The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (14 page)

Hostilities opened with a seemingly innocuous event. On January 9, 1840, three Comanches brought a Mexican captive to San Antonio, saying they had been delegated to negotiate a peace. Their message was passed onto Secretary of War Albert Sidney Johnston (later a noted Confederate general), who instructed Lt. Col. William S. Fisher of the First Infantry to meet with the Indians in San Antonio. If the Comanches brought their white captives, it would be considered a pledge of good faith, and they could depart unmolested after the treaty conference. If, however, they did not bring the captives, the chiefs would be detained as hostages.
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The Comanches returned on March 19. The party consisted of sixty-five men, women, and children, but only one captive, fifteen-year-old Matilda Lockhart, who had been taken two years earlier. She obviously had been tortured during much of her captivity; her nose was almost completely burned off, her hair had been singed to the scalp, and she was covered with fresh bruises and sores.
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Twelve of the main chiefs were escorted into the “Council House,” as the old Spanish government house was sometimes known, while the other Indians passed the time in the courtyard. A quick conversation with Matilda Lockhart determined the other white prisoners were held at the main Comanche camp and would be brought in one or two at a time in hopes of large and continuous ransom payments.

Assembling his troops around the building, Colonel Fisher told the chiefs they would remain as hostages while the Comanche women, children, and warriors returned to their camp for the captives. Troops were brought into the room, and the chiefs drew knives and strung their bows. Fisher told the soldiers to fire if the Indians did not surrender calmly. At that moment, one chief stabbed as entry and was shot. The others attacked the troops, who opened fire. Within moments all twelve chiefs were dead.

Hearing the commotion, the warriors and soldiers outside began fighting. Some Comanches headed toward the nearby San Antonio River, while others barricaded themselves into outbuildings around the Council House. When the shooting stopped, thirty chiefs and warriors, three women, and two children were dead, and twenty-seven women and children and two old men were prisoners. Among the Texans, seven soldiers and bystanders were killed and eight wounded.
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During the weeks following the Council House Fight, an uneasy truce prevailed while the two sides negotiated and exchanged prisoners. The death of the twelve chiefs left the Comanches temporarily demoralized, and it took them time to recover. By early summer, however, they had retreated into the hills west of Austin and San Antonio and begun planning a revenge raid. They were encouraged by Gen. Valentín Canalizo, the Mexican commandant in Matamoros, near the mouth of the Rio Grande. As word of the Mexican involvement filtered north in toTexas, Dr. Branch Archer, who succeeded Johnston as secretary of war, called up volunteer units against a potential raid. But when the weeks passed and nothing happened, the volunteers were mustered out and allowed to return home.
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THE GREAT COMANCHE
Raid of August 1840 took the Texans completely by surprise. Mexican agents in Texas had kept in touch with the Indians and apparently convinced them to delay until the volunteers disbanded. On August 4, a war party consisting of about six hundred Comanches and Kiowas moved out of the hills and descended onto a relatively uninhabited area of the coastal plains. By the afternoon of August 6, they were spotted on the outskirts of Victoria, where the citizens prepared a defense. Avoiding the town itself, the Indians spent that day and the next in the immediate vicinity, stealing horses, burning and killing, and taking some women and children prisoner.

From Victoria, the raiders rode on to the small coastal settlement of Linnville. They struck that town on the morning of August 8, taking the citizens completely by surprise. Most fled in boats to the steamer
Mustang,
anchored in the bay. Those who didn’t make it were captured or killed. The refugees on the steamer spent the rest of the day watching as the Indians burned and plundered the town. When they finally retreated, they carried several hundred horses and mules loaded with plunder taken from warehouses at the port.
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Even before the sack of Linnville, the Texans were gathering their forces. Early reports of Indian movement had prompted two ad hoc Ranger units, under Capts. Adam Zumwalt and Ben McCulloch, to head out in pursuit. The two units came together on the morning of August 7. By noon they were joined by the old Indian-fighting Ranger John Tumlinson with sixty-five men from Victoria and Cuero, who, unaware of the raiding around Victoria, were returning from a scouting expedition.
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As word of the attack on the towns spread, more soldiers, Rangers, and militia assembled, and Maj. Gen. Felix Huston assumed command. Guided by Tonkawa scouts under their veteran Chief Placido, the Texans moved inland and on August 12 intercepted the returning Comanches at Plum Creek, about twenty-seven miles southeast of Austin. Huston sent Ranger Robert Hall ahead with five men to reconnoiter. The Indians were strung out along the prairie, and to Hall the column “looked to be seven miles long.” Skirting the column to the Comanche rear, the Texans could see warriors decked out in the plunder of Linnville.

Many of them put on cloth coats and buttoned them behind. Most of them had on stolen shoes and hats. They spread the calico over their horses, and tied hundreds of yards of ribbon in their horses’ manes and to their tails.

By the condition of their fighting equipment and tribal regalia, Hall surmised they had been preparing for the raid for a long time.
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At that moment, an officer and a private inexplicably blundered into the Indian line and were surrounded. The officer managed to break free and escape, but the private was killed in sight of the Rangers. Hall told his men to keep back a safe distance and fire whenever they had a target. The men obeyed, and they skirmished for about two miles until they got back to the main body of Texans, and the battle opened in earnest.

The cautious General Huston ordered the Texans to dismount, form into line, and open fire, but the bullets glanced off the tough rawhide of the Comanche shields. Seeing this, veteran fighters waited until the Indians wheeled about on their ponies, then shot them as they turned. As their losses mounted, the Comanches began pulling back out of range. Pressed by Ben McCulloch and Edward Burleson, Huston ordered a charge.

The sudden Texas assault startled the Comanches, but some fought back. A load of buckshot hit Ranger Nelson Lee near his elbow. He dropped his reins and his uncontrolled horse carried him straight into the Indians. Other members of his company rode after him and rescued him.

Hall took a bullet in his thigh. “It made a terrible wound and the blood ran until it sloshed out of my boots.” He fell off his horse, but managed to stagger to his feet just as an Indian rode up. Hall raised his rifle, but the Indian threw up his hands and shouted, “Tonkaway!”—identifying himself as one of old Placido’s scouts.

The Comanches were routed, and the Texans chased them until their horses gave out. In the confusion, the Comanches left behind their plunder and captives. Some of the captives were recovered alive, but several had been killed when the Comanches realized they were defeated. One woman was seriously wounded but saved from death because her steel corset had deflected her captor’s arrow. A considerable amount of Mexican equipment was found, indicating the Comanches had been supplied from that quarter.
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Two months later, on October 14, an ad hoc Ranger company under Capt. John Moore with Lipan scouts attacked a large Comanche camp on the upper Colorado River. The Indians were completely routed, bringing public demand for more campaigns. These were the last major expeditions for the time being, however. The Republic was completely penniless.
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JACK HAYS WAS
in the Battle of Plum Creek, although not a key participant; the day really belonged to veteran Rangers Ben McCulloch and Ed Burleson. Nevertheless, Hays had already earned a solid reputation with a military expedition against Laredo under Col. Eurastus “Deaf” Smith in 1837, returned on two separate occasions in 1839 with Ranger expeditions of his own, and was in several Indian fights with Henry Karnes’s Rangers.
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His prestige was such that when the Texas Congress reorganized the frontier defense forces in January 1841, the twenty-three-year-old Hays was appointed to command one of three new Ranger companies. Records of these units are sketchy, but apparently Hays and the other two captains, John Price and Antonio Pérez, were responsible for enlisting the men.
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Nelson Lee, who had recovered sufficiently from his buckshot wound to join Hays’s company, recalled:

He was a slim, slight, smooth-faced boy . . . and looking younger than he was in fact. In his manners he was unassuming in the extreme, a stripling of few words, whose quiet demeanor stretched quite to the verge of modesty. Nevertheless, it was this youngster whom the tall, huge-framed brawny-armed campaigners hailed unanimously as their chief and leader when they assembled together in their uncouth garb in the grand plaza of Bexar [San Antonio] . . . for young as he was, he had already exhibited abundant evidence that, though a lamb in peace, he was a lion in war. . . .
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Hays’s calculated aggressiveness inspired frontiersmen to say an enemy fled “as if Jack Hays, himself, were after them.”
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Yet to say he was a daring youth amid grizzled pioneers does injustice to his men. The frontier drew people from all walks of life, and Hays’s Rangers were no exception. One of the company, Benjamin Highsmith, remembered many of them as “men of education and refinement. Around the camp fire at night it was not uncommon to hear men quoting from the most popular poets and authors, and talking learnedly on ancient and modern history.”
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In addition to Highsmith, who had carried messages out of the Alamo for Travis, Hays’s Rangers at various times included such men as Samuel Walker, who, while not an intellectual, would help design the first purely military Colt’s revolver; Ben McCulloch; P. H. Bell, a future governor of Texas; and Creed Taylor, around whom would one day center the most vicious blood feud in Texas history. As Rangers, however, they were young men looking for excitement.
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“Discipline is almost wholly lacking,” a visiting German naturalist observed, “but this lack is made up for by the unconditional devotion to the leader, who by example leads all in the privations and hardships they usually endure. No one is punished. The coward or incompetent must face the disgrace of dismissal. A uniform is not prescribed and everyone dresses to suit his taste and needs.”
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Creed Taylor remembered that before one fight, “[w]e dismounted and tightened up our saddle girths belts and etc, and while doing this I was struck with the spirit of dare-devil levity that seemed to have siezed every man.”
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When the new company organized, Hays’s salary was set at $75 a month, later raised to $150. The men were listed at $30 a month, although at first no one was paid because the Republic was in the process of stabilizing its badly inflated currency. It was not a terribly critical problem, however, because the militia acts that governed the Rangers initially allowed only fifteen men. They furnished their own arms, horses, and equipment. The government supplied ammunition and, officially at least, provisions. In reality, the Rangers in the field were cut off from supply and so lived by hunting or on provisions seized from Mexican trains. As a long arm, most carried single-shot muzzle-loading Jaeger rifles across the pommels of their saddles. Hays and a handful of others carried Col. Samuel Colt’s revolver.
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COLT WAS NOT
the first to invent a multishot revolving firearm, and he undoubtedly was inspired after seeing British attempts. Nevertheless, the Colt handgun, patented on February 25, 1836, was the first practical revolver, and by the end of that year, Colt was producing revolving pistols and rifles in his newly established factory in Paterson, New Jersey.
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The handguns included a pocket model in .28 caliber, and two .31-caliber belt models. The No. 5 (actually the fourth model produced) was a holster pistol in .36 caliber. Colt’s Patent No. 5 had a total production of a thousand, many of which went to Texas, and for that reason it is known as the Texas Paterson.
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By almost any later standard, the Texas Paterson was a crude, clumsy weapon. It was a cap-and-ball arm, with the five chambers in the cylinder charged from the front, the powder and ball being loaded separately. Each chamber had a nipple in the rear for a percussion cap that, when struck by the hammer, flashed directly into the chamber and ignited the powder charge. Once the chambers were loaded, they were sealed with grease, so that the powder blast from one would not ignite the others and cause the cylinder to explode in the hand of the user. The trigger normally folded into the frame and popped out when the gun was cocked; there was no trigger guard. The single-action mechanism required the hammer to be pulled back manually in order to turn the cylinder and cock the gun.

Yet for all its faults, the Texas Paterson was revolutionary. It fired five times before it was empty, compared to other contemporary handguns that had to be reloaded after each shot. And it was wonderfully uncomplicated, with only three basic components—frame, cylinder, and barrel. When it was empty, one simply removed the barrel, charged the chambers in the cylinder simultaneously from a five-spout powder flask, inserted the bullets, sealed the chambers, capped each nipple, replaced the barrel, and resumed firing. Paterson boxed sets often included an extra cylinder, doubling the amount of firepower before reloading. For its time, it was a brutally efficient weapon, and on the frontier, it could be used with devastating effect. J. W. Wilbarger, who was familiar with the arm, later wrote, “With these improved fire arms in their hands, then unknown to the Indians and Mexicans . . . one ranger was a fair match for five or six Mexicans or Indians.”
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