Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  Protection of the frontier and handling of Indians were federal responsibilities. But on the other hand, both the Indians and the U.S. Army were on Texas soil. The Army had no authority over the white citizens of Texas, and Army commanders could not behave or operate as they could on a federal frontier. Meanwhile, they were bound by an Eastern-imposed Indian policy, which did not envision aggressive war. The Army accepted the task of protecting the frontier, but the federal government refused the job of removing the Indians. This excited great exasperation in Texas, especially when in 1846, and again in 1848, the government went through an elaborate farce of making treaties with the Plains Indians at Comanche Peak, having these ratified by the Senate, and signed by President Polk. These treaties were absurd. They did not guarantee the Comanches and Kiowas a reservation or line of demarcation in Texas, because the federal government had no powers to grant them state lands. They did not halt the white advance to the edge of Comanchería, because Washington had no powers to do this, either. Finally, the policy-makers utterly failed to take the nature of the Comanches and Kiowas into account. These were hunting Indians, who had never in tribal history planted a seed in the ground. They were war Indians, who had seized and held the richest buffalo grounds; stealing horses and ripping scalps was at the root of their value system. They were strong Indians, too, who had avoided all contact with the white man, and therefore suffered none of the demoralization that affected tribal cultures that succumbed to white artifacts or had their sense of superiority shaken by dependence on European ways.

  They were not humble before the treaty-makers; they were proud and arrogant, as they had a right to be. They took American gifts, but their promises were as worthless as Washington's over the years. The Kiowa-Comanches never accepted, though they may have understood, the fact that the Tejanos and the Americanos were not two separate peoples or nations. A significant but little-mentioned aspect of federal–Texas relations with these tribes was that the Indians did consider the Americans friends of a sort, and accepted their agents in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma, but they considered Texas another country, and one they had a right to raid until the end of their independent days.

  As every Texas-born historian, with roots on the old frontier, has tried to point out, this peace policy with the Plains Indians was not humanitarian, but mistaken. It only deferred the destruction of the tribes, while it further brutalized the white population for another thirty years along the vast frontier.

  The government placed a string of forts along the Comanche frontier: Fort Worth, Fort Belknap, Fort Inge, Fort Clark, Fort Duncan. These ran along a general north–south line just west of the 98th meridian and the San Antonio–Dallas line. Eventually, other forts—Lancaster, Davis, Stockton, and Bliss—protected the California trail through completely unpopulated west Texas. These forts never adequately served their purpose, which was protection of the white frontier to their east. They did not and could not separate Indians raiders from the white settlements. They were static, while they were faced with continuing guerrilla war. They were separated by hundreds of miles through which Indians could ride at will; their garrisons were too small to cope with the numbers of Plains tribes involved; and for many years the troops themselves were inadequate and unequipped for the task. When the federal government assumed the job of protecting the Texas frontier, its army had no formal cavalry branch. Some of the first troops sent out on the edge of the vast Plains were infantry, mounted on mules. As Texans remarked bitterly, the only way they could damage the hard-riding Comanches was possibly by causing the Indians to laugh themselves to death. One Texas editor likened infantry toiling over the immense distances of the Plains, in pursuit of Comanches, to a "sawmill on the ocean." They were generally about as useful. Yet the War Department, dominated by men who never saw the West, was painfully slow to organize an effective horse arm. No real improvement came in Texas until Jefferson Davis became Secretary of War. Davis believed in cavalry; he also had a consuming interest in the West. He sent a succession of outstanding officers to Texas. He was accused of training warriors for the South, but he did bring some relief to Texans.

  Although they were always scorned by the Texans, the bluecoats did learn to fight Indians; but the constant irritant was that Washington did not want them to fight. Federal soldiers were not permitted to kill an Indian unless they were attacked; in fact, they were required to protect Indians from Texans at times. Above all, the passive stance was fatal against a foe who understood all the niceties of partisan war. What the Army did was to grant the Comanches their Plains sanctuary, but to afford no sanctuary to the white pioneers in their rear.

  In 1849 alone, incomplete figures indicate that at least 149 white men, women, and children were killed on the northwest Texas frontier. The effect of this kind of warfare, in a region where homesteads were many miles apart and people were very few, is easily imagined.

  The Texas State Gazette, in September 1849, printed the views of a man with vast experience and knowledge of the Plains tribes gained on the Santa Fe trail:

  I see that the Comanches are still continuing their forays upon the Texas border, murdering and carrying off defenseless frontier settlers who had been granted protection. . . . They must be pursued, hunted, run down, and killed—killed until they find we are in earnest. . . . If Harney can have his own way, I cannot but believe he will call in Hays, McCulloch, and all the frontier men, and pursue the Comanches to the heads of the Brazos, the Colorado, and even up under the spurs of the Rocky Mountains—they must be beaten up in all their covers and harassed until they are brought to the knowledge of . . . the strength and resources of the United States.

  But Harney, the Army commander, and his successors were rarely to have their way; they were circumscribed by distant policy. Nor did Harney and other officers want any part of Rangers. They could not ask for them without admitting their own forces were not the best Indian-fighters in the world. Parties of state troops were called for brief periods of service, but for the ten years following the Mexican War there was no real Ranger organization. The good men had gone, and the Rangers who did take the field from time to time were badly led and did poorly. There was a need for something like the

  Rangers, but Austin would or could not pay for their upkeep; besides, border defense was a federal responsibility. Meanwhile, for long agonizing years, the government would not admit the bankruptcy of its Indian policies in Texas.

  Considered of equal importance to the army by the government were its Indian agents. These were civil officers whose duty was to execute Indian laws and implement treaty terms and policy; over-all, their mission was to see that the Indians kept the peace. In Texas, the Indian agent had no authority over civilians or state officers, and his control over Indians was at best always theoretical. Whatever results an agent got he got with persuasion and the force of his personality; he specifically had no control over federal troops.

  These limitations were not understood either by the Texas population or by Washington, both of whom apparently expected the Indian agents to keep the aborigines under control by reading them the white man's law. Some aspects of this law were ridiculous to Indians, such as the treaty the United States signed with Mexico by which Indians were not permitted to raid south of the Rio Grande.

  The principal figure among Texas Indian agents was Major Robert S. Neighbors, a Texan who had worked with Indians for the Republic. Neighbors from the start had an impossible job, because he could not win and hold the confidence of the Indians without losing that of the whites. One of the worst problems Indian agents faced was the desire of whites to start trouble. Texas had no laws preventing its citizens from trading with Indians. One particularly bothersome trader, George Barnard, had a post high on the Brazos, from which he sold Indians liquor and firearms and stirred up trouble for all. The Army wanted to remove Barnard, but had no authority to take such action within the confines of a sovereign state. The Governor of Texas had no objection to getting rid of all gun
-runners and traders, but could secure no law to do so; nor did any federal code apply. The position of these traders was actually impregnable for many years; all deplored them, no one did anything about them in the squabbling over state–federal jurisdiction.

  The main work of the Indian agents, Neighbors, Rollins, Stem, and others, was not with the Plains tribes but with the border remnants in west central Texas, the Witchita bands, Tonkawas, Lipans, and similar small surviving groups. By 1850, the farm line had reached its natural limits along the 98th meridian, and these Indians were caught in limbo. The Anglos had pushed the game—in numbers Indians could live on—beyond their lands. None of these tribes dared venture out too far on the lordly Comanches' range. They wandered about on the fringes of the white man's world. They were hungry, and in some cases actually starving. They committed a number of small depredations, such as killing beeves and stealing horses.

  Agent John Rollins's report made it clear that the choice of these tribes was between stealing and starving, and even some Texas newspapers admitted that the "tame" Indians presented a pitiable sight. The Penateka Comanches, who had lost most of their range, were equally destitute. There were winters when the Indians ate all their dogs, and then their horses, the Indian's most prized possession. All these tribes had had considerable contact with European civilization, had tasted the white man's wars, and had been debilitated by both. They lived in terrible psychological confusion, unable to shake old Amerind values, unable to fully adopt white ways, having no longer any real belief in either.

  Nothing was done about this Indian detritus until Jefferson Davis became Secretary of War. Davis wrote Governor Bell of Texas in 1853, outlining certain problems of defense, among which was the fact that the Federal government could not give the Indians a defined territory in Texas. Davis promised that if the state would set aside lands for an Indian reservation, the government would restrict the savages to it, and be able to take control of them if they strayed off it. In February 1854, the state legislature set aside twelve leagues, or about 70,000 acres. Neighbors and Captain Randolph Marcy of the U.S. Army surveyed two separate reserves, one for the Anadarcos, Wacos and other semiagricultural tribes a few miles below Fort Belknap, called the Brazos Reservation, and another, on the Clear Fork of the Brazos about twenty miles to its southwest. This was to be the Penateka home. Both reserves had wood and water, and lay in beautiful, rolling country.

  Neighbors had the exhausting task of drawing the Indians in. In doing this, he won the respect of every civil and military officer in this part of Texas, but the hatred of most of the white settlers, who wanted the Indians exterminated or driven entirely away. Neighbors, who was a big, strong, immensely courageous man, patient with savages but angrily impatient with white prejudices, had to deal with Indian irresponsibility, interference by the Army, and white intransigence all at the same time. He got the Indians to congregate, but the promised food did not arrive. Then, a party of soldiers attacked his peaceful Indians for no apparent cause. Citizens fired on a large group of Tonkawas who were on their way to the reserve, scattering them. The whites feared all Indians and considered any mounted or armed Indian fair game. Some of Neighbor's assistants were incompetent and caused serious trouble. But in the end, Neighbors won the Indians' confidence completely. By what still seems superhuman efforts, he got virtually every tribesman in Texas into the Brazos Reserves. Even half the Penatekas, who were dying of hunger this winter, arrived at Clear Fork, though another 500 apparently joined the northern Comanche bands. Neighbors was forthright, religious, immensely ethical rather than pious, and even the Comanches trusted him. The Penatekas presented a peculiar problem on the reservation, because they had never farmed and refused to plant corn. But still, the policy, under Neighbors's direction, seemed on its way to success. Tragically, however, Robert Neighbors was more successful at winning friends and influencing people among the Indians than in getting the cooperation or sympathy of his own kind. Because he protected his charges and saw to their welfare against the wishes of his own people, he was universally known as an Indian-lover on the harsh frontier.

  Conditions in Texas improved briefly in 1856. The gathering of the border tribes into the reserves helped end petty depredations. More important was the appearance of the best-mounted regiment that ever rode the American West: Albert Sidney Johnston's 2d U.S. Cavalry.

  When Jefferson Davis became Secretary of War in 1853, he was the first national government officer to recognize that the utterly different terrain and conditions on the edge of the Great Plains required a different military approach. Davis reorganized the U.S. Army between 1853 and 1857. He laid the groundwork for the famous cavalry operations in the West. He was never given the credit he deserved for his vision and effort, because the gathering national storm obscured most of it. Davis, correctly, was accused of furthering the military stance of the South; in Texas, however, he seems only to have served a national interest and purpose. He left a series of papers, showing clearly he understood the enormous difference between the problems the United States faced east of the Mississippi and on the edge of the Plains. In the West, a scattered people could not hope to defend themselves under the old militia system, and while cavalry was more expensive than infantry (the government's main objection), it was ten times more effective. Davis thought the dividing line between East and West lay at the 100th meridian, along which the forts then lay. West of that line, the Army had to operate in new ways: in strong garrisons, not scattered, tiny forts that excited Indian contempt, and through mounting of effective punitive expeditions, "to pursue and punish the offenders," much as the French then operated in Algeria. Davis was greatly interested that the West should be won. Of course, he expected it to be added to the South upon conquest; his vision did not recognize the fact that the cotton kingdom had reached its ordained boundaries.

  The same North–South cloud has obscured the tremendous work of the old 2d Cavalry. Its commanders and most of its officers were Southerners, and its legends became lost in later prejudices. For a variety of reasons the 2d became outstanding. The regiment, a fighting unit, naturally pulled the better soldiers, throughout the army; and Texas, with fighting, surveying, and road-building to be done, was a career soldier's paradise in the 1850s. Then, the regiment had style; Davis saw to it that many appointments went to gentlemen. He was charged with training Southerners for a coming war, perhaps with justice, for in addition to Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert E. Lee, John B. Hood, and five other future Confederate generals were on its rolls. But the 2d also had George H. Thomas and George Stoneman, and a dozen lesser lights of Union fame.

  Johnston was effective, but he had too little time. In 1857 Davis left the War office, and the greater part of the 2d Cavalry was ordered off to Utah. The Comanches remained ignorant of many things out on the Plains, but they were never totally insensible or stupid. As soon as Johnston's pressure subsided, the pressure on the Texas frontier became severe. Again, hundreds of farmhouses went up in flames.

  Hardin R. Runnels, who became governor of Texas in January 1858, was to be known primarily for his Secessionist stand. But dissatisfaction with frontier defense always lay close to the heart of Texas politics. Runnels was elected partly on account of this discontent, and Runnels was always a deep conservative, who believed the shortest distance between two points was a straight line. When the legislature, despairing of federal action, authorized state troops again, Runnels immediately appointed John S. (Rip) Ford Senior Captain and supreme commander of all Texas forces. Ford at this time was the most experienced Ranger available to serve the state.

  Ford got specific orders: call a hundred men, establish a camp somewhere on the frontier, cooperate with the Federals and Indian agents, "but to brook no interference with his plan of operation from any source." The Governor agreed his position would call for delicacy, but stated Ford had the judgment to carry on. Nor could Runnels have appointed a better man for the job.

  Ford was under no misapprehension as to
what he was supposed to do. He was to "follow any and all trails of hostile or suspected hostile Indians" and "inflict the most summary punishment" on them. He was to do this quickly, because the public was howling for action, and also because his appropriation was limited and he could not exceed it. He also had something no other Captain had so far had: the authority to dismiss officers now in state service, and to replace them with his own.

  The Governor gave Ford a free hand; both men understood that both their reputations rested on "drastic action," as Webb said.

  Ford moved into northwest Texas, to the Brazos Indian Reserve. He planned to enlist Indian allies and scouts. Here, he was entirely successful; the son of the agent, L. S. Ross, recruited and led 113 assorted Indians under Ford's command. On April 22, 1858, Ford left Camp Runnels, as he called his Brazos station, with 102 Rangers, a pack train, and more than 100 Indians. He had planned his campaign. Indian spies had ridden far ahead and located Comanches north of the Red River. This was beyond the Texas border, but as one Texan observer said, Ford was after Indians, not out to learn geography.

  Now began the bloodiest two years in Texas history since 1835–36.

  Behind his screen of Indian scouts, Ford crossed the Red on April 29. On May 10, his column found Indian signs—a buffalo with two Comanche arrows sticking in it and the marks of meat-laden Comanche travois. On May 11, Ford carefully reconnoitered a large Comanche camp. He had not been discovered. He moved swiftly, quietly, without campfires, bugles, shouted orders, and similar nonsense of the Army in Indian country. Like many old Rangers, Rip Ford could out-ride, out-trail, out-sneak, and above all, out-think any Indian.