"...formal protest by Texan Secretary of State Andrew Jackson Houston, whom it was lost on few was making moves to burnish his own credentials ahead of the 1919 Presidential election to succeed Gore. With one of the state's most golden surnames thanks to his father Sam's legacy, Houston saw little downside and a considerable opening for himself within the Republican Party to "seize the ring" ahead of September's polls, especially with a fair deal of skepticism that either Sheppard or Garner would be willing to leave their plum positions in Congress to serve in the fairly weak Presidency. The gambit worked for Houston, who would indeed be selected by the Republican "presidential caucus" that July and win a landslide in September against minimal organized opposition as Texas' path towards a single-party democracy became clearer, but it did not necessarily work for Texas writ large.
The Second Republic's severance from the Confederacy through bloodshed had left its economy in tatters, and the Texas dollar, understandably, lacked much of anything to back it; the years after the war were characterized both by a huge speculative run on land by Americans, Canadians and a great many Confederates as well as hyper-inflation as Texas printed huge amounts of fiat currency, which only served to exacerbate the land run due to concerns that prices would not stay the same for long. Accordingly, many of the brave young Texans who had fought in the Republican Army to drive Ferguson's Loyalists across the Sabine were now unemployed or unable to make much of what little work they had, and a drop in the price of oil, beef and timber in 1918 as the North American economic depression worsened only served to further gut the Texan economy. Food riots were common, "outlanders" were lynched with some frequency, and by mid-1919 Gore, in one of his last major acts as President, was forced to suspend the issuance of the near-worthless Texas dollar and introduce a new currency, the Texas credit, which was on the gold standard, instantly depressing the country further. (The dollar would of course be re-issued again as early as 1923).
As tens of thousands of people, mostly single men and a great many of them Black freedmen fleeing the Confederacy or Mexican seasonal workers returning to prewar employment patterns, streamed into Texas, tens of thousands streamed out, in particular across the Red River into Sequoyah. In sharp contrast to the Texas of the late 1910s and early 1920s which was undergoing a crippling series of economic crises, Sequoyah on the other hand had begun to enjoy the dividends of peace by the turn of the decade, with the oilfields of Tulasah making the Osage and Cherokee tribes in its vicinity among the richest people per capita on earth, a wealth they distributed throughout their tribe via the indigenous precepts of communal land ownership and rights. The Tulasah of 1919, the "oil capital of the world," was a shimmering city undeterred by the sharp drop in oil prices in 1917-18, with new buildings and streets popping up every day to support the waves of men arriving there on six-month, typically non-renewable contracts to work, be paid in American money, and then go home; the practical knowledge of these "Sequoyah Boys" from Texas during the Texas oil boom of the 1920s would be invaluable.
The contracts were generally non-renewable because, in order to preserve communal ownership (and tribal political hegemony), Sequoyah was fiercely (and considering the history of indigenous peoples of the Americas, understandably) opposed to temporary workers staying on their lands. Members of other Sequoyahn tribes were generally prohibited from personal land title within other nations; for foreigners, it was completely out of the question, especially in the oil-rich Osage Hills. The vast tenements of Tulasah were thus never considered to be anything other than transient. This was not necessarily the case, however, in central and western Sequoyah, territory where "reserved land" for freedmen and white men had been opened up in the Treaty of Kansas City, particularly in a patch of central Sequoyah that today is home to Sequoyah City, the country's largest (and most ethnically diverse) city. This was in part due to the disinterest of the Six Nations in this land itself, and also in part due to American pressure that anticipated a need for freedmen to have somewhere to go and not wanting that to be entirely within their own borders; it just so happened that one of the main territories "reserved" for white men was largely co-extant with "Greer Country," the territory between the North and South Forks of the Red River that had been disputed between Texas and the Indian Territory for generations, but which Richmond had, previously, never bothered to resolve, in part due to the land's remoteness from population centers in both.
By 1919, however, Greer Country was home to close to thirty thousand people, almost exclusively white and the vast majority born and raised either there or across the South Fork in Texas. They were not the remittance workers of Tulasah's tenement housing but rather farmers, ranchers, and homesteaders; they were families who had established local schools and, quite critically, believed very much that their land was Texan soil. The ability of Sequoyahn reserve settlements to execute their own laws was fundamental to the Sequoyah Constitution and the Treaty of Kansas City (a circumstance that would be critical upon the discovery of oil in Sequoyah City's vicinity in the late 1920s), and so the "Greerites" had a genuine grievance over the decision of the Chickasaw Rangers to pursue suspected horse rustlers into their territory and hang them extrajudicially on the side of the road.
The Greer Country Dispute may have had its immediate origin in that March 1919 incident in one of the most remote corners of the North American interior, but something else would have triggered it eventually; Texas had her claims, and just needed a reason to exercise them. In lodging such an angry protest, Houston made sure that Texas' voice was heard on a matter of foreign policy for the first time, acting as one of many of a concert of nations in North America. However, in being heard, one also earns a response, and the response from Tahlequah was a cold one. The Council of Chiefs was bitter enough about the extraterritoriality afforded to American citizens; they would hear nothing of the same for Texans, which was essentially how they understood the grievance of Greer Country. Furthermore, even had they wanted to cede Greer Country to Texas (which some were open to, if for no other reason than to shed themselves of a troublesome corner of Sequoyah), their foreign policy was dictated exclusively by the United States and they were forbidden from entering bilateral agreements with other sovereign states. Philadelphia was sympathetic to Greer Country's white settlers for purely racial reasons, but was unwilling to entertain border revisions so soon after the conclusion of the Great American War; though their peace treaty recognizing Texas had established diplomatic relations, it had not said anything about recognizing specific borders of Texas, whereas its protectorate with Sequoyah explicitly mentioned defending its territorial integrity. In the view of American policymakers, on which there was bipartisan consensus, those who settled in Greer Country enjoyed the privileges of a reserve land but they had settled in Sequoyah with eyes open and if they wanted to be Texans, they were welcome to return to Texas.
As such, Houston's lodged complaint and subsequent presidency marked the beginning of two important factors in Texan history - one, its dispute with Sequoyah over the exact border along the Red River, and downstream from that, its uneasy relationship with the United States, which would become increasingly complicated as its economic domination by American capital intensified over the decades to come..."
- Republic Reborn