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The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875
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 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.
506 pages, Hardcover
First published October 23, 2005
14 people are currently reading
177 people want to read
About the author
Gary Clayton Anderson
22 books8 followersA specialist in American Indians of the Great Plains and the Southwest, Gary Clayton Anderson is a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma.
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April 27, 2016
The title of Gary Clayton Anderson’s The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land is designed to grab your attention. It’s use of the phrase ethnic cleansing – a term associated with international criminal law* – is arresting. This isn’t just a book about a historical event; it’s a book about a crime.
*Ethnic cleansing itself is not a crime, but is embodied in Article 49 of the Geneva Convention (IV).
Certainly, the title got my attention, and subsequently, my money.
For what it’s worth, the substance of this book doesn’t come near to matching its provocative name. It is not a polemic; it is not controversial; it isn’t even that passionate. Accordingly, if you are a Texan, no need to get upset. You can go back to plotting secession, gerrymandering, or building that scale model of the Alamo out of sugar cubes. Or whatever it is Texans do. Likewise, if you are a follower of Ward Churchill, you will have to read some other revisionist take on Western history. In fact, you’ll probably just have to read something by Ward Churchill.
The Conquest of Texas is a fairly familiar history of Texas’s Indian relations, with a notable reframing of focus. Instead of putting the Comanche’s long and bloody war front and center, Anderson chooses to explore the plight of the so-called “immigrant Indians” – those tribes who came to Texas after being forced out of their eastern homes. All the usual landmarks of the Texas-Indian Wars are covered – the attack on Parker’s fort, the Council House Massacre, the Linnville Raid – but they are treated as circumstantial to the experience of the less-heralded tribes, who despite assimilating into white culture, found themselves forced into the worst place in the United State: Oklahoma.**
**No offense. But at one point, land in Oklahoma was literally given away.
The immigrant Indian tribes in Texas included the Cherokee, Choctaw, Delaware, Creek, Seminole, Kickapoo, and Shawnee. Many of these tribes had once been great and renowned warrior cultures. Now, having tangled with the United States, they were a shattered remnant of their eastern selves.
Their story is a complicated one, involving fraught relations with not only the whites but with each other, as they vied for and clung to their land. Many of these refugees joined in a loose coalition. One of the central figures in this confederacy was Chief Bowles of the Cherokee. Bowles became friends with many whites, including Stephen Austin, and was noted for his wisdom. When Sam Houston ran from a failed marriage to a much younger woman, he ended in the arms of the Cherokee. Despite these bonds of friendship, the Cherokee bore the brunt of Texas wrath in 1839 at the Battle of the Neches River, where Bowles was killed.
In order to clear the Indians, the Texas leadership needed a casus belli. This came in the form of that oft-used word: depredations. Texans charged the tribes with raiding, stealing, kidnapping, rape, and murder. Anderson argues that many of these depredations were exaggerated or entirely unfounded. He also relates stories of white renegades dressed as Indians committing various crimes. (Like the Tea Party gone horribly wrong. The Boston Tea Party, I mean).
I have no problem believing that Texans were hyperbolic and heavily reliant on third-hand hearsay as solid fact when detailing Indian misdeeds. However, I would have appreciated stronger analysis on Anderson’s part when deprecating Texas sources. Time and again he baldly states that the numbers of murders and rapes committed by Indians was a fraction of that reported. Yet he does not back up that statement either in the text or in the endnotes.
The broader charge of ethnic cleansing in Texas is not a difficult one to prove. Indeed, contemporary Texans were very upfront about their intent. The second president of the Texas Republic, Mirabeau Lamar, called for a ruthless war against the Indians that would spare the women and children but nevertheless
My chief complaint of Conquest of Texas isn’t in its facts, focus, or thesis. It’s that it’s not a lively read. Hold on, you might say. This is a grim story. It isn’t meant to be entertaining. You should simply read it and feel bad.
I disagree, straw man.
History should always be told in a way that maximizes the drama. After all, history is the story of the world. It is about all the loves and hates and intrigues and actions and mistakes and bravery and cowardice of thousands of otherwise ordinary folk. Realizing this allows us to sympathize with their plight, and want to learn more.
The Texas story is filled with rich characters. From the murder-minded Mirabeau Lamar (who nonetheless loved education!), to the complex Sam Houston, to the doomed Chief Bowles, to the humane and equally-doomed Indian agent Robert Neighbors, there is enough human-interest to fill multiple volumes. Unfortunately, the narrative gives life to none of them. Rather, Anderson’s approach is dutifully straightforward. Often, it read as a textbook. Clear. Concise. Forgettable.
The value in Conquest of Texas is in its reminder that the Indian Wars went far beyond the clashes of cavalry and warrior popularized by John Ford films. That value can’t be understated.
As a voracious reader of the history of the American West, I’ve noticed a troubling trend that I’ll call the Tit-for-Tat Theory of the Indian Wars. This theory, popularized by Greg Michno (who recently fixated on the first week of the 1862 Dakota Uprising) and S.C. Gwynne (who wrote the Pulitzer-shortlisted, Texas Ranger fetishizing Empire of the Summer Moon), seeks to find a moral equivalence in the Indian Wars. Yes, they admit, we killed a bunch of Indians, took all their land, and utterly shattered their culture. But, they cry, the Indians were just as bad! They killed white people and raped white women and took scalps and so on and so forth. In the end, it becomes a disheartening list, atrocity matched with atrocity. Their conclusion – stated quite boldly in Gwynne’s book, which reads like it was published in 1930, rather than 2011 – is that the Indians were a barbarous culture that got the civilizing they deserved.
The woeful tale of the immigrant Indians of Texas gives lie to that theory. It shows how the voraciousness, greed, and – yes, frankly – racism of white Americans allowed for governmental policies that swept aside entire peoples as space-wasting inconveniences.
Perhaps you can talk yourself into the subjugation of the Comanche. They were, after all, a formidable warrior culture.
But what about the Cherokee? They took up farming. They developed a written language. They translated the Bible into that written language. They drafted a constitution. When the white men came to take their land, they did what any self-respecting Anglo-Saxon Protestant would do. They went to court. They went to the Supreme Court. They won.
And they got removed.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend that my interest in the American West doesn’t stem mainly from the visceral thrills of studying Custer’s Last Stand or the Fetterman Fight. It does. And my bookshelf proves that. So a book like this was important for me to read. To recall that the real tragedy of U.S.-Indian relations occurred away from the battlefield, where men could win glory. The tragedy occurred in treaty after treaty after treaty that took and took and took and gave nothing, nothing, nothing.
*Ethnic cleansing itself is not a crime, but is embodied in Article 49 of the Geneva Convention (IV).
Certainly, the title got my attention, and subsequently, my money.
For what it’s worth, the substance of this book doesn’t come near to matching its provocative name. It is not a polemic; it is not controversial; it isn’t even that passionate. Accordingly, if you are a Texan, no need to get upset. You can go back to plotting secession, gerrymandering, or building that scale model of the Alamo out of sugar cubes. Or whatever it is Texans do. Likewise, if you are a follower of Ward Churchill, you will have to read some other revisionist take on Western history. In fact, you’ll probably just have to read something by Ward Churchill.
The Conquest of Texas is a fairly familiar history of Texas’s Indian relations, with a notable reframing of focus. Instead of putting the Comanche’s long and bloody war front and center, Anderson chooses to explore the plight of the so-called “immigrant Indians” – those tribes who came to Texas after being forced out of their eastern homes. All the usual landmarks of the Texas-Indian Wars are covered – the attack on Parker’s fort, the Council House Massacre, the Linnville Raid – but they are treated as circumstantial to the experience of the less-heralded tribes, who despite assimilating into white culture, found themselves forced into the worst place in the United State: Oklahoma.**
**No offense. But at one point, land in Oklahoma was literally given away.
The immigrant Indian tribes in Texas included the Cherokee, Choctaw, Delaware, Creek, Seminole, Kickapoo, and Shawnee. Many of these tribes had once been great and renowned warrior cultures. Now, having tangled with the United States, they were a shattered remnant of their eastern selves.
Their story is a complicated one, involving fraught relations with not only the whites but with each other, as they vied for and clung to their land. Many of these refugees joined in a loose coalition. One of the central figures in this confederacy was Chief Bowles of the Cherokee. Bowles became friends with many whites, including Stephen Austin, and was noted for his wisdom. When Sam Houston ran from a failed marriage to a much younger woman, he ended in the arms of the Cherokee. Despite these bonds of friendship, the Cherokee bore the brunt of Texas wrath in 1839 at the Battle of the Neches River, where Bowles was killed.
In order to clear the Indians, the Texas leadership needed a casus belli. This came in the form of that oft-used word: depredations. Texans charged the tribes with raiding, stealing, kidnapping, rape, and murder. Anderson argues that many of these depredations were exaggerated or entirely unfounded. He also relates stories of white renegades dressed as Indians committing various crimes. (Like the Tea Party gone horribly wrong. The Boston Tea Party, I mean).
I have no problem believing that Texans were hyperbolic and heavily reliant on third-hand hearsay as solid fact when detailing Indian misdeeds. However, I would have appreciated stronger analysis on Anderson’s part when deprecating Texas sources. Time and again he baldly states that the numbers of murders and rapes committed by Indians was a fraction of that reported. Yet he does not back up that statement either in the text or in the endnotes.
The broader charge of ethnic cleansing in Texas is not a difficult one to prove. Indeed, contemporary Texans were very upfront about their intent. The second president of the Texas Republic, Mirabeau Lamar, called for a ruthless war against the Indians that would spare the women and children but nevertheless
[W]ill admit of no compromise and have no termination except in [the Indians] total extinction or total expulsion.
My chief complaint of Conquest of Texas isn’t in its facts, focus, or thesis. It’s that it’s not a lively read. Hold on, you might say. This is a grim story. It isn’t meant to be entertaining. You should simply read it and feel bad.
I disagree, straw man.
History should always be told in a way that maximizes the drama. After all, history is the story of the world. It is about all the loves and hates and intrigues and actions and mistakes and bravery and cowardice of thousands of otherwise ordinary folk. Realizing this allows us to sympathize with their plight, and want to learn more.
The Texas story is filled with rich characters. From the murder-minded Mirabeau Lamar (who nonetheless loved education!), to the complex Sam Houston, to the doomed Chief Bowles, to the humane and equally-doomed Indian agent Robert Neighbors, there is enough human-interest to fill multiple volumes. Unfortunately, the narrative gives life to none of them. Rather, Anderson’s approach is dutifully straightforward. Often, it read as a textbook. Clear. Concise. Forgettable.
The value in Conquest of Texas is in its reminder that the Indian Wars went far beyond the clashes of cavalry and warrior popularized by John Ford films. That value can’t be understated.
As a voracious reader of the history of the American West, I’ve noticed a troubling trend that I’ll call the Tit-for-Tat Theory of the Indian Wars. This theory, popularized by Greg Michno (who recently fixated on the first week of the 1862 Dakota Uprising) and S.C. Gwynne (who wrote the Pulitzer-shortlisted, Texas Ranger fetishizing Empire of the Summer Moon), seeks to find a moral equivalence in the Indian Wars. Yes, they admit, we killed a bunch of Indians, took all their land, and utterly shattered their culture. But, they cry, the Indians were just as bad! They killed white people and raped white women and took scalps and so on and so forth. In the end, it becomes a disheartening list, atrocity matched with atrocity. Their conclusion – stated quite boldly in Gwynne’s book, which reads like it was published in 1930, rather than 2011 – is that the Indians were a barbarous culture that got the civilizing they deserved.
The woeful tale of the immigrant Indians of Texas gives lie to that theory. It shows how the voraciousness, greed, and – yes, frankly – racism of white Americans allowed for governmental policies that swept aside entire peoples as space-wasting inconveniences.
Perhaps you can talk yourself into the subjugation of the Comanche. They were, after all, a formidable warrior culture.
But what about the Cherokee? They took up farming. They developed a written language. They translated the Bible into that written language. They drafted a constitution. When the white men came to take their land, they did what any self-respecting Anglo-Saxon Protestant would do. They went to court. They went to the Supreme Court. They won.
And they got removed.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend that my interest in the American West doesn’t stem mainly from the visceral thrills of studying Custer’s Last Stand or the Fetterman Fight. It does. And my bookshelf proves that. So a book like this was important for me to read. To recall that the real tragedy of U.S.-Indian relations occurred away from the battlefield, where men could win glory. The tragedy occurred in treaty after treaty after treaty that took and took and took and gave nothing, nothing, nothing.
November 10, 2020
I'm not a native Texan. I found the author's premise that the removal of the indigenous people from Texas should be considered "ethnic cleansing" convincing. At times though his descriptions of actions that occurred and the sentiment of the rank and file Texas rangers made me question when he didn't go so far as describing it as "genocide".
What I particularly liked about this book is that it took an extremely complex situation: indigenous tribes (Comanche, Lipan Apache, Caddoes, etc...), immigrant native American tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, etc...), Tejanos, Anglos: all with competing interests and needs. All competing for the same meager resources, and made it fairly straightforward and easy to understand.
For a native Texan's feelings on this book...
To read Larry McMurtry's NYT Book Review
What I particularly liked about this book is that it took an extremely complex situation: indigenous tribes (Comanche, Lipan Apache, Caddoes, etc...), immigrant native American tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, etc...), Tejanos, Anglos: all with competing interests and needs. All competing for the same meager resources, and made it fairly straightforward and easy to understand.
For a native Texan's feelings on this book...
To read Larry McMurtry's NYT Book Review
October 25, 2015
Absolutely fantastic if you want to learn the TRUE history of Texas.
February 9, 2023
A thorough military and cultural history of the Texan relationship with Native Americans and, to a lesser degree, Tejanos. Anderson makes an effective argument that Texans consistently pursued ethnic cleansing rather than genocide, but the distinction relies on definitions rather than the facts and interpretations Anderson provides.
March 6, 2021
A great book on Texas history.
This book takes off the veneer of Texas exceptionalism. The state has its warts, and Anderson exposes two of them. Racism and extreme violence are at the core of this book on Texas history.
This book takes off the veneer of Texas exceptionalism. The state has its warts, and Anderson exposes two of them. Racism and extreme violence are at the core of this book on Texas history.
April 16, 2020
Should be required reading.
January 27, 2022
Book # 3 in 2022.
Oh my Texas, what have you done?
Ugh, Texas was a violent place. Brutal.
Oh my Texas, what have you done?
Ugh, Texas was a violent place. Brutal.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews