Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The main work of the Indian agents, Neighbors, Rollins, Stem, and others, was not with the Plains tribes but with the border remnants in west central Texas, the Witchita bands, Tonkawas, Lipans, and similar small surviving groups. By 1850, the farm line had reached its natural limits along the 98th meridian, and these Indians were caught in limbo. The Anglos had pushed the game—in numbers Indians could live on—beyond their lands. None of these tribes dared venture out too far on the lordly Comanches' range. They wandered about on the fringes of the white man's world. They were hungry, and in some cases actually starving. They committed a number of small depredations, such as killing beeves and stealing horses.
Agent John Rollins's report made it clear that the choice of these tribes was between stealing and starving, and even some Texas newspapers admitted that the "tame" Indians presented a pitiable sight. The Penateka Comanches, who had lost most of their range, were equally destitute. There were winters when the Indians ate all their dogs, and then their horses, the Indian's most prized possession. All these tribes had had considerable contact with European civilization, had tasted the white man's wars, and had been debilitated by both. They lived in terrible psychological confusion, unable to shake old Amerind values, unable to fully adopt white ways, having no longer any real belief in either.
Nothing was done about this Indian detritus until Jefferson Davis became Secretary of War. Davis wrote Governor Bell of Texas in 1853, outlining certain problems of defense, among which was the fact that the Federal government could not give the Indians a defined territory in Texas. Davis promised that if the state would set aside lands for an Indian reservation, the government would restrict the savages to it, and be able to take control of them if they strayed off it. In February 1854, the state legislature set aside twelve leagues, or about 70,000 acres. Neighbors and Captain Randolph Marcy of the U.S. Army surveyed two separate reserves, one for the Anadarcos, Wacos and other semiagricultural tribes a few miles below Fort Belknap, called the Brazos Reservation, and another, on the Clear Fork of the Brazos about twenty miles to its southwest. This was to be the Penateka home. Both reserves had wood and water, and lay in beautiful, rolling country.
Neighbors had the exhausting task of drawing the Indians in. In doing this, he won the respect of every civil and military officer in this part of Texas, but the hatred of most of the white settlers, who wanted the Indians exterminated or driven entirely away. Neighbors, who was a big, strong, immensely courageous man, patient with savages but angrily impatient with white prejudices, had to deal with Indian irresponsibility, interference by the Army, and white intransigence all at the same time. He got the Indians to congregate, but the promised food did not arrive. Then, a party of soldiers attacked his peaceful Indians for no apparent cause. Citizens fired on a large group of Tonkawas who were on their way to the reserve, scattering them. The whites feared all Indians and considered any mounted or armed Indian fair game. Some of Neighbor's assistants were incompetent and caused serious trouble. But in the end, Neighbors won the Indians' confidence completely. By what still seems superhuman efforts, he got virtually every tribesman in Texas into the Brazos Reserves. Even half the Penatekas, who were dying of hunger this winter, arrived at Clear Fork, though another 500 apparently joined the northern Comanche bands. Neighbors was forthright, religious, immensely ethical rather than pious, and even the Comanches trusted him. The Penatekas presented a peculiar problem on the reservation, because they had never farmed and refused to plant corn. But still, the policy, under Neighbors's direction, seemed on its way to success. Tragically, however, Robert Neighbors was more successful at winning friends and influencing people among the Indians than in getting the cooperation or sympathy of his own kind. Because he protected his charges and saw to their welfare against the wishes of his own people, he was universally known as an Indian-lover on the harsh frontier.
Conditions in Texas improved briefly in 1856. The gathering of the border tribes into the reserves helped end petty depredations. More important was the appearance of the best-mounted regiment that ever rode the American West: Albert Sidney Johnston's 2d U.S. Cavalry.
When Jefferson Davis became Secretary of War in 1853, he was the first national government officer to recognize that the utterly different terrain and conditions on the edge of the Great Plains required a different military approach. Davis reorganized the U.S. Army between 1853 and 1857. He laid the groundwork for the famous cavalry operations in the West. He was never given the credit he deserved for his vision and effort, because the gathering national storm obscured most of it. Davis, correctly, was accused of furthering the military stance of the South; in Texas, however, he seems only to have served a national interest and purpose. He left a series of papers, showing clearly he understood the enormous difference between the problems the United States faced east of the Mississippi and on the edge of the Plains. In the West, a scattered people could not hope to defend themselves under the old militia system, and while cavalry was more expensive than infantry (the government's main objection), it was ten times more effective. Davis thought the dividing line between East and West lay at the 100th meridian, along which the forts then lay. West of that line, the Army had to operate in new ways: in strong garrisons, not scattered, tiny forts that excited Indian contempt, and through mounting of effective punitive expeditions, "to pursue and punish the offenders," much as the French then operated in Algeria. Davis was greatly interested that the West should be won. Of course, he expected it to be added to the South upon conquest; his vision did not recognize the fact that the cotton kingdom had reached its ordained boundaries.
The same North–South cloud has obscured the tremendous work of the old 2d Cavalry. Its commanders and most of its officers were Southerners, and its legends became lost in later prejudices. For a variety of reasons the 2d became outstanding. The regiment, a fighting unit, naturally pulled the better soldiers, throughout the army; and Texas, with fighting, surveying, and road-building to be done, was a career soldier's paradise in the 1850s. Then, the regiment had style; Davis saw to it that many appointments went to gentlemen. He was charged with training Southerners for a coming war, perhaps with justice, for in addition to Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert E. Lee, John B. Hood, and five other future Confederate generals were on its rolls. But the 2d also had George H. Thomas and George Stoneman, and a dozen lesser lights of Union fame.
Johnston was effective, but he had too little time. In 1857 Davis left the War office, and the greater part of the 2d Cavalry was ordered off to Utah. The Comanches remained ignorant of many things out on the Plains, but they were never totally insensible or stupid. As soon as Johnston's pressure subsided, the pressure on the Texas frontier became severe. Again, hundreds of farmhouses went up in flames.
Hardin R. Runnels, who became governor of Texas in January 1858, was to be known primarily for his Secessionist stand. But dissatisfaction with frontier defense always lay close to the heart of Texas politics. Runnels was elected partly on account of this discontent, and Runnels was always a deep conservative, who believed the shortest distance between two points was a straight line. When the legislature, despairing of federal action, authorized state troops again, Runnels immediately appointed John S. (Rip) Ford Senior Captain and supreme commander of all Texas forces. Ford at this time was the most experienced Ranger available to serve the state.
Ford got specific orders: call a hundred men, establish a camp somewhere on the frontier, cooperate with the Federals and Indian agents, "but to brook no interference with his plan of operation from any source." The Governor agreed his position would call for delicacy, but stated Ford had the judgment to carry on. Nor could Runnels have appointed a better man for the job.
Ford was under no misapprehension as to what he was supposed to do. He was to "follow any and all trails of hostile or suspected hostile Indians" and "inflict the most summary punishment" on them. He was to do this quickly, because the public was howling for action, and also because his appropriation was limited and he could not exceed it. He also had something no other Captain had so far had: the authority to dismiss officers now in state service, and to replace them with his own.
The Governor gave Ford a free hand; both men understood that both their reputations rested on "drastic action," as Webb said.
Ford moved into northwest Texas, to the Brazos Indian Reserve. He planned to enlist Indian allies and scouts. Here, he was entirely successful; the son of the agent, L. S. Ross, recruited and led 113 assorted Indians under Ford's command. On April 22, 1858, Ford left Camp Runnels, as he called his Brazos station, with 102 Rangers, a pack train, and more than 100 Indians. He had planned his campaign. Indian spies had ridden far ahead and located Comanches north of the Red River. This was beyond the Texas border, but as one Texan observer said, Ford was after Indians, not out to learn geography.
Now began the bloodiest two years in Texas history since 1835–36.
Behind his screen of Indian scouts, Ford crossed the Red on April 29. On May 10, his column found Indian signs—a buffalo with two Comanche arrows sticking in it and the marks of meat-laden Comanche travois. On May 11, Ford carefully reconnoitered a large Comanche camp. He had not been discovered. He moved swiftly, quietly, without campfires, bugles, shouted orders, and similar nonsense of the Army in Indian country. Like many old Rangers, Rip Ford could out-ride, out-trail, out-sneak, and above all, out-think any Indian.
Then, on May 12, his Tonkawa scouts attacked and demolished a small camp of five tepees. Two mounted Comanches got away; the alarm was out. Ford did not hesitate; he pounded after the two braves for three miles, and they led him to a large encampment beside the Canadian River.
The Comanches came out in magnificent, savage array, resplendent in feather and horn headdresses, iron lance points glittering in the morning sun. Their faces were painted black for war. They capered and pranced and thundered past on their ponies. Ford estimated he faced 300 braves that day.
It was a scene that was to be repeated in this region of the world many times in coming years: a shrieking, splendidly barbaric horde of Plains Indians, circling and prancing across the prairie; across from them, a band of bearded, sweat-stained riders in old clothes, calm and spitting tobacco juice, among their own screeching, threatening allies. They cocked their rifles, checked the seating of the red copper nipples on their Colts. They watched Rip Ford, cold as new ice.
At the head of the Comanches rode Iron Jacket, whose name came from a cuirass of burnished Spanish armor, lost on these Plains centuries before. Iron Jacket glittered in overlapping plates of steel; he was a great chief, with a legend of invulnerability in tribal wars. He rode out and challenged, to commence the combat.
Spanish armor would turn arrows, but not a Sharps' rifle ball. Several guns crashed, and Iron Jacket and his horse collapsed. Then, Ford knew it was time to go among them. He charged, and the battle broke into a shrieking, shooting, galloping series of small combats, covering six miles.
This battle was to be described a dozen times in fact and legend, a hundred times in fiction. Ford broke two Comanche charges, fighting until two o'clock. At the end, the Ranger horses were staggering, and could pursue no more. In running fights lasting about seven hours, the Rangers killed 76 Indians. They captured 300 horses, and 18 women and children. Their own losses were minimal; two Rangers died.
Ford rode back into Texas, arriving on the Brazos May 21. He reported to Runnels that the campaign was of much importance, not simply because the Indians had been punished but because it demonstrated several things. The Indians could be profitably pursued, fixed, and defeated on their own buffalo grounds by the right sort of men. It must be remembered that the Spaniards had felt three full companies of horse inadequate to cross these plains, which were still viewed by most Americans with awe and dread. Ford wanted to pursue this campaign with a strong force, into the winter. This he was denied, because he had expended his allowed funds in thirty days, and because he had stirred the federal forces into belated action at last.
Colonel Twiggs, commanding the Department, wrote to his next superior that a drastic revision should be made in federal Indian policy in Texas. Twiggs castigated the passive peace policy, which had put the Army on the defensive for a decade. He argued that a full regiment of cavalry be sent into the Indian country, pursuing the Indians summer and winter, to give them so much trouble they would not think of raiding Texas. Concurrently, Twiggs wrote Runnels that he always knew the Federal force was too small for its job, and the best way to do it anywhere was to attack. "As long as there are wild Indians on the prairie, Texas cannot be free from depredations," Twiggs stated.
Twiggs's letter, accompanied by two blasts from the Governor of Texas and a warning from Neighbors that Texas was contemplating violent action, jolted Secretary of War Floyd and President Buchanan into a temporary change of policy. On August 9, 1858, Major Earl Van Dorn of the 2d Cavalry was ordered to march into the Wichita mountains of Oklahoma with four companies of cavalry and one of foot. From a base camp here, Van Dorn was to scour the country between the Canadian and the Red, beginning September 15.
Van Dorn also gathered up some friendly Indians under Lawrence Ross, who had assisted Ford. These scouts located Comanches for him on September 29. Van Dorn marched ninety miles in thirty-seven hours with his Indians and four companies of the 2d Cavalry. He attacked a sleeping village of 120 lodges, 500 Indians, on October 1. Within thirty minutes, the cavalry killed 56 Indians of various sizes and shapes, took three hundred horses, burned the lodges, and dispersed the survivors across the hills. Although Van Dorn suffered heavier losses than Ford—he and Ross were both wounded, and two commissioned officers were among the American dead—Twiggs described his victory as "more decisive and complete than any recorded in the history of our Indian warfare." This was a palpable exaggeration, but it showed how deeply the regular army had been stung by Rip Ford. The Comanche menace was damped, but hardly destroyed.