The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 52, July 1948 - April, 1949 Page: 47
512 p. : ill., maps ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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The First Treaty of the Republic of Texas
ston with instructions to negotiate with them for the purpose
of purchasing their improvements and furnishing aid in the
transportation of their women and children.7 The negotiations,
however, proved in the end to be unsuccessful. Admitting that
the Cherokees had no legal claims to the lands they occupied,
the Bowl agreed tentatively that they would return to Arkansas.
Yet he delayed on one pretext after another to put the agreement
in the form of a treaty. Suspicious of his conduct, the Texan forces
in the area prepared for battle. In the ensuing actions, really
begun by the Indians, numbers of the Cherokees, including
Colonel Bowl himself, were killed; and the others, decisively
routed, fled back to the country whence they had come nearly
twenty years earlier.3" An excellent brief statement of his reasons
for expelling the Cherokees is to be found in Lamar's succeeding
annual message to Congress. Therein, as may be summarized,
he said: i) They were immigrant tribes assuming political rights;
2) an intelligent and wild foe, they were able to control wilder
Indian tribes; 3) they had committed atrocities upon the inhab-
itants of Texas; and, 4) they had been in constant collusion with
the Mexicans against the Texans.39
The full story of the Cherokee treaty passed to something
approaching an anticlimax, which holds some significance for
the purpose of this discussion, with the passage by Congress of
an act setting up provisions for sectionizing and selling the lands
designated in the document concluded on February 23, 1836.
This law which was adopted on February 1, 1840, made no
allowance, however, for those white settlers who had entered the
territory after 1822.40 The measure occasioned spirited debates
in Congress. Opponents of the proposal, led by David S. Kauf-
37Lamar to Burnet, etc., June 27, 1839, Executive Records, Department of State,
Book 39, pp. 82-84, MSS., Archives, Texas State Library.
" See the "Report of K. H. Douglass of the engagement with Cherokees, on the
15th of July, 1839," and "Extract from the Report of Gen. K. H. Douglass, to the
Secretary of War, relative to the late Cherokee Campaign," enclosures in, and the
Annual Report of the Secretary of War, November, 1839, reprinted in Smither,
Journals of the Fourth Congress of the Republic of Texas, III, 115-116, 103-105,
and 75-80, respectively. For the whole episode relating to the attempted negotiations
prior to, and the actual expulsion of the Cherokee Indians, cf. Christian, Lamar,
97-99-
ssSee Lamar Papers, III, 165.
4oGammel, Laws of Texas, II, 184-189.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 52, July 1948 - April, 1949, periodical, 1949; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101121/m1/53/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.