The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  It was bitter cold and raining hard when Ross got word at sunset on December 18 that Comanches were camped a few miles up the river, along a small freshwater stream called Mule Creek, just south of what is now the Texas-Oklahoma border. Ross and Spangler drove their men all night. Cureton’s volunteers had to stop when their horses became exhausted; Ross and Spangler pressed on. At daybreak on the nineteenth the Rangers and the troopers reached a ridge above the encampment. The Comanches appeared to be dismantling teepees and packing up to leave.

  Lawrence Sullivan “Sul” Ross: Indian fighter, Confederate general, governor of Texas, and self-proclaimed rescuer of Cynthia Ann Parker at the Pease River massacre of December 1860.

  Ross and Spangler knew their cold, bone-weary men and their spent horses would not be able to keep pace with the Indians. They couldn’t wait for the volunteers to catch up. If they were going to attack, they needed to do it now.

  Spangler, using cover from a chain of sand hills, took his men around the far side of the camp to cut off a retreat. Ross’s men advanced over the ridge. He promised a pistol and holster to the first man to present him with an Indian scalp. Then he gave the order to charge.

  THE BATTLE OF PEASE RIVER is one of those violent episodes in Texas history where fact and legend collide uneasily, leaving later generations to grope for the truth amid contradictory claims and shifting sensibilities. Sul Ross and his admirers—most notably James T. DeShields, an amateur historian whose book recounting the battle twenty years later became the definitive account—portrayed the battle as a glorious triumph for a small, intrepid band of Rangers who used the element of surprise and their own innate courage to overcome a much larger force. As Ross set out a decade later to build a political career, he and his supporters inflated his exploits at the Pease River in size and character. The detailed but highly embroidered memories of B. F. Gholson, who was likely not even at the battle, supported the DeShields-Ross version. Meanwhile, Ross’s critics, who emerged more gradually over the years, characterized the battle as a massacre of old men, women, and children.

  One enduring dispute was over the size of the Comanche encampment that morning. DeShields claimed there were between 150 and 200 warriors at the site. But many of the witnesses said the camp consisted of a small band of Comanche women, servants, and old men busily preparing buffalo meat and hides for the harsh winter ahead. A hunting party was out killing buffalo, and the camp followers trailing behind had set about butchering the dead animals, drying meat, and curing skins along the riverbank. Ross himself in his original report said the camp consisted of nine grass huts. It was in effect an on-site work crew engaged in the kind of drudgery that most Comanche warriors studiously avoided.

  No matter. The Rangers came rolling across the plain, guns blazing, while the troopers moved in from the right to cut off any retreat. The Indians panicked. The women in charge of moving the camp tried to flee by crossing Mule Creek on horses weighed down with hundreds of pounds of buffalo meat, tent poles, and skins. There they collided with Spangler and his troops coming at them from the opposite direction. Charles Goodnight, who arrived on the scene soon after the battle, said “the Sergeant and his men fell in behind on the squaws … and killed every one of them, almost in a pile.” Goodnight added that the sergeant “probably did not know them from bucks and probably did not care.”

  Other Comanches fled in panic. One old man tried to escape on horseback with a young girl holding on behind him, according to Ross’s written report to Sam Houston. Alongside them was another horse ridden by a middle-aged woman in a heavy buffalo robe. Ross said he and his top lieutenant, Tom Kelliher, gave chase and opened fire. His first shot killed the girl, who tumbled off the horse, dragging the old man after her. The man got up and let loose an arrow that struck Ross’s horse. Ross, trying to steady the animal, fired wildly several times before he finally hit the old Indian in the right arm. Then he dismounted and shot the man two more times. The Indian did not fall but staggered toward a small mesquite tree and began chanting a death song. Then Antonio Martínez, Ross’s Mexican servant, finished him off with a shot to the head.

  “Sul ran up to him and he was lying on his back, and he looked up at him and breathed about three times, and between breaths gritted his teeth like a wild hog and died,” said Gholson. Two soldiers hacked off the old man’s scalp, which they then carved in half and divided between themselves.

  Meanwhile, Kelliher chased down the woman in the buffalo robe. As he leveled his gun at her face, she cried out, “Americano!” The Ranger hesitated.

  Ross rode up and ordered him not to fire. “As soon as I looked at her face,” he later recalled, “I said: ‘Why, Tom, this is a white woman. Indians do not have blue eyes.’ “

  Nestled inside the woman’s robe was a baby girl.

  AT FIRST THE WOMAN STRUGGLED with her captors and Martínez, who spoke Comanche, warned her to stop. “They had to force her away from there, took hold of her and just put her on her horse,” Gholson recalled. “The Mexican was telling her that she would make them kill her if she didn’t come on.” The woman quieted down.

  This was the account that James DeShields compiled from Ross, Gholson, and their supporters, and its problems are multifold. For one thing, it was Spangler’s troopers, not Ross’s Rangers, who captured the woman and the baby. One sign of this was the fact that it was Spangler and his men who had custody of the prisoners from the moment the fighting ended, not Ross.

  The troopers escorted her back to the ruins of the encampment. She was, Ross later recalled, “very dirty and far from attractive in her scanty garments, as well as her person.” Gholson was even more brutal in his description: “She was sullen, was a hard looker, was as dirty as she could be and looked to me more like an Indian than a white woman.” H. B. Rogers, one of Ross’s Rangers, said the woman “was so dirty you could hardly tell what she looked like, but she was red-headed and freckle-faced.”

  She lingered over the bodies of her dead companions, including the old man and the young woman. “She uttered some words of moaning for every one that was killed,” said Gholson, “but seemed to be especially grieved over the body of one young warrior.” The Rangers thought the dead boy showed “signs of white blood” and figured he might be her son. They “scalped all the others but left him unscalped through respect for her,” Gholson reported.

  The woman was terrified of the troopers and the Rangers, and Ross said he tried to ease her distress. “I had the Mexican tell her in the Comanche language that we recognized her as one of our own people and would not harm her,” he recalled—a direct contradiction of Gholson’s account.

  Even after the Rangers sought to reassure her, however, she still seemed agitated. Eventually she told Martínez that she feared for the lives of her two sons, who had been in the camp earlier. “I’m greatly distressed about my boys,” she told him. “I fear they are killed.” Only after Ross and his men assured her that no other young boys had been killed did she seem to calm down somewhat.

  Charles Goodnight had a different explanation for her distress. She had been forced to watch as the Rangers and soldiers mutilated the corpses of the Indian dead for grisly souvenirs, looted the teepees, and set them ablaze. “We rode right over her dead companions,” Goodnight recalled. “I thought then and still think how exceedingly cruel it was.”

  Then there was the question of how many warriors were at the scene of the battle. “I was in the Pease River fight, but I am not very proud of it,” H. B. Rogers, a ranch hand, told an oral historian some sixty years later. “That was not a battle at all, but just a killing of squaws. One or two bucks and sixteen squaws were killed. The Indians were getting ready to leave when we came upon them.”

  James H. Baker, a young schoolteacher who was among the volunteers, put the number of dead even lower. After the battle, the volunteers caught up to Ross and his men, who were boisterously celebrating their victory with great yelling and whooping. The Rangers said they had killed twelve India
ns and taken three captives. Baker reported that he and the volunteers found only four dead bodies, all of them women. Other accounts put the likely number of dead Comanches at seven.

  Ross and Spangler, the cavalry commander, questioned the woman. She seemed in a daze, but they took her vague answers as confirmation of their belief that the Indians at the camp were related to the band that had conducted the bloody November raids. She indicated that most of the warriors had left for the main Comanche winter encampment, some two hundred miles west in the heart of Comancheria.

  The woman claimed not to know her name in English nor the name of her white family nor where she came from originally, and she could only vaguely recall the details of her capture by Comanches many years earlier. But upon further conversation, using Martínez as his interpreter, Ross believed it was likely that she was the legendary Cynthia Ann Parker. He decided to notify her white relatives at once. He sent a quick dispatch to the Dallas Herald, which published his account a few weeks later, puffing up his own role and downgrading that of the cavalrymen. The article reported triumphantly that Ross and his men had caught and killed the Indians responsible for the Parker County raids. Ross also claimed to have found Martha Sherman’s Bible at the campsite. “The evidence is conclusive—clothes, papers, &c., being recovered from, which proves beyond doubt that they are the guilty wretches,” the article reported.

  The unnamed correspondent went on to describe the captured white female prisoner: “This woman does not know her name, nor where she was taken from … She says there are four tribes banded together for the purpose of depredating on the frontier this winter and spring, and that they are camping upon the head waters of the Canadian and Red Rivers in a starving condition because of lack of buffalo.”

  Ross dispatched another letter—this one to Isaac Parker of Birdville, Texas, just outside Fort Worth—to inform him that the captured woman might well be his long-lost niece.

  As the years passed, and Sul Ross’s public career migrated from Texas Ranger to Confederate general to state senator to candidate for governor, his accounts of his actions at the Pease River expanded in their bravery and importance, aided and abetted by friendly historians such as DeShields, the journalist Victor Rose, who served as Ross’s chief political adviser, and fellow Rangers such as Gholson. For example, Ross’s first two accounts, written within days of the battle, make no mention of killing an Indian chief and put the number of horses captured at a mere forty. In a letter published in the Galveston News and Dallas Herald in 1875—at the time he first began considering running for public office—Ross for the first time tells the story of running down and killing a chief named Mohee. But by 1886, the year he was elected governor, Ross is claiming that the dead chief was Peta Nocona, the feared Comanche raider and Cynthia Ann’s husband. The size and composition of the Indian encampment also grew dramatically. Gholson would claim there were between 500 and 600 Indians and the number of captured Indian ponies jumped to 350.

  Gholson, who gave his account in interviews in 1928 and 1931—some seventy years after the battle—seems the least reliable of sources. His name is not on any of the duty lists for the units involved, and his stories at best seem to have come from his discussions with actual participants. “They represent far more fantasy, myth, and folklore than history,” wrote Paul H. Carlson and Tom Crum, two historians who have thoroughly dissected the facts and circumstances of the battle.

  Historians even got the date wrong: the granite historical marker erected by the state of Texas in 1936 near the site of the battle records the date as December 18, one day before the attack actually took place.

  Nonetheless, the battle won Sul Ross enduring fame as an Indian fighter. Sam Houston sang his praises. “Your success in protecting the frontier gives me great satisfaction,” the governor wrote to him.

  Ross went on to distinguished service as a two-term governor and president of the forerunner of today’s Texas A&M University. One contemporary observer said it was “this Pease River fight and the capture of Cynthia Ann Parker that made Sul Ross governor of Texas.”

  Ross himself was happy to feed the myth. “The fruits of this important victory can never be computed in dollars and cents,” he wrote in a letter after he became governor that sounds ghostwritten by the bombastic Victor Rose. “The great Comanche Confederacy was forever broken, the blow was decisive; their illustrious chief slept with his fathers and with him were most of his doughty warriors.”

  All of which was pure fantasy. The Comanche nation was as yet far from broken. The war between Texans and Comanches would continue for another fifteen years.

  The Pease River massacre, although celebrated as a great Ranger triumph over a superior force of Comanche warriors, was in truth just another revenge raid. The Comanches had killed five white women in northeastern Texas; in return, the troopers and Rangers killed at least four Comanche women. And, like the Comanches, the Rangers took scalps to verify the body count. In the merciless logic of the conflict, they had evened the score. As for Cynthia Ann Parker, a woman who twenty-four years earlier had been the victim of a massacre by one side had now been victimized again, only this time by the side that considered her one of their own.

  5.

  The Prisoner (Texas, 1861–1871)

  Slowed by the bitter cold and their human cargo, Sergeant John Spangler and his troops, accompanied by Sul Ross and his Rangers, took ten days to deliver the captured white woman and her baby girl to Camp Cooper, one of the chain of frontier forts that formed the uneasy perimeter between the settlers and the Indians of North Texas. Despite their efforts to put her at ease, Cynthia Ann said little and ate nothing but the dried buffalo meat she carried with her. Coming to a half-frozen creek one day, Cynthia Ann’s pony broke the ice with his front hoof. As she leaned over to drink some of the cold water with her hand, she lost hold of the little girl, who plunged into the stream. Cynthia Ann caught the child instantly, swooping her up and wrapping her in a shawl, then tucking her inside the vast smelly buffalo robe. Ross noted the speed and efficiency of a determined mother. He also noted that the child never cried.

  Spangler had formal custody of the prisoners. When they arrived at Camp Cooper, he turned them over to his commander, Captain N. G. Evans.

  Situated on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, Camp Cooper was a forlorn collection of thirteen small cabins and huts, most of them in an advanced state of disrepair. The damp cold penetrated the walls, floors, and ceilings of the six stone buildings, two mud huts, three picket-style sheds—wooden posts hammered directly into the ground with no frame or foundation—and two tarpaulins stretched over frames. Any attempt at repairs, an inspector had written the previous year, “would be a waste of the materials out of which they would be made.”

  Spangler and his men arrived soon after Christmas. The captives were taken to the stone guardhouse. Evans sought to question Cynthia Ann through an interpreter named Horace Jones. She told Jones she had lived among the Comanches for many years and said she had two sons who were still with them. It was unclear to Evans whether the woman was to be treated as a liberated captive or as a prisoner. “I have now the woman in the guard house and will await instructions from the department Commander as to her disposition,” he wrote to his immediate superior at U.S. Army headquarters in San Antonio.

  Evans turned the woman over to a fellow officer, Captain Innis Palmer, whose wife took charge of her. To the wives at the fort she looked and smelled like a savage, and so, despite her spirited objections, they stripped her of her Comanche garments, which they burned. Then they bathed and scrubbed her and dressed her in a secondhand pioneer outfit. It was the first time she had worn clothing with buttons in twenty-five years.

  “They found enough clothes to clothe her, had an old Negro mammy prepare some hot water and wash her thoroughly, combed her hair and let her look at herself in a mirror,” recalled Gholson. At first she seemed satisfied, but suddenly she dashed out the door. “It was a race such as I have never seen
before or since,” claimed Gholson. “In the lead was the squaw, jerking off clothes as she ran until she soon had on almost nothing; behind came the Negro mammy frantically waving a cloth or something, two or three bewildered white women … and the squaw’s little child, big enough to toddle around, following after.”

  Palmer asked Horace Jones to take the woman to his family quarters and look after her with his wife until she was identified and restored to her relatives. Jones refused. He told Palmer that as far as he was concerned, she was a wild Indian and would be constantly attempting to escape “and in all probability succeeding by stealing my horses.”

  Isaac Parker, older brother of Cynthia Ann’s late father, Silas, received Ross’s letter and read newspaper accounts suggesting the white woman captive might be his long-lost niece. Isaac was sixty-seven years old that winter, a gray-haired man with the thick white beard and stern countenance of a biblical elder. He had served in the Texas National Congress during most of its nine years of independence, and then as a senator in the state legislature for seven more. Over the years he had honored the memory of his murdered father and brothers by pushing through bills calling for greater protection for the frontier settlements, establishing payment and equipment for Ranger and volunteer groups, and demanding the return of all white captives. He was also a loyal supporter of Sam Houston, whom he had known for more than forty years. Like his older brother Daniel, Isaac had served as a middleman and conciliator between their hotheaded brother James and Houston, helping sponsor both James’s aggressive forays into Indian Territory and Houston’s peace policy. Isaac raised four children of his own with his wife, Lucy, on a farm near Birdville, a village some ten miles northeast of Fort Worth. He was known for his generosity and his keen commitment to his family. When state lawmakers created a new county west of Fort Worth in 1855, they named it in his honor.