UNSETTLED LAND

A study of Texas history that shows how the era of revolution was a contest of many sides.

Wresting Texas away from Mexico wasn’t just the work of Davy Crockett and Sam Houston. Haynes, director of the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, opens with a party of German freethinkers recruited by an Englishman in New York with the promise of free land—but not forewarned that the Comanches had designs on that land themselves. Then came a wave of eastern woodland Native peoples who had been driven out of their homelands by White settlement, guided by a canny leader who, though refused permission to colonize, did so anyway. They faced down Comanches along with many other neighbors. “The Indian refugees who came to Texas from the United States,” writes Haynes, “would find an even more diverse collection of Native peoples already living there.” Then came Anglo fortune-seekers and settlers, such as a Mississippi speculator who, “following in the footsteps of Stephen F. Austin, had been working for more than a year to establish his colony in the Piney Woods.” That colony put him up against Native peoples, the Hispanos of the town of Nacogdoches, and a nest of ruffians who had fled from Louisiana when the U.S. Army established an outpost there. All these parties came into conflict during the revolutionary era, and in the end, as Haynes documents, it was the pro-slavery Whites who initiated their revolution after learning that Mexico was abolishing slavery who emerged victorious. The effects of newly established White supremacy were many, including the removal of many Tejanos, Hispanic Texans who had joined in that revolution, from positions of authority or power. One was the guerrilla fighter Juan Seguín, driven from the mayorship of San Antonio in 1842. As Haynes notes, sharply, “Anglos dominated the city council; 140 years would pass before the town elected a Mexican-American mayor again.”

A much-needed exploration of the complex racial history of early Texas that won’t please the remember-the-Alamo crowd.