Then, on May 12, his Tonkawa scouts attacked and demolished a small camp of five tepees. Two mounted Comanches got away; the alarm was out. Ford did not hesitate; he pounded after the two braves for three miles, and they led him to a large encampment beside the Canadian River.
The Comanches came out in magnificent, savage array, resplendent in feather and horn headdresses, iron lance points glittering in the morning sun. Their faces were painted black for war. They capered and pranced and thundered past on their ponies. Ford estimated he faced 300 braves that day.
It was a scene that was to be repeated in this region of the world many times in coming years: a shrieking, splendidly barbaric horde of Plains Indians, circling and prancing across the prairie; across from them, a band of bearded, sweat-stained riders in old clothes, calm and spitting tobacco juice, among their own screeching, threatening allies. They cocked their rifles, checked the seating of the red copper nipples on their Colts. They watched Rip Ford, cold as new ice.
At the head of the Comanches rode Iron Jacket, whose name came from a cuirass of burnished Spanish armor, lost on these Plains centuries before. Iron Jacket glittered in overlapping plates of steel; he was a great chief, with a legend of invulnerability in tribal wars. He rode out and challenged, to commence the combat.
Spanish armor would turn arrows, but not a Sharps' rifle ball. Several guns crashed, and Iron Jacket and his horse collapsed. Then, Ford knew it was time to go among them. He charged, and the battle broke into a shrieking, shooting, galloping series of small combats, covering six miles.
This battle was to be described a dozen times in fact and legend, a hundred times in fiction. Ford broke two Comanche charges, fighting until two o'clock. At the end, the Ranger horses were staggering, and could pursue no more. In running fights lasting about seven hours, the Rangers killed 76 Indians. They captured 300 horses, and 18 women and children. Their own losses were minimal; two Rangers died.
Ford rode back into Texas, arriving on the Brazos May 21. He reported to Runnels that the campaign was of much importance, not simply because the Indians had been punished but because it demonstrated several things. The Indians could be profitably pursued, fixed, and defeated on their own buffalo grounds by the right sort of men. It must be remembered that the Spaniards had felt three full companies of horse inadequate to cross these plains, which were still viewed by most Americans with awe and dread. Ford wanted to pursue this campaign with a strong force, into the winter. This he was denied, because he had expended his allowed funds in thirty days, and because he had stirred the federal forces into belated action at last.
Colonel Twiggs, commanding the Department, wrote to his next superior that a drastic revision should be made in federal Indian policy in Texas. Twiggs castigated the passive peace policy, which had put the Army on the defensive for a decade. He argued that a full regiment of cavalry be sent into the Indian country, pursuing the Indians summer and winter, to give them so much trouble they would not think of raiding Texas. Concurrently, Twiggs wrote Runnels that he always knew the Federal force was too small for its job, and the best way to do it anywhere was to attack. "As long as there are wild Indians on the prairie, Texas cannot be free from depredations," Twiggs stated.
Twiggs's letter, accompanied by two blasts from the Governor of Texas and a warning from Neighbors that Texas was contemplating violent action, jolted Secretary of War Floyd and President Buchanan into a temporary change of policy. On August 9, 1858, Major Earl Van Dorn of the 2d Cavalry was ordered to march into the Wichita mountains of Oklahoma with four companies of cavalry and one of foot. From a base camp here, Van Dorn was to scour the country between the Canadian and the Red, beginning September 15.
Van Dorn also gathered up some friendly Indians under Lawrence Ross, who had assisted Ford. These scouts located Comanches for him on September 29. Van Dorn marched ninety miles in thirty-seven hours with his Indians and four companies of the 2d Cavalry. He attacked a sleeping village of 120 lodges, 500 Indians, on October 1. Within thirty minutes, the cavalry killed 56 Indians of various sizes and shapes, took three hundred horses, burned the lodges, and dispersed the survivors across the hills. Although Van Dorn suffered heavier losses than Ford—he and Ross were both wounded, and two commissioned officers were among the American dead—Twiggs described his victory as "more decisive and complete than any recorded in the history of our Indian warfare." This was a palpable exaggeration, but it showed how deeply the regular army had been stung by Rip Ford. The Comanche menace was damped, but hardly destroyed.
Again, the reservation Indians rendered splendid service, as both Ford and Van Dorn acknowledged. But these Indians, without whom there would have been no such quick victories, were to be rewarded by the American nation in a sorry and entirely too common way.
In the years between 1855 and 1858, the advancing Texas settlement line had flowed strongly around the Brazos and Clear Fork Reserves. These Indians were now living in close proximity to white farms. When the severe Comanche raids of 1857 began, these settled tribes were caught between two fires. The wild Indians despised them; the whites, harassed by other Indians, hated all the tribes.
Throughout 1858 there were numerous small, if ghastly depredations along the Brazos. These were certainly committed by the Penatekas and other Comanches who failed to come to the Reserves. Also, certainly, the wild Indians did not forgive the "white men's pets" for leading Ford and Van Dorn on their own killing raids. There was a curious phenomenon discovered in these months: Indian trails were always hard to follow, but after several murder raids a trail an Easterner could follow was blazed from mutilated white bodies to the Clear Fork Reserve. Texas newspapers fully record that white opinion believed the worst.
In retrospect, it was obvious that the reservations could not succeed while there were still savage Indians raiding into Texas. Major Neighbors wrote clear-cut letters explaining this, and stating that neither the Penatekas on the reservation nor the whites in the area could be protected while the war bands still roamed. He begged the government to bring all the Indians into reservations at once. He also stated that the many claims of atrocities by the reservation Indians were exaggerated, which they were. He pointed up the good service these people had done as auxiliaries under L. S. Ross. His reasoned arguments went unheard. The government shuddered at the cost of an extended Indian war; there were people in the East who violently protested such a war in principle. The Texans in this region were already blind with hate and prejudice; Neighbors's pets could not be good Indians, because they still lived.
One man, John R. Baylor, a former Indian agent who had been dismissed in disgrace from this service, was instrumental in stirring up such feelings. Baylor, whose past experience led many Texans to believe he knew Indians, addressed mass meetings and cleverly played upon the emotions of Texans who had lost kith and kin. It is evident that his main motive was a furious hatred of Neighbors, the man who had got him dismissed, but his campaign bore poisonous fruit. Baylor insisted that all Indians be driven from the state, and he soon gathered a roaring mob behind him.
Ford was at Camp Runnels during this time. He determined to investigate the charges of reserve Indians' complicity in Indian attacks. One of his own officers suggested that such evidence could easily be manufactured, assuming this was Ford's desire. Ford said, "No, sir, that will not do." No evidence convicting the reserve Indians was found by the Rangers, and Ford called upon Baylor and the citizens to present their charges in writing. None were submitted.
But among Ford's own men, Neighbors was hated; Rangers could not understand an Indian-lover who took his office seriously and stood up for Indian rights. One Ranger captain intercepted Ford's mail, and, against express orders, conspired with civilians to bring Neighbors down. Ford's own comment on Neighbors is clear and says something about both men: "The ordeal through which Major Neighbors has passed endorses him. He needs no commendation from any quarter."
Neighbors himself went to Washington to plead his cas
e. He had given up hope that the reservations could succeed in Texas, and recommended that all the Indians be removed north of the Red River. His motive was entirely one of protecting his charges from white action.
Events that took place two days after Christmas 1858, justified his view. Seven Indians, Caddoans and Anadarcos, were shot to death while sleeping in a camp along the Brazos. Four were men, three were squaws. A sub-agent of the Brazos Reserve investigated fully. He reported these were the most inoffensive Indians in his charge, and he named six white men who were known to have done the deed. The names included Captain Peter Garland and Dr. W. W. McNeill. McNeill wrote Ford a contrary version: the whites had been trailing horse thieves, and had defended themselves in a bitter fight. The evidence clearly indicated that all the Indians had been killed in their sleeping robes.
The judge of the Texas Nineteenth Judicial District of Texas ordered Captain Ford to arrest the six accused men. Ford refused. His grounds were that he was a military officer, not a civil one, and could not legally carry out such orders. Neighbors's own comment on this, that the Captain pandered in a contemptible manner to the prejudices of lawless men against the very Indians who led him to victory a year before, was largely true. Ford knew that the arrest of the whites would probably result in civil disorder, that no jury would convict them, but also, he could not bring himself seemingly to "turn renegade." He faced the terrible dilemma most basically honorable men faced in such racial conflicts, but in his choice, he had the roaring assent of the whole frontier.
Baylor and other armed men were now "prowling around the reserve," as Agent Shapley Ross said. A company of U.S. Rifles was at the Brazos, but Baylor told its captain that he was going to destroy the Indians even if he had to kill every man in the command. On May 23, 1859, whites and Indians fought a skirmish inside the reservation. Work had been suspended, and the Indians were huddling around Neighbors in fear.
On June 11 word arrived of a joint federal–state agreement to move the reserve Indians north of the Red, into Oklahoma. Captain John Henry Brown of the Rangers arrived to assist the federal troops in keeping order. One of Brown's first decisions was that the Indians could not be allowed to scatter to round up their livestock. Neighbors, who quarreled bitterly with Brown, informed the Indians they would have to leave without their cattle, horses, and pigs.
Escorted by soldiers and Rangers, the thousand reserve Indians marched north, leaving gardens, corn, and cattle behind. Their few belongings were carried in Army wagons. It was a long, dry, terrible trek, and some of the U.S. troopers who guarded it described the passage in bitter terms. On September 1, Agent Neighbors—who had never backed down to any man, who was respected by every official in the state, not one of whom would publicly acknowledge it—forded the Red with his pitiable crew, and turned them over to another Indian agent in a strange land. There is no record of how he said goodbye to the people who had put their faith in him. But that same night he wrote his wife in Texas:
I have this day crossed all the Indians out of the heathen land of Texas and am now out of the land of the Philistines.
If you want to have a full description of our Exodus out of Texas—Read the "Bible" where the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea. We have had about the same show, only our enemies did not follow us. . .
These were the last lines Robert Neighbors ever wrote. He rode back into the land of the Philistines to make his final report. At Fort Belknap, while he was talking to Pat Murphy, Murphy's brother-in-law, Ed Cornett, whom Neighbors had never met, shot the Indian agent in the back.
It was "not possible" to bring Cornett to trial. But on the other hand, it was not permissible on the frontier to shoot a white man, even an Indian-lover, in the back. John Cochran and Ben R. Milam got together some "Minute Men." This group convened a "court" in April 1860, months after the murder, and went after Cornett. He "made fight" on Salt Creek, as one of the members of this posse said, and all accounts agree that Ed Cornett was brought to justice without benefit of judge or jury.
Chapter 28
WAR ON THE RIO GRANDE
Some [Americans], brimful of laws, promised us their protection from the attacks of the rest; others, assembled in shadowy councils, attempted and excited the robbery and burning of our relatives' houses on the other side of the River Bravo; while still others, whom we entrusted with our land titles, refused to return them under false and frivolous pretexts; all, in short, with a smile on their faces, giving the lie to what their black entrails were planning. Many of you have been robbed of your property, jailed, chased, murdered, and hunted like wild beasts, because your labor was fruitful, and excited vile avarice. . . . There are criminals covered with frightful crimes, but these monsters are indulged, because they are not of our race, which is, they say, not fit to belong to the human species. . . .
Mexicans! Is there no remedy?
Mexicans! My stand is taken; the voice of Revelation tells me that to me is entrusted the breaking of the chains of your slavery.
FROM THE PROCLAMATION OF JUAN N. CORTINAS AT RANCHO DEL CARMEN, CAMERON COUNTY, TEXAS, NOVEMBER 23, 1859
BECAUSE, in the 18th century, the Crown of Spain seeded a series of communities along the lower Bravo, and granted vast tracts of land, reaching a hundred miles and more north of the river, to prominent citizens, it laid the groundwork for future conflict. In the waning days of Spain, and under the new Republic of Mexico, the territory south of the Nueces was not considered part of the Province of Texas, but rather Neuvo Santander, later the Estado de Tamaulipas. This great expanse, mostly brushland or chaparral, dotted with both mild savannahs and near-deserts, remained largely deserted. It lay on the northern fringes of the Mexican cattle culture, which emanated palely from the old Spanish towns on the south bank of the Rio Grande. It was no part of Anglo-Texas, nor had any Anglo-Texan settled there, but it was claimed, under old maps, by the Republic.
Between 1836 and 1846 this area was both a buffer and a battleground. Laredo and the scattered rancherías between this town and the mouth of the Bravo remained under Mexican control. In 1842, however, General Adrian Woll, on the orders of the Supreme Government, advised all Mexican nationals to evacuate south of the Rio Grande. Many did, abjuring Texas citizenship and abandoning their land, from Juan Seguín of San Antonio to the Ballí heirs on Padre Island. However, near the river, and from Matamoros, many Mexican families still claimed title to the soil.
By the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, after the Mexican War, this strip was attached to the United States. By the treaty, Mexican land titles were confirmed to their possessors, and their holders granted U.S. citizenship, if they chose. It was a fair treaty, but difficult of implementation. What many Americans failed to understand, was that a Mexico irredenta was created along the north banks of the Rio Grande.
Because of the enormous differences in culture, politics, and legal systems, the Mexican inhabitants of the lower Bravo valley of Texas did not easily adjust. The common people remained entirely Mexican. They came under Texas state and American national government, but they did not become Americans in the sense that German, Scandinavian, Irish, or Slavonic immigrants became American. In a very real sense, the approximately 8,000 inhabitants of the three lower Texas counties, Cameron, Starr, and Webb, in 1850 were under foreign rule.
The ordinary people, mostly part-Indian peasants, were politically quiescent, because they had had no part in government under Spanish-Mexican rule. Because the American immigration into this region, especially at Brownsville, was almost entirely composed of merchants opening up a profitable Mexican commerce, or supplying the U.S. Army, a peculiar, and colorful society developed. There were no Anglo-American farmers on this frontier; the farm line faltered at the Nueces. This was Mexican ranch country which had not left the former century; it had been dominated by a few aristocrats holding forth from the towns. Over the whole landscape, the new merchants, also operating from the towns, imposed their control, in the name of Texas and the United States. An intere
sting, but hardly significant, aspect of these American immigrants was that almost none of them were old "Texians," or even Southern. A high proportion arrived out of Pennsylvania and New York, and some from Europe. Much more significantly, they quickly became the most ardent "Texans" of all—an inescapable reaction of a cultural minority holding sway over a differentiated mass. Historically, close contact between two varied cultures tends to produce a polarization of their values. What grew up in far south Texas was a very polarized society, or rather two separate polarized societies. There was in no sense a melting pot then, or for the following hundred years.
Many Texas historians have come to the conclusion that different races tend to transmit their vices, rather than their virtues, to each other, and in Texas this seems generally to have been borne out, among Anglos, Mexicans, and even Indians. White social values and whiskey destroyed the agricultural Amerinds; and on the border Americans adopted many of the outlooks and attitudes of the Mexican upper class, but completely without its sense of cultural values and social organism. Mexicans were strongly attracted by Anglo social and political democracy and material success, but rejected most of the individual, internal discipline the pursuit of both required.
John S. Ford and others have described the 1850s as the great days of Brownsville, then the gateway city to Mexico. At least six men made fortunes that added into millions of dollars, but very little of this trade affected the 2,000 inhabitants of the Mexican lower class. Meanwhile, the American newcomers jostled uncomfortably upon the old Spanish hacendados, most of whom were gradually dispossessed.
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