by S. C. Gwynne
It was a singularly sharp trick, even for Indians, done of course to blind us and gain time in moving their families of women and children as far as possible out of our reach. Without our own Indian scouts to beat the Comanches at their own native shrewdness, we would have undoubtedly lost the trail and [in] hopelessness abandoned the task.28
Whether the Tonks were beating the Comanches, or being successfully tricked time and time again by a commander who knew exactly what he was doing, is a matter of interpretation.
Back upon the Llano Estacado yet again, the troops began to feel the full fury of the norther. Under a darkening sky, the frigid wind cut through their thin uniforms. Many of the men had neither coats nor gloves, and they were now a hundred miles from their supply base. As they moved forward, they caught occasional glimpses of the fleeing band, silhouetted against the horizon. They were closer than they had thought, and as if to underscore that fact Comanche riders suddenly appeared on their flanks, trying to divert them. Mackenzie refused to be distracted. He pressed his column onward toward the village, which in its haste and alarm had begun to throw off all sorts of debris, including lodge poles and tools. Even puppies, which some of Mackenzie’s men picked up and placed athwart their saddles. Battle seemed imminent. The Tonks painted themselves and invoked their medicine, the men closed up in columns of fours, the pack mules were closed in and set in herd formation.
Now as if on cue, the leaden skies seemed to descend upon them. What had been a garden-variety norther now turned into what people in west Texas call a “blue norther”—rain, sleet, and snow all mixed together, driven relentlessly by winds up to fifty miles per hour. Darkness was coming on fast, and the moment for decision had arrived: the Fourth Cavalry could either gallop forward into the gathering storm and attack, or break off for the day. Oddly, considering how aggressive Mackenzie was by nature, he decided not to attack. He did this against the advice of his officers. In retrospect, he probably made the right decision. His men were fatigued, his horses worn thin and frail, and unlike the Comanches he had no fresh mounts. The soldiers dismounted, and the storm that had been building up all afternoon now unleashed its full fury. Winds of gale force drove freezing rain, which soon coated the men with ice. It was the sort of night in which a soldier and his horse could easily die. Huge hailstones began to fall, bruising the troopers. They wrapped themselves in what they could find and miserably settled in. Mackenzie himself had brought no overcoat with him. Somebody was kind enough to wrap him in a buffalo robe.
The Quahadis, meanwhile, did not stop. They soldiered on into the teeth of the norther for the rest of the night. One can only wonder what it must have been like. The next day Mackenzie made a halfhearted attempt to follow them but soon gave up. He had chased them more than forty miles (from present-day Crosbyton to Plainview). He was beginning to push the limits of his supplies. The next day, while the troopers were making their descent back into Blanco Canyon, they cornered two stray Comanches in a ravine. For some reason, perhaps out of frustration, Mackenzie insisted on directing the skirmish from the front. He was hit by a barbed arrow that pierced to the bone and had to be cut out. Embarrassed at his own impetuousness, he never mentioned in his official report that he had been wounded.29 Robert Carter summed up the disappointment he felt in the campaign’s end in his memoirs, saying that “it was with the keenest regret and bitter disappointment that the driving of this half-breed Qua-ha-da into the Fort Sill reservation to become later a ‘good Indian’ could not have been accomplished then by the Fourth Cavalry, instead of its being delayed until more than three years from that date, and then by converging columns operating in four directions.”30 Quanah roamed free, and Mackenzie had missed a glorious opportunity to break the most violent Comanche band in its homeland.
Seventeen
MACKENZIE UNBOUND
FOR THE FREE Comanches in the spring of 1872, Mackenzie’s dramatic failure at Blanco Canyon was both good news and bad news. The good news was that one of America’s toughest combat officers had been duped and humiliated time and time again by people who knew a great deal more about this sort of warfare than he did. Quanah had outmaneuvered and outnavigated him; Mackenzie’s men had stumbled around in darkness and in dead-end arroyos and had their horses stampeded and paid a terrible price. They had been led on a merry chase, not by a highly mobile war party but by an entire village. The bluecoats had nearly perished in a storm that, nevertheless, did not prevent the Indians, young and old, from traveling to safety. Considering that the taibos had almost lost all their horses and their supply train, they were probably lucky to be alive.
The bad news, for those who could see it, was that Blanco Canyon marked the beginning of the end of the old empire. The logic was disarmingly simple. Previous military expeditions had violated Comancheria’s borders and had introduced the Indians to the idea that their home ranges were no longer completely safe. But they had done nothing to change the basic balance of power. Now, in their deliberate penetration of the heartland, the bluecoat leaders were signaling their intent not just to protect the frontier but to destroy the raiders themselves, to find the wolves in their den and kill them. They were aiming directly at the source of Comanche strength. And much of that strength was pure illusion, a sort of fantasy propped up by the self-defeating politics of Washington, D.C. In the year 1872 the once-glorious Comanches were really nothing more than a tiny population of overmatched and outgunned aboriginals who happened to occupy an absurdly large chunk of the nation’s midsection. That they were able to do so in an era of steam engines, transcontinental railroads, nation-spanning telegraph lines, and armies capable of greater destruction than the world had ever witnessed, was nearly inconceivable. Now, finally, that was going to change. Blanco Canyon meant that the tribe’s final ruin was only a matter of time. A few years at most, perhaps months. It meant that there existed both the will to pursue them to the caprock and beyond—embodied in grim warriors like Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, the men who had destroyed the South—and a commander in Texas who was capable of doing it. The dour, irascible Mackenzie was nothing if not a quick study, and he had just learned a critical lesson in how not to fight Comanches in the Texas Panhandle.
For the moment, however, death came to the frontier as it always had. In the spring of 1872, Comanche and Kiowa raiders swooped down into the Texas settlements as though there were nothing in the world that could possibly stop them. Some of those attacks were made by “reservation” Comanches—Yamparikas, Nokonis, and Penatekas—who used their agency as a refuge. Some were made by the Quahadis, who had never come to the reservation. Others were accounted for by Shaking Hand’s Kotsoteka band, which was straddling both worlds. The latter had come into the agency over the winter to get food and annuity goods, and then had moved back out onto the buffalo plains in the spring. Others, from the reservation bands, had followed them. The situation was highly fluid, unsettled, explosive. Many residents of the frontier, especially those in the Palo Pinto country southwest of Fort Worth, thought that 1872 was the worst year ever for Indian raids. A district judge from that area wrote a letter to President Grant that year, begging for relief. He described the worsening horror, and said that
I might give your Excellency scores of instances of recent date of murder, rape, and robbery which [the Indians] have committed alone in the counties composing my judicial district. It was but a few days since the whole Lee family, three of them being females, were ravished, murdered, and most terribly mutilated. Then Mr. Dobs, Justice of the Peace of Palo Pinto County, was but last week murdered and scalped, his ears and his nose were cut off. . . . Wm. McCluskey was but yesterday shot down by those same bloody Quaker pets upon his own threshold.1
Such a description of frontier violence could as easily have come from 1850 as from 1872. News of “depredations” had become so drearily familiar that it could sometimes seem unreal, almost a cliché. It was all horrifyingly real, of course. The terror had been taking place along roughly the same line o
f longitude in Texas for more than thirty-five years. Like some nightmarish and never-ending war, the front never really moved. No phase of the American Indian wars, beginning in the early 1600s, was remotely comparable.
And now Mackenzie was being unchained and ordered to make it stop. The peace policy still applied to Indians who were on the reservation, and his Fourth Cavalry, staging out of forts in central Texas, was still not allowed to cross the Red River to hunt hostiles. But there was to be death and scorched earth for those who insisted on remaining off the reservation. The problem was, as always, where to find them. In the spring of 1872 a solution presented itself. A captured Comanchero named Polonio Ortiz revealed the existence of a wagon road with plenty of water and grass that ran, east to west, across the Llano Estacado and into New Mexico. This was not only the legendary pass through the desiccated and impassable plains that white men had heard about but never found, it was also the road down which thousands of head of stolen cattle moved from Texas to New Mexico. This was the Comanchero cattle lode, the source of guns and ammunition and food for the still-wild Comanche bands. To discover it meant that they would not only disrupt the illegal cattle trade, they would also find Comanches.
In July and August of 1872, under orders to break up the organized cattle raiding, Colonel Mackenzie and his Fourth Cavalry conducted a series of remarkable, unprecedented explorations. Operating out of a base camp on the Freshwater Fork of the Brazos in Blanco Canyon, he first scouted northward along the caprock, crossing and recrossing from high to low plains as the Quahadis had done. Using the Comanchero Ortiz as a scout, he crossed the southern fork of the Red River (known as the Prairie Dog Town Fork) and into the region of present-day Clarendon. He then turned south again through jagged and harshly beautiful canyon lands and along a route that passed through present-day Turkey, Matador, and Roaring Springs. He did not know it at the time, but this part of Texas, just west of present-day Amarillo, had become the main refuge and sanctuary of the wild Comanche bands. One can imagine how Mackenzie’s troops looked: tiny figures in the monumental landscape of west Texas, riding week after week through the searing plains heat and the untracked immensity, their tack creaking and their regimental song on their lips (“Come home John, don’t stay long; Come home soon to your own Chick-a-biddy!”) The land was pristine, untouched. There was wildlife everywhere, sandhill cranes rising by the tens of thousands from playa lakes, buffalo herds that filled the horizon. Mackenzie found no Indians there, or the cattle trail, but his new understanding of the country, knowledge no white man had ever possessed, would figure heavily in the final battles. In late July Ortiz and other scouts discovered a wide road leading onto the Llano Estacado bearing evidence that large herds of cattle had recently traveled over it.
Mackenzie followed the new trail. He was by this point obsessed with his task, which as he conceived it meant forcing the Comanche and Kiowa outliers onto the reservation. He slept lightly, if at all, staying up late into the night studying scouting and other reports and whatever maps he could get his hands on. He drilled his troops hard. They were already a vastly superior fighting unit to the one he had inherited, not least because of their schooling at Blanco Canyon. His personality was harsher and quirkier than ever. His Civil War wounds, several of which had never properly healed, caused him unceasing pain. Riding for long hours over rough terrain was excruciating. According to Robert G. Carter, who served under him for many years, it was this “almost criminal neglect of his own health” that accounted for a personality that had become “irritable, irascible, exacting, sometimes erratic, and frequently explosive.”2 To the white epithet Three-Finger Jack was added the Comanche names Bad Hand and No-Finger Chief. They were getting to know him. He had a hectoring, badgering sort of personality that would not leave anything or anyone alone. He was hard on everyone around him, harsh in his assessments and almost never generous with praise. That included his reports to his superiors. His reticence to talk about what he had done guaranteed him and his men an obscure place in American history. Mackenzie was not without his good points. He was scrupulously fair, and quick to correct an injustice. He never played favorites and would not tolerate servility or self-seeking.
In the next month he crossed the Llano Estacado twice, by different routes, navigating an area that had never been penetrated by the army. (Carson’s trip from New Mexico to Adobe Walls had followed the Canadian River, much farther north.) On his return trip, which traced a route roughly from today’s Tucumcari to today’s Canyon, just south of Amarillo, he made a brilliant discovery: a plains-spanning trail with access to permanent, high-quality water sources at points no more than thirty miles distant from one another.3 It was just as Ortiz had predicted. Though Mackenzie had not seen any Indians or cattle—in such enormous spaces the chance had been small anyway—he had penetrated the great mystery of the Llano Estacado, the undiscovered country at the heart of Comancheria. By the end of the trip, the Fourth Cavalry knew all about the weird and quirky world of the high plains: its vicious thunderstorms, killer ant colonies, and raging wildfires; they learned how to use buffalo dung as fuel, and how to find water and navigate through immense flatness. Mackenzie, wrote Wallace,
had made a highly significant contribution to the exploration and opening of the Great American West. He had found two routes across the treacherous plains. The discovery of the roads and the good water would make it possible to keep the hostile Indians constantly on the run until they would surrender, or all be surprised and captured or killed.4
He thought nothing of this accomplishment. He still had work to do. He had heard from the same Comanchero that Kotsoteka chief Shaking Hand’s band was camped on the North Fork of the Red River. On September 21, 1872, he turned north. With 222 soldiers and 9 Tonkawa scouts he marched toward the rolling, broken prairie on the eastern slope of the caprock escarpment. At four o’clock in the afternoon of September 29, Mackenzie’s force, riding in four-column “echelon,” galloped into the middle of a Comanche village of 175 large tipis and 87 small ones on the North Fork, about five miles from the present town of Lefors.
Taken completely by surprise, the Comanches could do little more than run and hide from the bluecoats and their guns. Many died within the first few minutes of battle. Eighty or more of them were cut off and cornered in a ravine. They charged the white battle line several times, and each time were repulsed at great cost. The fight quickly became something more like a shooting gallery. One of Mackenzie’s officers, W. A. Thompson, compared it to “a troop of men in line on a stage firing into a crowded theater pit.”5 Many of the Indians ended up in a pool made by a brook that ran through the middle of the camp. Some were there hiding beneath overhanging grass. Most were dead. “So many were killed and wounded in the water that it was red from hole to hole with blood,” wrote a white captive named Clinton Smith who fought with the Indians.6 Many Comanches escaped into the brush of the river bottom. As Mackenzie noted tersely in his report, the battle was over in half an hour. He had to forcibly restrain his Tonkawas from scalping all the dead Comanches.
When the smoke from the black powder had cleared, he had killed fifty-two Indians, and had lost only four of his own. He had taken 124 prisoners—mostly women and children—something that had not happened to Comanches within anyone’s memory. It had very likely never happened. Not, at least, since the advent of the horse. Just as important, he had captured three thousand horses, which meant that he had very likely put on foot a good many of those who had escaped. How many got away is not known, just as it is not known how many were in the camp when the bluecoats attacked. The rule was eight to ten people, and two fighting men, per large tipi. If that was true, then a huge percentage of what was left of the Comanches, including reservation Indians, had been camped with Shaking Hand. It would later be learned that members of all five major bands were there, though at the time of the battle Shaking Hand, ironically, was on a train to Washington to meet the Great Father and discuss peace.7 Just downriver, moreover, w
as another camp of mostly Quahadis, so close that they could hear the shooting. In Mackenzie’s official report, he noted without elaboration that “the lodges were generally burned, and a large amount of other property was destroyed.”8 There would, in any case, be nothing left for the Indians to use.
In historical terms, Mackenzie’s victory was stunning. He had achieved it by daring to go where white men had not gone, by using his Indian scouts well, and then by attacking in force the moment he had intelligence of the camp. He had attacked with fury. Unlike Chivington’s drunken thugs, though, his men also knew restraint. They had been under orders to try to avoid killing women, children, and old men—Mackenzie was unusually attentive to this, for a western officer—but as he himself noted, many of the people in those categories “were too badly wounded to be moved.”9 And the Tonks had done plenty of damage before he could rein them in. The other side, predictably, had a somewhat different account. Captive Herman Lehmann, who was with the Comanches at the time, wrote: