An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (19 page)

That the Indian race of Mexico must recede before us, is quite as certain as that that is the destiny of our own Indians
.

—Waddy Thompson Jr., 1836

Captain Lemuel Ford of the First Dragoons, United States Army, made the above observation in his diary, referring to Comancheros, Mexican traders in northern Mexico who traded and intermarried primarily with Comanches on the plains. Waddy Thompson Jr. served as a US diplomat to Mexico from 1842 to 1844.
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Army officers like Ford and diplomats like Thompson were not exceptional in their racist views. Indian hating and white supremacy were part and parcel of “democracy” and “freedom.”

The populist poet of Jacksonian democracy, Walt Whitman, sang the song of manhood and the Anglo-American super race that had been steeled through empire. As an enthusiastic supporter of the US war against Mexico in 1846, Whitman proposed the stationing of sixty thousand US troops in Mexico in order to establish a regime change there “whose efficiency and permanency shall be guaranteed by the United States. This will bring out enterprise, open the way for manufacturers and commerce, into which the immense dead capital of the country [Mexico] will find its way.”
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Whitman explicitly grounded this prescription in racism: “The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history.… A superior
grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out.” The whole world would benefit from US expansion: “We pant to see our country and its rule far-reaching. What has miserable, inefficient Mexico … to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?”
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In September 1846, when General Zachary Taylor's troops captured Monterrey, Whitman hailed it as “another clinching proof of the indomitable energy of the Anglo-Saxon character.”
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Whitman's sentiments reflected the established US origin myth that had the frontier settlers replacing the Native peoples as historical destiny, adding his own theoretical twist of what would later be called social Darwinism.

Traversing the continent “from sea to shining sea” was hardly a natural westward procession of covered wagons as portrayed in Western movies. The US invasion of Mexico was carried out by US marines, by sea, through Veracruz, and the early colonization of California initially progressed from the Pacific coast, reached from the Atlantic coast by way of Tierra del Fuego. Between the Mississippi River and the Rockies lay a vast region controlled by Indigenous nations that were neither conquered nor colonized by any European power, and although the United States managed to annex northern Mexico, large numbers of settlers could not reach the Northern California goldfields or the fertile Willamette Valley region of the Pacific Northwest without army regiments accompanying them. Why then does the popular US historical narrative of a “natural” westward movement persist? The answer is that those who still hold to the narrative remain captives of the ideology of “manifest destiny,” according to which the United States expanded across the continent to assume its preordained size and shape. This ideology normalizes the successive invasions and occupations of Indigenous nations and Mexico as not being colonialist or imperialist, rather simply ordained progress. In this view, Mexico was just another Indian nation to be crushed.

The US invasion of Mexico has also been characterized as the first US “foreign” war, but it was not. By 1846, the United States had invaded, occupied, and ethnically cleansed dozens of foreign nations east of the Mississippi. Then there were the Barbary Wars. The opening lyric of the official hymn of the US Marine Corps, composed and adopted soon after the invasion of Mexico, “From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,” refers in part to 1801–5, when the marines were dispatched by President Thomas Jefferson to invade the Berber Nation of North Africa. This was the “First Barbary War,” the ostensible goal of which was to persuade Tripoli to release US sailors it held hostage and to end “pirate” attacks on US merchant ships.
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The “Second Barbary War,” in 1815–16, ended when pasha Yusuf Karamanli, ruler of Tripoli, agreed not to exact fees from US ships entering their territorial waters.

By this time, throughout Spain's American colonies, wars of independence flamed, the leaders of these revolutions inspired by the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution. A successful independence movement arose in France's Caribbean plantation slave colony of Haiti in 1801, when the majority enslaved African population overthrew the French planters and declared an independent nation-state. This was the first permanently successful national liberation movement against European colonialism in the world. The prevailing myth claims that the colonized peoples fighting for independence from Spain were inspired by successful US secession from Britain but this is a dubious claim.

Simon Bolívar was a major leader of the independence movements in South America. He visited liberated Haiti in 1815, a trip that sharpened his hatred for slavery and led to its abolishment in the independent nations that formed in South America. Bolívar and liberator José de San Martín were founders of the unitary republic they named Gran Colombia, which survived from 1819 to 1830 with Bolívar as president. Subsequently, Gran Colombia splintered into the nation-states of Venezuela, Colombia (which then included Panama), Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. A similar unitary nation formed in Central America called the United Provinces of Central America, with its capital in Guatemala City, which existed from 1821 to 1841,
thereafter splitting into the present separate small states. In both cases the larger and stronger unitary federations were subject to economic intervention and domination by the British and US empires.

Father Miguel Hidalgo, a priest who was instrumental in the Mexican independence movement, was deeply assimilated into Indigenous society in Mexico, and the majority of the movement's insurgent fighters were drawn from Indigenous nations. Most of the actual fighters in the independence movements led by San Martín and Bolívar in South America were also Indigenous, representing their communities and nations, fighting for their own liberation as peoples. In striking contrast, the US war of independence targeted the Indigenous nations as enemies. The Indigenous communities in the new South American republics were soon dominated economically and politically by national landed elites that consolidated their power following the wars of independence. However, Indigenous peoples whose ancestors fought for liberation from Spanish colonialism have never forgotten their important role in those revolutionary movements and realize that the liberation process continues. The Indigenous peoples of Latin America feel they own those revolutions, whereas the US secession from Great Britain was the intentional founding of a white republic that planned elimination of the Indigenous peoples as territorial-based, collective societies.

The period of US intervention to annex and dominate former Spanish territories in the Americas began not in 1898 with the Spanish-American War, as most history texts claim, but rather nearly a century before, during Jefferson's presidency, with the Zebulon M. Pike expedition of 1806–7. Those historians who track “continental expansion” separately from clear actions of US imperialism rarely note the juxtaposition in time and presidential administration of the interventions in North Africa and Mexico on the eve of its liberation from Spain. Like the Lewis and Clark expedition, completed the same year that Pike set off, the Pike expedition was a military project ordered by President Jefferson. Lewis and Clark had headed into the far reaches of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory to gather intelligence on the Mandan, Hidatsa, Paiute, Shoshone, Ute, and many other nations in the huge swath of territory between the Rockies
and the Pacific, bordered by Spanish-occupied territory on the west and south and British Canada on the north.
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Pike and his small force of soldiers and Osage hostages had orders to illegally enter Spanish territory to gather information that would later be used for military invasion. Under the guise of having gone astray, Pike and his contingent found themselves inside Spanish-occupied northern New Mexico (today's southern Colorado), where they “discovered” Pikes Peak and built a fort. Ultimately, as they had undoubtedly planned, they were taken into custody by Spanish authorities who transported them to Chihuahua, Mexico, allowing Pike and his men to observe and make notes about northern Mexico on the way. More important, they collected information on Spanish military resources and behavior and the location of and relations among civilian populations. Pike was released, and in 1810 published his findings. Later titled
The Expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike
, the book was a best seller.
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The instability of the impoverished new republic of Mexico, as it emerged in 1821 from more than three centuries of Spanish colonialism and an exhausting war of national liberation, put it in a weak position to defend its territory against US aggression. With Spain out of the way, the United States could pursue its own policy of imperialism without risking a difficult war with European imperialist powers—what George Washington had referred to in his farewell address when he warned against “foreign entanglements.” Once Mexico was independent, its newly formed government immediately opened its borders to trade, something Spanish authorities had never allowed. US trader William Becknell arrived at Taos in the Mexican province of Nuevo México from St. Louis in 1821, and a US trading party led by Sylvester Pattie arrived in 1824.
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Traders based in St. Louis, at the time the effective western frontier outpost of the United States, began extending their business to New Mexico. Until the publication of Pike's book in 1810, US merchants had shown little
interest in trading in Mexico. Pike's account of the potential profits to be made inspired them to set out to capture that trade.
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US traders would help pave the way to US political control of northern Mexico through what came to be known as the “American party of Taos.” Christopher Houston “Kit” Carson would play a major role in the success of the US invasion of northern Mexico as he continued work as a colonial mercenary. Born in 1809 in Kentucky, Carson was a fur trapper and entrepreneur, as well as a noted Indian hater and killer, who had left his family's homestead in Missouri for New Mexico at age sixteen. Most of the US citizens who made up the American party, including Carson, married into wealthy Spanish-identified families in New Mexico who had not favored independence from Spain, creating a strong Anglo affinity within the local ruling class. The goal of this clique was to attract, and thus monopolize, the trade in furs with Indigenous and other trappers, with the ultimate goal of US annexation. As a magnet, the traders would offer low-priced manufactured goods, from clothing to kitchenware, tools, and furniture. St. Louis was connected to transatlantic trading houses in cities on the East Coast, so it had the advantage of better variety and quality of goods than those of Chihuahua traders, who relied on the declining port of Veracruz. Bent's Fort (near present-day La Junta, Colorado) became the economic center for the fur trade in northern New Mexico, rivaling only John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company in North America. Missouri merchants circumvented the Mexican prohibition against exports of silver and gold (lifted briefly for silver between 1828 and 1835) through smuggling and bribery.
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St. Louis soon replaced Chihuahua as the entrepôt for the northern Mexico trade, and the elite of Mexico's northern provinces became parties to the US objective of incorporating the territory into the United States. As early as 1824, Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton introduced a bill in the US Senate on behalf of citizens of Missouri for a US government survey of the Santa Fe Trail to the Mexican border. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson began using US troops to protect caravans of merchandise on the Santa Fe Trail going to northern Mexico from possible interference by Indigenous peoples whose territories they crossed without permission.

In addition to New Mexico, US citizen residents laid groundwork for the annexation of Mexico in Texas and California as well. The Spanish Cortes (parliament) had enacted a law in 1813 that authorized provincial authorities to make private property land grants, and this practice of granting land to individuals, including foreigners, was continued under the independent Mexican government until 1828. In 1823, Mexico's despotic ruler Agustín de Iturbide enacted a colonization law authorizing the national government to enter into a contract granting land to an
empresario
, or promoter, who was required to recruit a minimum of two hundred families to settle the grant. Only applied in the province of Texas, many such grants were sought by and granted to slave-owning Anglo-American entrepreneurs, despite slavery being illegal in Mexico, making possible their dominance in the province and leading to Mexico's loss of Texas in 1836.
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Senator Benton, his son-in-law Captain John C. Frémont, and Kit Carson also helped pave the way for the invasion of Northern California. In the early 1840s, Benton and his daughter, Jessie—Frémont's wife—built a booster press to entice settlers to the Oregon Territory as well as to settle in the Mexican province of California. At the same time, Frémont and his guide Carson mounted five expeditions to gather information, laying the groundwork for military conquest. The third expedition illegally entered the Sacramento Valley region from the north in early 1846, just before the United States declared war against Mexico. Frémont encouraged Anglo settlers in the Central Valley to side with the United States, promising military protection if war broke out. Once a US warship was positioned for war, Frémont was appointed lieutenant colonel of the California Battalion, as if it had all been planned in advance.
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