Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
John Holland Jenkins, a Bastrop man, described the feints and challenges the Comanches displayed, as a prelude to combat: "arrayed in all the splendor of savage warriors, and finely mounted, [they] bounded over the space between the hostile lines, exhibiting feats of horsemanship and daring none but a Comanche . . . could perform." Jenkins, like many a gentle soul who found himself awaiting a fight to the death on the frontier, was awed by the barbaric unrealness of it all:
It was a spectacle never to be forgotten, the wild, fantastic band as they stood in battle array . . . Both horses and riders were decorated most profusely, with all the beauty and horror of their wild taste combined. Red ribbons streamed out from their horses' tails as they swept around us, riding fast . . . There was a huge warrior, who wore a stovepipe hat, and another who wore a fine pigeon-tailed cloth coat, buttoned up behind. . . . Some wore on their heads immense buck and buffalo horns. One headdress struck me particularly. It consisted of a large white crane with red eyes.
But the experienced Indian-fighting captains were watching the Comanche antics with more sardonic eyes. Caldwell and Burleson realized that the Indians were trying to delay the real combat until they had pushed the horse herd ahead of them—loot was uppermost in their mind. The horses had made Buffalo Hump ride home on his downward trail, rather than splitting up and infiltrating west in the age-old Comanche manner.
The experienced men—Caldwell, Burleson, McCulloch—wanted to press the attack as the horse herd went by. Huston hesitated. Then, a Comanche in a magnificent feathered headdress rode out of ranks and began to caper in front of the Texans, challenging their chiefs to individual combat. He was a magnificent target, and a long Texan rifle knocked him down. A groan went up from the watching Comanches—bad medicine.
"Now, General!" Caldwell said. "Charge 'em!"
Huston gave the order. Screaming and shooting, the Texas cavalry spurred into the Comanche flank. They stampeded the great horse herd, and the Comanches, dispersed to control their animals rather than arrayed for battle, were stampeded with it. Horses and mules piled up in a boggy stretch. The Comanches were scattered, and those jammed in the
caballado
were picked off. Caldwell took his own men around on the left flank, methodically killing every Indian in his path.
A running fight went on for fifteen miles. The combat was close and cruel. Hardeman's horse was shafted; Burleson shot several Comanches; even John Holland Jenkins got his man. It was more a massacre than a battle; the heart
was out of the Comanches. Eighty-odd Comanche bodies were strewn behind the stampede. Only one Texan was killed.
The captives of the Indians were not so lucky. Several were tied to trees and shot with arrows by Comanches during the chaotic retreat. One prisoner, the wife of the slain collector of customs at Linnville, a strikingly handsome woman, was wearing a whalebone corset. Her captors had not had time to figure out how to get her out of it. She was found fastened to a tree, with a blunted arrow lodged in her corseted breast. She was horribly sunburned on exposed limbs, but the whalebone had saved her life.
Jenkins saw one man leap on an abandoned, wounded squaw, stomp her, then pin her to the ground with a Comanche lance. However, a number of women and children prisoners were taken—it was the nature of Indians on extended war parties to take their families along. These captives later all escaped or were returned; Comanches made poor servants, as the Texans had found out by trial.
The Texans recovered a great pile of silver, cloth, whiskey, and tobacco, in addition to many horses. These liberated goods were divided among the victorious army. The Tonkawas, who had run on foot for thirty miles with Burleson to the battle, now had mounts. Huston wrote these fourteen "Tonks" a citation for bravery. When the moon came up over Plum Creek they held a victory dance, and ceremoniously roasted and ate several Comanche legs and arms.
Plum Creek punished the Penatekas severely. They had tried an unaccustomed form of warfare and failed. Afterward, no Comanche ever attacked a town again or raided down to the coast. They resumed the old guerrilla tactics, which were trouble enough.
The sequence of cause and effect in Lamar's Indian wars was not quite finished. The President and Johnston were determined the Comanches must be taught a lesson. In September 1840, Colonel John Moore raised a force in Fayette County and rode up the Colorado. He had 12 Lipans, and about 90 white men. Moore rode farther west than any Texan, except perhaps James Bowie, had gone before.
Moore's Rangers passed the San Saba, the Concho, and came to the Red Fork of the Colorado. Moore found this country rich and beautiful, high, dry, covered with a sea of waving grass broken by occasional rivers and canyons, with tremendous vistas. On October 23, the Lipans smelled out a Comanche village. Moore guessed he was about halfway to Santa Fe.
Grimly and efficiently, Moore's riders mounted and moved down on the Comanche village at midnight, behind a wave of Lipan scouts. The Apaches estimated the number of the enemy at 60 families, possibly 125 warriors. Moore sent 15 picked riflemen under Lieutenant Owens across the Colorado to set up a killing zone behind the village. Then, at daybreak on October 24, he charged in.
The Comanches were caught by surprise. As the Texans dashed through the tepees on horseback, men, women, and squawling children ran about in terror and confusion. Moore's men dismounted and began to use their rifles and pistols with deadly effect. Most of the Indians ran for the river, and into the muzzles of Owens's sharpshooters. The killing lasted some thirty minutes. About 125 Indians died, 80 of them at or in the river. The Texans lost two wounded, one fatally.
Colonel Moore's report stated: "The river and its banks . . . presented every evidence of a total defeat of our savage foe. The bodies of men, women, and children were to be seen on every hand wounded, dying, and dead." This was a punitive raid; no attempt was made to spare Indians because of age or sex. The Comanches had spared neither in their raids. The government was satisfied with Moore's report.
With this raid, the Comanche war in southwest Texas ended. The power of the southern Comanche bands was broken. The Penatekas were still a nuisance but no longer a mortal danger. Significantly, however, the Texans and the northern Comanche tribes were not yet really in contact. One factor in the defeat of the Penatekas was that they had chosen territory only on the edge of the Plains. The encroaching white settlement pushed the buffalo west, but the other Comanche bands were not hospitable to the Penatekas following them. All through the Indian wars, red man against red man helped seal the race's doom.
No Texas historian has ever tried to justify the harsh treatment of the Cherokees. Chief Bowles behaved and died as a noble, tragic figure, a victim of hatred and greed. The Comanches and Kiowas, by their own nature, precipitated their final fate, but the fate of the Cherokee nation was more revealing of the true nature of human societies, and man. The Cherokees were weak, holding something valued by a stronger race. Whatever face was put on it, the result, as Walter Prescott Webb said, was inevitable.
Justifiable or not, President Lamar's Indian policy and wars were enormously successful. Lamar spent $2.5 million the Republic did not have, and many hundreds of lives were spent as well; but in vast areas of Texas the Indian problem ceased to exist. East Texas was finally rid of all its immigrant tribes. A vast tier of territory through central Texas was made relatively safe for survey, sale, and rapid settlement. Lamar opened hundreds of thousands of acres of rich soul.
More important, he had convinced thousands of frontiersmen that his was the only final solution. He was a popular, if not a lasting, hero because he left Texas with more "good" Indians than it had when he found it.
Chapter 25
THE BORDER BREED
A Texas Ranger can ride like a Mexican, trail like an Indian, shoot like a Tennesseean, and fight like a very devil!
EDITORIAL BY JOHN SALMON FORD, IN THE TEXAS DEMOCRAT, SEPTEMBER 9, 1846
Of this far-famed corps—so much feared and hated by the Mexicans—I can add nothing to what has already been written. The character of the Texas Ranger is now well known by both friend and foe. As a mounted soldier he has had no counterpart in any age or country. Neither Cavalier nor Cossack, Mameluke nor Moss-trooper are like him; and yet, in some respects, he resembles them all. Chivalrous, bold and impetuous in action, he is yet wary and calculating, always impatient of restraint, and sometimes unscrupulous and unmerciful. He is ununiformed, and undrilled, and performs his active duties thoroughly, but with little regard to order or system. He is an excellent rider and a dead shot. His arms are a rifle, Colt's revolving pistol, and a knife.
LUTHER GIDDINGS, AN OFFICER OF THE 1ST OHIO VOLUNTEERS IN MEXICO
MOST Texan historians have depicted the essential story of Texas as one of enduring racial and cultural conflict and war. Other historians have been free to ignore this picture, but few have disputed it. The most striking aspect of this struggle is the adaptations the land and warfare forced on the Anglo-American vanguard. A significant element in American victory was the American ability to adapt and change.
Austin's Anglo enclave along the Brazos bottoms was nothing more than an extension of the American cotton-planting South, with planter, merchant, lawyer, doctor, soldier, and Negro slave, with its fringe of rifle-toting free farmers nestled through its uplands. These riflemen and aristocrats, together, conquered the Mexicans at San Jacinto and drove the settled Indians from the east. There was nothing to distinguish Houston's army on the bayou, or Lamar's summer militia of 1839, from Trans-Appalachian Americans of their age.
Moving into east Texas, down the coast to the mouth of the Nueces, and inland through the post oaks and waxy black prairies, these Americans found nothing radically different from lands and soils they had known before. The pine woods along the Red reminded settlers of their Georgia homeland. Both Mississippi planters and their slaves felt comfortable beside the cypresses and moss-hung oaks of the middle Guadalupe. Louisianans saw nothing new in the coastline of Galveston Bay, nor did the sweaty humidity of the lower river bottoms oppress them. The Alabamans and men from Tennessee found that corn grew splendidly in the central woodlands. Through half of the accidentally drawn boundaries of Texas, the social organization, agriculture, techniques, and warfare of southern America worked.
But the conquest of Texas in the 1830s was a conquest of only the extension of the Southern plain. The first abortive American culture, the cotton kingdom, took hold and flourished there; the years from 1836 to 1860 marked a consolidation of this empire, before its final downfall and enthrallment by the North.
Beyond this kingdom, Anglo-Americans confronted both a land and enemies totally unfamiliar to the English-speaking experience. From the middle of Texas, extending roughly on a north–south line connecting Sherman, Dallas, and San Antonio and curving along the Nueces below San Antonio to the sea, the entire nature of the country changed. Nowhere west or south of this line did annual rainfall exceed thirty inches; in most places it was much less. This was a wide, beautiful, but incredibly harsh land, which never quite left the Pleistocene age. It was subject to periodic, and violent change: blazing sun, ephemeral but chilling ice storms, rough winds, titanic floods, which preceded or ended decades-long droughts. There were months and years when the vistas burned with red and yellow flowers, and months and years when over large regions the grass shriveled and the limestone springs went dry. Extending for hundreds of leagues from north to south, this country was not all the same. It varied from the brushlands and chaparral-lined savannahs in the southern triangle to the cedar brakes above the Balcones Fault, and to the endless, butte-studded vistas of the far limestone plateaus. It ended, on the southwest and west, in arid greasebrush deserts overhung with blue-topped, treeless mountains. This was the southern extension of that geographical phenomenon known as the Great Plains.
The first English-speaking people to break out of the woodlands and confront the Plains seem to have been stunned by the aspect of a sea of waving grass reaching farther than the human eye could follow. The account of David B. Edward, a Scots traveler who published a history of Texas in 1836, is utterly typical:
Now, reader, your relator is lost for words to describe the balance of this landscape, after crossing the river Trinidad [Trinity]; as no language can convey to the mind any thing adequate to the emotions felt by the visitor, in ascending this vast irregularly regular slope of immense undulated plains, which extend before the eye in graceful rolls, affording from the summits of their gentle swells, a boundless prospect of verdure—blending in the distance, to the utmost extent of vision, with the blue of the horizon. Few spectacles surpass it in beauty and magnificence. The boundless expanse and profound repose of these immense plains, excite emotions of sublimity akin to those which arise from a contemplation of the ocean. . . .
Other Anglo-Saxon travelers referred to the play of light over the prairie at certain times of day, which made the scattered rises and clumps of trees in this sea of grass appear distant islands, and all seemed profoundly aware of the immensity of the earth, the sky, the sun, and the primordial, sullen stillness.