by S. C. Gwynne
Still, the job appealed to Hays, who was after adventure as much as wages. Surveying parties began to include not only the surveyors, but armed guards for the surveyors, as well as adventuresome types who just felt like tagging along, exploring the land, doing some hunting, and possibly shooting an Indian.34 For the fearless, the unattached, and the rough-and-ready, it was a good time to be living in San Antonio, Texas. The land on the edge of the Balcones Escarpment was strikingly beautiful. There were gentle live-oak savannahs, and in the spring they exploded into a rainbow spectrum of wildflowers. Game abounded: buffalo, bear, deer, antelope, wild turkeys, sandhill cranes, coyotes, wolves, and deer by the tens of thousands. The crystal clear limestone rivers like the Llano, the Guadalupe, the Pedernales, and the San Marcos were jumping with fish.35
Plenty of these young men died hard deaths in their new paradise, including Hays’s own cousin. Hays was undeterred. He did quite a bit of surveying: In 1838 he successfully surveyed seventy-six head rights.36 He also began to make a name for himself as an Indian fighter, especially one who knew how to keep his men alive. According to one writer who knew him, “The little Tennessean would seem to be another man when the cry ‘Indians’ was raised. He would mount a horse and assume the appearance of a different being. With him it was charge, and war to the knife, and the Indians were whipped every time they attacked his party.”37 Like Grant in the Civil War, Hays worried less about what his adversaries could do to him than about what damage he could inflict on them. Like Grant, too, he was all about offense. In conversation he was soft-spoken and well-mannered; in a fight he was cold as ice and firmly in command of men who quickly deferred to him. Having made his name keeping surveyors alive, he began to ride with the new ranging companies, who were often the same people who went out to guard surveying teams. We know that he fought at the Battle of Plum Creek, and that he was part of the ill-fated Moore expedition of 1839 that returned ignominiously home on foot.38 We do not know much more about his first years.
But he had clearly distinguished himself. In 1840, at the age of twenty-three, Hays became captain of the San Antonio station of the Rangers, a force that had been officially established by the Texas Republic but was still required to furnish its own arms, equipment, horses, and even food. There was no pay at first; later it would be set at $30 a month, when it arrived at all.39 Some of the funds in the early days came from donations from ordinary citizens. (The Rangers as an organization existed only intermittently, living from congressional authorization to authorization, often disbanding then reforming.) Considering the life expectancy of the new Indian fighters—two years at the outside—it was a job not everyone would have wanted. And yet changes were already taking place that were shifting the odds. No one knew this better than Hays. For one thing, the new breed of Ranger—the Hays Ranger—knew how to ride. And he was mounted on an agile and fast horse, the product of local breeding of mustangs with Kentucky, Virginia, and Arabian strains. Those horses were heavier than the Indian mounts, but they could run with mustangs and keep up with them over long distances. It was said that Hays would not accept any recruit whose horse was worth less than $100.
Under Hays the ranging companies, rarely numbering more than fifteen or twenty men—began to behave more and more like the people they were hunting. “They moved as lightly over the prairie as the Indians did,” wrote Caperton, “and lived as they did, without tent, with a saddle for a pillow at night.”40 Hays, in particular, paid a good deal of attention both to his Comanche foes and to his Lipan Apache scouts, learning from them how to ride, fight, track, make camp. Each man had a rifle, two pistols, and a knife; he had a Mexican blanket secured behind his saddle, and a small wallet in which he carried salt and cold flour and tobacco.41 That was all. Like Comanches, the Rangers often traveled by moonlight, navigating by river courses and the north star, and dispensing with fires altogether, making “cold camps” and eating hardtack or other uncooked rations.42 Hays’s men would sleep fully clothed and fully armed, ready to fight at a minute’s notice. They crossed rivers even in freezing weather, swimming by the side of their horses.43 None of this behavior had any precedent in American military history. No cavalry anywhere could bridle and saddle a horse in less time than the Rangers.
Some of this came naturally to these young men, but some was the result of training. Hays insisted that his men practice both shooting and riding. One drill involved setting two six-foot-high posts in the ground forty yards apart. The Ranger would ride toward them at full speed, firing his rifle at the first post and his pistols at the second. Before long they were able to hit a ring on the post that was the size of a man’s head.44 Note that these men were charging and shooting on horseback, a concept taken entirely from Plains Indians. They probably started to do this sometime between 1838 and 1840; whenever the transition took place, it was done in direct imitation of the Comanches’ own style and represented an enormous advance in anti-Indian warfare. The Rangers were the only ones in America who could do anything like that from the saddle, and they were absolutely the only ones who could do it in battle. It came from pure necessity: No one who had fought Comanches could possibly believe that there was any advantage to fighting them dismounted, on open ground.
Riding drills were even more elaborate. In a contemporary description by one of Hays’s men:
After practising for three or four months we became so purfect that we would run our horses half or full speede and pick up a hat, a coat, a blanket, or rope, or even a silver dollar, stand up in the saddle, throw ourselves on the side of our horses with only a foot and a hand to be seen, and shoot our pistols under the horses neck, rise up and reverse, etc.45
What Hays mainly understood was the value of pure audacity, of striking fear and panic in his opponents’ hearts. He was still at a great disadvantage in weaponry: Each of his men had only three shots before they had to stop and reload, an activity that could not be done easily on horseback. Thus his Rangers struck quickly and hard, often from ambush, and often at night, overcoming their odds with a pure and reckless charge. “The one idea rules,” wrote contemporary Victor Rose. “Make a rapid, noiseless march—strike the foe while he was not on the alert—punish him—crush him!” In the fall of 1840, Hays and twenty men encountered a party of two hundred Comanches at a crossing of the Guadalupe River near San Antonio. The Comanches had stolen a large number of horses. Hays put it this way to the men: “Yonder are the Indians, boys, and yonder are our horses. The Indians are pretty strong. But we can whip them. What do you say?”
“Go ahead,” the men replied. Their assumption, as always, was that Hays would lead. “And we’ll follow if there’s a thousand of them.”46 The Indians, very likely in disbelief that white people would be crazy enough to take ten-to-one odds against mounted Comanches in the wilderness, drew themselves into a battle line and waited for the small band to attack. The Texans charged furiously and discharged their three shots; the line of battle was “thrown into confusion.” In the scuffle, the headman was hit and killed; the Indians fled.
In this way Hays and his small companies slammed into the Penateka in central Texas, in engagements that were mostly unrecorded. Hays preferred surprise—killing them, just as the Comanches preferred to do, in their villages while they slept. He had learned the fundamental lesson of plains warfare: It was either victory or death. The Indians gave no quarter, and the Rangers rarely did, either. There was no expectation of honorable surrender. Hays did not always win, though he was astoundingly successful in preserving the lives of his men. In one fight he took one hundred twenty men and fifteen to twenty Lipan Apaches into battle against a vastly larger force of Comanches, losing twenty to thirty.47 In another he took fifty Texans and ten Lipans, engaged a larger force in a running fight for an hour and a half. Hays’s horses faltered, then broke down, unable to stay with the Comanche ponies. Several of his men were wounded. According to his own report, “Hays was now out of provisions and was forced to subsist on his broken down horses, until
he reached Bexar [San Antonio].”48
He also learned quickly what would soon become his main advantage: Comanches were extremely predictable. They never changed their methods. They were deeply custom-bound and equally deeply mired in their notions of medicine and magic. They reacted to a given situation—such as the killing of their war chief or medicine man—in exactly the same way, every time. In white man’s terms, they were easily spooked. What Hays did appeared to be unbelievably brave to men who did not have his ability to calculate odds; he was also, it must be said, unbelievably brave.
Hays had other attributes as well; he was extremely cautious where his men’s safety was concerned, and almost motherly in his care of them when they were wounded. He was remarkably industrious in camp, hauling wood and water, staking and hobbling horses, cooking food. But “when it was a mere question of personal danger his bravery bordered closely on rashness.” He had an iron constitution that made him seemingly impervious to discomfort, bad weather, or sleep deprivation: “I have frequently seen him sitting by his campfire at night in some exposed locality,” wrote J. W. Wilbarger,
when rain was falling in torrents, or a cold norther with sleet or snow was whistling about his ears, apparently as unconscious of all discomfort as if he had been seated in some cozy room of a first class city hotel, and this, perhaps, when all he had eaten for supper was a handful of pecans or a piece of hard tack.49
Though Hays’s exploits in battle were known along the border before his appointment to captain in 1840, two battles in 1841 established his fame on the frontier. The first involved Mexicans. With twenty-five men Hays routed a superior force of cavalry near Laredo, took twenty-five prisoners, and captured twenty-eight horses. He did it on sheer nerve, ordering his men to dismount, advance on the enemy, and to hold their fire well beyond where any normal skirmishers would have dared. Hays, as always, led the charge. At sixty yards—forty yards within the range of their accurate Kentucky rifles—they finally opened up. The Mexicans fled, and the Rangers, without waiting to reload, drew their pistols, jumped on the horses the Mexicans had abandoned, and pursued them.50 The defeat caused a panic in Laredo, many of whose residents “jumped” the Rio Grande in fear of their lives. When Hays approached the city, its alcalde came out with a white flag to beg the Rangers to spare the town.51 They did. They would not always be so kind. In Mexico City in 1847 they once executed eighty men in reprisal for the death of one Ranger.52
The second involved, as most of his fighting did, Comanches. In the summer of 1841 a Comanche war party came down on the settlements around San Antonio, raiding and killing and stealing horses. Hays, with one of the Texas Congress’s intermittent appropriations in hand, raised a company of thirteen men and rode after them, trailing them about seventy miles westward from San Antonio to the mouth of Uvalde Canyon. Hays found the Indians by using a trick he had learned from the Lipans: He simply followed the large flock of vultures that circled in a towering spiral over the Comanches’ bloody middens. Near the camp, Hays spotted and engaged a dozen Comanches. The Rangers charged, and the Indians took cover in a woody thicket.
Hays immediately understood the implications of what his opponents had done: Their arrows would be of little or no use to them in such dense brush. He then ordered his men to surround the thicket and shoot anyone who came out. Though he was wounded in the hand, he took two men with him and went into the thicket—he was later joined by a third—where they fought a four-hour battle with the Indians, killing ten of them. Hays himself made a rare, and casually chilling, report on it to the Texas secretary of war:
The Indians had but one gun, and the thicket being too dense to admit their using their arrows well, they fought under great disadvantage but continued to struggle to the last, keeping up their warsongs until they were all hushed in death. Being surrounded by horsemen, ready to cut them down if they left the thicket, and unable to use their arrows with much effect in their situation their fate was inevitable—they saw it and met it like heroes.53
It was an astonishing display of warrior prowess. For it, Hays was promoted to major. He was not yet twenty-five.
Despite his success fighting Comanches, Hays still faced one very large and intractable problem: his single-shot, hard-to-reload rifles and old-style pistols put him at a severe disadvantage against Comanches who carried twenty arrows in their quivers. There was no way around it. He had tried to adapt the long rifle to mounted use—and had actually worked minor miracles—but it was still a clumsy weapon that was best fired and reloaded on the ground. It was still the old backwoods rifle from Pennsylvania via Kentucky. Its shortcomings accounted, in large part, for the berserk aggressiveness of Hays’s Rangers in battle. To stand pat was to be soon peppered with iron-tipped arrows. Headlong attack, for all of its risks, remained a far safer idea.
Meanwhile, back in the civilized, industrializing East, an enterprise was under way that would soon solve Hays’s problem, and in so doing change the world, but for now was mired in failure and obscurity. In 1830 a sixteen-year-old with big ideas and a knack for intricate mechanics named Samuel Colt had carved his first model of a revolving pistol out of wood. Six years later, he took out a patent on it. In 1838 a company in Paterson, New Jersey, began to manufacture Colt’s patented firearms. Among them was a .36-caliber, five-chambered revolving pistol with an octagonal barrel and a concealed trigger that dropped down when the gun was cocked. It was not the first such idea, but it was believed to be the first that was put into production for general use.
There was just one problem with the new gun. No one wanted it. The weapon’s natural market, the U.S. government, could not see any application and refused to subsidize it. The weapon had the feel of a cavalry sidearm, but just then the U.S. Army did not have a cavalry. Nor did the new pistol seem to interest private citizens. It was a nifty, if somewhat impractical, product. Oddly, the only people who wanted it were in the exotic and faraway Republic of Texas. In 1939, President Mirabeau Lamar directed the Texas navy, of all things, to order 180 five-shot Colt revolvers from the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company in Paterson. Later the Texas army ordered another forty.54 The pistols were shipped and paid for. There is no particular evidence that they were ever used by sailors or anyone else in the service of the Texas government. It seemed to be an obscure and impractical weapon destined for an obscure and irrelevant branch of the Texas military. Such as it was. And there they languished.
No one knows exactly how these revolvers came into the hands of Jack Hays and his Rangers. But they most certainly did. In later correspondence with Colt, Samuel Walker, one of Hays’s most celebrated lieutenants, placed the date sometime in 1843.55 This is probably accurate, since that was the same year Sam Houston disbanded the navy.56 Whenever the event took place, the Rangers immediately grasped the significance of such weapons. To them, Colt’s contraption was a revelation: a multishot weapon that could be used from horseback and thus, at long last, even the odds. Though there is no record of it, Hays and his men must have spent long hours practicing with the new weapons and figuring out what they could do. And they must have spent many nights around the campfire discussing the revolver’s strengths and weaknesses.
The new Colt revolver had many weaknesses. It was fragile. The bullets it fired were of a light caliber when a heavier load—.44 caliber or larger—was needed. It was not terribly accurate except at close range. It employed pre-loaded cylinders, which meant that a Ranger armed with two pistols and four cylinders had forty shots. But the cylinders were difficult to change, and when they were empty a man in the field could not reload them. That, however, did not change the basic, astounding fact of a revolving chamber. Hays and the rest of his Rangers, notably Ben McCulloch and Samuel Walker, were convinced of its potential. By the spring of 1844 they were ready to give Colt’s unpopular, oddball revolver its first combat test.
That test came to be known as the Battle of Walker’s Creek, a minor military engagement that became one of the defining moments in the histo
ry of Texas and of the American West. Indeed, it can be argued that before Jack Hays arrived in San Antonio, Americans in the West went about largely on foot and carried Kentucky rifles. By the time he left in 1849, anybody going west was mounted and carrying a holstered six-shooter. Walker’s Creek was the beginning of that change.
In early June 1844, Hays and fifteen men were scouting the upper courses of the Pedernales and Llano. They were in the hill country, west of Austin and San Antonio, the Penateka heartland. Finding nothing, they headed back toward home. On June 8, they stopped to gather honey from a bee tree on Walker’s Creek, a tributary of the Guadalupe River about fifty miles north of San Antonio. Hays, meanwhile, had dispatched two of his men to lag behind the group, and see if they were being followed. This was an old Indian practice. Hays had learned many old Indian practices. The two men soon dashed into camp and breathlessly reported that they had found ten sets of Indian horse tracks behind them. The company quickly saddled up and countermarched in the direction of the Indians. As they approached, three or four Indians made a great show of alarm, and then an even greater show of fleeing for their lives. Another old Indian trick. Hays did not fall for it, and he did not pursue them.57
Soon the rest of the body of Penatekas—seventy-five of them—showed themselves. The Texans advanced slowly, while the Indians fell back to the top of a steep hill, a superb defensive redoubt in the broken, rocky country timbered with live oak. From there they taunted the Rangers, yelling in Spanish and English, “Charge! Charge!”