From Dominance to Disappearance: The Indians of Texas and the Near Southwest, 1786-1859

F. Todd Smith’s From Dominance to Disappearance chronicles the struggles, strategies, and tribulations of various Indian groups living in a region bounded by the Red River on the east, the Llano Estacado on the west, the Nueces River on the south, and the Canadian River on the north: an area that the author calls Texas and the “Near Southwest” but which imperious Texans may well have referred to as “Greater Texas.”The author self-consciously positions his text as an extension of Elizabeth A. H. John’s Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1975), minus New Mexico for the sake of clarity and sharper focus. Using various archival sources, as well as the relevant secondary literature, Smith takes the story from the late colonial period to the middle of the nineteenth century, examining the multifarious indigenous groups of this region and their evolving relationships with different groups of Euro-Americans who made their way into this area episodically beginning in the sixteenth century and with greater earnest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.From the very beginning, Smith sets out to show the astonishing human diversity contained within Texas and the “Near Southwest” — from the coastal Karankawas who lived by moving about and splitting into smaller bands and coming back together in predictable yearly cycles, to the more agricultural and semisedentary Caddos and Wichitas, to the powerful Comanches, whose dominion was based on the successful adoption of European horses and firearms. Along the way there are lucid passages on the role of trade, environmental change, the regional economy that developed around the taking of captives, and the ways in which the expansion of commercial networks worked in favor of France and England and against Spain. These are familiar themes that have been explored before but are seldom presented together concisely and in a way that illuminates the shaping of such a vast region.The synoptic coverage of From Dominance to Disappearance is one of its strengths, making it a worthy extension of Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds. But such a framework also poses formidable challenges. The most obvious one is that it makes for a convoluted tale. The author’s brave attempt to tell this story in a narrative, blow-by-blow fashion makes for more protagonists, agreements, and decisions than an unsuspecting reader can keep track of. Within the bounds of this book there are scores of groups who appear and disappear and literally dozens of Indian leaders interacting with an equally perplexing number of Euro-American officials, traders, settlers, and so on. A second challenge inherent in the ambitious scope of this work is that it precludes the possibility of engaging in lengthier discussions of the details. I generally found myself in agreement with the book’s statements of fact. But the devil is in the details, and some specialists will find themselves wishing for greater elaboration on population estimates or whether group X resulted from the amalgamation of Y and Z.Perhaps the best way to illustrate the difficult terrain that the author is forced to travel is by following the main thrust of the book, already prefigured in the title: namely, that the indigenous peoples of Texas went from dominance of the region to tenuous coexistence with Europeans and finally to defeat, desperation, and ultimately disappearance. The basic insight is that Indians were able to control the area as long as they maintained numerical superiority but quickly lost out when the demographic tide turned against them. This broad characterization — which also serves to organize the chapters of the book — certainly reflects the experience of many native groups, but it hardly applies to all. Some indigenous communities disappeared during the era of “dominance,” while other groups did well and even enlarged their domains at the expense of other Indians and even Euro-Americans during the era of “tenuous coexistence” and “defeat.” This is not surprising and indeed underscores another main contention of the book: that Indian communities followed different trajectories as they wrestled with various imperial/national projects. While monographs devoted to specific groups tend to highlight individual indigenous strategies vis-à-vis outsiders, the vast scale of this work necessitates a more general and inclusive guiding principle. All in all, From Dominance to Disappearance is an ambitious study that chronicles the tragic histories of scores of Indian groups as they struggled to maintain their cherished autonomy and livelihood in an increasingly hostile environment.

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