Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  Second, the Kiowas and Comanches had been badly mauled by the campaigns of 1858–59; they did not understand the great war in the East; and at first they were relatively quiescent. Then, finding no real opposition—they raided, and no terrible ranging companies pursued them—they became almost incredibly bold. By the end of the war, the Texas frontier was a shambles, and in full retreat.

  Finally, and most incredible to the frontier people, the end of the Civil War brought no real relief. For nine terrible years the federal government pursued a "peace policy," by which the hostile tribes were to be Christianized and protected on reservations. (Probably, no policy-maker in Washington in these years had ever studied the fate of the Spanish missions or the failure of this form of ideology on the 18th-century frontier.) However well-intentioned this policy, it was a form of idiocy, because it completely failed to halt Kiowa-Comanche depredations on the Texas plains. It only prolonged the agony of the Indians, while it brutalized the Anglo-Saxon frontier to an even greater degree.

  During these years in Texas, the frontier folk lived forted up, in constant danger and terror. They fought a hundred unseen battles, and suffered some thousands dead. The Young County, or Elm Creek, raid of October 1864, one incident of many, tells the story as well as any.

  After the removal of the reserve Indians, the country around Fort Belknap, including Elm Creek and the Clear Fork of the Brazos, grew rapidly. Young County had been organized, but this country was on the edge of nowhere. As France (or Francis) Peveler, one of the first Texans to settle here, wrote: "We were right on the frontier—nothing north of us but the North Star." This was not true. North of Young County rode and hunted the Kiowa and Comanche Indian nations, as free to roam as the cold winds that blew down from Canada.

  When the war came, the men in charge of frontier defense, Buck Barry and Jim Bourland of the Texas state troops, tried to get the settlers to fort up. At Fort Belknap, abandoned now by the U.S. Army, Barry built houses in a hundred-yard-long square of logs erected endwise in the earth, with picket bastions. A similar stockade was thrown up at Camp or Fort Murrah, where Rip Ford had headquartered in 1858. Behind log stockades and blockhouses, the settlers lived almost exactly as their forebears had in Kentucky a hundred years before.

  There were ten or twelve families at Fort Murrah: the Harmonsons, Duncans, Powells, Matthews, Mullins, and Pevelers. These families, as in Kentucky, were Anglo-Celtic clans, including several brothers, cousins, fathers and sons, each with their individual wives and children. Most of these people arrived out of Kentucky, via Missouri; in a way that they could not quite articulate or even understand, they were uncomfortable if anything lay before them besides the far North Star. There were, probably, between fifty and sixty white people along Elm Creek.

  In the early fall of 1864, large parties of Kiowas moved south onto the Llano Estacado, camping near their Comanche allies at Red Bluff on the Canadian. Here the combined Indian camp seems to have come under the influence of Little Buffalo, an ambitious Comanche chief. Little Buffalo was hungry for horses, loot, and above all, war prestige. He had scouted the territory along the upper Brazos carefully, and he felt it was ripe for raiding.

  Little Buffalo moved among the Comanches of the far-northern bands and the Kiowas and Kiowa-Apaches of Rainy Mountain in the Wichita range. He held council, talking of great victories: the horse soldiers were gone from Fort Belknap on the Brazos, and there was nothing to fear from the Tejano soldiers who replaced them, who were few. Hundreds of Comanches agreed to follow Little Buffalo, and many Kiowas, including the prominent Koitsenko, or Kiowa warrior society leader, Aperian Crow. The war parties gathered many extra horses for a hard ride, and streamed southwest into Texas. On October 13, 1864, Little Buffalo reached the Brazos where it joined Elm Creek, ten miles above Fort Belknap. He led seven hundred braves. It was a clear, beautiful, crisp fall day. Here, as one chronicler put it, "the butchery and looting began."

  There are many different accounts of the Elm Creek raid, told by different survivors, few of whom knew the whole picture at the time. In a valley beset by a hostile swarm, every man and woman and child knew only his own story. A wealth of detail remains, but the bare bones of the events tell the tale well enough.

  The Indians rode down both banks of Elm Creek at midday. They came across Joel Myers and his young son, who were out looking for strayed oxen. The Myerses never had a chance; they were killed and stripped, and the bands moved on; soon they were ringing the Fitzpatrick place. Here, a number of the men were away, gone to the trading post at Weatherford for supplies.

  There were three women and a number of children at the Fitzpatrick house. The women were Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, her daughter Susan Durgan, and a Negress, Mary Johnson, the wife of Britt Johnson, who, although legally a slave, had been allowed to live as a freeman all his life. Johnson had been inherited by Allan Johnson, a settler who had no use for slavery. He was universally known as Nigger Britt to the people on the frontier, and he was in Weatherford with the other men this day.

  As the howling Indians surrounded the Fitzpatrick place, Susan Durgan grabbed a gun and went outside. She fought valiantly, but the swarming Comanches cut her down, stripped her body and mutilated it in the yard. Then they poured into the house and seized the other people. Two braves quarreled over who had captured Nigger Britt's oldest boy; they settled the argument amicably by killing him. Then the Indians threw Mrs. Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, Mary Johnson, two Negro children, Joe Carter, about twelve, and the Durgan children, Lottie, three, and Millie, eighteen months, on horses and rode off.

  A little way off was the Thomas Hamby place, where the Tom (Doc) Wilson family also lived. There were three men here, including Thornton Hamby, a wounded Confederate veteran home on recuperation furlough. These men rushed their women and children to hiding in a cave under the creek bank. Then, they mounted up to warn the other settlers; smoke was beginning to curl upward across the valley.

  The William Bragg family, warned in time, hid out in the brush. Doc Wilson, riding hard while the two Hambys fought a rearguard action against a war party, reached the Judge Henry Williams ranch and gave the alarm.

  Two women visitors and their children were with the Williamses, also a young man named Callan. Callan seems to have seized his horse and rode away. Mrs. Williams herded her five children and her guests across Elm Creek. They lay down in the screening brush while Sam Williams, fifteen, stood guard with a gun. The raiders did not find them, although they sacked the Williams house.

  Thornton Hamby, the wounded veteran, and his father rejoined Doc Wilson at the Williams place, then rode for the George Bragg ranch, a short distance further on. This was a two-room picketed cabin, built for strength. Now, the Comanches were in full cry after the Hambys. They leaped from their horses in the George Bragg yard and dashed for the door of the cabin. Doc Wilson failed to make it;, a Comanche arrow struck him in the heart. He staggered into the house, said, "'Hamby, I am a dead man," jerked the missile out, and died.

  Old George Bragg was in the house with five white women, a Negro girl, and a great brood of children. The Hambys had thought to fort up here, since they expected to find more men. Now, they were surrounded by Indians, and committed; there was no escape. Thornton Hamby later said: "I might have jumped under the bed—had it not been occupied by three families of women and children who made their way to the ranch for protection." This was the statement of an entirely cool and courageous man, however; when the Indians, blowing on a bugle, advanced on the blockhouse, young Hamby took charge of the defense. The older men were "pretty excited," but Thornton had been under fire before.

  He ordered the women to load all the rifles and pistols in the house. One woman, braver than the rest, emerged and gave him great assistance.

  The Comanches rushed the house, trying to dig up the pickets. The elder Hamby killed one with his pistol, but was wounded four times. The fight devolved on Thornton, "whose cool heroism saved our lives," as a survivor later said. He stayed
at the loopholes, knocking back Indians time and again, while the women pressed recharged pistols into his hand. He was struck by an Indian bullet, but kept up the fight.

  He was lucky enough to bring down Little Buffalo himself with one quick shot. At nightfall, after a desperate afternoon, the Comanches retreated, mournfully tooting on their bugle and carrying off their wounded and dead.

  After dark, Thornton Hamby, with another man, went to the Fitzpatrick ranch to "see what happened." They buried the bodies they found there.

  Meanwhile, the Peveler-Harmonson clans had assembled at Fort Murrah. Chief Little Buffalo had not known that this blockhouse stockade existed; it had just been built. From the top of the fort, the defenders could scan the countryside through a spyglass, and found it alive with Indians. France Peveler and Perry Harmonson saw the Indians playing with something in the mesquite brush. Peveler told Harmonson, "They are killing old man McCoy and his son right now." The McCoy men, who lived about a mile away on Boggy Creek, had not made it to the fort.

  Harmonson told Peveler to shut up; Mrs. McCoy was in the fort, and "will be mightily distressed."

  The Comanche-Kiowas did not try to storm the fort; frontal assaults on Texan rifles were not the horse Indians' style.

  Meanwhile, Lieutenant N. Carson of Bourland's border regiment (variously called state troops, militia, and, erroneously, Rangers) had been near Fort Belknap with about twenty men. The Indians avoided the fort; this also was their style. But when Carson, with fourteen riders, tried to ride toward Elm Creek, they struck some three hundred braves. Five of Carson's men were killed outright, and several more wounded. Carson's report tended to be self-serving ("My men . . . acted with unexampled bravery"), but the troops fired and then galloped away for their lives. A stand, at any rate, would have undoubtedly gotten them all killed.

  On this retreat, Carson's troopers came by the Isaac McCoy house, and picked up the two McCoy women. Riding double, militia and women made Fort Murrah. A number of horses had arrows sticking in them when they arrived.

  Fort Murrah prepared for a siege, bringing in milk and water from the spring branch. As night fell, the defenders could see Indians on three sides of them, and a fire blazing to the north. The Pevelers, who had one man mortally wounded from a brush a few days before, and Harmonsons agreed that a dawn attack was likely and that someone should try to ride to Fort Belknap to round up more state troops. Carson's people absolutely refused to ride out, so France Peveler and a man named Fields, from Gainesville volunteered to go. On the way out, they passed a picket standing guard outside the fort. He was seventeen, and France Peveler said later that he was more afraid of him than of Indian marksmanship.

  Staying off the high ground, so the Comanches could not "sky-light" them, the two settlers passed a white object on the ground—Joel Myers's body. They came across a horse, pinned to the ground with a lance but still alive and trembling. They could not stop to shoot the pitiful animal. They galloped six miles into Fort Belknap only to find all the border regiment men gone—on a scout looking for Indians, it was said.

  Another youth, Chester Tackett, volunteered to ride to Veal's Station, the nearest settlement, some seventy-five miles away. Young Tackett, who was about nineteen, rode out at one the next morning. Changing horses at every white clearing he passed, he arrived at his destination at 9 a.m. But there was no help at the Station. The exhausted Tackett had to stop; another rider pounded on to Decatur, another thirty miles. At sundown, Major Quayle, who had a company of militia, heard that Fort Murrah was besieged. Quayle mounted and rode, ordering no stop until Fort Murrah was raised, although the distance was eighty miles. At dusk the following day, Quayle was within twenty miles of the fort when he met a rider who told him that the Indians were gone.

  Some men followed the Indians north-northwest for about one hundred miles on a fruitless chase.

  In all its details, this was a classic Texas Indian raid. It followed a pattern, being only larger in scope than most. Eleven Texans were killed; eleven houses were despoiled or destroyed; seven women and children were carried off. The frontierspeople defended themselves as best they could, either by heroism or flight. The cavalry, as usual, failed to arrive in time.

  The winter of 1864–65 was a hard one on Elm Creek. Only three farmhouses survived. Food, bedding, furniture, most of the horses—everything was lost. The Comanches ripped up mattresses to see the feather ticking fly; they emptied five-hundred-pound bags of flour on the ground just to get the sacks, which they prized. As Thornton Hamby said, the Indians ate or stole all the food they could, then "the dirty devils stirred sand in the rest."

  There is one more part to the story of Elm Creek, or the Young County raid. Nigger Britt Johnson rode back from Weatherford with Judge Williams to find his son dead and buried, and his wife and two children, both under ten, gone.

  He waited through the winter, then he said he was going to bring his family back. In April 1865, he rode out north-northwest from the Brazos country all alone. He took a pack-horse, a rifle, two six-shooters, and some food and blankets donated by the settlers; the Hambys were the first to contribute. He rode into the wilderness until he struck the Wichita, about sixty miles.

  He came across a lone Indian guarding a horse herd. Nigger Britt could "talk Mexican," which most of the Kiowas and Comanches understood. He made peace and found the Indian talkative. He learned that the Comanches had "a white woman" captive, and that the Kiowas had some negros, or blacks. In a short time, a band of Indians rode up, bringing more horses from a recent raid. Johnson knew every one of these; they were Johnson and Peveler horses from the Brazos. Again, the Negro was able to make peace, and he continued on with this war band for several weeks. They agreed to try to help him ransom his family. Some of these Indians were Penateka Comanches, who had been at the Clear Fork Reservation. Several of them knew Johnson and were not unfriendly. This was not an isolated instance. On the Elm Creek raid, several Indians had spared an old white man named Wooten they surrounded in the open. They called out his name, then ran him for several miles, perhaps shortening his years, because he hemorrhaged, but sparing his scalp. Wooten had delivered beef to Clear Fork.

  Nigger Britt knew Indian traveling companions would be a godsend, and he went with them to the Canadian, in the Indian Territory. Here, in a Comanche camp, he found Mrs. Elizabeth Fitzpatrick. He learned that about twenty Comanches had been killed at the Elm Creek fighting, and that little Joe Carter, a son of Elizabeth Fitzpatrick by a former marriage, had been killed by the Indians on the trail back. The twelve-year-old boy had taken sick, and could not keep up.

  Elizabeth Fitzpatrick was relatively rich, in cattle and land. She begged Johnson to get her and all the captives back; she would pay whatever it cost. He agreed, and in all the courageous Negro made four trips into Comanchería.

  He rescued his wife, Mary, and their two children. He paid "two dollars and a half to get his wife back," and in this he was helped by Comanches. The Penateka chief Milky Way told him how to bargain with the tricky Kiowas, and even sent two braves to travel with him in case the Kiowa allies developed a desire for woolly scalps. Finally, he got every Negro and white captive back, except little Millie Durgan. She had been adopted into the family of Aperian Crow, the Koitsenko, and was not for sale. It was not until sixty-six years afterward, at Lawton, Oklahoma, that a Kiowa woman named Saintohoodi Goombi was identified as Millie Durgan. Her life was not an unhappy one. She was too little to remember her white background and blood, and all her life she stood high in the tribe. She married happily. When, years later, after the discovery of her identity, the Governor of Texas asked what the state might do for her, she answered, "Nothing." She died in Oklahoma in 1934.

  Fate was less kind to Nigger Britt. He had won respect on the frontier, and he and three Negro partners began a successful freighting business between Weatherford and the new Fort Griffin. But in 1871, ten miles east of old Fort Belknap, the Kiowas got them all.

  Texas historians do
not care to explore the Cortinas war. American historians have a similar blind spot toward the terrible years on the Comanche-Kiowa frontier. These two tribes killed more white people than any other Amerinds, a fact not generally known. The reasons for avoiding the Indian wars in Texas are probably complex, and grow out of certain American traumas. The whites were the original aggressors, in that they moved onto Indian range, and the Texan hatred for red vermin could not be made to harmonize with certain American rationales. The culmination of the Indian wars was a tragedy, with all the classic inevitability of tragedy, and against true tragedy the North American soul revolts. Finally, the violence dragged on because of a triumph of Eastern theory over Western experience for some years, which left a sour taste in both Eastern and Western mouths. Whatever the nation as a whole, the vast majority of which never saw a painted Plains Indian, felt about the last stand of these most warlike of tribes, a bitter, never-quite-forgiven animosity grew in Texan hearts toward a government and people indifferent to their suffering. Texas frontier folk, and their descendants, believed that the Indian menace was not quickly ended out of anti-Texan prejudice, or hatred against the South.

  Richardson describes the west Texas situation at the close of the 1861–65 war:

  Indian raids, severe during the war, continued with increased fury after the surrender of the Confederates. The frontier was scourged as never before in its history. In some places the line of settlements was driven back a hundred miles. The country west of a line drawn from Gainesville to Fredericksburg was abandoned save for a few courageous people who moved into stockades. The worst raids were made on moonlit nights, and the soft summer moon became a harbinger of death. Charred rock chimneys stood guard like weird sentries, symbolizing the blasted hopes of pioneers and often marking their graves. Incomplete reports from county judges covering the period from the close of the Civil War to August 5, 1867 showed that 163 persons had been killed by Indians, 43 carried away into captivity, and 24 wounded.