‘We had stood ready to pick it up at Jacksborough,’ Reed said, but the other men assured him that Grierson was more than happy to extend the courtesy: ‘We have some young fellows who need the experience.’
‘Likewise,’ Reed said, and it was arranged that six days after the Fort Richardson men started west, Second Lieutenant Elmer Toomey, supported by First Sergeant John Jaxifer, would ride toward Three Cairns, those informal piles of rock which had been stacked on the treeless plains to mark the way to Fort Garner, to pick up the wagon train and bring it safely home.
Chief Matark and Amos Peavine had been kept informed of both the arrival of the C&C train at Jacksborough and the movement of a four-man escort west from Fort Richardson. ‘If they join up with the men from Fort Garner coming east to meet them,’ Matark warned, ‘they might be too strong for us.’ But Peavine reassured him: ‘The Fort Richardson men will come only halfway, then ride back to Jacksborough. We’ll have to fight only the small escort sent out by Fort Garner.’
‘If that, where do we attack?’
‘During the last half. Then the stronger force at Fort Richardson would have more difficulty sending help.’
Carefully the two plotters analyzed the situation, with Peavine supplying the relevant details concerning army strength: ‘Eight wagons, driver and shotgun each, that’s sixteen guns right there, but those C&C drivers don’t like to fight. Real cowards. The Buffalo Soldiers, they like to fight and think three of them can lick twenty of us.’ Any crusty Comanchero like the Rattlesnake liked to use the pronouns we and us when talking with his Indians. ‘Grierson, he’d send four men at most. Reed, this is his first fort as commander. He’ll send maybe a dozen. But whereas Grierson would never send an untried man, not on any mission at all, Reed might.’
‘More men in the second half?’ Matark asked. ‘But weaker?’
Before Peavine could respond, a scout rode up, quivering with excitement but also laughing: ‘Come see! You must see!’ And he led the two men nearly a mile south to where two other scouts were lying on the ground at the edge of a slight rise, below which nestled a small protected tank near which a soldier whose blue jacket lay beside him was twisting on the ground with a young woman who looked as if she might be very pretty indeed. They were making love, and for a long moment the five watchers looked approvingly.
‘Shall we kill them?’ one of the scouts asked, and each of the other four men thought how astonished those lovers would be if they were interrupted in their raptures by four Comanche and a white man with a withered left arm.
The three braves were ready to make the charge down the slopes of the little vale when Peavine halted them: ‘It would alert the fort.’ ‘But they’re so far away.’
‘They would be missed. Their bodies would be found.’ He spoke harshly: ‘It’s the wagons we want,’ but as they rode away he had to chuckle: ‘Wouldn’t they have been surprised?’ And he reined in his horse to look again at the lovers sprawled upon the ground in their secluded swale beside the tank.
At the end of May 1870 the eight creaking and complaining wagons left Jacksborough, throwing clouds of dust so high that Comanche scouts well to the north were assured that the convoy was under way. It was attended, the Indians quietly noted, by only seven cavalrymen: four blacks in front, two at the rear, and one white officer riding slowly back and forth to maintain communication. It was not an orderly procession, nor a compact one, because each driver, his own boss and in no way obedient to the army of which he was not a part, chose the track that he thought best, which meant that the line straggled ridiculously.
‘I’d keep that line firmed up,’ one of the troopers advised the carters, but they snapped: ‘You mind your horse, we’ll mind our mules.’
‘You’ll want us soon enough if the Comanche strike.’
‘That’s what we always hear. If, if …’
‘Well, damnit, when they do strike, and we’ve heard rumors out of Santa Fe, I want these wagons in a quick line.’
‘They been in line since we left St. Louis.’
Grierson’s men brought the wagons safely to Three Cairns, and when the watching Indians saw that an orderly transfer of responsibility was being made, they faced a problem: ‘If we attack too soon, the Fort Richardson men may gallop back to help. If we attack too late, men from Fort Garner will hear and come out with support.’ They were additionally perplexed when the eastern group, pleased with their work on the plains and loath to ride back to dull garrison duty at Jacksborough, stayed with the Fort Garner men till morning of the second day.
‘When will they leave?’ Matark grumbled, and Peavine had to reply: ‘Who knows? Soldiers, who ever knows about those idiots?’
That morning, however, the Fort Richardson men retired, rode a short distance eastward and fired their guns in the air. Some of the shotgun men riding next to the drivers responded, and now Elmer Toomey, a twenty-one-year-old farm boy from Indiana, fresh from West Point, was in command of his first important detachment. He rode at the front, always attentive to the boundless horizon for indication of storms or Indians; at certain periods only a few trees would be visible, and sometimes he would scan the four points of the compass and see none at all.
At such times Sergeant Jaxifer rode slowly back and forth, checking on his ten horsemen but never speaking to or even looking at the sixteen carters, who were disgusted to think that they were being guarded by niggers. One, a surly fellow from West Virginia who would have sold half his cargo in Jacksborough had not one of the cavalrymen kept close watch, protested to Lieutenant Toomey: ‘You keep them niggers well shy of me. You ask me, we fought on the wrong side in the Civil War.’
‘They’re soldiers of the United States Army,’ Toomey said stiffly. ‘I’m an officer in their company,’ and the carter sneered: ‘The more shame for you.’
‘Attention, you bastard! One more word like that and I’ll have you in the guardhouse when we get there.’
The driver, knowing that he could exercise no control over him, laughed: ‘Little boy, don’t play soldier with me. Now run along and nurse your niggers.’
An hour after dawn on the next day this driver shrieked in terror: ‘Comanche! Where in hell’s the army?’
Sixteen unreliable carters and eleven enlisted men led by an untested lieutenant were suddenly responsible for holding off more than a hundred Indian braves on terrain that afforded no protection. But they were not powerless, because the black cavalrymen were toughened professionals and their white lieutenant was about to prove that he more than deserved his rank.
‘Wagons form!’ he shouted, personally leading the tail wagon toward the head of the line and showing the others how to place themselves.
‘Sergeant Jaxifer! Keep your men inside the line of wagons!’ When carters were slow to obey, he threatened to shoot them, and before the Indians could strike he had his band in the best defensive position possible, but even so, they were not prepared, not even the black veterans, for the fury with which the Comanche struck.
From his command post Matark ordered: ‘Circle them! Set them on fire.’
His entire contingent formed a huge circle around the wagons, his braves wheeling counterclockwise, as they preferred, for this enabled them to fire across their steady left arms as they sped. But as the battle waxed, a cadre of fourteen braves bearing lighted brands detached themselves from the circle and dashed boldly at the wagons, trying to throw their flame so as to ignite the canvas covers. Six fell from their saddles, shot dead, but the other eight delivered their fiery brands, which the carters extinguished.
Inside the ring of wagons no orders were issued, for these embattled men required no exhortation. Each was aware of the terrible tortures he was going to undergo if he lost this fight, and each resolved that there would be no surrender. This was a fight to the death, and several wagoners muttered to their friends: ‘If they come at us, at the end I mean, shoot me.’
The eight carters who rode shotgun knew how to use their weapons,
and the eight drivers, shaking with fear, also fired with determination, with the early result that the Indians were kept some distance from the wagons; eleven now lay dead before the first member of the convoy had been seriously wounded.
Toomey stayed mostly with the panicky drivers, and he was furious when the mean-spirited men began to blame their plight on the fact that black troops had been sent to protect them: ‘Damned niggers, don’t know nothin’.’ One man growled as he fumbled with his gun, which had suffered a minor jam: ‘Niggers is no better than Indians. Curse ’em both.’ Toomey said nothing, interpreting the ugly expressions as signs of nervous fear, but he did what he could to reassure the civilians: ‘My men know how to hold a line. We’ll get out of this.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ One of the carters pointed to the north, where a line of at least forty shouting warriors came in solid phalanx.
‘Hold your fire,’ Toomey cried, knowing that Jaxifer would have his own men in readiness. He then called for two of the troopers to help him defend the spot at which the oncoming force seemed likely to hit, and there he stood, heels ground into the sandy soil as if he intended never to be budged.
The Comanche were so determined in what they expected to be their final charge that despite heavy losses to the steady fire of the black troops and the trained shotgun men, they simply rode down the defenders at two points, the victorious braves in the lead galloping right through the circle where mules attached to the wagons lay dead.
But they did not stop. They were not given time in which to rampage inside the circle, because whoever tried was either shot or clubbed down by the troops. They had broken the line, as they were determined to do, but they had not disorganized it, and they had lost many in the attempt. They did, however, succeed in taking with them a good portion of the horses, and had not the mules drawing the wagons been left in harness, they too would surely have been stolen. The men of the 10th Cavalry were now on foot.
Toomey was appalled to see his horses go, but he knew that he must not display either fear or consternation lest the civilians panic: ‘Sergeant Jaxifer, your men in good shape?’
‘Fine, sir.’
Indeed, the cavalry veterans were handling this battle as if it were a parade-ground exercise; they were not impeded by the loss of their horses, for they had learned that in a dozen typical engagements, they would in at least ten be expected to fight on foot. Said critics: ‘They ride comfortably to battle. Dismount and become infantry. Why in hell aren’t they infantry in the first place?’ Such critics were about to receive the best possible answer, but before it manifested itself, the Comanche organized another frontal assault, and this time they directed it specifically at where the surviving drivers stood, for their clever fighters had detected this to be the weak spot of the circle.
Toomey, seeing them come, stood beside the drivers, and once more twisted his heels to dig them in, but when the Indians struck he was powerless to hold them off, and he was tomahawked twice. His head was split open and his left arm, with which he tried vainly to defend himself, was nearly severed.
Jaxifer was now in control, and he was ruggedly determined to save the remnants of this escort, but when he started to tell the carters how they must arrange themselves to be most effective in the charges that he knew would soon come thundering at them, they refused to obey his commands: ‘No nigger tells me what to do.’
He did not respond. Instead he said slowly: ‘Two carters, one cavalryman. That way we can cover the space better.’
‘Don’t you touch me, nigger.’
‘You must move to that weak spot.’
‘I ain’t takin’ no orders …’
Sergeant Jaxifer stopped, smiled: ‘Man, we gonna survive this. They ain’t gonna ride us down, never. But we got to do it sensible. You been in this one fight. I been in sixteen. I don’t lose fights, and I ain’t gonna lose this one. Now fill those gaps.’
After thus disposing of the survivors, he threw a blanket over the corpse of his lieutenant, but even as he did so a terrible pain struck at his heart. He knew that as long as he remained in the service, he would be remembered as the black sergeant who had lost his white commander.
During the fight so far, no member defending the wagons had seen Chief Matark, nor could anyone have been aware that a white man was helping direct the fight, but had the defenders been told that such a man was hidden behind the first small hill, they would have guessed that it was Amos Peavine, for the Rattlesnake’s reputation had reached all the forts. He was the Comanchero they despised but also feared, and the men of this train would not have been surprised to learn that he was again trying to steal army guns for sale to his Indians.
At nine-thirty that morning Peavine was counseling Matark: ‘Wear them down. Send your men in from a different direction each time.’
‘How soon will they surrender?’
Peavine did not want to tell the chief that the behavior of the Comanche toward captives made it unlikely that soldiers would ever surrender, or carters either, so he dissembled: ‘By noon we’ll have the wagons.’
‘The next charge, I lead.’
Peavine did not like this at all, for he had often observed that when a great chief died, the problem of succession could become messy, with the friends of the old chief suddenly the enemies of the new, and he did not like to speculate on what might happen to him if, on this lonely plain, Chief Matark perished in a fruitless attack which he, Peavine, had recommended and helped organize. It was in his interest to see that Matark lived, so he counseled against participation in the charge: ‘You are needed here.’
‘I am needed there,’ Matark growled, and when the charge began, directed at a spot with three fallen horses, he was in the lead. Again his men ripped right into the circle, and again the stubborn black troops with their fiercely effective gunfire drove them out.
But Matark had seen the diminished strength of the defenders, and now he knew for certain that their officer was dead: ‘By noon we take the wagons.’ And this would have been a safe prediction except for the cautious behavior of two men who were not yet engaged in the battle at Three Cairns.
Hermann Wetzel never slept well if even one of his soldiers, infantry or cavalry, was absent from any fort to which he was attached, and he had been attached to many. His stubborn German conscience and his love of Prussian order hounded him if any man was not safely accounted for. Furthermore, the absence of Toomey made him most uneasy, for the young lieutenant was untested and operated under two severe disadvantages, which led Wetzel to interrupt his breakfast and hurry over to Reed’s quarters.
‘It’s a short ride in from the Cairns, and Toomey’s a good man.’
‘But he’s cavalry and they never know tactics. And his men are niggers, and they don’t know anything.’
‘None of that, Colonel.’
‘I’m still worried, sir. Very.’
Reed had put down his knife and fork, arranging them meticulously beside his plate: ‘I’m concerned too. What do you recommend?’
‘I’d send troops out to intercept them. The Comanche have been silent for too long.’
Reed, a man who never flinched from hard decisions, looked directly into the eyes of his German adviser: ‘I think you may be right, Colonel.’ And as soon as these words were uttered, he leaped from the table, rasping out orders for an immediate formation of the remainder of Company R, 10th Cavalry to intercept the incoming train. Of the company’s authorized strength of eighty troopers, only sixty-eight had been sent to Fort Garner; of these, one had deserted, seventeen were on guard duty or in the hospital, and twelve, including young Toomey, were already at Three Cairns. Thus, only thirty-eight answered the muster call.
He would lead, of course, for whenever there was a likelihood of action he insisted upon being in the vanguard; Wetzel, who disliked serving with the cavalry, would remain in charge at the fort, which he could be depended upon to defend should the Indians strike when the others had been lured away. Isolated forts were
sometimes endangered, but not when Captain Wetzel was in command.
Reed wanted to take Jim Logan as cavalry officer, but the Irishman was absent, on a scout, his men said, and when Reed checked quietly, he learned that Mrs. Minor was absent too, but for the moment he decided to do nothing about this: ‘Colonel Minor, you will be second in command.’ And then, with that second sight which had made him an able commander, he added: ‘Full campaign issue.’ Minor deemed it folly to carry full battle gear on such a trivial excursion, considering the abundance of supplies this involved, but he assumed that Reed wished to test his men, so he said nothing, and within eighteen minutes of having made his decision to intercept his young lieutenant, Reed was headed east with Minor and thirty-eight Buffalo Soldiers.
He posted scouts well in advance, of course, but they could find only remnants of Toomey’s march in that direction and no signs whatever of Indian activity. However, one of the ragged older men who served the army, a tracker with one-quarter Indian blood, elected to ride well to the north, from where he returned with ominous news: ‘General Reed! One hundred, two hundred Comanche headed east, maybe six days ago.’ Now it was clear! Chief Matark had made a most daring move.
‘Colonel Minor, he’s going to attack the wagons between here and Jacksborough.’ He was inclined to start immediately at full gallop, but his innate caution directed him to consult his subordinate: ‘How could he be trying to trap us, Minor?’
‘He could be feinting, then attack the fort.’
‘Colonel Wetzel can handle that. How about us?’
‘If he tricks us eastward, what gain to him? Moves us closer to the wagons.’
‘Bugler!’ A muted call, which could be heard only yards away, was sounded and the force of thirty-eight blue-clad troopers spurred their horses into an easy trot. They had gone only a few miles when another scout reported the news which Wetzel had intuitively feared: ‘Major battle. Hundreds of Comanche.’
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