The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875.

The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875. By Gary Clayton Anderson. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, c. 2005. Pp. x, 494. $29.95, ISBN 0-8061-3698-7.)

In 1820 roughly four thousand Hispanics resided in Texas in relative harmony with the province's thirty thousand Native Americans. Sedentary farmers such as the Caddos, Wichitas, and Cherokees lived in the eastern forests, while mounted Comanches hunted buffalo on the western plains, and nomadic Karankawas gathered food and fished in the marshes along the coast. By 1875, only about 250 Alabama-Coushatta Indians remained in the heavily forested Big Thicket. Yet one million Euroamericans--mainly Anglos from the United States--had, according to Gary Clayton Anderson in the controversial book under review here, removed or killed all the other natives through a policy of "ethnic cleansing" (p. 7). Arguing that all Indians were barbaric savages, the Texans justified this violent policy in the name of progress. Until recently, most triumphalist historians of the state either defended these actions or neglected the Indians altogether. In The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875, Anderson chronicles this half-century of violence, claiming to have written the first balanced, objective history of Texas in the mid-1800s that includes "Indians at every turn" (p. 12).

Anderson's credentials make him the ideal candidate for the task of placing Indians at the center of Texas history in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1999 he wrote The Indian Southwest, 1580-1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention (Norman, Okla.), arguably the most sophisticated study ever published on the Native Americans of the Southern Plains between the beginnings of Spanish settlement in the late sixteenth century and the advent of the Anglo-Americans' domination of the area in the early nineteenth century. Through the innovative use of a wide variety of sources, Anderson persuasively demonstrated how various tribes altered their lifestyles following the Spanish and French intrusion in order to forge a thriving exchange-based economy relatively independent of the Euroamerican newcomers. Chronologically, Conquest of Texas is Anderson's follow-up to his previous work, as it picks up the story in 1820 when the Native Americans began to lose their hegemony in Texas and ends when most were driven from the state altogether. However, in terms of interpretation, Conquest of Texas is very different from Indian Southwest in that it relegates the natives to a passive position while focusing on the violent actions of the Anglos from the United States who ultimately conquered the region. Also, whereas the previous work examined the impersonal forces that had an impact on the Indians--namely, disease and trade--and their ability to adapt to these changes, this book is surprisingly old-fashioned in its personality-driven action.

Employing an impressive array of primary sources but ignoring most of the recent revisionist works on Texas and its Indians, Anderson correctly points out that, in addition to Mexicans and Anglos competing for control of the region during the 1830s and 1840s, tribes native to Texas as well as huge numbers of Indians displaced by the United States--particularly, Wild Cat's band of Seminoles--were also centrally involved in the struggle. He also turns traditional Texas Indian history--with its emphasis on captives such as Cynthia Ann Parker--on its head by highlighting the many atrocities committed against the state's tribes by the various Euroamerican groups, including Mexican soldiers and the United States" Second Cavalry. However, Anderson strikes such a tone of moral outrage (possibly justified) at the actions of the Anglos that they--and especially their paramilitary arm, the Texas Rangers--are portrayed in the same caricatured language that past scholars have previously reserved for the Indians--a shrill cry that threatens to undermine the thesis of this much-needed addition to Texas historiography.

F. TODD SMITH

University of North Texas