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 expedition was political from start to finish. Ford’s raid had prompted the U.S. Army commander in Texas, the chubby, profane General David Twiggs, to obtain authority directly from army headquarters at West Point to abandon the passive defense policy the army had been forced to put up with since 1849. A punitive force was thus organized at Fort Belknap under the command of the dapper, blond, egotistical Mississippian Earl Van Dorn, who would later find fame as a Confederate major general. With five companies of troops and 135 friendly Indians under the command of the wiry, ambitious twenty-year-old college student Sul Ross, they rode north on September 15, 1858. They were tracking Buffalo Hump, the seemingly indestructible Penateka chief who had refused to go on the reservation and now rode with other Comanche bands. Their Wichita scouts soon found a large village of Comanches next to a village of Wichitas. The Indians were completely unaware of the danger.

  The reason they were unaware of danger is that they had just concluded a treaty with a Captain Prince, the commanding army officer at Fort Arbuckle, which was located just to the east. While the intrepid Van Dorn was at Fort Belknap making ready to strike the Comanches a deathblow, Prince was hobnobbing and making peace with the chiefs of the same band—Buffalo Hump, Hair-Bobbed-on-One-Side, and Over-the-Buttes. Neither Van Dorn nor Prince had any idea what the other was doing.49 Pleased with what seemed to be at least a temporary peace and freedom from worry about attacks like the one Rip Ford had made, the Wichitas and Comanches were feasting, trading, gambling, and generally carrying on. They were completely aware of the approach of the bluecoats and “friendlies” under Van Dorn and Ross. Several reports on their location and strength were given to Hair-Bobbed-on-One-Side, who considered the matter and concluded that the white man would never attack them having just made a treaty with them. The omens were good. They were safe. They went to sleep.

  At dawn the next morning Van Dorn’s troops attacked the Comanche village with a vengeance. Ross and his reserve Indians had run off the horses, so most of the warriors were forced to fight on foot. It was more of a massacre than a fight. Two hundred blue-coated troops were in the village, blasting away into the tipis, while the Indians frantically tried, as they always did, to cover the retreat of their families. Seventy Indians were killed, untold numbers wounded. Buffalo Hump managed to escape with most of his warriors. The Rangers lost four killed, and twelve wounded, including Van Dorn with an arrow through his navel and Ross with two bullet wounds. Both men had to stay on the field of battle for five days to recuperate.50 The army burned one hundred twenty tipis, along with all the Comanche ammunition, cooking utensils, clothing, dressed skins, corn, and subsistence stores. Those who escaped had only the clothing on their back, and many were afoot, since the soldiers had captured three hundred horses, too.51

  Though what had been perpetrated upon the Comanches amounted to a cruel trick, the army boasted a glorious victory. The Texas press wasn’t so sure. One paper expressed the opinion that the effect of what became known as the Battle of the Wichita Village “will, probably, be a cessation of depredations upon the border settlements for a time at least,” but insisted that “an end of the war should be the blow followed by active, energetic operations.”52 The latter did not happen anytime soon. On November 5, 1858, barely seven weeks later, Sul Ross himself noted that, since the battle, Comanches had stolen more than one hundred head of horses from settlements in northern Texas. The violent Indian raids of the fall of 1858, which had set off John Baylor’s reservation war, came at least in part in reprisal for Van Dorn’s attack.53

  Still, there was clear meaning in both Ford’s and Van Dorn’s attacks. They were unambiguously offensive, for one thing. They showed a willingness, for the first time, to cross the Red River in pursuit of Comanches, and they showed that such tactics could at least kill Indians. Whether they could stop raiding remained to be seen. They also showed that advances in weaponry, especially the six-shooter and the breech-loading carbine, had radically altered the basic balance of power. When two hundred men could take on and devastate a Comanche force twice their size, there was a lesson to be learned. Jack Hays of course had demonstrated this in 1844 at Walker’s Creek. But nobody remembered that now.

  Twelve

  WHITE QUEEN OF THE COMANCHES

  EVEN IN ONE of the bloodiest years on the frontier—1860—the killing of Martha Sherman stood out. Maybe it was because she had been gang-raped and tortured while she was pregnant. Maybe it was because of her dead baby or because the precise, horrific details of what happened to her, which she herself related in the few days she lived, spread so quickly in Parker, Jack, and other counties. Whatever the case, in the days following the Sherman raid, all hell broke loose. People panicked. They fled the frontier as fast as they could. “The indications are,” wrote twenty-eight-year-old schoolteacher Jonathan Hamilton Baker in his diary on November 28, “that our county will soon be depopulated.”1 Caravans were moving. The counties were emptying. Within days of the raid there were a hundred deserted farms in the area. Most of the people west of Weatherford had retreated eastward, leaving, in the words of one rancher, “the extreme frontier post.”2

  Yet not everyone was leaving. A twenty-four-year-old named Charles Goodnight, destined to become one of the most famous cattlemen in Texas and one of the originators of the great cattle drives, rode through the chill, rainy night, recruiting a posse to pursue the raiders. He found eight willing men who met the next morning at the house of an old man named Isaac Lynn, whose daughter and son-in-law had recently been brutally murdered by Comanches. When Goodnight entered the house, he found Lynn “sitting before a large log fire in the old-fashioned fireplace, with a long, forked dogwood stick, on which was an Indian scalp, thoroughly salted. The hair was tucked inside. As he turned it carefully over the fire, the grease oozed out of it. . . . He looked back over his shoulder, bade me good morning, and then turned to his work of roasting the scalp. I do not think I ever saw so sad a face.” Since his daughter’s death he had become a collector of scalps and asked people to bring him any they had. He roasted them so they wouldn’t spoil. Like so many people on the bleeding frontier, he was drowning in hatred and grief.3

  Goodnight and his men left immediately to track Peta Nocona’s raiders. Because the Indians were traveling with one hundred fifty stolen horses, this was easily done. The Comanches, who normally took pains to avoid being tracked, scattering their herds when they came to gravel, rock, or hard ground, were soon well beyond where white men had ever followed them before. And so they had stopped taking precautions and, in Goodnight’s words, “were driving in a body.” Goodnight and his party had traveled at least one hundred twenty miles across open prairies and swift, cold rivers. It had rained incessantly. They were without food or bedding, and now they realized they were approaching a camp with a large number of Indians, many more than had been with Peta Nocona’s raiders. This was Nautdah’s village on Mule Creek, the great supply depot and clearinghouse for the frontier raids. Satisfied that they knew where the Indians had gone, and aware that they had no chance against so many of them, Goodnight and his trackers turned back.4

  A full-scale expedition was quickly mounted. By the time it coalesced at Fort Belknap on December 13, it consisted of forty Rangers, twenty-one army soldiers from the Second Cavalry at Fort Cooper, and some seventy local volunteers, including Goodnight as scout. They were commanded by twenty-three-year-old Sul Ross, the wiry, ambitious young man who had recruited Indian scouts for the Van Dorn expedition while still an undergraduate at Wesleyan University in Florence, Alabama. Ross had fought bravely at the Battle of Antelope Hills and had been gravely wounded and had thus made a name for himself. He had been chosen personally by Governor Sam Houston to replace the incompetent and love-struck Middleton Johnson, under whom Ross had served. Ross’s commission would turn out to be a brilliant move for both men and convince people that Houston was doing something about the Comanche problem. Ross would use it as the springboard to a dazzling career.
He later became the youngest general in the Confederacy, a popular two-term governor of Texas, and president of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (now Texas A&M). For the moment, plenty of people hated him, especially John Baylor’s rabble-rousers, who saw him as an Indian sympathizer and threatened to hang him if they found him. Ross himself had higher purposes. In a letter written later that contained more than a hint of vainglory, he wrote: “I determined to make a desperate attempt to curb the insolence of these implacable enemies of Texas. . . . I planned to accomplish this by following them into their fastness and carry the war into their own homes where this tribe, the most inveterate raiders on the border, retired with their captives and booty to their wild haunts amid the hills and valleys of the beautiful Canadian and Pease rivers.”5 One can almost hear the campaign speeches and slogans stirring in his brain.

  The cavalcade headed northwest in bitter cold, over mesquite prairies scarred by ravines and limestone ridges. This was open country, dun-colored and wintry. The young schoolteacher Baker, who joined the volunteers, later recalled “poor prairie uplands with tolerably good valleys along the creeks where the grass was fine. There was no timber along our route today except small hackberries in the valleys and scrubby mesquite on the prairies.”6 They saw thousands of buffalo. The water of the Big Wichita and Pease rivers was “salty and gyppy,” and tasted awful. At night there were heavy frosts; the men wrapped themselves in blankets and buffalo robes and shivered before small fires. They crossed rivers in the tracks of the buffalo, to avoid quicksand.7 On December 17 came rain, dense fog, and briefly warmer air. On December 18 there were thunderstorms in the night. The next morning Goodnight found a pillow slip with a little girl’s belt and Martha Sherman’s Bible in it. Why had the Indians made a point of taking the Bible? According to Goodnight, Comanche shields, made of two layers of the toughest rawhide from the neck of a buffalo and hardened in fire, were almost invulnerable to bullets when stuffed with paper. When Comanches robbed houses they invariably took all the books they could find.8

  On December 19, the Rangers and soldiers from the Second Cavalry, riding out ahead of the volunteers in a long valley bounded by a range of sand hills, spotted the Indian camp Charles Goodnight and his scouts had seen. They were lucky: A blustery norther had come up, of the sort the plains were famous for, and the soldiers’ position was concealed by blowing clouds of sand.9 There were not many Indians in the camp; the five hundred that Goodnight had theorized were no longer there. The few they could see were packing horses and mules and preparing to leave, unaware of the approach of the white men. Seeing this, Ross ordered the army sergeant to circle around to the other side of the camp, to block the Indians’ retreat.

  Then he and his sixty men attacked what were later determined to be fifteen Indians. Many of the latter were killed before they even picked up weapons. Others fled into the jaws of the trap and were cut down there. Once among them, the men realized that most of the occupants of the camp were women. There were a few old men, too, and a few warriors. In Goodnight’s account, the Rangers spared most, but not all, of the women they encountered. The federal troops, meanwhile, killed everyone they encountered, regardless of sex. As Goodnight described it:

  The Sergeant and his men [from the Second Cavalry] fell in behind on the squaws, six or eight in number, who never got across the first bend of the creek. They were so heavily loaded with meat, tent poles and camp equipage that their horses could not run. We supposed they had about a thousand pounds of buffalo meat in various stages of curing. The sergeant and his men killed every one of them, nearly in a pile.10

  The fight lasted only a few minutes and was more of a butchery than a pitched battle. Participants remembered some interesting details. The few warriors in the camp used their horses for breastworks, standing behind them when they were on their feet, and lying down behind them after they were shot down.11 In the midst of the struggle, the white soldiers found themselves under attack from fifteen or so dogs from the Indian camp, who tried valiantly to defend their Indian masters. Almost all were shot and killed.

  The battle ended in a brief running fight. Ross and Lieutenant Tom Kelliheir rode in pursuit of the last three Indians, who were mounted on two horses. After a mile, they caught up with the single Indian, who rode a splendid iron-gray stallion. Ross was about to shoot when the Comanche, who he could now see was carrying a small child, reined in the horse and, depending on which version you believe, either opened her robe to show her breasts, or cried “Americano! Americano!” She may have done both. In any case, her ploy worked: Ross did not shoot. He ordered Kelliheir to stay with her and the child while Ross took off after the other two riders. He soon caught them and fired his army Colt, hitting the rear rider, who also turned out to be a woman. As she fell, she dragged the main rider to the ground with her. He was a large man, fully armed. From his earlier behavior and the way he had barked commands, Ross had identified him as the main chief, and he looked the part. He was nude to the waist, his body streaked with bright pigments. He wore two eagle plumes in his hair, a disk of beaten gold around his neck embossed with a turtle, broad gold bands on his upper arms, and fawn-skin leggings trimmed out with scalplocks.12 He managed to land on his feet, seized his bow, and loosed several arrows. The following is Ross’s account of what happened next:

  [M]y horse, running at full speed, was very nearly up on top of [the man] when he was struck with an arrow which caused him to begin pitching or bucking, and it was with great difficulty that I kept my saddle, and in the meantime narrowly escaped several arrows coming in quick succession from the chief’s bow. . . . He would have killed me but for a random shot from my pistol, which broke his right arm at the elbow, completely disabling him. My horse then became quiet, and I shot the chief twice through the body, whereupon he deliberately walked to a small tree, the only one in sight, and leaning against it began to sing a wild, weird song. . . . As he seemed to prefer death to life, I directed the Mexican boy to end his misery by a charge of buckshot.13

  Other accounts suggest a slightly more complex drama, in which Ross and the chief conversed through an interpreter, the chief insisting that “when I am dead I will surrender but not before” and even trying to throw a spear at Ross with his good arm. Either way, the Indian was soon dead. A man named Anton Martinez, Ross’s manservant who had been a child captive of the Comanches—and who said he had been a slave in Peta Nocona’s own family—identified him as Peta Nocona. The final tally: twelve Indians dead, three captured. The third was a nine-year-old Comanche boy. The loss to the Comanches, who were hunkering down into their winter camps, was stunning: sixty-nine pack-mule loads of buffalo meat—something more than fifteen thousand pounds of it—and three hundred seventy horses.14

  Now Ross rode back to the place where Kelliheir held the woman and her child captive. The woman was filthy, covered with dirt and grease from handling so much bloody buffalo meat. But to Ross’s astonishment he noticed that she had blue eyes. And he saw that under the grime her short-cropped hair was lighter in color than Indian black. She was white. Not quite believing what they had found, they took her back to what was left of her village, which the soldiers were busily looting. They were also scalping the dead Indians, men and women alike. By now scalping was the common practice on both sides. Since two men claimed the scalp of Peta Nocona, they decided to split it into two parts.15

  The “white squaw” was then taken back to where Peta Nocona had been killed. She wept and wailed over his body. The soldiers did not let her stay there. They brought her to the main battlefield, where she was allowed to walk among the mutilated dead, carrying her child. She muttered in Comanche as she went, and wailed loudly only when she came to one young warrior who had white features. When Martinez, who spoke Comanche, asked her who he was, the woman replied cryptically, “He’s my boy, and he’s not my boy.” She later explained that he was the son of another white girl who had been captured by the Comanches and married an Indian. She had died but ha
d asked Nautdah to look after the boy as though he were her own son.

  She then told the Mexican how she had come to be there. In Ranger Frank Gholson’s account, she was with her two boys—whom the translator identified as Quanah and “Grassnut”—when the Rangers attacked. They fled, along with other women and children. “After I had gone some distance,” she told Martinez, “I missed both of my boys. I came back in search of them, coming as near the battle as I could. In this way I was caught. I am greatly distressed about my boys. I fear they are killed.”16 Ross, whose men had killed no one of that description, assured her that they were alive. She continued to weep. This was, after all, the second time in her life that she had seen people close to her massacred and scalped. The second time she had been taken captive by an alien culture whose language she did not speak.

  Through Martinez, she told Ross that she remembered that her father had been killed in a battle long ago and that she and her brother had been captured. That and other details convinced Ross that she might be “the long lost Cynthia Ann Parker.” With that, she stopped talking. According to Gholson, she also “gave them a lot of trouble trying to escape.” At some point Jonathan Baker noticed a tiny, elaborately beaded moccasin on the ground. He picked it up and was looking at it when he noticed that Nautdah was watching him closely. He then realized that the child was missing a shoe. The little girl toddled over to him and he gave her the moccasin.17 Nautdah lived a hard life, but she had found the time and energy to make this exquisite little shoe. The next day the men burned everything they could not carry, and rode out.