The Black Jacks (3 page)

The irony of his own situation did not escape John Henry McAllen. Jonah Singletary had made snide comments in the
City Gazette
about his wife, Leah, who had been seen in the company of more than one young Austin man-about-town, while McAllen was off with his Black Jacks chasing a Comanche raiding party that had struck several farms in Brazoria County six weeks ago. "Poor Captain McAllen," Singletary had sneered. "While the heroic fellow is on the warpath against those red savages, his wife can be found on the footpath of Lovers Lane with several of our own local bucks."

The problem, from McAllen's point of view, was that this was no baseless slander. It was the truth. Nonetheless, he was obliged to defend Leah's honor—even though she had none. Truth or not, Singletary had overstepped his bounds.

"I never said I would issue a challenge," McAllen told Ashbel Smith. "But I could hardly be blamed for taking a blacksnake whip to the man's back."

Smith sighed. Whether Sam Houston or John Henry McAllen had the quickest tempers in Texas was a close-run thing. The difference lay in the Old Chief's talent for being charming and tactful when called upon. As for tact, McAllen did not know the meaning of the word. He was a blunt, straightforward man of action, cut from the Andrew Jackson mold. He was tall, lean, rugged, strong; a fighter, and a man of iron will. The kind of man Texas desperately needed, particularly in these times of crisis. But he was no politician. And Ashbel Smith worried that the scandalous Singletary comments were a trap designed to ruin one of Sam Houston's most loyal and able supporters. The caustic, keen-witted Jonah Singletary was taking advantage of McAllen's only weakness—his pride.

Smith was well aware of the problems in McAllen's marriage. The man seldom spoke of them, but Smith had eyes and sound instincts. McAllen didn't love Leah. Perhaps he never had. Leah Pierce was a beautiful and seductive young woman, and McAllen had fallen prey to her charms. The fatal flaw in Leah's character was a need for male attention. Not just from one man, but all men. That being so, she was incapable of fidelity.

John Henry realized now that he had made a terrible mistake. A few friends who were acquainted with Leah Pierce had dared to warn him before the marriage took place, but McAllen, completely beguiled, had refused to listen to their counsel. Now he was paying for his folly.

And paying dearly, mused Ashbel Smith. There were no children involved, and Smith believed his friend ought to divorce his unfaithful wife. But he didn't dare suggest such a course to McAllen. For one thing, it wouldn't do any good. Call it stubborn pride, a refusal to admit failure, but McAllen was a man who simply could not let go. And so, even though he knew that Jonah Singletary's information concerning Leah's indiscretions was probably accurate, McAllen felt duty-bound to defend the honor of a wife who had none. What cruel irony!

Deeming it unwise to press the issue, Smith changed the subject. "I wonder if Lamar really is up to something with the Comanches."

McAllen only shrugged. He was a man of occasional massive silences, and he now forgot all about the physician who accompanied him, and brooded over what Sam Houston had said about the imminent peace talk at San Antonio's Council House.

Comanche affairs were of tremendous importance to McAllen—as they were to all settlers who lived on the fringes of civilization. Criticizing Houston's conciliatory approach to Indian affairs, Mirabeau B. Lamar had made nothing but belligerent talk when it came to the Comanches. So why now, suddenly, these peace overtures?

The Comanches were a proud and fierce people. Tested by more than a century of conflict with the Spanish as well as other Indian tribes, they were now the undisputed masters of the plains. As fighters they had no peers. Fortunately for Texas, they were divided into a number of autonomous bands—the Quohadis, the Penatekas, the Tanawas, and others. Lacking unified leadership, they had yet to combine for the purpose of waging full-scale war upon the white interlopers.

But if they ever get together,
mused McAllen,
there wouldn't be a white left alive west of the Sabine.

That was what Sam Houston was worried about. The Old Chief was concerned that Lamar, by some underhanded device, might give the Comanche bands motivation to join together. In which case, the fledgling Republic of Texas would be extinguished in a maelstrom of fire and blood. McAllen hoped Lamar had better sense. Surely the man could see that Texas was in no condition to battle the Comanches, not with another war with Mexico so likely.

Lamar's chief weapon in his campaign to rid the republic of what he liked to call the "red scourge" was a group of hard-bitten Indian-haters called the Texas Rangers. The organization had been created by Stephen F. Austin in 1823, when the impresario dipped into his own pockets to pay ten men to serve as "rangers." Their job was to protect the Austin colony from all enemies. Later, the colony's militia as a whole took to calling themselves Rangers.

During the revolution, the Committee of Correspondence resolved to create a corps of Texas Rangers "whose business shall be to range and guard the frontiers between the Brazos and Trinity Rivers." The Rangers were irregulars; they furnished their own horses and weapons; they had no flag. There were three companies of fifty-six men each. They did little to distinguish themselves during the revolution, and while he was president, Sam Houston had made no use of them.

Then Mirabeau B. Lamar succeeded Houston. In his opinion, the white man and the red could never live in harmony. "Nature forbids it," he declared. He approved a law for the protection of the frontier by creating eight companies of mounted volunteers. Since the men who volunteered came from the frontier counties and had in all likelihood already tangled with the Comanches and, in some cases, had lost loved ones during a Comanche raid, there was no love lost between the Rangers and the Indians. The only good Indian was a dead one. That was their creed, and they tried to live by it. Their mission was to exterminate the Comanches. Only then, they believed, would Texas be safe. You couldn't make peace with a savage, because a savage had no concept of honor, and would not keep his word. This was their thinking. And President Lamar's, too. So McAllen kept coming back to the same old question.

Why the peace overtures?

Two months ago, three Penateka Comanche chiefs had ridden boldly into San Antonio and, in a conference with Ranger Henry Karnes, stated that a tribal council had agreed to ask the Texans for a treaty. Colonel Karnes had replied that no treaty was possible until the Indians gave up all their white captives. The Comanches agreed to this condition, and the talks were scheduled for March 19.

There would be trouble. McAllen could feel it in his bones. The Comanches were not gentle with their captives. If they did bring in their white prisoners, Texas would be able to see all the suffering those poor souls had endured, and bad feeling would run at high tide.

But what could he do?

Scowling, John Henry McAllen shook his head. It didn't really matter what he
thought
he could or couldn't do. Sam Houston had entrusted him with this task, and by God he would get it done or die trying.

Chapter Three

Saying farewell to Ashbel Smith in the bar room of Floyd's Hotel, McAllen took three days to travel the distance between the booming town of Houston and the Brazos River. The rains had swollen the creeks and rivers, and the crossings slowed him down. He arrived at the Grand Cane plantation late in the afternoon of the third day.

In spite of his problems with Leah, McAllen was glad to see his home. He was proud of Grand Cane, and anyone acquainted with the plantation would have said he had a right to be.

Five years ago, John Henry McAllen had come to Texas, like so many other adventurous Americans eager to strike a blow for liberty. He came from Mississippi, a lawyer by trade and a militia officer who had seen action in the Second Seminole War with Zach "Old Rough and Ready" Taylor. With McAllen came twenty-eight stalwart men, all of whom had served with McAllen in the Florida campaigns. The women of Warren County had presented them with black roundabouts adorned with red piping and brass buttons, and thanks to these distinctive shell jackets McAllen and his men rode boldly into Texas legend as the Black Jacks.

They were not the only such group to risk all for Texas independence. There were John Shackleford's Red Rovers from down Alabama way, and the New Orleans Grays, too. But as far as Sam Houston was concerned, Captain McAllen and his Black Jacks were the best and bravest of the lot. He had seen them in action—their gallant assault on Santa Anna's left flank at San Jacinto was a scene Houston would never forget. The Black Jacks had met and vanquished a much larger force of veteran lancers. And then, while the rest of Houston's little army became a wild mob embarked on a killing frenzy as the Mexican troops broke and ran, McAllen and his boys had kept good order and protected their suddenly vulnerable commander, who lay wounded in his camp on Buffalo Bayou.

That he had lost control of his army at San Jacinto, and that they had shot, clubbed, and stabbed hundreds of Mexican soldiers who had thrown down their weapons and tried to surrender, shamed Sam Houston to this day, even while he understood that the massacre of brave Texans at Goliad and the Alamo had spawned this irresistible thirst for vengeance. At least the actions of the Black Jacks gave him leave to claim that he had not lost complete control of affairs on that fateful spring day in 1836.

After San Jacinto, a grateful Republic of Texas had awarded John Henry McAllen with six leagues of land—about twenty-five thousand acres. It was prime land along the Brazos River, a few miles south of San Felipe de Austin. As president, Sam Houston had been delighted to put his name to the grant. Texas needed to keep men like McAllen, and all she had to entice them with was land.

McAllen had made the most of the gift. Of the numerous plantations along the Brazos, his Grand Cane was one of the finest. He was among a handful of planters—along with John Sweeney on the San Bernard, Captain John Duncan on Caney Creek, and Colonel James Morgan on Galveston Bay—who had successfully and profitably cultivated sugarcane. Most of the Black Jacks, eternally devoted to their captain and bound by a friendship with one another forged in the crucible of battle, had also settled in the vicinity, creating a settlement bearing the same name as McAllen's plantation.

He had built his home on a bluff overlooking the placid green waters of the lower Brazos. With the help of some of his Black Jacks and the four slaves he bought at the Galveston auction, he had constructed a large, rambling, two-story structure of his own design. It was build of cottonwood logs, hewn and counter-hewn. The roof sported post oak shingles, made with a drawing knife. The floor was of ash, hand sawed and planed.

Downstairs, two large rooms were placed on either side of a twelve-foot-wide hall, with two smaller ones—a pantry and McAllen's study—behind them. Six polished walnut columns marked the front gallery, which ran the full width of the house. The back gallery connected the house with a stone kitchen that had a huge fireplace for cooking. Upstairs in the main house were four more rooms. Doors, window frames, and interior woodwork was all solid walnut. Interior walls were plastered. Each room had its own old-fashioned sandstone fireplace.

At the base of the bluff he had built a landing. The Brazos was navigable here, and as early as 1830 the steamboat
Ariel,
owned and commanded by Stephen F. Austin's cousin, Henry, had ventured a considerable distance upriver. Later, the
Ocean
and the
Yellowstone
made the trip, although the former soon sank, breaking deep on the bar that made passage at the river's mouth a treacherous proposition. The
Yellowstone
had quit the Brazos for the Galveston-Houston trade shortly thereafter, but the small stern-wheeler
Laura
plied the river now during periods of high water.

It was by steamboat that McAllen shipped his sugar downriver and brought material comforts up from the thriving gulf port of Quintana. As a wedding gift for Leah he had promised to furnish Grand Cane in high style. He had been able to make such a promise, and keep it, because the steamboats could transport marble, furniture, carriages, and all manner of creature comforts, some of which would not have made it overland by wagon freight.

For Leah, then, McAllen had provided every fireplace in the house with a black marble mantel. In the dining room and parlor downstairs, brass chandeliers with crystal prisms depended from decorated ceilings. A square rosewood piano stood in the corner of the parlor. Damask drapes adorned the windows. Large gold-framed mirrors, eight feet tall, graced the dining room. Heavy mahogany, walnut, and rosewood furniture filled every room. Leah had ordered three hundred dollars' worth of silverware, including cream pot, teapot, coffee urn, sugar bowl, salt spoons, and dozens of other utensils. These, she had told McAllen, were essential accessories for the set of English china her parents had given them as a wedding present. How could she be expected to entertain properly with anything less?

There lay the problem, mused McAllen, as he rode up the tree-lined lane toward the main house: Leah was accustomed to living in a certain grand manner. Her father, Israel Pierce, was one of Galveston's chief merchants. His house—where McAllen had first met Leah at a ball given in honor of the "heroes" of the revolution—was a true showplace. Leah had never in her life wanted for anything, and she wasn't about to start now, even if she did live on a somewhat remote frontier plantation. As a consequence, McAllen had spent nearly every penny of profit from three years of good crops to keep her happy. That cut against the grain of the frugality inherent in him; waste and excess offended the Scot in him. And by now he was painfully aware that it was impossible to ever satisfy Leah. She could not have too many material possessions—any more than she could not have too much male attention.

Behind the main house and adjacent kitchen stood the barn, stock pen, carriage house, and blacksmith shop. Next to the kitchen stood a stout cedar-post dairy. Beyond a windbreak of pecan trees, on the slope of the bluff south of the main house, was a row of a half dozen log cabins, the slave quarters. At the base of the slope was the sugar mill, one of the few in Texas. In the bottomland to the south, along the river, grew the sugarcane.