NOAH SMITHWICK (1808–1899)
Settler, Frontiersman, and Memoirist
Noah Smithwick arrived in Texas in 1827 and spent nearly four decades on the Texas frontier before departing for California in 1861. His memoir, Evolution of a State, or, Recollections of Old Texas Days (1900), is one of the most valuable primary sources for the history examined in this project, precisely because Smithwick occupied an unusual position: a settler who had formed genuine personal relationships with Indigenous leaders — including Chief Muguara of the Comanche and members of the Cherokee and Tonkawa nations — and whose memoir therefore records both sides of the encounters that characterize this history with a complexity rare in the Anglo-Texan record.
Smithwick’s account of the Council House Fight is notable for his reference to Muguara as “my old friend” — testimony to the diplomatic relationship he had maintained with Comanche leadership in the years preceding the massacre (Smithwick 249). His account of the sequence from the Council House to the Great Raid to Plum Creek carries a sense of tragic inevitability: he understood that the Comanches had acted from a comprehensible logic of response to betrayal, and his description of the Moore expedition — “It was but the counterpart of the Indians’ raid upon Victoria and Linnville, and yet what a different aspect it assumed when the parties changed places” (Smithwick 250) — is the most searching moral observation in the primary sources examined in this project.
Smithwick is also significant as an example of the settler subject who inhabits the contradiction that American exceptionalism was manufactured to resolve: a man who formed genuine human bonds across the colonial divide, participated in the colonial enterprise, and recorded both without the capacity — or perhaps the will — to think through their structural relationship. His memoir, written at the end of the nineteenth century when he was in his nineties, has the quality of a man trying to remember everything truly while remaining unable to see what the truth, taken whole, would require of him.
Sources:
Smithwick, Noah. Evolution of a State, or, Recollections of Old Texas Days. Gammel Book Company, 1900, pp. 249–251.
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