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

  All of which meant that Texans, in the early days of the Republic, usually fought on foot. From that position, facing a furious mounted attack by a bow-wielding foe, they had exactly three shots, and two of those had to be made at close range. They then either had to be covered by their comrades’ fire, or take their chances reloading. The old Indian trick, and the classic wagon-train tactic, was to wait until the whites emptied their weapons, then charge before they could reload. For close-range fighting, the whites had hatchets or tomahawks that were of limited use at best.

  Comanches, meanwhile, carried a far more effective and battle-tested assortment of weapons: a disk-shaped buffalo-hide shield, a fourteen-foot plains lance, a sinew-backed bow, and a quiver of iron-tipped arrows. Their abilities with bow and arrow were legendary. In 1834, Colonel Richard Dodge, who was skeptical of the stories of their prowess, nonetheless observed that the Comanche “will grasp five to ten arrows in his left hand and discharge them so rapidly that the last will be on its flight before the first has touched the ground, and with such force that each would mortally wound a man at 20–30 yards.”5 He also noted that, while for some reason the Indians had trouble shooting conventional targets, “put a five cent piece in a split stick, and by giving a dexterous twist he will make the arrow fly sideways and knock down the money almost every time.”6 Their accuracy from the back of a moving horse was, to most white men, astonishing.

  The most destructive arrow wounds often came from the iron tips—basically just rough-cut triangles fashioned from barrel hoops or other sheet iron acquired from traders. They often bent or “clinched” when they hit bone, creating great internal damage and making extraction excruciatingly painful.7 The Plains Indians’ shields, made of thick, layered hide, were surprisingly effective against bullets, and at the right angle could stop any bullet from a musket and even, later, a rifle.8 Their flexible lances were especially deadly; Indians used them to spear three-thousand-pound buffalo from behind—always on the right side, between the last rib and the hip bone9—at full gallop, which meant that they got lots of practice. The lances were unmatched by anything the white men had at close range and, as Dodge observed, “exceedingly destructive to life.”10

  Indians had guns, too, though their use in combat against whites, prior to the advent of repeating rifles in the 1860s, has been greatly overstated. Most of what the Indians had were cheap trade muskets that were inaccurate, fragile, and used inferior gunpowder that produced low muzzle velocities and often did not work in humid or rainy weather.11 When they broke down, which they often did, Indians could not fix them. (In treaties, Indians often asked for gunsmithing services.) In the eastern woodlands, where it was possible to take cover, aim carefully, and fire, such weapons were marginally more valuable. On the plains, muskets were usually fired, by the relatively few Indians who had them, in an initial volley, then immediately replaced by arrow and lance.12

  The Texan’s greatest disadvantage lay in his horse and his horsemanship. American horses tended to be work plugs, plodding and incapable of running with the fleet, tough, and nimble Indian ponies. Frontier people did possess some finely bred horses, but most of them were too fragile to be ridden over many miles of hard terrain.13 Over short distances, it was impossible for any white horseman to outdistance a Comanche mustang. Over long distances, Indian horses had the advantage of eating forage (cottonwood bark, among other things) and grass as opposed to the grain the settlers’ horses ate.

  Even properly mounted, though, the whites were not the riders the Indians were. In the woodlands of the East they had not ridden much, because the distances between places were nowhere near what they were in Texas, and they certainly had no idea how to fight in the saddle or to shoot accurately from a moving horse. Comanches fought entirely on horseback and in a way no soldier or citizen in North America had ever seen. Consider the classic attack on a stationary enemy. The warriors formed themselves into a wedge-shaped mass, which then morphed with great precision and at high speed into the shape of a huge wheel without spokes, whose rim consisted of one or more moving lines of warriors: wheels within wheels. As described by Wallace and Hoebel:

  The ring, winding around with machinelike regularity, approached nearer and nearer with each revolution. As a warrior approached the point on the circle nearest the enemy, he dropped into the loop around his horse’s neck and shot arrows from beneath the neck. If his horse was shot down, he generally landed on his feet.14

  No American or Texan on a work plug could ever be a match for that sort of attack; few Indian tribes ever were. The Comanches had been fighting this way for two hundred years. They engaged in this sort of combat as a way of life, against lethal and highly mobile opponents. War was what they did, and all of their social status was based on it. The conquest of the Apaches over a generation had caused a profound change in Comanche life. Before, hunting meat had been the transcendent purpose of their existence. Now it was making war, and the People had developed a hunger for it.15 Most of their warfare was unseen by white men. But we have a few accounts from the era to remind us of what the Comanches were doing when they were not raiding white settlements. Former captive Herman Lehmann tells of a battle, probably typical in many ways of Indian fights, between Apaches and Comanches that raged for a full day, with great carnage on both sides. The Apaches lost twenty-five braves on the first day, the Comanches probably more than that. The next day the Comanches mounted another furious attack on horseback, this time killing forty more warriors and slaughtering all of the Apache women and children.16 In another account by a former captive, eighteen hundred mounted Blackfeet clashed with twelve hundred mounted Comanches in a six-hour battle that featured ferocious hand-to-hand combat. The Comanches “whipped” their opponents and reclaimed the three thousand horses the Blackfeet had stolen.17

  This was the sort of war-without-quarter they were now raining down on the hapless white farmers of the western frontier. The only real chance they had was to circle the wagons or the horses and hope they could kill enough Indians to make it too costly for them to continue. Mostly the settlers did not stand a chance.

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  The Texan solution to these problems—ranging companies—was unique in western military history. That was largely because, by anyone else’s standards, the companies made no sense at all. They violated every rule of military organization and protocol; every standard of hierarchy that allowed a traditional army to function. They fit no known category: They were neither police nor regular army nor militia. They had been officially organized, in 1835 and 1836, behind the thunderous oratory of Cynthia Ann’s uncle Daniel Parker, who became the prime mover in their establishment.18 They were meant to step into the void left by the army that had fought at San Jacinto, almost all of which had been furloughed by 1837. The plan had looked good on paper. Six hundred mounted gunmen—Parker’s legislation referred to them as “rangers,” the first official use of the word—were commissioned to hunt Indians and defend the frontier.19

  But in reality, the tiny, resourceless government provided neither guns nor men nor mounts.20 It provided no uniforms, provisions, or barracks. There were never anywhere near six hundred men that could be classified as Rangers; often fifty was more like it; sometimes one hundred. And because there was no formal, political organization around them, no one was designated to appoint officers. They arose casually and by acclaim and solely on merit; the rank and file gave them their commissions. In the absence of provisions, Rangers hunted for themselves, often going into the field with only water and a mixture of sugar and parched corn they called “cold flour”;21 sometimes they were given food by the communities they defended. Sometimes they stole chickens. The only thing the government reliably provided, in its wisdom, was ammunition.

  Oddly, considering the fact that almost nothing was given them, there seems to have been no real problem with recruitment: The western part of Texas in those years was awash in young, reckless, single men with a taste for wide open spaces, danger,
and raw adventure.22 They were almost all in their twenties, and they came to San Antonio looking for something other than a comfortable, sedentary life on a farm. They liked the idea of killing Comanches and Mexicans. Most of the famous Ranger captains had completed their careers by the time they were thirty-two. They had no property other than their horses and often no steady jobs. Without them, the idea of ranging companies would never have worked. They were happy to stay in the field for three to six months, the usual length of a Ranger commission. (It was this semipermanence that made them different from militia.) On this seemingly nonsensical model, Texas’s primitive Indian fighting organizations developed in the years 1836 to 1840. The Rangers were simply what was needed, and they grew organically from that premise.

  They began to patrol the frontier, looking for Comanches to kill. Since they were untried young men and did not know any better, they adapted quickly to this lethal new world of horses and weapons and Indian tactics. But they did not learn quickly enough to prevent appalling losses. The story of these first informal attempts to fight the Comanches will never be fully understood. That is because almost all of them went unrecorded. The new frontier folks, especially the Ranger types, were not literate, and they were not thinkers. They would rarely even acknowledge their victories (as whites were always falling all over themselves to do in the West, even when all they did was avoid disaster), let alone their defeats. The Rangers were just a dirty, ill-clad, underfed squad of irregulars anyway. They didn’t write letters and didn’t keep diaries. They rarely issued reports of any kind; often they didn’t tell anyone at all what they had done. Nor were there any journalists around of the sort who would later chronicle, with detail and considerable fanfare, the Indian battles of the 1870s. The few reporters in east Texas towns like Houston, Richmond, and Clarksville would not begin to grasp who the Rangers were or what they had accomplished or how they had changed American warfare until after the outbreak of the Mexican war in 1846. The little that is known about what happened on the frontier during the years of the Republic comes from a handful of memoirists who participated in it and wrote it down only later.

  From the evidence that does exist, however, it is apparent that many young men died fighting Comanches in battles that must have been cruelly one-sided. Ranger John Caperton estimated that “about half the rangers were killed off every year” and that “the lives of those who went into the service were not considered good for more than a year or two.”23 He also wrote that, of the one hundred forty young men in San Antonio in 1839, “100 of them were killed in various fights with Indians and Mexicans.”24 (Most would have been killed by Indians.) Those are very large numbers in a town with a population of only two thousand. There is a sense, when one reads histories of the Battle at Plum Creek, or of the bloody Moore raid that followed it, that the Texans quickly mastered the art of anti-Comanche warfare. This was not true. Plum Creek was a fiasco brought on as much by Buffalo Hump’s failure to control his army and to stop them from looting as it was by the bravery of Texas fighters. Moore’s success on the Colorado was entirely the result of surprise: The Comanches did not yet believe the white man would come after them in their homelands.

  Colonel Moore’s first, near-disastrous, attack on a Comanche camp offers a better look at what most of those early engagements might have looked like. So does Captain John Bird’s scouting expedition, which left Fort Milam on the Brazos River (near Belton, Texas) on May 27, 1839, with thirty-one Rangers. Hunting for “depredating” Indians, they came upon a group of twenty-seven of them skinning buffalo. Pleased at their marvelous good luck, the white men spurred toward them, and the Comanches of course fled because it was not their way ever to receive any sort of charge.25 The Rangers then gave chase and pursued them for three miles. Their horses, as usual, were no match for the Comanche ponies. So they gave up and headed back to the fort. Now, however, they began to notice that the Comanches had turned, too. Suddenly, the Comanches were pursuing them. In the words of one officer, they were “hurling their arrows upon us from every direction.”26 And there were forty of them. Bird then made the sort of error that experienced Comanche fighters would later never make: He fled like a scared jackrabbit. On the open prairie, that might have been the end of his company, especially since the Indian force, led by none other than Buffalo Hump, had now grown to some three hundred.27

  But Bird got lucky. He and his fleeing company came upon a ravine that offered cover. What followed was typical of Ranger battles of the day: The white men took cover, the Indians charged, men on both sides died, and the Indians finally withdrew, unwilling to take the losses it would require to pry the white men, with their fire-spitting Kentucky rifles, from their positions. Also typical was the way the white man spun it: Bird actually managed to claim victory, even though he was dying when he did so. Six of his soldiers died, too. Others were wounded. He had taken 30 percent or more casualties. The reality was that the ravine had saved him and his men from outright slaughter. One can imagine many such moments on the prairie, every one of them lost to history, in which gallant, pursuing Rangers became desperate, fleeing Rangers, and in which no ravine was found and they all died quickly, or if they were unlucky enough not to die quickly, were slowly tortured to death by fire and other means. They were learning about that, too. (Veteran Indian fighters were widely believed to save one bullet for themselves, though there is only one recorded instance of it: In 1855, U.S. Infantry officer Sam Cherry’s horse fell on him in a fight with Comanches. Pinned, he calmly shot five times at his attackers, then, surrounded by exulting Indians, he turned the gun to his temple for the last shot.)28

  The Rangers were a rough bunch. They drank hard and liked killing and fistfighting and knife-fighting and executing people they deemed criminals or enemies. As time went by, and so many of them were killed, creating a sort of natural selection in their ranks, they got even rougher, more brutal, and more aggressive. They looked the part, too. Though the idealized Ranger wore a leather hat with its brim turned up, a kerchief, cotton shirt, and plain britches, the reality was something else. They wore whatever pleased them. Sometimes that meant colorful Mexican serapes and wide-brimmed sombreros. Sometimes fur hats, bobtailed coats, or dirty panamas. Often it meant head-to-toe buckskins or bits and pieces of buffalo robes. Some went about naked to the waist, wearing the equivalent of Indian breechclouts over leggings.29 Many were large, physically imposing men with thick, brawny arms, long hair, and full beards. They had names like “Bigfoot” Wallace (who was truly huge, and a savage fighter), “Alligator” Davis (because he had wrestled one to a draw on the Medina River), and “Old Paint” Caldwell (because his skin was so mottled it looked like peeling paint). Seen from the more civilized parts of nineteenth-century America, they occupied a place in the social order just this side of brigands and desperados. They were not whom you wanted to pick a fight with in a frontier saloon.

  And so it was remarkable that this group of violent, often illiterate, and unmanageable border ruffians should give its full and unswerving allegiance to a quiet, slender twenty-three-year-old with a smooth, boyish face and sad eyes and a high-pitched voice who looked younger than his years. His name was John Coffee Hays. He was called Jack. The Comanches, who feared him greatly, called him “Capitan Yack,”30 as did the Mexicans, who put a high price on his head. He was the über-Ranger, the one everyone wanted to be like, the one who was braver and smarter and cooler under fire than any of the rest of them. He was one of the finest military commanders America has ever produced, a fact that San Antonians suspected as early as the late 1830s but the rest of the world would not learn until the Mexican war, when he became a national hero and his terrifying Rangers passed almost instantly into myth. Though he fought on the Texas frontier and Mexico for less than twelve years, he personally put an indelible stamp not only on the Texas Rangers—an organization that might be said to have arisen in imitation of him—but also the American West.

  There is a photograph taken of him in 1865, when
he was forty-eight, and it tells you everything about him. The face is still boyish, the hair thick and swept back, the features regular and moderately handsome and generally unexceptional except for one absolutely striking characteristic: his eyes. They are deep, wise, dead calm, a bit sad, and, even from a distance of 140 years, riveting. They are the eyes of a man who is not afraid of anything.31 He was the first great Indian fighter on the plains frontier; he was the legend that spawned a thousand other legends, dime novels, and Hollywood movies.

  He was born in Little Cedar Lick, Tennessee, in 1817 into a prosperous family of soldiers. His grandfather served with Andrew Jackson during the Indian Wars and later sold Jackson his famous home, the Hermitage. Hays’s father also served under Jackson and named his son for one of Jackson’s most trusted officers, John Coffee.32 Like many other young men looking for adventure, especially Tennesseans, young Jack migrated to Texas after the battle of San Jacinto, arriving in San Antonio probably in 1838, where he soon found work as a surveyor. Surveying in those years was the actual mechanism by which the settlers pushed their way westward into Indian lands. After independence Texas gave to new settlers a sort of land grant known as a “head right.” In order to give people clear title to the land, someone had to go out with levels, chains, and surveyors’ compasses and certify the claim. The Penateka Comanches, predictably, hated them and went out of their way to hunt them down. It was probably the most dangerous job in North America. The year Hays arrived, most of the men who did it were killed by Indians.33

  Still, the job appealed to Hays, who was after adventure as much as wages. Surveying parties began to include not only the surveyors, but armed guards for the surveyors, as well as adventuresome types who just felt like tagging along, exploring the land, doing some hunting, and possibly shooting an Indian.34 For the fearless, the unattached, and the rough-and-ready, it was a good time to be living in San Antonio, Texas. The land on the edge of the Balcones Escarpment was strikingly beautiful. There were gentle live-oak savannahs, and in the spring they exploded into a rainbow spectrum of wildflowers. Game abounded: buffalo, bear, deer, antelope, wild turkeys, sandhill cranes, coyotes, wolves, and deer by the tens of thousands. The crystal clear limestone rivers like the Llano, the Guadalupe, the Pedernales, and the San Marcos were jumping with fish.35