The Searchers Read Online Free

moody, and intensely ambitious, Houston carved hisown flamboyant legend as a two-fisted backwoodsman, soldier, and Indian fighter. He was a hard drinker and a brawler: he caned a fellow congressman on the streets of Georgetown after the man publicly questioned his honesty. Still, Houston looked like Old Hickory’s political heir and a surefire presidential candidate until his marriage to nineteen-year-old Eliza Allen mysteriously collapsed after only eleven weeks, and he resigned the governorship and fled Tennessee for Indian Territory. He lived there with the Cherokees in self-imposed exile for nearly three years—choosing, he wrote, to “ abandon once more the habitations of civilized men , with their coldness, their treachery, and their vices, and pass years among the children of the Great Spirit.” Houston added to his own myth when he visited Washington to lobby on the behalf of the Cherokees clad in native garb : turban, leggings, breechclout, and blanket. He became that classic American frontier figure: the Man Who Knows Indians.
    Like the Parkers, Houston eventually made his way to Texas, the land of fresh beginnings, where as an experienced military man he quickly became commander of the newly declared republic’s makeshift army. After his troops vanquished Santa Anna’s forces at San Jacinto, Houston’s popularity skyrocketed and he easily defeated Stephen F. Austin to become the first president of the new nation. Not all were enamored of their charismatic new leader. “He’s eloquent, patriotic, and talented,” wrote Texas newspaper editor John Henry Brown, a contemporary, but also “ jealous, envious, dissipated , wicked, artful, and overbearing.”
    Houston’s backwoods upbringing and experiences as an Indian fighter were similar to that of James Parker, but he and James had little else in common. While James was a teetotaling, sanctimonious Baptist, Houston was a proud and profane man whose bouts with alcohol were legendary. While James learned to hate Indians indiscriminately, Houston sympathized with many of them and celebrated his adoptive Cherokee heritage. He concluded early on that Indians, like whites, came in many varieties, some trustworthy and some not, and that it was important to be able to discern between them. In effect, the two men represented the American empire’s conflicting approaches to native peoples: the carrot versus the stick.
    During the independence war, Houston worked hard to tamp down hostilities between Texans and Indians and prevent native peoples from allying with Santa Anna and launching a second front. He showered friendly Indians with gifts and promises that Texans would not impinge on their territory. “ Your enemies and ours are the same ,” he wrote to agroup of Comanche chiefs in December 1836. If so, it was at best a temporary state of affairs.
    Houston expressed his condolences to the Parker family for the attack on Parker’s Fort and the abduction of the five captives, but he was reluctant to help James pursue a scorched-earth campaign to get them back. He saw James as an irrational Indian hater and a one-man wrecking crew who could single-handedly demolish the good-neighbor policy Houston was working so hard to establish with native peoples.
    After tending to his sick wife and children, James went in early July to see Houston, who was himself recovering from a severe leg wound he had received at the battle of San Jacinto. Houston rejected James’s demand for a large company of soldiers to hunt down the Indians and rescue the captives, telling James a peace treaty would be a more effective means of securing their release. James argued that the Indians would never agree “until they were whipped, and well whipped,” but Houston was unmoved. “ All argument failed ,” wrote James, who felt that “Gen. Houston betrayed too great an indifference to the matter.”
    James was still