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

By: Gary Clayton Anderson

Narrated by: George Utley

Length: 18 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's Summary

This is not your grandfather’s history of Texas. Portraying 19th-century Texas as a cauldron of racist violence, Gary Clayton Anderson shows that the ethnic warfare dominating the Texas frontier can best be described as ethnic cleansing.

The Conquest of Texas is the story of the struggle between Anglos and Indians for land. Anderson tells how Scotch-Irish settlers clashed with farming tribes and then challenged the Comanches and Kiowas for their hunting grounds. Next, the decade-long conflict with Mexico merged with war against Indians. For fifty years Texas remained in a virtual state of war.

Piercing the very heart of Lone Star mythology, Anderson tells how the Texas government encouraged the Texas Rangers to annihilate Indian villages, including women and children. This policy of terror succeeded: by the 1870s, Indians had been driven from central and western Texas.

By confronting head-on the romanticized version of Texas history that made heroes out of Houston, Lamar, and Baylor, Anderson helps us understand that the history of the Lone Star state is darker and more complex than the mythmakers allowed.

The book is published by University of Oklahoma Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

“A powerful and accurate volume that should become an essential additon to the library of anyone serious about the Texas past.” (Montana: The Magazine of Western History)

“One of the most important books on Texas history ever written.” (Fort Worth Weekly)

©2005 University of Oklahoma Press (P)2019 Redwood Audiobooks

Texas, well and truly messed with!

A brilliantly thorough account of a vicious period in the history of Texas, and America. One of the misconceptions of historical accounts is that they have a falsely equivalent "balance", as if to say that there are "good people on both sides". All that need be expected of historical narratives is that they are honest. And this book is astoundingly honest. It lays bare the deception, rumor-mongering, paranoia and flat out lies that led to the myth of Indian depredations, which forever colored the view of native people in the eyes of European newcomers to the continent, These inaccuracies further exacerbated by Hollywood depictions of native people, which only in the last few decades have started to be torn down.

The strength of the book however is the comprehensive accounts of the deceptions, and the acknowledgement of them, by people of unimpeachable character to those of the tender sensibility of the American / Texian / Anglo persuasion, who don't necessarily want to recognize the lies of history. People like Philip Sheridan, famed for his dislike of native people (debatably the originator of the term "the only good Indian is a dead Indian), who acknowledges the exaggeration of Indian depredations, and setting the scale of killings in Texas at 20 by white Texans to 1 by natives. The book seeks to set the record straight on the true motivations of the parties and the pernicious lies meant to vilify native people and glorify the likes of the Texas Rangers.

My only minor quibble with the book would be the hair-splitting of the terms genocide and ethnic cleansing. Clearly, ethnic cleansing was official policy by Texan and American authorities. But, while the goal of terms like "Indian removal" and cynical actions like Indian dressing (whites committing crimes dressed as natives) and bison slaughter may be debatable, the repeated use of terminology like "extermination" ought to make clear the true goal. The Texas Creed left no doubt that the land belonged to Anglos. And those in charge, even those immortalized by Texan and American history, didn't care how it was achieved.

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