Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Noah Smithwick, a gentle, literate "Texian," wrote of another incident that occurred in 1836. He had enlisted in the new "ranging force" (soon called Rangers), under Captain Tumlinson. Tumlinson's force was patrolling along the Colorado, within ten miles of present-day Austin. One night, as the Rangers made camp, a young white woman stumbled upon them. She was wounded, bleeding and almost naked.
She could not talk coherently for some time. Finally, the Texans learned her name was Hibbons, and she had been traveling to her home on the Guadalupe with her husband, brother, and two small children. Comanches jumped them; the two men were killed, and Mrs. Hibbons and her children seized and tied to mules. The three-year-old took this well enough, but the other child, an infant, screamed so continuously that the Indians bashed its head against a tree.
That night a cold front or norther struck, forcing the Comanches to take shelter in a cedar brake near where the present city of Austin stands. The Indians took no especial pains to guard their captives, believing that in the cold and wild country they could not escape. But Mrs. Hibbons sneaked into the dark while the Comanches were snoring in their buffalo robes. She fled, leaving her small son behind. She walked for a long way in the icy river, to hide her tracks.
Now, she begged the Rangers to rescue the boy. Tumlinson and his men mounted and soon struck the Comanche trail. They followed it; the Indians seemed to be taking no precautions, as they were beyond the settlement line. They surprised the Comanche camp, shot down one Indian and rescued the Hibbons boy. Then, in Smithwick's words:
The boys . . . awarded me the scalp. I modestly waved my claim in favor of [Conrad] Rohrer, but he, generous soul, declared that according to all the rules of the chase, the man who brought down the game was entitled to the pelt, and himself scalped the savage, tying the loathsome trophy to my saddle . . . thinking it might afford the poor woman whose family its owner had helped to murder, some satisfaction. . .
To the frontier white, all Indians were vermin. Searching for the most damning epithet to dehumanize the race, Texans called them "red niggers." The frontier proverb, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," did not originate in Texas, but it was probably used more there than in any other state.
The Texas Republic thus had inherited Indian wars at its birth. However, the first Texas President, Sam Houston, had no intention of waging this war, apparently for two reasons. Houston was a conservative, a planter-leaning President, who understood the weakness of the Texas economy and was determined to cut expenditures. Houston also was an enigma to his friends, because he loved Indians. He had lived with the Cherokees, and he recognized that the Indian and the European did not necessarily represent savagery and civilization respectively; the Amerind had an entirely different view of life. At this time, many of the red men living in the eastern half of Texas were peaceable remnants of once mighty tribes. The Caddoans and Tonkawas were natives; the Cherokees, Delawares, and Shawnees had been pushed westward when their lands had been usurped by the United States. Houston definitely wanted to stabilize the Indian situation, and uniquely among all Western leaders, he proposed a guarantee of Indian rights through the granting of legal title—not mere treaty rights—to Indian lands. Houston recognized a difference between the agrarian and Plains tribes; he believed a place could be made for the former within American civilization.
His Congress and his people did not. The Comanches were an admitted terror, but all Indians got the blame. It was true that even the lowly Caddoans were not above horse-stealing raids. They also occasionally joined the more warlike tribes, and parties of Caddoans had murdered whites they caught defenseless or alone. As for the Cherokees, Texans would not, and did not, distinguish between them and Comanches.
Houston's Indian policy, which was later much praised, actually was a tragic failure. He could not protect the Indians; he could merely defer their fate. In the meantime he made promises, especially to the Cherokees, he could not keep.
The temper of the Texas Congress was revealed in the bills it passed. In December 1836, a battalion of mounted riflemen was authorized for the frontier, together with plans for a string of forts. In 1837, a corps of "600 mounted gun men" for use in the northwest was approved. Houston did not exert himself to implement any of these authorizations; he let local communities form ranging bands as they could. He did approve a bill, in 1838, to raise a regular cavalry corps for use in the border south.
On December 10, 1838, Houston's term expired. The new President, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, abruptly brought the policy of hesitancy and diplomacy to an end. Lamar had two great hates: Indians and Sam Houston, not necessarily in that order. In his inaugural address to a cheering Congress, Lamar bluntly proposed that all Indians be expelled from eastern Texas:
Nothing short of this will bring us peace or safety. . . . The white man and the red man cannot dwell in harmony together. Nature forbids it . . . knowing these things, I experience no difficulty in deciding on the proper policy to be pursued towards them. It is to push a rigorous war against them; pursuing them to their hiding places without mitigation or compassion, until they shall be made to feel that flight from our borders without hope of return, is preferable to the scourges of war.
In retrospect, Lamar was entirely correct. No permanent peace was possible on the white man's terms without a punishing war; the Indians could not live peaceably in the world the Texans were determined to make. Lamar's policy followed that of the United States in these same years; the United States was pushing all Indian tribes out of the South, into Oklahoma and the West. Seminoles, Cherokees, and many other tribes were officially being dispossessed. More significant, Lamar stated a policy that the United States government only adopted more than thirty years later: that the Indians must be pursued, and their sanctuaries destroyed, before the guerrilla warfare would end. If the Indians survived, it would have to be as powerless remnants, living on land no white man desired.
Lamar's policy was actually more merciful than the hypocrisy practiced by others, which continually failed to take white prejudices and dominant desires into account. It was proposed to end the Indian problem brutally but quickly.
But the fact that Mirabeau Lamar took obvious satisfaction in fighting Indians, and was so devoid of cant or hypocrisy in saying the Indians must go, has continued to haunt historians who realize he was right, but who would have preferred to write that the Texas tribes were exterminated in a fit of absentmindedness.
The coastal planters were in opposition to Lamar. They were exposed to no Indian danger, unlike the hardy types who were pushing up the rivers into the post-oak wilderness. Landowners and businessmen, they desired economy in government; they were not eager to pay for western wars. Here again there was the East–West tension that colored so much of American history. The Texas cotton growers were like the Philadelphia Quaker oligarchy of the 18th century, who saw neither profit nor reason in assisting the angry, bleeding, aggressive Scots-Irish frontiersmen.
Lamar knocked down the idea of budgetary problems with dashing rhetoric: war rarely succeeded according to the advice of "those who would value gold above liberty and life above honor." He also said history indicated warfare most commonly succeeded in proportion to money spent—in other words, niggardly efforts produced piddling victories. None of this was refutable; the western counties were belligerent, and Lamar had his war. He could not be accused of starting it; it had begun two hundred years before. There was no way to stop it. The men who built Parker's Fort and the Comanches who raided it were to themselves being true.
Albert Sidney Johnston, a very competent soldier, was in full agreement as Texas Secretary of War. So was Bonnell, Texas Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Between January 1, 1839, and the end of October approximately 2,000 men were enlisted for militia or ranging service. The general pattern of the war was to raise temporary companies of armed men and to seek out Indians. Another pattern followed was to engage Indian allies, usually Lipans or Tonkawas, to act as scouts or "spies." There was never any problem finding Indian allies; the warfare and hatred among the tribes long antedated the arrival of the Americans.
In January 1839, Colonel John H. Moore led three companies of volunteers from the upper settlements along the Colorado against the Comanches. Moore had 63 white Rangers and 16 Indians under Castro, chief of the Lipan Apaches. He rode west on the Colorado, past the confluence of the Llano, high on the plateau homeland of the Penateka Comanches. The Apache scouts scoured the country and found a Comanche encampment on a small creek in the San Saba Valley.
Moore slipped down on the Indian camp and attacked. As was to happen again and again, the Indians, canny and careful warriors in the field, were easily surprised in their camp. Rangers and Indians attacked on foot and ran among the tepees, shooting some warriors in their robes. Finally, in a scene of pandemonium, Moore recalled his men. This so infuriated Castro that the Lipan allies deserted. The victory was a mixed one, although only one Texan was fatally wounded. In the course of the melee, the Comanches had found the Ranger horse herd, and escaped with 46. Most of Moore's men had to retreat back down the Colorado on foot.
Other parties of Texas gun men or Rangers were gathered all along the vast frontier. Captain John Bird led some 50 men from Austin and Fort Bend counties into Indian country on Little River. By accident, the company ran across Comanches hunting buffalo on May 26, 1839. The Rangers counted about 20 Indians on horseback, and they pursued these for several miles without catching them. By now Bird became nervous; he was far out on the Plains, and he ordered a retreat. The Indians immediately turned on him and filled the sky with arrows.
The Texans were forest men, armed with knives, single-shot pistols, and long Kentucky rifles. They were not able to meet the thundering Comanches horse to horse. Bird ran for a ravine, and soon found himself besieged by more than 200 howling foes. The Indians charged his position in the rocks repeatedly, but the long rifles knocked these rushes back with heavy loss. Finally, the Indians drew away.
Bird's "victory," as it was called, was Pyrrhic. The Rangers lost seven dead, including Captain Bird. The bloodied Rangers retreated back into Texas; they had stirred up more trouble than they had ended.
It was Mexican policy during all these years to foment trouble on the Anglo frontier; Mexico had not accepted Texan independence, and the two states were still, if informally, at war. Mexican agents continually worked among the Indians, especially in east Texas. Their great hope was in the Cherokees. Mexican representatives promised the Cherokees full title to their lands if Texas were reconquered; apparently there was a Mexican hope that an Indian nation might be erected along the Sabine as a buffer between them and the expanding United States.
The plans and plots were real; they formed a logical Mexican attempt to make trouble for an enemy. On May 18, 1839, a company of Texas Rangers attacked a party of Indians on the San Gabriel, about twenty-five miles from Austin. The attack was a success; the Texans captured 600 pounds of powder and lead, and more than a hundred horses. This material was being sent to the Indians from Mexico. More important, one of the dead men searched by the victors was Manuel Flores, a Mexican agent. Flores carried papers revealing a Mexican plan to unite all the Texas Indians for a great attack on the whites, to be launched with a Mexican invasion from the south. These plans were very detailed; they were written in Matamoros, and included tactical advice for the Indians. They were to wait until the Texas militia rode out, then strike and burn the settlements and towns. Also on Flores's body was a letter from another agent, Vicente Córdova, who was stirring up a rebellion among Mexican residents of Nacogdoches. Córdova wrote that the Cherokees had promised to join in the destruction of the Anglos.
There is no question that the Cherokees had talked with the Mexicans, but the evidence is almost definite that Bowles, the Cherokee chief, had no intention of joining in the war. The Cherokees had now been in east Texas for almost twenty years, and during this time they had lived in peace with the whites. They were agrarian, and civilizing rapidly. Houston was in close contact with them. But the Cherokee lands were extremely rich, and they were also now entirely enclosed by later settlement by whites. Their crime was that they had something the Texans wanted. But more than that, any red presence within Anglo-Texas had now become intolerable to the great majority of whites.
The Flores papers permitted Albert Sidney Johnston and President Lamar to declare a Cherokee war. The contents sent a thrill of horror and righteous indignation through the whole frontier, because the Mexicans made it clear that the Indians were free to exterminate the whites and keep their property as they chose. Johnston marshaled the entire Texas regular army in the north. Meanwhile, a commission was sent among the Cherokees to demand their voluntary removal from the state. This commission was composed of David Burnet, Johnston, Hugh McCloud, and Thomas Jefferson Rusk. These men told Bowles that Texas would pay for the improvements left on Cherokee land but could not pay for the land itself.
Bowles acquitted himself with grave dignity. He told the Texans that he could not agree with the Texan claim; the Cherokees owned, or ought to own, this land. He also said that he personally knew his people could not fight the more powerful whites and would be destroyed if they did. However, he also knew the temper of his people, and they would fight despite his counsel.