Comancheria – The Separate Peace

But first, before they were welcomed to Ketumsee’s main camp, the interpreter  Lorenzo de Rozas told Meusebach’s party that as a demonstration of their good faith and  confidence, they should empty all their firearms, firing them into the ground, or into the air.

For the forty men of Meusebach’s peace venture, it was a pivotal moment, for they were far beyond the safe frontier, and surrounded by what was estimated to be five or six thousand Comanche, the acknowledged warlords of the Southern plains. They had assembled on a hillside near Ketumsee’s encampment on the San Saba, mounted on their best horses,  in all their finery and carrying their weapons, on either side of a flag on a tall staff; warriors on the right, women and children on the left.  It was a splendid and heart-stopping sight. In the event of Meusebach having entirely miscalculated the Comanche’s desire for a peace treaty there would be no aid, no cavalry pounding to their rescue. About the only thing that would be a certain guarantee in that event… would be that every one of them would die, in as agonizing a manner as the most creative sadist could devise.

Meusebach quietly ordered all his men to empty their firearms. And in response, the Comanche warriors who carried firearms also emptied theirs. Chief Ketumsee and his senior chiefs came forward to greet them with handshakes and with elaborate ceremony; Meusebach and his party  were conducted into the village. They were invited to stay within the Comanche encampment, in their skin lodges, but on the excuse of finding better pasture for their horses, Meusebach graciously declined. They set up their own camp, but might as well have not bothered, because almost all of Ketumsee’s tribe came to visit over the next day or so; men, women, children and all, and mostly on horseback As one of the German visitors later wrote “Horses play an important role in the life of the Comanches… when there is a scarcity of food, horses furnish a supply of meat…from early youth both sexes are taught to ride… we saw children who had been nursed by their mothers until their third year, leave their mothers’ breast, jump on a horse and light a cigarette…”

Ketumsee had sent word to other high-ranking chiefs, namely Mopechucope, known as “Old Owl”, Chief Santanna, one of the important war leaders and Buffalo Hump, who had been bested in the Plum Creek fight after the Linville Raid seven years previously. But it would take time for those leaders and the lesser chiefs to assemble. In the meantime, Meusebach and the other Germans freely visited Ketumsee’s camp freely over the next few days. He earned a certain amount of good-will and respect by going about unarmed, among the Comanche, and showing neither fear nor favor. Both he and the scientist Von Roemer were genuinely interested in their hosts, which also earned further respect. Meusebach earned the nickname among them of “El Sol Colorado”, the Red Sun, on account of the reddish-auburn of his hair and beard.

In order to make good use of the time, and to hunt—replenishing their stocks of food which had been diminished by the many calls made in the name of hospitality to their hosts— Meusebach proposed that the main part of his company continue with surveying and hunting, while he and Von Roemer and some others pressed on to explore the old Spanish Fort on the San Saba River. The fort had been built in part to extend control of Texas into the north, and to protect a mission for Lipan Apache converts, but the mission had been destroyed by the Comanche and the fort abandoned seventy years before. It had been claimed that there were silver mines in the vicinity— which if true, would be of benefit to the near-empty Verein treasury. Meusebach didn’t seem to think there were, but their possible existence was one more illusion to disabuse his far-distant superiors from believing in.

At the end of February, Meusebach rejoined the rest of his party, and they traveled all together to a point on the lower San Saba River, to meet at a great council-fire with fifteen or twenty chiefs, including Old Owl, Santanna and Buffalo Hump. Besides the expected gifts and payments rendered to the Comanche, in return for leaving the German settlements unmolested, Meusebach took the fairly advanced line that as two separate peoples, they could never the less co-exist, to their mutual benefit. He cunningly pointed out that as skilled farmers, his people would always have plenty of food… and when hunting was bad for the Comanche, the Germans would be able to share in trade. He proposed that both the settlers and the Comanche be free to come to each others’ dwellings, that they be allies against outside enemies. He even, daringly, had no objection to intermarriage, although historians are decidedly mixed on exactly how much that was even possible, or welcome in either case.

And the Comanche chiefs were convinced. The treaty was ratified two months later, in Fredericksburg. For a number of years, the Comanche came and went, trading freely with the German settlers there. A number of the settlers developed personal friendships, notably with Chief Santanna, who seemed to be a rather jolly and gregarious sort, and who sincerely believed in the wisdom of making peace. In that breath of time, the gently-rolling limestone and oak-forested hill country of south-centralTexaswas transformed utterly into a district of neat and prosperous farms and well-laid out towns… where for a time, the two peoples did co-exist to their mutual benefit

 Alas, in the end it seemed that Meusebach’s treaty depended very much on the mutual liking and respect that each of the parties involved had for each other, rather than on the strict letter of the treaty itself. And there were Comanche tribes who did not consider themselves bound by it. As men grew old, as men died, so did the peace; but it lasted long enough, and those who signed it took great pride in the fact that they did not break it. Meusebach’s treaty held for about ten years, up to the time of  the Civil War… when much else in Texas headed towards the infernal regions, conveyed in the proverbial hand-held wicker-work container.

Rethinking Borders

No, not that border – the one featuring hot and cold running migrants and weaponry moving in whichever direction seems the most convenient at the moment – but Borders Books. Contra current nationwide expectations, the Borders Books in San Antonio are doing pretty darned well, being that they are on the short-list of stores doing well enough to remain open. When I was setting up book-signings and events for the latest book, I went through the motions of calling the Huebner Oaks Borders, and one of the closest Barnes and Noble outlets, not really expecting much of a response. And after the last signing event, at the Twig, I was expecting even less, but lo and behold, an email last month from the event manager at the Huebner Oaks Borders. Yea these many years ago, the-then manager was very active in getting local authors in for events; such is the turnover that he was about three managers ago, but the current manager team is very keen, and so – after a couple of false starts and reschedules, Blondie and I found ourselves sitting behind the Dreaded Author Table last Saturday afternoon. This seems to be their peak traffic time, and for sure there were a fair number of people wandering in. People who looked like they were seriously interested in books, and willing to buy books.

 Better yet – in spite of having been mistakenly placed on their calendar for the 25th of July (still kinda puzzled about how that happened!) – the staff pulled together at a couple of hours notice, and put up a table, with a tall stack of copies of Daughter of Texas, and supplied us with ice-water, a glass of iced-tea, several announcements on the store PA system, and every indication of noticing and welcoming my presence. The staff generally seemed full of hustle and helpfulness towards customers.

Last month, another author – and I don’t remember if this was on the IAG author group, the Historical Novel Society author group, or even if I had read it on one of the Linkedin groups – posted a kind of pep-talk and guide to doing signings. First, he said – none of this sitting at the table, staring out in space, or worse yet, sitting there reading a book. (Which I plead guilty of doing now and again – especially if there are no customers in the store, or there is a customer or two, clear the other side of the place and deliberately appearing to avoid the corner with the Dreaded Author Table.) You’ve been invited to the venue to sell books – so sell books. You have to strike up a conversation with people in the vicinity of the table, and he recommended opening it by saying, in an appropriately chipper and friendly voice, “You look like someone who is looking for a book!” – and then steering the conversation towards your own book or books, as soon as they said “Well, yes I am.” This gave me an opening to ask if they liked historical fiction, and would they consider mine – which were right here (gesturing towards stack on the table) and pointing out that the author could even autograph a copy with a personal message. And I have to say, it did work out pretty well, even if half the responses were something like, “Oh, no, I’m just here for a magazine-waiting for my spouse-strafing the marked-down bin.” And of course, there was the one customer who said, “Yeah, it’s called Lone Survivor, about this Navy SEAL, but I can’t remember the author,” to which I answered, “Marcus Luttrell, and if it’s in-stock, it will be back in the military section, or possibly current events.”

Blondie found this all hilarious, BTW – but as an opening gambit, it worked very well – and I believe that I am quick enough with the witty repartee to counter any smartass who answers, “Amazing – that’s exactly what I walked into a bookstore for!” Four copies sold, a fair number of good conversations, passed out a boatload of Adelsverein Trilogy postcards, and business cards with the website on it, recommended another handful of various books (Including Jack Shakely’s Confederate War Bonnet to a gentleman who had wandered down from the Cherokee Rez in Oklamoma) and plan to do it again at this Borders closer to December, when they have a big storewide event with a chorus singing Christmas carols, and offer food samples. I can work a crowd . . . as long as there is a crowd to work!

For anyone looking to buy my books locally in San Antonio – both the Twig at the Pearl Brewery, and the Huebner Oaks Borders both stock Daughter of Texas. The upcoming hard-bound version of the complete Trilogy will also be available at the Borders late in August, and so will the sequel to Daughter of Texas . . . umm, sometime in late November.

Comancheria – Herr Meusebach’s Mission

That there would ever be any sort of peace between the Comanche people, the horse-lords of the Southern Plains, and the settlers who steadily encroached upon the lands which they had always considered their own particular stamping grounds in 19^th century Texas  verges on the fantastical. That it lasted for longer than about a week must be accounted a miracle of Biblical proportions; but there was indeed such a treaty, negotiated and signed about mid-way through the bitter, brutal fifty-year long guerrilla war between the Tribes, and a group of settlers newly arrived in Texas.

The need a little patch of peace became apparent, and a matter  of urgency upon the arrival of nearly 7,000 German immigrants under the sponsorship and auspices of the Mainzer Adelsverein,  or as it was formally known; The Society for The Protection of German Immigrants in Texas, in a brief space of years after 1844.  The Verein, as it was called inTexas, was formed by a group of high-born and socially conscious German noblemen, who conceived the notion of establishing a colony of German farmers and craftsmen in Texas. Their motivations were a combination of altruism, and calculation. This settlement plan would generously assist farmers and small craftsmen who were being displaced by the dwindling availability of farm land, and by increasing mechanization. But it would also establish a large, homogenous and German-oriented colony in the then-independent Texas nation, from which they hoped to profit materially and perhaps politically.

Unfortunately, their organizational skills and economic resources were not anywhere near equal to their ambitions; ambitions which in turn were  only equaled by their astonishing naivety about the frontier. Their first commissioner in Texas was well-intentioned, well-born, and utterly clueless: every scammer, con-man and shady land-speculator west of the Mississippi must have seen Prince Karl of Solms-Braunfels coming for a considerable distance. In a remarkably short time, Prince Karl effortlessly managed to piss-off most of the elected officials of the independent State of Texas, spend money as if it were water, burden the Verein with the Fisher-Miller Grant,  (a large and almost useless tract of land smack-dab in the middle of Comanche territory), and amuse (or appall)  practically everyone with whom he came in contact. Among the most risible of his personal peculiarities was the fact that he traveled in state with a large and specialized entourage, including a personal chef and two valets to help him on with his trousers of a morning. This went over with the rough denizens of the frontier about as well as could be expected.

In his short tenure as commissioner, Prince Karl did manage to found two towns for the benefit of his German immigrants (Indianola and New Braunfels), before he departed, probably hastened with sighs of deep relief from all concerned… and the hot breath of his creditors.  Prince Karl’s hasty exodus late in 1844 left his replacement to handle the resulting tidal wave of hopeful  immigrants headed towards the extensively-advertised, but useless land grant in the high prairie north and west of the present-day Hill Country.  The new Verein commissioner in Texas was made— fortunately for the settlers— of abler and more experienced materiel;  Baron Ottfried Hans von Meusebach. Of the minor but substantial nobility, Baron von Meusebach was a lawyer and experienced civil servant, whose family motto was “Steadfast in Purpose”. He spoke five languages, including English, and had a wide circle of friends both in Texas and Germany. Sensibly, nearly the first thing he did upon arrival in Texas was to set aside his aristocratic title, becoming known thereafter as plain John O. Meusebach. He was faced with an absolutely Herculean task; where to put all the arriving German immigrants, how to move them from the coastal ports, and how to secure their safety, once arrived at… wherever.

Meusebach did not want to write off the Fisher-Miller Grant, around which the Verein had built so many hopes, including their own. With an eye towards a way-station to funnel settlers into it, he established the settlement of Fredericksburg in thePedernales River valley, and a handful of others on the edge of the frontier,  up in the limestone and oak forest Hill Country.  Today it is one of the more beautiful parts of Texas; kind of our very own Lake District, but then it was the edge of the wilderness… hardly the best situation for newly-arrived European immigrants, fresh off the boat. Having been informed by many local experts that the Comanche war parties would see the German colonies as a sort of take-all-you-want buffet, John Meusebach decided that their best chance for prosperity and survival lay in making a peace treaty with them, person to person, people to people, as equals.

Late in January of 1847, John Meusebach set out with a picked party of men and three wagons on a dual mission; to survey the land which the Verein had been granted the rights to settle upon, and to make peace with the Comanche. The party included a company of mounted Verein private troopers, a group of American surveyors, some Mexican teamsters and an interpreter, Lorenzo de Rosas, who had been kidnapped by the Comanche as a child, and was serving Meusebach’s party as guide and interpreter, and three wagon-loads of supplies and gifts for the Comanche. The party was also joined by a group of Shawnee Indians, who were hunting along the route that Meusebachs’ party traveled, and a wandering scholar and geologist named Ferdinand von Roemer, who had been energetically exploring Texas and extensively studying the exotic flora, fauna and geology wherever he found it. A later addition was the Indian agent for the State of Texas, Major Robert Neighbors,  sent post-haste after Meusebach with the noted scout and interpreter Jim Shaw, of theDelaware tribe, when the powers that be realized that Meusebach was entirely serious, and had already crossed the Llano into the Comanche hunting-grounds.

On the morning of February 5^th,  a day after crossing the Llano, Meusebach’s party was approached by a small party of Comanche warriors under a truce flag, led by a chief named Ketumsee.  Meusebach rode out with his interpreter: Ketumsee informed the German party that they had been observed, and were surrounded, and asked as to what their purpose was, either peace or war… either of which would be perfectly acceptable to the Comanche.  John Meusebach answered that he had come to make peace, as the representative of a people who had come a long way over the ocean, and stood with the Americans. He also added that the hospitality of Ketumsee’s people would be reciprocated, in the German colonies. Ketumsee appeared to be much impressed by this: he offered to receive the German party at his main encampment, a day or so journey away, and to send word to the other great Comanche chiefs to come to a peace conference. But first – there was a custom to be observed, and the fate of the excursion hung by a thread…

(To be continued)

Comancheria – The Rangers

What did a well-known naturalist, a daring mail-coach driver on the hazardous route through West Texas, a fiery newspaper editor,  a tireless peacemaker and  advocate for the Indians, and an amateur tinkerer/inventor all have in common, besides being present in Texas in the 1840ies?  Ferdinand Lindheimer,  William “Big Foot” Wallace, John Salmon “Rip” Ford, Robert Neighbors and Samuel Walker  all served at various times under the command of Jack Hays, the legendary Ranger Captain.

The Rangers of that time were nothing like their present-day iteration… an elite State law-enforcement body. And under Hays’ captaincy, they became more than just the local mounted volunteer militia, called up on a moments’ notice to respond to a lightening fast raid on their settlement or town by Indians or cross-border bandits. They took to patrolling the backcountry, looking specifically for a fight and  hoping to forestall raids before they happened, or failing that, to track down raiding parties, recover loot and captives, and to administer payback. There was only one abortive attempt to have them wear uniforms. Ranger volunteers provided their own weapons and horses, and usually their own rations, although the State ofTexasdid supply ammunition. They were famously unscathed by anything resembling proper military discipline and polish, as the regular Army would discover to their horror during the Mexican War. A mid-19th century newspaper caricature of a typical ‘Texas Ranger” featured a  hairy and ragged  creature resembling “Cousin It”, slumped on a horse and wearing a belt stuffed all the way around with knives and pistols.

All that Hays asked of his Rangers was that they follow him… and fight. And so they did, for Texas attracted young and restless males with a taste for adventure, a bit of ambition and no small propensity for administering violence when called upon. They came like moths to a flame, before, during and after the Texas War forIndependence;  many of them gravitating like a trout going upstream into an enlistment as a Ranger or service in the local militia. During the early 1840s Hays commanded a company of fluctuating size, operating out of San Antonio, which turned out to be extraordinarily effective, and made his name a legend in Texas. Many who had only heard of him were utterly flummoxed upon meeting him in person for the first time. He was slight and short, quiet-spoken and almost shy, appearing to be for the first third of his adult life (a contemporary sketch and various descriptions conform this) about fourteen years old.  In between forays and patrols he drilled his company tirelessly in shooting and horsemanship, copying many of the tricks of fighting from horseback used by the Comanche and other Plains warriors. Meeting the Comanche on anything like equal terms in a fight at short distance had to wait on a single technological innovation, and Hays was the first to put it to effective use.

Until 1844, the Rangers fought primarily with the same kind of weapons that Americans had always used: single-shot flintlock or percussion rifles of various type and design, augmented by single-shot pistols. While such rifles in well-trained hands were punishingly accurate, they were awkward and slow to reload, and nearly impossible to use from horseback in a running fight. Even single-shot pistols took time to reload, time during which  an opponent with a bow and arrow could get off any number of accurate shots. But in 1839, motivated by some mad, god-only-knows, pie-in-the-sky, by-god-it’s-crazy-but-just-might-work impulse, the State of Texas ordered a quantity of 180 patent .36 caliber  5-shot revolvers from Samuel Colt’s factory in Paterson, New Jersey. A portion of them were actually issued to certain Texas Navy fighting ships, where they served about as well as expected, but they began to be largely used by the Texas Army… and increasingly by Ranger units, to astonishing effect.

The early Paterson Colts were delicate, and needed constant care and maintenance:  loading the cylinder and reattaching it to the barrel was a finicky and careful business. To modern eyes they appear over-long in the barrel, and the lack of a trigger and guard is slightly odd.  But in 1843, they were expensive … and worth every penny to the men who carried them into a fight with mounted Comanche warriors. Being able to fire five shots before needing to reload evened the odds considerably; and Hays’s Rangers usually carried two; it was also possible to purchase extra cylinders, have them loaded and change them out quickly. Colt’s reputation in Texas was made, especially after Hays and a party of fourteen Rangers  armed with Paterson Colts charged and  routed a party of eighty Comanche, in a running fight along the PedernalesRiver.

A subsequent design improvement for military use in the Mexican War saw Ranger Samuel Walker working with Samuel Colt on improving the original design.  This new design, a six-shot .44 revolver which weighed a whopping four and a half pounds made Colt’s reputation and his economic future secure. Subsequent iterations of the Colt revolver proved enduringly popular in Texas to this day. Traveling there in the early 1850s, Frederick Law Olmsted wrote,  “There are probably in Texas about as many revolvers as male adults, and I doubt if there are one hundred in the state of any other make.”

For all it’s various shortcomings, the Paterson Colt, and its descendents filled a very particular need – the need of a horse- mounted fighter for a repeat-fire weapon that was relatively accurate at short range, rugged, easy to use, and capable of evening the odds of survival against a hard-fighting, and similarly mounted enemy. In the hands of Rangers, soldiers, lawmen and citizens, a Colt revolver was all that. Except on occasions where a shotgun was called for, but that’s another story.

Comancheria – Linnville and Plum Creek

It was not as if the Texans were entirely defenseless against a surprise attack like this. Poor in cash, poor in practically everything but land, the conditions of the frontier had attracted large numbers of the restless and adventurous, who were not inclined to accept any sort of insult lying down.  With no meaningful standing army, defense of local communities depended on their militia … usually composed of every able-bodied male. The sheer size ofTexas and the nature of war waged by the horse-lords of the Southern Plains made it imperative that at least a portion of the militia be mounted. Over the twenty years after the founding of Stephen Austin’s colony the practice evolved for a mounted militia, ready to ride in pursuit of raiders within fifteen minutes after an alarm being sounded. Sometimes they were able to catch up and retrieve captives, or stolen horses. More often, the raiding Indians split up and melted like smoke into the wilderness, leaving their pursuers frustrated and fuming, their horses exhausted. It became quite clear, as more Anglo settlers poured into Texas, that the best defense was in the offense, to field a mounted patrol out ranging the back-country, looking to forestall Indian raids. Such a Corps of Rangers was formally established on the eve of Texan rebellion against Mexico. Distinct from the militia and the regular army, the mounted ranging companies continued to serve after the war, in various forms, most of them locally supported. The citizen-rangers of the local companies  assembled for short periods of time in response to  specific dangers, their numbers ever-flexible. They supplied their own arms, horses and equipment. By the time of the Linnville Raid, most of them were veterans of the War for Independence, and had years of experience in the field otherwise; men like Mathew “Old Paint” Caldwell of Gonzales, and the McCulloch brothers, who had handled Sam Houston’s two artillery pieces at the Battle of San Jacinto. Ben McCulloch had even been trained in outdoor skills by no less than Davy Crockett himself. Companies from settlements along the Colorado assembled under Edward Burleson, including Chief Placido and twelve Tonkawa Indians, who had their own score with the Comanche to settle, and twenty-one volunteers from Port Lavaca. Other volunteers gathered from Bastrop, Cuero, Victoria and other towns scattered along the river valleys between the coast and the start of the limestone hills. Barely a week after the burning of Linnville, companies of volunteer Texans were closing in inexorably on the withdrawing Comanche raiding party, at an open plain by Plum Cree, a tributary of the  San Marcos River near present-day Lockhart. Burdened by loot, captives and a slow-moving herd of stolen horses and mules, the raiders, a huge party of Penateka Comanche, led by a war chief called Buffalo Hump, had not split up and scattered as was their usual custom.  Unknowing, Buffalo Hump’s war party  were closely pursued by part of McCulloch’s Gonzales company, who began seeing exhausted pack animals shot and left by the wayside. Caldwell and the other leaders had deduced the route by which they were returning, and had arranged their forces accordingly. They let the Comanche column pass, under a great cloud of dust and ash, for the prairie had recently been burned over.  Not until the Texans rode out from cover in two parallel lines converging on them, did the Comanche warriors even know they had been followed. Some of their gaudily adorned chiefs rode out to put on a show, intending to cover the withdrawal, taunting the waiting Texans, riding back and forth. A Texan sharp-shooter brought down the most flamboyant of the chiefs, and when several warriors rode out to carry his body away, the order for a charge was given. The Texans smashed through the line of Comanche fighters from both sides, and into the loot-laden horse and mule herd. As the herd stampeded, the whole raid dissolved into a rout, a hundred bloody running fights, with the Comanche fighters penned in and ridden down. The battle ran for fifteen miles, with some of the survivors chased as far as Austin. It was later estimated that the tribe lost about a quarter of  their effective fighters. They never raided so far into the settled regions ofTexas again, in such numbers … and after the Plum Creek fight learned to give a wide berth to volunteer Ranger companies.

One such company was based in San Antonio, composed of local volunteers and funded by local businessmen, many of whom also participated in the patrols. The captain of that company was a surveyor by profession, born in Tennessee and raised in Mississippi, who would live to a ripe old age as a politician and lawman in California. Quiet, modest, self-effacing, Jack Hays became the very beau ideal of a captain of Rangers. He had been among the volunteers at Plum Creek, but made his name in the decade afterwards, astounding people who knew only his reputation upon meeting him for the first time. He was slight, short and refined in appearance, and looked about fourteen years old. But he was a also gifted leader of irregular fighters, possessed an iron constitution, and procured for his men an innovation which allowed them to carry the fight against the Comanche Indians on something like equal terms… the Colt Revolver.

Comancheria: The Council-House Fight

In his one-volume history of Texas Lone Star, T.R. Fehrenbach cites one particular reason for Texas having such a distinctive culture relative to the other states. And there is a distinctly different “feel” to living here; of all the places in the States where I have lived or visited; onlyUtah and Hawaii came even close to it, for similar reasons.  Hawaii is an island, and was once itself an independent kingdom. So was Utah, metaphorically speaking: an island of Mormon separatists in empty vastness of the Great Basin. They are still generic American places, although one has frangipani and fabulous beaches, and the other has spectacular mountains and religious conformity.

Texasis more of a reduced and concentrated American essence; a demi-glace as it were. Like Utah and Hawaii, Texas started as independent political entity and did experience a certain degree of isolation, especially in the early years of settlement by Spanish, Mexican and American arrivals, but  Fehrenbach cites one more reason; that Texas was at war for a good fifty years.

 This war was fought mainly on one front (occasionally varying the program with other hostile factions), and a bitter and protracted fight it was too, beginning with the early days of Stephen Austin’s colony in the 1820ies. It had something of inevitability about it, for it was fought mostly against the Comanche Indian tribes; only in the early days of the American colonies east of theAppalachians had there been a war as prolonged and vicious. In most of the other territories-become-states, either the Indians were not particularly warlike, settlements and outposts were sparse and easily defended, leaving the resident Indians to withdraw to the back country - or such conflict between settlers and tribes was briskly concluded within a few years and to the settlers’ decided advantage. But in Texas, war with the Indians lasted until the last ragged band surrendered to the reservation life in 1875; a period of fifty years during which no settler ever felt entirely secure, even in the center of what were larger towns at the time.

 There was a dreadful inevitability in the collision of restless Anglo-American borderers, many of them that contentious Scots-Irish breed of whom it is usually said that they were born fighting, with the Comanche. But the Anglo-Texan borderers occasionally took a break from fighting; to farm, or ranch, to plant cotton or practice some more peaceful trade; the Comanche never did. For the Comanche lived entirely by war, by ransom and plunder—especially for horses, which they valued over practically anything else. They were restless and ever-moving, accustomed to hardship, feared by other tribes, whom they pushed out of the way, taking what they wanted, when they wanted it.  There was no other occupation; no other means of advancement save by being a fearless warrior and raider. Such a harsh life eliminated the unfit brutally, as brutally as they eliminated their own enemies. At the high noon-time of their peak, they were the lords of the harsh and beautiful country of the southern plains, from theArkansas River, to the Balcones Escarpment. They ranged and raided as far as they pleased, occasionally interrupted by a fragile peace treaty.

One of these treaties came to a spectacularly violent end, in the middle ofSan Antonioin the spring of 1840, during the course of what had been intended as a peace conference. In token of their good faith, a contingent of Penateka Comanche  chiefs were supposed to surrender a number of captives,  and sign a treaty. They turned over only a few, one of them a teenaged girl who had been savagely abused during a year of captivity. She told the Texan officials that the Comanche held more than a dozen other captives, but intended to extort a large ransom for each, one by one. When the chiefs and the peace commissioners met in a large building known as the Council House, the commissioners asked after the other captives who whose release had been promised. The leader of the chiefs – who had promised to bring in all the captives – answered that they had brought in the only one they had. The others were with other tribes. And then he added, insolently, “How do you like that answer?”

 The short answer was the Texans did not. There were already soldiers standing by: they were ordered to surround the Council House, and the chiefs informed that they would be held hostage until their warriors returned to their camps and brought back the rest of the hostages. Almost as one, the chiefs drew knives and rushed the soldiers guarding the doors. The fat was then in the fire, as the warriors who were waiting outside in the yard entered the fray, and a short running fight erupted in the street leading down to the San Antonio River. The Council House fight vigorously re-ignited the war between Comanche and Texan. A huge Comanche war party came down from the hills in the fall, sweeping down the empty country between the Guadalupe and Lavaca Rivers. They terrorized the town ofVictoria and burned Linnville on LavacaBay. The citizens of Linnville watched from the refuge of boats offshore, as the Indians looted the warehouses and homes.  They departed, with two hundred horses all laden with plunder, but what happened on the return from that spectacular raid set in motion a gathering of forces and personalities who would eventually reduce the proud lords of the Southern Plains to a handful of desperate, starving beggars.

(to be continued)