Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Relief was not at hand from Washington. It seemed that the federal government was prepared to accept a few casualties in Texas as the price of the absence of a general Indian war. Ironically, the succor of the frontier lay in the hands of men who were still hated in Texas: the commanders in Union blue, officers like General Sherman and Colonel Mackenzie. They were to become heroes in Texas, and to force the final Indian solution, almost, if not quite, against the government's will.
Chapter 30
UNTIL DAY BREAKS AND DARKNESS DISAPPEARS
Briefly, the obliteration of Texas Indians was but a small part, a footnote really, to the nineteenth-century development and emergence of a new, and in technological terms, a tremendously powerful nation-state.
W. W. NEWCOMB JR., THE INDIANS OF TEXAS
Their arrows are broken and their springs are dried up. . . . Their council fires have long since gone out on the shores and their war cry is fast dying away. . . .
They will live only in the songs and chronicles of their exterminators. Let these be true to their rude virtues as men, and pay tribute to their unhappy fate as a people.
SAM HOUSTON ON THE FLOOR OF THE SENATE, QUOTING CHARLES SPRAGUE
IN 1870, the Comanches and Kiowas, with some assistance from Kiowa-Apaches, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes, still barred white men from almost half of Texas. The farm line had failed along the 98th meridian for ecological reasons; beyond it, ranging from thirty to one hundred fifty miles in places lay a cattle frontier, where not more than one white person lived per square mile. The whites, like the former Wichitas, dared live only on the fringes of the great southern bison range, and here they were in constant warfare.
The other tribes of Texas had disappeared. A combination of imparted white disease, war, and exile had removed all other Indians. In the middle of the century, the Wichita bands were struck by a lethal wave of smallpox, as were the Lipans. A few Tonkawas had returned to Texas, and lived in miserable circumstances along the white frontier. During the Civil War, the Tonkawas were set upon by the other tribes in the Indian Territory and almost exterminated. The Shawnees and others gave the reason as Tonkawa cannibalism, but a strong suspicion remains that the real reason was the fact that the Tonkawas, even after expulsion, remained Texan allies. The tribe declared for the Confederacy, and after their virtual extermination, the survivors crept back to Texas. Here, they performed signal services as scouts for the U.S. Army and Ranger forces, and received the Amerind's usual reward.
The line of cavalry forts delineated the final frontier. Fort Richardson, at Jacksboro; Fort Griffin, near Albany; Fort Concho, at San Angelo; Fort McKavett, on the San Saba; and Fort Clark, near Brackettville, marked the edge of the Anglo-Saxon world. Beyond it were vast plains and plateaus, and only a handful of nomadic Stone Age savages, who ostensibly lived on the Indian Territory reservations, but actually roamed the high Texas bison range at will. These few bands were adequate to stall the white advance.
This was the Amerind last stand, in the struggle for North America. The eleven Plains tribes, from the Rio Grande to Canada, had remained the strongest, because their warlike spirit and way of life had kept them from the fatal contact with whites. The Kiowas and Comanches never let white men come among them. According to their historic codes and customs, they fought bravely to the end. And in the end, no white man could honestly say that they had been beaten fairly on the field of battle. To destroy them, white civilization had first to destroy their habitat, through one of the cruelest and bloodiest of logistic wars.
By 1870, the hunting of buffalo for hides had become a widespread, lucrative business. Every Easterner wanted a buffalo robe, as once every gentleman had desired a beaver hat. Also, an important leather business grew up, using bison hides. From Fort Worth, a burgeoning trading post near the final frontier, the hunters spread out into the plains. They congregated near the cavalry forts, especially at Fort Griffin. Here the hide hunters, a rough, bearded, dirty, violent band of men, waited for the annual migrations of the bison onto the southern range. These men, who worked in groups of about twelve, arrived with wagons, tons of ammunition, and heavy-caliber Sharps rifles. They set up camps in the shadows of the army posts, and they brought certain forms of European civilization with them.
Outside the walls of Griffin, The Flat arose. Originally a saloon, it grew into a typical hell-town of the Western frontier. Dance-hall girls and gunmen, prostitutes and professional poker players poured in, to prey on the men who preyed on the buffalo. At The Flat, red-haired Lottie Deno, the legendary Texas poker queen, ran her game, her cold-eyed gunmen all around. The Flat grew rapidly and raucously, a jangling and roaring boomtown on the edge of nowhere. There was no civil law, and the Army, austere behind its walls, professed no interest in what went on. With the coming of the buffalo, prosperity rocked the frontier, and freighters' wagons rumbled to and from the vicinity of the forts, carrying supplies for the cavalry and the rest of the army.
In the early seventies, there were still countless thousands of bison on the plains. An efficient hunter could kill between twenty-five and forty head per day. Buffalo were sighted, carefully stalked, then a "stand" was made. The nature of the beast was such that men with high-powered rifles could bring down a whole herd from afar, without a buffalo stampede. One hunter, Wylie Poe of Fort McKavett, was known to kill ninety beasts without moving from a single stand. When the singled-out herd was dead, the hunters moved on. Behind them came the hide wagons, with a dozen lowly skinners. These helpers stripped off the bloody hides, and left the carcasses to rot.
For miles and miles the high plateaus swarmed with circling vultures and were strewn with whitening animal bones. This was not sport but massacre for money. There were men who came out to join the trade and were sickened in a single season. But there was no shortage of hunters to carry on.
The buffalo were literally being exterminated. Everyone knew this; it was not done guilelessly or haphazardly. The Army, and the vast majority of whites along the cattle frontier approved, because the buffalo was the free Indian's staff of life. Without them, he was bound to the reservation and the government dole, and he would have to leave the land or starve.
The Treaty of Medicine Lodge, 1867, specifically pledged the Indians that there would be no bison hunting south of the Arkansas River. This would have preserved to them the richest grounds in all North America, the Staked Plains, the region along the Cimarron in Oklahoma, and the Texas Panhandle. There were two things wrong with this promise. The government had no authority to order citizens of Texas off legally recognized Texas soil, and while the government never openly abrogated the treaty, the U.S. Army changed its mind. General Phil Sheridan, commanding the Military Department of the Southwest, and General William T. Sherman, commanding the Army of the Missouri, agreed that there could be no solution to the Indian problem so long as the Plains tribes could support themselves outside the reservations. The "vexed Indian question," Sheridan stated, would be solved nicely by buffalo hunters' destruction of "the Indians' commissary." Sheridan and Sherman knew. They were modern generals, who had waged against the South, from the burned-out Valley of Virginia to the swath of destruction across Georgia, the most modern forms of war. The two generals were vehement spokesmen for this policy. Under them, the Army gave tacit approval to the buffalo hunters' operations against the last great herds of American bison in the United States.
It was dangerous to go onto Kiowa-Comanche ranges. But buffalo hunters were as hardy as they were greedy; they were heavily armed; and they went onto the Southern Plains in winter, when both climate and the shortage of grass kept most Indians comfortable in their lodges. Only when the Indians were panicked by the sight of mountains of whitening bones, and they saw that their own game was disappearing, did they react strongly against buffalo hunters. By then it was too late.
W. T. Hornaday, of the Smithsonian Institution, wrote the North American bison's bitter epitaph a few years later:
The men who killed buffaloes for their tongues and those who shot them from the railway trains for sport were murderers . . . finding exquisite delight in bloodshed, slaughter, and death, if not for gain, then solely for the joy and happiness of it. There is no kind of warfare against game animals too unfair, too disreputable, or too mean for white men to engage in if they can only do so with safety to their own precious carcasses. . . . Perhaps the most gigantic task ever undertaken on this continent in the line of game-slaughter was the extermination of the bison in the great pasturage region by the hide-hunters. Probably the brilliant rapidity and success with which that lofty undertaking was accomplished was a matter of surprise even to those who participated in it.
There was a movement in Texas to protect the buffalo, to halt what some men called an insane killing of God's creatures. A bill to stop the slaughter was introduced in the state legislature, and despite opposition by economic interests and cattlemen, who coveted the bison pasture, it would have passed, if General Sheridan had not made a special trip to speak before a House–State Senate session. Sheridan was vehement. He said the white hunters were assisting the advance of civilization by . . . destroying the Indians' commissary; and it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will, but for the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle, and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunter as a second forerunner of advanced civilization.
The bill was killed.
The cavalry had been sent West to protect the white frontier; under the peace and reservation policy in the Southwest it was not doing it; and whatever Army officers had thought of the policy in the beginning, they turned violently against it. The Army was in the cordon of death and destruction; it helped bury settlers; it ransomed demented captives, and again and again, futilely, cavalry pursued Indian marauders to the Oklahoma line, then had to turn back.
The definable turning point came in the summer of 1871. The reservation Indians made no secret of their coming and going. In May, some 150 braves, mostly Kiowas, set out under Satanta, Big Tree, and Satank, ostensibly to fight Tonkawas who were known to be camping near Fort Griffin. On May 18, these Indians came across a large wagon train on Salt Creek, between Jacksboro and Fort Griffin, on the edge of Young County. They attacked it, killed the wagon master and five teamsters. The sixth, whom they took alive, they chained to a wagon tongue and roasted to death. Five freighters escaped; one, called Brazeal, though badly hurt dragged himself to Jacksboro and raised the alarm.
This raid was no different, or any worse, than a series that had occurred. On January 24, 1871, Kiowas killed Britt Johnson and three Negro partners near Salt Creek. They scalped all four, but threw the hair away in disgust on their homeward trail because it was too kinky and short to make good trophies. Soldiers from Fort Richardson buried the Negroes and pursued, only to be driven back with one trooper wounded.
On April 19, another white man was scalped alive on Salt Creek prairie. A day later, and again on the 21st, other attacks on whites occurred. At least fourteen frontierspeople were slain this spring in Young County. Jacksboro and the surrounding country was almost hysterical with fear and rage. It was incontrovertible that these raids were the work of reservation Indians. Back in Oklahoma these Indians boasted to the agents of their exploits in Texas.
However, on the day the May 19 wagon train massacre occurred, both General William T. Sherman and Major General Randolph Marcy, the Army Inspector General, were in the vicinity. Sherman and Marcy were among those who believed the stories from the Texas frontier were exaggerated. They rode north from San Antonio with a 15-trooper escort, on an inspection tour.
All along the frontier, the commanding general left the impression he thought the Indians were hardly so bad as they were being painted. At Fort Belknap, which now contained only a corporal's guard, and Fort Griffin, Sherman gave irate citizen delegations little encouragement. But he was at Fort Richardson when Thomas Brazeal was carried in from Jacksboro for treatment by army doctors.
Sherman questioned Brazeal, then ordered Colonel (Brevet Major General) Ranald S. Mackenzie to take the field with four companies of the Fourth Cavalry. Mackenzie was to investigate and pursue the hostiles, meeting Sherman later at Fort Sill in the Indian Territory. He rode out with his command in a blinding rainstorm.
General Marcy on May 17, 1871, had written in his journal, "This rich and beautiful section does not contain as many white people today as it did when I visited it eighteen years ago, and, if the Indian marauders are not punished, the whole country seems to be in a fair way to become totally depopulated." But he had not been able to convince Sherman that things were worse than before the Civil War, until the events of May 19.
The horribly bloody, mutilated, fly-covered bodies of the teamsters, and above all, the body of Sam Elliott, who the official army report described as found hung face-down over a burnt-out fire, his tongue cut out and his body crisped, changed Sherman's mind. The general gave evidence of being disturbed.