“If the Comanches had taken a lesson from what happened on the San Saba—and apparently they had not—it would have been that the nature of the game had changed completely. The Texans were not the Spanish or the Mexicans. They were tougher, meaner, almost impossible to discourage, willing to take absurd risks to secure themselves a plot of dirt, and temperamentally well suited to the remorseless destruction of native tribes. They did not rely on a cumbersome, heavily mounted, overly bureaucratized, state-sponsored soldiery; they tended to handle things themselves, with volunteers who not only were not scared of Indians but actually liked hunting them down and killing them. Their president did not drone on as most government officials from time immemorial had about dreary, overly technical treaties that granted Indians boundaries and homelands in exchange for promises to return hostages or to refrain from harming whites. Lamar was talking about extinction. Extermination. That was the meaning of the Moore raid, as inept as it was. It was also the meaning of the extraordinary events that took place in the spring and summer of 1840 in San Antonio and south Texas. They amounted to the first big[…]” Excerpt From: S. C. Gwynne. “Empire of the Summer Moon.” Scribner. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:04:17 +0000