Evil Empire 53relocating them west of the Mississippi. Even following the founding
of the professional U.S. Army in the 1810s, irregular warfare was the
method of the U.S. conquest of the Ohio Valley, Great Lakes, South-
east, and Mississippi Valley regions, then west of the Mississippi to
the Pacific, including taking half of Mexico. Since that time, irregular
methods have been used in tandem with operations of regular armed
forces and are, perhaps, what most marks U.S. armed forces as different
from other armies of global powers.
By the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–37), whose lust for
displacing and killing Native Americans was unparalleled, the character
of the U.S. armed forces had come, in the national imaginary, to be
deeply entangled with the mystique of indigenous nations—as though,
in adopting the practices of irregular warfare, U.S. soldiers had become
the very thing they were fighting. This persona involved a certain identi-
fication with the Native enemy, marking the settler as Native American
rather than European. This was part of the sleight of hand by which U.S.
Americans came to genuinely believe that they had a rightful claim to the
continent: they had fought for it and “become” its indigenous inhabitants.
Irregular military techniques that were perfected while expropri-
ating Native American lands were then applied to fighting the Mexican
Republic. At the time of its independence from Spain in 1821, the terri-
tory of Mexico included what is now the states of California, New Mex-
ico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Texas. Upon independence,
Mexico continued the practice of allowing non-Mexicans to acquire large
swaths of land for development under land grants, with the assumption
that this would also mean the welcome eradication of indigenous peoples.
By 1836 nearly 40,000 Americans, nearly all slavers (and not counting
the enslaved), had moved to Mexican Texas. Their ranger militias were
a part of the settlement, and in 1835 became formally institutionalized
as the Texas Rangers. Their principal state-sponsored task was the