Texas Rising

by Stephen L. Moore

  Colonel Karnes succeeded in convincing a party of more than one hundred Comanches to visit Congress in the city of Houston on May 26. Three days later, Chiefs Muguara, Muestyah, and Muhy pledged that their Comanches would “stand by the white man and be his friend against all of his enemies.” The Comanche group left in high spirits, sporting glass beads, blankets, red cloth, gunpowder, and other goods gifted to them by their new Texan friends. Frédéric Leclerc, a French settler, noted that these same Comanches had returned to stealing horses within a week and had murdered three enterprising Texans who were lured to their camp to open new lanes of commerce.43

  Henry Karnes himself soon found proof of the true intentions of the Comanches. During the summer he led a force of twenty-one men out from San Antonio. His second in command was Benjamin Franklin Cage, a cousin to surveyor Jack Hays—whose mother was Elizabeth Cage Hays. Karnes and Cage were resting their horses on August 10 on the Arroyo Seco, west of the Medina River, when they were suddenly charged by two hundred mounted Comanche Indians. Jack Hays helped divide the attackers by shooting down the leading chief, Essowakkenny—one of the very leaders whom Karnes had made peace talks with in May. The Comanches made two more charges against the Texans to launch their arrows. The Anglos were slightly protected by a ravine and chaparral brush, but Colonel Karnes was struck by an arrow while standing atop the bank to help direct the battle. Many of his men’s horses were killed or wounded by the flint-tipped missiles slung at them. The Comanches retreated after losing an estimated twenty killed and as many wounded.44

  Karnes and Hays won the respect of the citizens of San Antonio for fighting off these aggressors. It was a clear sign to all involved that the Comanche, in spite of their feigns at peace talks, had no real intention of surrendering the prairies to any white settlers.

  17

  LAMAR’S CHEROKEE WAR

  OF EXTINCTION

  MAJOR GENERAL THOMAS RUSK’S Texas Militia was finally put to the test during the summer of 1838.

  General Vicente Filisola, the military commander of northern Mexico, had instigated an effort to unite various Indian tribes of Texas to rise up against settlers encroaching upon their lands. Mexican agent Julian Pedro Miracle moved from Matamoros into Texas during June. His party visited representatives of eight allied East Texas tribes and succeeded in stirring up resentment against the Anglo Texas settlers. One of Miracle’s key men was Vicente Córdova, a former Mexican judge and alcalde of Nacogdoches who had become frustrated with the Anglo leaders who failed to protect the property of Nacogdoches-area tejanos. Córdova was instrumental in rounding up rebel tejanos, at least one former slave, and a few tejano-loyal Anglos to their revolt. By August, the Nacogdoches Chronicle reported that Córdova’s rebel force had grown to about two hundred men. The first outbreak of violence occurred on August 4, 1838, when a Nacogdoches citizen was killed as a group of settlers tried to arrest one of Cordova’s tejanos who was herding stolen horses. Word of this killing was passed to General Rusk and his regional militia commander, Kelsey Douglass. Three days later, Rusk was informed by Captain John Durst that at least one hundred armed tejanos were encamped on the Angelina River with a couple dozen Biloxi and Ioni Indians.1

  Sam Houston issued orders for the Mexicans and Indians to disperse or be considered enemies of the republic. Córdova and his rebels instead sent a reply on August 10 that they were “ready to shed the last drop of blood” in defense of their principles. His force shot down and killed two brothers around this time, an act that further stirred the local Nacogdoches citizens to react. General Rusk began raising his militia in Nacogdoches and San Augustine against the orders of President Houston. Adjutant General Hugh McLeod helped organize fourteen companies of volunteers, who marched toward the Cherokee village of Chief Bowles, where Córdova’s rebels were believed to have taken shelter.2

  Rusk’s force, joined by other volunteer companies, set up camp near the Cherokee village while Rusk held peace talks with Bowles, Chief Big Mush, and other leaders. President Houston wrote to Bowles, strongly urging him to give up any ideas of fighting. By August 18, the so-called Córdova Rebellion was largely quelled when Chief Bowles refused to let his Cherokees take part in the uprising. Córdova’s men slipped away, and the Texas Militia forces gradually headed back to their settlements. Houston ordered Rusk to disband his men and maintain peace. Colonel McLeod was irked. He wrote to Vice President Mirabeau Lamar that this “timely demonstration of force” through Indian country had stirred fear in the Indians but that Houston had hindered Thomas Rusk’s work “in every way with his orders.” The policies of diplomacy versus war with the Indians held by the two top leaders of Texas could not be more conflicting.3

  No sooner had the militiamen returned to their homes than evidence of the hostile intentions of the rebels was discovered on August 20. Captain Julian Pedro Miracle was killed on the Red River and his captured papers detailed each of the Indian tribes that had been contacted. The smoking gun was more than even President Houston could ignore. Thomas Rusk began forming militia companies again during early September.4

  Rusk took advantage of the current crisis to implement a constant ranger presence within his militia. President Houston tried to keep the peace with the Texas Cherokees during the fall. He sent instructions for the surveying and marking of boundary lines for the territory he had promised Chief Bowles’s people in his February 1836 treaty. On October 1, some of Córdova’s rebels captured surveyor Elias Vansickle and held him prisoner for several months. Major Leonard Mabbitt’s Fort Houston rangers relayed word of the kidnapping to Major General Rusk. He ordered up additional militia units to move against the forces reported to be camping out near the Kickapoo village north of Fort Houston.5

  Support for Rusk’s desired offensive was gained by a tragic depredation carried out on October 5, 1838, in East Texas, and which became known as the Killough Massacre. Isaac Killough and at least fifteen members of his extended family were murdered or captured that day by Cherokee Indians and their affiliated members.6

  Three days after the Killough Massacre, a large party of Indians carried out another bloody assault on a group of Texas surveyors surveying land in what is now Navarro County, near present Dallas. William Fenner Henderson’s twenty-three-man surveying party was approached by Indians around noon on October 8 as they were running their survey lines across a stretch of prairie. Without warning, the surveyors suddenly came under heavy fire from forty or more Kickapoo, Tawakoni, Ioni, Waco, and Caddo Indians who had been concealed in bushes growing along the banks of a nearby ravine. The Texans took cover in a ravine and engaged in a shooting match that killed a dozen of the surveyors.7

  San Jacinto veteran Walter Lane and ten other survivors finally fled the ravine after midnight using their last five living horses. Four of the Texans were killed in the moonlit escape, but the other seven made it into the nearby forest. Lane, his leg shattered by a musket ball, made it to Parker’s Fort by October 12 with two other men. Another survivor, John Violet, was found by a mounted party days later. His thigh bone broken, Violet had crawled more than twenty-five miles with little food or water. Various accounts of this fight give various numbers of casualties, but it appears that as many as seventeen Texan surveyors perished. The conflict was later known as either the Surveyors’ Fight or the Battle Creek Fight.8

  Major General Rusk was mobilizing his East Texas militiamen on October 11, even as the Surveyors’ Fight survivors were struggling toward safety. Rusk departed Nacogdoches with four companies bound for the Kickapoo village in response to the Killough Massacre. He sent word for Major Mabbitt’s First Regiment of Mounted Gunmen—under Captains James Bradshaw, William T. Sadler, Squire Brown, and Jacob Snively—to move out from Fort Houston and rendezvous with him at Fort Duty, located four miles west of the Neches River and ten miles from Fort Houston. Mabbitt’s 175 rangers headed out on October 12 but were ambushed along the trail just six miles east of their fort. Four rangers were killed and two other wounded in
the hail of musket balls that suddenly rained down on them. One of those who perished, San Jacinto veteran John W. Carpenter, pursued a Caddo chief into the forest, where both men exchanged fatal shots. The ambushing party, a combined bunch of Córdova’s Mexican and Indian rebels, vanished into the forest as quickly as they had appeared, leaving five of their own dead.9

  Mabbitt’s rangers rendezvoused with General Rusk’s militiamen and the combined forces—numbering about 260 men—​marched from Fort Houston on October 15. After covering about thirty miles, they reached the abandoned Kickapoo village by nightfall. Rusk’s command staff included Adjutant General Hugh McLeod and Major Isaac Burton, the ranger captain who had captured Mexican schooners shortly after San Jacinto. The Texan force made camp for the night in a horseshoe bend of Kickapoo Creek about a half mile northwest of the Neches River.10

  Around 10 P.M., Córdova’s spies attempted to start a forest fire surrounding the Texan camp. The damp forest grounds refused to spread the fire, so the Texans tied off their horses in the center of camp and posted stronger guard details to keep watch. Just before daybreak on October 16, the forest around the militia camp suddenly erupted in war whoops and exploding muskets as hundreds of Indian and Mexican rebels took Rusk’s men under fire. The companies of Captains William Sadler, James Bradshaw, James Box, and Jacob Snively in the northern edge of camp took the brunt of the initial attack. Many of the rangers who had survived the previous ambush on Mabbitt’s force days earlier now had their clothing ripped by rifle balls, although none were killed. Hugh McLeod felt it was the “closest shooting I ever saw to do so little execution.”11

  Thirteen Texans were wounded, including more than a quarter of Captain Bradshaw’s men. John Murchison, brother-in-law to Captain Sadler, was knocked down by a musket ball that struck him in the forehead and lodged in the socket of his left eye against his eyebrow. General Rusk, angered by the hidden attackers, advanced from the camp and shouted at them to show themselves like men. After the initial firing died down, Rusk rallied his men and ordered a charge into the forest. They succeeded in scattering the Indians and Mexicans. In a running firefight that stretched for three-quarters of a mile, nearly a dozen rebels were left lying about the battlefield, including one Cherokee. The Texans estimated they may have killed as many as thirty of their opponents based on the blood trails they found after daylight. More than two dozen Texan horses were mortally wounded in the battle and one ranger, James Hall, later died from his wounds.12

  The Battle of Kickapoo was enough to quell the Córdova Rebellion and send the leader fleeing for Mexico. The Texans regrouped at Fort Houston, where many of Rusk’s militiamen headed for Nacogdoches to disband at the conclusion of the so-called Kickapoo War campaign. Captain Sadler’s volunteer rangers returned to the Mustang Prairie settlement in Houston County, where Sadler and his brother-in-law had left their families in the care of several older men. They found to their horror that a party of Kickapoo Indians had descended upon the dogtrot cabin of John Edens and carried out what became known as the Edens-Madden Massacre. Ten women and children were shot, tomahawked, scalped, and burned before the cabin was torched. Captain Sadler lost his wife and infant daughter in the bloody massacre near San Pedro Creek.13

  EAST TEXAS DID NOT possess sole ownership of the frontier violence franchise in 1838.

  In Béxar County, a party of Anglo and tejano surveyors was attacked on October 18, and at least five of their number were killed. A thirteen-man volunteer party under Captain Benjamin Cage, a cousin to Jack Hays, set out in pursuit toward the Leon Creek massacre site. They were attacked by more than one hundred Comanche Indians. Cage and seven others were killed and four other Texans were wounded. Among those to escape was Judge Joseph L. Hood of San Antonio, who survived an arrow wound and was later elected sheriff of Béxar County.14

  In Bastrop County, at least two settlers were killed in Indian depredations during November. In present DeWitt County, Comanches preyed upon Guadalupe River settlers, where they captured five young children on December 9. Thirteen-year-old Matilda Lockhart was out gathering pecans with four Putman children when they were seized. Elizabeth and James Putman were eventually ransomed, while their sister Juda would remain captive for fourteen years. Another of the children, Rhoda Putman, became the wife of a Comanche chief and refused to leave them. As for Matilda Lockhart, her captivity would become the focus of a major confrontation between Texan forces and the Comanche more than a year later.15

  Tom Rusk and Hugh McLeod held peace talks with Shawnee chief Linney in late November before moving toward the Red River to join with militiamen organized by General John Dyer and Captain Edward H. Tarrant. They pursued a band of rebel Caddos across the border of the Red River into Louisiana and forced them to surrender their firearms. The event ended without bloodshed, but the local Natchitoches Herald ran an article in its December 16 issue with the headline INVASION OF THE UNITED STATES BY TEXAS.16

  Rusk’s militia remained vigilant in late 1838 and even employed friendly Indians in the frontier service to serve as spies and scouts. Captain Panther of the Shawnees commanded a thirty-man unit of mounted Shawnees for three months, while another mounted ranger company was mustered in on December 24 under Captain James H. Durst. His unit was composed primarily of Cherokee Indians, with a few Caddo, Shawnee, and Anglo volunteers. Brigadier General John Dyer’s Fourth Militia Brigade marched out in late November for another campaign toward the Three Forks of the Trinity near present Dallas. Indian encounters were few but the militiamen and rangers did help build various fortifications in the Red River settlements during the winter months. Rusk and Dyer managed only to destroy some abandoned Caddo villages during December before turning for home as their supplies dwindled. Rusk returned to Nacogdoches “worn down and exhausted,” and obviously frustrated that his men had received little support from their government. “I fear if a decisive blow is not struck against the Indians before spring,” he wrote, “we shall be much troubled with them.”17

  A major change in Indian policy was in the works during the time Rusk’s men were in the field. President Mirabeau Lamar, elected as the new president of the Republic of Texas to replace Sam Houston, was inaugurated on December 10, 1838. He and Vice President David Burnet made it clear that they would not follow President Houston’s policy of pacifying the more hostile Indians of Texas. President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act had forcibly removed Indian tribes from the United States east of the Mississippi River. Army forces were marching some fifteen thousand Cherokees along the so-called Trail of Tears into Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) during the winter of 1838–39. The new Texas president intended to be equally aggressive.

  Lamar set the tone during his first speech before the Third Congress on December 21. “As long as we continue to exhibit our mercy without showing our strength,” he said, “so long will the Indians continue to bloody the tomahawk and move onward in the work of rapacity and slaughter.” President Lamar saw Indians as “wild cannibals” who committed killings with the “ferocity of tigers and hyenas.” He denounced the 1836 land treaty of Houston with Chief Bowles and pledged to remove the Western Cherokees from Texas. Lamar promised a war of extermination to bring about “their total extinction.” The Third Congress of the Republic of Texas went to work right away providing for frontier protection. New mounted ranger companies were approved for counties facing the greatest threat from Indian violence and a new regular army was authorized on December 21, 1838.

  The “Frontier Regiment” was to consist of fifteen companies with a total of 840 men, funded by $300,000 in republic promissory notes. Including both infantry and cavalry, the new Texas Army would be stationed along a military road to be laid out from the Red River on the U.S. border to the Nueces River near the border with Mexico. The new leaders of the army would be commissioned during the next month.18

  Congress additionally authorized President Lamar to use $75,000 to press eight “companies of mounted volunteers” into service
for six months’ ranging duty for protection against the Comanche and other hostile Indians. The commanders of this new ranging regiment were named on January 9, 1839, as Colonel Henry Karnes, Lieutenant Colonel Jerome Devereaux Woodlief, and Major William Jefferson Jones. Major Jones was ordered on January 21 to proceed with recruiting men through Columbia and Matagorda en route to Washington-on-the-Brazos.19

  The opening weeks of 1839 were marked by serious encounters between Texas settlers and frontier Indians as these new forces were being organized. The first major confrontation occurred on the evening of January 1 on the upper Brazos River when the home of George Morgan was assaulted by a party of about fifteen Indians. They were led by Anadarko chief José María, who also commanded several Caddos, Ionies, and Kichais. They laid into their Anglo victims with fury, hacking five families to death with tomahawks and scalping knives. Four children escaped to spread the alarm, one of the daughters being severely wounded.20

  Just two weeks after the Morgan Massacre, another party of forty Indians assaulted the fortified home of John Marlin on the Brazos River. The armed men were better able to fight back this time: they killed as many as seven of their attackers. The next morning, January 15, a fifty-two-man volunteer unit led by Captain Benjamin Franklin Bryant, an officer veteran of San Jacinto, crossed the Brazos in pursuit of the Indians. Near the plundered Morgan home they encountered Chief José María’s band of Anadarkos and other allied Indians. The chief fired a rifle ball through the sleeve of volunteer Joseph Boren and then signaled for his men to attack the approaching Texans.21