Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  Houston's Indian policy, which was later much praised, actually was a tragic failure. He could not protect the Indians; he could merely defer their fate. In the meantime he made promises, especially to the Cherokees, he could not keep.

  The temper of the Texas Congress was revealed in the bills it passed. In December 1836, a battalion of mounted riflemen was authorized for the frontier, together with plans for a string of forts. In 1837, a corps of "600 mounted gun men" for use in the northwest was approved. Houston did not exert himself to implement any of these authorizations; he let local communities form ranging bands as they could. He did approve a bill, in 1838, to raise a regular cavalry corps for use in the border south.

  On December 10, 1838, Houston's term expired. The new President, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, abruptly brought the policy of hesitancy and diplomacy to an end. Lamar had two great hates: Indians and Sam Houston, not necessarily in that order. In his inaugural address to a cheering Congress, Lamar bluntly proposed that all Indians be expelled from eastern Texas:

  Nothing short of this will bring us peace or safety. . . . The white man and the red man cannot dwell in harmony together. Nature forbids it . . . knowing these things, I experience no difficulty in deciding on the proper policy to be pursued towards them. It is to push a rigorous war against them; pursuing them to their hiding places without mitigation or compassion, until they shall be made to feel that flight from our borders without hope of return, is preferable to the scourges of war.

  In retrospect, Lamar was entirely correct. No permanent peace was possible on the white man's terms without a punishing war; the Indians could not live peaceably in the world the Texans were determined to make. Lamar's policy followed that of the United States in these same years; the United States was pushing all Indian tribes out of the South, into Oklahoma and the West. Seminoles, Cherokees, and many other tribes were officially being dispossessed. More significant, Lamar stated a policy that the United States government only adopted more than thirty years later: that the Indians must be pursued, and their sanctuaries destroyed, before the guerrilla warfare would end. If the Indians survived, it would have to be as powerless remnants, living on land no white man desired.

  Lamar's policy was actually more merciful than the hypocrisy practiced by others, which continually failed to take white prejudices and dominant desires into account. It was proposed to end the Indian problem brutally but quickly.

  But the fact that Mirabeau Lamar took obvious satisfaction in fighting Indians, and was so devoid of cant or hypocrisy in saying the Indians must go, has continued to haunt historians who realize he was right, but who would have preferred to write that the Texas tribes were exterminated in a fit of absentmindedness.

  The coastal planters were in opposition to Lamar. They were exposed to no Indian danger, unlike the hardy types who were pushing up the rivers into the post-oak wilderness. Landowners and businessmen, they desired economy in government; they were not eager to pay for western wars. Here again there was the East–West tension that colored so much of American history. The Texas cotton growers were like the Philadelphia Quaker oligarchy of the 18th century, who saw neither profit nor reason in assisting the angry, bleeding, aggressive Scots-Irish frontiersmen.

  Lamar knocked down the idea of budgetary problems with dashing rhetoric: war rarely succeeded according to the advice of "those who would value gold above liberty and life above honor." He also said history indicated warfare most commonly succeeded in proportion to money spent—in other words, niggardly efforts produced piddling victories. None of this was refutable; the western counties were belligerent, and Lamar had his war. He could not be accused of starting it; it had begun two hundred years before. There was no way to stop it. The men who built Parker's Fort and the Comanches who raided it were to themselves being true.

  Albert Sidney Johnston, a very competent soldier, was in full agreement as Texas Secretary of War. So was Bonnell, Texas Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Between January 1, 1839, and the end of October approximately 2,000 men were enlisted for militia or ranging service. The general pattern of the war was to raise temporary companies of armed men and to seek out Indians. Another pattern followed was to engage Indian allies, usually Lipans or Tonkawas, to act as scouts or "spies." There was never any problem finding Indian allies; the warfare and hatred among the tribes long antedated the arrival of the Americans.

  In January 1839, Colonel John H. Moore led three companies of volunteers from the upper settlements along the Colorado against the Comanches. Moore had 63 white Rangers and 16 Indians under Castro, chief of the Lipan Apaches. He rode west on the Colorado, past the confluence of the Llano, high on the plateau homeland of the Penateka Comanches. The Apache scouts scoured the country and found a Comanche encampment on a small creek in the San Saba Valley.

  Moore slipped down on the Indian camp and attacked. As was to happen again and again, the Indians, canny and careful warriors in the field, were easily surprised in their camp. Rangers and Indians attacked on foot and ran among the tepees, shooting some warriors in their robes. Finally, in a scene of pandemonium, Moore recalled his men. This so infuriated Castro that the Lipan allies deserted. The victory was a mixed one, although only one Texan was fatally wounded. In the course of the melee, the Comanches had found the Ranger horse herd, and escaped with 46. Most of Moore's men had to retreat back down the Colorado on foot.

  Other parties of Texas gun men or Rangers were gathered all along the vast frontier. Captain John Bird led some 50 men from Austin and Fort Bend counties into Indian country on Little River. By accident, the company ran across Comanches hunting buffalo on May 26, 1839. The Rangers counted about 20 Indians on horseback, and they pursued these for several miles without catching them. By now Bird became nervous; he was far out on the Plains, and he ordered a retreat. The Indians immediately turned on him and filled the sky with arrows.

  The Texans were forest men, armed with knives, single-shot pistols, and long Kentucky rifles. They were not able to meet the thundering Comanches horse to horse. Bird ran for a ravine, and soon found himself besieged by more than 200 howling foes. The Indians charged his position in the rocks repeatedly, but the long rifles knocked these rushes back with heavy loss. Finally, the Indians drew away.

  Bird's "victory," as it was called, was Pyrrhic. The Rangers lost seven dead, including Captain Bird. The bloodied Rangers retreated back into Texas; they had stirred up more trouble than they had ended.

  It was Mexican policy during all these years to foment trouble on the Anglo frontier; Mexico had not accepted Texan independence, and the two states were still, if informally, at war. Mexican agents continually worked among the Indians, especially in east Texas. Their great hope was in the Cherokees. Mexican representatives promised the Cherokees full title to their lands if Texas were reconquered; apparently there was a Mexican hope that an Indian nation might be erected along the Sabine as a buffer between them and the expanding United States.

  The plans and plots were real; they formed a logical Mexican attempt to make trouble for an enemy. On May 18, 1839, a company of Texas Rangers attacked a party of Indians on the San Gabriel, about twenty-five miles from Austin. The attack was a success; the Texans captured 600 pounds of powder and lead, and more than a hundred horses. This material was being sent to the Indians from Mexico. More important, one of the dead men searched by the victors was Manuel Flores, a Mexican agent. Flores carried papers revealing a Mexican plan to unite all the Texas Indians for a great attack on the whites, to be launched with a Mexican invasion from the south. These plans were very detailed; they were written in Matamoros, and included tactical advice for the Indians. They were to wait until the Texas militia rode out, then strike and burn the settlements and towns. Also on Flores's body was a letter from another agent, Vicente Córdova, who was stirring up a rebellion among Mexican residents of Nacogdoches. Córdova wrote that the Cherokees had promised to join in the destruction of the Anglos.

  There is no question
that the Cherokees had talked with the Mexicans, but the evidence is almost definite that Bowles, the Cherokee chief, had no intention of joining in the war. The Cherokees had now been in east Texas for almost twenty years, and during this time they had lived in peace with the whites. They were agrarian, and civilizing rapidly. Houston was in close contact with them. But the Cherokee lands were extremely rich, and they were also now entirely enclosed by later settlement by whites. Their crime was that they had something the Texans wanted. But more than that, any red presence within Anglo-Texas had now become intolerable to the great majority of whites.

  The Flores papers permitted Albert Sidney Johnston and President Lamar to declare a Cherokee war. The contents sent a thrill of horror and righteous indignation through the whole frontier, because the Mexicans made it clear that the Indians were free to exterminate the whites and keep their property as they chose. Johnston marshaled the entire Texas regular army in the north. Meanwhile, a commission was sent among the Cherokees to demand their voluntary removal from the state. This commission was composed of David Burnet, Johnston, Hugh McCloud, and Thomas Jefferson Rusk. These men told Bowles that Texas would pay for the improvements left on Cherokee land but could not pay for the land itself.

  Bowles acquitted himself with grave dignity. He told the Texans that he could not agree with the Texan claim; the Cherokees owned, or ought to own, this land. He also said that he personally knew his people could not fight the more powerful whites and would be destroyed if they did. However, he also knew the temper of his people, and they would fight despite his counsel.

  He asked the commissioners to allow the harvests to be gathered before the crisis began. The Texans refused. Generals Kelsey Douglas and Edward Burleson of the Texas militia and regular army advanced with large forces into the pine woods. Their orders were to drive the Indians out.

  The Cherokees, who had tried to live like white men, tried to fight like white men. They met the Texans in a regular battle line, on July 15, 1839. Two days later they were in complete rout. Bowles was dead, killed brutally and unnecessarily.

  Kelsey Douglas did not stop with the Cherokees. He recommended that the entire Indian rat's nest be burnt out, and all the villages and corn of the associated east Texas tribes be destroyed. By July 25, the Delawares, Shawnees, Caddoans, Kickapoos, Creeks, Muscogees, Biloxies, and Seminoles had all been harried across the Arkansas line. Only two tribes, the Coshatties and Alabamas, small and inoffensive, were allowed to remain, and these were removed to less fertile lands, on what was to be Texas's only permanent Indian reservation.

  Some Cherokees under The Egg and Chief Bowles's son, John, tried to find refuge in Mexico. Burleson pursued this band to the Colorado with Tonkawa scouts. Here the band was attacked; its leaders were slain, and all the Indian equipage and livestock brought back.

  This expulsion removed all Indians from the settled portions of the state, and opened up thousands of square miles for white settlement. At this time the Wacos and other Wichita tribes further west were beyond the colonization line; caught between Comanches and Texans, they seemed cowed.

  Meanwhile, the war along the general line from present Belton to Austin to San Antonio was being waged brutally in the west. This was true "Indian" warfare, skirmish and raid, escape and attack. Companies of Rangers carried the fight to the Penateka Comanches with varying success. President Lamar had established the Texas capital at Austin, which was then fully within Comanche country; in fact, parties of mounted Indians on the surrounding hills above the valley of the Colorado watched the settlement being built. Lamar used the fact that Austin was in the geographical center of Texas as his excuse, but an underlying motive was to pull the settlers west. Lamar thought beyond Indians; he even had the far Pacific in mind.

  The Penatekas were a formidable foe, as Bird's fate proved. But war, as Texans now waged it, became a trying sport. On January 9, 1840, three Penateka chieftains rode into San Antonio. They came boldly; San Antonio had long been "their" town, according to Comanche boast. Colonel Henry Karnes, a redheaded Ranger commander, met them for a parley.

  The chiefs told Karnes that the tribes had agreed to ask the Texans for a peace. Karnes consented, but only on condition the Comanches returned all white prisoners, of which there were now about 200 in Indian hands. The Comanches promised to return again in twenty days.

  Karnes wrote General Albert Sidney Johnston that he had no faith in Comanche promises, and he had not made prisoners of the three chiefs because they were too few to "guarantee the future." He recommended that commissioners be sent to San Antonio to meet with the Comanches, but that many troops also be sent, and that if the tribes did not return the promised white prisoners, those Indians who came to San Antonio should be held as hostages. Above all, Karnes urged that whoever was sent be able to act with decision and dispatch, with no dilly-dallying. Johnston accepted these recommendations in full, and sent three companies of the 1st Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel Fisher marching to Bexar. Fisher was ordered to seize the Indians if they did not fulfill their promise to return all whites.

  The three commissioners appointed to treat with the Indians were all soldiers: Fisher himself, the Texas Adjutant General, and Acting Secretary of War. The terms to be given the Comanches were: they must stay within certain boundaries to the west; they must recognize that Texas had the right to occupy "vacant" land, and settlers were not to be interfered with; they must not henceforth enter any white settlement.

  On March 19, 1840, sixty-five Indians rode in—men, women, and children, led by twelve chiefs and the great civil chieftain, Muguara, or Mukwah-rah, the Spirit Talker. The Comanches were brightly attired and painted for council. But they came with only two captives, a sixteen-year-old white girl and a Mexican boy, who did not count.

  The appearance of the girl, Matilda Lockhart, was to turn this day, as the spectator Mrs. Samuel Maverick wrote, into a "day of horrors." Mrs. Maverick helped bathe and dress Matilda, who told the white women she was "utterly degraded, and could not hold up her head again." Mrs. Maverick described her:

  Her head, arms and face were full of bruises, and sores, and her nose actually burnt off to the bone—all the fleshy end gone, and a great scab formed on the end of the bone. Both nostrils were wide open and denuded of flesh. She told a piteous tale of how dreadfully the Indians had beaten her, and how they would wake her from sleep by sticking a chunk of fire to her flesh, especially to her nose . . . her body had many scars from the fire.

  The Lockhart girl was extremely intelligent. She had been with the Comanches two years and understood some of their tongue. She said the Indians planned to bring in the captives one by one, and bargain for each, this way figuring to get a higher price. She knew of thirteen more in her own camp.

  Now, in the courthouse (called the Council House) in San Antonio, on the corner of Main Plaza and Market Street, Chief Muguara began to demand high prices for the remaining captives: ammunition, vermilion, blankets, and bangles. Meanwhile, a file of Texan soldiers surrounded the small, one-story, limestone building, Indian boys played outside, and a crowd of curious onlookers stood around. The Texas commissioners grimly asked why the other prisoners had not been delivered as promised. Muguara, bald and wrinkled, said they were with other tribes but could be bought. Then he said arrogantly: "How do you like that answer?"

  Lamar's mustached captains liked it not at all. Fisher ordered a group of soldiers into the room; all three men were pale with fury at the appearance and story of the Lockhart girl. Through the interpreter, Muguara was told all the Indians would be imprisoned until the rest of the white captives arrived. Then, ransom would be talked. The interpreter at first refused to repeat this, saying the Comanches would fight. When he did convey the message, he turned and

  fled from the room.

  The Comanches responded with war screams. One went for the door and put his knife into the soldier who blocked his way. The Texas officers gave the order to open fire. Amid the crash of rifles, shrieks,
and dense powder smoke, Comanches broke from the building and tried to flee to the river down the street. Indians, soldiers, and white onlookers were killed in a general melee and massacre. No Indian escaped; Muguara and all twelve chiefs died. Six Americans, including the Bexar sheriff and an officer, were killed and ten others wounded. Some of the Indian dead were women and children, but about 30 were caught and held.

  A visiting judge was pierced and killed by an arrow as the young Indian boys outside the Council House joined the fight.

  With the surviving Indians lodged in the calabozo or jail, a squaw was given a horse to ride to the Comanche camp. She was told that unless the Comanches brought in all white captives the prisoners in San Antonio would be killed. She was to have twelve days.

  She never returned. A young white boy, who had been adopted into the tribe, told what occurred when this chief's wife reached the camp. The Penatekas went into a frenzy of despair—the losses were indeed hideous for any Comanche band. The women shrieked and howled and cut off fingers in mourning. The men gave the guttural moans for the dead. Horses were sacrificed for two days. Then, thirteen captives were roasted to death or killed in lingering, revolting ways.

  From where the sun now stood, the Comanche nation was to observe no peace with Texas.

  Three hundred Comanches rode near San Antonio. Chief Hears the Wolf (Isi-man-ica), with only one warrior, clattered into Main Plaza and circled it, screaming insults and challenges to battle. The plaza remained quiet; a voice from Black's Saloon, through an interpreter, informed the chief that the soldiers were at San José Mission—he could go there for a fight.