Empire of the Summer Moon

by S. C. Gwynne

  An enormous amount of energy was expended making pointless treaties with Comanches. A brief summary will suffice to make the point. The first treaty was made in 1847, with the Penatekas, who of course could not enforce any of its provisions on the other bands. Its terms were typical: Indians were to give up captives and restore stolen goods, accept the jurisdiction of the United States, and trade only with licensed traders. In exchange, the government promised that no whites would be permitted to go among the Indians without a pass signed personally by the president of the United States, that they would give them blacksmiths to repair guns and tools, and would give them gifts worth $10,000.32 The whites, of course, never upheld the treaty. One wonders who came up with the ridiculous idea of making President James K. Polk approve passes for every settler who wanted to cross into the Indian country. As usual, the Indians were not allowed beyond a certain established line. Whites, meanwhile, clamored forward. Another similar treaty followed in 1850, which the Senate would not ratify, making all of the promises of the Indian office meaningless.

  The treaty of 1853 was pure fraud, on both sides. This agreement, signed by “representatives” of the northern Comanches, Kiowas, and Kiowa Apaches that had no tribal power to agree to anything, allowed the United States to build roads in Indian territory, establish depots and posts, and protect immigrants passing through. As compensation for this, the agents promised goods in the amount of $18,000 annually. The Indians pledged to cease their attacks both in the United States and Mexico, and to give back all of their captives.33

  Neither side abided by the agreement, nor had they any intention of doing so. The annuity goods were not delivered, though someone in the Indian office undoubtedly made a tidy profit. The Indians, wise perhaps now to the ways of the white man, never had any intention of honoring their promises. They liked the idea of gifts, and wanted to see how much they could get. The whites inevitably got something out of these treaties: The Indians could be painted as treaty-breakers. They had after all signed a document saying they would not raid and would give up captives, and then they had, treacherously, refused to keep it, notwithstanding that settlers ignored it as they ignored every other treaty. Manifest Destiny, as a notion and as a blueprint for expanding empire, meant that the land, all of it, belonged to the white man. And white men did what they had done ever since they landed in Virginia in the seventeenth century: They pushed as far into Indian country as their courage, or Indian war parties, would let them. Imagine the alternative: the U.S. government sending troops to shoot down God-fearing settlers who simply wanted a piece of the American dream. It never happened.

  The best idea the U.S. government could muster was to put four hundred starving Penatekas and a thousand other mostly Wichita-Caddoan remnants on to reservations on the Brazos River in 1855. The plan was hatched by Jefferson Davis, the new secretary of war in the Franklin Pierce administration. The Penatekas, decimated by waves of diseases, their hunting lands emptied of game, and their culture polluted by the white invaders, were literally starving to death; the other Indians who remained were simply being overrun.

  This plan backfired, too. The Comanches were given about twenty thousand acres on the Clear Fork of the Brazos between present-day Abilene and Wichita Falls. For nomadic hunters, this was an absurdly small plot, too small to raise stock and mostly impossible to farm. Only about four hundred of the remaining twelve hundred Penatekas came in; the rest, scared off by rumors that they would be killed, fled north of the Red River with the ubiquitous Buffalo Hump. For those who stayed, the idea was that they would become happy, well-adjusted farmers. But no Comanche had ever wanted to plant seeds. The Indian agent, Robert Neighbors, was forced to give them cattle. The reaction of Sanaco, one of the chiefs who came in, sums up the bitter resignation of the Penatekas:

  You come into our country and select a small patch of ground, around which you run a line, and tell us the President will make us a present of this to live on, when everybody knows that the whole of this entire country, from the Red River to the Colorado, is ours and always had been from time immemorial. I suppose, however, if the President tells us to confine ourselves to these narrow limits, we shall be forced to do so.34

  But the main problem with the Texas reservations was the white people who lived next to them. By 1858 white farms and ranches surrounded the reservations. And soon the whites were blaming the reservation Indians for raids that were being carried out by northern bands. In the fall of 1858 there were a series of savage raids all along the frontier—a settlement twenty-five miles from Fredericksburg was completely annihilated. Under the leadership of the Indian-hating newspaper editor John Baylor, settlers organized themselves and threatened to kill all of the Indians on both reservations. On December 27, 1858, a party of seventeen peaceful Indians from the reservation—Anadarkos and Caddoans—were attacked by white men while they slept. The white men fired on them, killing four men and three women. The six men who were guilty of the murders were identified but never charged. The feeling was that no jury would ever convict them, and that their arrest might stir the border into full-scale revolt. Meanwhile Baylor continued to stir up trouble, even going so far as to say that he would kill any soldier who tried to stand in his way. By the spring of 1859 the area around the reservations was in full panic. Groups of whites went about armed and looking for Indians. In May, some whites opened fire on a group of Indians. There was little doubt now that if the Indians stayed there, there would a full-scale war. Or, more likely, a full-scale slaughter.

  On July 31, Agent Neighbors and three companies of federal troops led a long, strange, and colorful procession of Indians out of the Brazos reservations, never to return. The sight was at once magnificent and pathetic. There were 384 Comanches and 1,112 Indians from the other tribes.35 They moved in a slow procession in the shimmering heat of the prairie, dragging their travois behind them as they had for hundreds of years; they crossed the Red River on August 8, and on August 16 arrived at their new reservation on the Washita River near present-day Fort Cobb, Oklahoma. The next day agent Neighbors returned to Texas to file a report. While he was at Fort Belknap, a man named Edward Cornett, who disagreed with his Indian policies, walked up to him and shot him in the back.

  By almost any measure, John Salmon “Rip” Ford was one of the West’s most remarkable characters. He was at various times a medical doctor, a newspaper editor, a state representative and state senator, a flamboyant proponent of the Confederacy, and an explorer who blazed the San Antonio to El Paso trail, which later bore his name. He served as mayor of Brownsville, delegate to the 1875 Constitutional Convention, and superintendent of the state’s Deaf and Dumb School. He was a peacekeeper, too. He once protected the Brazos Reservation Indians against false accusations from the local whites, but later refused to arrest the men responsible for killing the innocent Caddoans and Anadarkos, in spite of an order by a state district judge to do so.36 Rip Ford was a man of many opinions, all of them strong.

  But he was most famous as a fighter of Indians and Mexicans. He had joined Jack Hays’s upstart Rangers in 1836, rising to the rank of first lieutenant. He served under Hays again as his adjutant during the Mexican War, where he earned his nickname. It was his job to send death notices to soldiers’ families, and he often included the postscript “Rest in Peace.” Since he ended up writing so many such reports, he shortened the message to “R.I.P.” Many people believed the initials stood for all of the Indians he had killed. After the war he rejoined the Rangers, was promoted to captain, and spent time on the border hunting Mexican bandits and Indians. Though he was literate and cultured, he was a hard-looking man; you could imagine him in a cold camp in the limestone breaks of the hill country with Hays and McCulloch and the others, waking in a frozen dawn to track and kill Comanches. He had a broad face with deep-set eyes, a crooked nose, jug-handle ears, and a thin, hard mouth. He liked to wear buckskins and a long and narrowly cut beard. Sometimes he wore a stovepipe hat. He was known to be a hard drillmast
er.

  In January 1858, as Texas reeled from a fresh wave of Comanche attacks in Erath, Brown, and Comanche counties, Ford became the duly appointed savior of the frontier. Texas had had enough of the federal government’s staggering incompetence, and of its utter failure to stop Indian attacks. The last straw had been the army’s decision in 1857 to ship a large part of the federal troops in Texas, most of the Second Cavalry, north to Utah to quell a Mormon revolt.37 The Comanches had understood this perfectly, and had stepped up their raids.

  That was enough. Texans would take matters into their own hands. The sum of $70,000 was appropriated, and a hundred men were recruited for six-month terms of service. Ford, who accepted a commission as senior Ranger captain, would command them. Their mission was highly unusual. In recent years every significant military expedition against the Comanches had been mounted in response to specific attacks. The idea had been to pursue the raiders and punish them for what they had done. It was pure retribution. Ford and his men were to simply launch themselves north of the Red River, penetrate deep into Comanche territory, and strike an offensive blow. “I impress upon you the necessity of action and energy,” Texas governor Hardin Runnels told Ford. “Follow any and all trails of hostile or suspected hostile Indians you may discover, and if possible, overtake and chastise them, if unfriendly.”38 Runnels’s words sounded simple enough. In fact he was calling for open war against Indians, in direct defiance of federal policy. The orders harkened back to what Jack Hays had done twenty years earlier when he roamed the hill country looking for Indians, attacking whatever Indians he found. It no longer mattered to Texans if the Rangers had caught any Indians in criminal acts. The point was to strike them hard and preemptively; the point was that they could and would be pursued to deep within their homelands, to their very lodges.

  Thus was Ford unleashed. He recruited the best men he could find, armed them each with two revolvers and a rifle, and drilled them on marksmanship and tactics.39 They were going to do things the old Ranger way, the unpleasant, hard, and uncomfortable way. The Hays way. He added 113 friendly Indians to his force, mostly Tonkawas under their chief Placido and Caddos and Anadarkos under Jim Pockmark. There were even some Shawnees. Like Hays, Ford made extensive use of Indians, writing later that they “were men of more than ordinary intellect who possessed minute information concerning the geography and topography of that country.”40 On April 29, 1858, riding behind a wide screen of Indian flankers and scouts (“spies” in the vernacular of the day), Ford and his cohort splashed across the Red River, threading their way through large stretches of pure quicksand. The fact that they had absolutely no lawful authority outside of Texas did not seem to bother them.41 On May 10 their scouts brought in two arrowheads, which were quickly identified by the Indians as Kotsoteka Comanche. On May 11 they discovered a small Comanche camp on the Canadian River. Ross had moved like a Ranger: quietly, building few or no campfires, sending scouts out for twenty miles in four directions. And in the Ranger company there was, of course, none of the fuss and feathers and repeated bugling that characterized the army expeditions. The army was learning the old Ranger lessons, but only slowly. The federal troopers still moved with startling obviousness across the prairie.

  On May 12, Ford’s Tonkawas attacked and quickly destroyed the camp, killing several Indians and taking others prisoner. Two Comanches escaped at full gallop, heading toward the Canadian River. The Rangers and reservation Indians followed, chasing the Indians at high speed for three miles. They galloped across the Canadian River, and soon drew up in front of a large Kotsoteka camp that ran for a mile along a creek. It was a lovely piece of ground, a pure, clear stream flowing into a river valley; beyond the northern bank rose the picturesque Antelope Hills, bathed in the light of the sunrise. This was deep in Comanche territory, where they did not expect to be attacked. What they were looking at was not just a mobile war camp but a full-scale village, with women and children and buffalo meat drying on racks in front of the tipis. Ford’s two hundred thirteen men were now confronting four hundred Kotsoteka warriors.

  Ford sent his Indian cohort first, the idea being, as he put it, “to make the Comanches believe that they had only Indians and bows and arrows to contend against.”42

  The ploy apparently worked. The main Comanche chief, Pobishequasso, “Iron Jacket,” emerged from the swirling masses of horsemen and rode forward. Iron Jacket was not just a war chief. He was also a great medicine man. Instead of a buckskin shirt he wore iron mail, an ancient piece of Spanish armor. He carried a bow and a lance, wore a headdress decorated with feathers and long red-flannel streamers, and was elaborately smeared with paint.43 His horse, according to Ford, was “gloriously caparisoned.”44 As he rode forward he summoned his big magic, walking his horse in a circle and then expelling his breath with great force. He was said to be able to blow arrows away from their targets. Bullets and arrows were said to bounce off him; Iron Jacket was said to be invincible. And indeed for a little while he seemed to be. Rangers and Indians shot at him, to no effect. One participant recalled that pistol rounds “would glance off [his armor] like hail from a tin roof.”45 He circled again and moved forward. But now Ford’s Indians, who were armed with six-shooters and Mississippi rifles, found their mark. “About six rifle shots rang on the air,” wrote Ford. “The chief’s horse jumped about six feet straight up and fell. Another barrage followed, and the Comanche medicine man was no more.”46

  The effect was predictable and immediate. The Comanches in the main camp made a brief stand and then fled, demoralized by their chief’s broken magic. What followed was a running fight that featured Rangers and their Indian allies with far superior weaponry picking off Kotsoteka riders on the open plain and in the wooded river bottom. The battle extended to an area three miles by six miles, and soon turned into a series of single combats, in which the Rangers with reloadable .45-caliber six-shooters and breech-loading carbines held an enormous advantage of the bow-and-lance-wielding Comanches. The latter did have guns, but they were the old single-shot muskets that could be discharged only once. The Indians fought valiantly. Much of their fighting was meant to try to cover the retreat of their women and children. Women were killed along with the men. Ford makes a point of noting that “it was not an easy matter to distinguish Indian warriors from squaws,” meaning that the Rangers did not knowingly kill women. This was not really true. Women could ride as well as the men and were extremely adept with a bow. They were often killed as combatants (as would be true a hundred years later in the Vietnam War), and in any case were always potential combatants. Needless to say, the Tonkawas and Shawnees and other Indians had no such compunctions about killing women. Plains warfare was a fight to the death, always. In the running fight seventy-six Comanches were killed and many more were wounded. The Rangers suffered only two dead and three wounded. The numbers of dead “friendly” Indians were never reported.

  Now something very strange happened. Another force of Comanches, as large as or larger than the first, emerged over the ravines and thicket to confront Ford’s men. According to legend, it was commanded by Peta Nocona, but there is no hard evidence for that. What followed was ancient, ritual combat, of the sort that few white men had ever seen. Comanches in full regalia rode forth individually onto the plain, screaming taunts at the reservation Indians and daring them to come out in single combat. This they did. “A scene was now enacted beggaring description,” wrote Ford. “It reminded one of the rude and chivalrous days of knight-errantry. Shields and lances and bows and head dresses, prancing steeds and many minutias were not wanting to compile the resemblance. And when the combatants rushed at each other with defiant shouts, nothing save the piercing report of the rifle varied the affair from a battlefield of the middle ages. Half an hour was spent in this without much damage to either party.”47

  Then the modern era quickly reasserted itself. The Rangers charged, en masse, guns blazing, and the Comanche line soon broke. There was a running fight of some three miles, e
nding with no casualties on either side. Ford’s horses were exhausted. The Comanches hauled themselves off to lick their wounds.

  Ford’s fight became known in Texas history as the Battle of Antelope Hills, and it is famous for several reasons. It reasserted the superiority of Texans against Comanches, and underscored the incompetence of the army and the Indian office. It sealed Rip Ford’s fame and, most important, proved the lesson that Jack Hays had learned but that had somehow gotten lost over the years. “The Comanches,” Ford later wrote to Runnels, “can be followed, overtaken, and beaten, provided the pursuers will be laborious, vigilant, and are willing to undergo privations.” Willing, in short, to behave and fight like the Rangers of the late 1830s and early 1840s.

  The Battle of Antelope Hills also brought into focus the rather thorny political question of who was better qualified to patrol the borderlands, federals or Texans. On the floor of the U.S. Senate that year Sam Houston had risen to say, with withering scorn, that Texas no longer wanted federal troops at all. “Give us one thousand Rangers and we will be responsible for the defense of our frontier. Texas does not want regular troops. Withdraw them if you please.” He was countered by Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis, secretary of war, who reminded Houston of the disciplinary problems the army had experienced with the Rangers in the Mexican War. “If the General had gone further,” he retorted, “and said that irregular cavalry [Rangers] always produce disturbance in the neighborhood of a camp, he would have said no more than my experience would confirm.”48