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

MIRABEAU BUONAPARTE LAMAR was a poet. His best-known works—they were apparently popular in certain literary corners of nineteenth-century America—were “Thou Idol of My Soul” and “An Evening on the Banks of the Chatahoochee.” He was also an expert fencer, a superb horseman, an amateur historian, and an oil painter of some accomplishment and sensibility. When he was elected president of the sovereign nation known as the Republic of Texas in 1838, his critics derided him for making a better poet than president.

That may or may not have been true. But the one thing everyone could agree on, in that violent and unsettled year, was that he was, even by frontier standards, a dangerous, mean, and uncompromising son of a bitch. There is a famous photograph of him from sometime in the 1840s in which he looks less like a poet than a button man for the mob. His arms are crossed defiantly and defensively, enhancing the wrinkles in an already deeply creased broadcloth suit. His hair, swept back from his forehead, looks like it needs washing and combing. His thin lips are curled ever so slightly back into something that looks like the beginning of a snarl. It is unclear just how the poet and painter came to be housed in the body of a truculent Indian-annihilator and would-be empire builder.¹

He owed his elevation to the presidency both to his heroism at the battle of San Jacinto—his rescue of two fellow soldiers was so breathtakingly brave that it drew a salute from enemy lines—and to the utter failure of his predecessor, the brilliant alcoholic statesman Sam Houston, to solve the Indian “problem.” In the years since San Jacinto and the raid at Parker’s Fort, white men had been pouring into Texas by the thousands, crashing headlong into the eastern boundary lands of Comancheria, and as a result the frontier had exploded in violence, most of it at the hand of the Comanches. Houston had taken a conciliatory approach. He refused to implement congressional troop authorizations. He refused to authorize frontier forts. He had spent time with Indians, both as an agent and as the ambassador for the Cherokee nation in Washington. He liked them and believed he understood them. He often sided with them, and he invariably defended their right to territory. When a Comanche chief asked him to set a boundary on white settlement, he answered in frustration: “If I could build a wall from the Red River to the Rio Grande, so high that no Indian could scale it, the white people would go crazy trying to devise a means to get beyond it.”² He had held peace talks with Comanches, without result.

Meanwhile the settlers rushed in like a moon tide from the East, bearing their ingenious instruments that “stole the land,” and spurred on by the Texas Congress’s opening of all Indian lands to white settlement (over Houston’s veto). As homesteads crept up the valleys of the Colorado, Guadalupe, and Brazos rivers, Comanche attacks escalated. In just the first two years of Houston’s administration more than one hundred captives were carried off. Most, like little nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker, were simply, heartbreakingly gone. There was no appeal to the government, no redress, just wrenching, empty grief for hundreds of families who could not know the fate of their loved ones in the high, windy plains of Comancheria. After the raid at Parker’s Fort, Cynthia Ann’s uncle—and Rachel’s father—James had pleaded on two occasions with Sam Houston to finance a rescue expedition to retrieve the five hostages.³ Houston had turned him down flat. There was violent death everywhere along the bleeding edge of this westernmost frontier—a great deal more than historians ever recorded—and Houston could not afford to throw his scant resources at the rescue of one set of captives, however touching their story.

By late 1838 the new republic had reached a boiling point. And just at that moment, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar was elected president. The hard-edged Lamar was the perfect counterpoint to the measured, diplomatic Houston, whom he despised as much as he hated the new city on a bayou in east Texas that bore his name. One of Lamar’s first acts was to move the capital from the swamps of east Texas one hundred fifty miles west to a new town named Austin at the very foot of the Balcones Escarpment—in other words, right up against the edge of Comanche country.⁴ The move westward was in keeping with the views of this pro-slavery fire-eater who wanted nothing to do with union with the United States. His dream was to push the borders of his young republic all the way to the golden shores of the Pacific Ocean. Austin would be at the confluence of key western trade routes, a sort of Constantinople of the primitive West, the seat of a sprawling empire called Texas that would vie for continental supremacy with the agglomeration of eastern states known as the United States of America. Though the majority of Texans had expected that they would be annexed almost instantly by the United States after their victory at San Jacinto, Lamar had plenty of fellow dreamers. One of them was James Parker, who proposed to the Congress that he lead four thousand men gloriously to capture Santa Fe and New Mexico, and that each of the men be given three hundred sixty acres as a reward. Congress declined to approve the plan.⁵

In spite of an empty treasury and currency that was almost worthless,⁶ Lamar saw no reason why he could not build his empire of the West. The first step, of course, was getting rid of the Indians. He believed that Indians should be either expunged from Texas or killed outright. This included all Indians, from the Comanches on the west to the Wacos in the middle, and the Shawnees and Delawares and Cherokees in the east. In his inaugural address he put this quite succinctly, in case anyone was not clear about where he stood. Citing the Indians’ cruelties, he called for an “exterminating war” against them that would “admit of no compromise, and have no termination except in their total extinction, or total expulsion.”⁷ The Congress of the Republic of Texas heartily agreed. That month they voted to create an eight-hundred-forty-man regiment of fifty companies to serve for three years; they also voted a million-dollar appropriation.

Thus Lamar’s rallying cry: extinction or expulsion. It sounds a good deal like a public appeal for genocide, certainly among the very few in modern history. But as appalling as it might sound, in fact Lamar, a man who had experience with Creek Indians in Georgia, was just being brutally candid in a way that almost no white men had ever been on the subject of Indian rights. His was a policy of naked aggression, as usual, but without the usual lies and misrepresentation. He demanded the Indians’ complete submission to the Texans’ terms—there would be no endless renegotiation of meaningless boundaries—and stated quite clearly what would happen to them if they did not agree. “He proposed nothing and presided over nothing that was not already fully established in Anglo-American precedent and policy,” wrote historian T. R. Fehrenbach. “The people and the courts had decided that true peace between white men and red men was impossible, unless either the Indians gave up their world, or the Americans eschewed the nation they were determined to erect upon this continent.”⁸ Since two hundred years of duplicity and bloodshed had proved that neither of those things would ever happen, Lamar was just stating what was to him obvious.

What he had done that no high-ranking government official in the neighboring United States of America had ever done before was to explicitly deny that Indians in Texas had rights to any territory at all. Every treaty ever signed assumed that Indians would get at least some land on their terms. Indeed, in 1825 the U.S. government had created an Indian Country (modern Oklahoma) in order to guarantee that, in the words of Secretary of War James Barbour, “the future residence of these peoples will be forever undisturbed.”⁹ Lamar and most of the residents of their new sovereign nation opposed the very principle. In some sense, what he proposed was better than the piecemeal destruction that had been meted out to the eastern tribes. In another sense, it was an invitation to the outright slaughter of native peoples. The Texas Congress loved the new Indian policy. In 1839 two thousand revved-up, patriotic, adventure-hungry Texans signed up to fight Indians.¹⁰

And fight them they did. The upshot of the Lamar presidency was an almost immediate war against all Indians in Texas. The summer of 1839 witnessed one of the most savage campaigns ever unleashed against Native Americans. The first target was the Cherokees, who had been pushed relentlessly westward over many decades from their homelands in the Carolinas. Many had landed in the piney woods and sandy riverbanks of east Texas, near the Louisiana border, where they had largely lived in peace with whites for almost twenty years. They were one of the five “civilized tribes,” and were indeed quickly absorbing the white man’s culture, dressing like whites, farming or running businesses, speaking English. The excuse for getting rid of them was a trumped-up charge that they were part of a Mexican-backed plot to drive the whites from Texas. It was almost certainly false, but it was all that Lamar and his secretary of war needed.

Faced with the demand for his immediate departure from the state, Chief Bowles of the Cherokees agreed to leave if the government compensated his tribe for improvements they had made on the land. The Texans agreed in principle, but offered little, and talks soon broke down. Then, by plan, the soldiers moved in. Nine hundred of them. On July 15, 1839, they attacked a Cherokee village.¹¹ On July 16 they cornered five hundred Cherokees in a dense thicket and swamp and proceeded to kill most of the men, including Chief Bowles. Two days later, the soldiers burned their villages, homes, and fields.

The war was just beginning. Flush with his victory over the Cherokees, Texas commander Kelsey Douglass requested permission to clean out the “rat’s nest” of other, mostly peaceful, tribes in east Texas. Now there was more killing, and more fire. By the end of July, the cornfields and villages of all the Cherokees, Delawares, Shawnees, Caddoans, Kickapoos, Creeks, Muskogees, and Seminoles in east Texas were burned to the ground. Their innocence was beside the point. Whether a particular murder was committed by a Kiowa, Caddo, Wichita, or Creek seemed to Texans to make less and less difference. Most of the dispossessed Indians took their ragged, starving families and headed north to the designated Indian Territory, where some twenty thousand officially relocated Indians¹² now jostled with one another and with the native plains tribes—the last stop on what came to be known as the “trail of tears.” Some of the Cherokees, including Chief Bowles’s son, tried to flee to Mexico. As though to make sure there was absolutely no misunderstanding at all about the new Indian policies, the Texans hunted them down over several hundred miles and shot them, then took their women and children prisoner.¹³ Only two tribes, the Alabamas and the Coushattas, were permitted to stay—though they were moved from their own fertile fields to much less desirable lands. Thus were tens of thousands of acres of superb farmland in east Texas opened to white farmers, who immediately, happily, and presumably with immaculately clean consciences, moved in.

• •

Those were the sedentary, somewhat civilized, relatively nonwarlike, beaten-down, relocated, unmounted, agrarian Indians of east Texas, anyway. There were other sedentary tribes who lived beyond the frontier and were thus safe for the moment from this cleansing by fire: Wichitas, Wacos, Tawakonis, Kichais, Tonkawas, and a few others. But while it might be entertaining and rewarding to massacre and exile the relatively harmless and broken Muskogees and Seminoles, the real trouble, most of the “depredations,” came not from the east but from the west. Everyone knew it. For all of their bravado and puffed-up war talk and insatiable greed for new territory, there was very little the Texans could do in the immense expanse of land, constituting most of Texas itself, that was ruled by the Comanches.

To understand their dilemma, look at a map of modern Texas. Draw a line from San Antonio through Austin and Waco, ending at Dallas at the forks of the Trinity River. That is roughly the western, meaning Comanche, frontier as it existed in the late 1830s, though there was very little settlement near present-day Dallas. Most of it was spread around Austin and San Antonio. That line also follows the 98th meridian almost exactly—meaning that this is where the trees start to thin out; by the 100th meridian, in the neighborhood of modern Abilene, they are mostly gone. In the region of Austin and San Antonio it marks the edge of the Balcones Escarpment, a fault zone where the big, rolling, timbered limestone hills rose from the fertile coastal plain. (They rose so abruptly that their stone ramparts reminded the Spanish of balconies in a theater, hence the name.) Piercing this line at three points were the Brazos, Colorado, and Guadalupe rivers. Imagine them as raiders’ highways, sweeping down the state from the Northwest, aimed directly at the heart of the Texas frontier.

These rivers were also, of course, highways into the uplands of Comancheria, for anyone brave or stupid enough to ascend them. The problem was that, to the west of the line, from a white man’s perspective, there was a vast, mysterious, frightening, bone-dry world inhabited by a fierce and primitive people who could outride, outshoot, and out-track them, and who could navigate enormous distances with alarming ease. The Indians fought mounted, too, which put the westerners, with their heavy horses, their practice of fighting on foot, and their cumbersome, muzzle-loading rifles, at a huge disadvantage. Because the Indians did not have permanent villages, they were usually impossible to locate; if you located them you were likely to wish you hadn’t.

That did not stop the Texans from trying. In those early years of the republic, a motley assortment of militias, ranger companies, volunteers, and state companies trooped out regularly after Comanches following raids. They killed some Comanches, and they got lucky a few times, but mostly they did not. Mostly they were schooled by the superior Indians in plains warfare, and many of them died hard and lingering deaths. More than the Texans ever cared to admit.

One of the best examples of these early conflicts took place in February 1839 between Comanches and a state militia under Colonel John Moore. Moore was blessed with the same character trait that made pioneers want to settle the wildest and most hostile regions of the country, where their families were likely to be raped and disemboweled: heedless, unwarranted optimism. He viewed Indians as subhumans who were in need of destruction. He was known for standing next to the preacher during sermons at his church, casting a severe eye upon the congregation to make sure they did not fall asleep.¹⁴ He had been told by the Comanches’ arch-foes, the Lipan Apaches, that a band of Comanches was camped in the prairie north of Austin. The Lipans, victims of near extermination by the Comanches, could always be counted on to betray their old tormentors, to sniff them out and go running to the authorities. Afraid to fight Comanches alone, the Lipans invested much time goading the white man to chase their enemy. They also volunteered to join an expedition against them. Moore, who would not have known the first thing about how to find Comanches in the live oak thickets and limestone mesas of the Texas hill country, took them on. It should be noted that, with very few exceptions, white soldiers would have had very little chance of finding Comanches without the help of their old enemies, usually the Tonkawas or the Lipan Apaches. This was true for all of the years of the Comanche conflict. Moore’s expedition was one of the first to use Indian scouts. Later it became the policy of Texas and the practice of all white soldiers. (Custer made the mistake of not heeding the warnings of his Indian trackers at Little Bighorn.) There were some able trackers among the whites—Ranger Ben McCulloch was one, Kit Carson another—but generally speaking white soldiers were unable to read signs effectively in the wilderness, even if they had received instruction. It was Indian trackers, as much as white soldiers under famous generals like George Crook, Nelson Miles, and Ranald Mackenzie, who were responsible for the destruction of the Plains Indians. The cinematic image of the dusty, standard-bearing cavalry riding out from stockade forts is often missing one key component: the Indian scout.

Thus did Colonel Moore depart, with sixty-three hastily recruited volunteers and fourteen Lipan Apaches under their chief, Castro, for the limestone breaks of the San Gabriel River north of Austin, probably near the present town of Georgetown.¹⁵ When they reached the encampment, the Comanches had already departed, leaving a trail that headed upriver. Before they could follow, a prairie storm came howling in from the north. The men hunkered down in a grove of post oak in the fierce, penetrating cold, and waited out the driving snow and sleet. For three days. “Some of the horses froze to death,” wrote Noah Smithwick, one of the captains of the expedition, “and the Indians, loth to see so much good meat go to waste, ate the flesh.”¹⁶ When the weather cleared, they pursued the Comanches northwest to the junction of the Colorado and San Saba rivers, at the site of the present town of San Saba, some seventy-five miles inside the frontier. This was, by the standards of 1839, deep inside Comanche territory. There the Lipan scouts spotted the lodge fires. Smithwick, who was with them, describes what it felt like to be a white man tracking Indians in the heart of Comancheria:

While riding along about dark we heard a wolf howl behind us. My [Lipan] guide stopped short and assumed a listening attitude. In a few moments another answered, way to the right. Still the Indian listened so intently that his form seemed perfectly rigid. Then another set up a howl on our left. “Umph, lobo,” said the Lipan, in a tone of relief. I can’t say that I admired the music of the wolf at any time, but it certainly never had a more unmusical sound than on that occasion, and when I saw that even an Indian’s ears were uncertain whether it was a wolf or a Comanche, I felt the cold chills creeping over me.¹⁷

What they had found was a village of more than five hundred people. These were Penatekas—Honey Eaters—southern Comanches so arrogantly secure in the fastness of their ancient lands that they had posted no sentinels, so comfortably oblivious to any threat from the outside that in the chill early morning of February 15 they were all asleep in their tipis, wrapped warmly in their buffalo robes. Meanwhile the volunteers—they were all starting to call themselves “rangers”—were shivering in the icy darkness, loading and priming their old single-barrel, muzzle-loading muskets, waiting for daybreak.

The events of the next hour offered a stunning illustration of what happened when white men who had no idea how to fight Plains Indians came up against a tribe that had no idea that white men would ever attack them in their heartland. Their meeting was a precursor of years of grinding frontier war between the two. From the whites’ point of view, the ensuing battle amounted to a series of glaring, and nearly fatal, mistakes.

The first was when Moore, the incurable optimist, ordered his men to dismount about a mile from the Comanche camp and approach quietly on foot. This was a perfectly good surprise tactic, had it been executed in the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky one hundred years before. But this was the West. And these were Comanches. He had left his horses unguarded—perhaps the single most disastrous mistake a commander could make on the Great Plains.

He would soon pay for it. At daylight the soldiers rushed the camp, blasting directly into the tipis, firing blindly at everyone who emerged. The peaceful winter scene gave way to pure chaos with women and children shrieking, Texans “throwing open the doors of the wigwams or pulling them down and slaughtering the enemy in their beds,” dogs barking, men yelling, and shots ringing out. One ranger, Andrew Lockhart, who believed his teenage daughter Matilda was being held captive, raced ahead screaming, “Matilda, if you are here, run to me!” He never found her. (It later turned out that she was there and she did hear him, but her cries were swallowed by the noise and gunfire.)¹⁸

Instead of standing and fighting, as white men might be expected to do, the Comanches did what they always did in similar circumstances: They scattered like quail and rushed for their horses. This was Moore’s second mistake, again unthinkable in a surprise attack on Plains Indians: He had overlooked the Comanche horse herd. He had forgotten to stampede it. This meant that many Comanches were almost instantly mounted. Then they did what all plains tribes did automatically when given the chance: They circled back behind the soldiers and stampeded the Texans’ horses. With that, the entire tenor of the battle changed.

Moore now found himself with his troopers and Indians, wandering around an empty camp with nothing to shoot at as the realization dawned on him that almost all of his men were afoot in the wilderness and that they were greatly outnumbered by mounted Indians. And now Moore got scared. In the words of Texas Ranger historian Mike Cox, he “realized that he had cut a bigger plug of tobacco than he could chew.”¹⁹ He ordered a retreat to the protective cover of a wooded ravine.²⁰ The Comanches now rallied and charged, but were repulsed several times by accurate and lethal long-bore rifle fire. Though he had found an effective redoubt in the rocks and trees of the ravine, Moore’s brilliant surprise had suddenly turned into a desperate defensive action. With their superior numbers, the Indians could have annihilated the soldiers.²¹ But no Indian plan of battle in American history ever included sacrificing large numbers of lives to take a position. That was what white men did, exemplified in attacks later on at places like Little Round Top, Iwo Jima, and Gallipoli. The Plains Indians’ almost universal reluctance to press advantage was, from a tactical standpoint, one of their biggest weaknesses. It saved countless thousands of white lives.

Thus the Indians eventually withdrew. Castro, disgusted with Moore’s blundering tactics, his bizarre and cowardly order to retreat, and his failure to destroy the Comanche village, deserted with all of his Lipans. Moore was now forced to make a long and humiliating retreat, on foot, one hundred fifty miles down the Colorado to Austin, carrying six wounded men, frightened the entire way of an Indian attack.²² He believed, with his irrepressibly optimistic self-confidence, that he had won the battle. All he had done was to sidestep a disaster. The Comanches he had attacked retaliated immediately with a bloody raid against the settlements on the Colorado.

• • •

If the Comanches had taken a lesson from what happened on the San Saba—and apparently they had not—it would have been that the nature of the game had changed completely. The Texans were not the Spanish or the Mexicans. They were tougher, meaner, almost impossible to discourage, willing to take absurd risks to secure themselves a plot of dirt, and temperamentally well suited to the remorseless destruction of native tribes. They did not rely on a cumbersome, heavily mounted, overly bureaucratized, state-sponsored soldiery; they tended to handle things themselves, with volunteers who not only were not scared of Indians but actually liked hunting them down and killing them. Their president did not drone on as most government officials from time immemorial had about dreary, overly technical treaties that granted Indians boundaries and homelands in exchange for promises to return hostages or to refrain from harming whites. Lamar was talking about extinction. Extermination. That was the meaning of the Moore raid, as inept as it was. It was also the meaning of the extraordinary events that took place in the spring and summer of 1840 in San Antonio and south Texas. They amounted to the first big, reverberating collision between the westward-booming Texans and the Lords of the South Plains.

On January 9, 1840, the tolling of the San Fernando cathedral bell in San Antonio signaled the arrival of three Comanche chiefs. San Fernando is one of the great Spanish churches in North America. Its bell is the archetypal mission bell of the old American West. It rang matins for the Spanish and later Mexican padres, announced attacks by Apaches and Comanches dating from 1749. It was from its limestone tower that Mexican general Santa Anna hung his brilliant red “no quarter” flag that signaled the start of the Battle of the Alamo. In the Texan era, its peals dispatched minutemen to fight Mexicans and Indians.

On the bright, clear morning of January 9 there was no apparent threat, just something quite out of the ordinary. The Comanches had come to talk peace. They were alarmed at the encroachment on their old grounds, and they wanted it to stop. They had never made a treaty before with the Texans, but during Sam Houston’s presidency he had constantly badgered them about it. Now they were thinking maybe this was not such a bad idea. They were especially worried by surveyors, determined men who practiced a dark and incomprehensible magic intended to deprive the Indians of their lands. Even worse, the dark magic seemed to work. The Comanches killed them in horrible ways whenever the opportunity arose.

They were received civilly by the local army commander, Colonel Henry W. Karnes, who was still recovering from the wound he received when he had been shot in the hip with an arrow in a battle with Comanches in the summer of 1838.²³ He told them bluntly that he would not discuss peace with them unless they returned all of their captives. The chiefs, apparently understanding what Karnes was saying, nodded agreeably and left, promising to return. Karnes, meanwhile, soon received a very special set of orders, unprecedented in Texas and very likely American history. They came from Secretary of War Albert Sidney Johnston, a tall, dashing soldier with a finely chiseled nose who would later be killed, heroically, while leading Rebel troops in a devastating charge against Grant’s army at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862.²⁴ Johnston instructed Karnes, in no uncertain terms, that “the government assumes the right with regard to all Indian tribes . . . to dictate the conditions of such residence.” This was rhetoric straight from Lamar. In the same vein, he then asserted that “our citizens have the right to occupy any vacant lands of the government, and they must not be interfered with by the Comanche.”²⁵ This meant their lands were forfeit. Period. Moreover, said Johnston, if the Indians did not bring in prisoners they were to be held hostage—by most civilized standards an appalling way to treat an enemy who comes by invitation to negotiate peace.

The Comanches arrived on March 19. There were thirty-five warriors. They were in a festive, happy mood. They had brought thirty-two women, children, and old men with them. They were expecting no trouble. They were perhaps thinking of the old days, when the cowed and cautious Spanish and then Mexicans had allowed them free run of the town. Both the men and women were painted elaborately and attired in their finest beads, feathers, and skins. They had brought with them huge stacks of furs and a small herd of horses, apparently expecting to do a good deal of trading. The presence of these tradeable goods suggests that they may have completely misunderstood what Karnes had told them. They squatted in the street and waited. Young Indian boys played with toy bows and arrows, and white men affixed coins to trees for them to shoot.²⁶ A crowd of townspeople had gathered. They were not hostile, just curious.

They could not help noticing, though, that the Indians had brought only one captive with them. This was Matilda Lockhart, the same girl whose father had called to her during Colonel Moore’s fight on the San Saba a year before. She had been taken in a raid in 1838 along with her younger sister, during which other family members had been killed. She was fifteen, and her appearance in the plaza in San Antonio shocked the people who saw her. As one observer—Mary Maverick, wife of a prominent local merchant—put it, Matilda’s “head, face and arms were full of bruises, and sores, and her nose was actually burnt off to the bone—all the fleshy end gone with a great scab formed on the end of the bone. Both nostrils were wide open and denuded of flesh.”²⁷ She said she had been tortured by the Comanche women. It was not just her face that had been disfigured. Her entire body bore scars from fire. In private Matilda informed the white women that what she had suffered was even worse than that. She had been “utterly degraded,” she said, using the code word for rape, “and could not hold her head up again.”

The Comanches were completely oblivious to the effect this had on the Texans. Many of the latter were familiar with the tortures practiced by the eastern tribes such as the Choctaws and Cherokees, which included the use of fire. But it was almost always practiced on men. Those tribes rarely abducted, raped, and tortured white women, as the plains tribes did.²⁸ Even to people accustomed to Indian violence, the sight of Matilda came as a shock. As if to make things worse, Matilda was an intelligent, perceptive girl who had learned the Comanche language quickly and thus knew that there were other captives in Indian camps. She estimated fifteen. She told the Texans about these captives.

This was all prelude to the meeting, which took place in a one-story courthouse that would go down in history as the Council House. The building was made of limestone and had a flat timber roof and dirt floor.²⁹ Twelve Indians, all Penatekas and variously described as “chiefs” or “principal men,” were ranged across from three appointed Texas commissioners. Their spokesman was Spirit Talker (his Comanche name was variously given as “Muguara” or “Mukewarrah”), a good-humored and apparently peaceable type with a taste for whiskey who had recently hosted ranger Noah Smithwick for three months in his camp, at one point facing down a group of Wacos who wanted to kill Smithwick.³⁰ Smithwick had liked him and found him intelligent and sincere, and had “many long, earnest talks” with him. He had spoken eloquently to Smithwick about the white man’s destruction of his hunting grounds, saying

The white man comes and cuts down the trees, building houses and fences, and the buffalos get frightened and leave and never come back, and the Indians are left to starve, or if we follow the game we trespass on the hunting ground of other tribes and war ensues. . . . If the white men would draw a line defining their claims and keep on their side of it the red men would not molest them.³¹

If he sounds like a white man’s sort of Indian, it must be noted that he was also headman of the band that had made the raid on the Lockhart homestead, thus the same group that had killed her family members, taken her and her younger sister, and tortured her and raped her. It was Spirit Talker’s village that Colonel Moore had attacked on the San Saba.

Inside the courthouse, the Texans got right to business. They demanded to know why the Comanches had brought only one captive. Spirit Talker replied that there were indeed more captives, but they were in camps over which he had no control. He was very likely telling the truth, but no one believed him. He then explained that he believed that all of the captives could be ransomed. Of course, he added helpfully, they would require a high ransom in the form of goods, ammunition, blankets, and vermillion. But that could all be worked out. Then he surveyed his guests and concluded, with a grand gesture: “How do you like that answer?”

He may have thought he was being clever, or reasonable, or just plain chatty. Or maybe he was mistranslated. In any case, he grossly misunderstood his audience. He and his people considered themselves honorable warriors. To them, abduction of captives was honorable warfare. So was rough treatment of captives. To Spirit Talker, Matilda was an item of plunder, something not quite fully human, something to be bargained for. The Texans, meanwhile, considered the Indians vicious, conscienceless killers. Their treatment of the pathetic, noseless girl was gruesome and irrefutable evidence of that. Whatever Spirit Talker had in mind, or meant to say, those were the last words he ever spoke.

Colonel William Fisher, one of the Texas commissioners, replied sharply: “I do not like your answer. I told you not to come here again without bringing in your prisoners. You have come against my orders. Your women and children may depart in peace. . . . When those prisoners are returned, your chiefs here present may likewise go free. Until then we hold you as hostages.”³² As he spoke, a detachment of soldiers marched into the courthouse and took up positions in the front and back. When the astonished Comanches finally figured out, through the terrified translator, what had been said, they panicked and rushed for the doors.

The soldiers closed ranks. Spirit Talker, who got to the door first, drew his knife and stabbed a soldier. Then the soldiers opened fire, dropping Spirit Talker and other Indians as well as several of their own people. They fired again. The room was filled with noise and smoke and blood and ricocheting rifle balls. One soldier, Matthew “Old Paint” Caldwell, took a stray bullet in the leg. Hobbled, he grabbed a musket from one of the chiefs, blew his head off, then used it to bludgeon another Indian to death. The fight spilled outside, and now a full-scale, Hollywood-style melee erupted in the plaza. The Indians who had waited outside—men, women, and children—turned on the onlookers, many of whom were armed, and the fighting spread. People who saw it said the Indian women and boys fought as hard as the men.³³ One Indian boy shot a district judge through the heart with a “toy” arrow, killing him. The Comanches never really had a chance. Though it started as a street fight, it turned quickly to massacre, and then, soon enough, into something that resembled a turkey shoot in which the Comanches played the unaccustomed role of fleeing, terrified victims.

Within half an hour the “fight” was over. Now there was just a large, bloodthirsty, vengeful mob hunting Comanches through the streets of San Antonio. It was not pretty. A group of Indians who made it to the river were picked off, one by one, as they swam across.³⁴ Every Indian was hunted down. The house-to-house hunt was grim, and cruel. Some Indians took refuge in stone houses and locked the doors.³⁵ In Mary Maverick’s firsthand account, several white men climbed to the top of a building and set it on fire with a “candlewick ball soaked in turpentine.” Two Comanche men soon emerged from the smoke and fire. One had his head split open with an ax; the other was shot dead.

When it was over, thirty warriors, three women, and two children lay dead. Thirty-two were taken prisoner, many of them badly wounded. Seven Texans were killed, and ten wounded. (The town’s sole surgeon, a German immigrant, worked through the night to save the whites; the Indians were unattended.)³⁶ The soldiers threw the remaining thirty-two Comanches in the dirt-floored jail behind the courthouse. The next day a woman who had not been wounded was given a horse and rations and told to ride to her people with the news of what happened. She was also to deliver an ultimatum: The survivors would be put to death unless the Comanche bands released the fifteen captives that Matilda Lockhart had told them about. If the woman did not return in twelve days, during which time there would be a full truce, “these prisoners shall be killed, for we will know that you have killed our captive friends and relatives.”³⁷ If the Texans felt good about their bargaining position, they would soon learn otherwise.

Under normal circumstances, we would never have found out how this news was received in the Comanche villages. But in this case a young captive named Booker Webster, who was later released, left a harrowing account. When the woman arrived with her news, the Comanches reacted with a mixture of horror, despair, and cold fury. More or less in that order. The women screamed and wailed in mourning. They slashed their arms, and faces, and breasts, and lopped off fingers. Some even injured themselves fatally. The men moaned and rocked back and forth and some chopped off their hair. So large was the horse herd belonging to the dead chiefs that it took two days to kill and burn them all (a Comanche custom).

Then, through the smoke of burning horseflesh, they unleashed their feelings of depthless grief and anger on the hostages. In Booker Webster’s account, “they took the American captives, thirteen in number, and roasted and butchered them to death with horrible cruelties.”³⁸ One can only imagine what drawn-out horrors were perpetrated on them. The captives included children, one of whom was the six-year-old sister of Matilda Lockhart.

The Indians never responded to the ultimatum. They were in fact terribly demoralized, leaderless, and unsure what to do. In the nuanced world of the Comanches, where signs and spirits and magic and medicine were important decision-making tools, such an event was a profound spiritual blow, a completely mystifying shift in the puha of the band’s headmen. With a white man’s mentality, they might have simply destroyed San Antonio by fire or at least wreaked terrible havoc. They did not do that. Instead, several days later, three hundred warriors led by Isimanica rode to the San Jose Mission, just south of town, where they demanded the return of the prisoners and challenged the Texans to a fight. The Texans refused to give up the prisoners and insisted, bizarrely, that because the twelve-day truce was still in effect, they could not fight. Or perhaps the commanding officer was simply afraid of leaving the mission walls. Many of the white soldiers thought so. It was a strange scene, one that was rarely if ever repeated on the plains: a large force of Indians trying, unsuccessfully, to goad white soldiers into combat. One of the officers, Lysander Wells, accused the commanding officer, Captain William D. Redd, of cowardice. They promptly fought a duel, and killed each other. Though the Indians remained in prison, most eventually escaped. The women, some of whom were given to San Antonio citizens as slaves, also escaped. Oddly, there was, eventually, another exchange of captives that brought a boy—Booker Webster—and a young girl back to civilization. The girl was almost as badly scarred as Matilda Lockhart. They were spared because they had been adopted into the tribe.

Thus ended what became famous in the annals of Texas as the Council House Fight. Many Texans saw this as a sign that Texas, in the Lamar era, would brook no compromises with Indians. They were right. But the Texans had also made a terrible blunder that resulted immediately in the torture-killing of the rest of the hostages, set off a massive wave of retaliatory raids against settlements that ended up taking dozens of white lives, and destroyed for years whatever confidence the Comanches had in the integrity of the Texas government. One can only wonder what William Lockhart, whose lovely six-year-old daughter was slowly roasted alive to avenge the massacre, thought of the strategy. And though the whites crowed that they had killed twelve “leading chiefs,” there is no evidence to support that claim.³⁹ From Smithwick’s account, Spirit Talker was the leader of a relatively small group within the Penateka band. Isimanica, the most dangerous of the chiefs and far more powerful than Spirit Talker, was not there, nor was Isawaconi, who claimed to be the main chief of the Penatekas. Nor were prominent chiefs Pah-hah-yuco, Old Owl, Little Wolf, and Buffalo Hump.⁴⁰ The men who were killed were without a doubt leaders, but not big chiefs. Finally, as it turned out, there was little evidence that the Comanches at the Council House were involved in any recent raids on Texas settlements.⁴¹ At the time of the attack, in fact, Isimanica had apparently been abroad among the lodges hawking the idea of peace.⁴²

Now, instead of securing the peace, white men in south Texas were about to be targets of the greatest mobilization in Comanche history.