by S. C. Gwynne
The horse and the knowledge of how to use it spread with astonishing speed through the midcontinent. In 1630, no tribes anywhere were mounted.25 By 1700, all Texas plains tribes had them; by 1750, tribes of the Canadian plains were hunting buffalo on horseback. The horse gave them what must have seemed to them an astonishing new mobility. It allowed them, for the first time, to fully master the buffalo. They could now migrate with the herds. They could now travel faster than a buffalo at full gallop, and they quickly learned to ride the huge creatures down on the open plains, thrusting their fourteen-foot lances between the animals’ ribs or shooting them on the run with arrows. Hunting skills quickly became martial skills, too. Tribes who learned to hunt on horseback gained an almost instant military dominance over nonhorse tribes, and for a time over everyone else who dared challenge them. It turned them into expansive traders, providing both the thing to be traded and the mobility to reach new markets.
What the horse did not do was change their fundamental natures. Before the arrival of the horse, they were peoples whose lives were based almost entirely on the buffalo. The horse did not change this. They merely became much better at what they had always done. No true plains tribes fished or practiced agriculture before the horse, and none did so after the horse. Even their limited use of berries and roots went unchanged.26 They remained relatively primitive, warlike hunters; the horse virtually guaranteed that they would not evolve into more civilized agrarian societies. Still, the enhancements were breathtaking to see. War could now be made across immense distances. Horses—the principal form of wealth on the plains—could now be gathered and held in large numbers. And there was the simple, fundamental, spiritual power of the animal itself, which had transformed these poor foot Indians into dazzling cavalrymen. And the new technology turned tribes who had lagged behind their peers in culture and social organization into newly dominant forces. These included names that would soon be famous throughout the country: Sioux, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, Blackfoot, Crow, and Comanche.
No one knows exactly how or when the Comanche bands in eastern Wyoming first encountered the horse, but that event probably happened somewhere near the midpoint of the seventeenth century. Since the Pawnees, who lived in the area we now call Nebraska, were known to be mounted by 1680, the Comanches almost certainly had horses by that time. There were no witnesses to this great coming together of Stone Age hunters and horses, nothing to record what happened when they met, or what there was in the soul of the Comanche that understood the horse so much better than everyone else did. Whatever it was, whatever sort of accidental brilliance, whatever the particular, subliminal bond between warrior and horse, it must have thrilled these dark-skinned pariahs from the Wind River country. The Comanches adapted to the horse earlier and more completely than any other plains tribe. They are considered, without much debate, the prototype horse tribe in North America. No one could outride them or outshoot them from the back of a horse. Among other horse tribes, only the Kiowas fought entirely mounted, as the Comanches did. Pawnees, Crows, even the Dakotas used the horse primarily for transport. They would ride to the battle, then dismount and fight. (Only in the movies did the Apaches attack riding horses.)27 No tribe other than the Comanches ever learned to breed horses—an intensely demanding, knowledge-based skill that helped create enormous wealth for the tribe. They were always careful in the castration of the herd; almost all riding horses were geldings. Few other tribes bothered with this. It was not uncommon for a Comanche warrior to have one hundred to two hundred mounts, or for a chief to have fifteen hundred. (A Sioux chief might have forty horses, by comparison.)28 They were not only the richest of all tribes in sheer horseflesh, their horses were also the main medium through which the rest of the tribes became mounted.29
The first Europeans and Americans to see Comanche horsemanship did not fail to notice this. Athanase de Mézières, a Spanish Indian agent of French descent, described them thus:
They are a people so numerous and haughty that when asked their number they make no difficulty of comparing it to that of the stars. They are so skillful in horsemanship that they have no equal; so daring that they never ask for or grant truces; and in the possession of such a territory that, finding in it an abundance of pasturage for their horses and an incredible number of [buffalo] which furnish them all the raiment, food, and shelter, they only just fall short of possessing all the conveniences of the earth.30
Other observers saw the same thing. Colonel Richard Dodge, whose expedition made early contact with Comanches, believed them to be the finest light cavalry in the world, superior to any mounted soldiers in Europe or America. Catlin also saw them as incomparable horsemen. As he described it, the American soldiers were dumbfounded at what they saw. “On their feet they are one of the most unattractive and slovenly looking races of Indians I have ever seen, but the moment they mount their horses, they seem at once metamorphosed,” wrote Catlin. “I am ready, without hesitation, to pronounce the Comanches the most extraordinary horsemen I have seen yet in all my travels.” He went on to write:
Amongst their feats of riding there is one that has astonished me more than anything of the kind I have ever seen or expect to see, in my life:—a stratagem of war, learned and practiced by every young man in the tribe; by which he is able to drop his body on the side of his horse at the instant he is passing, effectively screened from his enemies’ weapons, as he lays in a horizontal position behind the body of his horse, with his heel hanging over the horses’s back. . . . in this wonderful condition, he will hang whilst his horse is at fullest speed, carrying with him his bow and shield and also his long lance 14 feet in length.31
Thus positioned, a Comanche warrior could loose twenty arrows in the time it took a soldier to load and fire one round from his musket; each of those arrows could kill a man at thirty yards. Other observers were amazed at the Comanche technique of breaking horses. A Comanche would lasso a wild horse, then tighten the noose, choking the horse and driving it to the ground. When it seemed as if the horse was nearly dead, the choking lariat was slacked. The horse finally rose, trembling and in a full lather. Its captor gently stroked its nose, ears, and forehead, then put his mouth over the horse’s nostrils and blew air into its nose. The Indian would then throw a thong around the now-gentled horse’s lower jaw, mount up, and ride away.32 The Comanches, as it turned out, were geniuses at anything to do with horses: breeding, breaking, selling, and riding. They even excelled at stealing horses. Colonel Dodge wrote that a Comanche could enter “a bivouac where a dozen men were sleeping, each with a horse tied to his wrist by the lariat, cut a rope within six feet of the sleeper, and get away with the horse without waking a soul.”33
No other tribe, except possibly the Kiowas, so completely lived on horseback. Children were given their own horses at four or five. Soon the boys were expected to learn tricks, which included picking up objects on the ground at a gallop. The young rider would start with light objects and move to progressively heavier objects until finally, without assistance and at a full gallop, he could pick up a man. Rescuing a fallen comrade was seen as one of the most basic obligations of a Comanche warrior. They all learned the leather thong trick at a young age. Women could often ride as well as men. One observer watched two Comanche women set out at full speed with lassoes and each rope a bounding antelope on the first throw.34 Women had their own mounts, as well as mules and gentle horses for packing.
When they were not stealing horses, or breeding them, they were capturing them in the wild. General Thomas James told a story of how he had witnessed this in 1823, when he had visited the Comanches as a horse buyer. He watched as many riders headed bands of wild horses into a deep ravine where a hundred men waited on horseback with coiled lariats. When the “terrified wild horses reached the ambush” there was a good deal of dust and confusion as the riders lassoed them by the neck or forefeet. But every rider got an animal. Only one horse got away. The Comanches pursued him and in two hours he came back “tamed and gent
le.” Within twenty-four hours one hundred or more wild horses had been captured “amid the wildest excitement” and appeared to be “as subject to their masters as farm horses.”35 They would chase a herd of mustangs for several days until the animals were exhausted, making them easy to capture. Comanches waited by water holes for parched horses to gorge themselves so they could barely run, then captured them. While the Comanches had a limited vocabulary to describe most things—a trait common to primitive peoples—their equine lexicon was large and minutely descriptive. For color alone, there were distinct Comanche words for brown, light bay, reddish brown, black, white, blue, dun, sorrel, roan, red, yellow, yellow-horse-with-a-black mane-and-tail; red, sorrel, and black pintos. There were even words to describe horses with red, yellow, and black ears.36
Comanche horsemanship also played a leading role in another Comanche pastime: gambling. Stories of Comanche horse hustles are legion. One of the more famous came from the Texas frontier. A small band of Comanches showed up at Fort Chadbourne, where the army officers challenged them to a race. The chief seemed indifferent to the idea, but the officers were so insistent that he agreed to it anyway. A race was arranged over a distance of four hundred yards. Soon a large, portly brave appeared on a long-haired “miserable sheep of a pony.” He carried a heavy club, with which he hit the horse. Unimpressed, the officers trotted out their third-best horse, and bet the Comanches flour, sugar, and coffee against buffalo robes. Swinging the club “ostentatiously,” the Indian won. For the next race, the soldiers brought out their second-best horse. They lost this race, too. Now they insisted on a third race, and finally trotted out their number-one horse, a magnificent Kentucky mare. Bets were doubled, tripled. The Comanches took everything the soldiers would wager. At the starting signal, the Comanche warrior whooped, threw away his club, and “went away like the wind.” Fifty yards from the finish, the Comanche rider turned fully around in his saddle, and with “hideous grimaces” beckoned the other rider to catch up. The losers later learned that the same shaggy horse had just been used to take six hundred horses away from the Kickapoo Indians.37
In the late 1600s, Comanche mastery of the horse had led them to migrate southward out of the harsh, cold lands of the Wind River and into more temperate climates. The meaning of the migration was simple: They were challenging other tribes for supremacy over the single richest hunting prize on the continent: the buffalo herds of the southern plains.
In 1706 they rode, for the first time, into recorded history. In July of that year a Spanish sergeant major named Juan De Ulibarri, on his way to gather Pueblo Indians for conversion in northern New Mexico, reported that Comanches, in the company of Utes, were preparing to attack Taos pueblo.38 He later heard of actual Comanche attacks.39 This was the first the Spanish or any white men had heard of these Indians who had many names. One name in particular, given to them by the Utes, was Koh-mats, sometimes given as Komantcia, and meant “anyone who is against me all the time.” The authorities in New Mexico translated this various ways (Cumanche, Commanche) but eventually as “Comanche.”40 It would take the Spaniards years to figure out exactly who these new invaders were.
Four
HIGH LONESOME
With these remarks, I submit the following pages to the perusal of a generous public, feeling assured that before they are published, the hand that penned them will be cold in death.1
Those are the words of twenty-year-old Rachel Parker Plummer, written probably sometime in early 1839. She was referring to her memoir of captivity, and predicting her own death. She was right. She died on March 19 of that year. She had been dragged, sometimes quite literally, over half of the Great Plains as the abject slave of Comanche Indians, and then had logged another two thousand miles in what amounted to one of the most grueling escapes ever made from any tribe by any captive. To the readers of her era, the memoir was jaw-dropping. It still is. As a record of pure, blood-tinged, white-knuckled adventure on America’s nineteenth-century frontier, there are few documents that can compare to it.
On the morning after that harrowing first night, the five Parker captives—Rachel and her fourteen-month-old son, James, her aunt Elizabeth Kellogg (probably in her thirties), nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker, and her seven-year-old brother, John, were strapped to horses behind Comanche riders again and taken north. For the next five days the Comanches pressed hard, passing Cross Timbers, the forty-mile-wide patch of woods on the otherwise open prairie west of modern Dallas, “a beautiful faced country,” as Rachel put it, with “a great many fine springs.” Not that she was allowed to drink from them. During that time, the Indians gave their captives no food at all, and only a single small allowance of water. Each night they were tied tightly with leather thongs that made their wrists and ankles bleed; as before, their hands and feet were drawn together and they were put facedown on the ground.
Rachel does not tell us much about what happened to Cynthia Ann—beyond the blows, the blood, and the trussing of the first night—but it is possible to make an educated guess about what happened to her. Though Comanches were mercurial about these things, their treatment of a nine-year-old girl would usually have been different from that accorded the adult women. Cynthia Ann’s first few days and nights were no doubt horrific. There was the shrieking panic of the Indian attack, the uncomprehending horror of the moment her mother, Lucy, set her on the warrior’s horse, her own father’s bloody death, the astonishing sight of her cousin and aunt being raped and abused. (In spite of her strict Baptist upbringing, as a farm girl she would have known about sex and reproduction; still, it would have shed little light on what she witnessed.) There was the hard ride through the prairie darkness of northern Texas to the camp where she was tied and bludgeoned, then the five subsequent days on the trail without food.
Considering what happened to her later, however, it is likely that the beatings and harsh treatment stopped. There are plenty of records of children being killed by Comanches, and of young girls being raped, but in general they fared far better than the adults. For one thing, they were young enough to be assimilated into a society that had abysmally low fertility rates (partly caused by the life on horseback, which induced miscarriages early in pregnancy) and needed captives to keep their numbers up.2 They were also valuable for the ransom they might bring. In several other unusually violent Comanche raids, young female captives had been conspicuously spared and quickly accepted into the tribe. Girls had a decent chance, anyway. Certainly that was true compared to adult male captives, who were automatically killed or tortured to death. The strongest argument for her humane treatment was the presence at the Parker raid of the man who would later become her husband and a war chief: Peta Nocona. Indeed, Peta may well have led the raid, and it may have been his horse upon which Lucy Parker had put the screaming, protesting Cynthia Ann.3
On the sixth day the Indians divided their captives: Elizabeth Kellogg was traded or given to a band of Kichai Indians, a sedentary tribe from north-central Texas that raised crops and enjoyed something like vassal status with the Comanches; Cynthia Ann and John went to a band of middle Comanches, probably the Nokonis; Rachel and James went to another Comanche band. She had assumed that they would let her son, bruised and bloody but somehow still alive, stay with her. She was wrong. “As soon as they found out I had weaned him,” she wrote, “they, in spite of all my efforts, tore him from my embrace. He reached out his hands toward me, which were covered with blood, and cried, “‘Mother, Mother, oh, Mother!’ I looked after him as he was borne from me, and I sobbed aloud. This was the last I ever heard of my little Pratt.”4
Rachel’s band pushed on to the cooler elevations in the north, probably into what is now eastern Colorado. She found herself on the high, barren plains. “We now lost sight of timber,” Rachel wrote. “We would travel for weeks and not see a riding switch. Buffalo dung is all the fuel. This is gathered into a round pile; and when set on fire it does very well to cook by, and will keep fire for several days.”5 They were i
n the heart of Comancheria, an utterly alien place that was known to mapmakers of the time as the Great American Desert. To anyone accustomed to timbered lands, which describes almost everyone in America prior to 1840, the plains were not just unlike anything they had ever seen, they were, on some fundamental level, incomprehensible, as though a person who had lived in the high mountains all his life were seeing the ocean for the first time. “East of the Mississippi civilization stood on three legs—land, water, and timber,” wrote Walter Prescott Webb in his classic The Great Plains. “West of the Mississippi not one but two of those legs were withdrawn—water and timber—and civilization was left on one leg—land. It is a small wonder that it toppled over in temporary failure.”6