by H. W. Brands
It was about the time the horses achieved this critical mass that the Comanches emerged from the mountains. The Comanches may have been driven from the mountains by better-armed enemies, but they were simultaneously pulled onto the plains by the promise of horses. Horses made almost everything about Comanche life easier and more rewarding. Before horses, the only beast of burden the Comanches employed was the dog, which, needless to say, could carry far less than the horse. The horse made the Comanches true nomads, freed from any particular place, roaming the plains from season to season.
Their new nomadism, in turn, allowed them to exploit the buffalo more fully than before; as the great herds migrated, so could the Comanches. The buffalo provided nearly everything the Comanches required: meat, marrow, and internal organs for food (and blood, in a pinch, for drink); hides for clothing and tenting; sinews for bowstrings and fasteners; hoofs and horns for glue and utensils; dung for fuel. And there was no end to the buffalo, which numbered in the scores of millions. In their mountain days as Shoshones, the Comanches—like most aboriginals (including those who captured Cabeza de Vaca)—were distressingly familiar with hunger; after they mastered the horse and emerged among the buffalo of the southern plains, they almost forgot the feeling.
But if the buffalo was the sustenance of the Comanches, the horse was their pride and joy. Comanche children—girls as well as boys—were raised to ride. They started out on their mothers’ mares but by four or five years of age had ponies of their own. They raced one another across the plains and practiced shooting arrows from horseback, throwing lassos, and plucking objects from the ground at a gallop. (This last skill was especially valued in battle, for the Comanches refused to leave comrades on the field and frequently tore into the thickest part of a fight to scoop up their dead and wounded.) The horsemanship of the Comanche warrior was the envy of every rider he encountered. “He makes but an awkward figure enough on foot,” recorded one nineteenth-century observer, “though he is no sooner mounted than he is transformed, and with no other aid than that of the rein and heavy whip he makes his horse perform the most incredible feats.” Another, more literary witness described the Comanche cavalryman as “the model of the fabled Thessalian centaur, half horse, half man, so closely joined and so dexterously managed that it appears but one animal, fleet and furious.”
As well they might have, the Comanches loved their horses and valued them above all else. Horses constituted Comanche wealth and conferred Comanche status. A single warrior might own two hundred horses (of which he would actually ride but several and dote on a few). A chief could own a couple of thousand; a band of Comanches, several thousand.
No less than other forms of conspicuous consumption, the maintenance of such large herds came at a cost. The Comanches were nomadic not simply in pursuit of the buffalo but also in search of fresh grass for their horses. In addition, the desire to expand their herds continually tempted the Comanches to intrude upon territory claimed by their neighbors. Sometimes these intrusions resulted in roundups of mustangs—the feral descendants of Spanish escapees. But even for the Comanches, capturing and breaking the mustangs was a challenge; the same spirit, stamina, and wariness that made the mustangs such valuable horses to own and ride made them difficult to catch and break. (By credible accounts, Comanche horses were trained to be lookouts when their riders were busy butchering buffalo they had killed. The horses would twitch their ears alternately upon the approach of a wolf or other animal, together upon the approach of a human. “Thus many lives were saved,” said one Comanche.)
More to the point, there was little glory in catching wild horses. Their mastery of the horse left the Comanches with substantial spare time, which they learned to fill by raiding their neighbors. Raids were exciting; they were also a way for young men to earn distinction within the band. As brilliant as they were at riding horses, the Comanches demonstrated even greater virtuosity at stealing them. The most adept of the Comanches could creep into a well-guarded corral or stable, cut the ropes or hobbles securing the finest mounts, and be miles away before anyone noticed. For the Comanches, horse stealing was a form of coup: the stroke of bravery that marked the best men of the tribe.
Equally often, the Comanches resorted to violence and intimidation in their quest for horses. Starting in the mid-eighteenth century and continuing for a hundred years, Comanche raiders swooped south to the Rio Grande and beyond, terrorizing the inhabitants and seizing anything that could trot, canter, or gallop. As late as the 1840s, a traveler heading north from Mexico City toward the upper Rio Grande wrote, “For days together, I traversed a country completely deserted on this account, passing through ruined villages untrodden for years by the foot of man.” Referring to the previous twelve-month period, this same traveler asserted, “Upward of ten thousand head of horses and mules have already been carried off, and scarcely has a hacienda or rancho on the frontier been unvisited, and everywhere the people have been killed or captured.”
The Spanish first heard of the Comanches at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when reports of attacks on Apaches reached New Mexico. As the Apaches were regular enemies of the Spanish, the news that the Apaches had enemies of their own elicited considerable interest. For the next few decades intelligence regarding the Comanches remained indirect and irregular; a Spanish army officer investigating the 1720 destruction of a Spanish patrol near the Platte River wrote:
Each year at a certain time, there comes to this province a nation of Indians very barbarous and warlike. Their name is Comanche. They never number less than 1,500. Their origin is unknown, because they are always wandering in battle formation, for they make war on all the nations. They halt at whichever stopping place and set up their campaign tents, which are of buffalo hide. . . . After they finish the commerce which brought them there, which consists of tanned skins, buffalo hides, and those young Indians which they capture (because they kill the older ones), they retire, continuing their wandering until another time.
By midcentury the Comanches had reached Texas. In 1743 three Comanches passed through San Antonio de Béxar looking for Apaches. The visit evoked curiosity among the Spanish but terror among the Apaches, who by now knew the Comanches all too well. Indeed, so frightened by the invaders from the north were the Apaches that they took the singular step of asking for Spanish protection. The Franciscans interpreted the request as an answer to their prayers, as God employing the Comanches to bring the Apaches to the gospel. Fray Benito Fernández de Santa Anna, a leader among the Franciscans in Texas, urged the secular authorities to honor the Apache request, noting the “copious number of souls who, through the merciful intervention of Our Lord, may be converted to our holy faith.”
Those secular authorities, however, were skeptical. Some doubted the conversion of the Apaches. Others preferred keeping the Apaches as official enemies, for as enemies they might be captured and employed as free labor—slaves, in effect—at San Antonio and the other settlements. But Fray Benito and the Franciscans persisted, as did the Apaches, till finally the authorities gave in.
A mission was founded in the spring of 1757 on the San Sabá River, about 180 miles northwest of San Antonio. The Spanish had high hopes for the endeavor, which appeared to open a new chapter in the development of the Texas frontier. But troubles vexed the San Sabá mission from the start. The Franciscans fought among themselves, not least since the soldiers sent to guard the new outpost were taken from other missions, which now felt themselves neglected and vulnerable. But the most ominous—and puzzling—aspect of the situation involved the Apaches. After their initial enthusiasm for the mission, they cooled to the idea. For months they stayed away from the mission; when a large group of Apaches finally did arrive, its leaders made clear they were just passing through, on the way to a buffalo hunt.
In time the reason for the Apaches’ reluctance grew evident. As the winter of 1757–58 approached, its north winds brought rumors of a major campaign by the norteños, as the Comanches and their al
lies were called, against the Apaches. Assessing the balance of forces on the northern frontier, the Apaches decided that the Spanish, with only several dozen soldiers in the presidio that accompanied the San Sabá mission, were no match for the Comanches, and they declined to make themselves more vulnerable by settling down at the mission.
The wisdom of this decision became evident in 1758. On the morning of March 16 a large group of Indians—at least a thousand—appeared at the mission, firing muskets and shouting contempt for the European interlopers. The leader of the missionaries and a Spanish officer tried to appease the war party but succeeded only in revealing how few the defenders were at the mission. Without warning the two were shot. “And then began a cruel attack against all,” recorded Fray Miguel de Molina, one of the survivors.
The destruction of the mission was appallingly thorough. Its nature and extent were described by a Spanish officer subsequently sent to examine the carnage:
When we reached the Mission we found near the entrance to the stockade the corpse of the Reverend Father President. Farther inside we found, burned to cinders, the bodies of Lázaro de Ayalas and a son of Juan Antonio Gutiérrez. We recognized the former by his head and the latter by a leg, which the flames had not completely consumed. We buried the bodies in the cemetery near the church. The ground was strewn with smoldering debris from its ruins. We moved onward to inspect the other buildings, only to find them all destroyed and the wreckage still burning. . . . As we continued our search, we came upon the corpse of Juan Antonio Gutiérrez, without eyes or scalp, for it is the custom of the barbarous Indians, when celebrating a triumph, to take the scalps of their victims. We buried this corpse also. Then we went on with our exploration and found 18 dead oxen, and even the cats were dead also.
The debacle on the San Sabá cured the Spanish of any desire to tangle with the Comanches. The Texas frontier retreated to the line of the Camino Real, which became the de facto southern boundary of the Comanchería, or Comanche lands. Not that the Comanches respected that boundary, or any other: they continued to raid, more or less at will, to the Rio Grande and beyond. Their warriors would visit San Antonio and saunter about the streets of the town, frightening the inhabitants and seizing whatever caught their eye. So cowed were the Spanish that the Comanches, despite a new and especially devastating outbreak of smallpox, were able to win a treaty from the Spanish in 1785 that specified large payments of tribute in the form of trade goods. The treaty didn’t preserve the Spanish settlements from horse raids, but it did buy some protection for human life and limb.
The lopsided peace lasted till the end of the century, when the diplomacy of the Atlantic world delivered Louisiana to the United States and made the Americans near neighbors of the Comanches. Thomas Jefferson, amateur scientist as well as professional politician, was interested in the Comanches as much for their anthropological characteristics as for their military prowess, and he directed American explorers in the vicinity of the Comanchería and American officers and agents around its borders to report to him what they observed of the tribe. John Sibley, a Louisiana-based army surgeon and Indian agent, in 1808 licensed a trader, Anthony Glass, to deal in Comanche horses. Glass traveled to Texas, keeping a journal along the way. On the Trinity River he encountered a Comanche camp. “We found about twenty tents,” he wrote. “They are made of different sizes of buffalo skins and supported with poles made of red cedar, light and neat which they carry with them. Their tents are round like a wheatstack, and they carry their tents always with them.” On the upper Colorado River, Glass and the group he was traveling with were overtaken by a large party of Comanches—he called them “Hietans,” after the Wichita word for the Comanches—who had learned that he was in the area and who wanted to do business. By day the Comanches bartered; after sunset they played. “They amused themselves at night by a kind of gambling at which a great number of horses and mules were lost and won. The game was very simple and called Hiding the Bullet; and the adverse party guesses which hand it was in. They were very dexterous at this kind of gaming.”
With each day, more Comanches appeared. “We have with us now ten chiefs and near six hundred men with a large portion of women and children,” Glass wrote. “I meet with them every day and we hold long conversations together. They profess great friendship for the Americans, or Anglos as they call us.” Some of the Comanches had visited Sibley at Natchitoches the previous year and had appreciated his friendliness. “They are very desirous of trading with us but say Nackitosh [the prevailing pronunciation for Natchitoches] is too far off.”
This last comment explained the Comanches’ friendliness—and also explained something that struck Glass more than once on this trip. “Here I found myself at the distance of many hundred miles from any white settlement, surrounded by thousands of Indians, with nearly two thousand dollars worth of merchandise and a large drove of horses and mules fatting away in flesh, and no assistance but Young and Lucas [his two partners].” Why didn’t the Indians simply kill him and take his goods and horses? Glass knew the answer, though he often wondered if it would keep him whole till his return to civilization. The Comanches and other Indians suffered Glass—and traders like him—to enter Texas because they wanted the merchandise the traders brought; if they killed the traders, they’d have to travel to Louisiana themselves. They preferred to have their purchases delivered.
Yet Glass discovered something else about the Comanches that constantly vexed relations between them and the whites. A group of Comanches stole two dozen of Glass’s horses. Several weeks later he received some of the lost animals back, courtesy of the chiefs he had met earlier. “The principal chief told me he was truly sorry but that there were bad men in all nations, and amongst them they have no laws to punish stealing.” In fact the Comanches had no laws to punish much of anything, for they had next to nothing in the way of government. The separate bands of Comanches were laws unto themselves, and what one band pledged—with respect to the whites, for instance—often had no effect on the actions of other bands. Nor, for that matter, did commitments made by the chief of a band necessarily bind the other members of that band, who followed whom they wanted when it struck their fancy. Natural anarchists, the Comanches recognized very little in the way of human authority, either among themselves or with regard to those other invaders who vied with them for control of Texas.
C h a p t e r 4
Don Estevan
In certain respects Stephen Austin could not have been less like his father. Moses was innately audacious, a gambler who crossed half a continent to build a business empire in the wilderness, who rode the western boom to become the richest man in the district, only to ride the bust into bankruptcy and disgrace, and then turned to Texas to try it all again. Stephen, on the other hand, was cautious, diffident, self-doubting. His caution owed much to his father’s failure, but his diffidence and doubting were his own. He never possessed the can-do optimism that characterized his father (and the frontier generally); he constantly questioned himself and his actions. His appearance suggested a poet rather than a pioneer. Five feet eight inches tall and slight of build, he had brown ringlets for hair, an aquiline nose, hazel eyes, and skin that burned far too easily for a trailblazer and colonizer. Where the Texas project came naturally to Moses, Stephen, left to himself, would never have dreamed of anything so bold. If not for his father’s deathbed request, he likely would have pursued a career of solid innocuousness. He would have become a lawyer, perhaps a state judge, and spent his life pondering the perplexities of human nature, his own included.
After his Virginia birth and the harrowing trek across the Mississippi, Stephen Austin grew up among the Frenchmen, Spaniards, Indians, and African slaves that inhabited the neighborhood of Mine à Breton. Moses and Maria educated Stephen as best they could, but Moses insisted, as the lad approached eleven, that he be sent east to receive real schooling. A suitable place was found at an academy for young men in Connecticut. Stephen suffered the homesickness that has
tested boarding-schoolers since parents first shipped their children away; he also received the traditional remonstrances from home. “I hope and pray you will improve every moment of time to the utmost advantage and that I shall have the satisfaction of seeing that my expectations are not disappointed,” Moses wrote. “Remember, my dear son, that the present is the moment to lay the foundation for your future greatness in life, that much money must be expended before your education is finished, and that time lost can never be recalled.” On Stephen would rest responsibility for the family. “I hope to God I shall be spared until I see you arrive at an age to give protection to your dear mother and sister and little brother Elijah Brown. Remember that to you they will look for protection should it so happen that my life should be shortened. Keep in mind that this may happen.”
What the eleven-year-old made of this counsel is difficult to know; that he saved the letter suggests he took it at least partly to heart. And when, after three years, his tutors declared him ready for college, he accepted his father’s decision for him to attend Transylvania University in Kentucky, rather than Yale, as his mother desired. The cash flow from the lead mines was diminishing, and the college in Lexington was cheaper than Yale. At Transylvania Stephen handled himself in an “exemplary and praiseworthy manner,” according to his preceptors. But his higher education was cut short after a year and a half. The lead business had gone from bad to worse, and the mine needed new investors. Moses had to travel east to find them; Stephen must come home and manage the operation in Moses’ absence.