Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Richardson describes the west Texas situation at the close of the 1861–65 war:
Indian raids, severe during the war, continued with increased fury after the surrender of the Confederates. The frontier was scourged as never before in its history. In some places the line of settlements was driven back a hundred miles. The country west of a line drawn from Gainesville to Fredericksburg was abandoned save for a few courageous people who moved into stockades. The worst raids were made on moonlit nights, and the soft summer moon became a harbinger of death. Charred rock chimneys stood guard like weird sentries, symbolizing the blasted hopes of pioneers and often marking their graves. Incomplete reports from county judges covering the period from the close of the Civil War to August 5, 1867 showed that 163 persons had been killed by Indians, 43 carried away into captivity, and 24 wounded.
It was understandable that the federal soldiers who returned to Texas in 1865 came to occupy it rather than defend it. Also, the government was more concerned with rebellion than the Indian depredations on the frontier. When, in 1866, Governor Throckmorton and the legislature authorized the raising of 1,000 Veteran Rangers, General Philip Sheridan quashed this act immediately. But Sheridan made only half-hearted efforts to end the Indian peril.
Fredericksburg was not reoccupied by federal cavalry until September 1866. Troops gradually moved out to the old forts, Inge, Duncan, and Camp Verde, primarily to guard against Kickapoo-Lipan-Mescalero incursions out of Mexico. Not until two years later was the old line of forts, with some modifications, reestablished from the Red River to Eagle Pass. In 1870, the fortified line of demarcation was almost exactly where it had been in 1850.
Despite the experiences of earlier history, the mistakes of the pre–Civil War period were repeated. Policy was still made by men with no personal knowledge of the Plains frontier, who insisted upon substituting theory for human history.
In 1867, the government of the United States held a convocation of southern Plains tribes at Medicine Lodge, in Kansas. Treaties were signed with the Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, and Southern Cheyennes, all of whom were now in some degree allied. By this treaty, the southern Plains Indians were to accept open reservations in the Indian Territory (Oklahoma), where, under the supervision of agents, they were to learn agriculture and receive some American education. By Act of Congress, the tribes had also been apportioned for proselytization by the various American religious denominations. The administration of the Indian agencies was given largely to members of the Quaker sect, on the assumption that this would be conducive to forging peace.
Under this "peace policy" the Army was given an entirely passive role. The tribes were not under the jurisdiction of the Army, unless they were caught in
flagrante delicto
, in acts of "murder, plunder, or theft." If the Indians left the Indian Territory, the Army was merely to escort them back. It could not follow Indians onto the reservations, even in hot pursuit. It could not punish Indians without the permission of the agents, for any cause.
The policy seemed practical and humanitarian, but in reality it was absurd. There was a number of glaring flaws. First, it was impossible, with the Indian social structure, to make binding pacts with these warlike bands. The old men could give their words, but the warriors could and did ignore them. For many years after the council at Medicine Lodge, the majority of the Kiowas, and at least half the Comanches, failed to show up on the appointed reservations. One powerful Comanche band, the Quahadis, did not even sit at Medicine Lodge, and never considered themselves bound by other Comanches' promises.
Second, while the tribes were willing to make peace with the
Americanos
, who did not impinge upon them, they considered the Tejanos a separate people. Apparently, the United States negotiators fell into some semantic traps. The tribes agreed not to make war on the United States, but never extended this courtesy to Texas. Psychologically, this was impossible for these Indians to do voluntarily. They had lived by raiding for generations. Further, they had good reasons on their side. They had been pushed out of parts of Texas, but they did not surrender their claims to this old hunting range. Texas and the Plains tribes had long been at war.
The Indians asked, logically enough, for a treaty that gave them the Great Plains buffalo range, which included the Panhandle of Texas and most of the high plateaus. They still held this ground; there were as yet no white men on it. But this was a game preserve that the mighty United States could not grant them. Under the annexation treaty of 1845—valid despite the Secession, because of the ruling that the states had never been out of the Union—all land within the arbitrarily drawn boundaries of Texas belonged to Texas. It was not national soil, nor would Texas even consider granting it to them. Texas had its own, single-minded solution for the Indian problem, as an editorial comment of 1870 showed:
The idea of making "treaties" with the Comanches is supremely absurd; just as well make treaties with rattlesnakes and Mexican tigers. Property will be stolen, men murdered, women ravished, and children carried into captivity on our frontier until the Indians are all killed off, or until they are all caught and caged. . . .
The Plains tribes would not soon or easily adopt peaceful agriculture, like Mohawks, who were far advanced over them culturally when the Europeans arrived. They would not voluntarily give up their ancient ways and ranges, nor would any people in similar circumstances. It should have been apparent that the Kiowas and Comanches had to be cordoned off on their reservations by overwhelming force, but this the government failed to provide. A few forts, separated by hundreds of miles of open, unsettled country, and a few companies of cavalry could not keep them behind their arbitrary borders. With the forces provided in the West, it was within the power of Washington to destroy the Indians, but not to contain them if they continued to wage guerrilla war.
The effect of the peace policy resumed in 1867 was to grant the Kiowas and Comanches a privileged sanctuary from which to stage their lightning raids. The years between 1867 and 1873 are filled with accounts of Indian agents who stated they could not keep their charges under control, and of army officers who humiliated themselves to buy back Texan captives in various states of repair. These officers could not threaten the Indians once they had reached the "reservation."
In one memorable scene, General B. H. Grierson had blond scalps, including women and children's hair, waved in his face while the Indians demanded presents. Grierson, who had led a cavalry brigade deep in Confederate territory during the war, was no coward, nor was he ignorant of what lay behind these fresh, grisly trophies. But he was bound by policy; he gave the presents.
Indian agents regularly refused to surrender any raiders for punishment, both from fear of a general Indian war and also from the forlorn hope that a little more understanding would in time bring peace. These agents themselves—though some were fearless, upstanding men—aggravated the situation. They were peaceable but not always honest. Huge profits were made by some, cheating the tribes of allotted government rations.
The Indian situation was not static. The Indians, even with their sketchy social organization, understood that the bison range was being narrowed every year from about 1830 onward. If the white farm line did not advance across the 98th meridian, white hunters did. The slaughter of bisons for their hides, by 1870, had become a national phenomenon. The federal government could not prevent this economic enterprise even had it wanted to, but it was making the Indians—who lived off buffalo, and who rode past thousands upon thousands of bleaching bison bones while increasingly game was hard to find—frantic. By 1870, the southern Plains Indians themselves were stepping up a retaliatory war. They were not quite so static in tactics or understanding as some observers implied. They acquired breechloading rifles from eager white traders and their old friends, the Comancheros. Many bands were better armed than the U.S. Army, and entirely formidable in waging war against the poorly protected Texas settlements.
While the army was bound to a passive policy of trying to keep the Indians out of the settled areas by patrol, the Carpetbagger regime in Texas pursued its own idiocies. E. J. Davis restored the old "minuteman" system of frontier defense. This system had not worked under the Confederacy, nor did it work now. The minutemen were unpaid and usually unsupplied. They were a reaction force, not a policing or punitive instrument, and against Comanches and the even faster Kiowas, their reaction time was invariably too slow. They assembled, buried the dead, and followed the Indian trail a few miles out on the Plains, then waited for the Comanche moon to come again. The bravery and efforts of all these minutemen companies should not be impugned, but they were ineffective for ranging war.
By the end of the 1860s the worst depredations in Texas history were occurring along the Mexican border, from Mescaleros, Lipans, and the battered but still powerful Kickapoos. The Rio Grande gave these Indians, who were often allied with Mexican communities in loot disposal, their sanctuary, just as the Oklahoma line provided the Kiowa-Comanches with glorious opportunities. The country above Eagle Pass, and down past Laredo, was regressing toward depopulation. Meanwhile, in central Texas, counties that had been laid out twenty years earlier were more unsafe than during the administration of Mirabeau Lamar.
In August 1870, the
Daily State Journal
reported: "The counties of Llano, Mason, and Gillespie swarm with savages. The farmers are shot down in their fields, and their stock is stolen before their eyes . . . Not for twenty years back have the Indians been so bold, well armed and numerous as now. At Llano, the frontier is breaking up. . . ."
Lampasas County reported this same month: ". . . During the last moon our entire county, and as far as reports can be credited, other surrounding counties, have been infested by large bodies of hostile Indians. . . . The truth is, if something is not done soon for the relief of the frontier it will have to be abandoned."
These were all farming communities, far behind the U.S. Army line.
At San Saba, however, the Galveston
Weekly Civilian
reported the situation as relatively peaceful in August 1870. The statement was meant as factual, not ironic: "The Indians are not worse than usual. Only one man killed, two children captured, and about seventy-five head of horses driven away during the past 'light moon' in this vicinity."
There were dozens of accounts of unwary travelers caught and scalped, of farmhouses entered at night and women raped and slaughtered, and deposition after deposition was made to U.S. commissioners of children carried away. There were also happier stories—from the Texan viewpoint—like that of Mrs. Buckmeyer of Mason County, who blew two marauders out of her windows with buckshot.
During all this time, the reports that arrived on Secretary of the Interior Delano's desk received no action. It was felt, in some quarters, that while some horse-stealing was going on, the reports from Texas were exaggerated.
No doubt, many were. But one of the repellent aspects of this frontier warfare, which has often kept it from being detailed by Americans from other than a frontier background, was the crawling hatred of the Texas people for their indigenous red vermin. Newspapers regularly described Indians as "red fiends of hell" and similar terms. The ordinary speech used terms unprintable in the Victorian Age. The Texans had discovered they could not surrender to Indians, and they took no prisoners.
Many of the young or female captives were eventually ransomed out of Oklahoma. One such returnee, who candidly admitted what all frontier folk knew but rarely discussed, that she had been raped all winter and in the process learned some Comanche talk, reported an overheard discussion between two squaws: "Didn't these damned fools, the Americanos, give us fine things for the few Texas rats we delivered to them?"
If the Amerind attitudes were almost incomprehensible to their Quaker supervisors, the Indians were equally puzzled by Quaker ideology. The agents and the U.S. Army ransomed many captives with presents and promises—it got to be a game with the tribes. Unfortunately, such returns were rarely happy ones. The position of a ransomee, especially a female one, was always anomalous in the light of 19th-century mores. Mrs. Elizabeth Fitzpatrick was able to marry again, but she was rich. Many other returnees left the frontier forever.
The United States policies caused outrage in Texas. The Speaker of the Texas House, in preparing a joint resolution asking Congressional help in 1870, snapped that while Great Britain, the greatest civilized power, went to war with Abyssinia because of the detention of a half-dozen of her subjects, the United States "has not even raised her voice in protest . . . for the murder of one hundred of her citizens." Congress did make an investigation of conditions along the Mexican border in 1872, but this was curtailed for lack of funds. It was noticeable that army officers were able to act with a slightly freer hand towards the Indians residing in Mexico than in the Indian Territory. Colonel R. S. Mackenzie went across the border on a punitive expedition against the Kickapoos, and finally, in 1873, the pressure of Texan Congressmen got the government to pressure Mexico—over some violent Mexican protests—to allow the army to gather up the Kickapoos at Santa Rosa, south of the border, and to remove them to the Indian Territory. This ameliorated, but did not end, the frightful chaos in postwar south Texas, amounting to some $48,000,000 in claims for property losses.