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  • From Dominance to Disappearance: The Indians of Texas and the Near Southwest, 1786-1859
  • Jesús F. de la Teja
From Dominance to Disappearance: The Indians of Texas and the Near Southwest, 1786-1859. By F. Todd Smith. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Pp. xviii, 320. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $59.95 cloth.

There has been a revival of interest in Texas Indian studies over the past two decades, including works on a number of individual tribes by authors employing modern ethnographic techniques in a field long mired in the Euroamerican triumphalist perspective. Among the reasons why the outdated approach has lasted so long is that for a western state, Texas lacks a meaningful American Indian presence. The process by which Texas lost its native peoples is precisely the topic of F. Todd Smith's From Dominance to Disappearance: The Indians of Texas and the Near Southwest, 1786-1859. As the title implies, the story arc stretches from the tribes' successful preservation of their autonomy against a relatively weak and ineffective Spain in the eighteenth century to the complete dependence of tribal remnants on United States government willingness to protect them from Texas frontiersmen by the mid-nineteenth century. The book is not only the story of the loss of sovereignty but also of the complete loss of resources and land.

The book is marked by a strong narrative and attention to detail. In this respect it is a worthy follow-up to Elizabeth John, Storms Brewed in Other Men's Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540-1795 (1975) and an interesting counterpoint to Gary Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875 (2005). Although Todd Smith restricts [End Page 479] his study to southwestern Louisiana and northern Texas, hence the "near Southwest" of the title, he too is concerned with telling the story of Indian-Euroamerican interactions from the Indian perspective whenever possible. His more restricted framework makes Todd Smith's work cohesive and compelling, as we easily follow the story from east to west and from the Spanish to the American eras. The first part of the book explains how the Caddoan peoples of the region successfully played Spaniards and Frenchmen, and then Spaniards and Americans off each other to maintain their autonomy. Comanches and other hunting peoples also used trade possibilities with Spain's rivals to enhance their positions throughout Texas. The second part explains how the Americans at first co-opted the area's native peoples to gain control, then all but abandoned them to the mercy of westward frontiersmen.

Todd Smith tells the tragic story of the decline of all the tribes of the near Southwest as objectively as possible given the circumstances. The range of Indian strategies to meet the much more powerful American adversaries, from accommodation to armed resistance, eventually led to the practice of withdrawal. Agricultural tribes moved farther and farther west, rebuilding villages and clearing lands, only to be quickly engulfed by ever encroaching settlers and forced to remove themselves again. The Comanches are presented by Todd Smith also as a besieged people who at the end of each cycle of raids and counter-raids, found themselves weaker. By the mid-1850s they had become the victims not just of encroaching whites, but also of northern Comanches whose raids were often blamed on the southern bands. The last ditch effort to find permanent homes for the Texas Indians in the upper reaches of the Brazos River lasted all of four years. Texans had negotiated retention of their public lands upon entry into the American Union and were unwilling to allow federal Indian reservations on their soil. Although the state government temporarily permitted two small reservations well west of the line of white settlement, the fast growing settler population brought friction and violence despite the Indians' best efforts to prove themselves good neighbors. By 1859 the federal government saw removal of the remaining bands into Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma as the only way of saving the last of the Texas Indians.

While the last part of the book may be familiar territory to students of...

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