Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (15 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 Indians
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.)
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