Texas was declared an independent republic on March 2, 1836. It was the shameful era of “Indian removal,” when Native Americans were driven from their homelands in places like Georgia to lands west of the Mississippi. It was a defining feature of Jacksonian democracy, which was kind of like the democracy we have today.
The Anglos who settled Texas were mostly Southerners who were filled with the spirit of that day. The policy of the new republic was rid the country Native peoples.
The new republic spent so much money doing that it went into debt. If you’re puzzled by why Texas has so little public land compared to other Western states, it helps to remember it had so much debt it had to sell everything. If you’re puzzled why Texas has almost no reservations for Native peoples, it helps to remember that shameful history.
The stories about Texas are like the myths of the ancient Greeks. Homer says the story of Jason and the Argonauts was popular in his day. But there were problems with the tale even then. If you look at the route Jason and Medea used to return after stealing the Golden Fleece, you see that the tales were invented before the Greeks knew much about geography.
Some of the rivers that Jason and Medea took didn’t run into lakes that the myths imagined. The rivers that connected into a kind of escape route didn’t connect. Rivers didn’t run into the right seas.
Geographers and historians gradually learned better, but they couldn’t contradict the hallowed myths without getting into trouble. So the myths kept splintering, getting ever more convoluted, ever more impossible to believe.
If you’re from Texas, all this might sound familiar. It’s what folks call heritage.
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