by S. C. Gwynne
Hays obliged them, though not exactly in the way they had imagined. Realizing that he and his fourteen men were temporarily concealed at the base of the hill, he turned his little band and galloped at full speed some two hundred to three hundred yards, circled the bottom of the hill, emerged behind the Indians, and charged their flank.58 Taken by surprise, the Comanches still managed to recover quickly. They split their forces and wheeled on the Texans on both flanks, yelling loudly. Under normal circumstances, their assault would have broken the Ranger battle line. It would have routed them. But in a remarkable display of horsemanship and raw, bone-rattling courage, the Rangers formed a circle with their horses and thus, rump to rump, received the charge.
What happened next—seventy-five Penateka Comanches on fifteen Rangers, arrows and lances against repeating pistols—sounds like pure bloody pandemonium. Several Rangers were badly wounded. Their pistols, meanwhile, were dropping Indians from the saddle at an alarming rate. This stage of the fight lasted fifteen minutes. Then the Indians broke and fled. It became a running fight, and went for more than an hour on over two miles of rough terrain. Urged on by their heroic chief, the Indians kept rallying, regrouping, and attacking, only to be overwhelmed by the Rangers’ fire-spitting Colt revolvers. Forty Indians were now dead or wounded. One Ranger was dead and four were wounded. Still, the fight went on, as the Indian leader rallied his men again and again.
Then, as though to illustrate the five-shooter’s main weakness, Hays’s men ran out of ammunition. More precisely, they had run out of preloaded cylinders, which could not be reloaded in the field, and no one had anything but five-shooters. They were now at the mercy of the thirty-five remaining Indians. Or at least they would be when the Indians figured out their ammunition had run out. Hays then coolly called out to see if anyone had any bullets left. One man, Robert Gillespie, rode forward and said he did. “Dismount and shoot the chief,” ordered Hays. This Gillespie did: At a range of “thirty steps” he dropped the chief from his saddle. The remaining Indians “in wild affright at the loss of their leader . . . scattered in every direction in the brushwood.”59
When the smoke had cleared, twenty Comanches were dead, and another thirty were wounded. Hays had suffered one man killed and three seriously wounded. One of his main lieutenants, Samuel Walker, was pinned to the ground with a Comanche lance. The Rangers made camp there, to care for their wounded. Three days later four Comanches showed up, perhaps to reclaim their dead. Hays attacked once more, killing three of them.
Though it would take awhile for everyone else on the frontier to understand what happened at Walker’s Creek, and it would take the Mexican War to make the U.S. government understand what it meant, a fundamental, paradigm-shattering change had occurred. The Indians now faced the prospect of being blasted from horseback by guns that never emptied; the whites could now fight entirely mounted against their foes with weapons whose frequency of firing nearly matched that of the Comanches. The odds had been evened up. Or better. “Up to this time,” Samuel Walker wrote in a letter to Samuel Colt in 1846, “these daring Indians had always supposed themselves superior to us, man to man, on horse. . . . The result of this engagement was such as to intimidate them and enable us to treat with them.”60
Still, no one outside the Republic of Texas understood what Sam Colt had done. In 1844, fully six years after he had begun to produce his repeating pistols, his invention was a failure. The Paterson, New Jersey, factory had gone into bankrupcty in 1842. Colt managed to keep his patents but little else. The models, prototypes, and plans for his six-shooters were all lost or destroyed. He spent five years in poverty.
But there was hope, and Colt knew it. Word of what Hays and his men were doing with the revolver had reached him in the East. He was so excited that in the fall of 1846 he wrote Samuel Walker in Texas,
with a few inquires regarding your expereance in the use of my repeating fire arm & your opinion as their adoptation to the military service in the war against Mexico—I have hard so much of Col Hayse and your exploits wit the arms of my invention that I have long desired to know you personally & get from you a true narrative of the vareous instances where my arms have proved of more than ordinary utility.61
Walker wrote back immediately and enthusiastically with a description of how effective the revolvers had been at the Battle of Walker’s Creek. “With improvements,” he concluded, “I think they can be rendered the most perfect weapon in the world for mounted troops.”62 From here on Sam Colt’s prospects began very quickly to improve.
The war in Mexico had started and the Texas Rangers had volunteered for it and had been accepted by General Zachary Taylor. They were soon fighting south of the border. They made an extraordinary impression on the U.S. Army in Mexico. They were like nothing anyone had ever seen. They wore no uniforms, provided their own weapons and equipment, and went everywhere mounted. Unlike almost everyone else in the army, they preferred to fight mounted. They served mainly as scouts—effectively transferring the style of warfare they had learned from the Comanches to the lands south of the border—and tales of their bravery, toughness, and resourcefulness spread from the Mexican War around the world. Samuel Walker’s swashbuckling dash with seventy-five men through a field held by fifteen hundred Mexican cavalry and Colonel Jack Hays’s savage efficiency in clearing the roads of Mexican guerrillas were told and retold in salons from Chicago to New York. General Taylor complained of their lawlessness, but the fact of the matter was that the enemy was terrified of them. Everyone was terrified of them.
The most striking thing of all about them was their weaponry. Their five-shot Colts, and their ability to wield them with deadly accuracy from horseback, were the wonder of the army. So much so that the army now wanted more. One thousand of them, to be exact, enough to supply all of the Rangers and other Texans in Mexico. There was just one problem. Colt had not made a revolver of any kind for five years. He had no money, and he had no factory to make them. He did not even have a working model of one of his pistols. He even advertised in the New York newspapers, without success, trying to find one. Still, he offered to sell the army a thousand of them for $25 apiece. With a contract in hand, in January 1847 he convinced his friend Eli Whitney to make the pistols. Now all he had to do was design a brand-new weapon.
And then something remarkable happened. Colt asked Samuel Walker, who happened to be temporarily stationed in Washington, to help him with the design. Colt wrote:
I have sergested the propriaty of your coming to see me before I commence the construction of thes arms. . . . Get from the department an order to cum to New York & direct in the construction of thees arms with the improvements you sergest.63
Thus the two men—the hardened Ranger from the Texas frontier and the ambitious young Connecticut Yankee—became collaborators. Walker was full of ideas. He explained to Colt that he needed a bigger caliber, and that the gun had to be heavier, more rugged, with a longer barrel and a longer and fuller “handle.” His refinements could be quite specific, too: In a letter to Colt on February 19, 1847, he recommended making the “hind sight much finer and the front sight of German silver and of a shape altogether different.”64 It was Colt’s idea to use six chambers instead of five.
The result, the Walker Colt, was one of the most effective and deadly pieces of technology ever devised, one that would soon kill more men in combat than any sidearm since the Roman short sword.65 It was a small cannon. It had an enormous nine-inch barrel and weighed in at four pounds nine ounces. Its revolving chambers held conical .44-caliber bullets that weighed two hundred twenty grains each. The powder charge—fifty grains of black powder—made the new Colt pistol as deadly as a rifle up to a hundred yards.66 Engraved on its barrel—this was Sam Colt’s gift to the Rangers—was an etching of the Battle of Walker’s Creek, as Samuel Walker had described it to him. The sight of a Ranger on horseback, flashing Walker Colt in hand, is one of the indelible images from the Mexican War. It of course saved Colt. Though he lost a
few thousand dollars on this deal, he later became one of the richest men in the country. Samuel Walker died, a hero, on October 9, 1847, in Huamantla, Mexico, from a sniper’s bullet.
Eleven
WAR TO THE KNIFE
IN THE PLEASANT, cool October air, in a lovely prairie upland by a clear spring in a place no taibo had ever been, the woman called Nautdah set about the very hard work of dismantling fifteen-hundred-pound buffaloes. This was women’s work, as was almost anything to do with a buffalo that did not involve tracking it and killing it. Comanche women cut the meat into strips for drying. They tanned the hides and made the robes and harvested the paunch and the sinew and the marrow from bones and the ground-up brains and every other part of the huge beasts that were, collectively, the foundations of Nermernuh existence. Women did everything else, too, it seemed: They cooked and tended to the children and horses, and did the packing when the pasturage ran out or the enemies got too close. They fought, too, usually only defensively; they went along with raiding parties. Nautdah did this.
It is impossible to say if Nautdah was happy, or if happiness had any place in her expectations of life, which amounted to an endless and unyielding progression of hard tasks. There were occasional joys. Children were joys. She had three of them. The oldest, a large, strong boy named Quanah, was twelve. His brother, Peanuts, was a few years younger. And there was the beautiful little girl, Toh-tsee-ah, “Prairie Flower,” who was just a toddler. If there was such a thing as happiness on the crude frontier, she was very likely happy with her marriage, too. Her husband, Peta Nocona, was an enormous, muscular, dark-skinned man and a prominent war chief. She enjoyed his elevated social status. She enjoyed the fruits of his hunting. He was a great raider and had many horses, which made them, in plains terms, rich. She had to share him with only one other wife, a full-blood Comanche woman.
This was October 1860. Though the United States of America was a month away from electing Abraham Lincoln and thus setting in motion political events that would break the nation apart and spill the blood of a million men, none of this was apparent to Nautdah or her family. She and her people could read the presence of white men. They were extraordinarily tuned to the presence or absence of military power, to the pulse and increase of settlement, or to the presence or absence of military will. They understood when the game did not return to the hunting grounds. But they saw everything from the remoteness of the plains, still a vast piece of the American continent’s midsection where much of life continued, amazingly, as it had before. Nautdah lived a life with her family that was not unlike the life of a Comanche woman in 1760. Or, in many ways, 1660. There were still buffalo. The Comanches still made war. They were still unchallenged in 95 percent of the old homelands.
The reader may well wonder how it is possible to see into a Comanche camp on the remote plains in a place where no white men lived or traveled. But the preceding account is not fictional in any sense. Though Cynthia Ann Parker was hard to track—and as time went by she was becoming an ever more distant memory on the fast-changing frontier—in October 1860 her whereabouts are known precisely. We know exactly where she was, who she was with, and what she was doing, and where she was camped within a few hundred yards. Her circumstances are known because of the events of the next two months, and because of the bloody catastrophe that was about to befall her, a fate that, twinned with her capture in the 1836 raid, made the woman born as Cynthia Ann Parker one of the least lucky people in the world.
She herself had no inkling of what was going to happen. She was doing what she had always done, and had a few months yet to enjoy the immemorial life of a Nermernuh woman. She was living in a large Comanche camp, one that contained as many as five hundred people. It was something more than a nomadic camp, though. It was more like an operations base and supply depot for many different raiding parties, a sort of swing station through which supplies moved as well as plunder, cattle, and horses on their way to markets elsewhere. The camp was also a relay for stolen horses.1 This was Indian logistics on a large scale; there were prodigious amounts of everything, from horses to shoes and sausages, suggesting a degree of planning and orchestration that the Comanches were not known to possess. Here is what was later found at the camp:
a large amount of dried beef and buffalo meat, buffalo skins . . . an enormous amount of buffalo rugs, cooking utensils, axes, knives, tomahawks, tools for dressing skins, wooden bowls, moccasins, whetstones, leather bags filled with marrow out of bones and brains, little sacks of soup, sausages, guts stuffed with tallow and brains, and various other things . . . 2
The Comanche camp was located near the Pease River, which originates in the Texas Panhandle and snakes westward along the northern corridor of Texas and joins the Red River. Before that confluence, south of the present-day town of Quanah, and ten or twelve miles northeast of the town of Crowell, a clear, spring-fed stream called Mule Creek enters the Pease in a long valley framed by rugged hills and oak and cottonwood and hackberry trees. Nautdah’s village was a mile back from where the crystalline Mule Creek met the salty, gypsum-laced waters of the Pease, strung out for a few hundred yards in a cottonwood grove along the creek. The country was pretty, spare. Wide, high prairie plains were broken by the river and the hills and the steep ridges that rose from the creek. The village was roughly 125 miles west of the line of settlement, which in the autumn of 1860 ran just west of Fort Worth.
What Nautdah did was bloody, messy work. Sometimes she was covered from head to toe in buffalo fat, blood, marrow, and tissue, so much so that it turned her naturally light hair and light skin almost black.3 So much so that it would have been hard to spot her as the white woman in the Indian camp. While she worked, she watched her children. She was still nursing her daughter, Prairie Flower. Her boys played. They were old enough to hunt now, too, and sometimes they went out with their father. Peta Nocona, meanwhile, spent his time hunting and raiding.
His raiding habits are known, too. Through the summer and early fall, he led a series of sweeping, devastating raids into the counties between present-day Fort Worth and Wichita Falls, Texas. There is more than a bit of irony in the fact that one of his chief targets, Parker County, was named for his wife’s uncle Isaac Parker, yet another prominent Parker who lived in the county seat of Weatherford.4 Parker had arrived in Texas in 1833 with his father, Elder John, and brothers Daniel, Silas, and James and the rest of the Parker clan. He had served Texas as an elected representative or state senator almost continuously from 1837 to 1857. He had been instrumental in passing the bill for the new county in 1855.5 He was wealthy, exceedingly handsome, with chiseled features. He was widely known as a storyteller. Peta Nocona of course did not know any of this.
And now he had come to plunder his in-law’s creation. From all local accounts, most of Nocona’s raids came at night, by the light of what was already widely referred to in Texas as a Comanche moon. According to Parker County resident Hilory Bedford, “People on moonlit nights were in perfect dread. I well remember the time when the beautiful nights of the full moon, instead of being a source of pleasure, were, on the contrary, to be dreaded as the worst of evils.”6 Whole families and settlements were wiped out. Families with the names Youngblood and Rippy, lost forever to history, ceased to exist, leaving as monuments smoking, burned-out cabins, and bodies mutilated beyond recognition. The raiders stole cattle and horses. Most of the raiding in those days involved stealing. Bedford attributed the raids to Peta Nocona. Because this area was their old hunting ground, Nocona and his warriors knew the land intimately. Moving by night, they were almost impossible to apprehend.7
The raids were remarkable, too, because the panicked whites in that arc of settlement west of Fort Worth did not seem to be able to do anything to stop them. In March of 1860, Governor Sam Houston had authorized Colonel Middleton T. Johnson to raise a regiment of Rangers to punish the Indians on the state’s northern and northwestern frontiers.8 Though Rip Ford had won a splendid victory on Antelope Creek two years bef
ore, and had wanted to continue to pursue Comanches in their heartland, his funding had been cut off. Now Johnson raised five companies. They rode north to Fort Belknap, where they installed themselves. It is not clear exactly whom Johnson recruited, or what his standards were. But these men were very clearly not the old Hays Rangers. While they waited hopefully for Indian raids, they were engulfed in boredom. They drank. They fought each other with fists and knives, played poker, and hunted buffalo. Colonel Johnson at one point took a long leave of absence to get married in Galveston. In June one drunken Ranger shot another and wounded him. Another was said to have been murdered by local desperados, or deserted, it was hard to tell which. The men held dances at which they took both male and female parts.9 They hunted buffalo.
When they finally took to the field, three hundred strong, they could not find any Indians. During the summer Johnson and his men were outfoxed, outrun, and generally humiliated in ways that would have amazed the old Rangers. According to one account, after one of their unsuccessful forays, they had started for home. Though they could not find Peta Nocona, he apparently had no trouble finding them. At night the Indians charged the Ranger camp, stampeded the horses, and drove them away, leaving the white men to return home across the plains on foot.10 On another occasion, while the Rangers were riding north toward Oklahoma, Indians swept around south of them, stealing seventy-five horses and killing several settlers during a four-day spree. The Rangers turned, vowing to “wipe them out.” Instead, the Indians set the prairie on fire, destroying horse forage and causing the white men to return to Fort Belknap.11 The failure of Johnson’s unit illustrated an old truth in the West: that knowledge of how to fight Comanches spread, at best, sporadically and unevenly along the frontier. There were things that Jack Hays knew in 1839 that Rangers in general still had not learned twenty years later.