FEW HISTORIANS WOULD argue that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which a defeated Mexican republic signed on February 2, 1848, in the wake of a lopsided war, was as momentous an event in American history as the signing, seventeen years later, of the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. Yet in its own way it was quite as definitive. Appomattox stitched the nation back together. It asserted that this oddball disaggregation of warring states was in fact a single nation with eternal common interests—a unified political idea that now included both a federal government with powers the founders could never have imagined, as well as millions of freed slaves whose welfare and freedom were now its assumed burden and responsibility.
But Guadalupe Hidalgo created the physical nation itself. Before the treaty the American West consisted of the old Louisiana Purchase lands that rose in ladderlike fashion from the mouth of the Mississippi, climbed the courses of the Missouri, and touched the rocky, fog-shrouded shores of the Northwest. It was a tentative, partial fulfillment of the national myth. Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which Mexico gave up its claims north of the Rio Grande, made the dream suddenly, and completely, real. It added the old Spanish lands that lay, enormous and sun-drenched, athwart the Southwest. They included the modern states of Arizona, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, California, and Nevada. There was Texas, too, in a sense, though it had been subsumed in 1845. U.S. annexation of Texas was what the war against Mexico was about, and the American victory settled the question forever. In all, the United States of America acquired 1.2 million square miles of real estate, an instant 66 percent increase in its total landmass. In terms of land gained, on a percentage basis, it was as though France had acquired Germany. Thus was the nation entirely recast. Its singularity of purpose, its raw and conquistador-like desire to possess and dominate all lands it touched and to dispossess or destroy all of its aboriginal peoples, its burgeoning will to power could now stretch, untrammeled, from sea to shining sea. It was manifest destiny made manifest.
The treaty changed everything in the West. It changed the world beyond the 98th meridian for everyone and for all time but perhaps most radically for the native peoples who inhabited the stark, open middle of the continent. At the time of the Mexican war this was still mysterious, dangerous, untraveled land. Much of it—from Canada to south Texas—had never been explored by white men, especially the headwaters of the big rivers that ran through the heart of Comancheria. The continent’s heart was pierced in two places: the Oregon Trail, which started in Missouri and scaled the continent along the North and South Platte Rivers to reach the Columbia, and the Santa Fe Trail, starting in the same place but then snaked from western Missouri to New Mexico, hugging the Arkansas River part of the way. But these were merely highways down which relatively small numbers of pioneers traveled. They did not draw settlement; westering pioneers did not stop in the middle of the Oregon Trail and decide they wanted to build a cabin. That was never their purpose and would have been suicidal anyway. The higher plains, including the 240,000 square miles of Comancheria, remained inviolate, their buffalo herds, horse tribes, trade routes, and rough boundaries still intact.
The problem for the Comanches was that, where once they existed as a buffer between two huge land empires, they now stood directly in the way of American nationhood. They were now surrounded by a single political entity. With the annexation of Texas, they were no longer dealing with a quirky, provincial republic with few resources, devalued currency, and a patchwork citizen soldiery; they were now a principal concern of the federal government, with its visions, blue-coated armies, vaults full of tax money, and complex, usually misguided, politically charged Indian policies. In the immediate aftermath of the Mexican war, none of this would have been apparent. In fact, a weird status quo reigned. Until the late 1840s, Texas was still the only part of civilized America that was in range of the horse tribes. In the Indian Territory, the relocations of eastern tribes had played out, depositing some twenty thousand Indians from a dozen tribes across modern-day Oklahoma; they jostled with one another and with plains tribes. But not with white men. Not yet. On the northern plains, in Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne country, Indians had dealings with the military and occasionally confrontations, but there were no human frontiers in those lands.
The status quo would not hold much longer. In the 1830s and 1840s white civilization had shouldered its way slowly up the Colorado, Guadalupe, Trinity, and Brazos rivers in Texas, moving inexorably into the Comanche borderlands. Soon those settlements would be replicated in the North, too, ascending the Kansas, Republican, and Smoky Hill rivers, directly onto Cheyenne hunting grounds. It was moving even into the Indian Territories, which the federal government had specifically set aside for Indians. In 1849 the floodgates opened. The Gold Rush was the first great exercise of America’s new spatial freedom. People poured giddily into the West in numbers that would have been unthinkable just a year before.
But pilgrims, land-grabbers, sodbusters, Forty-niners, and a nation with galloping expansionist urges were not the only problems for the Comanche nation in those years. Something else had happened during the years of the Texas Republic to change the fundamental nature of their relationship with the white man. Comanche power had long resided in sheer military superiority: the ability, man for man, to outride and outshoot the Anglo-Europeans. This had been true from the earliest days of Spanish rule. Now for the first time, came a serious challenge. It came in the form of dirty, bearded, violent, and undisciplined men wearing buckskins, serapes, coonskin caps, sombreros, and other odd bits of clothing, who belonged to no army, wore no insignias or uniforms, made cold camps on the prairie, and were only intermittently paid. They owed their existence to the Comanche threat; their methods, copied closely from the Comanches, would change frontier warfare in North America. They were called by many different names, including “spies,” and “mounted volunteers,” and “gunmen,” and “mounted gunmen.”¹ It was not until the middle of the 1840s that they finally had a name everybody could agree on: Rangers.
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To understand who they were and why they were necessary, it is important to grasp the extremely difficult, nearly untenable situation in which the new Republic of Texas found itself in the late 1830s.
Texas was never supposed to be its own sovereign country. After their victory at San Jacinto the vast majority of Texans believed that their territory would be immediately annexed by the United States. There were a few would-be empire builders like Mirabeau Lamar and James Parker (who volunteered to fulfill Lamar’s grandiose vision by conquering New Mexico) who had other ideas. But mostly everyone else wanted statehood. They were soon disappointed. There were two main reasons it did not happen. First, Mexico had never recognized the independence of its renegade northern province. If the United States added Texas it risked war with Mexico, something that, in 1836, it was not prepared to do. Nor could it easily admit a slave territory.
Texas was thus left alone, broke and militarily punchless, for ten years to confront two implacable enemies: Mexico on the south, and the Comanche nation on the west and north. The fledgling country would never know peace. Mexican incursions persisted; the city of San Antonio was captured twice by large Mexican armies in 1842. Raids were constant, as was the predation of itinerant bandits from across the border. And Texas’s western frontier was the scene of continuous attacks by Comanches. It is interesting to note Texas’s peculiar position here: Neither of these enemies would have accepted peace on the terms the new republic would have offered them. Even more remarkably, neither would accept surrender. The Mexican army consistently gave no quarter, most famously at the Alamo. All Texan combatants were summarily shot. The Nermernuh, meanwhile, did not even have a word for surrender. In plains warfare there was never any such thing; it was always a fight to the death. In this sense, the Texans did not have the usual range of diplomatic options. They had to fight.²
But while the Mexicans hovered, sent war parties north of the Nueces, and waited for their chance to reclaim their lost province, the constant, lethal, and unstoppable threat still came from the Comanches, who killed thousands more Texans than the Mexicans ever did. As ornery, stubborn, and fearless as the Texans were, they found themselves completely unprepared and ill equipped to deal with Comanches. So much so that, in the early days of the Republic, it looked very much as though the Texans were doomed to suffer the same fate as the Spanish and Mexicans. In the first phase of the Comanche wars, the Indians held all the advantages.
Their superiority started with weaponry. When the Texans arrived from Tennessee, Alabama, and other points east, they brought with them their main firearm, the Kentucky rifle. It was, in many ways, a fine piece of technology. Long, heavy-barreled, short-stocked, and extremely accurate, it could be devastatingly effective when fired from cover by a shooter at rest. It was an excellent hunting rifle. But it was ill suited to combat, and especially ill-suited to mounted combat. It required a good deal of time to load. Powder had to be measured and poured, and the ball had to be rammed down the barrel with a long rod. Then the tube had to be primed and the flint properly adjusted so that it would strike.³ This all took at least a minute, which amounted to a death sentence against mobile, bow-wielding Comanches. Worse still for anyone fighting Comanches, the shooter had to dismount to use the long rifle. From the saddle, the weapon lost its only real advantage, which was its accuracy. The Texans had pistols, too, old-fashioned, single-shot dueling weapons,⁴ equally cumbersome to load and fire, and equally impractical in the saddle.
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
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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
Plenty of these young men died hard deaths in their new paradise, including Hays’s own cousin. Hays was undeterred. He did quite a bit of surveying: In 1838 he successfully surveyed seventy-six head rights.³⁶ He also began to make a name for himself as an Indian fighter, especially one who knew how to keep his men alive. According to one writer who knew him, “The little Tennessean would seem to be another man when the cry ‘Indians’ was raised. He would mount a horse and assume the appearance of a different being. With him it was charge, and war to the knife, and the Indians were whipped every time they attacked his party.”³⁷ Like Grant in the Civil War, Hays worried less about what his adversaries could do to him than about what damage he could inflict on them. Like Grant, too, he was all about offense. In conversation he was soft-spoken and well-mannered; in a fight he was cold as ice and firmly in command of men who quickly deferred to him. Having made his name keeping surveyors alive, he began to ride with the new ranging companies, who were often the same people who went out to guard surveying teams. We know that he fought at the Battle of Plum Creek, and that he was part of the ill-fated Moore expedition of 1839 that returned ignominiously home on foot.³⁸ We do not know much more about his first years.
But he had clearly distinguished himself. In 1840, at the age of twenty-three, Hays became captain of the San Antonio station of the Rangers, a force that had been officially established by the Texas Republic but was still required to furnish its own arms, equipment, horses, and even food. There was no pay at first; later it would be set at $30 a month, when it arrived at all.³⁹ Some of the funds in the early days came from donations from ordinary citizens. (The Rangers as an organization existed only intermittently, living from congressional authorization to authorization, often disbanding then reforming.) Considering the life expectancy of the new Indian fighters—two years at the outside—it was a job not everyone would have wanted. And yet changes were already taking place that were shifting the odds. No one knew this better than Hays. For one thing, the new breed of Ranger—the Hays Ranger—knew how to ride. And he was mounted on an agile and fast horse, the product of local breeding of mustangs with Kentucky, Virginia, and Arabian strains. Those horses were heavier than the Indian mounts, but they could run with mustangs and keep up with them over long distances. It was said that Hays would not accept any recruit whose horse was worth less than $100.
Under Hays the ranging companies, rarely numbering more than fifteen or twenty men—began to behave more and more like the people they were hunting. “They moved as lightly over the prairie as the Indians did,” wrote Caperton, “and lived as they did, without tent, with a saddle for a pillow at night.”⁴⁰ Hays, in particular, paid a good deal of attention both to his Comanche foes and to his Lipan Apache scouts, learning from them how to ride, fight, track, make camp. Each man had a rifle, two pistols, and a knife; he had a Mexican blanket secured behind his saddle, and a small wallet in which he carried salt and cold flour and tobacco.⁴¹ That was all. Like Comanches, the Rangers often traveled by moonlight, navigating by river courses and the north star, and dispensing with fires altogether, making “cold camps” and eating hardtack or other uncooked rations.⁴² Hays’s men would sleep fully clothed and fully armed, ready to fight at a minute’s notice. They crossed rivers even in freezing weather, swimming by the side of their horses.⁴³ None of this behavior had any precedent in American military history. No cavalry anywhere could bridle and saddle a horse in less time than the Rangers.
Some of this came naturally to these young men, but some was the result of training. Hays insisted that his men practice both shooting and riding. One drill involved setting two six-foot-high posts in the ground forty yards apart. The Ranger would ride toward them at full speed, firing his rifle at the first post and his pistols at the second. Before long they were able to hit a ring on the post that was the size of a man’s head.⁴⁴ Note that these men were charging and shooting on horseback, a concept taken entirely from Plains Indians. They probably started to do this sometime between 1838 and 1840; whenever the transition took place, it was done in direct imitation of the Comanches’ own style and represented an enormous advance in anti-Indian warfare. The Rangers were the only ones in America who could do anything like that from the saddle, and they were absolutely the only ones who could do it in battle. It came from pure necessity: No one who had fought Comanches could possibly believe that there was any advantage to fighting them dismounted, on open ground.
Riding drills were even more elaborate. In a contemporary description by one of Hays’s men:
After practising for three or four months we became so purfect that we would run our horses half or full speede and pick up a hat, a coat, a blanket, or rope, or even a silver dollar, stand up in the saddle, throw ourselves on the side of our horses with only a foot and a hand to be seen, and shoot our pistols under the horses neck, rise up and reverse, etc.⁴⁵
What Hays mainly understood was the value of pure audacity, of striking fear and panic in his opponents’ hearts. He was still at a great disadvantage in weaponry: Each of his men had only three shots before they had to stop and reload, an activity that could not be done easily on horseback. Thus his Rangers struck quickly and hard, often from ambush, and often at night, overcoming their odds with a pure and reckless charge. “The one idea rules,” wrote contemporary Victor Rose. “Make a rapid, noiseless march—strike the foe while he was not on the alert—punish him—crush him!” In the fall of 1840, Hays and twenty men encountered a party of two hundred Comanches at a crossing of the Guadalupe River near San Antonio. The Comanches had stolen a large number of horses. Hays put it this way to the men: “Yonder are the Indians, boys, and yonder are our horses. The Indians are pretty strong. But we can whip them. What do you say?”
“Go ahead,” the men replied. Their assumption, as always, was that Hays would lead. “And we’ll follow if there’s a thousand of them.”⁴⁶ The Indians, very likely in disbelief that white people would be crazy enough to take ten-to-one odds against mounted Comanches in the wilderness, drew themselves into a battle line and waited for the small band to attack. The Texans charged furiously and discharged their three shots; the line of battle was “thrown into confusion.” In the scuffle, the headman was hit and killed; the Indians fled.
In this way Hays and his small companies slammed into the Penateka in central Texas, in engagements that were mostly unrecorded. Hays preferred surprise—killing them, just as the Comanches preferred to do, in their villages while they slept. He had learned the fundamental lesson of plains warfare: It was either victory or death. The Indians gave no quarter, and the Rangers rarely did, either. There was no expectation of honorable surrender. Hays did not always win, though he was astoundingly successful in preserving the lives of his men. In one fight he took one hundred twenty men and fifteen to twenty Lipan Apaches into battle against a vastly larger force of Comanches, losing twenty to thirty.⁴⁷ In another he took fifty Texans and ten Lipans, engaged a larger force in a running fight for an hour and a half. Hays’s horses faltered, then broke down, unable to stay with the Comanche ponies. Several of his men were wounded. According to his own report, “Hays was now out of provisions and was forced to subsist on his broken down horses, until he reached Bexar [San Antonio].”⁴⁸
He also learned quickly what would soon become his main advantage: Comanches were extremely predictable. They never changed their methods. They were deeply custom-bound and equally deeply mired in their notions of medicine and magic. They reacted to a given situation—such as the killing of their war chief or medicine man—in exactly the same way, every time. In white man’s terms, they were easily spooked. What Hays did appeared to be unbelievably brave to men who did not have his ability to calculate odds; he was also, it must be said, unbelievably brave.
Hays had other attributes as well; he was extremely cautious where his men’s safety was concerned, and almost motherly in his care of them when they were wounded. He was remarkably industrious in camp, hauling wood and water, staking and hobbling horses, cooking food. But “when it was a mere question of personal danger his bravery bordered closely on rashness.” He had an iron constitution that made him seemingly impervious to discomfort, bad weather, or sleep deprivation: “I have frequently seen him sitting by his campfire at night in some exposed locality,” wrote J. W. Wilbarger,
when rain was falling in torrents, or a cold norther with sleet or snow was whistling about his ears, apparently as unconscious of all discomfort as if he had been seated in some cozy room of a first class city hotel, and this, perhaps, when all he had eaten for supper was a handful of pecans or a piece of hard tack.⁴⁹
Though Hays’s exploits in battle were known along the border before his appointment to captain in 1840, two battles in 1841 established his fame on the frontier. The first involved Mexicans. With twenty-five men Hays routed a superior force of cavalry near Laredo, took twenty-five prisoners, and captured twenty-eight horses. He did it on sheer nerve, ordering his men to dismount, advance on the enemy, and to hold their fire well beyond where any normal skirmishers would have dared. Hays, as always, led the charge. At sixty yards—forty yards within the range of their accurate Kentucky rifles—they finally opened up. The Mexicans fled, and the Rangers, without waiting to reload, drew their pistols, jumped on the horses the Mexicans had abandoned, and pursued them.⁵⁰ The defeat caused a panic in Laredo, many of whose residents “jumped” the Rio Grande in fear of their lives. When Hays approached the city, its alcalde came out with a white flag to beg the Rangers to spare the town.⁵¹ They did. They would not always be so kind. In Mexico City in 1847 they once executed eighty men in reprisal for the death of one Ranger.⁵²
The second involved, as most of his fighting did, Comanches. In the summer of 1841 a Comanche war party came down on the settlements around San Antonio, raiding and killing and stealing horses. Hays, with one of the Texas Congress’s intermittent appropriations in hand, raised a company of thirteen men and rode after them, trailing them about seventy miles westward from San Antonio to the mouth of Uvalde Canyon. Hays found the Indians by using a trick he had learned from the Lipans: He simply followed the large flock of vultures that circled in a towering spiral over the Comanches’ bloody middens. Near the camp, Hays spotted and engaged a dozen Comanches. The Rangers charged, and the Indians took cover in a woody thicket.
Hays immediately understood the implications of what his opponents had done: Their arrows would be of little or no use to them in such dense brush. He then ordered his men to surround the thicket and shoot anyone who came out. Though he was wounded in the hand, he took two men with him and went into the thicket—he was later joined by a third—where they fought a four-hour battle with the Indians, killing ten of them. Hays himself made a rare, and casually chilling, report on it to the Texas secretary of war:
The Indians had but one gun, and the thicket being too dense to admit their using their arrows well, they fought under great disadvantage but continued to struggle to the last, keeping up their warsongs until they were all hushed in death. Being surrounded by horsemen, ready to cut them down if they left the thicket, and unable to use their arrows with much effect in their situation their fate was inevitable—they saw it and met it like heroes.⁵³
It was an astonishing display of warrior prowess. For it, Hays was promoted to major. He was not yet twenty-five.
- • •
Despite his success fighting Comanches, Hays still faced one very large and intractable problem: his single-shot, hard-to-reload rifles and old-style pistols put him at a severe disadvantage against Comanches who carried twenty arrows in their quivers. There was no way around it. He had tried to adapt the long rifle to mounted use—and had actually worked minor miracles—but it was still a clumsy weapon that was best fired and reloaded on the ground. It was still the old backwoods rifle from Pennsylvania via Kentucky. Its shortcomings accounted, in large part, for the berserk aggressiveness of Hays’s Rangers in battle. To stand pat was to be soon peppered with iron-tipped arrows. Headlong attack, for all of its risks, remained a far safer idea.
Meanwhile, back in the civilized, industrializing East, an enterprise was under way that would soon solve Hays’s problem, and in so doing change the world, but for now was mired in failure and obscurity. In 1830 a sixteen-year-old with big ideas and a knack for intricate mechanics named Samuel Colt had carved his first model of a revolving pistol out of wood. Six years later, he took out a patent on it. In 1838 a company in Paterson, New Jersey, began to manufacture Colt’s patented firearms. Among them was a .36-caliber, five-chambered revolving pistol with an octagonal barrel and a concealed trigger that dropped down when the gun was cocked. It was not the first such idea, but it was believed to be the first that was put into production for general use.
There was just one problem with the new gun. No one wanted it. The weapon’s natural market, the U.S. government, could not see any application and refused to subsidize it. The weapon had the feel of a cavalry sidearm, but just then the U.S. Army did not have a cavalry. Nor did the new pistol seem to interest private citizens. It was a nifty, if somewhat impractical, product. Oddly, the only people who wanted it were in the exotic and faraway Republic of Texas. In 1839, President Mirabeau Lamar directed the Texas navy, of all things, to order 180 five-shot Colt revolvers from the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company in Paterson. Later the Texas army ordered another forty.⁵⁴ The pistols were shipped and paid for. There is no particular evidence that they were ever used by sailors or anyone else in the service of the Texas government. It seemed to be an obscure and impractical weapon destined for an obscure and irrelevant branch of the Texas military. Such as it was. And there they languished.
No one knows exactly how these revolvers came into the hands of Jack Hays and his Rangers. But they most certainly did. In later correspondence with Colt, Samuel Walker, one of Hays’s most celebrated lieutenants, placed the date sometime in 1843.⁵⁵ This is probably accurate, since that was the same year Sam Houston disbanded the navy.⁵⁶ Whenever the event took place, the Rangers immediately grasped the significance of such weapons. To them, Colt’s contraption was a revelation: a multishot weapon that could be used from horseback and thus, at long last, even the odds. Though there is no record of it, Hays and his men must have spent long hours practicing with the new weapons and figuring out what they could do. And they must have spent many nights around the campfire discussing the revolver’s strengths and weaknesses.
The new Colt revolver had many weaknesses. It was fragile. The bullets it fired were of a light caliber when a heavier load—.44 caliber or larger—was needed. It was not terribly accurate except at close range. It employed pre-loaded cylinders, which meant that a Ranger armed with two pistols and four cylinders had forty shots. But the cylinders were difficult to change, and when they were empty a man in the field could not reload them. That, however, did not change the basic, astounding fact of a revolving chamber. Hays and the rest of his Rangers, notably Ben McCulloch and Samuel Walker, were convinced of its potential. By the spring of 1844 they were ready to give Colt’s unpopular, oddball revolver its first combat test.
That test came to be known as the Battle of Walker’s Creek, a minor military engagement that became one of the defining moments in the history of Texas and of the American West. Indeed, it can be argued that before Jack Hays arrived in San Antonio, Americans in the West went about largely on foot and carried Kentucky rifles. By the time he left in 1849, anybody going west was mounted and carrying a holstered six-shooter. Walker’s Creek was the beginning of that change.
In early June 1844, Hays and fifteen men were scouting the upper courses of the Pedernales and Llano. They were in the hill country, west of Austin and San Antonio, the Penateka heartland. Finding nothing, they headed back toward home. On June 8, they stopped to gather honey from a bee tree on Walker’s Creek, a tributary of the Guadalupe River about fifty miles north of San Antonio. Hays, meanwhile, had dispatched two of his men to lag behind the group, and see if they were being followed. This was an old Indian practice. Hays had learned many old Indian practices. The two men soon dashed into camp and breathlessly reported that they had found ten sets of Indian horse tracks behind them. The company quickly saddled up and countermarched in the direction of the Indians. As they approached, three or four Indians made a great show of alarm, and then an even greater show of fleeing for their lives. Another old Indian trick. Hays did not fall for it, and he did not pursue them.⁵⁷
Soon the rest of the body of Penatekas—seventy-five of them—showed themselves. The Texans advanced slowly, while the Indians fell back to the top of a steep hill, a superb defensive redoubt in the broken, rocky country timbered with live oak. From there they taunted the Rangers, yelling in Spanish and English, “Charge! Charge!”
Hays obliged them, though not exactly in the way they had imagined. Realizing that he and his fourteen men were temporarily concealed at the base of the hill, he turned his little band and galloped at full speed some two hundred to three hundred yards, circled the bottom of the hill, emerged behind the Indians, and charged their flank.⁵⁸ Taken by surprise, the Comanches still managed to recover quickly. They split their forces and wheeled on the Texans on both flanks, yelling loudly. Under normal circumstances, their assault would have broken the Ranger battle line. It would have routed them. But in a remarkable display of horsemanship and raw, bone-rattling courage, the Rangers formed a circle with their horses and thus, rump to rump, received the charge.
What happened next—seventy-five Penateka Comanches on fifteen Rangers, arrows and lances against repeating pistols—sounds like pure bloody pandemonium. Several Rangers were badly wounded. Their pistols, meanwhile, were dropping Indians from the saddle at an alarming rate. This stage of the fight lasted fifteen minutes. Then the Indians broke and fled. It became a running fight, and went for more than an hour on over two miles of rough terrain. Urged on by their heroic chief, the Indians kept rallying, regrouping, and attacking, only to be overwhelmed by the Rangers’ fire-spitting Colt revolvers. Forty Indians were now dead or wounded. One Ranger was dead and four were wounded. Still, the fight went on, as the Indian leader rallied his men again and again.
Then, as though to illustrate the five-shooter’s main weakness, Hays’s men ran out of ammunition. More precisely, they had run out of preloaded cylinders, which could not be reloaded in the field, and no one had anything but five-shooters. They were now at the mercy of the thirty-five remaining Indians. Or at least they would be when the Indians figured out their ammunition had run out. Hays then coolly called out to see if anyone had any bullets left. One man, Robert Gillespie, rode forward and said he did. “Dismount and shoot the chief,” ordered Hays. This Gillespie did: At a range of “thirty steps” he dropped the chief from his saddle. The remaining Indians “in wild affright at the loss of their leader . . . scattered in every direction in the brushwood.”⁵⁹
When the smoke had cleared, twenty Comanches were dead, and another thirty were wounded. Hays had suffered one man killed and three seriously wounded. One of his main lieutenants, Samuel Walker, was pinned to the ground with a Comanche lance. The Rangers made camp there, to care for their wounded. Three days later four Comanches showed up, perhaps to reclaim their dead. Hays attacked once more, killing three of them.
Though it would take awhile for everyone else on the frontier to understand what happened at Walker’s Creek, and it would take the Mexican War to make the U.S. government understand what it meant, a fundamental, paradigm-shattering change had occurred. The Indians now faced the prospect of being blasted from horseback by guns that never emptied; the whites could now fight entirely mounted against their foes with weapons whose frequency of firing nearly matched that of the Comanches. The odds had been evened up. Or better. “Up to this time,” Samuel Walker wrote in a letter to Samuel Colt in 1846, “these daring Indians had always supposed themselves superior to us, man to man, on horse. . . . The result of this engagement was such as to intimidate them and enable us to treat with them.”⁶⁰
- • •
Still, no one outside the Republic of Texas understood what Sam Colt had done. In 1844, fully six years after he had begun to produce his repeating pistols, his invention was a failure. The Paterson, New Jersey, factory had gone into bankruptcy in 1842. Colt managed to keep his patents but little else. The models, prototypes, and plans for his six-shooters were all lost or destroyed. He spent five years in poverty.
But there was hope, and Colt knew it. Word of what Hays and his men were doing with the revolver had reached him in the East. He was so excited that in the fall of 1846 he wrote Samuel Walker in Texas,
with a few inquires regarding your expereance in the use of my repeating fire arm & your opinion as their adoptation to the military service in the war against Mexico—I have hard so much of Col Hayse and your exploits wit the arms of my invention that I have long desired to know you personally & get from you a true narrative of the vareous instances where my arms have proved of more than ordinary utility.⁶¹
Walker wrote back immediately and enthusiastically with a description of how effective the revolvers had been at the Battle of Walker’s Creek. “With improvements,” he concluded, “I think they can be rendered the most perfect weapon in the world for mounted troops.”⁶² From here on Sam Colt’s prospects began very quickly to improve.
The war in Mexico had started and the Texas Rangers had volunteered for it and had been accepted by General Zachary Taylor. They were soon fighting south of the border. They made an extraordinary impression on the U.S. Army in Mexico. They were like nothing anyone had ever seen. They wore no uniforms, provided their own weapons and equipment, and went everywhere mounted. Unlike almost everyone else in the army, they preferred to fight mounted. They served mainly as scouts—effectively transferring the style of warfare they had learned from the Comanches to the lands south of the border—and tales of their bravery, toughness, and resourcefulness spread from the Mexican War around the world. Samuel Walker’s swashbuckling dash with seventy-five men through a field held by fifteen hundred Mexican cavalry and Colonel Jack Hays’s savage efficiency in clearing the roads of Mexican guerrillas were told and retold in salons from Chicago to New York. General Taylor complained of their lawlessness, but the fact of the matter was that the enemy was terrified of them. Everyone was terrified of them.
The most striking thing of all about them was their weaponry. Their five-shot Colts, and their ability to wield them with deadly accuracy from horseback, were the wonder of the army. So much so that the army now wanted more. One thousand of them, to be exact, enough to supply all of the Rangers and other Texans in Mexico. There was just one problem. Colt had not made a revolver of any kind for five years. He had no money, and he had no factory to make them. He did not even have a working model of one of his pistols. He even advertised in the New York newspapers, without success, trying to find one. Still, he offered to sell the army a thousand of them for $25 apiece. With a contract in hand, in January 1847 he convinced his friend Eli Whitney to make the pistols. Now all he had to do was design a brand-new weapon.
And then something remarkable happened. Colt asked Samuel Walker, who happened to be temporarily stationed in Washington, to help him with the design. Colt wrote:
I have sergested the propriaty of your coming to see me before I commence the construction of thes arms. . . . Get from the department an order to cum to New York & direct in the construction of thees arms with the improvements you sergest.⁶³
Thus the two men—the hardened Ranger from the Texas frontier and the ambitious young Connecticut Yankee—became collaborators. Walker was full of ideas. He explained to Colt that he needed a bigger caliber, and that the gun had to be heavier, more rugged, with a longer barrel and a longer and fuller “handle.” His refinements could be quite specific, too: In a letter to Colt on February 19, 1847, he recommended making the “hind sight much finer and the front sight of German silver and of a shape altogether different.”⁶⁴ It was Colt’s idea to use six chambers instead of five.
The result, the Walker Colt, was one of the most effective and deadly pieces of technology ever devised, one that would soon kill more men in combat than any sidearm since the Roman short sword.⁶⁵ It was a small cannon. It had an enormous nine-inch barrel and weighed in at four pounds nine ounces. Its revolving chambers held conical .44-caliber bullets that weighed two hundred twenty grains each. The powder charge—fifty grains of black powder—made the new Colt pistol as deadly as a rifle up to a hundred yards.⁶⁶ Engraved on its barrel—this was Sam Colt’s gift to the Rangers—was an etching of the Battle of Walker’s Creek, as Samuel Walker had described it to him. The sight of a Ranger on horseback, flashing Walker Colt in hand, is one of the indelible images from the Mexican War. It of course saved Colt. Though he lost a few thousand dollars on this deal, he later became one of the richest men in the country. Samuel Walker died, a hero, on October 9, 1847, in Huamantla, Mexico, from a sniper’s bullet.
