The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (23 page)

Indian Superintendent Robert Simpson Neighbors was convinced that the raiders were “Indians who do not properly belong to the State, but intruders from the United States Indian Territories [i.e., Oklahoma].”
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Rip Ford was not so certain and decided to investigate any possibility. Ford had reentered state service after the legislature authorized Governor H. R. Runnels to enlist a hundred men for six months’ service in the Rangers and appropriate $70,000 for their expenses. In his instructions to Ford, Runnels wrote, “I impress upon you the necessity of action and energy. Follow any trail and all trails of hostile or suspected hostile Indians you may discover, and if possible, overtake and chastise them, if unfriendly.”
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Ford wasted no time taking to the field. He met with former Ranger captain Shapley Ross, who now served as agent for the Lower Brazos near Belknap and recruited warriors to serve as scouts for an expedition along the Canadian River. The expedition set out on April 22 and included 102 Rangers with 113 Indians commanded by Ross. A week later they reached the Red River, where the Indians guided them across the treacherous quicksands and into the Indian Territory of Oklahoma. Indian scouts and flankers moved as much as twenty miles ahead of the main force, looking for signs of hostiles. On May 10, they returned with Comanche arrowheads. They had happened on some wounded buffalo, and after killing them, extracted the hostile points from the carcasses. The following day, the Indians reported they had spotted Comanches chasing buffalo.

Ford left a small guard at camp, and at 2
P.M.
set out with his main force of Rangers and Indians to find the Comanches. They had hoped to locate the hostile camp and attack it at daylight on May 12, but it was 7
A.M.
before they discovered and overran a small camp of five lodges. A band of Tonkawas was left behind to destroy the camp, while the rest of the force moved on, locating the main camp several miles away on the Canadian River. Ross’s Indians rode between the camp and the river and charged from that direction while Ford took the Rangers straight in.
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“The head chief, Iron Jacket, had ridden out in gorgeous array—clad in a coat of mail—and bore down upon our red allies,” Ford reported to Governor Runnels.

He was followed by warriors and trusted for safety to his armor. The sharp crack of fire of six rifles brought his horse to the ground, and in a few moments the chief fell riddled with balls. . . . The fight was now general, and extended very soon over a circuit of six miles in length and more than three in breadth. It was in fact, almost a series of single combats. Squads of Rangers and [government] Indians were pursuing the enemy in every direction. The Comanches would occasionally halt and endeavor to make a stand, however, their efforts were unavailing and they were forced to yield the ground to our men in every instance. The din of the battle had rolled back from the river—the groans of the dying, cries of frightened women and children, mingled with the reports of fire arms, and the shouts of men as they rose from hill top, from thicket and from ravine.

The noise attracted Comanches from another large camp several miles upriver, and they came into the fight. The Rangers and their Indian allies were now in control of the first big camp, and the two sides faced off, each daring the other to move. Occasionally one side would rush the other and break off at the last moment. “Half an hour was spent in this without much damage to either party. A detachment of Rangers advanced to reinforce the friendly Indians, and the Comanches quited [
sic
] the field. . . .”

The Rangers pursued, but eventually broke off. It was growing late, and Ford wanted to get back to his own camp with its skeleton guard detail before the Comanches discovered it. He was particularly concerned when one of the captured Comanche women said that Buffalo Hump was camped twelve miles downriver “with a considerable body of warriors.” Texas casualities that day were two killed and three wounded. Based on the number of bodies that the Comanches had been forced to leave behind, Ford estimated their losses at seventy-six killed and a large but indeterminate number wounded. There were eighteen prisoners, mostly women and children.
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THE VALIANT SERVICE
of the Indians from Fort Belknap did them little good against the white tide that was rapidly overwhelming them. The reservation was on prime land, and although the newly established town of Belknap was economically dependent on the soldiers at the fort and the Indians from the reserve, a flood of newcomers intended to open the Indian land to settlement. Incidents flared up and spread to the Comanche reserve at Camp Cooper. Settlers alleged that reservation Indians were joining in on the raids, and while Ford was willing to concede the probability that some reservation Comanches were involved, he was not willing to move against the reservation tribes as a whole.
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During one officers’ conference, Ford proposed sending patrols through the vicinity of the Comanche reservation. One officer remarked that a trail leading from the scene of an attack to the reservation would be enough evidence of guilt. To that, Lt. Allison Nelson added, “The thing can be managed; the trail can be made.”

Jerking Nelson up by the collar, Ford thundered, “No, Sir, that will not do, I am responsible to the state, and to public opinion, and I will take no step in the matter, unless I am backed by the facts, and of such a character as to justify me before the public. I am willing to punish the [reserve] Comanches, if they are found guilty; but I am not disposed to do so unjustly and improperly.”
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Nelson walked out of the meeting and soon found an ally in John R. Baylor, whom Superintendent Neighbors had discharged as Comanche agent because his overbearing attitude had alienated the chiefs. Baylor issued public statements accusing the Comanches of depredations, while Nelson, hoping to obtain Neighbors’s position, began inciting the local population against the superintendent. On the night of December 27, 1858, while Agent Ross was in Waco, a band of whites slipped onto the reserve by Belknap and attacked an Indian camp. Four men and three women were killed while they slept. The Rangers identified the assailants and Ford was ordered to arrest them, but refused on the grounds that as a military officer he could not enforce the orders of a civil court. Legally he was correct, because the Rangers (technically at least) were state auxiliaries to the army, but Neighbors never forgave him. The killing of the sleeping Indians was explained away by stating that the whites simply could not distinguish between friendly Indian and hostile.

Although Governor Runnels appointed a peace commission “with power and authority to repair to said Brazos Agency and represent the State of Texas, in the peacable [
sic
] and lawful adjustment of said difficulties,” confrontations and killings continued into the next year. The climate of violence probably was responsible, at least in part, for the increasing number of depredations in 1858 and 1859, for when raids against the Indians on the reserves stepped up, so did raids against the white settlements as the reserve Indians began to retaliate. Rangers and even federal troops from Fort Belknap were called out to protect the Indians from the whites, occasionally forcing the settlers back at gunpoint. Neighbors realized that to avoid a full-scale war, he would have to close the agencies and move his charges to Oklahoma. The relocation began on June 11, 1859, and continued through the summer. As the Indians attempted to round up their livestock, Rangers patrolling the edge of the reserve refused to allow them to leave to search for strays. Stock losses during those roundups and during the trek northward left the tribes impoverished when they arrived at their new homes.

On September 1, Neighbors officially turned the Indians over to the Wichita Agency. Upon his return to Belknap, he was gunned down on the street. The murder infuriated the Rangers, who respected Neighbors as a man even if they did not approve of his ideals. When his killer’s body was found out on the prairie, it was presumed the Rangers had inflicted their own justice.
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NEIGHBORS WAS DEAD
but Shapley Ross remained, hated by the pro-Baylor faction for standing by his beliefs. Ross’s courage and convictions carried over to his son, Lawrence Sullivan (Sul) Ross, who at twenty-one years of age became the last great Ranger leader of antebellum Texas. Like his father, he was faithful to any man—red or white—who stood by him, and ferocious to any man who opposed him.

Although Sul Ross ultimately became a Confederate general, he differed from most Ranger leaders of the era by the fact that he was not a Southerner. Born in Iowa Territory, he was not quite a year old when his family emigrated, and so was the equally rare case of a man who had been in Texas since infancy and knew no other home. His first experience with Indians came as a toddler when he and his father were walking home from a neighbor’s and encountered fifteen Comanche warriors. Shapley thrust young Sul up on his back and dashed for his cabin, barely making it to the door before a shower of arrows rained down. He was still young when a band of Comanches caught him near the cabin. Between his own nerve and Shapley’s offer to barter part of his crop for the boy, Sul was released after being whipped on his bare legs with arrows.

In 1845, Shapley Ross moved the family to Austin, and again in 1849 to the newly surveyed site of Waco, where they operated a farm on the south side of the prospective town. Sul entered Baylor University, then located in Independence, Texas, in 1856. Although Baylor provided a reasonably good education at the time, Ross, for reasons lost to history, transferred to Florence Wesleyan University in Alabama. Returning to Texas on holiday in 1858, he assisted his father on the Lower Brazos Reservation at Fort Belknap and led a group of Indian auxiliaries in an army expedition commanded by Bvt. Maj. Earl Van Dorn against Buffalo Hump’s Comanches. He and Van Dorn were both badly wounded in a fight on Otter Creek in the Indian Territory, and it was five days before he was well enough to be moved.

Eventually Ross recovered, and he graduated from Florence Wesleyan in 1859. Still weak from his wound, he spent much of the remainder of the year recovering. During that time, he adopted a little white captive girl recovered in the Otter Creek fight, whose identity could not be established. In March 1860, he joined a company of Rangers from Waco, one of several units raised on order of Governor Sam Houston in response to stepped-up Indian raids. He soon became lieutenant, and when the company captain was promoted to major, Sul Ross succeeded him.
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Ross distinguished himself as company commander, and Houston had further use for him after the enlistments of the Waco Rangers expired. On September 11, 1860, the governor authorized him to raise a Ranger company for service in the vicinity of Fort Belknap, known as a route toward Texas for marauding Indian bands from Oklahoma and the Plains. Resentment of his father—and by extension of him—still ran strong among the anti-Neighbors faction in the area, but he ignored it as he prepared to carry the war out onto the Plains and into the Comanche homeland.
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THE CASE OF
the little captive girl adopted by Ross was not unusual. For more than two centuries, from the beginning of British settlement on the Atlantic seaboard, white children almost routinely had disappeared into Indian captivity. Some were later located and recovered; others were never seen again. Among those recovered, many were reunited with family members, but often the children were essentially displaced orphans. The great mystery of the era, however, was Cynthia Ann Parker, who was taken in the massacre of Parker’s Fort in 1836 and whose surviving relatives never ceased looking for her.

She reportedly had been seen four years after the raid, when she was thirteen years old. According to the story, two white traders and a Delaware guide found her in a Comanche village, but the Indian family into which she was adopted refused to ransom her, and she expressed no particular interest in the whites, nor did she indicate any understanding of English. Several years later, when she was about twenty-four, she supposedly was located in a Comanche camp on the Upper Canadian River. By that time, however, she was married with children and fully assimilated into Comanche life.
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Cynthia Ann Parker would have been about thirty-three in the fall of 1860, when Indian forays into the northwest frontier became especially bad. The depredations began as horse-stealing expeditions in October and culminated in a string of murder raids toward the end of November. A pregnant woman identified as “Mrs. Sherman” reportedly was tortured, raped, scalped, and left to die when the Indians rode on, creating an uproar on the frontier.

Sul Ross had been out scouting with his company when the raids occurred, and upon returning to his base he learned that local citizens had managed to trace the raiders to camps on the Pease River in northwest Texas. Faced with the prospect of attacking a large village, he asked for support from the army at Camp Cooper, and was given a twenty-one-man detachment of the Second Cavalry. The addition of a company of volunteers from Bosque County brought the total up to about 150 men.
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An Indian camp was located on December 18, but from that point, the record is clouded with various conflicting accounts. One Ranger on the expedition, Benjamin Franklin Gholson, recalled more than seventy years later that they located the village about daylight. It was a hunting camp and the Indians were drying meat. Gholson said that “women and children and all, there was between five and six hundred Indians,” perhaps two hundred of whom were warriors under the renowned war chief Peta Nacona. Other sources place the total number of Indians as low as fifteen.
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