The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875 / Edition 1

by Gary Clayton Anderson

Overview

This is not your grandfather’s history of Texas. Portraying nineteenth-century Texas as a cauldron of racist violence, Gary Clayton Anderson shows that the ethnic warfare dominating the Texas frontier can best be described as ethnic cleansing.

The Conquest of Texas is the story of the struggle between Anglos and Indians for land. Anderson tells how Scotch-Irish settlers clashed with farming tribes and then challenged the Comanches and Kiowas for their hunting grounds. Next, the decade-long conflict with Mexico merged with war against Indians. For fifty years Texas remained in a virtual state of war.

Piercing the very heart of Lone Star mythology, Anderson tells how the Texas government encouraged the Texas Rangers to annihilate Indian villages, including women and children. This policy of terror succeeded: by the 1870s, Indians had been driven from central and western Texas.

By confronting head-on the romanticized version of Texas history that made heroes out of Houston, Lamar, and Baylor, Anderson helps us understand that the history of the Lone Star state is darker and more complex than the mythmakers allowed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806136981
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	11/04/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	506
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.12(d)

About the Author

Gary Clayton Anderson, George Lynn Cross Research Professor at the University of Oklahoma , is author of The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875. His book The Indian Southwest, 1580–1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention won the Angie Debo Prize and the publication award from the San Antonio Conservation Society.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

AT THE DAWN OF THE AMERICAN INVASION

The year was 1815. The weather for June was hot and dry, as a drought had hit the great plains of Texas. Riding over yet another rise in a seemingly endless prairie, a tired Reuben Ross and his trading party suddenly saw a massive camp of more than five hundred bison-skin tepees before them in a beautiful valley. The town covered several miles of the upper Brazos River. Ross was startled and pleased. He had discovered the main encampment of some of the most powerful Indians in Texas and, in terms of livestock, some of the richest.

Each circular tepee stood sixteen feet tall, with a ground diameter of twelve feet. Most had bison hides stacked eight or nine deep inside to make for comfortable bedding. In and about the tepees, campfires were clustered, with copper kettles hung over them in readiness for the midday meal. Children, half-naked owing to the heat but healthy and well fed, scurried around the camp. Ross could see that these were a successful people.

The Comanches were busy putting in a stock of bison meat. Everyone in camp seemed busy. Next to the tepees, young women tended racks hung with fresh meat, drying in the wind. Built six feet off the ground, the racks were high enough to keep the hundreds of dogs milling greedily about from grabbing a morsel. Intermixed were large frames where other women stretched and cleaned hides. The idyllic scene likely distracted Ross from an obvious reality — the butchering produced a considerable odor, and the women who did it, despite their dexterity, often had their deerskin frocks covered with blood at the end of the day.

Shifting his view to the horizon, Ross saw what he and his friends had come for. Along the far ridges and beyond he could see horses, thousands of them — perhaps twenty thousand animals in a camp that size. Boys tended these animals, the older ones of twelve or thirteen giving orders, but many younger lads only five or six years old following them. Ross could not be sure, but the camp seemed to hold at least five thousand people.

Comanches were sturdy people, strong, independent of will, and committed to their freedom and their plains lifestyle. At times, they ate mostly bison meat for sustenance. The women boiled it, served it in a soup, or handed it out as jerky. Comanche camps seemed disordered to the common observer, but senior women directed the labor necessary for food, clothing, and housing. The women who ran the camp could be distinguished by the orders they gave and the clothing they wore. Most had some jewelry and often a blanket to cover their simple deerskin frocks and leggings. Those with greater status might wear a cloth over one shoulder, like a sash.

Men lounged around the camp seemingly uninterested in domestic affairs. This attitude changed when hunting or raiding parties left. Then they dressed for the occasion, donning a breechcloth and decorative leggings that stopped below the knee and turned into moccasins. During winter, they wore bison-skin coats with an attached hood. Comanche men took obvious pride in their weapons. Typically, each carried a bison-skin shield nearly four feet long, a knife, a quiver with arrows and bow, and a long lance. They favored close combat and occasionally clashed with other tribes, as cavalry on the plains had done since the early 1600s to protect their hunting ranges. By the time Ross found them, a few had acquired short trade muskets. The chiefs especially carried these arms for status. They also wore magnificent headdresses with eagle feathers, the train of which sometimes reached the ground and included the hair of their several wives, woven in.

Seldom did Plains Indian villages reach the size that Ross observed; June was a special time when many bands of Comanches came together to hunt, feast, and dance. Other Indian bands that lived nearby or visited the Comanches were not as numerous. Nevertheless, likely nowhere else in America did so many different kinds of Indians come together to talk and barter. Ross was surprised to see so many others in the Comanche town, including Kiowas, Wichitas, Delawares, and Lipan Apaches. And farther east, back in the wooded river valleys of Texas, were others — Caddos, Karankawas, and Tonkawas — whom Ross had passed before entering the plains.

All of these peoples possessed a belief in themselves, their way of life, and their religion. Though they never built churches, they knew the afterlife well. They had a sense of morality — they knew what actions were necessary to preserve themselves and their society and to reach their utopian life beyond death. Texas Indians were quick to defend this way of life. Conventional pioneer wisdom often said that no one ever saw an Indian more self-assured than a Comanche sitting astride a horse, whether in war or on the hunt for bison.

Some Native Texas groups were less militant than the Comanches, more prone to nurture their farms and sedentary towns nestled in the river bottoms Ross had crossed before entering the plains. These people held Green Corn ceremonies that represented a cultural richness in religion, folklore, and social organization that was six or seven centuries old. They farmed and hunted. On the coast were superb fishermen. Overall, the first occupants of Texas were successful people. They shared their food, raised their children to be fiercely protective of their way of life (rebelliousness was not tolerated), and survived and prospered in a land that required endurance, fortitude, and organization.

The Comanches were actually the last indigenous group to arrive in Texas, having migrated into the plains around 1700. Apaches, Wichitas, Caddos, Tonkawas, and Karankawas had been there for centuries, and most had had extensive contact with early Spaniards. Those living in East Texas had known Frenchmen. Intertribal warfare and conflict with invading Spaniards had existed early on, but contact also had led to exchange or, as Europeans called it, "trade." While Spanish missionaries sought to convert the Native societies, most of the Franciscans had little success. The Wichitas and Caddos were too far north of the mission enclave at San Antonio, which eventually became the Spanish capital of Texas, and the Apaches, Tonkawas, Karankawas, and Comanches were too mobile and too independent. Karankawas lived along the gulf coast on sea animals and deer and seldom settled in one locale long enough to listen seriously to a sermon.

Nevertheless, prosperity from commerce affected everyone in the region, Spaniards and Indians alike, and ultimately Spain gave up trying to conquer Texas. Instead, it agreed to a negotiated peace with the tribes. The agreements that Spanish officials brokered with Comanches, Wichitas, Tonkawas, and Apaches in the 1780s led to the expansion of Mexican ranching in southern Texas as well as the development of larger Indian livestock herds. No other Indians had as many horses as did the Comanches, and they, along with their Wichita and Caddo neighbors, even learned to breed mules, an increasingly important commodity in the American market after 1815. This peace, broken occasionally by small raids, remained in place until 1810, when the war for independence began in Mexico.

Given the presumption of Indian "savagery," a view held by many Texans in later years, it seems almost heresy to suggest that the Indians of the southern plains built a political economy that thrived on an ordered and at times peaceful acquisition of wealth. But that is what happened in the late eighteenth century. Wichitas and Caddos were excellent farmers who produced bountiful crops, and most of the Plains people who avoided agriculture had mastered pastoralism, raising both horses and mules. They also took hundreds of bison for meat each year, preserving the hides and drying the meat into jerky. Plains Indians produced hides, tallow, jerky, and livestock, which they commonly exchanged at San Antonio, Laredo, or Santa Fe, New Mexico, and these products rapidly found their way into the Spanish economy.

Intertribal commerce also prospered. One Indian group would have a surplus of bison meat, robes, and horses, while another would have large quantities of corn, beans, and melons; Spaniards manufactured goods that also entered this market. Applying market value to such items proved impossible, and Indians and Spaniards alike exchanged them, enhancing each other's diet or lifestyle and thereby preserving alliances.

Chiefs, or senior men within the Native societies, controlled the process of exchange through councils, negotiating agreements with other Indian groups and Europeans. These men acquired their authority initially through a demonstrated bravery in war. Once their leadership was recognized, they maintained their authority through the redistribution of goods to their people, which gave them greater status and political power. Such success among Plains people also led to the acquisition of wives, sometimes nearly a dozen.

Fundamentally, chiefs often opposed war, at least with exchange partners, because it disrupted the economic system that they had created. Indeed, chiefs often bonded themselves to their fellow exchange partners (senior leaders in other villages or European towns) through alliances. Such agreements were negotiated and maintained by the giving of presents. Reciprocal relationships were so important in the Southwest that Spaniards had to agree to honor them or face war. The same held true for the various tribal societies that created such bonds.

Raiding, or warfare of any kind, was thus reserved for peoples who lacked a reciprocal or economic relationship. For the Comanches, this included their enemies: Pawnees, Arapahos, Cheyennes, and Osage Indians to the north and Tonkawas and sometimes Lipan Apaches to the south. Wichitas and Caddos had the same enemies and often joined the Comanches. After 1810, such raiding was extended to northern Mexico.

Warfare was also more frequently conducted by young men who were seeking status, hoping to acquire power and wives in Plains society. Tension, then, existed within the Plains communities, often driven by honor and shame, violence and kinship, and diplomacy and war, the dichotomies of Indian life.

As the process evolved, particularly among the Comanches and Wichitas, tribes became wealthier and more socially stratified. European wares enhanced this new socioeconomic formation, as manufactured goods became marks of distinction and status. Thus, Texas Native societies learned to reach out to Europeans and Americans such as Ross. Indeed, as early as 1790, several Americans who were connected with the horse trader Philip Nolan had penetrated the plains to attend Indian "exchange fairs." They left few records but imported thousands of horses into the Louisiana market until Nolan was killed by a Spanish patrol in 1801.

Even as exchange helped sustain political hierarchies in Indian communities, it augmented cultural diffusion. Ideas and mores common to both Indians and Europeans found their way into Spanish and Indian towns. From 1786 to 1810, Indian diplomatic and exchange missions freely entered Spanish towns, where leaders held councils as Indian women hawked their goods and talked with the local citizenry. The Spanish benefited from these relationships to such an extent that Spanish ranchers expanded well up the Rio Grande valley and spilled over into the Nueces River valley of southern Texas by 1800. Some Spanish ranchers even marketed their expanding cattle herds in Louisiana.

Spaniards dubbed the period of prosperity the "false peace," since a few disgruntled Comanche and Wichita young men occasionally defied their chiefs and launched a raid or two, mostly to acquire horses. Chiefs, hoping to maintain peace, would occasionally return the animals to the Spaniards. These restitutions indicate a surprising level of mutual respect in the way Indian and non-Indian groups interacted. In a council at San Antonio with Governor Antonio Cordero in 1807, leading Comanche, Wichita, and Lipan Apache chiefs spoke at great length of their appreciation for the state of affairs. "I cannot express to Your Lordship," Governor Cordero wrote to the commandant general, "the energy with which they spoke against the evils of war, the sane morals they set forth, and the opportune remarks they made on this matter." Their speeches, he said, left him "impressed and aware of the injustice that is done" to the Indians "in considering them nothing but savages."

In some regards, the Spanish had little choice other than to accept the false peace. Demographically, American Indians were the most populous people in Texas in 1820; some thirty thousand indigenous Natives, the majority of them hard-riding Comanches, called it home. Probably forty thousand Comanches had inhabited Texas in the 1780s, when the peace was established. But epidemics of smallpox had struck in 1781, 1800, and 1816, lowering the Comanche population to roughly twenty thousand by 1820. Their numbers declined to about twelve thousand by the 1830s and 1840s, primarily because of more epidemics, including the first reported incidents of cholera.

The farming Indians of Texas, such as the Wichitas and Caddos, were perhaps the most productive despite small populations. They had suffered from the same epidemics as the Comanches, their numbers plummeting to about five thousand people in 1820. They lived in a half-dozen towns spread out along the Brazos, Trinity, and Red rivers. The Caddos, who numbered perhaps two thousand, had fractured into eastern and western villages, the easternmost establishing farming communities along what would become the Louisiana border, while the western Caddos had moved into the Neches and Trinity river valleys. The severe drought of 1806 to 1821 had damaged their economy; crop failures were common during this period.

When crops failed, the farmer Indians turned to hunting, entering the plains to take bison. These animals had roamed the plains in the millions of animals in earlier centuries, but they also had been affected by the severe drought of the early part of the century. The hide trade was a second factor in the decline of bison, as thousands of animals were slaughtered each year for their hides by the 1830s. This hunting domain of the southwestern Texas Indians extended from the Arkansas River nearly to the Rio Grande, some one thousand miles. It was nearly as wide, beginning in central Texas and extending into the foothills of New Mexico.

The Apaches who had once inhabited much of that domain had been pushed deep into southern Texas and northern Mexico by the Comanches by 1820. They occasionally allied with yet another group, the Tonkawas, a small tribe of southeastern Texas. To the east of the Tonkawas, along the gulf coast, lived a final survivor of the early Spanish missions — the Karankawas. Living in small bands that mostly fished and hunted deer, the Karankawas numbered only a few hundred by the time of Anglo occupation in 1820.

In retreat, Apaches had built strongholds in the mountains of southeastern New Mexico and along the Rio Grande and Nueces rivers. By the period of Anglo settlement, only a few Apache bands, called mostly Lipan Apaches, remained in Texas; one or two of these bands tried to maintain friendly relations with Texans. The animosities that had characterized Apache-Comanche relations early on had subsided by 1820, but Apaches would occasionally act as guides for Anglo or Mexican military forces against Comanche towns.

The Comanche people who had inherited the bison-hunting lands of the southern plains constituted twelve bands, broken geographically into southern and northern groups. The southern bands comprised the Penatekas ("Honey Eaters") and the Hois ("Comanches of the Woods"). The northern Comanches, generically designated as Yamparicas by the Spaniards, were divided into three major bands and a number of smaller ones. The three main groups included the Tanimas (or Tenawas), Kotchatecas (or Cuchanticas), and Quahadas (also called Naconis). Americans later corrupted these names, creating a number of variants, some of which were almost unrecognizable. The southern Comanches faced the reality of diminishing bison herds first, as the surviving animals moved northward, away from central Texas. By the 1850s, when at most only a few million animals remained, a number of southern Comanches joined northern bands.

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations,
Introduction: Demythologizing Texas,
1. At the Dawn of the American Invasion,
2. The Texas Creed in a Tejano and Indian Land,
3. Mexican Politics and the Struggle to Settle Early Texas,
4. The Muddle of Early Mexican Federalism,
5. Centralists and the Struggle for Texas Land,
6. The Americanization of Texas,
7. The Texas Creed and the Clouds of War,
8. Revolution and the "Rumor" of Indian War,
9. Indian Intransigence,
10. Sam Houston, the Legislature, and a Failed Indian Policy,
11. Lamar, His Generals, and Ethnic Cleansing,
12. The Indians' Last Stand in Central Texas,
13. The Failure of Well-Intended Efforts,
14. The Boundary Line Fiasco,
15. Lines, Politics, Depredations, and the U.S. Army,
16. General Persifor Smith and the Salvation of Texas,
17. Reservations or Concentration Camps?,
18. The Plan,
19. Anarchy and "Total War",
20. The Final Exodus,
21. Indians and the Civil War,
22. The Final Ethnic Cleansing of Texas,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,