Monument marks treaty between Republic, tribes
GRAPEVINE, Texas — City officials have worked for years in this Dallas suburb to memorialize an 1843 treaty that promised peace and friendship among Indigenous communities and the Republic of Texas. They plan to unveil the culmination of those efforts on Saturday: A bronze monument of former Texas President Sam Houston standing among 10 Native leaders — all at least 8 feet tall — located prominently at one this town’s busiest intersections.
The project’s backers know the unveiling arrives as many historic monuments have become symbolic targets in the movement for racial justice, viewed as glorifying past wrongs instead of trying to right them. Grapevine leaders say the city’s new monument is a counterpoint to that narrative.
“How many huge monuments do you see to American Indians?” said Cody Jolliff, who manages heritage museums and educational programs for the Grapevine Convention and Visitors Bureau.
But for many Indigenous communities, the Treaty of Bird’s Fort represents a chapter in the long, violent push out of Texas to make way for white settlers.
The Wichita, Waco, Keechi and Tawakoni people lived throughout the southern Plains for hundreds of years, said Greg McAdams, cultural program planner for the tribes. Several leaders signed the Treaty of Bird’s Fort as a final
attempt to secure land in Texas, he said. Yet within 16 years, they were forced into western Oklahoma. Many descendants remain there today. The treaty “was just another step in that process to where our people were forcibly removed from our Texas homeland,” McAdams said.
Peace or political strategies?
Historians also question the treaty’s premise of peace.
“It is not simply peace, like they are going to link arms and everything’s going to be fine,” said Jeffrey P. Shepherd, a history professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. “It was a political strategy to gain Indigenous land that as Houston said, cost less money (than fighting). It was a cheaper way to take Indigenous land for slavery.”
Grapevine officials say it’s true the peace pledged in the Treaty of Bird’s Fort didn’t last. They’re also clear about what the treaty accomplished: AngloAmericans settled in the area one year later.
They want the sculpture to start conversations about the land’s history and original inhabitants, who gathered in the area to trade for thousands of years.
“We’re putting forth all our history,” said Jolliff. He and others worked for several years with tribal leaders and Native historians on the monument. “We don’t want to hide different things such as that. It’s really presenting everything so that it’s there for people to understand and enjoy.”
One signer of the treaty was Chicken Trotter, a Cherokee leader who helped form an Indigenous settlement in Texas that became the Mount Tabor Indian Community. J.C. Thompson served as chairman of the state-recognized tribe for nearly 30 years.
For Thompson’s ancestors, the treaty brought to an end violent clashes with Texas and set the foundation for their community in the eastern part of the state.
Houston hoped Native people living closest to settlers could create a buffer between white farms and more combative Indigenous groups, said Catharine Franklin, a history professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.
She said expat Tennesseans eyed east Texas for a cotton empire supported by slave labor. Houston viewed peace talks as a way to open the area to white settlers and claim Indigenous land.
“There was a military and political and economic set of motivations behind the strategy of peace versus the strategy of all-out war advocated by President (Mirabeau B.) Lamar, the second president of the Republic,” Shepherd said.
Grapevine, population 53,000, sits in the northeast corner of Tarrant County. The county is named after Edward Tarrant, known for leading militias against Native groups, according to the state historical society.
Tarrant also was a chief negotiator of the Treaty of Bird’s Fort. Months after the treaty was signed, settlers moved into the Grapevine area. One town in Tarrant County is still called White Settlement. The new monument leaves Tarrant out.
Land is legacy
Only 2.8% of Tarrant County residents are Native American, according to new 2020 census figures. It’s similar to the statewide rate. Iowa is the only state west of the Mississippi River that has a smaller share of Native residents.
Historians say demographics point to the lasting legacy of forced removal in the 1800s. “What we now call Texas had one of the largest and most diverse communities of Indigenous peoples in North America,” Shepherd said. “Where did they go? So that’s part of the problem with this desire to foreground peace, and how it creates this sort of timeless illusion of peace. It traps Native peoples in the past, and it fails to explain the legacy of the treaty.”
White settlers considered Indigenous land as available to conquer and develop, said Gary Clayton Anderson, a University of Oklahoma history professor and author of “Conquest of Texas.” It’s a viewpoint rooted in manifest destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery, a legal concept enshrined in an 1823 Supreme Court decision. Europeans had an “absolute right” to lands they “discovered.”
“The general population doesn’t know much about what happened or care about what happened, and in the end, there hasn’t been much of an effort to rectify the basic argument we’re talking about, which is ethnic cleansing,” Anderson said. “Get them off the land, and get them out of the way. Dump them into places where they are going to starve to death, and that’s just fine.”
But land is identity for Indigenous people, said Cornel Pewewardy, a Comanche scholar who was recently elected vice-chair of his nation in western Oklahoma. The Comanche homelands covered much of the Plains, including Texas.
“A lot of settlers don’t look at the land as their identity. They may look at it more so to gain profit or to exploit,” Pewewardy said. “That is an ideological difference.”
Tribal sovereignty undercut by promises of peace
Houston wanted to create a line dividing Natives and whites in Texas, which had become its own country after breaking off from Mexico in 1836. He was a protégé of Andrew Jackson, the U.S. president who signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830. The federal government forced Native communities in the eastern U.S. to move west, namely to Oklahoma. Some factions, including of the Delaware and Cherokee nations, settled in Texas after being pressed out. Many Indigenous communities already lived in the region, including the Comanche, Kiowa and Apache. Those groups never signed on to the Treaty of Bird’s Fort.
The treaty draws from language that was popular at the time, pledging friendship and peace, Franklin said. But beyond that pledge were articles that cut into tribal sovereignty and contrasted against the framework of peace. Article 20 of the treaty requires the Indigenous leaders to kill young men who fail to follow its clauses, Shepherd noted. Finding slivers of peace within a treaty fails to recognize the broader historical context, he said. “We allow these sort of white-washed Disney-esque histories to continue,” he said. “Native people are again left wondering: When are our narratives foregrounded?”
The treaty’s sweeping goals never happened. Houston left office the next year. “Of course, the attitude of whites was they didn’t care,” Anderson said. “They were going to move beyond the line anyway, and they did. The settlement of Texas is going to go on.”
Texas joined the U.S. in 1846. The forced removal of Indigenous people was complete by 1859. The federal government had to abandon the small reservations that it had set up on the Brazos River because they were repeatedly targeted by white settlers, Anderson said.
Jolliff said Grapevine plans to post signs explaining the history of the treaty — both good and bad — and invite tribal nations to host educational symposiums at a new city train station next to the monument. City leaders worked for several years to research and raise money to build it, he said.
Officials plan to host a ceremony Saturday to reveal the monument that will include representation from several of the Native nations who signed on to the treaty nearly 180 years ago.
“We try to celebrate the concept,” said Paul W. McCallum, executive director of the city’s visitors bureau. “We take joy in the concept, but we also sort of have a heavy heart about the fact that it didn’t bring the peace and such that it was hopeful that it would.”
Thompson, the Mount Tabor Indian Community leader, said the monument is important, because it introduces information that isn’t available anywhere else. Still, he said, some people will ignore the history behind it and take away a romanticized view of Native Americans.
“They don’t want to think about why the treaty was made in the first place,” Thompson said.
McAdams, with the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, said he supports the goal of the monument and similar projects, to increase understanding about the land’s original owners. But those efforts often don’t bring clear benefits to tribal nations today.
“I think the kind of thing that would be more meaningful is for these same groups to stand up when our status as sovereign nations is being, or attempted to be, diminished,” he said.