Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  For miles and miles the high plateaus swarmed with circling vultures and were strewn with whitening animal bones. This was not sport but massacre for money. There were men who came out to join the trade and were sickened in a single season. But there was no shortage of hunters to carry on.

  The buffalo were literally being exterminated. Everyone knew this; it was not done guilelessly or haphazardly. The Army, and the vast majority of whites along the cattle frontier approved, because the buffalo was the free Indian's staff of life. Without them, he was bound to the reservation and the government dole, and he would have to leave the land or starve.

  The Treaty of Medicine Lodge, 1867, specifically pledged the Indians that there would be no bison hunting south of the Arkansas River. This would have preserved to them the richest grounds in all North America, the Staked Plains, the region along the Cimarron in Oklahoma, and the Texas Panhandle. There were two things wrong with this promise. The government had no authority to order citizens of Texas off legally recognized Texas soil, and while the government never openly abrogated the treaty, the U.S. Army changed its mind. General Phil Sheridan, commanding the Military Department of the Southwest, and General William T. Sherman, commanding the Army of the Missouri, agreed that there could be no solution to the Indian problem so long as the Plains tribes could support themselves outside the reservations. The "vexed Indian question," Sheridan stated, would be solved nicely by buffalo hunters' destruction of "the Indians' commissary." Sheridan and Sherman knew. They were modern generals, who had waged against the South, from the burned-out Valley of Virginia to the swath of destruction across Georgia, the most modern forms of war. The two generals were vehement spokesmen for this policy. Under them, the Army gave tacit approval to the buffalo hunters' operations against the last great herds of American bison in the United States.

  It was dangerous to go onto Kiowa-Comanche ranges. But buffalo hunters were as hardy as they were greedy; they were heavily armed; and they went onto the Southern Plains in winter, when both climate and the shortage of grass kept most Indians comfortable in their lodges. Only when the Indians were panicked by the sight of mountains of whitening bones, and they saw that their own game was disappearing, did they react strongly against buffalo hunters. By then it was too late.

  W. T. Hornaday, of the Smithsonian Institution, wrote the North American bison's bitter epitaph a few years later:

  The men who killed buffaloes for their tongues and those who shot them from the railway trains for sport were murderers . . . finding exquisite delight in bloodshed, slaughter, and death, if not for gain, then solely for the joy and happiness of it. There is no kind of warfare against game animals too unfair, too disreputable, or too mean for white men to engage in if they can only do so with safety to their own precious carcasses. . . . Perhaps the most gigantic task ever undertaken on this continent in the line of game-slaughter was the extermination of the bison in the great pasturage region by the hide-hunters. Probably the brilliant rapidity and success with which that lofty undertaking was accomplished was a matter of surprise even to those who participated in it.

  There was a movement in Texas to protect the buffalo, to halt what some men called an insane killing of God's creatures. A bill to stop the slaughter was introduced in the state legislature, and despite opposition by economic interests and cattlemen, who coveted the bison pasture, it would have passed, if General Sheridan had not made a special trip to speak before a House–State Senate session. Sheridan was vehement. He said the white hunters were assisting the advance of civilization by . . . destroying the Indians' commissary; and it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will, but for the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle, and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunter as a second forerunner of advanced civilization.

  The bill was killed.

  The cavalry had been sent West to protect the white frontier; under the peace and reservation policy in the Southwest it was not doing it; and whatever Army officers had thought of the policy in the beginning, they turned violently against it. The Army was in the cordon of death and destruction; it helped bury settlers; it ransomed demented captives, and again and again, futilely, cavalry pursued Indian marauders to the Oklahoma line, then had to turn back.

  The definable turning point came in the summer of 1871. The reservation Indians made no secret of their coming and going. In May, some 150 braves, mostly Kiowas, set out under Satanta, Big Tree, and Satank, ostensibly to fight Tonkawas who were known to be camping near Fort Griffin. On May 18, these Indians came across a large wagon train on Salt Creek, between Jacksboro and Fort Griffin, on the edge of Young County. They attacked it, killed the wagon master and five teamsters. The sixth, whom they took alive, they chained to a wagon tongue and roasted to death. Five freighters escaped; one, called Brazeal, though badly hurt dragged himself to Jacksboro and raised the alarm.

  This raid was no different, or any worse, than a series that had occurred. On January 24, 1871, Kiowas killed Britt Johnson and three Negro partners near Salt Creek. They scalped all four, but threw the hair away in disgust on their homeward trail because it was too kinky and short to make good trophies. Soldiers from Fort Richardson buried the Negroes and pursued, only to be driven back with one trooper wounded.

  On April 19, another white man was scalped alive on Salt Creek prairie. A day later, and again on the 21st, other attacks on whites occurred. At least fourteen frontierspeople were slain this spring in Young County. Jacksboro and the surrounding country was almost hysterical with fear and rage. It was incontrovertible that these raids were the work of reservation Indians. Back in Oklahoma these Indians boasted to the agents of their exploits in Texas.

  However, on the day the May 19 wagon train massacre occurred, both General William T. Sherman and Major General Randolph Marcy, the Army Inspector General, were in the vicinity. Sherman and Marcy were among those who believed the stories from the Texas frontier were exaggerated. They rode north from San Antonio with a 15-trooper escort, on an inspection tour.

  All along the frontier, the commanding general left the impression he thought the Indians were hardly so bad as they were being painted. At Fort Belknap, which now contained only a corporal's guard, and Fort Griffin, Sherman gave irate citizen delegations little encouragement. But he was at Fort Richardson when Thomas Brazeal was carried in from Jacksboro for treatment by army doctors.

  Sherman questioned Brazeal, then ordered Colonel (Brevet Major General) Ranald S. Mackenzie to take the field with four companies of the Fourth Cavalry. Mackenzie was to investigate and pursue the hostiles, meeting Sherman later at Fort Sill in the Indian Territory. He rode out with his command in a blinding rainstorm.

  General Marcy on May 17, 1871, had written in his journal, "This rich and beautiful section does not contain as many white people today as it did when I visited it eighteen years ago, and, if the Indian marauders are not punished, the whole country seems to be in a fair way to become totally depopulated." But he had not been able to convince Sherman that things were worse than before the Civil War, until the events of May 19.

  The horribly bloody, mutilated, fly-covered bodies of the teamsters, and above all, the body of Sam Elliott, who the official army report described as found hung face-down over a burnt-out fire, his tongue cut out and his body crisped, changed Sherman's mind. The general gave evidence of being disturbed.

  That night, quietly, Sherman gave his word to citizens of Parker and Jack Counties who came in a delegation to see him, that he would do everything within his power to reform the national military policy. Then, he rode on to Fort Sill and asked the agent, Laurie Tatum, if any Indians were off the reservation. Tatum believed that Satanta and some others were gone, but he expected them to be back, since it was time for issue of rations.

  Tatum, who was known to the Indi
ans as Bald Head, was a Quaker, but he told Sherman that for some time he had been trying to convince his superiors that military force would have to be used against the Kiowas, but they insisted that a policy of kindness would eventually succeed. He strenuously denied that he had sold any rifles or carbines to the tribes.

  When Satanta appeared, Tatum questioned him in his office. Satanta, with some arrogance, admitted he had led the Salt Creek raid. He gave his reasons: he had asked for arms and ammunition, and they had not been given. None of the Indian requests had been granted; "You do not listen to my talk." Satanta said he had no intention of raiding "around here," but would raid in Texas when he felt like it. He wanted no more talk about it.

  Tatum repeated this to Sherman, and the resident Army officer, Colonel (Brevet Major General) B. H. Grierson. With a file of soldiers, in a scuffle, the two officers arrested Satanta, Satank, and Big Tree, identified as the war party chiefs. When Mackenzie, who had had trouble following the war trail in the rain, but had finally traced it into Sill, arrived, Sherman ordered him to take the three Kiowas back to Texas for public trial.

  This was the first time an Indian agent had ever allowed a reservation Indian to be arrested; by law, one could only be arrested on a reservation with the agent's consent. The Sill Indians fled in some consternation. The news caused wild jubilation in Texas.

  An escort of soldiers, with a wagon, took the three accused Indians south into Texas; they were to be tried in the civil courts for murder. Satank, who was very old, boasted about his greatness as a chief, and complained that he should not be humiliated in this way. He was fastened in hand irons, wrapped in a blanket, and ignored. A few miles out of Fort Sill, the old Indian began to wail his death song:

  O Sun, you remain forever, but we Koitsenko must die.

  O Earth, you remain forever, but we Koitsenko must die.

  The soldiers guarding him were recruits detailed for this kind of duty; they were new to the frontier. They ignored the warnings of Caddo George, a scout, and did not see that the other two prisoners remained frozen, watching Satank.

  Beneath the concealing blanket, the old chief gnawed at the flesh of his hand and wrist until he was able to slip off his chain. Suddenly he leaped upon his guards. He badly wounded one, before another put a bullet through his lungs. Thus he died fighting, a Koitsenko, one of the ten greatest warriors of the Kiowas.

  For the other two Indians a great farce began at Jacksboro. The murder trial was a national sensation, for precedent, for lurid testimony, and for the crawling hatred that lay in the courtroom behind red man and white. The trial could not establish true justice, because the accused were not guilty of crimes under the codes of their own people. Both Kiowas expected to be killed; neither begged for mercy. Satanta, who was about fifty, denied nothing, and said that if he were killed by the Texans, his tribe would take revenge. The younger warrior, Big Tree, said little.

  At this trial, Prosecutor W. T. Lanham began the career that was eventually to make him governor of Texas. The two white defense lawyers went through the motions, defending the Indians at the risk of their careers, even, on this gun-slung frontier, their own lives. Due process was served; the jury found the prisoners guilty, and the judge condemned them to death by hanging.

  But the great farce had just begun. Back in the East, a number of people were influenced by sentimentalism, or—in some government circles—by fear of an Indian war in retaliation. Enoch Hoag, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, begged President Grant to set the sentences aside. Grant could not do this; murder was not a federal offense; and Grant had no jurisdiction over a Texas court. But he did wire Governor E. J. Davis of Texas, asking that the sentences be commuted to life imprisonment. Davis, knowing that Grant was under much Eastern pressure, did this. Both Indians were sent to the state prison at Huntsville—actually, for a Plains Indian, a fate worse than death.

  From Fort Sill agent Tatum reported that the Kiowas were agitated and uncontrollable, and that the warning that the future fate of their chiefs depended on peace was unheeded. By 1872, there was much evidence that all the Southern Plains tribes were planning for war. Worried, President Grant ordered a great conference of tribes to be held at St. Louis. Representatives from all the restive tribes were sent to hear the federal Commissioner of Indian Affairs; at Presidential request, the two Kiowas at Huntsville were sent to St. Louis under guard. At this conference, incredibly, federal agents promised the tribes that Satanta and Big Tree would be released in return for peace. This, whether judicious or not, was absolutely beyond the powers of the President. When the promise was made public, reaction in Texas was violent. The commutation of the death sentences had been widely disapproved; now, the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a resolution stating that under no conditions whatever would the two Indians ever be freed.

  General Sherman was furious at the actions of the Indian agency. He penned Secretary Delano a strong letter, prophesying that if released, both Indians would kill again. Despite this, Delano began to put pressure on Governor Davis, both through official and Party circles. Davis, now approaching his own political crisis in Texas, hoped for favors from the federal government. On October 8, 1873, he paroled both Kiowas and let them leave the state. When General Sherman heard this, he wrote Davis an absolutely vitriolic letter, stating that the parolees would raid again, and that "if they are to have scalps, yours is the first that should be taken."

  Sherman was only half right. Satanta did take the warpath again; he was an old warrior and could not learn new ways. It was proved that he attacked a party of buffalo hunters; the fact that the hunters were on ground barred to them by treaty was ruled irrelevant. Satanta was arrested and returned to Texas in 1874. In prison, the Kiowa was like an animal caged. He cut his wrists, but a white doctor kept him from dying. Then, he leaped from the second-story prison hospital window, head-first into the prison courtyard. This time he prevailed, and died.

  Big Tree, however, was an Indian cowed in spirit. Big Tree did not fight again. He took up Christianity, taught a Baptist Sunday-school class among the Indians, and lived to be eighty.

  But meanwhile, total Indian policy was changing. Agent Laurie Tatum found his Quaker beliefs strained beyond endurance. He began to deny rations to Indians who left the reservation, only to find this forced his charges to raid all the more. He reported that: "They have taken one young woman and two children captives and murdered in Texas twenty-one persons that I have heard of . . . They brought in two of the captives, Susanna and Milly F. Lee . . . They promised to bring in [the girls'] brother in two weeks. . . ." He stated that, unless directly ordered, he intended never to issue food to these particular Indians again.

  Meanwhile, other records show that 1872 was a bad year. The Indian Commissioner admitted to 100 murders, and the theft of 1,000 horses by reservation Indians; this was a remarkable report to come out of Washington, since Tatum alone reported that the Fort Sill reservation Indians alone took 16,500 horses and mules out of Texas. In April, another wagon train was attacked in Crockett County, this time with the killing of sixteen white men. These raiders held off two companies of cavalry, finally escaping north across the Red River onto the reservation.

  But something was happening, without as yet an official change of policy. Generals Sherman and Sheridan had agreed privately that the army must take the initiative. They quietly gave Colonel Ranald MacKenzie freedom of action to do something about the situation in Texas.

  Mackenzie was an experienced officer, probably the best Indian-fighter at that time in the West. He was not flamboyant or headline-seeking, like Custer, nor did he have the sympathy for Indians attributed to Miles. He was a hard, thoroughly professional soldier. He knew how to select officers and men for particular jobs. He would use his own judgment without fear of consequences, whether to send his command into Mexico in hot pursuit of raiding Mescaleros, or to spread an enlisted slacker against a wagon wheel and have him flogged. He was no book soldier, and Sherman could not have
had a better agent on the frontier.

  In 1871, Mackenzie had raided far up into the Llano Estacado, far beyond the country where his Tonkawa scouts had been. He knew more about the Texas Panhandle than any other officer in service. From one expedition into this terra incognita, he was carried back on a litter, a Comanche arrow embedded in him. In 1872, Sherman could not give Mackenzie instructions to cross over into Oklahoma, but he could and did order the Colonel to hunt, hound, and harass every Indian on the High Plains of Texas.

  Mackenzie took the field, now hunting the recalcitrant Quahadis, who had never gone on the reservation, and whose war chief, Quanah, was beginning to win a great name. Mackenzie's troopers did not defeat the Comanches, but they hurt them. Mackenzie gave the Quahadis summer and winter war, patrolling so vigorously that for some months the frontier was almost quiet.

  This was the beginning of brutal times for the proud Quahadis, the fiercest of Texan tribes, and the beginning of the end. If the Comanches went to the reservation, they would be fed—but never enough. One of the minor corruptions of the Grant Administration was the starving of Indians; Indian agents who were against violence and capital punishment were not above graft. If the Comanches remained on the bison plains, their last great game preserve, they were in danger from Mackenzie, who hunted them, man, women, and child, implacably.