The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

The Republic of Texas was a political anomaly, an independent nation that did not expect—or much want—to remain as such. Anticipating fast annexation by the United States, it kept its eastern border open and took in thousands of American immigrants each year. Its government, modeled after that of the United States, was strong only on paper and soon proved incapable of accommodating the prodigious demographic and material growth. There was no treasury to speak of, no functioning taxation system, and no money economy. Geographically, the republic was a patchwork of disparate and in many ways incompatible parts. Its division into a flourishing Anglo cotton kingdom and a poor Tejano Texas clustered around San Antonio and Goliad prevailed, but in the late 1830s, as the immigrant flow from the United States swelled, yet another distinctive subsection emerged: a restless northern frontier of poor, land-hungry subsistence farmers. Texas, in short, was disjointed, expansionist, volatile, and potentially self-destructive. Those were also the attributes of its Indian policy.