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Book Review
| The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875. By Gary Clayton Anderson. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. x + 494 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.)
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Texas is something of an orphan child to the field of western history. The Lone Star State gave the nation one of its most powerful frontier stories in the Alamo and maintained a western self-conception even as it became a center of national political and economic power in the twentieth century. Yet over the last few generations, most western historians have ignored Texas in their surveys and rarely tested their larger claims with reference to it. |
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Gary Anderson's compelling and insightful narrative demonstrates the fruitfulness of integrating the often insular world of Texas history with accounts of the American West. Anglos were a tiny minority in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas when they began arriving in significant numbers in the 1820s. Even in 1836, when the improbable bid for independence succeeded, they were still outnumbered by Indians and Tejanos. But by 1875, they had expelled nearly all of its Indian peoples and had decisively subordinated Tejanos, even in traditional power bases like San Antonio. This fifty-year process encountered significant obstacles—vigorous Indian resistance, Sam Houston's willingness to accommodate the Cherokee and other transplanted peoples as permanent residents, the reluctance of Texans far removed from the frontier to support costly military ventures, the opposition of federal authorities to often indiscriminate Texan brutality, and the good relations between some Anglo settlers and Plains Indians. But at every step, the willingness of ordinary Texans to engage in wanton violence to seize Indian territory proved too powerful to resist. Anderson draws on his vast knowledge of the region's native peoples, changing environmental dynamics, and national political developments in the United States and Mexico to explain and contextualize this story of dispossession. |
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He is not shy about explaining the outcome. The expulsion of Indians was the product of "an Anglo-Texas strategy and a policy ... that gradually led to the deliberate ethnic cleansing of a host of people" (p. 7). He takes particular pleasure in pointing out the key role played by the Texas Rangers and repeatedly lambastes the "distorted history created by Anglo founding fathers" and later historians (p. 361). This is intentionally polemical language, and will strike some readers as ham-handed. Anderson invokes a monolithic and pathologically racist southern culture as an explanation for Texan actions, leaving under-explored his own mention of the harmonious relations between many pioneer Anglos and Indians. As his brief discussion of the Sand Creek Massacre suggests, the virulent pattern of Texas race relations might well have been reproduced more faithfully across the West had the federal government not maintained the control over public lands (and thus jurisdiction over Indian affairs) that Texas exercised under the unique terms of its admission into the United States. Furthermore, since the Rangers loom so large in his account, Anderson might also have acknowledged previous scholarly critiques of the mythic force, dating back to Américo Paredes's 1958 classic "With His Pistol in His Hand" (Austin, 1958). His historiographic discussion needlessly downplays the extent to which scholars have written works sharply critical of Texas's nineteenth-century racial order, ignoring or mischaracterizing the work of F. Todd Smith, William Carrigan, Pekka Hämäläinen, Randolph Campbell, and others. |
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But even those disturbed by Anderson's tone and occasional posturing must reckon with the disturbing events he describes. Specialists in Southern Plains Indian peoples, Cherokee history, and Texas history will find much new information about race relations along with Anderson's provocative analysis. Scholars of race and historical memory will find themselves drawn to the connections between Indian fighting, land development, myth-making, and historical scholarship. Western historians as a whole should take this book as evidence that Texas is just too big—and perhaps too bad—to be ignored. |
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| Benjamin Heber Johnson
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| Southern Methodist University |
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ISSN 1939-8603
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