the heathen land of texas

from John Graves, Goodbye to a River (1959)

[Describes local atrocities near the Brazos of waged by settlers versus non-Comanche natives]. It is unlikely that his little ugliness lighted the fuse to the main powder keg, because the main powder keg was labeled "Comanche," and he hadn't ventured to touch them. But he set a pattern for other settlers like him, and it seems that more were like him than were like, say, Robert Neighbors. Many more . . . And The People themselves were getting restive, resentful of the white encroachment on so much good land and grass and water, and covetous of the big, fast, American riding stock. That was the year they massacred the Cambren and Mason families in Jack County just to the north, the first real bloodiness of its kind in the area. Companies of white Rangers, official and otherwise, were organized and began vengefully to track war parties and stolen stock across the wild prairies.

Things were shaping up. Old Sam Houston the Raven, ally of all Indians by tepee marriage and temperament, hurled objections from the southern seat of government but got nowhere. "I agreed," Austrian George Erath wrote in his memiors--he knew the Brazos country--"I agreed, but I said that no man would dare tell them so unless he wanted to be hanged, and that if he, Houston, went up there preaching peace, they would hang him."

Houston was the one who sadly, somewhere along the line, said there was no solution. He said that if he could build a wall across Texas which would keep all the Indians securely to the west, the God-damned Texans would crawl over it from their side. . . . He was right. The Brazos whites finally organized a full-scale attack on the Lower Reserve, the peaceful Indians. Because of the firmness of the army commander there, and the unexpected backbone of the Indians themselves, it came to nothing; but in 1859, Robert Neighbors had to lead an official removal of all Indians from Texas, farmers and fighters alike, up across the Red and into the Territory. After he had them there, he sent Washington a bitter message:

I have this day crossed all Indians out of the heathen land of Texas and am now out of the land of the Philistines. If you want to have a full description of our exodus, see the Bible where the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea. We have had the same show, only our enemies did not follow us to Red River.

When he returned south, one of the truly decent men of his time and place, he was immediately shotgunned down by a drunken Indian-baiting Irishman, whom he had never before seen, in the street at Fort Belknap up the Brazos. It had something to do with his having spoken out against the murder of some Reserve Indians, or, some say, with his having accused the Irishman's brother-in-law of stealing horses and letting the Indians take the blame. There was a lot of that, then and later. . . .