Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
In the aftermath, a number of shacks, called
jacales
, in the area were fired. In his official report, Major Heintzelman stated that this was done contrary to Major Ford's orders, and not by his men, which put the onus squarely on the Tobin Rangers. But regardless of who did it, a number of hapless Mexican peasants were made homeless in the February chill. Immediately afterward, the Tobin men recrossed the river and returned to Brownsville, possibly on Ford's request.
The following morning, February 5, Ford went back into Mexico with forty-seven mounted Rangers. He rode down the south bank of the river abreast of the
Ranchero
as it steamed downstream. The whole Mexican countryside was in alarm; women and children ran screaming from their huts as the
Rinches
rode past. At Las Palmas, a large body of Mexican soldiery appeared, led by the Prefect of that place. The Prefect asked Ford for a parley and demanded to know what he was doing in Mexico. Ford told him that he had come to wage war on Cortinas, and that he had secured permission first. As they talked, Ford counted approximately eight hundred men—soldiers,
vaqueros
, police—drawn up against him. He also saw about two hundred whom he was certain were Cortinistas. To his blunt query about this, the Mexican leaders shrugged and said, "Who knows?"
Now, what the Rangers called a "Mexican stand-off" developed. Outnumbered about sixteen to one, Ford camped, and spent the night, while the Mexican authorities awaited instructions from Matamoros. The next morning he again parleyed and stated that his mission was to protect the
Ranchero
and its cargo; if it were molested by anyone from the Mexican side, or depredations of the Texas side continued, he promised disastrous consequences for the Mexicans. The Mexicans promised that neither would occur. With such assurances, and with some relief, Rip Ford coolly rode back down to the river and recrossed into Texas.
Cortinas now retreated back from the river, into some mountains in the interior. But the Mexican authorities made no move to arrest him. Ford and Stoneman continued to patrol the Texas side, hopeful of catching him. On the report of an informer that Cortinas was at a place called La Mesa, Ford's Rangers and Stoneman's cavalry charged into Mexico on March 17. Reaching La Mesa, the Americans were fired on, and in a short gun battle, they took the town. Cortinas was not there. From a captured Mexican major, Ford learned that he had fought the local national guard.
"Shit," Ford is reputed to have said to Stoneman. "Captain, we have played Old Scratch—whipped the
Guardia Nacional
, wounded a woman, and killed a mule." Actually, it was a bit worse than that, because the woman, and five other Mexicans, were dead.
Back on the Texas side, Ford and Stoneman heard that the town of Reynosa, in a fit of patriotic outrage and fervor, had offered to pay $30,000 if any foreign troops "entered their town as the gringos had entered La Mesa." The two officers, who understood that pacification of the Texas side required that the Mexicans be afraid to aid or abet Cortinas, rode to Edinburg, across from the Mexican town. Here Stoneman halted, with a promise to cross the border if Ford got into a fight.
Ford, with his officers Littleton, Nolan, and Dix, boldly rode into the town plaza. They were surrounded by armed Mexicans on every side, but the Mexican officials came to parley. Ford bitingly stated he had come to collect the offered reward, and demanded the surrender of any Cortinistas in the town. He noticed several of his own men dropping their Sharps rifles, apparently hoping for an accidental discharge that would start a war. But no gun fired, and upon the Mexican assurance that there were no Cortinistas in Reynosa, Ford clattered back to the Bravo, leaving a badly shaken town behind.
Ford's and Stoneman's brand of border diplomacy was halted by the arrival of the new U.S. Army commander in Texas, the Virginian Robert E. Lee. Lee had been sent specifically to the Rio Grande to halt the trouble, and he carried authority from the Secretary of War, if necessary, "to pursue Mexicans beyond the limits of the United States." He was commended to Governor Houston as an officer of "great discretion and ability." He proved it, quickly bringing the Cortinas war to a quiet end.
Ford, Heintzelman, and Stoneman had already done the dirty work, but their results had not been decisive; Cortinas was still at large. Lee met Ford just as he arrived back from Reynosa, on April 7, 1860. He did not approve of the demonstration, but worked in his own way. He sent firm, courteous, notes to every Mexican official on the border; he explained in clear detail his own instructions. If Cortinas were held in check, there would be peace. If Cortinas were allowed to raid, there would be war. This dignified, utterly superior, beautifully self-controlled lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Army made an enormous impression on both sides of the river. The local chieftains explained the facts of life to the red-bearded
hacendado
hero, who was soon involved in much more profitable politics-cum-banditry on the Mexican side. Cheno Cortinas became a brigadier in the Mexican army, and soon afterward, the governor of Tamaulipas.
He did not give up sponsoring raids into his old homeland, but he was to have no further opportunity until the aftermath of the American Civil War.
On May 6, 1860, Lieutenant Colonel Lee left the border for San Antonio. Two enormously significant details stand out in his report to the Adjutant General of the Army: first, that 20,000 regulars were necessary to police the frontier adequately from Brownsville to Eagle Pass; and second, that most of the
ranchos
from Brownsville to Rio Grande City had been abandoned or destroyed. "Those spared by Cortinas have been burned by the Texans," Lee wrote.
In the aftermath of Cortinas's raids, the American population of the border made their own counterraids; a vicious, little-reported racial war ensued. Between Cortinas's banditry and Texan suspicion of all Mexicans, the delta was laid waste. Many
ranchos
were burned to the ground, and many ethnic Mexicans in Texas were intimidated into leaving their land.
Cortinas's mother, Doña Estéfana, was never molested by the authorities; in fact, she was treated as a great lady, with exquisite courtesy, by Majors Ford and Heintzelman. Cortinas was forever grateful to Rip Ford for this. It was known that Cortinas's mother did not support her son's actions. In fact, the two became estranged, not over politics but because Cortinas conveniently deserted his first wife in Texas when he fled south of the border.
In the Cortinas war fifteen Americans, one hundred fifty Cortinistas, and eighty Texas Mexicans, loyal or neutral, died. This toll was bad enough. But the evil that was spawned lived on; there was to be even more bloodshed on the Rio Grande.
Chapter 29
THE TERRIBLE YEARS
During the Civil War, the Indians, unrestrained by the United States Army, held carnival across the plains—north to south and east to west—looting, pillaging, and marauding over a wide area, especially to the west and south of the federal forces at Fort Leavenworth, burning out the stage stations and disrupting travel across the plains. Colonization receded; homes and fields were abandoned in north central Texas and settlers were withdrawn for over a hundred miles.
MILDRED P. MAYHALL, INDIAN WARS OF TEXAS
For a long time have this people endured an almost uninterrupted war-fare bloody and savage at the hands . . . of Indians. But sir those depredations have been growing from bad to worse until they are perfectly alarming to our people. I might give your Excellency scores of instances of recent date of murder, rape, and robbery which they have committed alone in the counties composing my Judicial District. It has been but a few days since the whole Lee family consisting of six persons were inhumanly butchered, three of them being females were ravished, murdered and most terribly mutilated. Then Mr. Dobs, Justice of Peace of Palo Pinto County was but last week murdered and scalped, his ears and nose were cut off. Mr. Peoples and Mr. Crawford of said county met the same fate. Wm. McCluskey was but yesterday shot down by those same bloody Quaker Pets upon his own threshold. I write to your Excellency, as to one who from your Exalted Position in our nation can if you will protect us from this inhuman butchery . . . Your humble correspondent believes your Excellency to be endowed with at least a moderate amount of human feeling and a mind that cannot be trammeled by this one dread insane Pseudo humanitarian Policy: called the "Quaker Indian Peace Policy." Am I mistaken?
CHARLES HOWARD, JUDGE OF THE THIRTEENTH JUDICIAL DISTRICT,
TO PRESIDENT U. S. GRANT, JULY 1872
THE plight of the Texas frontier during and immediately after the War Between the States has tended to be obscured by the bigger guns, glamour, and gore of the greater war. The frontier was a secondary front while the bulk of the American people were deciding the course of their nation and the future shape of their dominant society. Several things occurred in the West. First, almost all regular troops, whether Union or Confederate, were withdrawn. In Texas—the only area where a large white population actually lay within reach of the horse Indians—the various expedients of minutemen and local militia were utter failures. Farmer militia could not fight Plains Indians on their own ground. Toward the end of the war, it was an axiom on the frontier that the state troops employed there were composed almost entirely of men who chose border service to escape the considerably greater dangers of death or dismemberment with Hood, Bragg, or Lee.
Second, the Kiowas and Comanches had been badly mauled by the campaigns of 1858–59; they did not understand the great war in the East; and at first they were relatively quiescent. Then, finding no real opposition—they raided, and no terrible ranging companies pursued them—they became almost incredibly bold. By the end of the war, the Texas frontier was a shambles, and in full retreat.
Finally, and most incredible to the frontier people, the end of the Civil War brought no real relief. For nine terrible years the federal government pursued a "peace policy," by which the hostile tribes were to be Christianized and protected on reservations. (Probably, no policy-maker in Washington in these years had ever studied the fate of the Spanish missions or the failure of this form of ideology on the 18th-century frontier.) However well-intentioned this policy, it was a form of idiocy, because it completely failed to halt Kiowa-Comanche depredations on the Texas plains. It only prolonged the agony of the Indians, while it brutalized the Anglo-Saxon frontier to an even greater degree.
During these years in Texas, the frontier folk lived forted up, in constant danger and terror. They fought a hundred unseen battles, and suffered some thousands dead. The Young County, or Elm Creek, raid of October 1864, one incident of many, tells the story as well as any.
After the removal of the reserve Indians, the country around Fort Belknap, including Elm Creek and the Clear Fork of the Brazos, grew rapidly. Young County had been organized, but this country was on the edge of nowhere. As France (or Francis) Peveler, one of the first Texans to settle here, wrote: "We were right on the frontier—nothing north of us but the North Star." This was not true. North of Young County rode and hunted the Kiowa and Comanche Indian nations, as free to roam as the cold winds that blew down from Canada.
When the war came, the men in charge of frontier defense, Buck Barry and Jim Bourland of the Texas state troops, tried to get the settlers to fort up. At Fort Belknap, abandoned now by the U.S. Army, Barry built houses in a hundred-yard-long square of logs erected endwise in the earth, with picket bastions. A similar stockade was thrown up at Camp or Fort Murrah, where Rip Ford had headquartered in 1858. Behind log stockades and blockhouses, the settlers lived almost exactly as their forebears had in Kentucky a hundred years before.
There were ten or twelve families at Fort Murrah: the Harmonsons, Duncans, Powells, Matthews, Mullins, and Pevelers. These families, as in Kentucky, were Anglo-Celtic clans, including several brothers, cousins, fathers and sons, each with their individual wives and children. Most of these people arrived out of Kentucky, via Missouri; in a way that they could not quite articulate or even understand, they were uncomfortable if anything lay before them besides the far North Star. There were, probably, between fifty and sixty white people along Elm Creek.
In the early fall of 1864, large parties of Kiowas moved south onto the Llano Estacado, camping near their Comanche allies at Red Bluff on the Canadian. Here the combined Indian camp seems to have come under the influence of Little Buffalo, an ambitious Comanche chief. Little Buffalo was hungry for horses, loot, and above all, war prestige. He had scouted the territory along the upper Brazos carefully, and he felt it was ripe for raiding.
Little Buffalo moved among the Comanches of the far-northern bands and the Kiowas and Kiowa-Apaches of Rainy Mountain in the Wichita range. He held council, talking of great victories: the horse soldiers were gone from Fort Belknap on the Brazos, and there was nothing to fear from the
Tejano
soldiers who replaced them, who were few. Hundreds of Comanches agreed to follow Little Buffalo, and many Kiowas, including the prominent Koitsenko, or Kiowa warrior society leader, Aperian Crow. The war parties gathered many extra horses for a hard ride, and streamed southwest into Texas. On October 13, 1864, Little Buffalo reached the Brazos where it joined Elm Creek, ten miles above Fort Belknap. He led seven hundred braves. It was a clear, beautiful, crisp fall day. Here, as one chronicler put it, "the butchery and looting began."