by Drew McGunn
More than a dozen men who were either related to the Parkers or came from nearby farms met Will and his force when they arrived. The leader of the band was an older man, in his mid-fifties. As he approached Will, his face was hard edged and belied his soft-spoken voice, “Thank God you all have finally arrived. We prayed daily for Elisha to get through.”
After stretching from the long ride, Will went over to the group of survivors, “He arrived in San Antonio eight days ago. We got here as soon as we could.”
“My apologies, sir. I’m Daniel Parker, and these men are my family and neighbors. I implore you, please fetch back our womenfolk and children.”
Will took off his hat, knocking the trail dust from it, and ran his fingers through his damp, red hair, “I’m General Travis, sir. I wish we had been able to get here earlier. But now we’re here, we’ll be heading into the Comancheria to find your women and children.”
Parker’s shoulders sagged, and a couple of his relatives guided him over to a stump, where he sat down. Will thought the older man was out of breath, but when he lifted up his head, his eyes were swimming in tears as he said, “General, had you arrived when we did, you could have helped us bury our relatives. Oh, dear God in Heaven, what those savages did to John, Silas and the others, it’s enough to make the hardest heart weep.”
Without any prompting, Parker continued, “We found my brother, Benjamin’s, body where they killed him, in front of the fort. They had pierced him with dozens of spears. I pray he was dead before hitting the ground. They scalped, defiled, and disfigured his body, General. My family, we’re men of peace, we came here from Illinois for the opportunity to spread the gospel. But as God is my witness, sir, as wrong as I know it is, I want vengeance, General Travis. Find our women and children, and avenge our father, brothers and sons.”
Parker lowered his head into his hands, where Will heard him sobbing. Taking leave from the settlers, he returned to where Juan Seguin and Deaf Smith waited, out of earshot. Smith said, “I’ve got a few of my boys riding patrol around the fort. Like as not, the Comanche are long gone back into the Comancheria, but we’ll make sure.”
Chapter 2
The morning following their arrival at the remnants of Fort Parker, Will ordered his command to follow the trail to the west left by the large war party. Joining Will’s little army were a half dozen of the Parkers’ family and neighbors. Flacco, Seguin’s Apache scout, and a couple of Smith’s Rangers, skilled at tracking, led the way. Will held no illusions about his own tracking skills, they were nonexistent. Even so, he had no problem seeing the westward trail left by the Comanche war band.
There were no settlements west of the Parkers’ fort, but several homesteads were burned husks. The second day out from the fort, as they watered their horses in the Brazos river, one of the scouts rode back along the trail and found Will discussing where to ford the river with Seguin and Smith. “Sir, we found a place a couple of miles north, where we can ford the river. Water’s only a few feet deep there.” He stopped, opening and closing his mouth a couple of times before he managed, “We found the body of a woman on the other side of the Brazos, sir. She’d been there for a while.”
Will dreaded what they would see when they crossed the river. As they spurred their horses toward the ford, Will muttered to Seguin, “Bad news doesn’t get any better by waiting for it to come.”
On the west bank of the Brazos, a couple of Rangers and Flacco, the Apache scout, stood over the body of the woman. A blanket covered the corpse when Will and the other officers rode up. When he motioned for the blanket to be removed, one of the Rangers standing beside the blanket said, “General, you don’t want to see this. What they done to her ain’t fit for Christian eyes.”
Flacco glanced at the Ranger disapprovingly and knelt by the body. He said something rapidly in Spanish. When he finished, Seguin shook his head and said, “Buck, it’s up to you, but Flacco says it isn’t pretty, what the Comanche did to her.”
Will paused as his thoughts were drawn back to what seemed a lifetime ago, before his mind had been cast through time, to several years before the transference, when his unit participated in the battle for Fallujah in 2004. The terror of hearing a bullet careen off the concrete inches from where he was sitting was bad enough. Even so, he thought the daily firefights with snipers inured him to death. After finding himself cast back in time, he had taken the battles at the Rio Grande and the Nueces in stride. As a soldier, death was something he had learned to steel his heart against. Now he needed to know into what he was leading the men who followed him, he needed to know what they faced.
When Flacco pulled back the blanket, Will retreated a step. He was no expert, but even to his untrained eyes, the body had been exposed to the elements for a while. While animals had found and mangled the body, what skin remained left little doubt the Comanche warriors had tortured the woman before she died. Before ordering her buried, Will sent for one of the Parker men to examine the body. When he arrived, he threw up his most recent meal upon seeing the body, but after recovering, confirmed she didn’t appear to resemble either of the women captured from the fort.
After the woman was hastily buried, and the command was again following the trail westward, the image of her brutalized body kept returning to Will. The number of bodies he saw killed when his unit took part in the 2004 battle of Fallujah was low, and while some of them were badly mangled, they paled in comparison to hers. Despite hearing stories of the Comanche warrior culture, the frequency of which bordered on commonplace, and now seeing first-hand the terror they struck among the settlers along the frontier, Will was still shocked to see the casual brutality inflicted on the woman’s body. Somewhere along the way, he decided the author who wrote “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” obviously wasn’t thinking of the Comanche when she penned her book.
The mixed command was a few days further west of the Brazos, and the war party’s trail had become harder to track. Flacco told Will it was because various groups had peeled away, going back to their own bands. The Texas plains were hot in June. The command had left the Alamo more than two weeks earlier and the strain of being under a constant state of alertness was beginning to show on the men under Will’s command. The day was at its hottest as the sun was tracking across the western sky. The men, in columns of two, wound their way across the prairie. The only tracks in sight were those made by the buffalo. In the back of his mind, Will knew the heat sapped his attention and made all of the men more lethargic.
To the west, in the distance he heard a gunshot shatter the monotonous sound of squeaking saddles. The lethargy fell from Will, as adrenaline coursed through his system. The flurry of shots came from the direction where their scouts were riding forward of the main column. He spurred his horse into a gallop, waving the column of men toward the sound of the gunfire.
The steady drumbeat of more than a hundred sets of horse hooves thundered across the plain as Will led the mixed command over a low rise. In the distance, he saw a dust cloud retreating westward, farther into the Comancheria. A few hundred yards away a horse was down. Will scanned the area, looking for his forward scouts, but apart from the fallen horse and the dust cloud in the distance, the only movement was the tall grass rustling in the sweltering breeze. He let his horse gallop until he closed the distance to the fallen animal. When only a few dozen yards separated them, he saw the bodies of his scouts from Smith’s Ranger company, lying in the grass. From beneath the downed horse, which had several arrows protruding from its body, he saw movement as Flacco, the Apache struggled to get out from underneath the dead animal.
Juan Seguin leapt from his horse, rushing over to where the Apache was trapped. He grabbed the reins and tried dragging the horse in the opposite direction from where the Indian lay. Several men joined the officer as they managed to drag the horse from atop the Apache scout. When the horse no longer trapped him, the Apache attempted to stand up, but his left leg gave way, and he collapsed. He landed with only a grunt, an
d Will couldn’t help but to admire his stoic response to his injury and the loss of his horse.
As a couple of men looked to the injured Apache, Will walked over to where one of the Rangers had fallen. A single arrow pierced his side. Despite only a few minutes passing between the time of the gunshot and the column arriving, the man had been scalped, and his clothing ripped from his body. Deep gouges were cut into his legs, and someone had been in the process of cutting off his genitalia when Will’s command had crested the ridge, as the job had been abandoned midway. He turned away from the body, desperately willing the image from his mind, and yelled, “Boys, get some shovels. We’re going to bury our fallen. We’ll not leave them for the Comanche.”
***
Three wooden crosses were a few hundred yards away as the little army camped on the rolling prairie that night. The sky was dark, the distant stars standing sentinel in the night sky against the return of the new moon. Before collapsing into his bedroll, Will had ordered a strong guard to watch over the camp and the horses, which were staked out along a picket line. As he drifted to sleep, his mind was filled with the images of mutilated bodies. He awoke several times when nightmares broke through his restless slumber.
The sound of gunshots startled Will awake when they shattered the stillness of the night. He leapt to his feet and grasped his sword. Standing over his bedroll, he saw other men rising and reaching for their weapons, which they kept by their sides each night. From where the horses were staked, Will heard more shouting and gunfire. “The horses! Juan! Deaf! They’re raiding the horses!”
Will ran toward the picket line where shadows moved and rushed around the panicked animals. Only a few yards away, a shadow melded onto one of the horses and he realized it was a young warrior bounding onto the back of the startled horse. When the warrior spotted Will, he kicked his heels into the horse’s flanks and charged at him, brandishing a sharp spear. As the warrior lunged forward, Will dodged to the left, coming up on the other side of the horse. Will drove forward with his sword, piercing the warrior in the left side of the rib cage. A look of stunned surprise crossed the Comanche’s face as he slipped from the horse, crashing to the ground. Will barely contained his astonishment when the warrior climbed to his feet, grasping his side.
Will scarcely had time to think, “What the hell! I should have punctured something vital.”
When the Comanche brought his bloodied fingers away from his wound, he drew a knife from his leather belt and tried circling around Will. Will knew he would never be Inigo Montoya, but between his college fencing days, Travis’ own memories and frequent practice, he confidently interposed himself between the injured warrior and the stampeding horses. Rather than attempting to circle around again, the young Comanche warrior sprang forward, arm outstretched, blade first at Will’s chest. Will parried the short blade, and reposted. The warrior’s shock was complete as he ran himself into the outstretched blade. The knife slid from his fingers and blood bubbled from his lips as the young warrior buckled to the ground, where he quickly bled out.
Will stepped over the body, rushing toward the horses, where he, Seguin and Smith directed their men to corral all the horses they could find. The night’s raid appeared to be an unmitigated disaster for the Texians, for as the sun arose less than an hour later, they discovered they lost more than thirty of their mounts. For the Comanche’s troubles, Will’s men found the bodies of four warriors. As he and his officers took stock of the situation at dawn, they found three more dead and five wounded among their men. The news grew progressively worse, when Seguin reported two of last night’s watch were also missing.
Will understood, only too well, the frustration which had plagued the Texian and US armies in the history he had learned, in their fight to pacify the Comanche, for it was now his own. He had ridden into the Comancheria with one hundred thirty riders. Six were dead, five were wounded and only a hundred horses remained. And two of his men were missing. As he looked out across the vast prairie of west central Texas, he felt a sinking realization. He wasn’t going to win this fight. He was outmatched and outnumbered. There was a bitter taste in his mouth as he considered he had led the Texas army to victory against the larger Mexican army using tactics which were not entirely dissimilar to those of the Comanche. Now, as the invader, Will knew defeat, lacking the resources and men to successfully avenge the massacre at Fort Parker. But before he would permit himself to withdraw, he owed it to his men to find the two missing troopers.
A day later, and twenty miles south from where they lost their horses, Smith’s Rangers found the two men. When they reported back the location, Will led the rest of the command there. Will found both troopers had been stripped and staked atop fire ant mounds. Both had been tortured, their bodies mutilated. One had a bullet hole in his forehead. Will turned to Smith, “Did you find him like this?”
Smith spit a stream of tobacco juice onto the ant mound and shook his head, “No. Poor bastard was still alive when we came upon him. What those red devils did to him was … ghastly.”
Will shuddered at the thought. “Did your boys end his misery, Deaf?”
Smith shook his head, “No. Had to do it myself, damn it. General, I ain’t doing this anymore. When we return to San Antonio, I’m done, all I want to do is get back to my wife and daughters.”
Taken aback by Smith’s outburst, Will realized Deaf’s frustration was entirely justified. As he played back in his mind the past few weeks, he realized his first mistake was racing north to Fort Parker. Despite thinking he had the resources, circumstances proved otherwise, as a third of the men were riding double, with the loss of their horses. The Comanche never deigned to fight his men on terms remotely equal. The attack against his scouts had potentially crippled his Apache scout and the attack on their horses had effectively ended his campaign.
Seeing no other option available, he ordered his command to ride to the southwest, toward San Antonio. He stopped his horse as his men filed past and turned, looking at the land of the Comancheria. “I swear, I’ll be back. And when I do, we’ll end, once and for all, these raids on our settlements.”
***
True to his word, Deaf Smith resigned the same day Will’s column limped back to the safety of the Alamo’s ramparts. To replace him, Will brought to the fort the captain commanding the Rangers assigned to patrol the area between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. Matthew Caldwell was thirty-eight years old and had earned a reputation for being decisive and a hard fighter. Before Will could lead the army back into the Comancheria, he needed to stop the raids. He needed someone like Caldwell to lead the Rangers.
Part of Will was glad the provisional government had relocated eastward to the population center of Harrisburg, on the western bank of the San Jacinto River, around fifty miles north of Galveston. The failure of the campaign to punish the Comanche was overlooked by the provisional government as they were busy scheduling a plebiscite to adopt the recently completed constitution. When he sent a requisition for more Rangers, he was surprised how quickly Burnet authorized the expense, until he realized the acting president wanted security along the frontier to increase turnout for the vote. Even on the edges of civilization, the provisional government wanted as open and democratic elections as possible.
Will and Matthew Caldwell sat in his office, with the window open, letting in hot July air. “I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, Matt. If Burnet has loosed the purse strings, then let’s not delay in building up the Rangers.”
Caldwell joined Will at looking at map of Texas spread over the large desk and said, “With six companies, we can establish a line of forts along the frontier. General, I’d like to set our northern most fort on the West fork of the Trinity River.”
Will arched his eyebrows, as the location was just over the loosely defined border of the Comancheria. “Do you think thirty Rangers can hold the fort that far away from our population centers?”
“I ain’t one to underestimate the Comanche. They are
fierce warriors. But that fort's going to be full of thirty Rangers, not a few settler families like at Fort Parker. I’ll personally make sure them Comanche don’t see it as low-hanging fruit when we’re done building it.”
Caldwell also marked a spot on the Brazos river, fifty miles south of the first marker, and again on the Brazos River at the confluence of the Bosque. The fourth marker was on the Lampasas River, about fifty miles northwest of where Will had met Jacob Harrel on the bend of the Colorado River. The fifth mark was drawn on the falls of the Pedernales River. The sixth mark he placed at the Alamo.
He looked up at Will and said, “With these six forts, we’ll hopefully have warning before the Comanche raid into our eastern settlements. Also, these men can, when we’re ready to clear the Comanche from Texas, form the core of our mounted force, if you want.”
Will nodded in agreement and took the charcoal marker and added a fort at Laredo and another at the mouth of the Rio Grande. “It will be the responsibility of our infantry and regular cavalry to man these two forts, but let’s not forget when we’re looking at the Comancheria that our back door is the Rio Grande.”
***
7th July 1836
To Colonel William B. Travis
The Alamo, San Antonio, Bexar, Republic of Texas
Your recent inquiry into our patented revolving pistol has come at a fortuitous time, and I and my investors have set a price of $15 per pistol. We will also sell for $1 each extra cylinder for the pistols. I will consider a license to your government for the manufacture of replacement parts for $2,000 in gold, silver, or US Treasury certificates. I urge you send an experienced gunsmith to our facility in Connecticut where we will provide him the necessary dies for the replacement parts, at cost. As a sign of goodwill between the Patent Arms Manufacturing and your government, I am sending with this letter a matched pair of the Patterson Model Revolving pistol as a gift to you. May you wear the pistols with continued success.
