RANALD SLIDELL MACKENZIE came from one of those prodigiously overachieving eastern seaboard families that seemed connected, in profound and unaccountable ways, to everyone who was anyone in the corridors of power. His grandfather John Slidell was a Manhattan bank president and political power broker in New York City. His uncle John Jr. became the most powerful man in Louisiana politics, a U.S. senator, and the top adviser to President James Buchanan. Mackenzie’s aunt Jane married Commodore Matthew Perry, the man who opened Japan to the West. Aunt Julia married a rear admiral. Uncle Thomas became chief justice of Louisiana. His father, Alexander Mackenzie Slidell, who reversed his last and middle names at the request of a maternal uncle, was both a prominent naval commander and a well-known writer of histories and travel books who once had the distinction of being court-martialed for hanging the son of the secretary of war for mutiny. His mother came from splendid bloodlines, too: Her grandfather had been assistant secretary of the treasury under Alexander Hamilton.
Mackenzie thus grew up in elevated society, though his father’s death when he was eight put the family in more or less permanent financial difficulty. He was a frail, shy, smallish, unhealthy boy with the pale skin and transparent eyes of his Scottish forebears and a speech impediment that some described as a lisp and others as a slight stutter. He attended Williams College in Massachusetts, hoping to be a lawyer. But the family’s strained finances would not allow him to finish. After two years he arranged for a transfer to West Point, which paid a salary in addition to providing free education. He matriculated there in 1858.
Against all of his family’s expectations, he performed brilliantly, graduating first in his class of twenty-eight cadets. He was considered by many in his class to be “the all-around ablest man in it.”¹ He never grew much—as an adult he was a slim five feet nine inches tall (the limit for a cavalryman)—but he lost some of his shyness, made friends more easily, played pranks, and ran with a lively crowd. His talent in mathematics secured him a position as assistant professor while he was still a student. In the tiny, cloistered world of the military academy, he undoubtedly knew the immodest and trouble-prone young man, one class ahead of him, named George Custer, though there are no records of their relationship. The two officers could not have been more different. Custer was exuberant, vainglorious, and outrageous. Mackenzie was dark and complex, deeply private and inwardly turned, and never built for public adulation. Custer was a horrendous student, and the word able was not the first that came to mind when people described him. More like “libidinous and alcoholic.”² When he graduated in 1861, he ranked thirty-fourth out of thirty-four students in his class, having accumulated a class-high of 726 demerits. In spite of these gaping differences, the two men were, oddly, twins of fate. Born less than a year apart, their careers mirrored each other’s virtually every step of the way, from their money-strangled ambitions to study law to their West Point days to their heroism and precociousness in the Civil War, where they fought in the same campaigns, and ultimately to their Indian fights in the West. The parallel lines crossed only a few times, the last occurring after the disaster at Little Bighorn, when Mackenzie was sent north to, in effect, clean up Custer’s mess.
Mackenzie’s graduation in 1862 landed him in the middle of the Civil War, and over the next three years he climbed the ranks with breathtaking speed. He served in the engineer corps at the battles of Manassas (second), Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, receiving brevet promotions that quickly boosted him to the rank of major. (A brevet rank was temporary, often given on the battlefield to increase the officer corps in times of emergency. The idea was to keep the army from becoming, in peacetime, top-heavy with officers.) Still, he was bored by engineering work and longed for command. He finally got it at the battle of Cold Harbor in June 1864, when he was brevetted to lieutenant colonel and given charge of the Second Connecticut Volunteer Artillery. He was twenty-three years old. He soon proved himself to be both dazzlingly competent and almost recklessly brave. At the Battle of Winchester, where Custer also fought, he “seemed to court destruction all day long,” wrote one of his soldiers. “With his hat held aloft on the point of his saber, he galloped over the forty-acre field through a perfect hailstorm of rebel lead and iron with as much impunity as though he had been a ghost.”³ At one point a Confederate artillery shell cut the horse he was riding in half. Wounded in the thigh, he bound the gash and kept on fighting.
With just a few months left in the war, he was given his first major command: the cavalry division of the Army of the James. By Appomattox he held the brevet ranks of brigadier general of the regular army and major general of the volunteers, making him the highest-ranking officer in West Point’s class of 1862. He was only twenty-four years old. He had been brevetted seven times in less than three years, a pace of promotion almost unheard of in the army and which beat Custer’s five brevets, though Custer ended with the same rank.⁴ Mackenzie was, moreover, one of Grant’s favorites. “I regarded Mackenzie as the most promising young officer in the army,” Grant later wrote in his memoirs. “Graduating at West Point, as he did, during the second year of the war, he had won his way up to command of a corps before its close. This he did upon his own merit and without influence.”⁵
Something else happened to Mackenzie during the war. Like so many other young men, he hardened. He lost his easy affability, his prankishness, and much of his good humor. This was undoubtedly caused in part by the bloodshed and suffering he witnessed from 1862 to 1865. But it was more directly related to a series of gruesome, debilitating wounds he received and from which he would never fully recover. He was wounded on six different occasions. At Manassas, he was shot with a .50-plus-caliber bullet through both shoulders, a terrible internal wound that should have killed him. He lay where he fell for twenty-four hours before being rescued. He was hit in the leg with an artillery shell (at Winchester), and later wounded in the chest by shrapnel. Another artillery shell took off the first two fingers of his right hand. The pain never left him, and it changed him.
His first command felt the brunt of this change. When he inherited it, the Second Connecticut had been a beaten, neglected, and demoralized unit. After Cold Harbor, Mackenzie drilled them mercilessly and punished them liberally. The men hated him. He was so hard on them that some even plotted to shoot him in the next battle.⁶ “By the time we reached the Shenandoah Valley,” wrote one of his lieutenants, “he had so far developed as to be a greater terror to both officers and men than Early’s grape and canister.”⁷ At Winchester the regiment fought gallantly; its losses were higher than any other regiment in the fight; the men also witnessed Mackenzie’s astounding bravery. After that the talk of mutiny stopped. His men did not like him. Many feared him. But like all men in subsequent Mackenzie commands, they always believed they had a better chance with him in battle than with other commanders. He was not what West Pointers would describe as a martinet. He was neither vain nor arrogant nor capricious. He was just brutally demanding: the boss from hell.
After the war was over, Mackenzie remained in the army, reverting to his actual rank of captain (as did Custer), and building harbor defenses in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In 1867 he was promoted to colonel and took command of the Forty-first Infantry, a black regiment that soon moved to Texas. He was stationed at various different forts there, and saw his first limited Indian engagements in 1869 and 1870. They were really nothing more than skirmishes. He spent a good deal of his time sitting on courts-martial in San Antonio. In 1871 he got his big break. He was given command of the Fourth Cavalry on the frontier, an event that was a direct consequence of President Grant’s increasing impatience with the “peace policy.” It was no accident that the man he considered his most aggressive and effective officer was being placed squarely in the path of Comanche war parties.
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The record of federal officers on the frontier in those days showed just how lethal the West still was, even for mounted bluecoats. In 1864, Carson had nearly perished against Comanches and Kiowas at Adobe Walls. Van Dorn and Chivington had had their massacres, but the experience of the ebullient and egocentric Captain William Fetterman in 1866 more closely approximated the real risks of western command. Oozing self-confidence and itching to kill savages, Fetterman led eighty men out from Fort Phil Kearney in Wyoming on December 21, under orders to rescue a wagon train of woodcutters that was under attack by Red Cloud’s Oglala Sioux. He was warned twice that he should do nothing more than escort the woodcutters back to the fort.
Instead of following those orders, Fetterman plunged ahead looking for Indians to shoot. He spotted a small and vulnerable-looking group of Sioux warriors and pursued them. He soon discovered that they had been put there as bait. He thus rode directly into ambush. Exactly how many Indians took part in the attack is not known. Enough to kill eighty troopers in less than twenty minutes. In his report to his superiors, post-commandant Henry Carrington listed some of the items he found on the battlefield the next day: eyes torn out and laid on rocks, noses and ears cut off, teeth chopped out, brains taken out and placed on rocks, hands and feet cut off, private parts severed. The Oglalas seemed especially annoyed at two men who carried brand-new sixteen-shot Henry repeating rifles. Presumably they had done a good deal of damage. Their faces had been reduced to bloody pulp, and one of the men had been pierced by more than a hundred arrows.⁸
Two years later another army unit was destroyed at the Battle of the Washita, which was in all other ways a massacre of Indians. In November 1868, Colonel George Custer, commanding the Seventh Cavalry for the first time, attacked a Cheyenne village on the Washita River in what is now western Oklahoma. His strategy was the same one that got him killed eight years later. He divided his force, then advanced over unknown terrain against an enemy of unknown strength, and executed a “double envelopment,” a maneuver that required overwhelming superiority in numbers. This time he got lucky, at least at first. At dawn, his troopers tore into a small village of fifty-one lodges under Chief Black Kettle, surprising them and sending them fleeing from their tipis. Black Kettle had made the mistake of not believing his scouts, a mistake Custer also made and would soon pay for. Custer’s men rampaged through the snowy camp, killing indiscriminately.⁹Women and children who had taken cover under buffalo robes were dragged out of the tipis by Osage scouts and shot. Though Custer reported that he had killed a hundred three warriors, he had actually killed only eleven. The rest were women, children, and old men. The soldiers then looted and burned the village.
Meanwhile a squad of men under Major Joel Elliot, last seen in hot pursuit of Indians, was now missing. It was later learned that they had fallen for the same immemorial trick that had fooled Fetterman. They had ridden after a bunch of Cheyenne boys. At some distance from the village, the boys evaporated and in their place appeared several hundred mounted, armed Indians. The white soldiers then dived for cover in the high grass, thus violating a fundamental principal of defensive combat: They abandoned a clear field of fire.¹⁰ They were mostly shot where they lay. Their bodies were later found on the south bank of the river, frozen and horribly mutilated. It was believed that the Indians who killed them were Arapahos.
What were Arapahos doing near the Cheyenne camp? The answer revealed exactly how lucky Custer had been. Just below Black Kettle’s camp, stretching for fifteen miles along the river, was the entire winter encampment of the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. Comanches and Kiowas were camped with them. This disconcerting fact was uncovered when a platoon that had gone downriver to round up horses suddenly found itself encircled by warriors from the lower camps. Beyond the Indians the white men could see hundreds of tipis in the river valley. Laying down a covering fire, they retreated, barely making it back to camp, where they breathlessly told Custer the news. He was alarmed. His men were tired; he was running out of ammunition; the command was alone in subzero weather in a hostile wilderness; and his main supply train had been left lightly guarded many miles away. Realizing now that he could not take the eight hundred captured Indian horses with him, he ordered them all shot. The men used pistols to do it and the scene was gruesome. After being shot the horses broke away and ran in all directions, bleeding onto the snow. Then he retreated. He was so worried about an Indian attack that he marched all night.¹¹
One of the Comanches in those lower camps was twenty-year-old Quanah. “When we heard of the fight,” he recalled later, “all of our men hurried to the scene but General Custer retreated when he saw so many of us coming. We did not get close enough to fight him. After several skirmishes without results, we returned to our camp and moved out onto the plains.”¹² He never explained how he had come to be there, though the Washita was fully within the Comanche heartland.
Custer had only narrowly avoided Fetterman’s fate. He had come perilously close to confronting what would have been perhaps the largest group of hostile Indians ever assembled in one place. Later, he would actually face the largest group of hostile Indians ever assembled in one place, and he would not be so lucky.
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By the time Mackenzie arrived at Fort Concho (in present San Angelo), President Grant’s peace policy had been in effect for two years. The idea had been to replace graft, corruption, and indifference in the Indian service with a stern but loving kindness. By putting Quakers in place of the old self-serving agents of the Indian office, Indian trust would be regained. Annuities would be paid on time. Promises would be kept. The Indians would honor the Great Father by coming into their reservations, laying down their weapons, and taking up peaceful new lives as farmers, as specified by the Medicine Lodge treaty. This was devoutly to be wished, especially since nothing like it had ever actually happened. When the Quaker agent Lawrie Tatum arrived at the Comanche and Kiowa agency in 1869, some two-thirds of all Comanches were not on the reservation. They accounted for most of the continuing attacks on settlements in Texas and Mexico.
Almost from the start, the plan was a disaster, less a coherent policy than an invitation to open war. Its most basic problem was that the peace policy rewarded aggression and punished good conduct. The Indians realized that their most violent wars always ended with some sort of treaty, which was always accompanied by many splendid gifts and tokens of friendship and trust. They were thus convinced that the easiest way to get money and goods was, in Tatum’s words, “to go on the warpath awhile, kill a few white people, steal a good many horses and mules, and then make a treaty, and they would get a large amount of presents and a liberal supply of goods for that fall.”¹³ The treaties also typically allowed them to retain any horses and mules they had stolen. When they behaved well and limited their raiding, on the other hand, they got nothing. They were acutely aware of this. In addition, the taibos appeared to punish those who were cooperating. In 1868 and 1869 a number of Comanches did come in to the reservation, notably from the Yamparika and Nokoni bands. But because their west Texas brethren kept raiding, all annuities in 1869 were forfeited to pay depredation claims, thus penalizing the “good” Indians, which of course made no sense to any of them.
Worse still, by prohibiting the use of troops in the reservation areas, the government had created what amounted to a sanctuary for Comanche raiding parties. This was probably the most pernicious effect of the peace policy. It meant there was nothing preventing the Indians from coming and going as they pleased, or from using their two-million-acre reserve as a base camp for attacks on the Texas settlements. They could evade cavalry pursuit, and even keep their stolen stock, simply by crossing the Red River. The upshot was that Tatum himself, the pacifist Quaker, became convinced that force would have to be used to get the Comanches to stay on the reservation.
It was into this illogical and decidedly unpeaceful world of the far Comanche frontier that Mackenzie came in 1871. The border was still rolling backward, unmaking decades of progress. Counties west of Fort Worth and on down to Waco and the hill country continued to empty out. The peace policy was, perforce, about to change, and Ranald Slidell Mackenzie would be the instrument of that change. Following the Salt Creek Massacre (where General Sherman had narrowly escaped) and the trial of the Kiowa chiefs who had led it, Mackenzie wrote a letter to Sherman, advocating a large-scale campaign. “The Kiowas and Comanches are entirely beyond any control and have been for a long time. . . .” he wrote. “Mr. Tatum understands the matter. . . . He is anxious that the Kiowas and Comanches now out of control be brought under. This can only be accomplished by the Army. . . . It is not very important who we deal with first, the staked plains people, or those of the reserve.”¹⁴ Sherman agreed. Not only to a campaign but to new freedom for the army to pursue hostile Indians north of the border. Nothing had changed officially, but this was the beginning of the end of the peace policy.
And so in the fall of that year Mackenzie, not quite knowing what he was doing yet, and with an indifferent regiment he had not yet had time to remake, marched six hundred men and twenty-five Tonkawa scouts up into Blanco Canyon and made his humbling mistakes and then had sixty-six of his horses, including his own gray pacer, deftly removed from him by Quanah and his midnight raiders. That encounter is worth noting because such Indian behavior was probably without precedent on the plains. Indians habitually avoided soldiers; almost all their battles with army regulars were defensive, including those against Fetterman in Wyoming and Custer on the Washita. Large concentrations of soldiers with long supply trains were a signal to simply disappear, which was usually easy enough. It was the reason so many U.S. troops spent so much time marching and riding about, looking for and not finding Indians. Not finding Indians had been the principal activity of the U.S. cavalry for years in the West. Mackenzie’s force was enormous by plains standards: It was the largest that had ever been sent to pursue Indians.
And yet it was directly into the camp of this large assemblage of firepower—the men all were equipped with Colt revolvers and repeating Spencer carbines and several hundred rounds each—that Quanah rode on the night of October 10. He and his men had not simply run off horses on a far perimeter. They had crashed directly into the sleeping area, nearly running over Mackenzie’s tent, all the while screaming and shooting and ringing cowbells.¹⁵ Was it the sheer reckless bravery of youth that had led him to do it? Was it desperation? An instinctive defensive response to the presence of so many bluecoats so far out on the buffalo plains, like a man blocking a punch? In later interviews, Quanah said that his plan had been to put the soldiers afoot.¹⁶ If he had succeeded, the result might well have been a disaster of epic proportions for the whites.
They had avoided that disaster by moving quickly in the darkness, amid the panicked horses and the lethal swinging pickets, to recapture most of their mounts. But there were now sixty-six dismounted cavalrymen on the high remote plains of west Texas. And there was not much you could do with such men under those circumstances except order them to march east, back to the supply camp. Humiliated by the repeated blunders his command had made, the man they called Three-Finger Jack and his Fourth Cavalry sorted through the tangled mass of horses, lariats, and picket pins, and set out at dawn on the morning of October 11 to find the Comanches who had attacked them. Mackenzie had no idea then that he had stumbled into not just a Quahadi village, but the main body of the Quahadi band, several hundred lodges’ worth. Though the principal chiefs of the Quahadis were thought to be Bull Bear and Wild Horse, the village was under the much younger Quanah’s command. The remarkable tactics employed during this extended engagement were his and his alone.¹⁷ Meanwhile Mackenzie, snapping the stumps of his fingers irritably—it had already become a defining personal habit—was also completely unaware that he was about to embark upon a rollicking forty-mile chase along a razor edge of the Llano Estacado, the likes of which no western troops had ever experienced.
The day began with yet another blunder by the white soldiers, this one far more serious. Just as the first light began to streak the eastern sky, two detachments of troops searching in the valley for the lost herd came upon a dozen Comanches leading as many horses. Thrilled with their good luck, the men under Captain E. M. Heyl spurred forward, gaining rapidly on the Indians, until they were just within pistol range. The Indians abandoned the animals and appeared to make a run for it, crossing a ravine and climbing onto the higher ground just beyond it, where a butte rose toward the top of the canyon walls. The soldiers, who also numbered a dozen and were now three miles from their camp, followed. As they ascended toward the butte, they could see in the clear light of morning that the Indians they were following had turned on them. And now a much larger force had emerged on the high ground. Heyl had been suckered by the same trick that had fooled Fetterman and Elliot. Suddenly the prairie was “fairly swarming with Indians, all mounted and galloping toward us with whoops and blood curdling yells that, for the moment, seemed to take the breath completely away from our bodies,” wrote Carter. “It was like an electric shock. All seemed to realize the deadly peril of the situation.”¹⁸ Above them, from the battlements of the canyon walls, came the eerie high-pitched ululation of the Comanche women, looking down at their men and cheering them on.¹⁹
Again, it was the twenty-three-year-old Quanah riding in front, resplendent in black war paint and bear-claw necklace and armed with a brace of six-shooters. Carter found him terrifying to look at, and, considering Quanah’s height and massive upper-body muscles, there is no reason to doubt him. Having sprung the trap, Quanah ordered his warriors to flank and surround the twelve men. The besieged troopers, realizing what was about to happen to them, dismounted and backed slowly toward the ravine, firing as they retreated. Suddenly the seven men with Heyl turned and ran, abandoning their comrades to the Indians. The Indians whooped and came on. The five remaining soldiers, one of whom had been shot in the hand, continued their retreat. As they reached the lip of the ravine, they unlocked their magazines and delivered several volleys, driving the Indians back long enough for them to mount their horses. But as they turned and started toward the ravine, the horse carrying Private Seander Gregg faltered.
Carter gives us an interesting and rare snapshot of frontier battle in the close-quarters fight that followed. Seeing Gregg’s problem, Quanah spun and rode quickly toward him, zigzagging his horse and turning Gregg and his stumbling mount into a shield. Quanah’s command of his horse was such that Carter and the others could not shoot at him without hitting Gregg. As Quanah closed for the kill, Gregg tried to use his carbine but in his panic failed to pull the lever hard enough, jamming the cartridge. Carter shouted at him to use his six-shooter, but it was too late. Quanah was upon him. He shot Gregg in the head from feet or inches away. It would have been customary for Quanah to scalp the fallen Gregg. But instead he whirled and with the rest of his men galloped away and up the canyon wall. Amazed, Carter turned and saw why. The Tonkawa scouts had crested the ridge; behind them rose the prodigious dust from Mackenzie’s main column.
Carter’s cool head had saved his men from almost certain death. For his actions in Blanco Canyon that morning he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. He was undoubtedly a very brave man. But he had something else going for him, too, that would bear importantly on the final outcome of the Indian wars: Spencer rifles. Prior to the Civil War the only repeating weapons in military use in America were the six-shot revolvers that Samuel Colt had introduced in the 1840s. But the war had seen the advent of the repeating rifle, most of which were Spencer carbines. For their time, they were technological wonders. They fired .52-caliber bullets from a seven-round magazine, which could be reloaded in one-tenth the time it took to reload a Colt-style revolver and gave the rifles a sustainable rate of fire of twenty rounds per minute. They were accurate up to five hundred yards.
The Comanches had nothing at the time of the Blanco Canyon fight to match it.²⁰ Their main weapons, revolvers and bows, were effective only at short range, generally less than sixty yards. The single-shot muskets they carried, meanwhile, were accurate at longer ranges but were so cumbersome to load—two shots a minute from horseback would have been considered good—that they were mainly used only to fire an opening volley. (Carter noted that most of their muskets were muzzle-loading.)²¹ The mismatch was extraordinary. Colonel Richard Dodge observed this huge gap in firepower between whites and Indians. He believed that a horse Indian armed with repeating rifle, “an arm suited to his mode of fighting” was “the finest natural soldier in the world.”²² But Indians carrying repeaters would not appear in numbers until the last days of the plains wars. And even at Little Bighorn, five years later, most of the shots the Indians fired came from bows.
Now that Mackenzie’s column had nearly caught up to Quanah’s advance guard, the chase began in earnest. Mackenzie outnumbered him and with his superior weaponry enjoyed an enormous tactical advantage, something the Indians, who scrupulously avoided pitched battles against well-equipped bluecoats, were well aware of. They were also defending their village, which included their women and children. And so they ran.
One might think that an entire human settlement consisting of several hundred lodges, with large numbers of women and children and old men, many tons of equipment and provisions and supplies, along with a remuda of three thousand horses and mules, an unspecified number of cattle, and dogs, would be an easy enough quarry. The Comanche village could not hide on the open plains. Nor could it possibly move as fast as a well-mounted and determined force of nearly six hundred men. These things seem obvious enough. This was one of the few times in recorded history where a large number of troops pursued an entire village in open country, and its outcome might have seemed a foregone conclusion. Instead, Quanah gave Colonel Mackenzie an object lesson in one of the most important components of plains warfare down the centuries: escape.
Aware now that they were hunting the whole camp as well as the warriors, Mackenzie’s men moved northwest along the Clear Fork of the Brazos, cutting a gentle arc just to the east of the present city of Lubbock. The river ran through a canyon that was sometimes narrow and sometimes opened out into broad valleys broken by ravines and rolling sand hills, and bordered by high, often impassable bluffs. The men saw small herds of buffalo here and there, and at places where the creek widened into lovely, clear pools, enormous flocks of ducks and curlews. This was unmapped terrain, pristine and untouched by white civilization. Every so often they would pass abandoned grass and brush huts, known as wickiups, that were used by the Indian herders.
The highest of the bluffs, on the west side of the canyon, were part of a massive geological formation in west Texas called the “caprock,” essentially a long seam of rock that underlies the Llano Estacado and becomes an outcropping just at the point where the high plains give way to the lower, rolling plains. The formation is worth noting because it became a key part of the Indians’ evasive maneuvers. Seen from the land below, where Mackenzie’s men were, it looks like an enormous shelf, topped by rocky battlements. It rises anywhere from two hundred to a thousand feet above the lower plains. The term llano estacado is usually translated as “staked plain.” But that is not what Coronado meant when he named it. He meant “palisaded plain,” meaning a plain that begins (or ends) in a steep cliff. The caprock runs for several hundred miles.²³
The men marched steadily through the day in the “stillness and utter solitude of this lovely valley only disturbed by the tramp of our horses’ hoofs.”²⁴ They were more than fifty miles from their supply camp, isolated on the absolute edge of the known world, in one of the most dangerous places on the plains for white men. Late in the afternoon they came upon the site of Quanah’s village. The Comanches had left in great haste, dragging their enormous load with them, leaving a broad trail up the canyon. Confident now that they were close on the heels of the slow-moving tribe, Mackenzie’s column spurred forward, following their twenty-five Tonkawa trackers.
That confidence was short-lived. Soon the trail divided, and then it appeared to cross and recross itself in every direction until the scouts could discern no clear direction. After much parleying with Mackenzie and the other officers, the scouts concluded that Quanah and his band had actually doubled back on their pursuers, and had proceeded away back down the trail. Frustrated and chagrined that they had been outfoxed yet again by the Comanches, the Fourth had no choice but to countermarch, bivouacking for the night at the site of the abandoned village.²⁵
The next morning the Tonks managed to pick up the trail again, but now the broad traces left by hundreds of lodge poles and thousands of head of stock seemed to do the impossible, climbing hundreds of feet up the nearly vertical canyon wall and over the cliffs of the caprock. Somehow the village was behaving like a small group of riders. And now the soldiers toiled upward through an extremely steep ascent over rock outcroppings and ravines. At the top, they saw something that relatively few white men had ever seen: the preternaturally flat expanse of the high plains, covered only with short buffalo grass. “As far as the eye could reach,” wrote Carter, “not an object of any kind or a living thing, was in sight. It stretched out before us—one uninterrupted plain, only to be compared with the ocean in its vastness.”²⁶ The scene was terrifying even for men with experience of the plains. “This is a terrible country,” railroad worker Arthur Ferguson had written a few years earlier, “the stillness, wildness and desolation of which is awful. Not a tree to be seen. The stillness too was perfectly awful, not a sign of man to be seen, and it seemed as if the solitude had been eternal.”²⁷ The men noticed something else, too: The temperature was dropping; a norther was starting to kick up. They were at an elevation over three thousand feet, still wearing their summer uniforms. The day before they had basked in the warm sunshine of the cloistered canyon. Now the north wind bit into them, and the short, stiff grass made the task of tracking the Comanches difficult at best.
Again, the column paused while the Tonks tried to figure out where Quanah’s village had gone. When they finally found the trail, they realized that, after following the edge of the caprock, it went back over the bluff and down into the canyon. Disgusted, and aware that they had been duped once more, the troopers made the dangerous descent, only to find the same tangled skein of wildly crisscrossing trails, some leading up the valley, some down, and some moving directly across it. The Tonks fanned out again. Now they found that the trail led once again up and over the steep bluffs, this time on the other side of the canyon. Again, the troopers went up through the rocky breaks. For all of their anger and frustration, the men were beginning to feel admiration, bordering on astonishment, at what Quanah’s Comanches were able to do. Wrote Carter:
It was a singularly sharp trick, even for Indians, done of course to blind us and gain time in moving their families of women and children as far as possible out of our reach. Without our own Indian scouts to beat the Comanches at their own native shrewdness, we would have undoubtedly lost the trail and [in] hopelessness abandoned the task.²⁸
Whether the Tonks were beating the Comanches, or being successfully tricked time and time again by a commander who knew exactly what he was doing, is a matter of interpretation.
Back upon the Llano Estacado yet again, the troops began to feel the full fury of the norther. Under a darkening sky, the frigid wind cut through their thin uniforms. Many of the men had neither coats nor gloves, and they were now a hundred miles from their supply base. As they moved forward, they caught occasional glimpses of the fleeing band, silhouetted against the horizon. They were closer than they had thought, and as if to underscore that fact Comanche riders suddenly appeared on their flanks, trying to divert them. Mackenzie refused to be distracted. He pressed his column onward toward the village, which in its haste and alarm had begun to throw off all sorts of debris, including lodge poles and tools. Even puppies, which some of Mackenzie’s men picked up and placed athwart their saddles. Battle seemed imminent. The Tonks painted themselves and invoked their medicine, the men closed up in columns of fours, the pack mules were closed in and set in herd formation.
Now as if on cue, the leaden skies seemed to descend upon them. What had been a garden-variety norther now turned into what people in west Texas call a “blue norther”—rain, sleet, and snow all mixed together, driven relentlessly by winds up to fifty miles per hour. Darkness was coming on fast, and the moment for decision had arrived: the Fourth Cavalry could either gallop forward into the gathering storm and attack, or break off for the day. Oddly, considering how aggressive Mackenzie was by nature, he decided not to attack. He did this against the advice of his officers. In retrospect, he probably made the right decision. His men were fatigued, his horses worn thin and frail, and unlike the Comanches he had no fresh mounts. The soldiers dismounted, and the storm that had been building up all afternoon now unleashed its full fury. Winds of gale force drove freezing rain, which soon coated the men with ice. It was the sort of night in which a soldier and his horse could easily die. Huge hailstones began to fall, bruising the troopers. They wrapped themselves in what they could find and miserably settled in. Mackenzie himself had brought no overcoat with him. Somebody was kind enough to wrap him in a buffalo robe.
The Quahadis, meanwhile, did not stop. They soldiered on into the teeth of the norther for the rest of the night. One can only wonder what it must have been like. The next day Mackenzie made a halfhearted attempt to follow them but soon gave up. He had chased them more than forty miles (from present-day Crosbyton to Plainview). He was beginning to push the limits of his supplies. The next day, while the troopers were making their descent back into Blanco Canyon, they cornered two stray Comanches in a ravine. For some reason, perhaps out of frustration, Mackenzie insisted on directing the skirmish from the front. He was hit by a barbed arrow that pierced to the bone and had to be cut out. Embarrassed at his own impetuousness, he never mentioned in his official report that he had been wounded.²⁹ Robert Carter summed up the disappointment he felt in the campaign’s end in his memoirs, saying that “it was with the keenest regret and bitter disappointment that the driving of this half-breed Qua-ha-da into the Fort Sill reservation to become later a ‘good Indian’ could not have been accomplished then by the Fourth Cavalry, instead of its being delayed until more than three years from that date, and then by converging columns operating in four directions.”³⁰ Quanah roamed free, and Mackenzie had missed a glorious opportunity to break the most violent Comanche band in its homeland.
