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

by S. C. Gwynne

  The Comanches were completely oblivious to the effect this had on the Texans. Many of the latter were familiar with the tortures practiced by the eastern tribes such as the Choctaws and Cherokees, which included the use of fire. But it was almost always practiced on men. Those tribes rarely abducted, raped, and tortured white women, as the plains tribes did.28 Even to people accustomed to Indian violence, the sight of Matilda came as a shock. As if to make things worse, Matilda was an intelligent, perceptive girl who had learned the Comanche language quickly and thus knew that there were other captives in Indian camps. She estimated fifteen. She told the Texans about these captives.

  This was all prelude to the meeting, which took place in a one-story courthouse that would go down in history as the Council House. The building was made of limestone and had a flat timber roof and dirt floor.29 Twelve Indians, all Penatekas and variously described as “chiefs” or “principal men,” were ranged across from three appointed Texas commissioners. Their spokesman was Spirit Talker (his Comanche name was variously given as “Muguara” or “Mukewarrah”), a good-humored and apparently peaceable type with a taste for whiskey who had recently hosted ranger Noah Smithwick for three months in his camp, at one point facing down a group of Wacos who wanted to kill Smithwick.30 Smithwick had liked him and found him intelligent and sincere, and had “many long, earnest talks” with him. He had spoken eloquently to Smithwick about the white man’s destruction of his hunting grounds, saying

  The white man comes and cuts down the trees, building houses and fences, and the buffalos get frightened and leave and never come back, and the Indians are left to starve, or if we follow the game we trespass on the hunting ground of other tribes and war ensues. . . . If the white men would draw a line defining their claims and keep on their side of it the red men would not molest them.31

  If he sounds like a white man’s sort of Indian, it must be noted that he was also headman of the band that had made the raid on the Lockhart homestead, thus the same group that had killed her family members, taken her and her younger sister, and tortured her and raped her. It was Spirit Talker’s village that Colonel Moore had attacked on the San Saba.

  Inside the courthouse, the Texans got right to business. They demanded to know why the Comanches had brought only one captive. Spirit Talker replied that there were indeed more captives, but they were in camps over which he had no control. He was very likely telling the truth, but no one believed him. He then explained that he believed that all of the captives could be ransomed. Of course, he added helpfully, they would require a high ransom in the form of goods, ammunition, blankets, and vermillion. But that could all be worked out. Then he surveyed his guests and concluded, with a grand gesture: “How do you like that answer?”

  He may have thought he was being clever, or reasonable, or just plain chatty. Or maybe he was mistranslated. In any case, he grossly misunderstood his audience. He and his people considered themselves honorable warriors. To them, abduction of captives was honorable warfare. So was rough treatment of captives. To Spirit Talker, Matilda was an item of plunder, something not quite fully human, something to be bargained for. The Texans, meanwhile, considered the Indians vicious, conscienceless killers. Their treatment of the pathetic, noseless girl was gruesome and irrefutable evidence of that. Whatever Spirit Talker had in mind, or meant to say, those were the last words he ever spoke.

  Colonel William Fisher, one of the Texas commissioners, replied sharply: “I do not like your answer. I told you not to come here again without bringing in your prisoners. You have come against my orders. Your women and children may depart in peace. . . . When those prisoners are returned, your chiefs here present may likewise go free. Until then we hold you as hostages.”32 As he spoke, a detachment of soldiers marched into the courthouse and took up positions in the front and back. When the astonished Comanches finally figured out, through the terrified translator, what had been said, they panicked and rushed for the doors.

  The soldiers closed ranks. Spirit Talker, who got to the door first, drew his knife and stabbed a soldier. Then the soldiers opened fire, dropping Spirit Talker and other Indians as well as several of their own people. They fired again. The room was filled with noise and smoke and blood and ricocheting rifle balls. One soldier, Matthew “Old Paint” Caldwell, took a stray bullet in the leg. Hobbled, he grabbed a musket from one of the chiefs, blew his head off, then used it to bludgeon another Indian to death. The fight spilled outside, and now a full-scale, Hollywood-style melee erupted in the plaza. The Indians who had waited outside—men, women, and children—turned on the onlookers, many of whom were armed, and the fighting spread. People who saw it said the Indian women and boys fought as hard as the men.33 One Indian boy shot a district judge through the heart with a “toy” arrow, killing him. The Comanches never really had a chance. Though it started as a street fight, it turned quickly to massacre, and then, soon enough, into something that resembled a turkey shoot in which the Comanches played the unaccustomed role of fleeing, terrified victims.

  Within half an hour the “fight” was over. Now there was just a large, bloodthirsty, vengeful mob hunting Comanches through the streets of San Antonio. It was not pretty. A group of Indians who made it to the river were picked off, one by one, as they swam across.34 Every Indian was hunted down. The house-to-house hunt was grim, and cruel. Some Indians took refuge in stone houses and locked the doors.35 In Mary Maverick’s firsthand account, several white men climbed to the top of a building and set it on fire with a “candlewick ball soaked in turpentine.” Two Comanche men soon emerged from the smoke and fire. One had his head split open with an ax; the other was shot dead.

  When it was over, thirty warriors, three women, and two children lay dead. Thirty-two were taken prisoner, many of them badly wounded. Seven Texans were killed, and ten wounded. (The town’s sole surgeon, a German immigrant, worked through the night to save the whites; the Indians were unattended.)36 The soldiers threw the remaining thirty-two Comanches in the dirt-floored jail behind the courthouse. The next day a woman who had not been wounded was given a horse and rations and told to ride to her people with the news of what happened. She was also to deliver an ultimatum: The survivors would be put to death unless the Comanche bands released the fifteen captives that Matilda Lockhart had told them about. If the woman did not return in twelve days, during which time there would be a full truce, “these prisoners shall be killed, for we will know that you have killed our captive friends and relatives.”37 If the Texans felt good about their bargaining position, they would soon learn otherwise.

  Under normal circumstances, we would never have found out how this news was received in the Comanche villages. But in this case a young captive named Booker Webster, who was later released, left a harrowing account. When the woman arrived with her news, the Comanches reacted with a mixture of horror, despair, and cold fury. More or less in that order. The women screamed and wailed in mourning. They slashed their arms, and faces, and breasts, and lopped off fingers. Some even injured themselves fatally. The men moaned and rocked back and forth and some chopped off their hair. So large was the horse herd belonging to the dead chiefs that it took two days to kill and burn them all (a Comanche custom).

  Then, through the smoke of burning horseflesh, they unleashed their feelings of depthless grief and anger on the hostages. In Booker Webster’s account, “they took the American captives, thirteen in number, and roasted and butchered them to death with horrible cruelties.”38 One can only imagine what drawn-out horrors were perpetrated on them. The captives included children, one of whom was the six-year-old sister of Matilda Lockhart.

  The Indians never responded to the ultimatum. They were in fact terribly demoralized, leaderless, and unsure what to do. In the nuanced world of the Comanches, where signs and spirits and magic and medicine were important decision-making tools, such an event was a profound spiritual blow, a completely mystifying shift in the puha of the band’s headmen. With a white man’s mentality, the
y might have simply destroyed San Antonio by fire or at least wreaked terrible havoc. They did not do that. Instead, several days later, three hundred warriors led by Isimanica rode to the San Jose Mission, just south of town, where they demanded the return of the prisoners and challenged the Texans to a fight. The Texans refused to give up the prisoners and insisted, bizarrely, that because the twelve-day truce was still in effect, they could not fight. Or perhaps the commanding officer was simply afraid of leaving the mission walls. Many of the white soldiers thought so. It was a strange scene, one that was rarely if ever repeated on the plains: a large force of Indians trying, unsuccessfully, to goad white soldiers into combat. One of the officers, Lysander Wells, accused the commanding officer, Captain William D. Redd, of cowardice. They promptly fought a duel, and killed each other. Though the Indians remained in prison, most eventually escaped. The women, some of whom were given to San Antonio citizens as slaves, also escaped. Oddly, there was, eventually, another exchange of captives that brought a boy—Booker Webster—and a young girl back to civilization. The girl was almost as badly scarred as Matilda Lockhart. They were spared because they had been adopted into the tribe.

  Thus ended what became famous in the annals of Texas as the Council House Fight. Many Texans saw this as a sign that Texas, in the Lamar era, would brook no compromises with Indians. They were right. But the Texans had also made a terrible blunder that resulted immediately in the torture-killing of the rest of the hostages, set off a massive wave of retaliatory raids against settlements that ended up taking dozens of white lives, and destroyed for years whatever confidence the Comanches had in the integrity of the Texas government. One can only wonder what William Lockhart, whose lovely six-year-old daughter was slowly roasted alive to avenge the massacre, thought of the strategy. And though the whites crowed that they had killed twelve “leading chiefs,” there is no evidence to support that claim.39 From Smithwick’s account, Spirit Talker was the leader of a relatively small group within the Penateka band. Isimanica, the most dangerous of the chiefs and far more powerful than Spirit Talker, was not there, nor was Isawaconi, who claimed to be the main chief of the Penatekas. Nor were prominent chiefs Pah-hah-yuco, Old Owl, Little Wolf, and Buffalo Hump.40 The men who were killed were without a doubt leaders, but not big chiefs. Finally, as it turned out, there was little evidence that the Comanches at the Council House were involved in any recent raids on Texas settlements.41 At the time of the attack, in fact, Isimanica had apparently been abroad among the lodges hawking the idea of peace.42

  Now, instead of securing the peace, white men in south Texas were about to be targets of the greatest mobilization in Comanche history.

  Seven

  DREAM VISIONS AND APOCALYPSE

  IN LEGEND AND history, the Penatekas (Pen-’ah-took-uhs) were the largest and most powerful of all the Comanche bands. They had swept the Apaches into Mexico and fought the Spanish to a standstill in Texas. They raided, at will, deep into Mexico, and dominated the tribes of central Texas. They were also the one large Comanche band that had come into close and constant contact with the invaders and colonizers. The other main bands—Yamparika, Kotsoteka, Quahadi, and Nokoni—still held themselves largely aloof from settlements and soldiers, from their cultures and their invisible white man’s diseases. They stayed farther out on the Great Plains, following the buffalo herds. The Quahadis dealt extensively with the merchants of Santa Fe, but only through the Comanchero intermediaries.

  This proximity to whites had changed the Penatekas. Profoundly. As Spirit Talker pointed out, they had seen the buffalo depart, never to come back to the southernmost reaches of the plains. They were thus forced to hunt different sorts of increasingly smaller game. And eventually, as the game thinned out, into trading for food with the white man or with farmers like the Wichitas or Wacos. As years passed, they had more and more contact with whites, not all of it unfriendly. They cadged food and stole small useful or ornamental things. Most had learned to speak Spanish and some had even learned English. They discovered that clothing made of cotton or wool was warmer in winter and cooler in summer than their traditional skins. They began, like the members of the Five Civilized Tribes, to adopt white clothing. Metal kettles were more practical than clay jars, and when they wore out could be used to make arrow points. Ready-made glass beads were brighter than handcrafted shell beads.1 With every raid they accumulated the white man’s artifacts—his utensils and tools and weapons. It was a sort of cultural pollution that could not be stopped. There developed a casual intimacy between the cultures that was somehow interwoven with all the blood and violence and hostility.

  Such intimacy could be seen in a story from the hill country a few years later. A woman who was part of a German settlement recalled a typical Comanche encounter. “One day while I was home,” she said, “in walked a big buck indian. I had just made a successful bake of bread and was exceedingly proud of it. . . . The big scamp sized up everything, spied my bread, picked it up and walked off with it. . . .” There is an interesting and almost funny offhandedness here: It would not have been surprising if she had picked up a rolling pin and beaned him with it. Other people in her town complained that Comanches would show up at mealtime expecting generous hospitality and would steal small items from around the house.2 To a Yamparika, living in a village far to the north on the Arkansas River, such a scene would have been beyond imagining.

  Texans, too, were beginning to understand this change. The following account was published in the Houston Telegraph and Texas Register on May 30, 1838, after a delegation of Comanches had visited President Sam Houston, at his invitation.

  All expected to meet a band of fierce, athletic warriors with sinewy limbs and gigantic frames, but what was their astonishment on arriving at the President’s House, to behold paraded there about 25 diminutive, squalid, half-naked, poverty stricken savages, armed with bows and arrows, and mounted on wretched horses and mules! Every feeling of admiration was dispelled at once, and our citizens viewed them with mingled feelings of pity and contempt . . . their squaws and children were scattered in all directions through the city picking up old tin plates, iron hoops, clippings of tin, glass bottles, and similar rubbish which they appeared to consider extremely valuable. . . .

  Mr. Legrand, who has resided several years among the Comanches, states that this party belongs to a portion of the tribe called “Comanches of the Woods”—who inhabit the hilly country northeast of Bexar [San Antonio]. They are a poor, degraded, sorry race and hardly have any resemblance to the Comanches of the prairie.3

  This is a remarkable account in many ways. First, in its sneering, overtly racist dismissal of the Indians, and in its frank astonishment that real Indians were not like James Fenimore Cooper Indians. Second, in the fact that, minus the Anglocentrism, the writer is substantially correct in his observations. Comanches were short, and they were unimpressive physically, as almost all observers had noted. They were half-naked (it was summer in Houston, so they wore simple breechclouts), they did ride mustangs that were small, unshod, scrawny, and unattractive by European standards. They used bows and arrows as their main weapons. They were undoubtedly poor in the eyes of the average Texan, having no houses or real estate or bank accounts. And they of course loved to scavenge tin and iron: That was how they made arrows, knives, and lances.

  The reporter got the larger sense of it right, too. The Penatekas, by virtue of years of cross-cultural pollination, were a decayed and degenerative version of the truly wild Comanches of the plains. The proximity had its physical effects as well. Smallpox epidemics had killed huge numbers of Penatekas in 1816 and 1839 (cholera would destroy most of what was left in 1849). Their hunting grounds had become so depleted by the influx of settlers that soon many in the band would be on the verge of starving to death. They had indeed become the Comanches of the Woods, dependent now on the alien culture for their livelihood, while the rest of the bands still rode free and wild on the high plains. In fact, while the Penatekas were bein
g cross-pollinated out of existence and reeling from white man’s diseases, you could argue that the Comanches of the high plains were still at the peak of their historical power.4 Where the reporter was wrong was in the implied assumption that this decadent version of the pure plains warrior would not amount to much of a military threat. He was quite wrong about that. The pathetic little half-naked folks still constituted the greatest light cavalry on earth; no more than a handful of American or Texan soldiers were yet a match for them.

  Buffalo Hump had a vision. It had come to him in the night. It was a violent, mystical, all-encompassing, apocalyptic sort of dream vision in which the lying and treacherous Texans, perpetrators of the massacre at the Council House, were attacked and driven into the sea. Buffalo Hump was a Penateka chief. Until recently he was a lower sort of chief, the type that could recruit warriors for this or that raid but did not enjoy the jefe status of the big civil and war chiefs. But now many of the paraibos were dead. Some had been killed in the disastrous 1816 smallpox epidemic that swept through Comanche, Wichita, and Caddo villages and killed as many as four thousand Comanches,5 taking fully half of the estimated eight thousand band members at the turn of the nineteenth century. At least four headmen were lost during another smallpox epidemic in 1839; twelve more war chiefs were killed at the Council House Fight. Buffalo Hump was a survivor, a charismatic leader who spoke fluent Spanish and would live to fight many campaigns, even after most of his band had been destroyed. He happened to be Spirit Talker’s nephew.6 He had first encountered white colonists, taibos, at the Barton Springs settlement in Austin in 1828, where he conversed with them in Spanish and charmed them and was described as “a magnificent specimen of savage manhood.”7 That was before the Comanches had figured out how unfriendly and acquisitive the Anglo-Texans were. A German scientist who met him in the 1840s described him this way: