For example, Comanches and Apaches ran rampant in the 1830s in this new power vacuum created by Mexican neglect, burning scores of major ranches that had been around for hundreds of years and massacring their inhabitants.
I don't necessarily agree with this sentence Travis. My family is Comanche on my fathers side and Apache and Comanche on my mother's side.
Mexican Federales murdered members of my family for just being "Indios"...so did Los Pinches Rinches (Texas Rangers).
There are still songs being sung about these times in the Southwest. Someone should really write them all down.
The Mexicans were basically European land owners that stole the land that was inhabited by my ancestors for generations.
I don't care what history you read or what accounts you read I will never believe that my ancestor's killed innocents. It is not what is taught or indwelled in the culture. Killing is for defense and for food. There was a saying that my grandfather once told me that his grandfather told him..."white people are like children." In context what he meant was that White people (Mexican Europeans included) could not be trusted...they kill for sport...and they kill to take things away from you. He was saying that they are undisciplined and selfish.
Now I know this isn't true today...but that was the reality of those times. The land was inhabited and the Mexican land owners with their 400,000 acres tracts of land wanted it all. That is why Indians congregated around the Roman Catholic Missions and took "Christian names." They wanted protection. They eventually assimilated into Mexican-Spanish culture and two hundred years later were Americanized like 13sisters76 wrote.
Rope,
I know what is taught and what passes for "history" in the US but the reality IS (and time for the politically correct to get) is that culture forms, is advanced and refined through discovery and the conquering of the existing population. Them's just the facts. The so-called "native americans" (and I am offended by that term- I was born in Boston and so, therefore, am a 'native american') did it to the northern european population that was here previously and the later europeans did it to them. A stronger, more advanced population will overcome a another more naive group everytime- or at least, that is the way it was then. Unfortunately, we don't do that anymore- hence, we have problems such as Darfur, Somalia and Rwanda NOW.
When the euros got to the Americas, the population HERE hadn't even invented the wheel yet, enslaved and warred against their neighbors and practiced cannibalism. This attempt by modern historians to paint them as "peaceful" "buddists" at peace with nature is enough to make me want to barf.
As to your ancestors: the farmers who moved out and farmed along what was the "frontier" were, indeed, "innocents". Whole families were massacred by roving bands of Indians and it is specious to claim otherwise.
What Andrew Jackson did during the "Trail of Tears" was beyond inhuman and I agree with you on that- but then, WHAT can one expect from the first democrat. Did you know that some members of the groups he forcibly moved were so europeanized that they even owned slaves?