by Scott Zesch
They’d been lucky enough to find a large supply of grapes near the camps. Although the Comanches were mostly meat eaters, they liked to vary their diets with wild fruits and nuts. About seven miles downstream from Mowway’s village, McClellan Creek emptied into the river. Along its banks grew thick vines loaded with grapes.
On September 29, 1872, a Comanche mother and her youngest son left home to pick grapes. The air felt warm and slightly breezy on their faces, and the sky was deep blue, with small patches of broken clouds. The mother and son rode their mounts several miles up Mc-Clellan Creek and stopped. They got off and thrashed the vines, then gathered the ripe grapes that fell to the ground. After they’d depleted the lower vines, the boy climbed a tree to reach those higher up. From his vantage point, he could gaze at the open countryside for miles around. What he saw made him freeze. In the distance, a long column of men in blue coats was crossing the prairie like an enormous serpent, heading straight toward them. The boy shouted to his mother as he scrambled down the tree. They jumped on their horses and started back toward camp. Their packs bounced all the way home, leaving a trail of purple grapes for the soldiers to follow.
Mowway had been away from his people’s village for several weeks. Earlier that month, he’d gone to Leeper’s Creek near the Wichita Agency in Indian Territory for a peace conference. At the meeting, the Indians told the federal commissioner that they weren’t ready to come live on the reservation. Mowway said, “When the Indians in here are treated better than we are outside, it will be time enough to come in.” Tabenanaka, who had once been Banc Babb’s chief, was even blunter: “I would rather stay out on the plains and eat dung than come in on such conditions.”
On September 26, Mowway boarded a train at Atoka, Indian Territory, bound for Washington, D.C. He was part of a multitribal delegation that had been invited to meet with President Grant and the commissioner of Indian Affairs. The Indian delegates traveled in a private car so that their fellow passengers from the plains region, whose ire had been fueled by tales of Indian raids, wouldn’t harass them during the trip.
While he was away, Mowway had left one of the headmen, Kai-wotche, in charge of his people’s village. Shortly after noon on September 29, Kaiwotche headed out on a mule to look around and make sure everything was all right. He followed the route that the mother and her son had taken, traveling twelve miles up McClellan Creek. He was returning to camp that afternoon when he caught a glimpse of the soldiers. By then they were approaching at full gallop. Goading his mule, he tried to get home to alert the villagers, but the warning would come too late. For one terrible half hour that afternoon, President Grant’s peace policy was suspended.1
The advancing formation of soldiers looked endless: seven officers, 215 enlisted men, and nine Tonkawa scouts. Their commander was Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie, a thirty-two-year-old New Yorker who had graduated at the top of his class at West Point. Ulysses S. Grant called him “the most promising young officer in the Army.” Ranald Mackenzie was on a difficult mission. For two months, he’d been riding across the plains of the Texas Panhandle and eastern New Mexico, trying to find and punish Native Americans whom his boss, General Sherman, considered “hostile”—that is, any Indians still living off the reservation. It was the army’s duty to put an end to their wandering and raiding.
The Comanches living along the North Fork of the Red River had been enjoying the bounty of several successful raids. In June a young man named Tenebeka (Gets to Be a Middle-aged Man) and a few of his friends had daringly stolen fifty-four horses and mules from the corral at Fort Sill, while the army guard was taking shelter from a thunderstorm. The Comanches also had forty-three mules taken from a wagon train they’d attacked between San Antonio and El Paso the previous April. So far they’d stayed out of Mackenzie’s path, and his expedition against them had been entirely uneventful.
At about one o’clock on the afternoon of September 29, his soldiers stopped to rest and eat some wild grapes they’d found along Mc-Clellan Creek. There, one of the Tonkawas discovered two fresh trails. One was made by two horses, the other by a mule. Mackenzie’s men got back on their mounts and followed the tracks at a quick gait. Each time they lost the trail, they looked for the grapes, which led them all the way to Mowway’s village.
Around four o’clock in the afternoon, the Comanches noticed a cloud of dust forming. Unable to see what was causing it, they assumed their hunters were chasing buffalo nearby. It was a lazy time of day in camp, and no one felt motivated to investigate. The prairie surrounding Mowway’s village was deceptively open. With only a few patches of trees to break the sight lines, the Comanches could see tiny features on the horizon miles away. However, the knobby ridges nearby were high enough to hide the soldiers swiftly descending on them.
They were caught unprepared. The young boys minding the horses on the outskirts of camp suddenly heard the roar of hooves and saw four columns of soldiers only half a mile away, charging the village. One company of cavalrymen started racing straight toward the boys. They tried to hurry the hundreds of horses to their camp for the fighting men to use. Mackenzie’s troops were on them in no time. They charged right through the clusters of tepees at full speed. Then they fanned out, chasing the panicked villagers. Some Comanches fled on horseback or tried to find cover in the brush and ravines. Others, including women, grabbed bows and arrows, desperately trying to defend the village.
Clinton Smith had just stepped outside his tepee to start a fire when a volley of gunfire startled him. He looked around and saw smoke rising in the clear air at the end of the village. He called to his father, Tosacowadi: “Get up quick! Something is happening in camp.” Tosacowadi rushed out of the tepee, clutching his gun. His wives were close behind him. He peered in the distance and hollered to Clinton, “This is an attack by white men!” Then he told everyone in his family to run for safety. One of his wives picked up her baby and headed for the river. Clinton’s gray mule was staked nearby. Tosacowadi leaped on it. He grabbed his son, Monewostuki, and pulled the boy up behind him. Then he stuck out his foot and yelled for Clinton to climb on, too. The frightened mule took off but didn’t get far. In his haste, Tosacowadi had forgotten to untie the animal. The mule jerked and fell, throwing all three riders into a heap. Tosacowadi sprang to his feet. He cut the rope. He and his two sons got back on the mule and fled.
The whole village was thrown into a frenzy of flashes, smoke, bloodshed, gunshots, shouts, and screams. Soldiers appeared from every direction. Clinton said they were “literally pumping lead into our badly demoralized camp.” Tosacowadi finally gave up on the overburdened mule. He freed the terrified animal with a yell. Then he and his sons ran about four hundred yards to get out of the heat of battle. In the commotion, Tosacowadi deflected a bullet with his shield, causing it to strike his hip. The wound wasn’t bad enough to cripple him. Clinton and Monewostuki followed him, stumbling over dead horses in their path.
Adolph Korn had managed to jump on a horse and was shooting arrows at Mackenzie’s men. Clinton recalled that Adolph never ran from the fight and “left several dead men to show for his brave stand.”2 While Tosacowadi and his two sons were escaping up the river, they saw Adolph’s horse shot down in front of them. Adolph took cover in the bushes. He squatted there, waiting. As soon as Ranald Mackenzie drew near, Adolph shot an arrow that pierced the colonel’s blue army jacket but somehow missed his flesh.
The Comanches in Mowway’s village sent runners to the nearby camps to alert their neighbors and get reinforcements. One of the messengers was a white boy, eight-year-old John Valentine Maxey. As soon as the attack began, he mounted his pony and rode off to warn the other Comanches in the valley about the soldiers. Meanwhile, some of the Comanche men and boys circled around a small ridge, from which they watched the fight in terror. Clinton Smith, normally imperturbable, was enraged by what he saw that afternoon. He reported, “It seems that the soldiers tried to make a massacre of this attack, for they killed squaws, babies, warriors,
and old white headed men.”
The heaviest fighting took place near a long water hole in the river. About seventy-five Comanche men were trapped there, shooting at the soldiers from beneath the bank. Some of the warriors jumped into the water and took cover behind the long grass hanging from the edge of the stream. It was hard for them to hit their enemies, who were crouched in gulches and hidden from view. From time to time, a single Comanche horseman would rush the attackers, ride in a circle, and then return to the embankment, causing some of the soldiers to retreat momentarily. Twice a group of warriors tried to charge, but both times the cavalrymen drove them back, inflicting heavy losses. One warrior who made a run at the soldiers on foot was killed by a friend trying to give him cover. The Comanches threw the bodies of their dead comrades into the deep water, probably to save them from being scalped. During the combat at the water hole, the cavalrymen were startled to find a crippled Comanche woman hiding in a buffalo wallow very close to them. When they realized she was unarmed, they made signs for her to lie down and stay put until the shooting stopped.
Upstream, Paruacoom and his people heard the gunfire. The brawny Quahada chief shouted to his warriors in a booming voice: “Get all your good horses! Mount up! Get ready to fight!” Decades later his followers could still hear their chief’s voice, which they said sounded “like the roar of a buffalo bull when angry.” One of the young men preparing to lead the Quahadas’ charge was a future chief, Quanah Parker, then in his early twenties. A shaman encouraged him and his cohorts, saying: “Many times you walk many miles to find an enemy. Today they are right before you.” Quanah asked the medicine man to help make him invincible. Then Paruacoom, Quanah, and the Quahadas (who may have included Quanah’s friend, Rudolph Fischer) gave the war cry and took off downstream.
They found the soldiers crouched in ravines, firing at the trapped Comanches along the river. At that distance, it would be hard for the reinforcements to attack the cavalrymen with bows and arrows. Paru-acoom wasn’t discouraged. He preferred hand-to-hand combat, anyway. To fire up the younger, inexperienced men, the chief made a short speech. He said, “When I was a young man like you, I met things straight ahead. I fight! I want you young men to do the same. Be brave!”3 They charged straight toward the soldiers. The army’s bullets cut down several of them, and before long the others were forced to pull back. The battle was lost.
Around the village, soldiers were trying to flush out the Comanches who were hiding. They were about to fire into a thicket when a woman came out waving a white flag. Ranald Mackenzie, through his interpreter, asked: “What do you want?”
She replied, “We do not want to be shot.”
He told her, “Leave your weapons in the thicket. Come out and surrender to me. You will not be hurt.”
A large group of women and children crawled out of the bushes with their hands raised. They surrendered to a captivity that would last seven months.
After only half an hour, Mowway’s village was quiet once again. Campfires smoldered, meals sat half eaten, and strips of buffalo meat still hung from the drying racks, as if the villagers had all gone inside their tepees for an afternoon nap. In fact, the only Comanches who remained in camp were wounded, captured, or dead. Ranald Mackenzie’s guide, Henry W. Strong, remembered that the fallen Comanches “were pretty thick on the ground.”
Before long Mackenzie’s Tonkawa scouts, who hated the Comanches, “were having a good time scalping and plunging their knives into the bodies,” according to Strong. When Mackenzie ordered them to stop, they “said some very uncomplimentary things to him.” One Tonkawa indignantly blurted out, “What fur you no lette me scalp heem Comanche?” The Tonkawas claimed they took eighty scalps that day, which was probably an exaggeration. Mackenzie’s troops recovered the bodies of twenty-three dead Comanche men, but the colonel acknowledged that the actual number killed was probably higher. (He didn’t mention how many women and children died in the battle.) The Comanches later reported fifty-two fatalities. Among the dead were the acting chief of the village, Kaiwotche, and his wife.
Mackenzie’s men poured into the camp. Famished from their long ride, they helped themselves to some of the Comanches’ dried buffalo meat. Sgt. John B. Charlton noticed a different type of meat of a lighter color on one rope and ate some of it. He handed it to the chief of the Tonkawa scouts and asked him if it was pork. The Tonkawa tasted it, and said, “Maybe so him white man.” The Comanches weren’t cannibals, and Sergeant Charlton must not have realized that the poker-faced Tonkawa was pulling his leg. He doubled over and vomited.
A few of the cavalrymen were taunting and baiting a blind woman, who made anguished, futile efforts to slash them with a knife as she cradled the body of her slain son. While the captured women and children looked on, the soldiers destroyed their homes, setting fire to the tepees. They also burned the Comanches’ clothing and all their personal possessions, except for a few choice buffalo robes that the officers kept for themselves. The Comanches watched their store of food for the winter go up in flames.
Exactly what else happened in Mowway’s camp that afternoon will never be known. According to Comanche lore, the soldiers plundered the tepees, murdered the wounded, and raped the captured women. Ranald Mackenzie, on the other hand, claimed that any injuries to the women and children were accidental, and that they received “the best care possible.” Regardless of whose story is closer to the truth, the battle was a severe blow to the Comanches’ morale. The commissioner of Indian Affairs later referred to Mackenzie’s attack on Mowway’s village as “righteous retribution for long courses of cruel and cowardly outrages.”4 Righteous or not, it was certainly effective. The free-roaming life the Comanches had known for as long as any of them could remember would vanish in less than three years.
Once the soldiers and their prisoners were gone, the Comanches who had escaped crept back into Mowway’s burning village. Those who had been separated from their kin when the battle broke out searched anxiously for family members among the dead and wounded. Soon the mourning wails of the widows began. Clinton Smith walked to the riverbank where the heaviest fighting had occurred and was shocked by what he saw: “So many were killed and wounded in the water that it was red from hole to hole with blood.” He recalled, “After what I had seen that day I was mad all over, and was willing to risk anything to get even with the soldiers.”
By dusk men from the scattered Comanche camps had regrouped, determined to rescue their captives. That evening they headed for the army camp in the sand hills about two miles away. From a distance, they could see their women and children in the center of Mackenzie’s camp, closely guarded by the soldiers. After darkness set in, the Comanches came within one hundred fifty yards of the army camp and began riding in wide circles around it, whooping and firing pistols. The soldiers returned the fire. Clinton Smith, who rode with the warriors, claimed that a few of the Comanche prisoners were able to escape during the confusion. He said, “Some of the Indians crawled out between the wagon spokes, and some even crawled through the soldiers’ legs in getting away.”
The Comanches failed to rescue their captured friends and relatives that night. However, they had better luck recovering their stock. The army had taken all of their loose horses and mules and corralled them in a sinkhole about a mile away from Mowway’s village. The Tonkawas who were guarding them had rolled into their blankets and fallen asleep. Around midnight Clinton and the Comanches rushed the herd. The animals stampeded. The Comanches took many of the horses, including those of the Tonkawa guards. The following night, they attacked Mackenzie’s next camp, about eighteen miles away, and recovered most of their remaining horses.
But this was a small victory. Ranald Mackenzie was making his way across the plains with 124 of their women and children. Eight would die during the march. The colonel sent the 116 surviving Comanche prisoners to Fort Concho, which he thought was the military post best suited for their long confinement.
The Quahadas had often sent t
aunting messages to Lawrie Tatum at Fort Sill, claiming that they wouldn’t report to his agency and shake hands with him unless the soldiers came out to their camps and whipped them. The time for hand-shaking had finally arrived.
In the days after the battle, the Comanches were inconsolable. Every night the widows and mothers withdrew from the camp, gashing their faces, arms, and breasts with knives and wailing for their dead. The men grieved over their failure to rescue their friends and relatives taken by Colonel Mackenzie. They had no idea what the soldiers would do to them or whether they would ever see them again.
For the boy captives, life became increasingly difficult over the next six weeks. Antiwhite feelings ran high in the tribe, especially among the Comanche women who had lost husbands and sons. They made threats to kill the white boys if they ever caught them outside of camp. Clinton Smith’s Comanche mother warned him to be on guard if these women approached him while he was alone in the woods. His father, Tosacowadi, even advised him to shoot anyone who refused to keep away from him after fair warning.
Before long the white boys faced another threat, one that terrified them even more than the vengeful widows. Indian visitors to their camp began to relay a message that the army would not release the women and children prisoners until the Comanches gave up all of their captives. That rumor was true. Both the army and the Indian agency had agreed that the Comanche prisoners would remain at Fort Concho until every captive was returned.
Captives had always been commonplace in the Comanche villages, but now their presence divided the tribe. Clinton Smith said that his father, Tosacowadi, put the question to his group and “could not get a one to say that they would” take the boy captives to Fort Sill. Nor was Clinton willing to go. He considered himself an Indian, and he had no desire to leave Tosacowadi and his Comanche brothers, not even if his departure would help the tribe as a whole. However, the army was holding 116 Comanche people, and all the tribe had to do to get them back was surrender a handful of stolen children and a few horses. There was no other choice. The captives would have to be hauled in.