Michener, James A.

by Texas

  At Bear Creek, two of the youngest children were grabbed by the heels and bashed against rocks, three were hatcheted and three were lanced. Absalom and a brother were tomahawked in what

  might have been called fair fight, and two of the wives were also slain in the heat of battle. But even the bodies of these four were sought after the slaughter and ceremoniously mutilated, appendages being cut off and sexual organs defiled in savage and repulsive ways.

  It was the four living prisoners, three adults and a young girl, who suffered the real terrors of Indian warfare, because the two men were staked out in the embers of their burned homes, and living coals were edged about them while their extremities were painfully hacked off. Their genitals were amputated, dragged across eyes from which the lids had been cut away, and then stuffed into their mouths. Their eyes were then blinded, and slowly they were roasted to death.

  The third wife was saved till last, and even the official reports of the massacre, compiled by Captain Reed from Jacksborough, refrained from spelling out in detail what she had suffered, for it was too horrible for him to write.

  Not one of the fifteen dead bodies was left whole. Heads were cut off. Arms and legs were chopped into pieces. Breasts were severed. Eyes were gouged out. And not even torsos were entire. From the evidence I saw, I must conclude that four adults were burned alive after the most terrible tortures.

  I cannot imagine that a chief as wise as Matark is supposed to be can think that by such actions he can frighten away our legitimate settlers or deter our army from retaliation. When I buried the fifteen bodies 1 stood beside their common grave and took an oath, which 1 required the men at Fort Richardson to take with me when I returned last night: 'I will hunt down this savage killer, even though he hides at the ends of the earth. These dead shall be revenged, or I shall die in the attempt.'

  But after the oath was taken, a soldier who had kept records of settlers passing through reminded us that the Larkin family had consisted of sixteen members, which meant that one must still be alive, and with the help of my men who assisted at the burial, we reconstructed the family and concluded that a girl named Emma, about twelve years old, was not among the dead. She must be with them, and with God's help we shall win her back.

  As he forwarded his report to Department headquarters in San Antonio, which in turn would send it along to Divisional offices in Chicago, the girl Emma was indeed alive. She was in a camp out toward the canyons, where she had already been raped repeatedly by young braves and where jealous women and sportive young men had begun the slow, playful process of burning off her ears and her nose.

  The orders initiated by four-star General William Tecum-seh Sherman in Washington for Captain George Reed, Company T, 14th Infantry at Fort Richardson near Jacksborough, Texas, were concise:

  You will proceed immediately to the spot where Bear Creek joins the Brazos and there establish a fort of the type common in Texas and the Indian Territory. You will take with you two companies of the 14th Infantry and two from the 10th Cavalry, plus such supporting cadre as may be required, not to exceed the authorized complement of 12 officers, 58 non-commissioned officers and 220 privates, 8 musicians and 14 auxiliary personnel (total 312). The fort is to be named, with appropriate ceremony, in honor of the Texas Ranger captain who distinguished himself so heroically at Monterrey, Sam Garner Your mission is to protect American settlers, to establish working relations with the Indian reservation at Camp Hope in the Indian Territory, and to capture and punish Chief Matark of the Comanche if he strays into Texas.

  At the end of October 1869, Captain Reed, thirty-three years old, crop-headed, clean-shaven, underweight, and the owner of an unblemished military record, led his contingent west. Symbolic of the condition in which he would find himself during the next three decades of his command, his paper allotment of 312 effectives was 66 short, including a Lieutenant Renfro, whose energetic and conniving wife, Daisy, had succeeded in gaining him a third extension of his temporary desk assignment in Washington. Since the conclusion of the Civil War, Renfro had avoided any frontier duty and seemed on his way to avoiding this stint as well.

  Several aspects of Fort Sam Garner were noteworthy. First, it was not a fort in the accepted sense of that romantic word, for it boasted no encircling walls and provided no secure defense against an enemy. It was instead a collection of some two dozen buildings laid out neatly on a large expanse of open ground. Second, the buildings were not of stone or brick but of timber, adobe, field-stone or whatever else might be at hand. Third, even these miserable accommodations were not in existence when the 246 effectives arrived on the scene; the enlisted men would have to erect them in haphazard fashion as time passed. Until then the men would live in tents, and since winter was approaching, the men worked diligently, requiring little urging from their officers, because until houses of some sort were slapped together, they were going to freeze at night, regardless of how much they sweated during the day. Fourth, when General Sherman assigned two companies of

  the 10th Cavalry to the fort, he knew that he was creating permanent trouble for Captain Reed, because the 10th Cavalry was an all-Negro regiment, which meant it would generate not only the customary animosity which existed between foot and horse soldiers, but also the more serious viciousness stemming from the difference in color.

  One aspect of the typical Texas fort in 1869 would have surprised the Northern troops who built it had they known the facts. Their wall-less, adobe, unfortified assembly of buildings resembled strikingly the old presidio which the Spanish military had erected in San Antonio a century and a half earlier. Like sensible men, the Spanish and the American soldiers reacted almost identically to similar geographical and logistical problems.

  But the outstanding characteristic of the fort was the nature of its officer cadre, as revealed by the roster:

  One interesting thing to be noted was that none of the officers— and only an occasional black enlisted man—came from the South, because that region had recently been in rebellion, with even its West Point sons like Generals Lee and Davis rejecting their oath to defend the Union: 'You cain't never trust no Southron, and we won't tolerate 'em in our army.' Of the many forts that would protect Texas in these years, none would be manned by Texans. The presence of a German and an Irishman at Fort Garner was not unusual; thousands of such volunteers had served in the Union

  forces, usually with distinction, and not infrequently it was these European veterans who formed the backbone of the frontier army. They were belligerent, sticklers for proper drill, and dependable In Hermann Wetzel and Jim Logan, Fort Garner had two best: the former a Prussian disciplinarian m charge of all foot soldiers; the latter a daring, laughing horseman who worked with the black troops.

  It was the last column of the roster that showed the hear' of a peacetime fort, because, as can be seen, all the office Lieutenant Toomey had enioyed, during the Great War, a brevet or temporary rank considerably higher than what they now held A brevet promotion could have been conferred in one of manv ways: a new regiment would be formed, requiring colonel majors, so officers much lower in rank would be temporarily promoted to meet the emergency, it being understood that when peace came, they would revert to their lower rank. A >fficer

  would be killed in battle, and a replacement w< eted.

  Often in the heat of battle some extremely brave lieutenant would be breveted to colonel, and he would be addressed as colon* treated like one, but his real rank would remain lieutenant it was peacetime, and military personnel was savagi 1,000,516 men in 1865; 37,313 now—and even tl est-witted

  officer could foresee that he was going to remain in permanent rank for years and years. During the war an a! like Reed had almost leaped from second lieutenant to brigadier general, six promotions in heady sequence; he, George Reed, a schoolteacher from Vermont, had actually been a general in charge of a flank attack on Petersburg, and now he was a lowly captain, four demotions downward, with every expectation of remaining indefinitely at tha
t level. During the war the leap from lieutenant to major had required, in his case, five months, for attrition had been great. In peacetime the slow crawl back to major would require at least a quarter of a century, if it was ever attained

  Yet all except young Elmer Toomey could remember when they had been officers of distinguished rank, johnny Minor had been a full colonel and a good one, but now and for as long as he could see into the future he would be a captain in charge of one company of black troops, and he could not reasonably anticipate higher promotion, not ever. White officers who served with black troops were contaminated, and scorned by their fellow officers, to such men few promotions fell.

  However, within the security of these remote forts, it was customary when speaking directly to an officer to award him the highest rank he had held as brevet, so although the adjutant, when

  reporting in writing to Washington, had to write. 'Captain Reed, Commanding Officer, Fort Garner, wishes to inform . . .' when that same adjutant addressed Reed within the fort he would say: 'General Reed, I wish to report . . .' It was a delicate game, where sensitivities were constantly exposed and where imagined insults rankled for years, and nowhere was it played out with richer variation than on the vast expanses of Texas. Actual duels were forbidden, but they sometimes occurred; what was more likely, some disgruntled first lieutenant who had once been a lieutenant colonel would nurture in secret a grudge against a lieutenant who had been only a brevet major, and on some hate-filled day would find an excuse to bring court-martial charges against him. This then became an affair of honor, dragging on year after year; often each officer would publish a small book giving his True Account of What Transpired at Richards Crossing, proving that it was his accuser, not he, who had been craven.

  This was Fort Garner in 1869, a collection of makeshift and undistinguished buildings, but each laid out with that compass-point precision which would have prevailed had they been built of marble. Reed had insisted on this, and during the planning he had appeared everywhere with his chalk line, squaring walls and ensuring that buildings of the same character stood in orderly array: 'It may be an unholy mess now, but it won't always be.'

  After consultation with Wetzel, who had a keen sense of tactics, he had decided that the fort would be built east of Bear Creek, so that any Indians coming at it from the west would have to attack across that stream or across the Brazos. To safeguard against flooding, he had his men spend two weeks deepening each stream, and then he strengthened the mud dam with which the Larkins had constructed their tank.

  Fort Garner would stand fifty-eight miles west of Jacksborough, same distance south of Camp Hope in the Indian Territory. The five officers' buildings, each with detached kitchen and privy, would form the eastern boundary of the long parade ground; the enlisted men's quarters, the western. The northern limit was hemmed in by the service buildings, while the southern was defined by the hospital and the store run by the post sutler.

  As if to give protection from the west, where the enemy roamed, the stables were located there as a kind of bulwark, north of which stood one of the curiosities of the western fort, Suds Row, where the hired laundresses, sometimes Mexican, sometimes reformed prostitutes, but most often the wives of enlisted men, washed uniforms six days a week. When the men of Fort Garner were at their home station they were a natty lot, especially the Buffalo

  Soldiers, as the blacks were called because their knotted hair was supposed to resemble that of the buffalo.

  Buffalo Soldier, originally a term of opprobrium, had been adopted by the black cavalrymen as a designation of honoi one fact about Fort Garner summarized that situation: the effective complement had begun at 246, but because of desertion, conniving to escape difficult duty and slow recruitment it would become only 232; but of the 134 black horsemen assigned to Fort Garner, only two would desert over a period of three years, of the white infantrymen, fourteen had already gone by the end of the first four months. To be a Buffalo Soldier was a sterling attainment. Many of these men had entered Union service in the darkest days of the war and they had served heroically, fighting both the avowed enemy at the South and the insidious one at the North. From the beginning they had known they were not h'ked and were not wanted, and during peace this dislike was hammered home in a hundred mean and malicious ways.

  For example, the parade ground at Fort Garner had been in operation less than a week when Wetzel came to Reed with a serious complaint: 'General, when the troops line up at morning and evening review, the Buffalo Soldiers, as is proper, stand at the south, before their stables. Could you direct Colonel Minor to keep his niggers well removed from my men? We cannot tolerate the smell.'

  When Reed broached the subject to Minor, the Wisconsin man showed no animosity, nor did his cavalrymen when he jokingly asked them to muster 'just a wee bit to the south, so we don't offend anyone.' The cavalrymen knew how desperately they were appreciated when at the height of some offensive against the Indians, they appeared at the critical moment to support infantry units pinned down by Indian fire: 'We was there when you needed us and we'll be there next time, too.' It was unpleasant, sometimes, being a Buffalo Soldier, but the work provided moments of great satisfaction, and it was for these that the black troops drilled so strenuously and served with such resilient humor.

  A DISTINCTIVE COMPONENT OF ANY FRONTIER FORT WAS THE

  group of wives who managed to stay with their husbands, often under the most appalling conditions, and Fort Garner was blessed with two of the finest. The mud huts had scarcely been roofed over when Louise Reed, the commander's wife, and Bertha Wetzel, wife of the senior infantry officer, appeared in a cargo wagon which they had commandeered at jacksborough. Mrs. Reed brought her ten-year-old daughter, who reveled in the ride across the plains,

  and such household gear as she and Mrs. Wetzel could assemble, not only for their own families but for all the others at the fort.

  When the two women drove onto the parade grounds, men cheered, for those long associated with the four companies were well acquainted with the contributions such energetic wives made to soldiering, and within two days evidences of improved conditions were seen. Mrs. Reed gave a tea at which the eight officers and the four wives were present, and on the next day Mrs. Wetzel carried her teapots to Suds Row, where she assured the washerwomen that if they had any problems with the men, they would find support from her. She served them sandwiches and called each by name.

  The two women were remarkably similar. Each was a little taller than average, a little thinner. Mrs. Reed was from her husband's state of Vermont; Mrs. Wetzel had met her German husband when he was stationed at a fort in Minnesota. Each had a strong affiliation with her Protestant church, and each was painfully aware that her husband was probably going to remain in his present rank for as long as he wore the uniform. They were about the same age, too, in their early thirties, and whereas neither could ever have been termed beautiful, each had acquired from years of service that noble patina which comes from dedication to duty and the building of a good home. One enlisted man who had never spoken directly to the commander's wife said: 'The two good days at a new fort: when we put a roof over where we sleep and when Mrs. Reed appears.' In the postwar period she had helped make life easier at three different forts as the army moved resolutely west, and although this was the poorest site of the lot, she observed with pleasure that the land was flat and easy to manage and the water supply copious: The rest will come in due time.'

  One factor at Fort Garner displeased her. Johnny Minor, one of the best leaders of cavalry and a man who already bore a heavy burden because he was required to lead black troops, had a pretty little wife named Nellie, who gave him much trouble. She despised his assignment and humiliated her husband's black cavalrymen by refusing ever to speak to them; to her they did not exist, except when she was talking with the other wives. Then she called the Buffalo Soldiers 'those apes,' and lamented that it was they who prevented Johnny from gaining the promotions he deserved.

/>   Mrs. Reed would not tolerate such dissension and halted Nellie whenever it began, but Mrs. Wetzel, so admirable in other respects, shared her husband's deep distrust of colored troops: 'Colonel Wetzel tells me constantly when we talk at night of how irresponsible they are. He says it's bad enough to serve with cav-

  airy . .' At the most inappropriate tunes she would forcefully proclaim her husband's harsh theories about the cavalry And I mean any cavalry, not just the unfortunate Negroes. The colonel tells me: "Horses require so much fodder, and this must be earned along in so many wagons that the cavalry winds up doing nothing but riding happily along, guarding its own tram In fight after fight, the poor infantry is far ahead, doing the dirty work, while the cavalry lags behind, bringing up its food." '

  Mrs. Reed, wife of an infantry officer, believed that most oi what Mrs. Wetzel said was true: The cavalry really is a most wasteful branch,' but she also knew that to keep peace m the fort, this constant barrage of criticism must be silenced, or at least muffled, so she cautioned her friend against blatant disparage ment. For some days Mrs. Wetzel kept quiet, but she v Scandinavian, well educated by her parents, who found it impossible to remain silent when she saw error, and one afternoon when most of the officers and all the wives were present, she erupted: 'It's a known fact that during the first days of a campaign against the Indians, the cavalry is most daring, dashing here and there But we rarely encounter Indians during those first days, and soon the cavalry horses are worn down, so that they can barely keep up with the infantry. And by the end of the second week the horses are so tired, they cannot keep up. On all days after that, the foot soldiers have to make camp early, and sit there waiting for the cavalry to drift in. From the twelfth day on they're reallv useless, for not only are they exhausted, but they've also used up all their fodder.'