by S. C. Gwynne
We arrived the next day after the fight and found the dead bodies scattered about. I remember finding the body of Batsena, a very brave warrior, lying mutilated and scalped, and alongside of him was the horribly mangled remains of his daughter, Nooki, a beautiful Indian maiden, who had been disemboweled and scalped. The bodies presented a revolting sight. . . . Other bodies were mutilated too, which showed the hand of the Tonkaway in the battle.10
Mackenzie had achieved what Plains Indians valued more than anything: surprise. He was learning from them to exploit weakness. That night he took pains to place his captives inside a well-guarded circle of supply wagons. They were amazingly representative of the larger tribe: there were thirty-four Kotsotekas, thirty Quahadis, eighteen Yamparikas, eleven Nokonis, and nine Penatekas, showing just how fluid the exchange between the “reservation” and the “wild” Comanches really was and suggesting that the old band structures were dissolving. (One or possibly two of the Quahadis were wives of Quanah.)
He ordered the pony herd to be taken a mile away from the burned village, and placed the horses under the guard of the one of his lieutenants and the Tonkawas. Incredibly, Mackenzie, so roughly schooled in Comanche horse culture, had made another mistake. He still did not understand Comanches and horses, or the fact that a handful of Tonks were still no match for Comanche riders. After dark, the Comanches made short work of it, stampeding the horses and not only getting most of their own back, but also those of the Tonkawas, who arrived in the main camp the next day looking sheepish and unhappy, leading a small burro.11 The following night, when the command made another camp eighteen miles distant, the Comanches took back most of the horses that were left. All that remained of the remuda were fifty horses and nine mules.12 Mackenzie was furious. He would never again make the mistake of believing he could hang on to Comanche horses. According to his sergeant John Charlton, “No effort after that was ever made to hold a herd of wild captured Indian ponies. They were all shot.”13
For the People, the Battle of the North Fork of the Red River (sometimes called the Battle of McClellan Creek) was a shattering experience. Nothing like this had happened to them before, and the depth of their grief was startling. They were inconsolable. Wrote former captive Clinton Smith, who was with the tribe:
Every night for a long time I could hear the old squaws crying away out from the camp, mourning for their dead. They would gash themselves with knives, and when they returned to the camp their faces and arms and breasts showed signs of the mutilation which they underwent in their agony.14
The worst of it was their utter powerlessness to get the captives back. The Comanches, famous for their arrogance, were abject and helpless in their grief. This was amply shown a few weeks later when Bull Bear, the chief of the wild, unbowed Quahadis and the only chief who had never signed a treaty or reported to the agency, humbly brought his band to the vicinity of Fort Sill to beg for the release of the women and children. He told agent Lawrie Tatum, known to him as Bald Head, that he had lost the fight with the soldiers, accepted his final defeat, and was now ready for peace. He would come into the reservation, put his children in the white man’s school, and become a farmer, as long as he got his women and children back. Bull Bear was lying. His views on the subject were well known. He believed in fighting to the death. But at the moment he just wanted his people released.
He got his wish. In June 1873, one hundred sixteen women and children and a few old men were brought back from their imprisonment at Fort Concho to Fort Still and returned to freedom. The release did not resolve anything. Soon large numbers of Comanches, including Bull Bear and his Quahadis, were back in their old camps, doing what they had always done. That year they got a reprieve: Mackenzie, who was ready to mount a final campaign against them, was sent instead to the Mexican borderlands to stop the cross-border raiding of Texas settlements by Kickapoos and Apaches. Acting on unofficial orders from Sheridan, Mackenzie and his Fourth Cavalry crossed eighty miles into Mexico—in violation of every conceivable international treaty—and destroyed three Kickapoo Apache settlements.15 His attack caused an international furor, and he maintained all along the fiction that he had taken the action on his own authority. When one of his men then asked what Mackenzie would have done if he had refused to cross the border, the colonel answered: “I would have had you shot.” When he returned in August he had a violent attack of rheumatism that kept him out of the field until January 1874.
It meant that the Comanche problem would have to wait another year.
Eighteen
THE HIDE MEN AND THE MESSIAH
BUT SOMETHING EVEN worse than the No-Finger Chief haunted the Comanche nation in the cruel spring of 1874. They were losing their identity. In the long years of their ascendancy they had always been a people apart, fiercely independent, arrogantly certain that their pragmatic, stripped-down spartan ethic was the best way to live. Unlike the Romans, who had borrowed everything from clothing to art, food, and religion from cultures around them, the Comanches were aggressively parochial. They were the world’s best horsemen and the unchallenged military masters of the south plains. They did not need elaborate religious rituals or complex social hierarchies. They kept their own counsel.
Now, in ways startlingly reminiscent of what happened to the miserable Penatekas, all that was changing. It began with the bands themselves. Once the main social units of the tribe, and the principal source of tribal identity, they were disintegrating, losing their boundaries, merging with other remnants. The captives taken by Mackenzie from what was nominally a Kotsoteka camp represented all five major bands, a level of tribal intermingling that would have been unimaginable even ten years before.1 This partly had to do with sheer numbers. Where, once, thousands upon thousands of Comanches in single, unified bands lived in camps that wound for miles along the Brazos or Canadian or Cimarron rivers, now groups with blurred affiliations numbering only in the hundreds huddled together against the harsh emptiness of the plains. The idiosyncrasies of language, customs, and folkways that had made each band distinct were vanishing. (Quahadi culture and vernacular, in fact, had begun to dominate.) The end of the bands meant a scarcity of war chiefs and peace chiefs: Increasingly, there were no followers to lead.
There was also the relentless push of the invading culture. Like all Indians before them, the People were being submerged in a sea of the white man’s material goods. This was true even of the Quahadis, who had held themselves aloof and apart longer than any others. Where once the tribe lived in the purity of the buffalo and all that it provided, now there were the taibos’ weapons and cooking tools and sheet metal, his sugar and coffee and whiskey, his clothing and calico. They used his blankets. They ate food boiled in his brass kettles. At the agency they waited quietly to be given his rancid meat, rotten tobacco, and moldy flour.2
But it wasn’t just the white man’s civilization that was corrupting the old Nermernuh. They had also begun to adopt the customs of other tribes. There were many examples of this cultural jostling, to which they were increasingly vulnerable. Their traditional headgear, for example, had been the fearsome, unornamented black buffalo-wool cap with jutting horns, the stuff of nightmares for generations of settlers. Now most of them had taken to wearing the more delicate, streaming feathered headdress of the Cheyennes. (Quanah was among those who had adopted this style.)3 Comanche burial had been, like so much else in the culture, a simple and practical affair. The body would be carried off to a natural cave, a crevice, or a deep wash and covered with rocks or sticks in no particular arrangement.4 Now the tribe was adopting the more elaborate, raised scaffold biers of the northern tribes. Soon they would even steal the Kiowas’ Sun Dance. They had witnessed the ceremony for decades without caring much about what it was. Now they were less sure that they did not need it.
At the core of their identity, of course, they were hunters and warriors—precisely what the white man wanted to deny them. While the Great Father and his apostles had not yet succeeded in this righteous
mission, the thousand or so Comanches who took food and annuities at Fort Sill had already lost their identity as hunters. The men saw this as a form of slavery. What stories could they tell their children or grandchildren if all they did was wait at the reservation to be given food? Or, worse still, became farmers?
The greatest threat of all to their identity, and to the very idea of a nomadic hunter in North America, appeared on the plains in the late 1860s. These were the buffalo men. Between 1868 and 1881 they would kill thirty-one million buffalo, stripping the plains almost entirely of the huge, lumbering creatures and destroying any last small hope that any horse tribe could ever be restored to its traditional life. There was no such thing as a horse Indian without a buffalo herd. Such an Indian had no identity at all.
The first large-scale slaughter of buffalo by white men with high-powered rifles took place in the years 1871 and 1872. There had been a limited market for buffalo products before that. Even as far back as 1825, several hundred thousand Indian-tanned robes had made it to markets in New Orleans.5 There had been demand for buffalo meat to feed the railway workers building the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, spawning the fame and legend of hunters like Buffalo Bill Cody. But there was no real market for buffalo hides until 1870, when a new tanning technology allowed them to be turned into high-grade leather. That, combined with a new railhead in Dodge City, Kansas, meant that the skins could be shipped commercially. For hunters, the economics of the new business was miraculous, all the more so since the animals were so stupefyingly easy to kill. If a buffalo saw the animal next to it drop dead it would not flee unless it could see the source of the danger. Thus one shooter with a long-range rifle could drop an entire stand of the creatures without moving. A hunter named Tom Nixon once shot 120 animals in 40 minutes. In 1873 he killed 3,200 in 35 days, making Cody’s once outlandish-sounding claim of killing 4,280 in 18 months seem paltry by comparison.6 Behind the hunters stood the stinking, sweating skinners, covered head to toe in blood and grease and the animals’ parasites. Legendary hunter Brick Bond, who killed 250 animals a day, employed 15 such men.7 Covered wagons waited at Adobe Walls to take the stacked skins to Dodge City. Except for the tongues, which were salted and shipped as a delicacy, the carcasses were left to rot on the plains. The profits, like the mass killing itself, were obscene. In the winter of 1871–72 a single hide fetched $3.50.8
Within two years these hunters, working mainly the Kansas plains close to Dodge City, had killed five million buffalo.9 Almost immediately, they were victims of their own success. By the spring of 1874 the herds on the middle plains had been decimated. The economics of hunting became a good deal less miraculous. As one scout traveling from Dodge City to the Indian territory put it: “In 1872 we were never out of sight of the buffalo. In the following autumn, while traveling over the same district, the whole country was whitened with bleached and bleaching bones.”10 Thus the hunters were forced to move farther from the railheads in search of prey.11
So they went south to the Texas plains, where horizon-spanning herds still drifted across the landscape, where they appeared, as historian Francis Parkman observed in 1846, “like the black shadow of a cloud, passing rapidly over swell after swell of the distant plain.”12 The problem was that the Texas Panhandle was 150 miles away from Dodge City, the only place set up to ship hides. To remedy that, and to give the hunters a place to sell their goods, in March 1874 a trading post was built near the Canadian River, only a mile from the Adobe Walls ruins where Kit Carson had battled Comanches a decade before. The place went by the same name and consisted of two stores, a saloon, and a blacksmith shop. Except for the blacksmith shop, which was built of pickets, the buildings were wood-framed, sod-sided, and sod-roofed. The precise type of building materials would soon become extremely important. By June the post was doing a brisk business. Hunters brought in tens of thousands of hides, and traded for weapons, ammunition, flour, bacon, coffee, canned tomatoes, soup, dried apples and syrup, and such sundries as wolf poison and axle grease.13 The money was beyond their wildest dreams of avarice; it flowed in buckets; the fortunes of Dodge revived, and the slaughter, which everyone knew would result in the extermination of the buffalo within a few years, continued apace.
The hide men were, on the whole, a nasty lot. They were violent, alcoholic, illiterate, unkempt men who wore their hair long and never bathed. The skinners had body odors that defied the imagination. These plainsmen hated the Indians, and not just because they had brown skins. They believed that the Comanches and Kiowas raided and made war not because it was their traditional way but so they could squeeze money and land out of the government. They believed that what the government paid the Indians amounted to blackmail. “They are a lazy, dirty, lousy, deceitful, race,” said hunter Emmanuel Dubbs in 1874. “True manhood is unknown, and they hold their women in abject slavery.”14 When they were not eradicating the helpless buffalo from the face of the earth, the hide men congregated in a set of western “hell towns” that had arisen to meet their primitive urges. Outside the Fourth Cavalry outpost at Fort Griffin, for example, an instant town was put up known as “The Flat.” It consisted of flimsy, unpainted frame buildings made of lumber that had been hauled several hundred miles. There were sleazy hotels, dance halls, and saloons, prostitutes, gamblers, and cardsharps. In one of the saloons a red-haired poker queen named Lottie Deno held court. Her hired gunmen stood by to kill anyone who questioned her ethics.15
Surprisingly, only a few voices cried out against the slaughter of the buffalo, which had no precedent in human history. Mostly people didn’t trouble themselves about the consequences. It was simply capitalism working itself out, the exploitation of another natural resource. There was another, better, explanation for the lack of protest, articulated best by General Phil Sheridan, then commander of the Military Division of the Missouri. “These men [hunters] have done in the last two years . . . more to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years,” he said. “They are destroying the Indians’ commissary. . . . For the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy.” Killing the Indians’ food was not just an accident of commerce; it was a deliberate political act.
The winter of 1873–74 had been a hard one for the People, many of whom were now shifting restlessly between the agency lands and the camps of the wild Comanches in west Texas. Those who stayed on the reservation were cruelly deceived. There was little game there and no buffalo at all. As before, they were forced to live on the white man’s rations. As before, much of this promised food simply never arrived and what was given to them was often of shockingly inferior quality. Facing starvation, the Comanches were forced to kill their own horses and mules for food.16
These Indians were now victimized by an entirely new phenomenon: organized gangs of white horse thieves, often dressed up as Indians, who preyed with impunity on the Comanche and Kiowa herds. They took the animals to Kansas and sold them. No one pursued them, no one prosecuted them.17 Cheating the Indians was always a good business. And while that was happening white whiskey peddlers moved freely inside the reservation, illegally selling diluted rotgut in exchange for buffalo robes. It amounted to robbery; the liquor cost little to make, while selling robes was virtually the only way many Indians could make money. Whiskey was becoming a serious problem. Many of the Indians became quickly addicted, and thus desperate to trade anything to get it.
For those Comanches who still raided the borderlands, the winter of 1873–74 was even worse. Mackenzie kept patrols in the field at all times, and those patrols began to have a devastating effect on small raiding parties. In December a group of twenty-one Comanches and nine Kiowas rode south through Texas and crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico. It was a good, old-fashioned raid, and must have warmed their hearts. They killed and took captives and stole horses and suffered no casualties. Then they turne
d for home, and their luck ran out. At Kickapoo Springs (near present-day San Angelo), they and their string of one hundred fifty horses were intercepted by Lieutenant Charles Hudson and forty-one troopers from Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry. A hot, ten-minute fight ensued in which nine Comanches were killed and Hudson suffered only one man wounded. The Comanches also lost seventy horses. A few weeks later a Tenth Cavalry patrol under Lt. Col. George Buell engaged a Comanche raiding party near the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River, killing eleven. Two weeks later, another raiding party was attacked and another ten Indians killed.18
Though the absolute numbers were small, in the desperate, waning years of Comancheria, these were major disasters. The People took the news hard, as did the Kiowas. Kiowa chief Lone Wolf lost his son and his nephew in the fight with Hudson. In his grief, Lone Wolf cut off his hair, killed his horses, and burned his wagon, lodge, and buffalo robes and vowed revenge.19 He might have been gratified to know that Lieutenant Hudson died that winter, too, killed accidentally by his roommate, who was cleaning a gun. Quanah, who also lost a nephew to Buell’s men, would have a far more radical reaction, one that would eventually affect the fate of all Plains Indians.
All of this was terrible news for the People. They went into deep mourning for their lost ones and also, perhaps, for their own lost world. Then, when it did not seem as if things could get any worse, the buffalo hunters arrived in Adobe Walls and began to turn the panhandle into a stinking graveyard. These were frightening times, and there is no reason to believe that the last of the Comanches, defiant on the high plains, did not understand their historical position. They were almost alone now. Most of the Arapahos had given up; they had gone in. The Cheyennes were confused and leaderless. (These were the southern bands of those two tribes.) The Kiowas were riven by political quarrels, deeply split between the idea of surrendering and fighting to the end. There was no one else living outside the territories anymore, not on the south plains. Just a few thousand Comanches who were watching their old world die and losing their identities in the process.