by S. C. Gwynne
If there existed an implacably hostile human barrier to Spanish, French, and American advance in the form of the Plains Indians, there also existed an actual, physical barrier. For people living in the twenty-first century this is hard to imagine, because the land today is not as it was in the nineteenth century. Almost all of the American landscape has now been either farmed, ranched, logged, or developed in some way, and in many parts of the country the raw distinctions between forest and prairie have been lost. But in its primeval state, almost all of North America, from the eastern coast to the 98th meridian—a line of longitude that runs north to south roughly through the modern cities of San Antonio, Oklahoma City, and Wichita—was densely timbered, and the contrast between the dense eastern woodlands and the “big sky” country of the west would have been stark. A traveler going west would have seen nothing like open prairie until he hit the 98th meridian, whereupon, in many places, he would have been literally staring out of a dark, Grimm Brothers forest at a treeless plain. It would have seemed to him a vast emptiness. At that point, everything the pioneer woodsman knew about how to survive—including building houses, making fire, and drawing water—broke down. It was why the plains were the very last part of the country to be settled.
The main reason was rainfall. Or lack of it. Just west of the 98th, the annual rainfall dropped below twenty inches; when that happens trees find it hard to survive; rivers and streams become sparse. The ecology of the plains was, moreover, one of fire—constant lightning- or Indian-induced conflagrations that cut enormous swaths through the plains and killed most saplings that did not live in river or stream bottoms. A traveler coming out of humid, swampy, rain-drenched, pine-forested, river-crossed Louisiana would have hit the first prairie somewhere south of present-day Dallas, not very far from Parker’s Fort. Indeed, one of the reasons Parker’s Fort marked the limit of settlement in 1836 was that it was very near the edge of the Great Plains. That land consisted of rolling, creased plains dotted with timber; there was thicker timber in the bottoms of the Navasota River. (From the Parkers’ point of view this was quite deliberate; they built a stockade fort, after all, of cedar.) But a hundred miles west there would have been no timber at all, and by the time the traveler reached modern-day Lubbock and Amarillo, he would have seen nothing but a dead flat and infinitely receding expanse of grama and buffalo grasses through which only a few gypsum-laced rivers ran and on which few landmarks if any would have been distinguishable. Travelers of the day described it as “oceanic,” which was not a term of beauty. They found it empty and terrifying. They also described it as “trackless,” which was literally true: All traces of a wagon train rolling through plains grass would disappear in a matter of days, vanishing like beach footprints on an incoming tide.
Not only were the High Plains generally without timber and water, they were also subject to one of the least hospitable climates in North America. In the summer came brutal heat and blowtorch winds, often a hundred degrees or hotter, that would later destroy whole crops in a matter of days. The winds caused the eyes to burn, the lips to crack, and the body to dehydrate with alarming speed. In fall and winter there was the frequent “norther”—a sudden strong wind from the north, often at gale force, accompanied by a solid sheet of black clouds and enormous billowing clouds of blown sand. A norther could send the temperature plunging by fifty degrees in an hour. A “blue” norther had the additional feature of freezing, driven rain. This was routine weather on the plains.
Worst of all was the blizzard. People from the east or west coasts of America may think they have seen a blizzard. Likely they have not. It is almost exclusively a phenomenon of the plains, and got its name on the plains. It entailed wind-driven snow so dense and temperatures so cold that anyone lost in them on the shelterless plains was as good as dead. In the years after the plains were settled it was not unusual for people to become lost and die while walking from their barns to their houses. Howling winds blew for days. Forty- to fifty-foot snowdrifts were common, as were “whiteouts” where it no longer became possible to tell the ground from the air. Plains blizzards swallowed whole army units, settlements, and Indian villages. This, too, was Comancheria, the beautiful and unremittingly hostile place they had chosen, the southernmost and richest range of the American buffalo. This was the very last part of the continent conquered and held by the U.S. Army. The last part anyone wanted, the last part civilized. The land alone stood a good chance of killing you. The fact that it was inhabited by Comanches and other mounted Indians made death something of a certainty.
This is where Rachel Plummer was now, very likely five hundred miles beyond the nearest settlement, in a place where only a few white men had ever been. From a settler’s viewpoint, this was just empty territory, part of the United States by dint of the Louisiana Purchase (1803) but without forts or soldiers or even human beings beyond the odd trapper or explorer or occasional mule train along the nearby Santa Fe Trail. The first caravans would not roll across the Oregon Trail for four years. This was Indian land; lived on by Indians, hunted by Indians, and fought over by Indians. In Rachel’s account, she spent much of her thirteen months of captivity on the high plains, though she also describes a journey through the Rocky Mountains, where “I suffered more from cold than I ever suffered in my life before. It was very seldom I had anything to put on my feet, but very little covering for my body.”7
She was a slave and was treated like one. Her job was to tend the horses at night and to “dress” buffalo skins by day, with a quota that she had to fill every full moon. This process involved painstakingly scraping all the flesh off the skin with a sharp bone. Lime was then applied to absorb grease, then the brains of the buffalo were rubbed all over it until it became soft.8 To make the quota and avoid a beating she often took her buffalo skins with her while she tended the horses. She had been given to an old man, and thus had become the servant of his wife and daughter, both of whom mistreated her.
Rachel’s kidnapping may seem the somewhat random product of a random raid on a Texas settlement. There were, in fact, important reasons for what had happened to her, all related to the highly specialized buffalo economy of the plains. Hides and robes had always been useful trading items. (Comanche trade rested on horses, hides, and captives.) The hides were rising in value, so much so that, while an individual Comanche might eat only six buffalo per year, he would now kill an average of forty-four per year, and the number grew every year. The women, of course, did all the value-added work: preparing the hides and decorating the robes. The men of the plains soon realized that the more wives they had, the greater their production of hides would be, thus the more manufactured goods they could trade for.9 This simple commercial fact had two important effects: first, an increase in polygamy among Indian men; and second, a desire to seize and hold more women captives. These changes were perhaps more instinctive than deliberate among the Comanches. But it meant that Rachel’s days would always be long and hard, and that she would always have to meet her quotas.
She was also, unfortunately, pregnant. She had been four months pregnant at the time of the Parker raid, and had borne all of this misery in advancing stages of pregnancy. In October 1836 she gave birth to her second son. She knew immediately that the child was in danger. She spoke the Comanche language well enough to, as she put it, “expostulate with my mistress to advise me what to do to save my child.”10 To no avail. Her master thought the infant too much trouble, and feeding him meant that Rachel was not able to work full-time. One morning, when the baby was seven weeks old, half a dozen men came. While several of them held Rachel, one of them strangled the baby, then handed him to her. When he showed signs of life, they took him again, this time tying a rope around his neck and dragging him through prickly pear cactus, and eventually dragged him behind a horse around a hundred-yard circuit. “My little innocent one was not only dead, but literally torn to pieces,” wrote Rachel.11
The tribe moved on. In spite of what she had been through, Rachel s
omehow kept up her daily routines. She managed to note details of the flora, fauna, and geography that she saw. She wrote about prairie foxes, mirages of cool blue lakes that would appear magically in front of her, and shell fossils on the open plains. In what amounted to the first ethnography of the tribe, she noted details of Comanche society. The group moved every three or four days; the men danced every night; some worshipped pet crows or deerskins; before going into battle the men would drink water every morning until they vomited; taboos included never allowing a human shadow to fall across cooking food. When she had free time, she climbed to the top of mountains and even explored a cave. With her new grasp of the language, she was able to eavesdrop on a large Indian powwow near the headwaters of the Arkansas River. Since women were not allowed in tribal councils, “I was several times repulsed with blows,” she wrote, “but I cheerfully submitted to abuse and persevered in listening to their proceedings.”12 She overheard a plan for a large-scale, multitribe invasion of Texas. After taking Texas, and driving out the inhabitants, they would attack Mexico. The attack was to come either in 1838 or 1839.
In spite of Rachel’s amazing resilience, she began to lose hope. She believed that her son, James, was probably dead, and that her husband, father, and mother had probably not survived the attack at Parker’s fort. She had almost no hope of escaping, or of ever changing her status in the tribe. Despondent, suicidal, but unable to kill herself, she decided to provoke her captors into doing the job for her. After being ordered by her captor’s daughter (“my young mistress”) to get a root-digging tool from the lodge, she refused. The young woman screamed at her, then ran at her. Rachel threw her onto the ground, held her down “fighting and screaming,” and began beating her over the head with a buffalo bone, expecting “at every moment to feel a spear reach my heart from one of the Indians.”13 If they were going to kill her, she was determined at least to make a cripple of her captor. As this unfolded, she realized that a large crowd of Comanche men had gathered around them. They were all yelling, but no one touched her. She won the fight. “I had her past hurting me and indeed nearly past breathing, when she cried out for mercy,” wrote Rachel. She let go of her adversary, who was bleeding freely, then picked her up, carried her back to the camp and washed her face. For the first time, the woman seemed friendly.
Not so her adoptive mother, who told Rachel she intended to burn her to death. (She had burned Rachel before with fire and hot embers.) Now Rachel and the old woman fought, in and around the roaring fire. Both were badly burned; Rachel knocked the woman into the fire twice and held her there. During the fight they broke through one side of the tipi. Again, a crowd of men assembled to watch them. Again, no one intervened. Again, Rachel won. The following morning twelve chiefs assembled at the “council house” to hear the case. All three women testified. The verdict: Rachel was sentenced to replace the lodge pole she had broken. She agreed, provided that the young woman helped her. After that, Rachel says, “all was peace again.”
It is impossible to read Rachel Plummer’s memoir without making moral judgments about the Comanches. The torture-killing of a defenseless seven-week-old infant, by committee decision no less, is an act of almost demonic immorality by any modern standard. The systematic gang rape of women captives seems to border on criminal perversion, if not some very advanced form of evil. The vast majority of Anglo-European settlers in the American West would have agreed with those assessments. To them, Comanches were thugs and killers, devoid of ordinary decency, sympathy, or mercy. Not only did they inflict horrific suffering, but from all evidence they enjoyed it. This was perhaps the worst part, and certainly the most frightening part. Making people scream in pain was interesting and rewarding for them, just as it is interesting and rewarding for young boys in modern-day America to torture frogs or pull the legs off grasshoppers. Boys presumably grow out of that; for Indians, it was an important part of their adult culture and one they accepted without challenge.
A story from the early 1870s illustrates the larger point. According to the account of a former child captive named Herman Lehmann, who later became a full-fledged warrior, a group of Comanches had attacked some Tonkawa Indians, in their camp. They had killed some of them and run off the rest. In the abandoned camp, they found some meat roasting in the fire. It turned out to be the leg of a Comanche. The Tonkawas, known for their cannibalism, had been preparing a feast. This sent the Comanches into a fury of vengeance, and they pursued the Tonkawas. A fierce battle followed, in which eight Comanches were killed and forty were wounded. Still, they were victorious, and now, in the battle’s aftermath, they turned to deal with the enemy’s wounded and dying. “A great many were gasping for water,” wrote Lehmann, who was there,
but we heeded not their pleadings. We scalped them, amputated their arms, cut off their legs, cut out their tongues, and threw their mangled bodies and limbs upon their own campfire, put on more brushwood and piled the living, dying and dead Tonkaways on the fire. Some of them were able to flinch and work as worms, and some were able to speak and plead for mercy. We piled them up, put on more wood, and danced around in great glee as we saw the grease and blood run from their bodies, and were delighted to see them swell up and hear the hide pop as it would burst in the fire.14
This sort of cruelty is a problem in any narrative about American Indians, because Americans like to think of their native aboriginals as in some ways heroic or noble. Indians were, in fact, heroic and noble in many ways, especially in defense of their families. Yet in the moral universe of the West—in spite of our own rich tradition of torture, which includes officially sanctioned torments in Counter-Reformation Europe and sovereign regimes such as that of Peter the Great in Russia—a person who tortures or rapes another person or who steals another person’s child and then sells him cannot possibly be seen that way. Crazy Horse was undoubtedly heroic in battle and remarkably charitable in life. But as an Oglala Sioux he was also a raider, and raiding meant certain very specific things, including the abuse of captives. His great popularity—a giant stone image of him is being carved from a mountain in South Dakota—may have a great deal to do with the fact that very little is known about his early life.15 He is free to be the hero we want him to be.
Thus some chroniclers ignore the brutal side of Indian life altogether; others, particularly historians who suggest that before white men arrived Indian-to-Indian warfare was a relatively bloodless affair involving a minimum of bloodshed, deny it altogether.16 But certain facts are inescapable: American Indians were warlike by nature, and they were warlike for centuries before Columbus stumbled upon them. They fought over hunting grounds, to be sure, but they also made a good deal of brutal and bloody war that was completely unnecessary. The Comanches’ relentless and never-ending pursuit of the hapless Tonkawas was a good example of this, as was their harassment of Apaches long after they had been driven from the buffalo grounds.
Such behavior was common to all Indians in the Americas. The more civilized agrarian tribes of the east, in fact, were far more adept at devising lengthy and agonizing tortures than the Comanches or other plains tribes.17 The difference lay in the Plains Indians’ treatment of female captives and victims. Rape or abuse, including maiming, of females had existed when eastern tribes had sold captives as slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But that practice had been long ago abandoned. Some tribes, including the giant Iroquois federation, had never treated women captives that way.18 Women could be killed, and scalped. But not gang-raped. What happened to the Parker captives could only have happened west of the Mississippi. If the Comanches were better known for cruelty and violence, that was because, as one of history’s great warring peoples, they were in a position to inflict far more pain than they ever received.
Most important, the Indians themselves saw absolutely nothing wrong with these acts. For westering settlers, the great majority of whom believed in the idea of absolute good and evil, and thus of universal standards of moral behavior, this was nearly
impossible to understand. Part of it had to do with the Comanches’ theory of the nature of the universe, which was vastly different from that of the civilized West. Comanches had no dominant, unified religion, or anything like a single God. Though in interviews after their defeat they often seemed to go along with the idea of a “Great Spirit,” Comanche ethnographers Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel were extremely skeptical of any creation myths that involved a single spirit or an “evil one.”19 “We never gave much consideration to creation,” said an old Comanche named Post Oak Jim in an interview in the 1930s. “We just knew we were here. Our thoughts were mostly directed toward understanding the spirits.”20
The Comanches lived in a world alive with magic and taboo; spirits lived everywhere, in rocks, trees, and in animals. The main idea of their religion was to find a way to harness the powers of these spirits. Such powers thus became “puha,” or “medicine.” There was no dogma, no priestly class to impose systematic religion, no tendency to view the world as anything but a set of isolated episodes, with no deeper meaning. There were behavioral codes, to be sure—a man could not steal another man’s wife without paying penalties, for example. But there was no ultimate good and evil: just actions and consequences; injuries and damages due.