriation. Ivey used the same tactic as 2019: State of the State one day, special session the next. The money went to healthcare, broadband, infrastructure, and repaying the final $60 million owed to the Alabama Trust Fund from the Bentley-era borrowing.

2023 — Second Special Session: Court-ordered redistricting

After the Supreme Court ruled in Allen v. Milligan that Alabama’s map likely violated the Voting Rights Act, the Legislature drew new maps that a federal court rejected as non-compliant. A court-appointed special master drew the maps used in the 2024 elections instead.

2026 — Redistricting, again

Monday’s session follows the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. The Legislature will prepare contingency maps and special primary election procedures in case the court lifts the injunction blocking Alabama from redrawing its districts before 2030.

The pattern

Three distinct forces have driven Alabama’s special sessions over the past decade. The Bentley-era sessions were born from a structural budget collapse the Legislature couldn’t or wouldn’t fix through new revenue.

The Ivey-era spending sessions used tightly controlled special sessions to move high-dollar legislation quickly with minimal floor debate.

And the redistricting sessions have been driven by court deadlines and Supreme Court decisions, with the Legislature’s maps rejected or overridden in two or three attempts.

Sawyer Knowles is a capitol reporter for Yellowhammer News. You may contact him at [email protected].

As of Monday, with six days left in the season, hunters checked 12,666 wild turkeys in Arkansas.

That’s a increase of 1,334 gobblers, approximately 12%, checked during the 2025 spring season. The 2025 official tally of 11,332 gobblers was a 24% increase over 2024.

These stats are noteworthy because they illustrate a consistent uptick in hunter success, which should represent corresponding growth in the statewide turkey population. The growth trend also rebuts complaints that Arkansas intentionally suppresses hunter success by opening its spring turkey season too late, after gobblers are reputably less vocal.

Anecdotal observations are situational and specific to a particular time and location. They are not scientific, but field reports are all we have to evaluate turkey behavior in the field. Two hunters in northern Grant County told us on Tuesday that they worked vocal gobblers on the last week of the season in turkey management zone 2. One of the hunters, Alan Thomas of Conway, said that a strutting gobbler, with a subordinate in tow, hung up about 75 yards away.

“I had my gun up for 27 minutes,” Thomas said. “I needed him to come about 12 or 15 more steps, but he wouldn’t do it, and I wasn’t going to shoot that far.”

Thomas said he might have considered taking the shot with tungsten super shot loads. Nevertheless, he said he was satisfied with the experience because he gets more satisfaction from working a bird in close than merely tagging a bird.

Thomas said he hunted in a small section of hardwoods where the open ground story created very long sight lines.

“Turkeys love it,” Thomas said. “That kind of habitat is great for turkeys, but it’s not great for hunting. They can see a long way.”

Thomas’s hunting companion worked a different gobbler that bellowed for a very long time. The companion abandoned the effort after the bird went silent. He gathered his gear and found the gobbler strutting in the middle of a nearby road.

Our point is that for every hunter who is disgruntled over what they believe to be unfair season dates, there are at least 12,666 other hunters who are happy. Others, like Thomas, worked birds that they didn’t kill.

Still, it’s easy to see why some hunters resent our spring turkey season structure. Before our season opens, many Arkansans hunt in states that have more liberal seasons. They hire guides and kill three gobblers in Texas in March. They have success in Mississippi and Alabama in March. March is the peak of breeding season, when it is easiest to work a gobbler.

Then they come home and get humbled.

The spring season in south Arkansas opens April 13. It opens April 20 in north Arkansas. That is after the peak of the breeding season. Arkansas doesn’t have as many turkeys as other southern states. That combination makes Arkansas a harder place to kill turkeys. Many hunters are proud of that because killing a turkey here is quite an achievement.

Missouri, the gold standard for turkey hunting, opened its spring season April 20, on a Monday. That is the standard to which Arkansas aspires. It is achievable on a smaller scale because we are a smaller state with a fraction of the turkey habitat that Missouri has.

I wish I could make sense of turkey gobbling behavior. I have had some epic hunts with very vocal gobblers late in the season, including on the closing day. I’ve had them slip in silently on opening day, and I’ve had them walk up so loudly crunching sticks and leaves that I was initially alarmed that another hunter was stalking my calls.

Once, at a camp in southeast Arkansas, Sheffield Nelson and I watched a gobbler stroll through the middle of camp gobbling non-stop in the middle of a hot day. Mostly, my experience in Arkansas involved one or two gobblers traveling apart from hens. They are generally not loquacious birds, and they only gobbled after I provoked them with aggressive calling.

That frustrates hunters who are accustomed to working multiple gobblers in other states. Some feel entitled to that degree of activity.

For turkey hunting, Arkansas is the big leagues. The birds themselves are a big reason for that, but our late season structure contributes to the difficulty level.

I haven’t killed a gobbler this season, but I tip my cap to the many others that did.