Extinction Or Expulsion 

In spite of an empty treasury and currency that was almost worthless, Lamar saw no reason why he could not build his empire of the West. The first step, of course, was getting rid of the Indians. He believed that Indians should be either expunged from Texas or killed outright. This included all Indians, from the Comanches on the west to the Wacos in the middle, and the Shawnees and Delawares and Cherokees in the east. In his inaugural address he put this quite succinctly, in case anyone was not clear where he stood. Citing the Indians’ cruelties, he called for an “exterminating war” against them that would “admit of no compromise and have no termination except in their total extinction or total expulsion.” The Congress of the Republic of Texas heartily agreed. That month they voted to create an eight hundred forty-man regiment of fifty companies to serve for three years; they also voted a million-dollar appropriation. 

Thus, Lamar’s rally cry: extinction or expulsion. It sounds a good deal like a public appeal for genocide, certainly among the very few in modern history. But as appalling as it might sound, in fact Lamar, a man who had experience with Creek Indians in Georgia, was just being brutally candid in a way that almost no white man had ever been on the subject of Indian rights. His was a policy of naked aggression, as usual, but without the usual lies and misrepresentation. He demanded the Indians complete submission to the Texan’s terms—there would be no endless re-negotiation of meaningless boundaries—and stated quite clearly what would happen to them if they did not agree. “He proposed nothing and presided over nothing that was not already fully established in Anglo-American precedent and policy,” wrote historian T.R. Fehrenbach. “The people and the courts had decided that true peace between white men and red men was impossible, unless either the Indians gave up their world, or the Americans eschewed the nation they were determined to erect upon this continent.” Since two hundred years of duplicity and bloodshed had proved that neither of those things would ever happen, Lamar was just stating what was to him obvious. 

What he had done that no high-ranking government official in the neighboring United States of America had ever done before was to explicitly deny that Indians in Texas had right to any territory at all. Every treaty ever signed assumed that Indians would get at least some land on their terms. Indeed, in 1825 the US government had created an Indian country (modern Oklahoma) in order to guaranteed that, in the words of Secretary of War James Barbour, “the future resident of these peoples will be forever undisturbed.” Lamar and most of the residents of their new sovereign nation opposed the very principle. In some sense, what he proposed was better than the piecemeal destruction that had been meted out to the eastern tribes. In another sense, it was an invitation to the outright slaughter of native peoples. The Texas Congress loved the new Indian policy. In 1839 two thousand revved up, patriotic, adventure hungry Texans signed up to fight Indians. 

-excerpted from “Empire of the Summer Moon” (2011) by S.C. Gwynne