Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Millions of beasts still roamed this vast Comanche-Kiowa game preserve. The soil was rich, if the rainfall slight, and the grass on the unbroken earth grew thick and high. There were no boundaries within the natural limits of the Great Plains; when drought or fire temporarily removed the grass, men and animals moved on to where it was still rich and green. Buffalo, deer, and men were free, each to follow their own source of life. The men, however, were few. There were never probably more than 26,000 associated Kiowas and Comanches living on the southern Plains.
Significantly, early American geographers called this the Great American Desert, not differentiating between true desertland and the sea of grass. The name was apt, because for early-19th-century Americans the Plains might as well have been the Sahara. Their tried and true techniques, the ax, the ox, the rail fence, seed corn, and plow, were collectively useless here. No American knew what to do with country where there was neither plentiful water nor ample wood. None of Austin's colonists ever settled beyond the 98th meridian.
But the Plains, by accident of Spanish exploration and Mexican history, were part of the province of Texas, and when Anglo-Texas won its freedom, it did not limit its claims to the Anglo enclave. The "Texians" claimed all lands north and east of the Rio Grande.
Their traders, trappers, and a few lonely farmers stood on the edge of the great scarp, looking into an immensity of distance as strange and mysterious as the heart of Africa. To some men, the Plains meant loneliness and fear. In others, the vistas produced a feeling of freedom, even exaltation. Just as women feared the cruel sea but men went down to it in ships, there was an Anglo-American vanguard with bordering in its blood. This vanguard would pay its price for inland admiralty: the last great American frontier was to cost seventeen lives per mile of advance.
The land was not only harsh and strange to an essentially island, woodland race, but the enemies it presented were more so. Plains Indians in the north, Mexican
vaqueros
in the south, were outside the experience of Americans, who did not understand the ways or the mind of either. Yet they had to encounter both in a long, bloody, running war on their own ground for mastery of it. This was a war that never engaged more than a handful of the American nation, but it was to engage the American consciousness and create images and legends that would never die. The Plains frontier was ephemeral but influential. Upon the already bifurcated soul of Anglo-Texas, split between cotton empire and farming frontier, there was thrust a new experience. Here was where the West began.
San Jacinto and Lamar's Indian wars had delivered the old enclave of Anglo-Texas, but neither brought lasting peace. Mexico never acquiesced to the Texan surgery, though internal troubles prevented the Mexicans from serious action. The decimation of the Penateka Comanches did not affect the powerful northern bands, toward whose hunting grounds a swarm of Texas pioneers was inexorably moving.
Thus the return of Sam Houston to the Texas Presidency could only forge a precarious breathing spell rather than genuine peace. Historically, Houston's considered peace policy toward Mexico was well taken; Texas had more to gain at this stage by internal development than by foreign war.
Houston's Indian policy, however, stemmed more from goodwill toward Indians and hopeful thinking than the cold logic of which he was usually capable. He had no power to stem the steady encroachment of white settlers on Indian hunting grounds. As he once remarked with some bitterness, even if he built a high wall between whites and Indians, his countrymen would scheme night and day for a way to get around it.
Houston also failed to recognize that the nature of the Plains Indians made peace on white terms impossible. So long as a Comanche or Kiowa was free, he would raid and kill. This was imbedded in Plains culture; the Indian "couldn't help it," as General William Tecumseh Sherman later wrote. The Comanche economy was also attuned to raiding; since the days they left the Rocky Mountains, Comanches had depended on European settlements for their horseherds. In the face of culture and necessity, the agreements of Comanche chiefs to end raiding were as hypocritical and useless as the treaties ratified by the white government. While Anglo-American encroachment on the Plains precipitated war, it should be remembered that the Comanches were accustomed to raid deeply into Mexico, a region that did not threaten or impinge on them. They began to descend upon the Texan settlements as soon as Americans moved within range, long before the actual buffalo plains were breached by white wagons. They would continue to do so so long as they enjoyed a privileged sanctuary high on the Plains.
Significantly, while Houston was able to secure truces with Wacos, Tonkawas, Anadarcos, and other tribes at a great council held at Bird's Fort (near present Dallas) and force promises that all these Indians would remain northwest of the Austin–San Antonio line, the Comanche tribes did not attend.
Small, deadly, burn-kill-rob-and-run raiding parties descended regularly off the high plateaus during the light of the summer moons. The Comanche raid became a certainty, not a possibility, of the Texas northwest.
These horse Indians were incredibly mobile by white standards. They rode enormous distances by night, then hid in brushy streambeds by day. The great distances and the thinness of white settlement made any kind of passive white defense ineffective, as ineffective as the earlier Spanish presidios. Yet, tragically, a passive defense was usually the dominant policy of, first the Republic, and later, the United States government.
Here, in these western regions, was repeated a war between agricultural communities and wandering nomads that had counterparts in earlier conflicts between the nomads and agrarian civilizations of Asia. And as in those earlier wars, at first the mobile, warlike nomads seemed to have all the advantage.
Americans suffered from three great deficiencies: they were not horsemen; they lacked an effective war organization; and they were ill-armed to face Indians on the open plains.
The old militia system was too cumbersome. It reacted with fatal slowness on a widely scattered frontier; by the time American hoemen assembled, the Indians had struck and gone. The militia could provide no effective pursuit. Militia could not sustain the far-ranging punitive expedition.
Also, while American farmers in Texas rode horseback, they were hardly cavalrymen or mounted warriors equal to Kiowa and Comanche braves. The average Indian could ride rings around the average mounted white. Worse yet, the American weapons were not designed for horse combat. The Kentucky rifle and the tomahawk were woodland weapons. The long flintlocks (percussion caps began to come into use about 1820) were awkward tools in the saddle; they lost their accuracy, and could not be recharged easily. In the time it took a frontiersman to reload, a Comanche could charge three hundred yards and shoot twenty arrows. In a country without trees to hide behind, the whites were outclassed.
When whites engaged Comanches, they had to dismount and make a stand, firing some of their pieces to hold the Indians off, but always keeping some loaded rifles in reserve against a charge by what was the best light cavalry in the 19th-century world. Many Americans were saved, not by the stubbornness of their defense but by the fact that it was against Indian sensibilities and tactics to push an attack home. The best the Americans could achieve with their single-shot rifles was a standoff. If they ran, however, they were doomed, unless they quickly found timber or rock. Frontier manuals and books were emphatic, in detail, against trying to outrun Comanches; when the enemy fled, it brought out the hunting and killing instinct, and the Comanche was splendidly armed, with the bow, to kill fleeing horsemen during pursuit.
Colonel Dodge, who wrote as an authority, described the American regular soldier as superior to the Plains Indian in only two respects: discipline and the courage to make a sustained fight. Captain John Bird's "victory" in 1839 was typical of early Comanche–American combat. Pursuit of Indians out in the open was dangerous. If the whites fired their rifles, the Comanches charged behind a cloud of missiles, shooting as they rode. At ten feet, the long rifle made a poor club; the long Plains lance was supple and deadly. Bird's command lived only because it found a rocky ravine to fort up in.
In these same years, noticeably, the worst defeats the Texas forces suffered from the Mexicans came when they engaged Mexican cavalry out on open ground. Urrea's troopers wiped out every unit of Americans they caught, with the exception of one which took cover behind mission walls. The embattled farmers were not equipped to stand their ground on the wide prairie.
The Anglo-Celts who filtered out to the Indian-Mexican frontier in west and southwest Texas in the 1830s arrived with the basic necessities for conquest. They were aggressive, competitive, ambitious, and given to prejudice and hate—the last characteristics of a well-developed, rather than a primitive, society. They possessed the mental and moral equipment to wage a sustained campaign. But above all, they showed the two most important traits of a genuine dominant race: intelligence and the ability to adapt.
Both Indian and Mexican cultures were peculiarly static and frozen; they would repeat their strengths and failures to the end. Further, the Americans had one final, priceless asset. The Anglo-Celt frontiersmen were the far extension of a race with budding industrial skills. The adaptation of these skills to the frontier marked the turning point in the long European failure to conquer the Plains.
The Anglos who collided, at about the same time, with the terrible Comanches and formidable Mexican horsemen, found they had to change the traditional Anglo-American system of war. The first great change involved the horse.
They had to learn to use the horse as a military implement, in other words, to ride like Mexicans. The distances of Texas were so vast, and the country so open beyond the Brazos-Colorado bottoms and the eastern pine woods, that this came quickly and instinctively. Young Texans grew up astride. A number of observers made the valid judgment that a man who could not ride well, or who detested the saddle or the horse, had no business on the Texas frontier. He could not prosper, or even survive. Conversely, the men who loved the saddle were irresistibly pulled to the western frontier.
Another factor that came about was the deliberate improvement of the American horse breed. Farm plugs could take a wagon to town, but Americans had to have breeds that could race the Spanish mustang. They captured or developed them, out of Kentucky race horses, mustangs, and mounts with Arabian blood.
Thus was a new breed of fighting man prepared.
Texas was thinly populated everywhere, and it was an agrarian society; its only early assets were approximately equally valueless paper money and open lands. At its birth the Republic inherited two bloody frontiers in the south and west, but Texas did not have the means to garrison or police them. The reaction against Lamar's wars was not a psychological one against their aims or violence; it was a practical one, against the bankrupting of the state government. Farmer militia could not fight or even find Indian raiders, and Texas could not afford a large regular army. This forced a new adaptation on the frontier settlements, as Noah Smithwick wrote: "So, the government provided for their protection as best it could with the means at its disposal, graciously permitting the citizens to protect themselves by organizing . . . ranging companies."
Ranging companies dated from Austin's colony; they had been formed in 1823 and 1826. The term Ranger was already old in Anglo-America; it referred to Indian fighters, the kind of men who carried war to the enemy, beyond the frontier. And from 1836 onward, the history of Texas Rangers was, as the historian Webb indicated, only a little less than the history of Texas, while the history of all west Texas was only a little more than the story of the Ranger force.
The Rangers were unique. They were first a form of mounted militia, though from the first it was recognized that they needed a semipermanent form. Ranger companies guarding the frontier had more or less permanent duty, because the danger never ceased. Yet, there was never sufficient funds to pay or equip them, at any period of the long frontier. They could never become an established, regularized force, standing from year to year.
What took place, in effect, was that the government of Texas authorized Rangers as a paramilitary force and supported them when it could. Their recruitment was left to the frontier communities, as, to a great extent, was their support. The comment of one Ranger captain, that when he arrived in a certain locality all he heard about was Indian depredations, but after he drove the Indians off he heard only complaints about his Rangers killing local farmers' hogs, summed up a world of Texan, and human, experience.
The ranging companies, without uniforms, badges, or even government-supplied horses or arms, evolved slowly but in strikingly adaptive ways. At first, even the leaders were not appointed by the state, or honored with recognized commissions. The state, accidentally but fortunately, let an indigenous brand of frontier leadership arise. The Rangers were to be described many times, at first as state troops, later as a police force or constabulary. During most of the 19th century they were neither. They were apart from the regular army, the militia or national guard, and were never a true police force. They were instead one of the most colorful, efficient, and deadly band of irregular partisans on the side of law and order the world has seen. They were called into being by the needs of a war frontier, by a society that could not afford a regular army. Texans passed in and out of the Rangers regularly; in the early years a very high proportion of all west Texans served from time to time. If they bore certain similarities to Mamelukes and Cossacks, they were never quite the same.