Coupled with the recent massacres of the Killough and Wood families, a commission was established to pay for their improvements they had constructed and for them to relocate to their assigned lands north of the Red River.
[4] The letter written in Spanish sought an arrangement with the Cherokee which would give them title to their land in exchange for assistance in joining a war of extermination against the Texians.
Despite Houston's orders he should not cross the Angelina River to interfere, General Thomas Rusk sent on a party of 150 men under Major Henry Augustine, who defeated the rebels near Seguin, Texas.
[5] Warriors believing their lands to be violated by the legal settlers then perpetrated the Killough massacre, killing eighteen, mutilating and partially devouring their bodies .
Stating that "the white man and the red man cannot dwell in harmony together," as "Nature forbids it," Lamar instructed his subordinates to communicate to the Cherokees:[7] that unless they consent at once to receive a fair Compensation for their improvements and other property, and remove out of this Country, nothing short of the entire distruction [sic] of all they possess, and the extermination of their Tribe will appease the indignation of the white people against them.Should the Cherokee refuse compensation for their removal and resist, Lamar's orders were: to push a rigorous war against them; pursuing them to their hiding places without mitigation or compassion, until they shall be made to feel that flight from our borders without hope of return, is preferable to the scourges of war.The removal of the Cherokee was one of the first acts of his presidency.
[5] General Kelsey Douglass was charged with ensuring the removal and camped with about 500 Texan soldiers six miles south of the principal Cherokee settlement.
[10] The Cherokee retreated several miles overnight before Colonel James Carter's spy company discovered them near the Neches headwaters in modern Van Zandt County.
[12] Among the Texians injured were serving Vice President David G. Burnet and Secretary of War Albert Sidney Johnston, both cited in the commander's report "for active exertions on the field" and "having behaved in such a manner as reflects great credit upon themselves."