In 1825, Stephen Austin, whose father had dreamed of colonizing the territory, settled 1,200 families in Texas under a contract with the Mexican government. They were slave owners. ‘The idea of seeing such a country as this overrun by a slave population almost makes me weep,’ said Austin. ‘It is in vain to tell a North American that the white population will be destroyed some fifty or eighty years hence by the negroes, and that his daughters will be violated and butchered by them.’ Hence ‘Texas must be a slave country.’
Austin, joined by Davy Crockett, demanded autonomy for his colony, then in October 1835 declared independence. Santa Anna arrested him and marched into Texas but was held up by Crockett and other frontiersmen at the old mission at Alamo. During the thirteen-day siege, Santa Anna killed 188 frontiersmen, then slaughtered Crockett and 342 prisoners. His wars were usually combined with sex: during the Alamo, Santa Anna seduced a beautiful girl who refused to sleep with him unless they married. The caudillo dressed a colonel as a priest and held a fake wedding ceremony to trick her.
Yet the delay at the Alamo enabled a remarkable late-coming Texan settler to emerge as leader. Sam Houston, who had spent years living with the Cherokee people and had fought with Jackson against the Creek, had qualified as a lawyer and been elected governor of Tennessee before arriving in Texas, where he swiftly rivalled Austin as leader. At San Jacinto, Houston defeated and captured Santa Anna (though he himself was wounded) and was elected president of the Republic of Texas. At the end of his presidency, Jackson offered Mexico $5 million for Texas and considered seizing it. President Houston knew the Cherokee and other tribes well and planned to negotiate a border between Texas and Comancheria, but he lost power to Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar,* a Georgian cotton planter’s son, poet, lawyer and warrior. Lamar had led the cavalry charge at San Jacinto and now armed the republic’s own paramilitary killers, the Rangers, to destroy the Comanche and Cherokee, whom he called ‘red n——’ and ‘wild cannibals’, demanding their ‘total extinction’. The Rangers, aided by Indian auxiliaries, the cannibal Tonkawa and mixed-race black Indians, fought the Comanche and Apache, the two sides mirror-images of the other. These masters of murderous frontier war embarked on fifty years of ferocious conflict.
In May 1836, Iron Jacket and his teenaged son Peta Nocona joined 500 Comanche and allies on a raid into eastern Texas, where they attacked Fort Parker, the log-cabin stronghold of a seventy-seven-year-old frontiersman, John Parker, and his family. The Comanche killed, scalped and castrated the male Parkers and captured two women and three children, including Cynthia Ann Parker, aged eight, who was adopted by Comanche and renamed Foundling, learning the language and embracing their culture. A few years later, she was chosen by Peta Nocona as a wife. Comanche were polygamous, but Peta loved her, and they had three children, the first being a son, Quanah. Cynthia was not alone. By the 1840s, the Comanche owned 5,000 Mexican slaves.
In 1849, Kit Carson helped track an American woman, Mrs Ann White, captured by the Apache, who killed her at the last moment. ‘Mrs. White was a frail, delicate, very beautiful woman,’ wrote one of the soldiers, ‘but having undergone such usage as she suffered nothing but a wreck remained … covered with blows and scratches.’ If they survived the initiation, these prisoners could be freed to become Comanche themselves.
The Texans never gave up on trying to find each of the captives taken during the raids. Although hundreds were either ransomed or eventually rescued in Texas Ranger and Scout expeditions, many others remained in the hands of the Comanche; some wished to remain. The Rangers launched reprisal attacks against Comancheria. Comanche chiefs became willing to negotiate peace, restoring white slaves in return for recognition of Comancheria.
In March 1840, sixty-five chiefs, accompanied by women and two children, arrived at the Council House in San Antonio to negotiate, bringing with them one white captive, a girl. Suddenly the windows of the Council House opened and hidden Texan militiamen opened fire on the Comanche, who had left their guns and lances outside the town. Thirty-five Comanche (including three women and a child) were shot down, along with seven Texans. As vengeance, a war chief, Buffalo Hump, amassed a war band of around 500, including Iron Jacket, who in July raided towns on the coast, killing slaves, capturing 1,500 horses and bloodying Texas units – even the Rangers, who managed to kill twelve Comanche at Plum Creek. When Sam Houston was re-elected as Texan president, he negotiated a peace recognizing Comancheria, but the Senate refused to ratify it. Meanwhile the Comanche
