Rather than Mexico being an integrated nation with control of its borders, the lands were contested among a variety of indigenous groups: Tejanos, Neuvomexicanos, Californios, and increasingly, American settlers. Indian raids, slave warfare and trading, and all manner of violent conflict between and among indigenes, Hispanics, and others raged across “a thousand deserts.” From California to Texas, “Mexico’s northern border with independent Indians became a far more violent place than it had been in the late Spanish era,” Weber notes. Indians, Hispanics, American traders, and people of mixed ethnicity all had been “born into worlds steeped in violence,” Ned Blackhawk observes, and “had become accustomed to and fluent in its uses.”4
By far the most formidable indigenous group in the Southwest was a coalescence known as the Comanche, from a Ute word meaning “enemy.” Highly skilled equestrians, confirmed opportunists, merciless raiders, and enthusiastic slave traders—the Comanche “were the dominant people in the Southwest” from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. They “halted the expansionist Texas in its tracks and carved out a vast raiding domain in northern Mexico.”5
The Comanche were a masculinized raiding culture yet women played crucial roles in the community and often in diplomacy as well. Cultivation of the male warrior culture went through stages, as boys began as sheepherders until they could go out on raids to prove themselves as men and warriors. Political leaders earned and maintained their status through performance in warfare. Like most indigenous groups, the Comanche lived by blood revenge: any attack on the tribe would precipitate a ruthless and relentless counterassault. On the other hand, women sometimes went as envoys to pursue diplomacy.6
For decades the tribe ranged across “Comancheria,” a broad territory centered on the Texas panhandle but extending outward in every direction into several future American states. In the late eighteenth century, the Comanche traded captive slaves for guns and ammunition. The Comanche brilliantly exploited their access to markets extending in all directions, which enabled them to raid and trade across a broad swath of the Southwest and into the Rockies and the Plains. The massive buffalo herds throughout the grasslands sustained the tribe with plentiful food, clothing, and shelter. The combination of arms, equestrian skills, and a favorable location for trade and security undergirded Comanche supremacy.7
Comanche raided, enslaved, and killed but their reputation for ruthless militarism sometimes overshadows their allure to indigenous people. Captives willingly stayed with the tribe and other indigenes joined the Comanche coalescence or sought to ally with them. Until the buffalo herds declined and the American settlers overwhelmed them, no other band in the Southwest enjoyed the power and prestige of the Comanche.8
With the majority of the Mexican population living in central Mexico, the northern borderlands were terrifyingly vulnerable to attacks by Comanche and other Indians. By the mid-1820s the Comanche and other tribes “raided ranches and towns at will, killing cattle and carrying off people.” Like the Comanche, the Kiowa, a militarized warrior society, engaged in raids. Further West the Navaho, Utes, and indigenes generically lumped as Apaches also plagued the Mexican borderlands with raids and captive taking. The Mexican cattle industry suffered millions of dollars in losses.9
Brutal Indian raids wreaked “breathtaking systematic carnage” turning the northern third of Mexico into “a vast theater of hatred, terror, and staggering loss,” Brian DeLay points out. As Mexicans defended themselves, killing hundreds of Comanche and other Indians in the process, their efforts ignited an “extraordinarily cruel war for revenge.” Motivated to avenge the deaths of their own, the invading tribes strove to capture, kill, rape, scalp, dismember, and mutilate their foes. In the years leading up to the American-Mexican War, death and destruction stalked Mexico’s northern borderlands.10
The assaults by the Comanche and other tribes so weakened northern Mexico as to pave the way for the US triumph in the ensuing war with Mexico. As Pekka Håmålåinen points out, “The stunning success of American imperialism in the Southwest can be understood only if placed in the context of the indigenous imperialism that preceded it.”11
The Ethnic Cleansing of Texas
The weakness and vulnerability of Mexico to Indian attack accounts for the desperation move in which Mexico authorized migration of American settlers into Texas shortly after Mexican independence. Although Mexico ostensibly required the migrants to become citizens and embrace the Catholic Church, these requirements could not be enforced. Americans, primarily from the southern states, soon outnumbered the Tejanos—the longtime Hispanic residents of Texas—and in time would take control of the territory and establish it as a slaveholding republic.
From the 1820s to the early 1830s ambivalent relations prevailed between the American settlers and the Tejanos. Although racism, tensions, and violent clashes occurred in early Texas history, the American settlers and the Tejanos found “much common ground.” The gringos and the Tejanos shared similar living patterns including the growing and grinding of corn, raising livestock, and shared entertainments such as fandangos, gambling, horse races, and breaking of wild horses. However, as the Anglos began to outnumber the Tejanos on Mexico’s northern frontier, they increasingly emphasized the otherness of the Spanish-speaking, Catholic people they called “Mexicans” to emphasize their foreign character. The Texans increased the level of “indiscriminate violence” against Tejanos. At the same time, “Manipulation of the legal system led to land loss” for the Tejanos.12
The Texans declared their independence in 1836, prompting Mexico to send in the army, which proceeded to massacre hundreds of Texas-Americans at the Spanish missions Alamo and Goliad. As nothing else could have, these massacres provoked outrage and a boomerang of violent retribution. On April 21 Sam Houston surprised the army of Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna at San Jacinto and won the decisive “battle” for Texas independence. The Texans killed without quarter at San Jacinto, as attested by the mind-boggling disparity in the death toll: 630 Mexicans to nine Texans. The Texans had their revenge for the Alamo and Goliad, but the indiscriminate killing had only just begun. Found hiding in the bush, Santa Anna preserved his own life by agreeing to Texas independence.13
Captors of a sprawling multiethnic territory, the Texans embarked on a campaign of cleansing the state of Indians and removing or relocating Tejanos as well. “Texans gradually endorsed (at first locally and eventually statewide) a policy of ethnic cleansing that had as its intention the forced removal of certain culturally identified groups from their lands,” Gary C. Anderson explains. The Texas Rangers, immortalized in the state’s lore as mythic frontier heroes, functioned as a vigilante assault force targeting Indians and Tejanos. “Rangers killed indiscriminately, they robbed, and they raped,” Anderson recounts. “Their goal was to spread terror so that neighboring Native groups would leave.”14
By the 1830s American settler colonials mostly from the slaveholding South had arrived in Texas in sufficient numbers to begin a nearly half-century-long campaign of removal and indiscriminate killing of indigenous people. Not all Texans advocated ethnic cleansing of Indians, yet for the most part ambivalence about killing or removing of the savages was unwelcome in the Lone Star republic. Houston, who had been friendly with many Cherokee back in his native Tennessee, tried to make the case for drawing distinctions between “good Indians” versus “murderous hordes of wild Indians” but most Texans did not care to discriminate and thus shot down Houston’s efforts to negotiate land agreements with the Texas tribes. Instead, “racial hatred became compatible with honor” and “Indian hunting” a “sport” as a “culture of violence” prevailed in Texas.15
While frontier mythology saturates the entire history of the American West, few histories have been as distorted as that of Texas. Under the dictates of Texas mythology, “Indians, brutal and bloodthirsty, were always at fault, and Texas Rangers were saviors, brave and righteous in their actions,” Anderson explains.16 While popular accounts con
tinue to appear with heavy emphasis on Indian depredations and righteous retaliatory violence,17 the settlers killed far more Indians than vice versa while driving out the indigenes, including those seeking accommodation.
Captivity narratives and horrid tales of savage violence and depravity triggered by a few incidents in the mid- to late-1830s became hegemonic in the colonial discourse of Texas. These incidents included most famously an Indian assault in June 1836 on the Parker Fort, which the Texas Rangers had used as a base of operations against the tribes. The indigenous raiders killed five settlers and took five prisoners, one of who, Rachel Plummer, wrote a lurid captivity narrative following her release. Texas lore elided the Ranger assaults for an exclusive focus on the murders of innocent settlers as well as the rape of “Granny Parker”—a rape that actually did not happen. One of the captured women, Cynthia Ann Parker, in subsequent years famously chose to remain with her Comanche husband and children, including her son and legendary Comanche leader Quanah Parker.18
Texas colonial discourse and its political leaders rationalized “the indiscriminate killing of Indians.” Governor Mirabeau Lamar, a Georgian, advocated “absolute expulsion” of the “wild cannibals of the woods.” By 1842 Lamar’s war had cleansed Indians from the central valleys of Texas, thereby opening up productive farmland for settler colonialism. Vigilantes such as John Baylor, who had his own army, killed indiscriminately with the knowledge that no American would be prosecuted in Texas merely for killing Indians. As the Texas newspaper—aptly named “The Whiteman”—explained, “The killing of Indians of whatever tribe [is] morally right” and “we will resist to the last extremity the infliction of any legal punishment on the perpetrators.”19
The colonial discourse of Indian savagery obscured ambivalent indigenous efforts to negotiate for agreed-upon borders but the Texans opted for wholesale ethnic cleansing. As Anderson notes, “Warfare was honorable to Indians, but so was negotiation.” A good example of the willingness of Indians including the “bloodthirsty” Comanche to negotiate—along with the willingness of Texans to kill them—came with the Council House massacre, typically rendered in Texas mythology as the Council House “fight.” The Comanche delegation arrived in San Antonio to negotiate in March 1840 but when they brought with them only one captive to turn over, the Texans responded by attempting to incarcerate the entire delegation. When the Comanche tried to flee, the Texans opened fire, killing 35 Indians compared with seven or eight Texans dead, some of them from friendly fire.20
As proud slaveholders who had orchestrated their own Indian removal campaign in the 1830s, Americans in the southern states especially identified with the Texans and viewed their incorporation into the United States as both desirable and inevitable. But once he had safely returned to his estate, Santa Anna reneged on his pledge of Texas independence and the Mexican government indignantly rebuffed President Andrew Jackson’s offer to purchase Texas. In 1837 the United States formally recognized Texas independence. Hostilities between the Texans and Mexicans continued episodically for the next few years. In 1842 Mexicans attacked and occupied San Antonio, but the Texans retook the city in a battle marked by “horrendous bloodshed and atrocities.”21
Fully aware that Mexico was not in control of its northern borderlands, President James K. Polk and his generals “intended to make the most” of Mexico’s weakness. “Americans had come to see and to describe the whole Mexican north as a vast theater for an unfolding race war between mongrel Mexicans and the most savage and politically undeveloped of American Indians,” DeLay explains. “This observation informed U.S. expectations about Mexico’s willingness to sell its northern territory, Mexico’s ability to defend the territory, and the way in which northern civilians would receive the U.S. Army.”22
As a providential nation on a mission to take control of colonial space, Americans could justify aggression to resolve racial ambiguities and extend the “empire of liberty.” Indians, Tejanos, Neuvomexicanos,and Californios were beneath Americans in the formation of racial hierarchies and thus could be removed through violence. In 1845, the hour of “Manifest Destiny” arrived, as the United States provoked war with Mexico in order to annex Texas and to take California and the southwest. A “messianic conception of the American people as the chosen agents of God’s will,” Manifest Destiny blended “revolutionary nationalism, evangelical Christianity, and material self-interest.”23
While choosing a path to war against Mexico, Polk backed down from a fatuous claim to the 54-degree line of latitude in the northwest, thus averting a potential casus belli with the fellow “Anglo-Saxon” British. In 1846, the Oregon Treaty freed the United States of concern that Britain might intervene on Mexico’s behalf or try to take California for itself, neither of which, however, had been on the agenda in London.24
Showing that his claim to expansive boundaries without historical justification was not confined to Oregon, Polk asserted a southern American boundary at the Rio Grande rather than the Nueces River. War could be averted only if the Mexicans accepted not only the unprecedented new border with Texas but also the loss of California and New Mexico. The vast terrain of New Mexico encompassed not only the modern-day Southwest (west Texas and the states of Arizona and New Mexico) but also nearly all of contemporary Nevada and Utah and stretched east as far as Nebraska. The Americans thus demanded Mexican capitulation to extraordinary new boundaries that would strip the nation of more than half its territory. The Mexicans had not even accepted the loss of Texas, hence there was no chance they would acquiesce to the American demands. In June 1845, Polk sent General Zachary Taylor to the banks of the Rio Grande, an “extraordinarily provocative move [that] made war all but inevitable.”25
Feverish with Manifest Destiny, many politicians and much of the press and the public issued “hysterical calls for war in a toxically racist tone.” Having recognized Texas and pushed the US Army into disputed territory, Polk had done all he could to bring on a war and merely had to await the almost certain clash. The men in Taylor’s army knew why they had been sent south of the Nueces. Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock declared that the US government sought “to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses.” Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant likewise acknowledged, “We were sent to provoke a fight but it was essential that Mexico should commence it.”26
On April 25, 1846, Mexican troops obliged by ambushing a squadron of Taylor’s patrolling dragoons, killing 11 of them. Polk now had the pretext he sought for the legislation he sent to Congress not asking for a declaration of war but rather declaring that one already existed. Despite “all our acts to avoid it,” Polk mendaciously asserted, a state of war existed “by act of Mexico,” which had “shed American blood on American soil.” In truth, Mexico had refrained from going to war over the loss of Texas and never encroached on US soil. Determined to use violent aggression to carry out Manifest Destiny, the US Congress reflected popular sentiment as it voted 174–14 in the House and 40–2 in the Senate to wage war.27
Although they were roughly the same size in 1846, Mexico and the United States evolved on wholly divergent trajectories, which influenced the outcome of the war. The Enlightenment, with its powerful impetus to the accumulation of knowledge and notions of progress, propelled the American colonies and the future United States but it largely bypassed Spain and the Catholic Church hierarchy. Whereas the United States had come into existence in a revolutionary era and received crucial support from France and other European powers, Mexico struggled after independence in 1821 to establish its nationhood at a time when the European powers had restored monarchies and committed themselves at the Congress of Vienna (1815) to fighting off liberalism.
In sharp contrast, the United States, benefiting from 50 years’ more experience than Mexico as a republic, had forged a powerful, crusading national identity framed at mid-century as Manifest Destiny. A magnet for immigrants, the United States had grown to some 22 million people, more than trip
le Mexico’s population of about seven million, on the eve of war. The Louisiana Purchase (1803), the Transcontinental Treaty (1819), in which Spain recognized US borders to the Pacific, and the Monroe Doctrine (1823), in which the United States asserted its separation from Europe and intention to dominate the Western Hemisphere, powerfully affirmed the drive for continental hegemony. The United States did not have a large army but one that had grown increasingly professional since the establishment of West Point in 1802. More important, legions of volunteers including many seasoned Indian fighters would turn out for the conflict. By contrast, the Mexican army, like the economy and society of the young republic, was in disarray.
Like the Indians, the Mexicans found themselves squarely in the path of a crusading nation committed to an almost boundless settler colonial expansion. Many Mexicans remain resentful of the “North American invasion,” a war with “geographic consequences and repercussions that are still felt today.”28 Some Mexican writers and intellectuals have acknowledged, however, that in view of the inability to control the northern borderlands, the Mexican government should have perceived the realism of selling a portion of the land, including California, to the crusading Americans who in any case meant to take it one way or the other.29
Mexicans living on the borderlands at the time displayed a high degree of ambivalence. With the outbreak of war, the Hispanics on the borderlands were “caught between two opposing forces.” Tejanos and Neuvomexicanos,especially, had significant economic ties with the American settlers. In California and the northern borderlands, “Shaky financial conditions and a stream of U.S. immigrants prevented Mexico from maintaining healthy ties to frontier societies.”30 At the same time, however, the Mexican government appealed to their national identity and devotion to Catholicism in a holy war against the invaders. As “American and Mexican national projects collided” in northern Mexico, “cross-cultural and cross-class alliances and counter-alliances … played out at the local level.”31
American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 17
