Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
There are many different accounts of the Elm Creek raid, told by different survivors, few of whom knew the whole picture at the time. In a valley beset by a hostile swarm, every man and woman and child knew only his own story. A wealth of detail remains, but the bare bones of the events tell the tale well enough.
The Indians rode down both banks of Elm Creek at midday. They came across Joel Myers and his young son, who were out looking for strayed oxen. The Myerses never had a chance; they were killed and stripped, and the bands moved on; soon they were ringing the Fitzpatrick place. Here, a number of the men were away, gone to the trading post at Weatherford for supplies.
There were three women and a number of children at the Fitzpatrick house. The women were Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, her daughter Susan Durgan, and a Negress, Mary Johnson, the wife of Britt Johnson, who, although legally a slave, had been allowed to live as a freeman all his life. Johnson had been inherited by Allan Johnson, a settler who had no use for slavery. He was universally known as Nigger Britt to the people on the frontier, and he was in Weatherford with the other men this day.
As the howling Indians surrounded the Fitzpatrick place, Susan Durgan grabbed a gun and went outside. She fought valiantly, but the swarming Comanches cut her down, stripped her body and mutilated it in the yard. Then they poured into the house and seized the other people. Two braves quarreled over who had captured Nigger Britt's oldest boy; they settled the argument amicably by killing him. Then the Indians threw Mrs. Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, Mary Johnson, two Negro children, Joe Carter, about twelve, and the Durgan children, Lottie, three, and Millie, eighteen months, on horses and rode off.
A little way off was the Thomas Hamby place, where the Tom (Doc) Wilson family also lived. There were three men here, including Thornton Hamby, a wounded Confederate veteran home on recuperation furlough. These men rushed their women and children to hiding in a cave under the creek bank. Then, they mounted up to warn the other settlers; smoke was beginning to curl upward across the valley.
The William Bragg family, warned in time, hid out in the brush. Doc Wilson, riding hard while the two Hambys fought a rearguard action against a war party, reached the Judge Henry Williams ranch and gave the alarm.
Two women visitors and their children were with the Williamses, also a young man named Callan. Callan seems to have seized his horse and rode away. Mrs. Williams herded her five children and her guests across Elm Creek. They lay down in the screening brush while Sam Williams, fifteen, stood guard with a gun. The raiders did not find them, although they sacked the Williams house.
Thornton Hamby, the wounded veteran, and his father rejoined Doc Wilson at the Williams place, then rode for the George Bragg ranch, a short distance further on. This was a two-room picketed cabin, built for strength. Now, the Comanches were in full cry after the Hambys. They leaped from their horses in the George Bragg yard and dashed for the door of the cabin. Doc Wilson failed to make it;, a Comanche arrow struck him in the heart. He staggered into the house, said, "'Hamby, I am a dead man," jerked the missile out, and died.
Old George Bragg was in the house with five white women, a Negro girl, and a great brood of children. The Hambys had thought to fort up here, since they expected to find more men. Now, they were surrounded by Indians, and committed; there was no escape. Thornton Hamby later said: "I might have jumped under the bed—had it not been occupied by three families of women and children who made their way to the ranch for protection." This was the statement of an entirely cool and courageous man, however; when the Indians, blowing on a bugle, advanced on the blockhouse, young Hamby took charge of the defense. The older men were "pretty excited," but Thornton had been under fire before.
He ordered the women to load all the rifles and pistols in the house. One woman, braver than the rest, emerged and gave him great assistance.
The Comanches rushed the house, trying to dig up the pickets. The elder Hamby killed one with his pistol, but was wounded four times. The fight devolved on Thornton, "whose cool heroism saved our lives," as a survivor later said. He stayed at the loopholes, knocking back Indians time and again, while the women pressed recharged pistols into his hand. He was struck by an Indian bullet, but kept up the fight.
He was lucky enough to bring down Little Buffalo himself with one quick shot. At nightfall, after a desperate afternoon, the Comanches retreated, mournfully tooting on their bugle and carrying off their wounded and dead.
After dark, Thornton Hamby, with another man, went to the Fitzpatrick ranch to "see what happened." They buried the bodies they found there.
Meanwhile, the Peveler-Harmonson clans had assembled at Fort Murrah. Chief Little Buffalo had not known that this blockhouse stockade existed; it had just been built. From the top of the fort, the defenders could scan the countryside through a spyglass, and found it alive with Indians. France Peveler and Perry Harmonson saw the Indians playing with something in the mesquite brush. Peveler told Harmonson, "They are killing old man McCoy and his son right now." The McCoy men, who lived about a mile away on Boggy Creek, had not made it to the fort.
Harmonson told Peveler to shut up; Mrs. McCoy was in the fort, and "will be mightily distressed."
The Comanche-Kiowas did not try to storm the fort; frontal assaults on Texan rifles were not the horse Indians' style.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant N. Carson of Bourland's border regiment (variously called state troops, militia, and, erroneously, Rangers) had been near Fort Belknap with about twenty men. The Indians avoided the fort; this also was their style. But when Carson, with fourteen riders, tried to ride toward Elm Creek, they struck some three hundred braves. Five of Carson's men were killed outright, and several more wounded. Carson's report tended to be self-serving ("My men . . . acted with unexampled bravery"), but the troops fired and then galloped away for their lives. A stand, at any rate, would have undoubtedly gotten them all killed.
On this retreat, Carson's troopers came by the Isaac McCoy house, and picked up the two McCoy women. Riding double, militia and women made Fort Murrah. A number of horses had arrows sticking in them when they arrived.
Fort Murrah prepared for a siege, bringing in milk and water from the spring branch. As night fell, the defenders could see Indians on three sides of them, and a fire blazing to the north. The Pevelers, who had one man mortally wounded from a brush a few days before, and Harmonsons agreed that a dawn attack was likely and that someone should try to ride to Fort Belknap to round up more state troops. Carson's people absolutely refused to ride out, so France Peveler and a man named Fields, from Gainesville volunteered to go. On the way out, they passed a picket standing guard outside the fort. He was seventeen, and France Peveler said later that he was more afraid of him than of Indian marksmanship.
Staying off the high ground, so the Comanches could not "sky-light" them, the two settlers passed a white object on the ground—Joel Myers's body. They came across a horse, pinned to the ground with a lance but still alive and trembling. They could not stop to shoot the pitiful animal. They galloped six miles into Fort Belknap only to find all the border regiment men gone—on a scout looking for Indians, it was said.
Another youth, Chester Tackett, volunteered to ride to Veal's Station, the nearest settlement, some seventy-five miles away. Young Tackett, who was about nineteen, rode out at one the next morning. Changing horses at every white clearing he passed, he arrived at his destination at 9 a.m. But there was no help at the Station. The exhausted Tackett had to stop; another rider pounded on to Decatur, another thirty miles. At sundown, Major Quayle, who had a company of militia, heard that Fort Murrah was besieged. Quayle mounted and rode, ordering no stop until Fort Murrah was raised, although the distance was eighty miles. At dusk the following day, Quayle was within twenty miles of the fort when he met a rider who told him that the Indians were gone.
Some men followed the Indians north-northwest for about one hundred miles on a fruitless chase.
In all its details, this was a classic Texas Indian raid. It followed a pattern, being only larger in scope than most. Eleven Texans were killed; eleven houses were despoiled or destroyed; seven women and children were carried off. The frontierspeople defended themselves as best they could, either by heroism or flight. The cavalry, as usual, failed to arrive in time.
The winter of 1864–65 was a hard one on Elm Creek. Only three farmhouses survived. Food, bedding, furniture, most of the horses—everything was lost. The Comanches ripped up mattresses to see the feather ticking fly; they emptied five-hundred-pound bags of flour on the ground just to get the sacks, which they prized. As Thornton Hamby said, the Indians ate or stole all the food they could, then "the dirty devils stirred sand in the rest."
There is one more part to the story of Elm Creek, or the Young County raid. Nigger Britt Johnson rode back from Weatherford with Judge Williams to find his son dead and buried, and his wife and two children, both under ten, gone.
He waited through the winter, then he said he was going to bring his family back. In April 1865, he rode out north-northwest from the Brazos country all alone. He took a pack-horse, a rifle, two six-shooters, and some food and blankets donated by the settlers; the Hambys were the first to contribute. He rode into the wilderness until he struck the Wichita, about sixty miles.
He came across a lone Indian guarding a horse herd. Nigger Britt could "talk Mexican," which most of the Kiowas and Comanches understood. He made peace and found the Indian talkative. He learned that the Comanches had "a white woman" captive, and that the Kiowas had some negros, or blacks. In a short time, a band of Indians rode up, bringing more horses from a recent raid. Johnson knew every one of these; they were Johnson and Peveler horses from the Brazos. Again, the Negro was able to make peace, and he continued on with this war band for several weeks. They agreed to try to help him ransom his family. Some of these Indians were Penateka Comanches, who had been at the Clear Fork Reservation. Several of them knew Johnson and were not unfriendly. This was not an isolated instance. On the Elm Creek raid, several Indians had spared an old white man named Wooten they surrounded in the open. They called out his name, then ran him for several miles, perhaps shortening his years, because he hemorrhaged, but sparing his scalp. Wooten had delivered beef to Clear Fork.
Nigger Britt knew Indian traveling companions would be a godsend, and he went with them to the Canadian, in the Indian Territory. Here, in a Comanche camp, he found Mrs. Elizabeth Fitzpatrick. He learned that about twenty Comanches had been killed at the Elm Creek fighting, and that little Joe Carter, a son of Elizabeth Fitzpatrick by a former marriage, had been killed by the Indians on the trail back. The twelve-year-old boy had taken sick, and could not keep up.
Elizabeth Fitzpatrick was relatively rich, in cattle and land. She begged Johnson to get her and all the captives back; she would pay whatever it cost. He agreed, and in all the courageous Negro made four trips into Comanchería.
He rescued his wife, Mary, and their two children. He paid "two dollars and a half to get his wife back," and in this he was helped by Comanches. The Penateka chief Milky Way told him how to bargain with the tricky Kiowas, and even sent two braves to travel with him in case the Kiowa allies developed a desire for woolly scalps. Finally, he got every Negro and white captive back, except little Millie Durgan. She had been adopted into the family of Aperian Crow, the Koitsenko, and was not for sale. It was not until sixty-six years afterward, at Lawton, Oklahoma, that a Kiowa woman named Saintohoodi Goombi was identified as Millie Durgan. Her life was not an unhappy one. She was too little to remember her white background and blood, and all her life she stood high in the tribe. She married happily. When, years later, after the discovery of her identity, the Governor of Texas asked what the state might do for her, she answered, "Nothing." She died in Oklahoma in 1934.
Fate was less kind to Nigger Britt. He had won respect on the frontier, and he and three Negro partners began a successful freighting business between Weatherford and the new Fort Griffin. But in 1871, ten miles east of old Fort Belknap, the Kiowas got them all.
Texas historians do not care to explore the Cortinas war. American historians have a similar blind spot toward the terrible years on the Comanche-Kiowa frontier. These two tribes killed more white people than any other Amerinds, a fact not generally known. The reasons for avoiding the Indian wars in Texas are probably complex, and grow out of certain American traumas. The whites were the original aggressors, in that they moved onto Indian range, and the Texan hatred for red vermin could not be made to harmonize with certain American rationales. The culmination of the Indian wars was a tragedy, with all the classic inevitability of tragedy, and against true tragedy the North American soul revolts. Finally, the violence dragged on because of a triumph of Eastern theory over Western experience for some years, which left a sour taste in both Eastern and Western mouths. Whatever the nation as a whole, the vast majority of which never saw a painted Plains Indian, felt about the last stand of these most warlike of tribes, a bitter, never-quite-forgiven animosity grew in Texan hearts toward a government and people indifferent to their suffering. Texas frontier folk, and their descendants, believed that the Indian menace was not quickly ended out of anti-Texan prejudice, or hatred against the South.