Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

IN THE PLEASANT, cool October air, in a lovely prairie upland by a clear spring in a place no taibo had ever been, the woman called Nautdah set about the very hard work of dismantling fifteen-hundred-pound buffaloes. This was women’s work, as was almost anything to do with a buffalo that did not involve tracking it and killing it. Comanche women cut the meat into strips for drying. They tanned the hides and made the robes and harvested the paunch and the sinew and the marrow from bones and the ground-up brains and every other part of the huge beasts that were, collectively, the foundations of Nermernuh existence. Women did everything else, too, it seemed: They cooked and tended to the children and horses, and did the packing when the pasturage ran out or the enemies got too close. They fought, too, usually only defensively; they went along with raiding parties. Nautdah did this.

It is impossible to say if Nautdah was happy, or if happiness had any place in her expectations of life, which amounted to an endless and unyielding progression of hard tasks. There were occasional joys. Children were joys. She had three of them. The oldest, a large, strong boy named Quanah, was twelve. His brother, Peanuts, was a few years younger. And there was the beautiful little girl, Toh-tsee-ah, “Prairie Flower,” who was just a toddler. If there was such a thing as happiness on the crude frontier, she was very likely happy with her marriage, too. Her husband, Peta Nocona, was an enormous, muscular, dark-skinned man and a prominent war chief. She enjoyed his elevated social status. She enjoyed the fruits of his hunting. He was a great raider and had many horses, which made them, in plains terms, rich. She had to share him with only one other wife, a full-blood Comanche woman.

This was October 1860. Though the United States of America was a month away from electing Abraham Lincoln and thus setting in motion political events that would break the nation apart and spill the blood of a million men, none of this was apparent to Nautdah or her family. She and her people could read the presence of white men. They were extraordinarily tuned to the presence or absence of military power, to the pulse and increase of settlement, or to the presence or absence of military will. They understood when the game did not return to the hunting grounds. But they saw everything from the remoteness of the plains, still a vast piece of the American continent’s midsection where much of life continued, amazingly, as it had before. Nautdah lived a life with her family that was not unlike the life of a Comanche woman in 1760. Or, in many ways, 1660. There were still buffalo. The Comanches still made war. They were still unchallenged in 95 percent of the old homelands.

The reader may well wonder how it is possible to see into a Comanche camp on the remote plains in a place where no white men lived or traveled. But the preceding account is not fictional in any sense. Though Cynthia Ann Parker was hard to track—and as time went by she was becoming an ever more distant memory on the fast-changing frontier—in October 1860 her whereabouts are known precisely. We know exactly where she was, who she was with, and what she was doing, and where she was camped within a few hundred yards. Her circumstances are known because of the events of the next two months, and because of the bloody catastrophe that was about to befall her, a fate that, twinned with her capture in the 1836 raid, made the woman born as Cynthia Ann Parker one of the least lucky people in the world.

She herself had no inkling of what was going to happen. She was doing what she had always done, and had a few months yet to enjoy the immemorial life of a Nermernuh woman. She was living in a large Comanche camp, one that contained as many as five hundred people. It was something more than a nomadic camp, though. It was more like an operations base and supply depot for many different raiding parties, a sort of swing station through which supplies moved as well as plunder, cattle, and horses on their way to markets elsewhere. The camp was also a relay for stolen horses.¹ This was Indian logistics on a large scale; there were prodigious amounts of everything, from horses to shoes and sausages, suggesting a degree of planning and orchestration that the Comanches were not known to possess. Here is what was later found at the camp:

a large amount of dried beef and buffalo meat, buffalo skins . . . an enormous amount of buffalo rugs, cooking utensils, axes, knives, tomahawks, tools for dressing skins, wooden bowls, moccasins, whetstones, leather bags filled with marrow out of bones and brains, little sacks of soup, sausages, guts stuffed with tallow and brains, and various other things . . . ²

The Comanche camp was located near the Pease River, which originates in the Texas Panhandle and snakes westward along the northern corridor of Texas and joins the Red River. Before that confluence, south of the present-day town of Quanah, and ten or twelve miles northeast of the town of Crowell, a clear, spring-fed stream called Mule Creek enters the Pease in a long valley framed by rugged hills and oak and cottonwood and hackberry trees. Nautdah’s village was a mile back from where the crystalline Mule Creek met the salty, gypsum-laced waters of the Pease, strung out for a few hundred yards in a cottonwood grove along the creek. The country was pretty, spare. Wide, high prairie plains were broken by the river and the hills and the steep ridges that rose from the creek. The village was roughly 125 miles west of the line of settlement, which in the autumn of 1860 ran just west of Fort Worth.

What Nautdah did was bloody, messy work. Sometimes she was covered from head to toe in buffalo fat, blood, marrow, and tissue, so much so that it turned her naturally light hair and light skin almost black.³ So much so that it would have been hard to spot her as the white woman in the Indian camp. While she worked, she watched her children. She was still nursing her daughter, Prairie Flower. Her boys played. They were old enough to hunt now, too, and sometimes they went out with their father. Peta Nocona, meanwhile, spent his time hunting and raiding.

His raiding habits are known, too. Through the summer and early fall, he led a series of sweeping, devastating raids into the counties between present-day Fort Worth and Wichita Falls, Texas. There is more than a bit of irony in the fact that one of his chief targets, Parker County, was named for his wife’s uncle Isaac Parker, yet another prominent Parker who lived in the county seat of Weatherford.⁴ Parker had arrived in Texas in 1833 with his father, Elder John, and brothers Daniel, Silas, and James and the rest of the Parker clan. He had served Texas as an elected representative or state senator almost continuously from 1837 to 1857. He had been instrumental in passing the bill for the new county in 1855.⁵ He was wealthy, exceedingly handsome, with chiseled features. He was widely known as a storyteller. Peta Nocona of course did not know any of this.

And now he had come to plunder his in-law’s creation. From all local accounts, most of Nocona’s raids came at night, by the light of what was already widely referred to in Texas as a Comanche moon. According to Parker County resident Hilory Bedford, “People on moonlit nights were in perfect dread. I well remember the time when the beautiful nights of the full moon, instead of being a source of pleasure, were, on the contrary, to be dreaded as the worst of evils.”⁶ Whole families and settlements were wiped out. Families with the names Youngblood and Rippy, lost forever to history, ceased to exist, leaving as monuments smoking, burned-out cabins, and bodies mutilated beyond recognition. The raiders stole cattle and horses. Most of the raiding in those days involved stealing. Bedford attributed the raids to Peta Nocona. Because this area was their old hunting ground, Nocona and his warriors knew the land intimately. Moving by night, they were almost impossible to apprehend.⁷

The raids were remarkable, too, because the panicked whites in that arc of settlement west of Fort Worth did not seem to be able to do anything to stop them. In March of 1860, Governor Sam Houston had authorized Colonel Middleton T. Johnson to raise a regiment of Rangers to punish the Indians on the state’s northern and northwestern frontiers.⁸ Though Rip Ford had won a splendid victory on Antelope Creek two years before, and had wanted to continue to pursue Comanches in their heartland, his funding had been cut off. Now Johnson raised five companies. They rode north to Fort Belknap, where they installed themselves. It is not clear exactly whom Johnson recruited, or what his standards were. But these men were very clearly not the old Hays Rangers. While they waited hopefully for Indian raids, they were engulfed in boredom. They drank. They fought each other with fists and knives, played poker, and hunted buffalo. Colonel Johnson at one point took a long leave of absence to get married in Galveston. In June one drunken Ranger shot another and wounded him. Another was said to have been murdered by local desperados, or deserted, it was hard to tell which. The men held dances at which they took both male and female parts.⁹ They hunted buffalo.

When they finally took to the field, three hundred strong, they could not find any Indians. During the summer Johnson and his men were outfoxed, outrun, and generally humiliated in ways that would have amazed the old Rangers. According to one account, after one of their unsuccessful forays, they had started for home. Though they could not find Peta Nocona, he apparently had no trouble finding them. At night the Indians charged the Ranger camp, stampeded the horses, and drove them away, leaving the white men to return home across the plains on foot.¹⁰ On another occasion, while the Rangers were riding north toward Oklahoma, Indians swept around south of them, stealing seventy-five horses and killing several settlers during a four-day spree. The Rangers turned, vowing to “wipe them out.” Instead, the Indians set the prairie on fire, destroying horse forage and causing the white men to return to Fort Belknap.¹¹ The failure of Johnson’s unit illustrated an old truth in the West: that knowledge of how to fight Comanches spread, at best, sporadically and unevenly along the frontier. There were things that Jack Hays knew in 1839 that Rangers in general still had not learned twenty years later.

The people on the frontier were furious. John Baylor, the flamboyant, vehemently anti-Indian editor of the Weatherford paper, The White Man, insulted the Rangers by calling them “perfectly harmless,” declaring that their hiring was “the most stupendous sell practiced on the frontier people” and that all of their expectations “have resulted only in the rangers’s eating twice their weight in beef at 11 cents a pound . . . drinking bad water, and cursing the day they were induced to soldier for glory, in a campaign that has resulted in the killing of two citizens, and the marriage of the Colonel of the regiment.” It further stated that if he and his people found one of them, especially Johnson, they would hang him.”¹² Johnson, meanwhile, seemed more interested in his blossoming love affair with the lovely socialite Louisa Power Givens.¹³ His unsuccessful expeditions that summer offer a good example of what happened when white men wrote the history of the Indian wars. Johnson gets scant mention in Ranger histories. There is very little detail on his expeditions. He is dismissed with a shrug. No one is much interested in the abject humiliation of the institution of the Texas Rangers. If Indians had been writing about the northwest frontier of Texas in 1860, they might have characterized Peta Nocona’s attacks as tactically brilliant guerrilla warfare, in the same way historians would later speak of the daring exploits of Confederate raider Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Flush with victory, scalps, cattle, and horses, Nocona returned to his camp on Mule Creek and rejoined his wife and three children. In late November he rode eastward again to the frontier, this time at the head of fifty-five warriors. This time the raiding was worse, crueler, more vengeful even than it had been in the early fall. His war party swung west of Mesquiteville (now Jacksboro), and rode hard into the line of settlements, killing everyone they saw. Near Weatherford they attacked the ranch of John Brown, stealing his horses, killing him by driving lances through every part of his body, and cutting off his nose. They rode across open country in a torrential rain and arrived at a place called Stagg Prairie, on the western edge of Parker County.¹⁴ Here, on the very outermost edge of the bleeding frontier, in the most hazardous place in the state of Texas, a greenhorn name Ezra Sherman, who did not even own a gun, had decided to move his wife, Martha, and three children. On November 26, a group of seventeen braves from Nocona’s force arrived at the Sherman home. The Shermans were having dinner at the time. The Indians entered the cabin, actually shook hands with the family, then asked for something to eat.¹⁵ The Shermans, nervous and unsure what was happening, gave the Indians their table. Once they had eaten, the Indians turned the family out, though with continuing professions of goodwill. “Vamoose,” they said. “No hurt, vamoose.” The Shermans’ seven-year-old son fled and hid himself. The others got away as fast as they could, stumbling in the driving rain across their fields toward a nearby farm.¹⁶

They weren’t fast enough. Half a mile from their house, the Indians reappeared. Now they seized Martha, who was nine months pregnant. While Ezra and his two children continued on, they dragged Martha back to a point about two hundred yards from the cabin. There she was gang-raped. When they were finished, they shot several arrows into her and then did something that was unusually cruel, even for them. They scalped her alive by making deep cuts below her ears and, in effect, peeling the top of her head entirely off. As she later explained, this was difficult for the Indians to do, and took a long time to accomplish. Bleeding, she managed to drag herself back inside her house, which the heavy rain had prevented the Indians from burning, where her husband found her. She lived four days, during which time she was coherent enough to tell the story to her neighbors. She gave birth to a stillborn infant. She probably died of peritonitis: Comanches knew what it was and often aimed their arrows at a victim’s navel. Half a century later, a Palo Pinto County rancher recalled that her scalping left her a “fearful sight.”¹⁷ She was one of twenty-three people who died by the hand of Peta Nocona’s raiders over a span of two days, November 26 to November 28.

• • •

Frontier people saw Martha Sherman’s death as the random and senseless slaughter of a Christian woman by a tribe whose primitive, godless, and subhuman nature it was to do such things. Mrs. Sherman hadn’t hurt anyone. She had committed no acts of war. But her death was neither random nor senseless. She was as much a victim of colliding political and social forces as she was of the arrows and knives of Peta Nocona’s raiders. Her death did mean something. It was a consequence of the unprecedented invasion of Comancheria by white settlers that had taken place at the end of the 1850s. The land she lived on was not the hardscrabble hills of Edwards Plateau west of Austin and San Antonio where the buffalo herd rarely roamed. This was lush, open, long-grass prairie beyond the Cross Timbers in northern Texas, and encompassed the rich and ancient buffalo ground that Comanches had been fighting for since the early eighteenth century. Pioneers had been gradually pushing westward behind a line of federal forts that had been built in the early 1850s. But the big rush came at the end of the decade, when white settlement leapfrogged fifty miles to a line of longitude that passes through present-day Wichita Falls: way beyond where the white people had ever gone before.

The newly chinked cabins in Parker County were part of this swelling presence. And though Martha Sherman was undoubtedly a well-intentioned and God-fearing woman, she and Ezra were part of that clamorous, chaotic, and brazenly aggressive lunge into the enemy’s territory. The Comanches saw it that way, because there was no other way for them to see it. That fall the buffalo had moved south, bumping up against the white man’s homesteads, meaning that Comanches who stayed away from the frontier were going hungry. Peta Nocona’s brutal sweep through northern Texas was thus a political act, with political objectives. So was the Shermans’ decision to build their cabin in western Parker County, though less self-consciously so. Both coveted the same land, both wanted the other side to stop contesting it, and neither was willing to give anything meaningful in exchange. By comparison, what happened at Parker’s Fort was minor contact between picket lines. The raids of Peta Nocona in 1860 constituted outright war for territory. Everything was at stake now. Everything was changing.¹⁸

Exploding might be a better word. When Cynthia Ann Parker was taken from her family in 1836, the population of Texas was around 15,000. By 1860 it had grown to 604,215.¹⁹ In the 1850s alone, some 400,000 new people had arrived. Fully 42,422 of Texas’s residents that year were foreign born; 182,921 of them were slaves. San Antonio was a bustling town of 8,235.²⁰ Galveston, Houston, and Austin were all booming, transforming themselves from mudtraps where pigs roamed the streets into something that began to look like urban civilization. In 1836 there were only a few rutted dirt wagon roads in Texas; by 1860 there were thousands of miles of such roads, plus 272 miles of railroad tracks.²¹ There were three newspapers when the Parker captives disappeared into the plains; now there were seventy-one.²² Still, the state’s population was mostly rural, and most of its citizens were subsistence farmers. On the outer frontier they built primitive dog-run cabins or sod huts, made everything themselves except for tools and weapons, and scratched out a hard and meager living from the land. They endured many of the horrors that settlers on the Appalachian frontier had endured a century before. And they kept coming on in spite of this, from Alabama and Tennessee and other points east, piling up by the thousands on the edge of the plains barrier that had stood inviolable for so long.

The problem, as Peta Nocona’s raid illustrated, was that they were still being eviscerated, tortured, raped, and made captive by Comanches, and there was little evidence that anyone in the Office of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., had the remotest idea of what to do about it. It seemed impossible that, twenty-one years after Jack Hays and the Rangers started fighting Indians in new ways, this could be the case. Every so often troops would be sent forth with the glorious task of breaking Comanche power forever. Every so often they would actually find Comanches and kill a significant number of them. But these expeditions never added up to anything. They didn’t stop anything. There was no concerted will to pursue the adversaries into their dark heartland, to destroy them.

And so the attacks continued, increasing in severity after 1857. Most came from the Yamparika, Kotsoteka, Nokoni, and Quahadi bands, who remained as free as ever in their strongholds in the far north or far west. Kiowas, equally untouchable above the Canadian River, were raiding, too, often in tandem with Comanches. The old patterns reasserted themselves, only slightly altered, and nothing really changed. The great wave of American settlement had swept forward from the eastern coastlands through the trans-Appalachian country and on past the Mississippi. It had had a brief moment of hope and optimism, sailing across the 98th meridian with the Shermans and other settlers. And suddenly it had crashed and burned yet again on the same vast and deadly physical barrier that had stopped the Spanish, the French, the Mexicans, and the original Texans: the Great Plains. There, stretching clear to Canada, remained the formidable war machines of the Sioux, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne.

• • •

By the time he left Texas to seek his fortune in California in 1849, Jack Hays had proved a point. He had shown, many would have said incontrovertibly, that Comanches could be hunted, pursued to their villages, fought on their own terms, and beaten. He had invented a new form of warfare, and he had invented its implausible agent of destruction: a lightly armed and lightly mounted man on a fast horse who wore an old slouch hat and scraggy beard and spit tobacco and defied absurd numerical odds against him. Hays had adapted a weapon no one else had wanted and had turned it into the ultimate frontier sidearm, one that soon changed the very nature of the experience of the American West. By the time the Mexican War ended, a casual observer might have concluded that the tide had already turned against the Indians and that the Comanches, encased as they now were inside the pulsing American empire and facing a determined people who understood how to fight them, were going to meet their doom rather faster than one might have expected.

Nothing of the sort happened. It was as though the Rangers had never happened, as though no one remembered what they had spilled the blood of so many young men to learn. No Rangers were consulted by anyone in Washington. Hays, who had gone west with the Gold Rush and soon became sheriff of San Francisco County, was largely forgotten, at least for a time, as were his hard-riding comrades. The Rangers were disbanded, replaced by U.S. Army units. They were periodically re-formed, which usually meant that a single captain recruited a band of men for an expedition with limited state funding, in 1850, 1852, 1855, 1857, and 1858. But most of these companies did little Indian fighting. Some fought small skirmishes with Lipan Apache raiders in far south Texas. A few fought Comanches. One of them went renegade, joining an ill-fated expedition under the command of an infamous adventurer to overthrow the government of Mexico. They ended by burning the Mexican border town of Piedras Negras and covering themselves with shame.²³ The 1857 recruits, wrote Walter Prescott Webb, “left practically no record of their presence on the frontier.” One of their companies managed to find a small group of Indians, “but was completely deceived and worsted by them.”²⁴ The notable exception to this was Rip Ford’s 1858 expedition north of the Red River, of which more will be said later.

But the inefficiency of the post-Hays Rangers paled next to the U.S. Army, which over a decade managed to engineer a retrogression of astounding scale and proportion. The cruel, lingering death of Martha Sherman in the fall of 1860 had another meaning as well: It was the harvest of a decade of federal incompetence, stupidity, and willful political blindness.

The failure took many forms. In 1848 and 1849 the army sent its engineers forth to build a line of five forts, stretching from Fort Worth (which was one of them) to San Antonio. They were obsolete the minute they were finished. The line of settlement had already engulfed them.

There was also the problem of the men who were sent to occupy them. When it had withdrawn its forces from Mexico, the United States had sent seven companies of regulars to replace the Texas state troops. These consisted of infantry in various forms. Considering the advances in Indian warfare on the Texas frontier in the previous ten years, this was a remarkable decision. It could only have been made by people in cravats and waistcoats who lunched at fancy hotels and lived two thousand miles from the border; people, moreover, who did not want Indian wars and therefore did not want professional killers like Bigfoot Wallace out hunting redskins in their home ranges. In almost every way, the new Indian fighters were the antithesis of Hays’s men.

The best examples were the army’s new “elite” fighters in the West: the dragoons. They were a heavily mounted infantry who rode horses to the scene of battle, but fought dismounted. They were undoubtedly effective against comparably mounted and armed opponents, but on the Texas frontier they were a shocking anachronism, like something out of Louis XIV’s court. They were clad in “French-inspired blue jackets, orange forage caps, white pantaloons, and sweeping mustaches.”²⁵ Like Louis’s old musketeers, too, they were self-consciously gallant, in ways that would soon seem nearly comical.

They were armed with weapons that the Spanish and Mexicans had long ago discovered to be useless against horse tribes: single-shot pistols (apparently the army, unlike its Mexican War victims, had not quite grasped the meaning or value of the Walker Colt), gleaming swords that had no particular application against Indians with fourteen-foot lances and rapid-fire arrows, and, oddest of all, the Springfield Arsenal Musketoon, Model 1842, a truly atrocious weapon that was unreliable at any distance. Heavy in the saddle, and not a real cavalry anyway, the splendidly arrayed horse infantry could barely manage twenty-five miles a day in pursuit of Indians. They often had to walk by their horses, so as not to exhaust them. The warriors they pursued—pursuit being something the army in the West did not do very much of—could ride fifty miles in seven hours, and one hundred miles without stopping, abilities the plodding, weighed-down dragoons simply refused to believe. The only way the Indians could ever be in danger from these soldiers, observed one Texas Ranger, was if their ridiculous appearance and ungainly horsemanship caused the Indians to laugh themselves to death.²⁶ “It was rather an unfortunate experiment to mount infantry soldiers,” wrote a Ranger captain, “many of whom had never been on horse in their lives, to operate against the best horsemen in the United States—the Comanche. Yet the United States Army tried it.”²⁷ One can only speculate on how long it would have taken Rangers under Hays or Walker or McCulloch to leave such soldiers in pieces on the ground. It is not surprising that they never caught any Indians.

They were still far more efficient than the infantry, which made up the largest part of the troops then stationed on the frontier. The choice was a curious one, since the best an infantryman could do in such a vast and wide open country, against a fleet, mounted opponent, was to shoot his weapon from the gun portals of a stockade fence. Such a defensive notion was reasonable enough in places more civilized than the western frontier. But it had nothing to do with fighting horse Indians, who were never stupid or desperate enough to attack federal forts. They quickly learned to bypass them. Even before the posts were complete, citizens in some towns were calling for protection by Rangers. In 1849 one Texas newspaper stated that “The idea of repelling mounted Indians, the most expert horsemen in the world, with a force of foot soldiers, is ridiculous.”²⁸ It did not help that most of these men were foreign-born German and Irish, that many of them were criminals, led miserably demoralizing lives, and suffered greatly from disease, poor sanitation, and alcoholism.

Yet this was the policy that seeped forth from Washington. That policy was deeply ambivalent. In 1849 the Home Department (later to become the Department of the Interior) had taken over the Office of Indian Affairs from the army. In principle, this was a reasonable idea. But it set up two conflicting authorities. The Office of Indian Affairs was deeply committed to avoiding Indian wars in the West. It distrusted the army, and tended to disbelieve cries of wolf from the settlements, believing that the whites’ problems with the Indians were of their own doing. They liked the idea of treaties, the more the better. They liked the notion of an enduring peace, in spite of the headlong rush of settlers into Indian territory who wanted peace only if it meant complete capitulation by Indians. The army knew better, but could do nothing about it. The Indian office was moreover deeply corrupt, full of agents who saw nothing wrong with cheating Indians of gifts or annuities or food allotments—acts that often led to bloodshed. The result was a policy of breathtaking passivity that lasted from 1849 to 1858. Soldiers were not to fight Indians unless attacked, or unless they had clear evidence that the Indians had been involved in a criminal act.

The government’s approach was purely defensive. Thus the new line of forts, built one hundred miles to the west and finished by 1852,²⁹ were not much more effective than the first ones. Not at first, anyway. Though they had been built at great expense, they were typically understaffed and underfunded. Infantrymen could do little more than drill and march about the parade ground. Pursuit of mounted Comanches by foot troops was pointless. The forts were built to stop Indian raids on both the Texas frontier and northern Mexico, yet through most of the 1850s they were ineffective. As Wallace and Hoebel wrote, “Officers and troops were strangely ignorant of the rudiments of warfare as carried on by the Indians of the plains.”³⁰

The failure at the federal level also extended to treaties, which were no different from any of the failed treaties signed by the government of the United States from its earliest days. One historian has estimated the number of treaties made and broken by the government at 378.³¹ The outcome of nearly every treaty was the same: White civilization advanced, aboriginal civilization was destroyed, subsumed, pushed out. The government made claims it could never enforce and never intended to enforce, and Indians died. This is a dreary history. The Five Civilized Tribes were chased westward by a series of treaties, each of which guaranteed that this time government promises would be kept, that this time the trail of tears would end. Some of this treaty-making was pure hypocrisy; some of it, as in the case of Texas Indian agent Robert Neighbors, was earnest and well-meaning naïveté. Indians always wanted agreements that would last for all eternity; no white man who ever signed one could have possibly believed that the government could make such promises.

An enormous amount of energy was expended making pointless treaties with Comanches. A brief summary will suffice to make the point. The first treaty was made in 1847, with the Penatekas, who of course could not enforce any of its provisions on the other bands. Its terms were typical: Indians were to give up captives and restore stolen goods, accept the jurisdiction of the United States, and trade only with licensed traders. In exchange, the government promised that no whites would be permitted to go among the Indians without a pass signed personally by the president of the United States, that they would give them blacksmiths to repair guns and tools, and would give them gifts worth $10,000.³² The whites, of course, never upheld the treaty. One wonders who came up with the ridiculous idea of making President James K. Polk approve passes for every settler who wanted to cross into the Indian country. As usual, the Indians were not allowed beyond a certain established line. Whites, meanwhile, clamored forward. Another similar treaty followed in 1850, which the Senate would not ratify, making all of the promises of the Indian office meaningless.

The treaty of 1853 was pure fraud, on both sides. This agreement, signed by “representatives” of the northern Comanches, Kiowas, and Kiowa Apaches that had no tribal power to agree to anything, allowed the United States to build roads in Indian territory, establish depots and posts, and protect immigrants passing through. As compensation for this, the agents promised goods in the amount of $18,000 annually. The Indians pledged to cease their attacks both in the United States and Mexico, and to give back all of their captives.³³

Neither side abided by the agreement, nor had they any intention of doing so. The annuity goods were not delivered, though someone in the Indian office undoubtedly made a tidy profit. The Indians, wise perhaps now to the ways of the white man, never had any intention of honoring their promises. They liked the idea of gifts, and wanted to see how much they could get. The whites inevitably got something out of these treaties: The Indians could be painted as treaty-breakers. They had after all signed a document saying they would not raid and would give up captives, and then they had, treacherously, refused to keep it, notwithstanding that settlers ignored it as they ignored every other treaty. Manifest Destiny, as a notion and as a blueprint for expanding empire, meant that the land, all of it, belonged to the white man. And white men did what they had done ever since they landed in Virginia in the seventeenth century: They pushed as far into Indian country as their courage, or Indian war parties, would let them. Imagine the alternative: the U.S. government sending troops to shoot down God-fearing settlers who simply wanted a piece of the American dream. It never happened.

The best idea the U.S. government could muster was to put four hundred starving Penatekas and a thousand other mostly Wichita-Caddoan remnants on to reservations on the Brazos River in 1855. The plan was hatched by Jefferson Davis, the new secretary of war in the Franklin Pierce administration. The Penatekas, decimated by waves of diseases, their hunting lands emptied of game, and their culture polluted by the white invaders, were literally starving to death; the other Indians who remained were simply being overrun.

This plan backfired, too. The Comanches were given about twenty thousand acres on the Clear Fork of the Brazos between present-day Abilene and Wichita Falls. For nomadic hunters, this was an absurdly small plot, too small to raise stock and mostly impossible to farm. Only about four hundred of the remaining twelve hundred Penatekas came in; the rest, scared off by rumors that they would be killed, fled north of the Red River with the ubiquitous Buffalo Hump. For those who stayed, the idea was that they would become happy, well-adjusted farmers. But no Comanche had ever wanted to plant seeds. The Indian agent, Robert Neighbors, was forced to give them cattle. The reaction of Sanaco, one of the chiefs who came in, sums up the bitter resignation of the Penatekas:

You come into our country and select a small patch of ground, around which you run a line, and tell us the President will make us a present of this to live on, when everybody knows that the whole of this entire country, from the Red River to the Colorado, is ours and always had been from time immemorial. I suppose, however, if the President tells us to confine ourselves to these narrow limits, we shall be forced to do so.³⁴

But the main problem with the Texas reservations was the white people who lived next to them. By 1858 white farms and ranches surrounded the reservations. And soon the whites were blaming the reservation Indians for raids that were being carried out by northern bands. In the fall of 1858 there were a series of savage raids all along the frontier—a settlement twenty-five miles from Fredericksburg was completely annihilated. Under the leadership of the Indian-hating newspaper editor John Baylor, settlers organized themselves and threatened to kill all of the Indians on both reservations. On December 27, 1858, a party of seventeen peaceful Indians from the reservation—Anadarkos and Caddoans—were attacked by white men while they slept. The white men fired on them, killing four men and three women. The six men who were guilty of the murders were identified but never charged. The feeling was that no jury would ever convict them, and that their arrest might stir the border into full-scale revolt. Meanwhile Baylor continued to stir up trouble, even going so far as to say that he would kill any soldier who tried to stand in his way. By the spring of 1859 the area around the reservations was in full panic. Groups of whites went about armed and looking for Indians. In May, some whites opened fire on a group of Indians. There was little doubt now that if the Indians stayed there, there would be a full-scale war. Or, more likely, a full-scale slaughter.

On July 31, Agent Neighbors and three companies of federal troops led a long, strange, and colorful procession of Indians out of the Brazos reservations, never to return. The sight was at once magnificent and pathetic. There were 384 Comanches and 1,112 Indians from the other tribes.³⁵ They moved in a slow procession in the shimmering heat of the prairie, dragging their travois behind them as they had for hundreds of years; they crossed the Red River on August 8, and on August 16 arrived at their new reservation on the Washita River near present-day Fort Cobb, Oklahoma. The next day agent Neighbors returned to Texas to file a report. While he was at Fort Belknap, a man named Edward Cornett, who disagreed with his Indian policies, walked up to him and shot him in the back.

• • •

By almost any measure, John Salmon “Rip” Ford was one of the West’s most remarkable characters. He was at various times a medical doctor, a newspaper editor, a state representative and state senator, a flamboyant proponent of the Confederacy, and an explorer who blazed the San Antonio to El Paso trail, which later bore his name. He served as mayor of Brownsville, delegate to the 1875 Constitutional Convention, and superintendent of the state’s Deaf and Dumb School. He was a peacekeeper, too. He once protected the Brazos Reservation Indians against false accusations from the local whites, but later refused to arrest the men responsible for killing the innocent Caddoans and Anadarkos, in spite of an order by a state district judge to do so.³⁶ Rip Ford was a man of many opinions, all of them strong.

But he was most famous as a fighter of Indians and Mexicans. He had joined Jack Hays’s upstart Rangers in 1836, rising to the rank of first lieutenant. He served under Hays again as his adjutant during the Mexican War, where he earned his nickname. It was his job to send death notices to soldiers’ families, and he often included the postscript “Rest in Peace.” Since he ended up writing so many such reports, he shortened the message to “R.I.P.” Many people believed the initials stood for all of the Indians he had killed. After the war he rejoined the Rangers, was promoted to captain, and spent time on the border hunting Mexican bandits and Indians. Though he was literate and cultured, he was a hard-looking man; you could imagine him in a cold camp in the limestone breaks of the hill country with Hays and McCulloch and the others, waking in a frozen dawn to track and kill Comanches. He had a broad face with deep-set eyes, a crooked nose, jug-handle ears, and a thin, hard mouth. He liked to wear buckskins and a long and narrowly cut beard. Sometimes he wore a stovepipe hat. He was known to be a hard drillmaster.

In January 1858, as Texas reeled from a fresh wave of Comanche attacks in Erath, Brown, and Comanche counties, Ford became the duly appointed savior of the frontier. Texas had had enough of the federal government’s staggering incompetence, and of its utter failure to stop Indian attacks. The last straw had been the army’s decision in 1857 to ship a large part of the federal troops in Texas, most of the Second Cavalry, north to Utah to quell a Mormon revolt.³⁷ The Comanches had understood this perfectly, and had stepped up their raids.

That was enough. Texans would take matters into their own hands. The sum of $70,000 was appropriated, and a hundred men were recruited for six-month terms of service. Ford, who accepted a commission as senior Ranger captain, would command them. Their mission was highly unusual. In recent years every significant military expedition against the Comanches had been mounted in response to specific attacks. The idea had been to pursue the raiders and punish them for what they had done. It was pure retribution. Ford and his men were to simply launch themselves north of the Red River, penetrate deep into Comanche territory, and strike an offensive blow. “I impress upon you the necessity of action and energy,” Texas governor Hardin Runnels told Ford. “Follow any and all trails of hostile or suspected hostile Indians you may discover, and if possible, overtake and chastise them, if unfriendly.”³⁸ Runnels’s words sounded simple enough. In fact he was calling for open war against Indians, in direct defiance of federal policy. The orders harkened back to what Jack Hays had done twenty years earlier when he roamed the hill country looking for Indians, attacking whatever Indians he found. It no longer mattered to Texans if the Rangers had caught any Indians in criminal acts. The point was to strike them hard and preemptively; the point was that they could and would be pursued to deep within their homelands, to their very lodges.

Thus was Ford unleashed. He recruited the best men he could find, armed them each with two revolvers and a rifle, and drilled them on marksmanship and tactics.³⁹ They were going to do things the old Ranger way, the unpleasant, hard, and uncomfortable way. The Hays way. He added 113 friendly Indians to his force, mostly Tonkawas under their chief Placido and Caddos and Anadarkos under Jim Pockmark. There were even some Shawnees. Like Hays, Ford made extensive use of Indians, writing later that they “were men of more than ordinary intellect who possessed minute information concerning the geography and topography of that country.”⁴⁰ On April 29, 1858, riding behind a wide screen of Indian flankers and scouts (“spies” in the vernacular of the day), Ford and his cohort splashed across the Red River, threading their way through large stretches of pure quicksand. The fact that they had absolutely no lawful authority outside of Texas did not seem to bother them.⁴¹ On May 10 their scouts brought in two arrowheads, which were quickly identified by the Indians as Kotsoteka Comanche. On May 11 they discovered a small Comanche camp on the Canadian River. Ford had moved like a Ranger: quietly, building few or no campfires, sending scouts out for twenty miles in four directions. And in the Ranger company there was, of course, none of the fuss and feathers and repeated bugling that characterized the army expeditions. The army was learning the old Ranger lessons, but only slowly. The federal troopers still moved with startling obviousness across the prairie.

On May 12, Ford’s Tonkawas attacked and quickly destroyed the camp, killing several Indians and taking others prisoner. Two Comanches escaped at full gallop, heading toward the Canadian River. The Rangers and reservation Indians followed, chasing the Indians at high speed for three miles. They galloped across the Canadian River, and soon drew up in front of a large Kotsoteka camp that ran for a mile along a creek. It was a lovely piece of ground, a pure, clear stream flowing into a river valley; beyond the northern bank rose the picturesque Antelope Hills, bathed in the light of the sunrise. This was deep in Comanche territory, where they did not expect to be attacked. What they were looking at was not just a mobile war camp but a full-scale village, with women and children and buffalo meat drying on racks in front of the tipis. Ford’s two hundred thirteen men were now confronting four hundred Kotsoteka warriors.

Ford sent his Indian cohort first, the idea being, as he put it, “to make the Comanches believe that they had only Indians and bows and arrows to contend against.”⁴²

The ploy apparently worked. The main Comanche chief, Pobishequasso, “Iron Jacket,” emerged from the swirling masses of horsemen and rode forward. Iron Jacket was not just a war chief. He was also a great medicine man. Instead of a buckskin shirt he wore iron mail, an ancient piece of Spanish armor. He carried a bow and a lance, wore a headdress decorated with feathers and long red-flannel streamers, and was elaborately smeared with paint.⁴³ His horse, according to Ford, was “gloriously caparisoned.”⁴⁴ As he rode forward he summoned his big magic, walking his horse in a circle and then expelling his breath with great force. He was said to be able to blow arrows away from their targets. Bullets and arrows were said to bounce off him; Iron Jacket was said to be invincible. And indeed for a little while he seemed to be. Rangers and Indians shot at him, to no effect. One participant recalled that pistol rounds “would glance off [his armor] like hail from a tin roof.”⁴⁵ He circled again and moved forward. But now Ford’s Indians, who were armed with six-shooters and Mississippi rifles, found their mark. “About six rifle shots rang on the air,” wrote Ford. “The chief’s horse jumped about six feet straight up and fell. Another barrage followed, and the Comanche medicine man was no more.”⁴⁶

The effect was predictable and immediate. The Comanches in the main camp made a brief stand and then fled, demoralized by their chief’s broken magic. What followed was a running fight that featured Rangers and their Indian allies with far superior weaponry picking off Kotsoteka riders on the open plain and in the wooded river bottom. The battle extended to an area three miles by six miles, and soon turned into a series of single combats, in which the Rangers with reloadable .45-caliber six-shooters and breech-loading carbines held an enormous advantage over the bow-and-lance-wielding Comanches. The latter did have guns, but they were the old single-shot muskets that could be discharged only once. The Indians fought valiantly. Much of their fighting was meant to try to cover the retreat of their women and children. Women were killed along with the men. Ford makes a point of noting that “it was not an easy matter to distinguish Indian warriors from squaws,” meaning that the Rangers did not knowingly kill women. This was not really true. Women could ride as well as the men and were extremely adept with a bow. They were often killed as combatants (as would be true a hundred years later in the Vietnam War), and in any case were always potential combatants. Needless to say, the Tonkawas and Shawnees and other Indians had no such compunctions about killing women. Plains warfare was a fight to the death, always. In the running fight seventy-six Comanches were killed and many more were wounded. The Rangers suffered only two dead and three wounded. The numbers of dead “friendly” Indians were never reported.

Now something very strange happened. Another force of Comanches, as large as or larger than the first, emerged over the ravines and thicket to confront Ford’s men. According to legend, it was commanded by Peta Nocona, but there is no hard evidence for that. What followed was ancient, ritual combat, of the sort that few white men had ever seen. Comanches in full regalia rode forth individually onto the plain, screaming taunts at the reservation Indians and daring them to come out in single combat. This they did. “A scene was now enacted beggaring description,” wrote Ford. “It reminded one of the rude and chivalrous days of knight-errantry. Shields and lances and bows and head dresses, prancing steeds and many minutias were not wanting to compile the resemblance. And when the combatants rushed at each other with defiant shouts, nothing save the piercing report of the rifle varied the affair from a battlefield of the middle ages. Half an hour was spent in this without much damage to either party.”⁴⁷

Then the modern era quickly reasserted itself. The Rangers charged, en masse, guns blazing, and the Comanche line soon broke. There was a running fight of some three miles, ending with no casualties on either side. Ford’s horses were exhausted. The Comanches hauled themselves off to lick their wounds.

Ford’s fight became known in Texas history as the Battle of Antelope Hills, and it is famous for several reasons. It reasserted the superiority of Texans against Comanches, and underscored the incompetence of the army and the Indian office. It sealed Rip Ford’s fame and, most important, proved the lesson that Jack Hays had learned but that had somehow gotten lost over the years. “The Comanches,” Ford later wrote to Runnels, “can be followed, overtaken, and beaten, provided the pursuers will be laborious, vigilant, and are willing to undergo privations.” Willing, in short, to behave and fight like the Rangers of the late 1830s and early 1840s.

The Battle of Antelope Hills also brought into focus the rather thorny political question of who was better qualified to patrol the borderlands, federals or Texans. On the floor of the U.S. Senate that year Sam Houston had risen to say, with withering scorn, that Texas no longer wanted federal troops at all. “Give us one thousand Rangers and we will be responsible for the defense of our frontier. Texas does not want regular troops. Withdraw them if you please.” He was countered by Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis, secretary of war, who reminded Houston of the disciplinary problems the army had experienced with the Rangers in the Mexican War. “If the General had gone further,” he retorted, “and said that irregular cavalry [Rangers] always produce disturbance in the neighborhood of a camp, he would have said no more than my experience would confirm.”⁴⁸

But Ford’s raid had stung the army deeply; it had suggested, or perhaps proven, that Houston was right. Ford had done what no one in the U.S. Army had ever done, which was to pursue Comanches into their home ranges. Thus was the Second Cavalry summoned from its labors in Utah, to make its own march north of the Red River against the Comanches.

The expedition was political from start to finish. Ford’s raid had prompted the U.S. Army commander in Texas, the chubby, profane General David Twiggs, to obtain authority directly from army headquarters at West Point to abandon the passive defense policy the army had been forced to put up with since 1849. A punitive force was thus organized at Fort Belknap under the command of the dapper, blond, egotistical Mississippian Earl Van Dorn, who would later find fame as a Confederate major general. With five companies of troops and 135 friendly Indians under the command of the wiry, ambitious twenty-year-old college student Sul Ross, they rode north on September 15, 1858. They were tracking Buffalo Hump, the seemingly indestructible Penateka chief who had refused to go on the reservation and now rode with other Comanche bands. Their Wichita scouts soon found a large village of Comanches next to a village of Wichitas. The Indians were completely unaware of the danger.

The reason they were unaware of danger is that they had just concluded a treaty with a Captain Prince, the commanding army officer at Fort Arbuckle, which was located just to the east. While the intrepid Van Dorn was at Fort Belknap making ready to strike the Comanches a deathblow, Prince was hobnobbing and making peace with the chiefs of the same band—Buffalo Hump, Hair-Bobbed-on-One-Side, and Over-the-Buttes. Neither Van Dorn nor Prince had any idea what the other was doing.⁴⁹ Pleased with what seemed to be at least a temporary peace and freedom from worry about attacks like the one Rip Ford had made, the Wichitas and Comanches were feasting, trading, gambling, and generally carrying on. They were completely unaware of the approach of the bluecoats and “friendlies” under Van Dorn and Ross. Several reports on their location and strength were given to Hair-Bobbed-on-One-Side, who considered the matter and concluded that the white man would never attack them having just made a treaty with them. The omens were good. They were safe. They went to sleep.

At dawn the next morning Van Dorn’s troops attacked the Comanche village with a vengeance. Ross and his reserve Indians had run off the horses, so most of the warriors were forced to fight on foot. It was more of a massacre than a fight. Two hundred blue-coated troops were in the village, blasting away into the tipis, while the Indians frantically tried, as they always did, to cover the retreat of their families. Seventy Indians were killed, untold numbers wounded. Buffalo Hump managed to escape with most of his warriors. The Rangers lost four killed, and twelve wounded, including Van Dorn with an arrow through his navel and Ross with two bullet wounds. Both men had to stay on the field of battle for five days to recuperate.⁵⁰ The army burned one hundred twenty tipis, along with all the Comanche ammunition, cooking utensils, clothing, dressed skins, corn, and subsistence stores. Those who escaped had only the clothing on their back, and many were afoot, since the soldiers had captured three hundred horses, too.⁵¹

Though what had been perpetrated upon the Comanches amounted to a cruel trick, the army boasted a glorious victory. The Texas press wasn’t so sure. One paper expressed the opinion that the effect of what became known as the Battle of the Wichita Village “will, probably, be a cessation of depredations upon the border settlements for a time at least,” but insisted that “an end of the war should be the blow followed by active, energetic operations.”⁵² The latter did not happen anytime soon. On November 5, 1858, barely seven weeks later, Sul Ross himself noted that, since the battle, Comanches had stolen more than one hundred head of horses from settlements in northern Texas. The violent Indian raids of the fall of 1858, which had set off John Baylor’s reservation war, came at least in part in reprisal for Van Dorn’s attack.⁵³

Still, there was clear meaning in both Ford’s and Van Dorn’s attacks. They were unambiguously offensive, for one thing. They showed a willingness, for the first time, to cross the Red River in pursuit of Comanches, and they showed that such tactics could at least kill Indians. Whether they could stop raiding remained to be seen. They also showed that advances in weaponry, especially the six-shooter and the breech-loading carbine, had radically altered the basic balance of power. When two hundred men could take on and devastate a Comanche force twice their size, there was a lesson to be learned. Jack Hays of course had demonstrated this in 1844 at Walker’s Creek. But nobody remembered that now.