'Tis a bit sanitized for family consumption ain't it Birdy.
Oh, he's heavy enough on the torture.
My take on it is that its entirely Texan-centric and therefore slants the truth consderable. My major specific beef is that he jumbles up the 1840's as bad as he does. Really, putting Walker's Creek in 1840 rather than 1844 is just unforgivable, especially in a putative history book, and ESPECIALLY concerning the usage of something as fundamentally Texan as the Colt revolver.
Jack Hays? An exceedingly bold and admirably aggressive man, but the functional equivalent of that hero Stuka pilot in the face of incessant Indian raiding, killing and plundering. Other than that. The likes of the a Hays, McCulloch, Caldwell, Burleson and Fords and their men were relative handfuls compared to the population of Texas as a whole.
Texas had the manpower, it had the horsemen and it had the weaponry to decisively take out the Comanches but it never mustered the collective will to do so. I mean, by the 1870's the Comanche and Kiowa remnants were driving off whole herds of COWS fer chrissakes, holding up settlement of nearly half the land area of the state.
Musta come down to the fact that, from quite early on, MOST people simply didn't have to deal with Indians. As was pointed out, people would go out to round up the cows or whatever not expecting anything to happen.
By 1860 as Clark ("Frontier Defense in the Civil War") points out, out of a population of 600,000 in the state, only about 1% (5,000) actually lived on the far Indian Frontier. Seems like Indian raiders were tolerated in the same way we tolerate inner-city crime, or the drug gangs. People bitch, but most people dont percieve themselves affected.
A cynic might argue that Texans were too busy killing each other to worry about Indians and yepper, feuds were common, as were infamously lawless areas. But really, compare the response to Indians to the virtual statewide uprising that occurred with secession, and the violent passions that ensued. Tells you where the priorities of the people themselves lay.
IMHO the definitive books on the Texas Frontier are currently Harkonnen's "Comanche Empire", Mike Cox's "Wearing the Cinco Peso", and Moore's "Savage Frontier" four-book series. I'll include "Comanche Empire" mostly for its extensive treatment of the reservation period, which is otherwise generally ignored.
JMHO
Birdwatcher
