Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What if Texas hadn't joined the Union?

Desertmuledeer:

"Thank the Lord of all that slavery is no more. At least as sanctioned by the law of the land because it is unfortunately alive and well in Texas illegally."

What? I am in Houston right now I don't see any slaves.
What?

What if Superman was a Caddo?

Which Caddo! Anadarko, Neche, keechi, Bidai, Nebedache, Nachito, Adai, ????

And the list goes on!

There would be no Fire!!

Oh, they'd be a helluva fire!

The Colt revolver was a significant factor in the defeat of the Comanches by the Rangers.
This often involved close quarters combat on horseback. The Comanche had bows and arrows, their famous lances of course, and some muzzle loading rifles.

A Texas Ranger with two fully loaded Colts was more than even the Comanche warrior could handle.

We gave it our best shot about 10 years after the Alamo went down, it was called the Mexican War.

We won, we occupied Mexico City and everything.

Be careful what you wish for....

There were around ten million Mexicans in 1848 and we didn't beat all of THEM. Guerilla is a Spanish word; step out of your camp if you were an American and your throat was cut, plus our supplies could only arrive if sent in armed convoys. Then enlistments started expiring and diseases broke out.

If the Mexican government had been a little less venal we would have just evaporated. Instead they accepted $15 million American dollars from us. In return for that 15 million they ceded California and all claims on Texas and we got to declare victory and go home.

Twelve years later again Texas Governor Sam Houston did his very best to start a war with Mexico in the vain hope that such a war would unite a nation (us) teetering on the verge of Secession.

That attempt failed, but ironically it has been said that the only thing that can unite Mexico is the threat of an American invasion.

Birdwatcher

Read "RIP" Ford's Texas, the collected memoirs of Ranger Captain John Salmon Ford.

Captain Ford spent more time in the field fighting Indians than just about any other White man who lived to tell about it. Most of this against Comanches.

Ford specifically states that the revolver and the Comanche bow were at a rough parity in combat. The real proof is that there was no sudden increase in the Comanche body count subsequent to the introduction of the revolver, which was just a handgun after all.

Which is part of the reason why Ford did almost all of his own Indian fighting with rifles.

And of course the bigger picture was that the proportion of Comanches killed by Texans relative to the numbers felled by epidemics was miniscule.

Birdwatcher

there are so many ver. 2.0 wars looming.

Some serious ominous stuff they all are.

The kind that taught Charles Goodnight woodcraft in the Brazos River bottoms when he was a kid.

Maybe we can make that Caddo a Jedi instead.

If Texas had been assumed by Mexico, would the US have tried to take all of Mexico?

Caddo Jedi????
Hmmmmm???


I think you're onto something!

Bidai Jedi rhymes.

They were the band that a Mexican doctor innoculated for smallpox according to the journal of Mier e' Teran!

Stephen L. Moore in his surprisingly good "Savage Frontier" series has it that the Ranging Company out of Parker's Fort the year before the place was sacked captured an Indian and tried to infect that man with smallpox before releasing him to infect his people. The outcome of that episode not known.

Maybe they had caught one of Teran's crowd.

It was the Mexican Army that tore down the Alamo in the spring and summer of 1836 on their way out after the capture of Santa Anna, they did that so that they wouldn't have to take it again when they came back.

I read somewhere recently that they almost did return in 1837, a force of 10,000 troops assembled, but that internal political chaos prevented that force from ever being sent. If it had been sent the Second Texas Revolution woulda had another chapter or two though undoubtedly we would have won in the end by a tidal wave of immigration. In 1836 the American-born in Texas already outnumbered Spanish-speaking Tejanos five to one.

So it was the Mexican Army didn't return until 1842, twice, the second time a 1,500 man Mexican Army occupying San Antonio, the largest city in Texas, for three weeks. This to fulfill a pledge by the returned-to-office Presidente Santa Anna to redeem Mexican honor by taking back Texas.

Sending just 1,500 men in 1842 was Quixotic at best on account of there were 100,000 American/Texians in Texas by that time, already three times as many as there had been in 1836.

Still, that army was able to march right in unopposed until gathering militia threatened to cut it off, the army withdrawing back across the Rio Grande after two skirmishes on the outskirts of town.

But when Santa Anna did that in 1842 it made obvious just how defenseless the RoT really still was, six years after independence.
If we didn't annex it, somebody else would. So we did, precipitating the Mexican War.

Would annexation have taken place even if Santa Anna hadn't sent that invasion force? Hard to say.

Birdwatcher

Numbers.

We swept across North America relatively unopposed on account of 90% or more of the Indian population died from epidemics upon contact, meanwhile our own population at that time was growing at a rate rivaled today only by present-day Kenyans.

The CDC has estimated that 20 million Indians died in epidemics in Mexico alone in the 50 years following the arrival of Cortez. By the time of our Second Texas Revolution 300 years later the surviving population of Mexico was about as resistant as our own in that regard.

Occupying a country still occupied by 8 to 12 million still very much alive Mexicans woulda been a whole different ballgame than moving in post-epidemic.

Birdwatcher

Ah, ha. So, Texas didnt let in any of those African bros. Not a bad move.

Ya, and interesting given the fact that before the revolution Galveston had been a prime place for smuggling African slaves into North America, at enormous profit given the demands of the exponentially expanding cotton and sugar cane concerns in the Deep South.

Again from recollection, the three Bowie brothers had made $65,000 this way (equivalent of about $4 million today) and Fannin himself, in the employ of monied interests, had brung in 200 African slaves in one shipment.

I do not know why this trade was considered undesirable by the 49 delegates to the Independence Convention of '36, most of whom were wealthy planters.

Birdwatcher

Quite possibly the case. Correct time period and less than 100 miles from the Bidai area of occupation.