Empire of the Summer Moon

by S. C. Gwynne

  The first of the horrors to be unleashed by the demon of neglect had little to do with the white man. These were the Indian-on-Indian wars in the Indian Territory, the land north of the Red River and south of Kansas that would eventually become the state of Oklahoma. Most of the conquered and displaced tribes from the East, South, and Midwest had been relocated there—a process that had begun in the early nineteenth century. In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which forced most tribes to give up all of their lands in the East and Midwest for a supposedly eternal plot of ground in the Indian Territory. By the 1860s the territory had become an intricate patchwork of aboriginal cultures, each with its own designated reserve. The larger reserves had been given to the Five Civilized Tribes (Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Seminole), as well as to the combined Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache tribes, the Cheyennes and Arapahos, and to the Wichitas and their affiliated tribes (Caddos, Anadarkos, Tonkawas, Tawakonis, Keechis, and Delawares). There were smaller areas for Kickapoos, Sac and Fox, Osages, Pawnees, Pottawotamies and Shawnees, Iowas, Peorias, Quapaws, Modocs, Ottawas, Wyandottes, Senecas, Poncas, and Otos and Missouris. It was, all in all, an astonishing collision of native interests and antagonisms, all jammed together by fiat of Congress on the rolling plains and timberlands north of the Red River.

  For many of these tribes, the Civil War was as much of a disaster as it became, eventually, for white farmers in eastern Georgia. The trouble began in 1861, soon after the first shots of the war were fired, when the United States withdrew its troops from Indian Territory.2 Though there were a few ragtag confederates scattered through the territory, the agrarian tribes were mostly unprotected from the wild horse tribes, who had always hated them for encroaching on their hunting grounds and for what they saw as their fawning accommodation of the white man. With no one to offer the farming tribes even nominal protection, the Comanches unleashed a terrible violence. (These were mostly the wild bands, but Penatekas from the reservation sometimes rode with them.) The Chickasaws were the principal target, though other tribes also fell victim. Comanches raided their farms and settlements just as they raided on the Texas frontier. They rode down upon their foot-bound, house-dwelling, field-tilling victims. Many Chickasaws were driven out of the Indian Territory altogether and into Kansas. Choctaws and Creeks came under Comanche attack, too, as did the Indians of the Wichita Reservation, some of whom had copied the settled, agrarian ways of the civilized tribes with great success. Comanches made short work of their farms, stock, and crops. Whole settlements were butchered, captives taken. It should be noted that the “civilized” Indians were not always easy prey: They were often capable fighters and sometimes got the better of their tormentors.3

  But Comanche raids were just part of the tragedy. There were also partisan wars between the entrenched tribes. There were “Confederate” Indians and “Union” Indians. Many members of the Five Civilized Tribes were slaveholders, which both angered Union Indians and caused deep rifts within their own ranks. The result was a series of massacres and retaliations, most of which are lost to history. What is known about them suggests that they were brutal and widespread. Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole territories became the scenes of battles between loyalists on both sides. Houses and farms were burned, seedstock and farming tools destroyed or stolen. Large segments of those tribes ended the war hungry and destitute, dependent once again upon the government for their livelihood.4 In 1862, one hundred Tonkawas were killed in a single attack, part of a wave of such incidents that nearly resulted in their extermination.5 This was ostensibly because of their cannibalism, which the other tribes deplored, but it was more likely because they had long served the Texans as scouts in their anti-Indian expeditions.6 The Civil War offered many such opportunities for settling scores.

  As in the larger war, there were massive displacements of human beings. In late 1861 a large body of “loyal” Creeks and other tribes under the command of Creek chief Opothle Yahola were attacked repeatedly in the last week of December by a combination of Confederate tribes and Texas cavalry. The terrified Union Indians dropped everything and fled northward. Large numbers of them froze in the bitter cold, and many of their bodies were eaten by wolves. Babies were born naked on the snow and soon died of exposure.7 According to one report, 700 Creeks and others were either killed in the attacks or froze to death.8 Once in Kansas, they gathered in a refugee camp where things were scarcely better. Families slept on the frozen ground with only scraps of cloth—handkerchiefs, aprons, and such—stretched on saplings as protection against the plains blizzards. The initial composition of that camp reveals much about what the Civil War did to the Indian territory. It contained 3,168 Creeks, 53 Creek slaves, 38 “free Creek negroes,” 777 Seminoles, 136 Quapaws, 50 Cherokees, 31 Chickasaws, and a few Kickapoos. By April the camp held 7,600 refugees that included Kichais, Hainais, Biloxis, and Caddos, all of them utterly dispossessed of everything they once owned.9

  As the war raged in the east, the white frontier exploded into its own nightmare of killing. The outbreaks had their origins in the north in 1862, with an Indian revolt on the prairie plains of Minnesota. That year the Santee Sioux (the eastern Sioux, also known as Dakota) rose up in rebellion from their reservation along the Minnesota River. They killed as many as eight hundred white settlers, the highest civilian wartime toll in U.S. history prior to 9/11. They made another forty thousand into refugees, who fled eastward in full mortal panic. The violence was extreme, almost mindless, spurred in part by the failure of the federal government to deliver annuities and supplies, and in part by the absence of government troops. Unlike the Texans, most of whom came from pioneer stock and understood the atrocities of Indian and especially Comanche warfare, these Minnesotans were simple yeoman farmers. Most were from Europe. Their reaction was hysterical fear, which only became worse when they experienced what the northern settlers had not yet encountered: the calculated rape and torture of female captives.

  When bluecoat volunteers finally crushed the Santee rebellion, angry mobs screamed at the captives in their cages, castrated the few they got hold of, and demanded that the rebels be executed. If President Lincoln had not stepped in, hundreds would have died that way. As it was, thirty-eight were hanged, the largest one-day execution in American history. The following year the tribe was expelled from Minnesota, their reservations abolished.10 At long last, the Sioux, the great power of the north, were finally colliding with the advancing line of settlements, something that had been happening in Texas since the 1820s.

  By late 1863 it had become clear to most of the free-ranging horse tribes on the southern plains that there were no soldiers to stop them. By the summer of 1864 they were riding roughshod into the settlements from Colorado to south Texas, attacking pioneers and soldiers alike recklessly and with little fear of retribution. Huge stretches of land that had been settled as far back as the 1850s became completely depopulated. Comanche attacks virtually shut down the Santa Fe Trail. The overland mail abandoned its stations for four hundred miles. Emigration stopped. Cheyenne raids cut off supplies to the Colorado mining camps, where people were starving. The price of a bag of flour in the isolated town of Denver reached $45. The frontier again rolled backward, in some places between one hundred and two hundred miles, canceling two decades of westward progress.11 For a brief and terrifying moment the raids appeared to have stalled the very idea that undergirded America’s westward boom. Manifest Destiny only worked, after all, if you could conquer and subdue the nation’s midsection.

  One of the best examples of this new untrammeled violence was the Elm Creek Raid. In October 1864, a force of seven hundred Comanche and Kiowa warriors and three hundred assorted other women, children, and old men under the Comanche chief Little Buffalo rode out from their camp at Red Bluff on the Canadian River.12 The expedition—the largest mounted to date by these two tribes—crossed the Red River ten miles above Fort Belknap, then attacked a settlement consisting of sixty houses in the creek bottoms just south of th
e Red. There was nothing to stop them, no fear of Rangers or federal forces, no commanders like Hays or Ford to pursue them. Unlike the Santee Sioux, they were still nomads and thus could hide anywhere on the Great Plains. They burned and killed, stole cattle and horses, and forced a group of terrified settlers to retreat into a small stockade called Fort Murrah.

  At this point the cavalry arrived, though it did not save the day. Quite the contrary. Riding briskly out of Fort Belknap, fourteen state militiamen ran headlong into a swirling body of three hundred mounted warriors. Five of these soldiers died instantly, and several others were wounded. The rest fled for their lives, some riding double on their horses, most of which had been “pincushioned” with arrows and were bleeding profusely. They took shelter at Fort Murrah, and there they cowered with the others, refusing to ride for help. In their place went several less intimidated settlers, who barely made it with their lives. By the time help arrived, the Indians had lost interest and departed. The tally: eleven settlers and five soldiers killed, seven women and children carried off. The perpetrators were not pursued. This sort of raid was duplicated all along the frontier that year. Like many others against the militias, it was not a fair fight.

  Such violence called for retribution. In late 1864, Brigadier General James H. Carleton, the ranking U.S. Army officer in the territory of New Mexico, decided to do something about the problem. Carleton was a buttoned-down New Englander, a prig, and a stubborn know-it-all with a large ego and a startling range of talents that included mountain climbing, seed collecting, waltzing, archaeology, military history, boat design, and the study of meteorites.13 He was deeply offended by the impunity with which the Comanches were attacking his territory. Early that year he and the legendary scout Colonel Christopher “Kit” Carson had conducted a massive campaign against the Navajos in New Mexico, finally cornering them in the Canyon de Chelly, destroying their crops and seizing their stock, and forcing eight thousand of them on to a reservation.14

  Unfortunately for Carleton, that reservation happened to be located on the margins of Comancheria. It was not long before the western Comanche bands figured out how exquisitely vulnerable their old enemies were in their new location. The Nermernuh swooped down in early-morning raids, attacking Navajo villages, stealing sheep, horses, women, and children, and generally ruining Carleton’s well-laid plans.15 Carleton was further infuriated by the relentless Comanche attacks on army supply caravans on the Santa Fe Trail. These wagon trains contained both the food that would ensure the Navajos’ survival and the communications that served as the general’s only contact with his colleagues in the east. Carleton had been, in fact, isolated. From where he sat in his Santa Fe office, everything to the east of him seemed chaos and destruction.

  In November 1864 he dispatched Colonel Carson on a punitive expedition into the most remote and historically inviolable part of the Comanche heartland, the thirty-five-hundred-foot-high country in the Texas Panhandle, distinguished by its flat, oceanic expanses of grass that were broken by jagged rock canyons, cut by ancient rivers, inhabited by the fiercest and most remote Comanche bands, and pierced only by the Comanchero traders out of New Mexico. Only a few white men had ever been there before, mostly traders. And no Texan, Ranger or otherwise, had ever had the courage to track Comanches onto the Llano Estacado. That had long been considered certain death: Either the trackless, waterless plains would get you, or the Comanches would. It was quite a brave thing for mounted soldiers to cross the Red River, to ascend the austerely beautiful Wichita Mountains in pursuit of the raiders; launching oneself onto the wide-open high plains to the west was more like suicide. Oddly enough, the Comanches, who had heard about Carleton’s plan through Comanchero traders, had tried to arrange a truce. A group of ten Comanches and Kiowas led by the Yamparika chief Ten Bears (Paruasemena) had traveled to Fort Bascom in eastern New Mexico for that purpose.16 But Carleton had ordered the fort’s commander to tell them, in no uncertain terms, that “they need not come in with any more white flags until they are willing to give up the stock they have stolen this year from our people, and also the men among them who have killed our people without provocation or cause.”17 The campaign would move forward. Perilous though it was, if there was one man in the country who could actually lead such an expedition, that man was Kit Carson.

  Carson was one of the most storied figures in the American West, celebrated in dime “blood and thunder” novels even while he was alive. He was a trapper, hunter, and wilderness scout and one of the first white men to explore the wild lands beyond the 100th meridian. He served as guide for John C. Frémont’s famous expeditions into the transmountain west between 1842 and 1846, and became a national hero through Fremont’s published reports. Diminutive, taciturn, barely literate, and unimpressive personally, he was nonetheless a dominant figure on the western frontier. He had married several Indian wives, was fluent in a number of Indian languages, and had served as Indian agent in New Mexico. He was also a successful Indian fighter, having led effective campaigns against the Navajo and the Mescalero Apaches. He had done battle with Comanches in small engagements over the years. He knew what he was doing.

  On November 12, 1864, four days after Abraham Lincoln was reelected president and the day after William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, Carson rode out of his camp on the plains of eastern New Mexico with 14 officers, 321 enlisted men, and a screen of 72 Apache and Ute scouts. The latter were bitter traditional enemies of the Comanches, and they were not frightened, as most white men were, by the appalling emptiness of the buffalo plains. Carson, moreover, did not have to pay them; he simply promised them all the plunder and Comanche scalps they could carry away. Like other white commanders of Indian scouts, he would simply have to live with, and try to rein in, their worst tendencies, which involved torture and rape and wanton killing of noncombatants and other deeds the whites found distasteful. In principle, anyway. The Utes and Apaches also drove the white soldiers to distraction with their war dances—howlingly loud, raucous affairs that often lasted nearly until dawn.

  The expedition left in the late fall. That was when the Indians, who tended to rove in fragmented and widely dispersed groups during the spring and summer, headed for their winter camps, where they concentrated in villages whose sun-bleached buffalo-hide tipis snaked for miles along a few favorite streams. Carleton believed that the Comanches and Kiowas were camped on the Canadian River, in the northern part of the Texas Panhandle. That was Confederate territory, of course, though nothing could have been less likely than an encounter with Rebel militias on the high and wild plains. Carson’s troops moved eastward through the thin, frosty air, riding through the horizon-spanning, horse-high grass, behind their screens of Indian scouts.18

  By now it had become so common to find Kiowas and Comanches camping, hunting, and raiding together that their relationship as fellow-travelers deserves a note of explanation. Though it is hard to say exactly why the two tribes had such a deep affinity for each other, they did share common traits. Like the Comanches, the Kiowas had migrated in the seventeenth century from the mountains north down to the buffalo-rich southern plains. Both tribes had found extraordinary power in the horse. Both were exceptional horsemen, even on the plains, where all tribes were excellent riders, and both were exceptionally warlike, even by the brutal martial standards of the plains. They had fought each other for years, and had made a single definitive peace in 1790. There were differences, too. Instead of the Nermernuh’s practical, minimalist culture, the Kiowas had elaborate and hierarchical military societies, a rich tradition of art that produced sophisticated pictographs and elaborate chronological calendars, and a far more complex religious mythology that featured a Sun Dance. What they were not was numerous, and that made perhaps the biggest difference. They never exercised the raw power of numbers that the Comanche tribe did. The Kiowas and their subband the Kiowa—or Plains—Apaches (a very small, Athapaskan-speaking tribe) never numbered more than eighteen hundred—a small fraction of Comanc
he strength at its apogee.19

  After a twelve-day ride, Carson’s scouts finally spotted Comanche and Kiowa lodges just south of the present town of Borger, Texas. That night the men rode silently and in darkness down into the Canadian River valley, under strict orders not to talk or smoke. They dismounted and stood shivering in heavy frost and holding their horses by their bridle reins until the first gray streaks of dawn appeared in the eastern skies.20 They moved forward at daylight, fronted by their Indian scouts, and dragging with them two Mountain Howitzers, which they had considerable trouble lugging through the tall brown grass and the driftwood along the banks of the Canadian.

  These were not incidental pieces of equipment. The howitzers looked like foreshortened, downsized cannon. They were short-barreled, large-caliber guns with large spoked wheels that fired twelve-pound payloads. Their advantage was that they were extremely mobile. They also packed a nasty wallop, especially when used against crowds of people. They fired two main types of ammo: spherical case shot and canister. Spherical case shot consisted of a single round iron shell filled with 82 musket balls packed in sulfur with a small bursting charge of gunpowder. Canister turned the howitzer into the equivalent of a giant sawed-off shotgun, spewing 148 .69-caliber lead musket balls with every shot. The weapons had seen limited use against Indians, notably in the 1862 campaign against the Santee Sioux in Minnesota. No one among Carson’s troops knew, as they cursed and dragged the homely little cannon through the tall grass, that the guns would mean the difference between life and death, victory and defeat for the expedition.21

  At around eight-thirty in the morning on a brilliantly clear and cloudless day, Carson’s advance swept into a Kiowa village of 176 lodges. They surprised the Indians, who fought desperately to cover the retreat of their women and children, then fled downriver themselves. There were only a few casualties in this skirmish, among them four blind and crippled old Kiowas who had had their heads cloven with axes wielded by Ute women, who had been brought along, it seems, to help their mates commit what whites might have considered war atrocities. Meanwhile Carson’s main force pressed onward toward the much larger Comanche camp, which was located four miles ahead, finally stopping at the ruins of a trading post known throughout the frontier as Adobe Walls. And it was here, around ten a.m., that they engaged some sixteen hundred Comanches and Kiowas. The battle did not last long. The howitzers, which had been dragged to the top of a symmetrical, cone-shaped thirty-foot-high hill nearby, were loaded and fired. Almost instantly, the Comanches and Kiowas who had been charging furiously along the battle line stopped, stood high on their stirrups, and watched as the case shot exploded and then exploded again. No weapon like this had ever been seen on the high plains. The Indians soon had a name for it: “the gun that shot twice.” In the account of Captain George Pettis, who was with Carson at Adobe Walls, the hostiles “gazed, for a single moment with astonishment, then, guiding their horses’ heads away from us, and giving one concerted, prolonged yell, they started in a dead run for their village. . . . When the fourth shot was fired there was not a single enemy within the extreme range of the howitzers.”22