Lone Star (97 page)

Americans, from Ohio to Georgia, sensed something new in these men. It appealed strongly to the American character, because, after all, the Texas Rangers were manifestations of the American character under certain conditions.

The Rangers were a completely masculine society, with a deep camaraderie born of open spaces and the camp fire. They were taciturn, devoted not to talk but to direct, violent action. Hays made a tremendous impression: a quiet, modest, essentially decent man, who never boasted but never backed down. He did not look for trouble, but minded his own business. If someone gave him trouble, he retaliated with quick, clean, brutal force. His bravery, and that of his men, was so striking that physical courage became an inseparable part of the legend, unremarkable, taken for granted. If some aspects of Hays's reactions to trouble seemed shockingly brutal to later Americans, it must be remembered that in the 1840s Americans were at war with both Mexicans and Indians, two races few Americans admired.

The Ranger image was that of a tall, quiet-spoken Westerner, who preferred his horse to female society, who wore a well-oiled pistol and knew how to use it, and who, when called upon, would destroy the forces of evil by killing them. The image was appealing rather than repellant. Records of the times show that virtually every volunteer in the American forces in Mexico wanted to acquire a Colt's revolver, and most eventually did. Here, certainly, both the revolver and the symbology of the revolver entered American life. Both would be lasting.

The Texas Ranger and his six-shooter would enter American consciousness, to be eulogized under different names, and in a hundred different places, in song, story, and on the screen. The man, the gun, and the action would be as attractive to millions of Americans a hundred years later as it was in 1848. A new prototype was born.

The Mexican term
charro
had not yet been translated into English; the
vaquero
had not yet become a buckaroo or cowboy. But as Jack Hays and his troop began the long, dusty ride back to Texas (and, it is hoped, all honest Mexicans kept out of their way) the ways and world views, and the world image, of the American Western hero had been formed.

Chapter 27

THE BLOODY TRAIL

The Texans had very definite ideas as to how Indians should be treated. Their psychology was fixed, and they refused to yield their views to the more lenient policies of the federal government. Out of the maelstrom of the past and its many bitter experiences they had come with hard and relentless methods. Their independent existence for ten years had fostered self-reliance and created new institutions suited to the circumstances, and produced in them a spirit that could not be cast off lightly. Theoretically, they were quite willing to turn the task of protecting the frontier over to the federal government, but practically they were unwilling to accept the federal plan; they soon demanded that the work be done through their institutions and leadership—at federal expense. They easily convinced themselves, for example, that the Texas Rangers knew best how to whip Mexicans and exterminate Indians, and their impatience with the clumsy methods and humanitarian policy of the United States Army was colossal.

WALTER PRESCOTT WEBB,

The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense

IT was always evident that Texas came into the Union never expecting to surrender the amount of sovereignty other Americans came to demand. From 1845 onward, and even after the state's efforts to solve its problems through secession failed, there tended to be a sleep divergence between the Texan and the national view on many things.

The dominant view in Texas toward state–federal relations was that Texans should dictate basic policies within the state, while the federal apparatus should assist with the implementation, especially with money. This attitude was not illogical, certainly no more than the eventual federal system that emerged in the next century, by which the national government dictated internal policy, reserved the major revenues, but left the really troublesome social problems to the states. Texas's major controversies with the national government during the 19th century arose over policies toward Mexicans, Negroes, and Indians. In perspective, if Anglo-Texans' attitudes were often brutal, the distant government's policies were often absurd because they failed to take local conditions into account.

The first great dissatisfaction with the Union in Texas was over the United States' protection of the Indian frontier. Texas and the United States in the years immediately preceding annexation had evolved different Indian policies. All of the states east of the Mississippi had either expelled their Indians or confined them on reservations, and the United States had reverted to something similar to the old British Indian policy. The edge of the Plains was considered a line of demarcation, and the Great American Desert was to be reserved as a sort of wild Indian game preserve. The Texan view was radically different: the Texans wanted all Indians run out of the state.

The Texas situation was unique. Other states went through a territorial stage before admittance to the Union, and it had become axiomatic that by the time a territory was ready for statehood its wild Indians were either conquered or removed. But Texas not only had a savage frontier, but more than half the state was unsettled, much of it even unexplored. This, and the fact that the terms of annexation reserved all lands within Texas's drawn boundaries to the state, created serious problems.

Protection of the frontier and handling of Indians were federal responsibilities. But on the other hand, both the Indians and the U.S. Army were on Texas soil. The Army had no authority over the white citizens of Texas, and Army commanders could not behave or operate as they could on a federal frontier. Meanwhile, they were bound by an Eastern-imposed Indian policy, which did not envision aggressive war. The Army accepted the task of protecting the frontier, but the federal government refused the job of removing the Indians. This excited great exasperation in Texas, especially when in 1846, and again in 1848, the government went through an elaborate farce of making treaties with the Plains Indians at Comanche Peak, having these ratified by the Senate, and signed by President Polk. These treaties were absurd. They did not guarantee the Comanches and Kiowas a reservation or line of demarcation in Texas, because the federal government had no powers to grant them state lands. They did not halt the white advance to the edge of Comanchería, because Washington had no powers to do this, either. Finally, the policy-makers utterly failed to take the nature of the Comanches and Kiowas into account. These were hunting Indians, who had never in tribal history planted a seed in the ground. They were war Indians, who had seized and held the richest buffalo grounds; stealing horses and ripping scalps was at the root of their value system. They were strong Indians, too, who had avoided all contact with the white man, and therefore suffered none of the demoralization that affected tribal cultures that succumbed to white artifacts or had their sense of superiority shaken by dependence on European ways.

They were not humble before the treaty-makers; they were proud and arrogant, as they had a right to be. They took American gifts, but their promises were as worthless as Washington's over the years. The Kiowa-Comanches never accepted, though they may have understood, the fact that the
Tejanos
and the
Americanos
were not two separate peoples or nations. A significant but little-mentioned aspect of federal–Texas relations with these tribes was that the Indians did consider the Americans friends of a sort, and accepted their agents in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma, but they considered Texas another country, and one they had a right to raid until the end of their independent days.

As
every
Texas-born historian, with roots on the old frontier, has tried to point out, this peace policy with the Plains Indians was not humanitarian, but mistaken. It only deferred the destruction of the tribes, while it further brutalized the white population for another thirty years along the vast frontier.

The government placed a string of forts along the Comanche frontier: Fort Worth, Fort Belknap, Fort Inge, Fort Clark, Fort Duncan. These ran along a general north–south line just west of the 98th meridian and the San Antonio–Dallas line. Eventually, other forts—Lancaster, Davis, Stockton, and Bliss—protected the California trail through completely unpopulated west Texas. These forts never adequately served their purpose, which was protection of the white frontier to their east. They did not and could not separate Indians raiders from the white settlements. They were static, while they were faced with continuing guerrilla war. They were separated by hundreds of miles through which Indians could ride at will; their garrisons were too small to cope with the numbers of Plains tribes involved; and for many years the troops themselves were inadequate and unequipped for the task. When the federal government assumed the job of protecting the Texas frontier, its army had no formal cavalry branch. Some of the first troops sent out on the edge of the vast Plains were infantry, mounted on mules. As Texans remarked bitterly, the only way they could damage the hard-riding Comanches was possibly by causing the Indians to laugh themselves to death. One Texas editor likened infantry toiling over the immense distances of the Plains, in pursuit of Comanches, to a "sawmill on the ocean." They were generally about as useful. Yet the War Department, dominated by men who never saw the West, was painfully slow to organize an effective horse arm. No real improvement came in Texas until Jefferson Davis became Secretary of War. Davis believed in cavalry; he also had a consuming interest in the West. He sent a succession of outstanding officers to Texas. He was accused of training warriors for the South, but he did bring some relief to Texans.

Although they were always scorned by the Texans, the bluecoats did learn to fight Indians; but the constant irritant was that Washington did not want them to fight. Federal soldiers were not permitted to kill an Indian unless they were attacked; in fact, they were required to protect Indians from Texans at times. Above all, the passive stance was fatal against a foe who understood all the niceties of partisan war. What the Army did was to grant the Comanches their Plains sanctuary, but to afford no sanctuary to the white pioneers in their rear.

In 1849 alone, incomplete figures indicate that at least 149 white men, women, and children were killed on the northwest Texas frontier. The effect of this kind of warfare, in a region where homesteads were many miles apart and people were very few, is easily imagined.

The
Texas State Gazette
, in September 1849, printed the views of a man with vast experience and knowledge of the Plains tribes gained on the Santa Fe trail:

I see that the Comanches are still continuing their forays upon the Texas border, murdering and carrying off defenseless frontier settlers who had been granted protection. . . . They must be pursued, hunted, run down, and killed—killed until they find we are in earnest. . . . If Harney can have his own way, I cannot but believe he will call in Hays, McCulloch, and all the frontier men, and pursue the Comanches to the heads of the Brazos, the Colorado, and even up under the spurs of the Rocky Mountains—they must be beaten up in all their covers and harassed until they are brought to the knowledge of . . . the strength and resources of the United States.

But Harney, the Army commander, and his successors were rarely to have their way; they were circumscribed by distant policy. Nor did Harney and other officers want any part of Rangers. They could not ask for them without admitting their own forces were not the best Indian-fighters in the world. Parties of state troops were called for brief periods of service, but for the ten years following the Mexican War there was no real Ranger organization. The good men had gone, and the Rangers who did take the field from time to time were badly led and did poorly. There was a need for something like the
 

Rangers, but Austin would or could not pay for their upkeep; besides, border defense was a federal responsibility. Meanwhile, for long agonizing years, the government would not admit the bankruptcy of its Indian policies in Texas.

Considered of equal importance to the army by the government were its Indian agents. These were civil officers whose duty was to execute Indian laws and implement treaty terms and policy; over-all, their mission was to see that the Indians kept the peace. In Texas, the Indian agent had no authority over civilians or state officers, and his control over Indians was at best always theoretical. Whatever results an agent got he got with persuasion and the force of his personality; he specifically had no control over federal troops.

These limitations were not understood either by the Texas population or by Washington, both of whom apparently expected the Indian agents to keep the aborigines under control by reading them the white man's law. Some aspects of this law were ridiculous to Indians, such as the treaty the United States signed with Mexico by which Indians were not permitted to raid south of the Rio Grande.

The principal figure among Texas Indian agents was Major Robert S. Neighbors, a Texan who had worked with Indians for the Republic. Neighbors from the start had an impossible job, because he could not win and hold the confidence of the Indians without losing that of the whites. One of the worst problems Indian agents faced was the desire of whites to start trouble. Texas had no laws preventing its citizens from trading with Indians. One particularly bothersome trader, George Barnard, had a post high on the Brazos, from which he sold Indians liquor and firearms and stirred up trouble for all. The Army wanted to remove Barnard, but had no authority to take such action within the confines of a sovereign state. The Governor of Texas had no objection to getting rid of all gun-runners and traders, but could secure no law to do so; nor did any federal code apply. The position of these traders was actually impregnable for many years; all deplored them, no one did anything about them in the squabbling over state–federal jurisdiction.