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Reviewed by:
  • Book Reviews
  • Jesús F. de la Teja and Juliana Barr
From Dominance to Disappearance: The Indians of Texas and the Near Southwest, 1786-1859. By F. Todd Smith. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Pp. 332. Preface, maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 0803243138. $59.95, cloth.)

In his latest book, Todd Smith adds yet another layer to his previously published trilogy on Caddo and Wichita Indians, expanding his focus to include as well Karankawas, Atakapas, Tonkawas, Lipan Apaches, Comanches, and later emigrant Indian groups such as Alabamas, Coushattas, Cherokees, and Kickapoos. Exploring the period from the late eighteenth century, when Spaniards finally achieved some level of stability in their relations with native peoples, through 1859 when the short-lived experiment in native reserves in northern Texas collapsed, Smith offers new perspectives on nineteenth-century Indian-Euroamerican interactions in Texas, a subject that had long been crying out for historical analysis.

Building upon findings from his last three books, Smith uses additional archival and secondary sources to chronicle in great detail movements of different groups, demographic changes of populations, the series of political and economic events, and the decisions made by native and Euroamerican leaders that all intertwined to lead, tragically, to the decimation and removal of Texas's native peoples by the eve of the Civil War. He begins in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when Indian nations, especially Caddos, Wichitas, and Comanches, held the upper hand over a weak and ill-financed Spanish government. Smith then takes the reader through the vicissitudes of Spanish and Mexican diplomacy rocked by the civil disturbances between royalists and rebels accompanying the Mexican War for Independence, the invasion of Texas by Anglo-American filibusters, and the establishment of the Mexican state. It was the influx of both Anglo-American settlers and new emigrant Indian peoples that brought about critical change, however. Native declension thus follows, Smith details, from Anglo-Indian conflicts before and after the Texas Revolution, the policies of the Texas Republic toward its Indian populations and the later U.S. policies once Texas joined the Union, and finally the ill-fated attempt to establish reservations for Indian peoples within Texas in the 1850s. Attempting to correct long-held misperceptions that Texas Indians used only warfare in their response to Anglo-American settlement in the nineteenth century, Smith argues that "most tried to reach an accommodation with the Texans that would have allowed them to peacefully remain in what they considered to be their traditional homeland" (p. xv). [End Page 549]

Sadly, Anglo-Americans—except for notable exceptions like Sam Houston and Robert S. Neighbors—had no interest in peaceful accommodation and sought only the extermination or exile of all Indians in Texas. In fact, though he writes of "military defeat" rather than "conquest" or "ethnic cleansing," Smith's political and military narrative tells a stomach-wrenching story of Anglo-Americans' conscious campaign against Indians: the lies and double-dealing of land hungry politicians and individuals; the razing of Indian homes, agricultural fields, and food stores; the hunting down and slaughtering of men, women, and children (often in dawn attacks on Indian villages where sleeping families were killed in their beds); the capture of Indian women and children who were then sold into slavery; and the devastation of so many others left homeless and starving as they were driven from Texas at gunpoint.

To such a successful degree does Smith make the case for the inexorable destruction and desolation of Texas's native peoples—in careful, measured (and thus all the more convincing) detail—that the reader is sometimes brought up short by statements that "the Indians continued to be self-sufficient" (p. 190). Such moments do not put his conclusions in doubt, but one wishes for more information about the people themselves—their cultural, social, and spiritual responses to the horrific turn of fate in their lives. A narrative governed primarily by diplomatic and military events misses the sociocultural processes that accompanied and gave meaning to political and economic change. Yet even if it does not provide an ethnohistorical perspective to its story, Smith's work gives us a haunting and sorrowful look into Texas...

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