The Mammoth Book of the West (47 page)

At daylight the next morning, we were on the march to meet our supply train and encountered it some time that forenoon. We were glad that it was safe, but disappointed that Major Elliott and party had not come in. After supper in the evening, the officers were called together and each one questioned as to the casualties of enemy warriors, locations, etc. Every effort was made to avoid duplications. The total was found to be one hundred and three.

The Washita “battle” was one of many controversies which trailed in the wake of George Armstrong Custer. The village attacked was that of the unfortunate Black Kettle, whose tipi flew a white flag. Black Kettle and his wife were shot in the back as they tried to flee across the Washita, and died face down in the water. Contrary to the claims of the 7th Cavalry, the soldiers killed not 103
warriors but eleven. The rest of the dead were women, children and old men.

The destruction of Black Kettle’s village was a Western tragedy, but it was not another Sand Creek. Black Kettle was the leading peace chief of the Cheyenne, yet his camp harboured warriors. The chief had also been informed that he would be attacked unless he surrendered to Sheridan. Black Kettle’s village was a mixture of Indians who wanted war and Indians who wanted peace. It was the Indian nation in miniature.

Sheridan applauded Custer for the Washita battle, which appeared to have ended Indian resistance on the central and southern plains. All winter long, straggles of Indians appeared at Fort Cobb wanting to surrender. To encourage the recalcitrant, Custer summoned Cheyenne chiefs to a peace council – then seized three of them and threatened to hang them on the spot unless the tribe carried out his demands. More Indians surrendered and moved onto reservations. When the Comanche arrived at Fort Cobb, one of their chiefs introduced himself to Sheridan. “
Tosawi
, good Indian,” he said. Sheridan replied: “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”

In March 1869 General Philip Sheridan was able to report to the War Department that the tribes assigned to the Indian Territory were living quietly on their reservations.

Custer’s victory at the Washita was not, as Sheridan thought, the end of the Indian war on the central and southern plains. But it was the beginning of the end.

There was something about the Comanche and the horse. They were uncannily conjoined. Writing in the 1830s the frontier artist George Catlin, who regarded the Comanche as “homely”, remarked that as soon as one of the tribe “lays his hand upon his horse, his
face
, even, becomes handsome, and he gracefully flies away like a different being.”

All who witnessed the Comanche on horseback were amazed and scared in equal measure by their skill. A favourite Comanche feat was to hang under the neck of the horse to fire arrows or throw 14-foot lances. Some Comanche warriors could hang under the belly of the horse to shoot their bows. While many plains tribes rode to war and then got off and fought on foot, the Comanche disdained any form of pedestrian warfare or hunting. Raids and the taming of mustangs made the Comanche enormously rich in horses. An ordinary warrior often owned 250 horses, a chief a thousand.

Their equine prowess aside, the Shoshoni-speaking Comanche were originally mountain dwellers from the
north (“Comanche” is derived from the Ute
kohmachts
, “always against us”), who arrived on the south plains as late as 1700. Yet as nobody took to the horse like the Comanche, their ability to fight a highly mobile warfare won them a huge 240,000 square mile empire on the high plains, from which they evacuated the eastern Apache, the Navajo and others. The five main Comanche bands also blocked the northward expansion of the Spanish, confining them in the bulk to southern Texas. At the peak of their power, in the early nineteenth century, the Comanche were 20,000 strong. Their horses were almost countless.

And then the Anglo-Americans started to appear in east Texas. The Comanche had a reputation for belligerence, but the Whites matched it. A long and venomous war between the Anglo-Americans and the Comanche began shortly after Texas won independence from Mexico in 1836. Massacres and reprisals became commonplace on both sides.

One of the first Comanche victories in 1836 was at Parker’s Fort, a stockaded cluster of homesteads in east-central Texas. The Comanche raiders killed and scalped the men, and ripped their genitals out. Some of the women were raped, and five were borne off as captives, a practice the Comanche adopted to offset their low birth rate. They included the nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker. When she was 18 Cynthia Ann became the wife of Chief Peta Nocona of the Nocona band. Early in the marriage she bore him a son Quanah (“Fragrant”). Another son, Pecos, and a daughter, Topasannah (“Prairie Flower”), followed.

In December 1860, while the Nocona band were camped near the Pease River and the men were off hunting buffalo, a force of 40 Texas Rangers and 21 US cavalry struck. Cynthia Ann was recaptured and taken, with her daughter, back to the settlements. Cynthia Ann was welcomed
by her brother and her uncle. But she mourned for her sons and several times tried to ride away to join them. When her daughter died in 1864, Cynthia Ann starved herself to death.

Meanwhile, her sons, Quanah and Pecos, had suffered other tragedies. Their father had died from an infected arrow wound. Then Pecos died of disease, probably in one of the cholera epidemics that repeatedly decimated the Comanche.

With no ties to hold him Quanah joined the Quahadi, a particularly warlike and anti-White band of the Comanche. When the Civil War stripped Texan forts of US soldiers and sent 60,000 Texan men flocking to the Confederate colours, the Quahadi Comanche were in the forefront of the devastation of central Texas. Hundreds of settlers were killed, their homes burnt to the ground.

In the course of these Comanche Wars of the 1860s, Quanah rose to become a war chief of the Quahadi band, second only to Bull Bear, the main Quahadi leader. Quanah was famed for his exploits in war, and his unbending opposition to the Whites. During a debate with other Comanche chiefs he declared: “My band is not going to live on the reservation. Tell the White chiefs that the Quahadi are warriors.”

Refusing to attend the Medicine Lodge peace talks of 1867, Quanah instead marauded Texas, always afterwards retiring to the Quahadi sanctuary of the Staked Plains, a hostile arid land in the Texas Panhandle in which the Whites showed little interest. There the Quahadi were joined by other holdout bands of Comanche and Kiowa who refused to take the White road offered at Medicine Lodge, such as that of Woman Heart. On the remote Staked Plains the Indians still had freedom to live in the old ways.

It was about the last place on the southern plains where they could do so.

Occasionally news of the Comanche and Kiowa who had signed the Medicine Lodge Treaty came to the Texas Panhandle. The news was not good.

Government rations on the barren Comanche–Kiowa reservation in Indian Territory were pitiful. The inhabitants resented the attempts to teach them to farm, and the intrusions of Whites and eastern Indians onto their lands. Most of all these free-riding hunters of the endless plains were unable to accept confinement, or forsake the calendar joys of the buffalo hunt. Before long, Kiowa and Comanche alike were jumping the reservation to hunt. Outside reservation limits they came into violent conflict with White settlers.

In spring 1871, Satanta (White Bear) led a hundred Kiowa and Comanche off the reservation. Some of their annuity goods had been diverted to Texans, and they decided to make up the loss with a raid. They also wanted to stop a railroad being built across their old and beloved hunting grounds. On the prairie they spotted a luckless mule train and swooped down on it. Seven teamsters were killed. The Indians then plundered the train and made off with 41 mules.

When he returned to the reservation, Satanta was summoned before General William T. Sherman, out in the West on a tour of inspection. Before Sherman, Satanta gave a defiant account of the raid. At this, Sherman gave a sharp command and soldiers, previously hidden, appeared at the windows behind him with their rifles levelled. Satanta pulled a carbine from beneath his blanket and pointed it at Sherman’s heart. For a few, brief moments it looked as though Satanta and the chiefs with him would kill Sherman in a suicidal shooting match. The General’s nerve held, however, and the chiefs put up their guns.
Satanta, Satank and Big Tree were arrested and sent to Texas to be tried for murder.

During the journey to Texas Satank, manacled hand and foot, began singing his death song: “O sun you remain forever, but we Ko-eet-senko must die, / O earth you remain forever, but we Ko-eet-senko must die.” He made a grab for a rifle, but was shot before he could fire it. Satanta and Big Tree were tried and sentenced to death by the court in Jacksboro, Texas, in July 1871 but on the advice of Indian agents and the trial judge, who feared an Indian uprising if the chiefs were hanged, the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment.

But the Kiowas wanted Satanta, their great chief, free. When their entreaties failed, they began raiding. They captured an army ordinance train, drove off 127 mules from Camp Supply, and raided the home of a Texas family. Lone Whites on trails and in settlements were murdered.

Once again, the Kiowa were at war.

The tribulations of the Kiowa alarmed and agitated the Quahadi Comanche. Chief Quanah resolved ever more strongly to resist the White man. He soon had the chance to show his resolution.

Determined to halt Quahadi raiding in Texas, the Army assigned Colonel Ranald Slidell Mackenzie to conquer the band and other holdouts operating from the Staked Plains. Unapproachable and merciless, Mackenzie was considered by Ulysses S. Grant to be the most “promising young officer in the Army”. Like other Civil War heroes, how-ever, he had much to learn about Indian fighting.

In September 1871, Mackenzie assembled 600 troopers for an invasion of the Staked Plains. But Quanah and Bull
Bear did not oblige Mackenzie with the frontal fight he wanted. Instead, they harried his columns and made reckless lightning thrusts, before wheeling away and vanishing. Often the war parties were led by Quanah himself. He made an impressive, unforgettable sight in battle. A cavalry officer who fought Quanah wrote in his memoirs:

A large and powerfully built chief led the bunch on a coal black racing pony. His heels nervously working in the animal’s side, with a six-shooter poised in the air, he seemed the incarnation of savage brutal joy. His face was smeared with black war paint, which gave his features a satanic look. A large cruel mouth added to his ferocious appearance. Bells jingled as he rode at headlong speed, followed by the leading warriors, all eager to outstrip him in the race.

Shortly after midnight on 10 October 1871 Quanah led a charge through Mackenzie’s encampment, flapping buffalo skins and ringing bells to panic the cavalry’s horses. The Quahadi ran off 70 mounts, including Mackenzie’s own prized animal. When Mackenzie sent a detachment of troopers after the Comanche, the Indians unceremoniously beat them off.

The relentless Mackenzie kept after the Quahadi. But in mid-October blizzards caused him to end the mission. On the way home, Mackenzie chased two Comanche who were trailing the column – and got an arrow in the hip.

But the redoubtable Mackenzie was back in the field by March 1872, hunting the Comanche. He campaigned throughout the summer, and in September his scouts came across a camp of the Kotsoteka Comanche on McClellan Creek. Mackenzie and 231 troopers attacked, killing 23 warriors and taking 124 women and children captive.

Mackenzie’s victory at the creek was a crippling blow to the Kotsoteka. Most of the band trickled to the reservation. Even the Quahadi lost their morale, and raiding almost ceased. A strange quiet descended on the west Texas frontier.

It held for almost two years, but in 1874 the South Plains War set the Panhandle afire.

Having stripped Kansas of buffalo, White hunters began to drift south in March 1874 and set up a base near the deserted trading post of Adobe Walls (where Carson had engaged the Comanche a decade before) on the South Canadian River. The presence of these buffalo hunters enraged the Indians, for it seemed the end of their world. The White hunters had to be fought.

Another cause of the war was the governor of Texas. In 1873 the Kiowa chiefs Satanta and Big Tree were released from prison. This was offset by the demand of the governor of Texas that five Comanche braves on the reservation be surrendered to him as punishment for a raid which had occurred on Texas.

The Comanche refused to give up five men to an unknown fate. Instead, they moved out on the plains. So did the Cheyenne, Arapaho and some of the Kiowa.

In the spring of 1874, Quanah called a great council of all the Indians holding out on the south plains. They met near the mouth of Elk Creek and debated, and held a medicine dance. Isa-tai (Rear End of a Wolf), a young Quahadi medicine man, prophesied that an all-out attack would drive the White man away. “The buffalo shall come back everywhere,” said Isa-tai, “so that there shall be feasting and plenty in the lodges. The Great Spirit has taught me strong medicine which will turn away the White man’s bullets.”

Quanah probably thought Isa-tai a fraud, but saw how desperately the others wanted to believe his predictions.
He even allowed Isa-tai to organize a sun dance, not a ceremony the Comanche observed. After the celebration, the Indians agreed to launch a combined attack on the buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls. From there they would move north, raiding all the camps in Panhandle country.

Before dawn on 27 June 1874, 700 warriors moved through the darkness and took up positions in the timber at the edge of Adobe Walls Creek. Before them were the three adobe buildings of the camp, and 30 sleeping hunters.

The hunters would have been slain in their sleep but for the luck of a ridge pole which happened to snap just before daylight. The noise awoke the hunter Billy Dixon, who chanced to go outside. In the grey dawn he saw hundreds of warriors moving towards the camp and shouted the alarm.