Texas Rising

by Stephen L. Moore

  Rusk and his Nacogdoches militia companies reached Major Walters’s Fort Kickapoo camp during the first days of July. They were joined by additional companies of General Douglass’s regiment while Colonel Willis Landrum marched toward the area with an additional 262 Third Regiment militiamen raised near the Red River. Colonel Hugh McLeod and several officers opened a round of peace talks with Bowles on July 9, as the size of the Texan camp swelled to roughly 550 men. During the ensuing days, Thomas Rusk advised the Indian leaders that his troops intended no harm unless they were forced to fight. He cautioned Chief Bowles that if his people persisted in being friendly with “the wild Indians and Mexicans, we will be forced to kill your people in defense of our frontier.” Rusk made it clear that the Cherokees were “between two fires” and that if Bowles chose to remain, “you will be destroyed.”40

  On July 12, Bowles stated that his tribe intended to leave peacefully but would need time to prepare for such a journey. Spy Buck, representing Shawnee chief Linney, said that his people would need three moons’ time, or about two months, to prepare. The commissioners advised him this was far too long but that they would be given ample time to prepare for their move. The parties agreed to meet again in two days, when it was hoped that Chief Big Mush of the Cherokees and the Delaware chief would be present to sign a peace treaty.

  General Rusk used this time to organize more companies by sending a rider back to Nacogdoches. A final meeting was held at Council Creek on July 14 between Rusk, Johnston, Burnet, Burton, and Mayfield for Texas and Bowles and twenty Indians. Rusk noted that Bowles, Chief Key, and the other Indian leaders carried war clubs and had painted their faces black with war paint. David Burnet read an agreement, while interpreter Cordray explained the terms to the leaders. The Cherokees, Delawares, and Shawnees were to leave in peace with payment for their improvements and they were to surrender their gun locks to the Texan troops until they had crossed into the United States.41

  Bowles refused to sign the treaty. He said he would present the demands to the other chiefs and would give Mayfield an answer the following morning. The Indians were likely discouraged from further negotiations by the arrival of Colonel Burleson’s regulars on May 14. Added to Colonel Landrum’s Red River troops, General Rusk’s numbers had surpassed eleven hundred in camp—more Texans than had been available to engage Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto. Rusk, head of the militia, and Burleson, leader of the Texas Army, refused to oppose each other, so they made an agreement to let General Kelsey Douglass—the regional commander of the Third Militia Brigade—take overall command.

  Colonel Mayfield rode to the Indian campgrounds on July 15 with four other men to have the Cherokee treaty signed. Bowles informed them that his men were afraid that they would be killed as soon as they surrendered their gun locks. Mayfield warned the Indian leaders that the Texas Army would march against them this day if they refused. Bowles promised to keep the Texans informed as to their movements, and he followed through on this vow around noon on July 15. His son, John Bowles, and a half-breed Cherokee named Fox Fields rode in under a truce flag to inform commissioner Albert Sidney Johnston that the Cherokees were breaking camp to move to the west side of the Neches River.42

  General Douglass put his Texan troops in motion and sent Colonel Landrum’s regiment to the east side of the Neches to move upriver. The Indians were believed to have moved sixteen miles away to the Delaware village of Chief Harris. The first to arrive found the village abandoned, however, and they followed the trail of the retreating large body of Indians. Captain James Carter’s spies located the Indians about three and a half miles northwest of the present town of Chandler, west of the Neches River. Carter sent a rider back to alert command while advance groups of Thomas Rusk’s began exchanging shots with the Indians.43

  Ed Burleson quickly arrived with his regular army soldiers and the two mounted gunmen companies under Lieutenant Colonel Woodlief. They made a determined push against the Indian forces, who were occupying a ravine and thicket near the body of water that became known as Battle Creek. “You would have thought our men were mad,” recalled William Hart of Captain Peter Tipps’s mounted Nacogdoches volunteer company. Hart felt his own hollering was as loud as any of the war whoops being emitted by the Indians he faced.44

  The Indians put up heavy fire as the Texans charged the creek bed. Four Texans were mortally wounded and eight others were injured. Two of Captain George T. Howard’s regular soldiers crumpled with fatal head shots. John Crane, a member of Henry Karnes’s Mounted Rifleman Battalion, paused his horse near the creek as one of his companions, John S. Caddell, hollered that an Indian was taking aim at him. Crane’s horse reared up and the Indian’s rifle ball struck him under the right arm just under his heart. Crane, who had commanded a company during the 1835 Béxar siege, fell from his horse and died almost instantly. “By that time, I shot the Indian, killing him,” said Caddell.45

  The Cherokees and their allies were driven from their defensive positions, and they fled the battlefield as darkness fell over Battle Creek. The main fighting had lasted little more than a quarter hour. General Douglass reported that eighteen Indian bodies were found on the field and that many other casualties of theirs were seen to be carried away. The Texans seized five kegs of gunpowder, 250 pounds of lead, as well as horses, cattle, and corn the Indians left behind. The Texans set up camp for the night on the battlefield, naming it Camp Carter in honor of Jim Carter’s spies.

  Chief Bowles and his Cherokees retreated up the Neches River during the predawn hours of July 16. They reached the Delaware village of Chief Harris while the Texans tended to their wounded. The Texan forces saddled up around 10 A.M. and rode toward the Delaware camp. Captain Carter’s spies were again first to spot their adversaries, on a small hilltop overlooking the Neches River. Colonel Burleson’s battalion reached the Delaware town around midday. Rifles were already cracking as Carter’s scouts exchanged shots with the Cherokees.

  Burleson’s regulars were taken under heavy fire before they could even dismount. Seven horses and one soldier fell to the Indian guns but General Rusk soon joined the action with the first two companies of his Nacogdoches volunteers. The Texans set fire to the Delaware village. The towering flames quickly added to the misery of the mid-July heat. Bowles and his men were forced into a dry creek bed below the burning village as more of General Douglass’s troops reached the scene. Douglass ordered every sixth man to be left behind to guard their horses as he took the majority of his men to sweep around the Indians and their area of entrenchment.

  Douglass, Rusk, and Burleson faced approximately six hundred Indians: Cherokees, Delawares, Shawnees, Kickapoos, Quapaws, Choctaws, Biloxis, Ionies, Alabamas, Coushattas, Caddoes, Mataquos, and Tahocullakes. During the next ninety minutes, the Texans attempted three charges upon the Indians’ creek bed. Several men were killed and others were wounded in the heavy exchange of gunfire. The heat caused many to suffer from dehydration under the broiling afternoon sun, and the Cherokees nearly succeeded at one point in stampeding the Texan horses. “Under a scorching meridian sun, we again met a rallied enemy,” said volunteer ranger Peter Rodden. “The captain of my company was shot down on the first onset. Confusion spread among the ranks, the Indians on three sides of us.”46

  Several doctors moved carefully about the battlefield, tending to their wounded comrades. Kelsey Douglass finally ordered an all-out charge upon the Indians, which was carried out by rangers, regular soldiers, and militiamen alike. This time the Texans did not turn back, and they forced Chief Bowles’s men into great panic. Indians fled through the nearby cornfields toward the Neches River bottomlands below. Bowles remained valiantly on horseback, in plain view. He wore a military hat, a silk vest, a sash presented to him years before by Sam Houston, and a fine military sword on his side. “He was a magnificent picture of barbaric manhood and was very conspicuous during the whole battle,” wrote militiaman John Reagan.47

  The fine sorrel horse ridden by Bowles had
four white feet and a blaze face. As his forces retreated, the chief became the object of fire for many Texans. His horse collapsed with seven bullet wounds and Bowles suffered a bullet wound through his leg. As the Cherokee leader stumbled away from his fallen mount, ranger Henry C. Conner shot him through the back with a buck and ball load. Captain William Sadler, commanding one of Burleson’s regular companies, was given credit by some with having scored one of the musket shots that wounded the eighty-three-year-old chief. Bowles pulled himself up to a sitting position, still clutching his sword, a Bowie knife, and a holster of pistols. Captain Bob Smith approached Bowles.48

  John Reagan hoped that the chief might be taken as a prisoner as he watched his captain advance. Smith’s father-in-law had been murdered by Indians in 1838, however, and he had no sympathy for the gravely wounded Cherokee leader.

  “Captain, don’t shoot him!” Reagan cried out.

  Smith had already pulled his belt pistol. Militia volunteer William Hart recalled, “Bob Smith shot him above the eye with a pistol.” Smith then took the prized sword while others removed his red military jacket and even his scalp. Hart collected the bloodstained saddle from Bowles’s fallen horse to add to his own bareback mount. The final minutes of the Cherokee battle near the Neches River saw as many as one hundred Indians killed, including Chief Big Mush of the Cherokees. The remainder of the Indians fled the area as darkness soon closed over the battlefield.49

  Four Texans had perished in the July 16 battle, while another twenty lay wounded, including Adjutant General Hugh McLeod, Vice President Burnet, and Secretary of War Johnston. McLeod suffered an arrow through his thigh, while militia leader Hugh Augustine took another arrow through his leg that would require it to be amputated at the knee. Against the wishes of many of his men, General Douglass ordered pursuit of the fleeing Indians to be halted for the night. The Cherokee War, as this campaign came to be known, was deemed by supporters of President Lamar to be the second most important conflict fought on Texas soil after San Jacinto. Sam Houston and other Indian advocates were openly critical of Tom Rusk and other leaders of the Cherokee campaign.50

  The body of Chief Bowles, mutilated by some who wished to keep souvenirs, would lie unburied on the Cherokee battleground for years. The combined force of Texas Army, Texas Militia, and Texas Rangers spent the next days following the trail of the slowly retreating Indian survivors, burning villages they found along the way. Bodies of some of those who had perished following the battle were found along the trail for miles like discarded baggage. The Texans countermarched back into the old Cherokee Nation and began disbanding many of their companies in early August.51

  Leaders of the Shawnees agreed to a peace treaty in the wake of the Cherokee War. They were paid for their improvements and given about two months to prepare for their journey to the United States. With their gun locks removed, they were escorted to the border and removed from Texas without any further bloodshed. The Texas Cherokees remained splintered. The majority of the survivors crossed into the southeastern portion of Indian Territory to settle in what would become Oklahoma. Other small groups, including Chief John Bowles (son of the martyred leader), remained in Texas to face future confrontations with the white people.

  The Cherokee War was the greatest assembly of troops to deal with an Indian crisis in Texas history to that point, and the most expensive. The tab for paying the Third Militia Brigade under General Douglass alone amounted to $21,000. Ed Burleson removed most of his Frontier Regiment men back toward the Colorado River settlements to regroup before making his next Indian campaign. The cost of maintaining President Lamar’s new Texas Army was going to be hefty. Estimated funds to maintain Burleson’s staff, five companies of cavalry, and fifteen companies of infantry were tabulated to be $306,649. The land cost was equally high for Texas. Since the commencement of issuing bounties in 1837 through September 30, 1839, Albert Sidney Johnston reported that more than four million acres of Texas land had been issued in certificates of claim to donation and bounty lands for military service.52

  Small county ranger companies were maintained through the fall of 1839 in areas that were deemed most needy of protection from frontier marauders. The Texas Militia was still struggling to organize companies. Adjutant General Hugh McLeod found that by October, only sixteen of the Republic of Texas’s thirty-one counties had submitted complete muster rolls of their companies. Eight other counties merely submitted proof that companies had been formed.

  Texas Army strength had reached 440 men by early December, at which time Secretary of War Johnston decided that the Frontier Regiment was strong enough to conduct its first major campaign since the Cherokee War. Colonel Ed Burleson moved out from Austin on December 16 with four of his infantry companies, one small company of mounted scouts under Captain Mathew Caldwell, and two large companies of friendly Indian scouts—members of the Lipan tribe under Chief Castro and Tonkawa scouts commanded by Chief Placido. The Frontier Regiment expedition marched up the San Gabriel River, past the Lampasas River, and was about one hundred miles northwest of Austin by Christmas Eve.53

  Burleson’s scouts located an Indian camp on the Colorado River that day and he moved his men into position to attack the next morning. His men had located a small detachment of Cherokees led by Chiefs Egg and John Bowles, whose men were attempting to reach Mexico by passing beyond the outermost white settlements. The Texans approached the Cherokee camp on December 25 and took the Indian prisoner who came out to meet with them. The remaining Cherokees immediately took flight and a general fight ensued. Six Indians were killed, including both Cherokee chiefs. More than two dozen Indian women and children were captured. Burleson’s force suffered one wounded Tonkawa and the loss of scout John Lynch of Caldwell’s spy company, who received a fatal shot through his chest. The Texas Army had broken up the last major faction of Bowles’s Cherokees and spent the last week of 1839 scouring the Texas Hill Country for signs of any more Indians willing to give them a fight. Burleson described his final Cherokee battle on Christmas Day as a “short but decisive affair.”54

  AUSTIN, THE NEW CAPITAL city of Texas, was becoming a boomtown by October 1839. President Lamar and his cabinet transferred the seat of government there during the first of the month and Colonel Burleson’s regular army largely took up station in the area that month to construct more blockhouses.

  With the Cherokees and Shawnees largely removed, Indian troubles in central and western Texas became more frequent with the Comanches. Captain George Howard fought a skirmish with them on October 24 with portions of his Company D of the First Regiment and a detachment of Captain William H. Moore’s Company C. His men killed three Comanches and three of their horses against no losses to the regular soldiers.55

  The following day, October 25, a Texan regiment of mounted gunmen attacked an Indian village. President Lamar had authorized the regiment in late August for the purpose of conducting a campaign to the upper Brazos River against hostile Indians who had been plaguing the Austin-area settlers. Henry Karnes, the former mounted gunman battalion commander, had resigned his commission by the time Lamar’s new battalion was organized in September. Colonel John C. Neill of Harrisburg was chosen by his volunteers to lead the new battalion. His command included six mounted companies, a fifteen-man artillery company, and a twenty-nine-man mounted spy company under Captain John Tumlinson—in all, more than four hundred men.

  Colonel Neill’s companies proceeded up the Trinity River and moved across the Brazos at the town of old Nashville. They proceeded to the Falls of the Brazos to the old Waco village, and then to the Indian village of Anadarko chief José María, victor of the January Bryant’s Fight battle. The Indians largely fled the village, save one Ioni chief who was killed. The Texans looted all worthwhile camp equipage and about forty Indian ponies before continuing their campaign up the Brazos. Tumlinson’s spies captured an Indian woman and her two children as the expedition continued to track Indians who were fleeing ahead of them. Near the Clear Fork of t
he Trinity River, Neill’s battalion fought a battle on November 5. Two Comanches were killed. The Texan lost a dozen horses shot by the Indians and Private Laban Menefee was hit in the thigh by an arrow.56

  Neill’s gunmen moved southeast after the battle toward Parker’s Fort. Two members of Captain Henry Reed’s company were shot and killed by Indians on Richland Creek after they departed the main group of Texans. Colonel Neill marched his companies back toward the settlements and allowed his companies to disband in late November, having fulfilled Lamar’s wishes to take an offensive campaign out into the prairies to where the Indians lived.

  Another expedition went out from San Antonio during the time that John Neill’s men were on the campaign. Henry Karnes, having resigned his commission as colonel of mounted gunmen, returned to San Antonio in late summer 1839 and began organizing men to join him on an expedition against the Comanches. During September, he helped organize a forty-six-man company of tejanos and Anglo Texans in San Antonio. Captain José María Gonzales was elected into command of the largely tejano ranger company. It did include a few Anglo surveyors and former rangers such as Jack Hays. On September 24, Colonel Karnes met up with Captain William F. Wilson’s Galveston Mounted Gunmen, who had orders to join him in San Antonio for an expedition. Karnes and the Wilson company reached San Antonio on October 3 after traveling some 215 miles from Houston.57

  Captain Wilson’s Galveston Mounted Gunmen remained on station in San Antonio for two weeks while Karnes attended to business. The men amused themselves by enjoying fandangos at night. The streets were lighted and men and women enjoyed the festive music, and dancing that ranged from waltzes to the Virginia reel. Wilson’s rangers camped within a mile of the San Antonio River, but crafty Comanches were able to slip in during the night and steal three of their horses. Several rangers set out in pursuit, and managed to kill one Indian and recover one horse.