In both Kentucky and Texas, for long years national policy let the Indians and white settlers fight it out. A stronger government would have made efforts to tidy up the bloody mess, and avoided the double trauma that hypocrisy and violence caused in the North American soul.
Nowhere was the frontier violence in America so bloody, or so protracted, as on the soil of Texas. If Kentucky was the key, Texas was the culmination of the inner American experience. For forty years, frontier defense was Texas's most crucial problem, and frontier warfare continued for four decades.
The conflict with the differentiated civilization of Mexico continued for even longer. Blood was still shed in the second decade of the 20th century, and tensions in the middle of that century had far from disappeared.
The Mexican–Indian warfare, taken together, spawned an almost incredible amount of violence across west and southwest Texas. Almost every ranch, every water hole, and every family had its record of gunshots in the night and blood under the sun. Violence became commonplace. Every Texan historian is aware of whole chunks of Texas history moved in fiction to other states, simply because the reiteration of violence and conflict on the soil of Texas became boring to Americans.
Because of this history, the dominant Texan viewpoint was not that Texans settled Texas, but that they conquered it. Many other Americans have never been able to rationalize this in terms of a mythical North American mission in the world. Texas was never a refuge for the lowly, or oppressed, or a beacon proclaiming human rights. It was a primordial land with a Pleistocene climate, inhabited by species inherently hostile to the Anglo-Celtic breed. Some North Americans chose to conquer it, and in the process unquestionably came to look upon themselves as a sort of chosen race.
This sense of being a chosen people, which was tribal and biblical, was an enormous Texan strength rather than a weakness. It gave Anglo-Texans immediate moral superiority, in action, over their enemies. It led to high nobility and at times a valor almost beyond belief. It also produced brutal prejudice, and ethnic self-satisfaction that amounted to chauvinism. The whole feeling was guileless, and therefore guiltless. Hypocrisy toward warfare was never part of the Texan ethos. The generations that moved across the Sabine were already bred to certain hatreds and war. Their mothers and fathers had endured Indians as they endured winters and the typhoid; the sons and daughters were entirely convinced that life would be better once both plagues were conquered. Mexicans were a new experience, but the quirks of Mexican warfare—the parleys, the guile, and the frequent treacheries—were quickly learned. To hold this land, Texans developed the pervasive beliefs that Indians must be eliminated and Mexicans must be dominated. These views were not palatable to many other Americans, but they cannot be fairly rejected or criticized by those who failed to share the Texan experience. Once the future Texans committed themselves to moving onto Mexican soil and Indian range, such attitudes were inevitable, and necessary, if they were to prevail. There was a great struggle for this soil; palatable or not, this fact cannot be ignored.
The struggle, the violence, the tribal instincts, and the feeling for place that these engendered may have separated Texans in some ways from other North Americans. But they tended to make Texans closer, in most ways, to the rest of mankind. Texas experience, in the 19th century, permitted few illusions. Texans had to be pragmatic to prosper and warlike to stay alive. They had to be as purposeful as Israelis in the next century, and as brutal as the Normans, who brought order and a new civilization to Saxon England with the sword.
The State of Texas stands as a historic reminder that Americans, on these shores, did not create something entirely new, nor emerge entirely innocent, into the brave new world.
Historically, no people voluntarily permitted wholesale immigration of foreign stock into their territory unless they expected the immigrants to perform some sort of dirty work.
The Mexicans were no exception to the rule. The biggest factor in their decision in favor of Austin's colony was their fervent hope that the Americans would become a buffer between Mexicans and the Plains Indians. In the 18th century the Spanish had failed to win their Indian wars. In the 19th century, the Mexicans had allowed the situation to deteriorate. Vast areas of northern Mexico were virtually under a state of siege. Villages were depopulated, and peasants cowered in the adobe-walled towns.
This was a role Stephen Austin deliberately eschewed. He understood the Comanche problem; he wanted no part in it. In 1822, on his journey to Mexico, Austin was actually captured by a band of Indians on the Nueces above Laredo. He was not killed because he convinced the Comanches he was no Mexican. Both Comanches and Apaches, like many primitive peoples, were not basically hostile to all strangers. In 1822, the Americans, unlike Mexicans and a whole tier of Amerind tribes, had no Comanche history.
Austin was determined not to let one develop, particularly while his colony was weak.
Austin's Indian policy was one of classic diplomacy: he made treaties with the distant Comanches, whom he feared; he both made treaties with and demonstrations of force against the weaker, less numerous Tonkawas and associated Wichita tribes; he sent the despised and verminous Karankawas on their last short slide to extinction. As a result, the Brazos-Colorado colony enjoyed peace, much to the disgust of the Mexican political chiefs and even some of Austin's own people.
Austin pacified the Mexicans, while San Antonio and Goliad were raided by Comanches, by promising action when his colony was strong enough. This was a classic ploy of diplomacy, too.
This was a happy state that could not last. Gradually, inevitably, the American colonists that poured in during the 1830s moved up the Texas rivers beyond the coastal prairies into the post-oak belts, into Comanche range. The Comanches at times agreed to treaties, but the Comanche peoples lived for raiding. Nor did they have European social organization. No chief could bind the whole people, only his own small band. And warriors went from band to band at will, for Amerind society on the Plains was truly democratic. No Comanche followed a chief he failed to respect. If white treaties were worthless because treaties were a part of white diplomacy, which changed with changes in relative strength, Indian pacts were likewise technically unworkable. This fact, peculiarly, was apparently never fully understood by either side.
When the Texas Revolution began in 1835, falling timber, rail fences, and log cabin dog-runs had already begun to disrupt the game trails far up the Brazos. Isolated travelers on the western edges of the colony had been killed. Beset by a Mexican invasion, the government at Washington-on-the-Brazos immediately sent emissaries to the Indians, seeking out the newly arrived powerful Cherokee nation in east Texas and the Comanches on the Plains beyond. Debates in the Texas convention show a fear of Indian attacks on the vulnerable Texan flank. In addition to the promises of peace, the revolutionary regime authorized a "ranging force" to guard the western frontier.
The Cherokees, a civilized tribe now trying to adopt many white ways, agreed to peace. The Comanches who could be reached did not. However, during the brief 1836 campaign, the Comanches and their Kiowa allies did not interfere. Although at this time the Plains Indians outnumbered all Texan whites and could muster a greater fighting force, the distant tribes were ignorant. They understood neither the Anglo–Mexican war nor their own eventual danger. War was the Comanche way of life, but formal, organized warfare in the European manner they did not understand, nor could they wage it.
However, the long saga of death on the Plains and prairie was about to begin.
In the year 1834, Elder John Parker took his family, really a clan of 30 people, up the Brazos, into the later Limestone County. Parker was a "hardshell" Baptist preacher out of Virginia by way of Tennessee. The hardshells were what their name implied; stubborn, hardy frontier folk, who believed in closed communion and suspected that even other Baptists might be bound for Hell. The Parkers found open, beautiful, rich country, alive with wildfowl, bear, and deer. The land was oak-dotted and grassy, ephemerally splashed in spri
ng with deep blue pools of the flowers called bluebonnets by Scots pioneers. John Parker built a stockade on the Navasota River and named it Parker's Fort. Here the clan lived, staking out corn fields in the vicinity. There were then only two or three other cabins in the entire region.
On the morning of May 19, 1836, most of the Parker men went as usual to work their fields, which were out of sight of the stockade. Six men and the women and children were left behind.
About midmorning, a large party of Indians rode up to the stockade walls. They were Comanche braves, with some Kiowa allies, and a few Caddoans. These horsemen showed a dirty white flag and asked for water and a beef.
Benjamin Parker parleyed with them outside the walls. He told his brother Silas that he felt these Indians were hostile, but it would be better to avoid a war. Silas and he went outside again, although the others begged them not to go.
Parker apparently told the visitors he had no beeves. They became angry, and suddenly several Comanches pierced him with their lances. Silas ran for the fort, but was cut down. Two more men, named Frost, were killed in a melee at the gates. Then, shrieking, the Indians poured inside Parker's Fort.
Elder John Parker, his wife Granny, and several of the women tried to run. The Indians overtook them all. They stabbed John Parker, scalped him, then cut off his private parts. Granny Parker was stripped, pinned to the ground with a lance, and raped. Other women were attacked.
In the midst of this scene, the Parker men came running from the fields with rifles. Whooping, the raiders leaped on their horses and galloped off. They left behind five dead men and several badly wounded women, two of whom would die. Granny Parker, however, pulled the spear from her flesh; she was of a tough breed, and lived.
The Indians also took five captives: Rachel Plummer and her small son; Elizabeth Kellogg; and John and Cynthia Ann Parker, aged six and nine.
The Comanches rode north-northeast, toward the Trinity River. They halted once far out on the prairie to hold a ritual victory dance. All of the captives were tied cruelly with rawhide thongs and thrown upon the ground. The two grown women were tortured, though not severely, and thoroughly raped. There was never to be a single case of a white woman being taken by Southern Plains Indians without rape. Then the raiding band split up, in Indian fashion.
Rachel Plummer lived as a Comanche slave for eighteen months. At last she was ransomed by an American named Donahue in Santa Fe, through the agency of Comancheros—the despised half-breeds who traded with the Comanches from New Mexico. The Comancheros found Mrs. Plummer in a camp high in the Rocky Mountains. During her captivity she bore a child, but the Indians killed it by dropping it on the ice. She was returned to Texas by way of Missouri, but soon died. She did not see her son James again.
Elizabeth Kellogg was slightly more fortunate. She fell to the Caddoan allies, who took her to the Red River and there sold her to a band of Delawares. The Delawares then sold her back to General Sam Houston in December 1836, for $150.
John Parker and James Plummer were found and ransomed in 1842. Young Parker, raised for six years as a Comanche, was unable to readjust. He went back to the tribes, looking for his sister; finally, he married a Mexican girl who had been a Comanche slave and settled south of the Rio Grande.
Cynthia Ann Parker was in the hands of Quahadis, the most remote and most warlike Comanche tribe. They took her high into the Staked Plains. Though she was seen or heard of a number of times, all efforts to ransom her failed. In 1846, a U.S. Army colonel, at a council with the Indians, saw her briefly. He said she refused to speak, wept incessantly, and ran away. She was then seventeen. When the colonel tried to free her, he was threatened with death and had to desist. This was a frequent, bitter, frustrating experience of American officers on the Southern Plains frontier. The Indians here took female slaves among Mexicans and whites, and it was a common custom to carry off and adopt children. Although it was Indian practice to grant the adopted captives full tribal rights, the practice inflamed the American frontier mind as few other acts, even the hideous tortures, did.
Cynthia Ann Parker matured and became the wife of Peta Nocona, war chief of the Noconi band. The raid on Parker's Fort in 1836 thus began one of the great and tragic stories of the Texas frontier, because both Cynthia Ann and her half-Indian children would be heard from again, from this beginning of the Comanche wars until the bloody, bitter end.
The Parker raid was not unusual. It was to be repeated in various ways many hundreds of times. The Comanches had raided the Spanish-Mexicans for a hundred years; now the warfare became three-sided. But there was a difference to the Anglo frontier in Texas that colored the whole struggle, that imbued it with virulent bitterness rare in any time or place. The Anglo frontier in Texas was not a frontier of traders, trappers, and soldiers, as in most other states. It was a frontier of farming families, with women and small children, encroaching and colliding with a long-ranging, barbaric, war-making race. For forty years, this bleeding ground was filled with men and boys, wives and sons, who had kinfolk carried off, never to be heard from again or to be ransomed and returned in shamed disgrace. Thousands of frontier families were to see the results of Comanche raids: men staked out naked to die under the blazing sun, eyelids and genitals removed; women and female children impaled on fence poles and burned; captives found still writhing, dying, with burned-out coals heaped on scrota and armpits; ransomed teen-age girls and women returned to their relatives with demented stares.
These were insults and injuries the Anglo-Celtic stock would not forgive or bear. This was racial war in its truest sense, and as in all true ethnic wars, there could be no parameters of right or wrong. The most moral of Indians lived by a code that nauseated whites. The most moral of whites, on this harsh ground, became savagely brutalized.
Noah Smithwick, a gentle, literate "Texian," wrote of another incident that occurred in 1836. He had enlisted in the new "ranging force" (soon called Rangers), under Captain Tumlinson. Tumlinson's force was patrolling along the Colorado, within ten miles of present-day Austin. One night, as the Rangers made camp, a young white woman stumbled upon them. She was wounded, bleeding and almost naked.
She could not talk coherently for some time. Finally, the Texans learned her name was Hibbons, and she had been traveling to her home on the Guadalupe with her husband, brother, and two small children. Comanches jumped them; the two men were killed, and Mrs. Hibbons and her children seized and tied to mules. The three-year-old took this well enough, but the other child, an infant, screamed so continuously that the Indians bashed its head against a tree.
That night a cold front or norther struck, forcing the Comanches to take shelter in a cedar brake near where the present city of Austin stands. The Indians took no especial pains to guard their captives, believing that in the cold and wild country they could not escape. But Mrs. Hibbons sneaked into the dark while the Comanches were snoring in their buffalo robes. She fled, leaving her small son behind. She walked for a long way in the icy river, to hide her tracks.
Now, she begged the Rangers to rescue the boy. Tumlinson and his men mounted and soon struck the Comanche trail. They followed it; the Indians seemed to be taking no precautions, as they were beyond the settlement line. They surprised the Comanche camp, shot down one Indian and rescued the Hibbons boy. Then, in Smithwick's words:
The boys . . . awarded me the scalp. I modestly waved my claim in favor of [Conrad] Rohrer, but he, generous soul, declared that according to all the rules of the chase, the man who brought down the game was entitled to the pelt, and himself scalped the savage, tying the loathsome trophy to my saddle . . . thinking it might afford the poor woman whose family its owner had helped to murder, some satisfaction. . .
To the frontier white, all Indians were vermin. Searching for the most damning epithet to dehumanize the race, Texans called them "red niggers." The frontier proverb, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," did not originate in Texas, but it was probably used more there than in any other state.
The Texas Republic thus had inherited Indian wars at its birth. However, the first Texas President, Sam Houston, had no intention of waging this war, apparently for two reasons. Houston was a conservative, a planter-leaning President, who understood the weakness of the Texas economy and was determined to cut expenditures. Houston also was an enigma to his friends, because he loved Indians. He had lived with the Cherokees, and he recognized that the Indian and the European did not necessarily represent savagery and civilization respectively; the Amerind had an entirely different view of life. At this time, many of the red men living in the eastern half of Texas were peaceable remnants of once mighty tribes. The Caddoans and Tonkawas were natives; the Cherokees, Delawares, and Shawnees had been pushed westward when their lands had been usurped by the United States. Houston definitely wanted to stabilize the Indian situation, and uniquely among all Western leaders, he proposed a guarantee of Indian rights through the granting of legal title—not mere treaty rights—to Indian lands. Houston recognized a difference between the agrarian and Plains tribes; he believed a place could be made for the former within American civilization.
His Congress and his people did not. The Comanches were an admitted terror, but all Indians got the blame. It was true that even the lowly Caddoans were not above horse-stealing raids. They also occasionally joined the more warlike tribes, and parties of Caddoans had murdered whites they caught defenseless or alone. As for the Cherokees, Texans would not, and did not, distinguish between them and Comanches.
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