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  • The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875
  • Ty Cashion
The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875. By Gary Clayton Anderson. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. Pp. 504. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 0806136987. $29.95, cloth.)

Every Texan has grown up hearing "It was either them or us." The history of the world, after all, is the story of one group conquering another. How else could you deal with bloodthirsty savages who measured their wealth in stolen horses and their social rank by the number of scalps that dangled from their lodge poles? Surely, the [End Page 296] sophistry of such conventional notions has at times escaped even the most reflective minds among us. Gary Anderson, however, has peeled back the bright veneer that normally covers this chapter in the "Winning of the West" to reveal something much darker in tone than we have ever seen.

Not only has Anderson consulted some seldom-tapped sources, but he also constructed an interpretation that, even if biased, is at least as sound as the creation myth it challenges. Evidence poor Matilda Lockhart. Every serious student of Texas history knows about the 1840 Council House Fight, particularly descriptions of the girl's torture—"her nose actually burnt off to the bone"—and the way the Comanches planned to use their other captives as bargaining chips (n. 419). The message of course was that the Comanches were cruel and untrustworthy by nature. Yet, quite persuasively, Anderson argues that Cynthia Ann Parker's assimilation was more typical of captivity. In fact, he makes a convincing case that Lockhart's suffering was manufactured almost six decades removed from the event. In the late 1880s Texans were trying to mollify an eruption of adverse press abroad, much as they were in 1840 when American and European correspondents concluded that "men coming in peace with their families had been shot down in cold blood" (p. 135).

At home, Anderson contends, militantly conservative newspaper editors habitually exaggerated reports of Indian and Mexicano depredations, casting these undesirable peoples as both inhumane and less than human; as primary sources these accounts later served historians who justified the Texans' behavior. So ingrained is the image of Comanches raping their women captives as a matter of routine, that only persistent documentation to the contrary begins to achieve a climate of credibility. On the other hand, the author asserts that to the extent such a custom existed, it was Anglos who practiced it. Other whites joined multiethnic gangs that committed heinous crimes for which Indians were blamed. Then, there was President M. B. Lamar's policy of expulsion or extermination. John Moore, for example, a colonel in the service of the Republic, led ninety volunteer rangers on a winter raid in 1840 in which they massacred over 140 Indians and netted for each man almost a year's salary in plunder. "Come the spring of 1841," the author noted, "excited volunteer rangers sprang into action all across Texas" (p. 191).

While Anderson's interpretation rests on a solid bedrock of indisputable documentation, critics will find it rather one-sided. They will also find many niggling errors of peripheral facts. The operative word, however, is peripheral. This reviewer will leave it to others to find fault with the volume and point out that in the brief time since its release, it has already commanded a prominent place in discussions of the frontier and the nature of the conquerors and conquered alike.

The Conquest of Texas joins an emerging historiography that is rewriting the story of the relationship between Anglo Texans and people of color. Just as Ben Johnson's passionate Revolution in Texas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) finds its foil in the monumental work of Charles Harris and Ray Sadler's TheTexas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), Anderson finds a similar counterweight in F. Todd Smith's From Dominance to Disappearance (Lincoln: Univerity of Nebraska Press, 2005). True, much of the world's history indeed revolves around the story of one group conquering another, and we should [End Page 297] not...

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