by S. C. Gwynne
The war was just beginning. Flush with his victory over the Cherokees, Texas commander Kelsey Douglass requested permission to clean out the “rat’s nest” of other, mostly peaceful, tribes in east Texas. Now there was more killing, and more fire. By the end of July, the cornfields and villages of all the Cherokees, Delawares, Shawnees, Caddoans, Kickapoos, Creeks, Muskogees, and Seminoles in east Texas were burned to the ground. Their innocence was beside the point. Whether a particular murder was committed by a Kiowa, Caddo, Wichita, or Creek seemed to Texans to make less and less difference. Most of the dispossessed Indians took their ragged, starving families and headed north to the designated Indian Territory, where some twenty thousand officially relocated Indians12 now jostled with one another and with the native plains tribes—the last stop on what came to be known as the “trail of tears.” Some of the Cherokees, including Chief Bowles’s son, tried to flee to Mexico. As though to make sure there was absolutely no misunderstanding at all about the new Indian policies, the Texans hunted them down over several hundred miles and shot them, then took their women and children prisoner.13 Only two tribes, the Alabamas and the Coushattas, were permitted to stay—though they were moved from their own fertile fields to much less desirable lands. Thus were tens of thousands of acres of superb farmland in east Texas opened to white farmers, who immediately, happily, and presumably with immaculately clean consciences, moved in.
Those were the sedentary, somewhat civilized, relatively nonwarlike, beaten-down, relocated, unmounted, agrarian Indians of east Texas, anyway. There were other sedentary tribes who lived beyond the frontier and were thus safe for the moment from this cleansing by fire: Wichitas, Wacos, Tawakonis, Kichais, Tonkawas, and a few others. But while it might be entertaining and rewarding to massacre and exile the relatively harmless and broken Muskogees and Seminoles, the real trouble, most of the “depredations,” came not from the east but from the west. Everyone knew it. For all of their bravado and puffed-up war talk and insatiable greed for new territory, there was very little the Texans could do in the immense expanse of land, constituting most of Texas itself, that was ruled by the Comanches.
To understand their dilemma, look at a map of modern Texas. Draw a line from San Antonio through Austin and Waco, ending at Dallas at the forks of the Trinity River. That is roughly the western, meaning Comanche, frontier as it existed in the late 1830s, though there was very little settlement near present-day Dallas. Most of it was spread around Austin and San Antonio. That line also follows the 98th meridian almost exactly—meaning that this is where the trees start to thin out; by the 100th meridian, in the neighborhood of modern Abilene, they are mostly gone. In the region of Austin and San Antonio it marks the edge of the Balcones Escarpment, a fault zone where the big, rolling, timbered limestone hills rose from the fertile coastal plain. (They rose so abruptly that their stone ramparts reminded the Spanish of balconies in a theater, hence the name.) Piercing this line at three points were the Brazos, Colorado, and Guadalupe rivers. Imagine them as raiders’ highways, sweeping down the state from the Northwest, aimed directly at the heart of the Texas frontier.
These rivers were also, of course, highways into the uplands of Comancheria, for anyone brave or stupid enough to ascend them. The problem was that, to the west of the line, from a white man’s perspective, there was a vast, mysterious, frightening, bone-dry world inhabited by a fierce and primitive people who could outride, outshoot, and out-track them, and who could navigate enormous distances with alarming ease. The Indians fought mounted, too, which put the westerners, with their heavy horses, their practice of fighting on foot, and their cumbersome, muzzle-loading rifles, at a huge disadvantage. Because the Indians did not have permanent villages, they were usually impossible to locate; if you located them you were likely to wish you hadn’t.
That did not stop the Texans from trying. In those early years of the republic, a motley assortment of militias, ranger companies, volunteers, and state companies trooped out regularly after Comanches following raids. They killed some Comanches, and they got lucky a few times, but mostly they did not. Mostly they were schooled by the superior Indians in plains warfare, and many of them died hard and lingering deaths. More than the Texans ever cared to admit.
One of the best examples of these early conflicts took place in February 1839 between Comanches and a state militia under Colonel John Moore. Moore was blessed with the same character trait that made pioneers want to settle the wildest and most hostile regions of the country, where their families were likely to be raped and disemboweled: heedless, unwarranted optimism. He viewed Indians as subhumans who were in need of destruction. He was known for standing next to the preacher during sermons at his church, casting a severe eye upon the congregation to make sure they did not fall asleep.14 He had been told by the Comanches’ arch-foes, the Lipan Apaches, that a band of Comanches was camped in the prairie north of Austin. The Lipans, victims of near extermination by the Comanches, could always be counted on to betray their old tormentors, to sniff them out and go running to the authorities. Afraid to fight Comanches alone, the Lipans invested much time goading the white man to chase their enemy. They also volunteered to join an expedition against them. Moore, who would not have known the first thing about how to find Comanches in the live oak thickets and limestone mesas of the Texas hill country, took them on. It should be noted that, with very few exceptions, white soldiers would have had very little chance of finding Comanches without the help of their old enemies, usually the Tonkawas or the Lipan Apaches. This was true for all of the years of the Comanche conflict. Moore’s expedition was one of the first to use Indian scouts. Later it became the policy of Texas and the practice of all white soldiers. (Custer made the mistake of not heeding the warnings of his Indian trackers at Little Bighorn.) There were some able trackers among the whites—Ranger Ben McCulloch was one, Kit Carson another—but generally speaking white soldiers were unable to read signs effectively in the wilderness, even if they had received instruction. It was Indian trackers, as much as white soldiers under famous generals like George Crook, Nelson Miles, and Ranald Mackenzie, who were responsible for the destruction of the Plains Indians. The cinematic image of the dusty, standard-bearing cavalry riding out from stockade forts is often missing one key component: the Indian scout.
Thus did Colonel Moore depart, with sixty-three hastily recruited volunteers and fourteen Lipan Apaches under their chief, Castro, for the limestone breaks of the San Gabriel River north of Austin, probably near the present town of Georgetown.15 When they reached the encampment, the Comanches had already departed, leaving a trail that headed upriver. Before they could follow, a prairie storm came howling in from the north. The men hunkered down in a grove of post oak in the fierce, penetrating cold, and waited out the driving snow and sleet. For three days. “Some of the horses froze to death,” wrote Noah Smithwick, one of the captains of the expedition, “and the Indians, loth to see so much good meat go to waste, ate the flesh.”16 When the weather cleared, they pursued the Comanches northwest to the junction of the Colorado and San Saba rivers, at the site of the present town of San Saba, some seventy-five miles inside the frontier. This was, by the standards of 1839, deep inside Comanche territory. There the Lipan scouts spotted the lodge fires. Smithwick, who was with them, describes what it felt like to be a white man tracking Indians in the heart of Comancheria:
While riding along about dark we heard a wolf howl behind us. My [Lipan] guide stopped short and assumed a listening attitude. In a few moments another answered, way to the right. Still the Indian listened so intently that his form seemed perfectly rigid. Then another set up a howl on our left. “Umph, lobo,” said the Lipan, in a tone of relief. I can’t say that I admired the music of the wolf at any time, but it certainly never had a more unmusical sound than on that occasion, and when I saw that even an Indian’s ears were uncertain whether it was a wolf or a Comanche, I felt the cold chills creeping over me.17
What they had found was a villag
e of more than five hundred people. These were Penatekas—Honey Eaters—southern Comanches so arrogantly secure in the fastness of their ancient lands that they had posted no sentinels, so comfortably oblivious to any threat from the outside that in the chill early morning of February 15 they were all asleep in their tipis, wrapped warmly in their buffalo robes. Meanwhile the volunteers—they were all starting to call themselves “rangers”—were shivering in the icy darkness, loading and priming their old single-barrel, muzzle-loading muskets, waiting for daybreak.
The events of the next hour offered a stunning illustration of what happened when white men who had no idea how to fight Plains Indians came up against a tribe that had no idea that white men would ever attack them in their heartland. Their meeting was a precursor of years of grinding frontier war between the two. From the whites’ point of view, the ensuing battle amounted to a series of glaring, and nearly fatal, mistakes.
The first was when Moore, the incurable optimist, ordered his men to dismount about a mile from the Comanche camp and approach quietly on foot. This was a perfectly good surprise tactic, had it been executed in the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky one hundred years before. But this was the West. And these were Comanches. He had left his horses unguarded—perhaps the single most disastrous mistake a commander could make on the Great Plains.
He would soon pay for it. At daylight the soldiers rushed the camp, blasting directly into the tipis, firing blindly at everyone who emerged. The peaceful winter scene gave way to pure chaos with women and children shrieking, Texans “throwing open the doors of the wigwams or pulling them down and slaughtering the enemy in their beds,” dogs barking, men yelling, and shots ringing out. One ranger, Andrew Lockhart, who believed his teenage daughter Matilda was being held captive, raced ahead screaming, “Matilda, if you are here, run to me!” He never found her. (It later turned out that she was there and she did hear him, but her cries were swallowed by the noise and gunfire.)18
Instead of standing and fighting, as white men might be expected to do, the Comanches did what they always did in similar circumstances: They scattered like quail and rushed for their horses. This was Moore’s second mistake, again unthinkable in a surprise attack on Plains Indians: He had overlooked the Comanche horse herd. He had forgotten to stampede it. This meant that many Comanches were almost instantly mounted. Then they did what all plains tribes did automatically when given the chance: They circled back behind the soldiers and stampeded the Texans’ horses. With that, the entire tenor of the battle changed.
Moore now found himself with his troopers and Indians, wandering around an empty camp with nothing to shoot at as the realization dawned on him that almost all of his men were afoot in the wilderness and that they were greatly outnumbered by mounted Indians. And now Moore got scared. In the words of Texas Ranger historian Mike Cox, he “realized that he had cut a bigger plug of tobacco than he could chew.”19 He ordered a retreat to the protective cover of a wooded ravine.20 The Comanches now rallied and charged, but were repulsed several times by accurate and lethal long-bore rifle fire. Though he had found an effective redoubt in the rocks and trees of the ravine, Moore’s brilliant surprise had suddenly turned into a desperate defensive action. With their superior numbers, the Indians could have annihilated the soldiers.21 But no Indian plan of battle in American history ever included sacrificing large numbers of lives to take a position. That was what white men did, exemplified in attacks later on at places like Little Round Top, Iwo Jima, and Gallipoli. The Plains Indians’ almost universal reluctance to press advantage was, from a tactical standpoint, one of their biggest weaknesses. It saved countless thousands of white lives.
Thus the Indians eventually withdrew. Castro, disgusted with Moore’s blundering tactics, his bizarre and cowardly order to retreat, and his failure to destroy the Comanche village, deserted with all of his Lipans. Moore was now forced to make a long and humiliating retreat, on foot, one hundred fifty miles down the Colorado to Austin, carrying six wounded men, frightened the entire way of an Indian attack.22 He believed, with his irrepressibly optimistic self-confidence, that he had won the battle. All he had done was to sidestep a disaster. The Comanches he had attacked retaliated immediately with a bloody raid against the settlements on the Colorado.
If the Comanches had taken a lesson from what happened on the San Saba—and apparently they had not—it would have been that the nature of the game had changed completely. The Texans were not the Spanish or the Mexicans. They were tougher, meaner, almost impossible to discourage, willing to take absurd risks to secure themselves a plot of dirt, and temperamentally well suited to the remorseless destruction of native tribes. They did not rely on a cumbersome, heavily mounted, overly bureaucratized, state-sponsored soldiery; they tended to handle things themselves, with volunteers who not only were not scared of Indians but actually liked hunting them down and killing them. Their president did not drone on as most government officials from time immemorial had about dreary, overly technical treaties that granted Indians boundaries and homelands in exchange for promises to return hostages or to refrain from harming whites. Lamar was talking about extinction. Extermination. That was the meaning of the Moore raid, as inept as it was. It was also the meaning of the extraordinary events that took place in the spring and summer of 1840 in San Antonio and south Texas. They amounted to the first big, reverberating collision between the westward-booming Texans and the Lords of the South Plains.
On January 9, 1840, the tolling of the San Fernando cathedral bell in San Antonio signaled the arrival of three Comanche chiefs. San Fernando is one of the great Spanish churches in North America. Its bell is the archetypal mission bell of the old American West. It rang matins for the Spanish and later Mexican padres, announced attacks by Apaches and Comanches dating from 1749. It was from its limestone tower that Mexican general Santa Anna hung his brilliant red “no quarter” flag that signaled the start of the Battle of the Alamo. In the Texan era, its peals dispatched minutemen to fight Mexicans and Indians.
On the bright, clear morning of January 9 there was no apparent threat, just something quite out of the ordinary. The Comanches had come to talk peace. They were alarmed at the encroachment on their old grounds, and they wanted it to stop. They had never made a treaty before with the Texans, but during Sam Houston’s presidency he had constantly badgered them about it. Now they were thinking maybe this was not such a bad idea. They were especially worried by surveyors, determined men who practiced a dark and incomprehensible magic intended to deprive the Indians of their lands. Even worse, the dark magic seemed to work. The Comanches killed them in horrible ways whenever the opportunity arose.
They were received civilly by the local army commander, Colonel Henry W. Karnes, who was still recovering from the wound he received when he had been shot in the hip with an arrow in a battle with Comanches in the summer of 1838.23 He told them bluntly that he would not discuss peace with them unless they returned all of their captives. The chiefs, apparently understanding what Karnes was saying, nodded agreeably and left, promising to return. Karnes, meanwhile, soon received a very special set of orders, unprecedented in Texas and very likely American history. They came from Secretary of War Albert Sidney Johnston, a tall, dashing soldier with a finely chiseled nose who would later be killed, heroically, while leading Rebel troops in a devastating charge against Grant’s army at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862.24 Johnston instructed Karnes, in no uncertain terms, that “the government assumes the right with regard to all Indian tribes . . . to dictate the conditions of such residence.” This was rhetoric straight from Lamar. In the same vein, he then asserted that “our citizens have the right to occupy any vacant lands of the government, and they must not be interfered with by the Comanche.”25 This meant their lands were forfeit. Period. Moreover, said Johnston, if the Indians did not bring in prisoners they were to be held hostage—by most civilized standards an appalling way to treat an enemy who comes by invitation to negotiate peace.
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p; The Comanches arrived on March 19. There were thirty-five warriors. They were in a festive, happy mood. They had brought thirty-two women, children, and old men with them. They were expecting no trouble. They were perhaps thinking of the old days, when the cowed and cautious Spanish and then Mexicans had allowed them free run of the town. Both the men and women were painted elaborately and attired in their finest beads, feathers, and skins. They had brought with them huge stacks of furs and a small herd of horses, apparently expecting to do a good deal of trading. The presence of these tradeable goods suggests that they may have completely misunderstood what Karnes had told them. They squatted in the street and waited. Young Indian boys played with toy bows and arrows, and white men affixed coins to trees for them to shoot.26 A crowd of townspeople had gathered. They were not hostile, just curious.
They could not help noticing, though, that the Indians had brought only one captive with them. This was Matilda Lockhart, the same girl whose father had called to her during Colonel Moore’s fight on the San Saba a year before. She had been taken in a raid in 1838 along with her younger sister, during which other family members had been killed. She was fifteen, and her appearance in the plaza in San Antonio shocked the people who saw her. As one observer—Mary Maverick, wife of a prominent local merchant—put it, Matilda’s “head, face and arms were full of bruises, and sores, and her nose was actually burnt off to the bone—all the fleshy end gone with a great scab formed on the end of the bone. Both nostrils were wide open and denuded of flesh.”27 She said she had been tortured by the Comanche women. It was not just her face that had been disfigured. Her entire body bore scars from fire. In private Matilda informed the white women that what she had suffered was even worse than that. She had been “utterly degraded,” she said, using the code word for rape, “and could not hold her head up again.”