FOR THE FREE Comanches in the spring of 1872, Mackenzie’s dramatic failure at Blanco Canyon was both good news and bad news. The good news was that one of America’s toughest combat officers had been duped and humiliated time and time again by people who knew a great deal more about this sort of warfare than he did. Quanah had outmaneuvered and outnavigated him; Mackenzie’s men had stumbled around in darkness and in dead-end arroyos and had their horses stampeded and paid a terrible price. They had been led on a merry chase, not by a highly mobile war party but by an entire village. The bluecoats had nearly perished in a storm that, nevertheless, did not prevent the Indians, young and old, from traveling to safety. Considering that the taibos had almost lost all their horses and their supply train, they were probably lucky to be alive.
The bad news, for those who could see it, was that Blanco Canyon marked the beginning of the end of the old empire. The logic was disarmingly simple. Previous military expeditions had violated Comancheria’s borders and had introduced the Indians to the idea that their home ranges were no longer completely safe. But they had done nothing to change the basic balance of power. Now, in their deliberate penetration of the heartland, the bluecoat leaders were signaling their intent not just to protect the frontier but to destroy the raiders themselves, to find the wolves in their den and kill them. They were aiming directly at the source of Comanche strength. And much of that strength was pure illusion, a sort of fantasy propped up by the self-defeating politics of Washington, D.C. In the year 1872 the once-glorious Comanches were really nothing more than a tiny population of overmatched and outgunned aboriginals who happened to occupy an absurdly large chunk of the nation’s midsection. That they were able to do so in an era of steam engines, transcontinental railroads, nation-spanning telegraph lines, and armies capable of greater destruction than the world had ever witnessed, was nearly inconceivable. Now, finally, that was going to change. Blanco Canyon meant that the tribe’s final ruin was only a matter of time. A few years at most, perhaps months. It meant that there existed both the will to pursue them to the caprock and beyond—embodied in grim warriors like Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, the men who had destroyed the South—and a commander in Texas who was capable of doing it. The dour, irascible Mackenzie was nothing if not a quick study, and he had just learned a critical lesson in how not to fight Comanches in the Texas Panhandle.
For the moment, however, death came to the frontier as it always had. In the spring of 1872, Comanche and Kiowa raiders swooped down into the Texas settlements as though there were nothing in the world that could possibly stop them. Some of those attacks were made by “reservation” Comanches—Yamparikas, Nokonis, and Penatekas—who used their agency as a refuge. Some were made by the Quahadis, who had never come to the reservation. Others were accounted for by Shaking Hand’s Kotsoteka band, which was straddling both worlds. The latter had come into the agency over the winter to get food and annuity goods, and then had moved back out onto the buffalo plains in the spring. Others, from the reservation bands, had followed them. The situation was highly fluid, unsettled, explosive. Many residents of the frontier, especially those in the Palo Pinto country southwest of Fort Worth, thought that 1872 was the worst year ever for Indian raids. A district judge from that area wrote a letter to President Grant that year, begging for relief. He described the worsening horror, and said that
I might give your Excellency scores of instances of recent date of murder, rape, and robbery which [the Indians] have committed alone in the counties composing my judicial district. It was but a few days since the whole Lee family, three of them being females, were ravished, murdered, and most terribly mutilated. Then Mr. Dobs, Justice of the Peace of Palo Pinto County, was but last week murdered and scalped, his ears and his nose were cut off. . . . Wm. McCluskey was but yesterday shot down by those same bloody Quaker pets upon his own threshold.¹
Such a description of frontier violence could as easily have come from 1850 as from 1872. News of “depredations” had become so drearily familiar that it could sometimes seem unreal, almost a cliché. It was all horrifyingly real, of course. The terror had been taking place along roughly the same line of longitude in Texas for more than thirty-five years. Like some nightmarish and never-ending war, the front never really moved. No phase of the American Indian wars, beginning in the early 1600s, was remotely comparable.
And now Mackenzie was being unchained and ordered to make it stop. The peace policy still applied to Indians who were on the reservation, and his Fourth Cavalry, staging out of forts in central Texas, was still not allowed to cross the Red River to hunt hostiles. But there was to be death and scorched earth for those who insisted on remaining off the reservation. The problem was, as always, where to find them. In the spring of 1872 a solution presented itself. A captured Comanchero named Polonio Ortiz revealed the existence of a wagon road with plenty of water and grass that ran, east to west, across the Llano Estacado and into New Mexico. This was not only the legendary pass through the desiccated and impassable plains that white men had heard about but never found, it was also the road down which thousands of head of stolen cattle moved from Texas to New Mexico. This was the Comanchero cattle lode, the source of guns and ammunition and food for the still-wild Comanche bands. To discover it meant that they would not only disrupt the illegal cattle trade, they would also find Comanches.
In July and August of 1872, under orders to break up the organized cattle raiding, Colonel Mackenzie and his Fourth Cavalry conducted a series of remarkable, unprecedented explorations. Operating out of a base camp on the Freshwater Fork of the Brazos in Blanco Canyon, he first scouted northward along the caprock, crossing and recrossing from high to low plains as the Quahadis had done. Using the Comanchero Ortiz as a scout, he crossed the southern fork of the Red River (known as the Prairie Dog Town Fork) and into the region of present-day Clarendon. He then turned south again through jagged and harshly beautiful canyon lands and along a route that passed through present-day Turkey, Matador, and Roaring Springs. He did not know it at the time, but this part of Texas, just east of present-day Amarillo, had become the main refuge and sanctuary of the wild Comanche bands. One can imagine how Mackenzie’s troops looked: tiny figures in the monumental landscape of east Texas, riding week after week through the searing plains heat and the untracked immensity, their tack creaking and their regimental song on their lips (“Come home John, don’t stay long; Come home soon to your own Chick-a-biddy!”) The land was pristine, untouched. There was wildlife everywhere, sandhill cranes rising by the tens of thousands from playa lakes, buffalo herds that filled the horizon. Mackenzie found no Indians there, or the cattle trail, but his new understanding of the country, knowledge no white man had ever possessed, would figure heavily in the final battles. In late July Ortiz and other scouts discovered a wide road leading onto the Llano Estacado bearing evidence that large herds of cattle had recently traveled over it.
Mackenzie followed the new trail. He was by this point obsessed with his task, which as he conceived it meant forcing the Comanche and Kiowa outliers onto the reservation. He slept lightly, if at all, staying up late into the night studying scouting and other reports and whatever maps he could get his hands on. He drilled his troops hard. They were already a vastly superior fighting unit to the one he had inherited, not least because of their schooling at Blanco Canyon. His personality was harsher and quirkier than ever. His Civil War wounds, several of which had never properly healed, caused him unceasing pain. Riding for long hours over rough terrain was excruciating. According to Robert G. Carter, who served under him for many years, it was this “almost criminal neglect of his own health” that accounted for a personality that had become “irritable, irascible, exacting, sometimes erratic, and frequently explosive.”² To the white epithet Three-Finger Jack was added the Comanche names Bad Hand and No-Finger Chief. They were getting to know him. He had a hectoring, badgering sort of personality that would not leave anything or anyone alone. He was hard on everyone around him, harsh in his assessments and almost never generous with praise. That included his reports to his superiors. His reticence to talk about what he had done guaranteed him and his men an obscure place in American history. Mackenzie was not without his good points. He was scrupulously fair, and quick to correct an injustice. He never played favorites and would not tolerate servility or self-seeking.
In the next month he crossed the Llano Estacado twice, by different routes, navigating an area that had never been penetrated by the army. (Carson’s trip from New Mexico to Adobe Walls had followed the Canadian River, much farther north.) On his return trip, which traced a route roughly from today’s Tucumcari to today’s Canyon, just south of Amarillo, he made a brilliant discovery: a plains-spanning trail with access to permanent, high-quality water sources at points no more than thirty miles distant from one another.³ It was just as Ortiz had predicted. Though Mackenzie had not seen any Indians or cattle—in such enormous spaces the chance had been small anyway—he had penetrated the great mystery of the Llano Estacado, the undiscovered country at the heart of Comancheria. By the end of the trip, the Fourth Cavalry knew all about the weird and quirky world of the high plains: its vicious thunderstorms, killer ant colonies, and raging wildfires; they learned how to use buffalo dung as fuel, and how to find water and navigate through immense flatness. Mackenzie, wrote Wallace,
had made a highly significant contribution to the exploration and opening of the Great American West. He had found two routes across the treacherous plains. The discovery of the roads and the good water would make it possible to keep the hostile Indians constantly on the run until they would surrender, or all be surprised and captured or killed.⁴
He thought nothing of this accomplishment. He still had work to do. He had heard from the same Comanchero that Kotsoteka chief Shaking Hand’s band was camped on the North Fork of the Red River. On September 21, 1872, he turned north. With 222 soldiers and 9 Tonkawa scouts he marched toward the rolling, broken prairie on the eastern slope of the caprock escarpment. At four o’clock in the afternoon of September 29, Mackenzie’s force, riding in four-column “echelon,” galloped into the middle of a Comanche village of 175 large tipis and 87 small ones on the North Fork, about five miles from the present town of Lefors.
Taken completely by surprise, the Comanches could do little more than run and hide from the bluecoats and their guns. Many died within the first few minutes of battle. Eighty or more of them were cut off and cornered in a ravine. They charged the white battle line several times, and each time were repulsed at great cost. The fight quickly became something more like a shooting gallery. One of Mackenzie’s officers, W. A. Thompson, compared it to “a troop of men in line on a stage firing into a crowded theater pit.”⁵ Many of the Indians ended up in a pool made by a brook that ran through the middle of the camp. Some were there hiding beneath overhanging grass. Most were dead. “So many were killed and wounded in the water that it was red from hole to hole with blood,” wrote a white captive named Clinton Smith who fought with the Indians.⁶ Many Comanches escaped into the brush of the river bottom. As Mackenzie noted tersely in his report, the battle was over in half an hour. He had to forcibly restrain his Tonkawas from scalping all the dead Comanches.
When the smoke from the black powder had cleared, he had killed fifty-two Indians, and had lost only four of his own. He had taken 124 prisoners—mostly women and children—something that had not happened to Comanches within anyone’s memory. It had very likely never happened. Not, at least, since the advent of the horse. Just as important, he had captured three thousand horses, which meant that he had very likely put on foot a good many of those who had escaped. How many got away is not known, just as it is not known how many were in the camp when the bluecoats attacked. The rule was eight to ten people, and two fighting men, per large tipi. If that was true, then a huge percentage of what was left of the Comanches, including reservation Indians, had been camped with Shaking Hand. It would later be learned that members of all five major bands were there, though at the time of the battle Shaking Hand, ironically, was on a train to Washington to meet the Great Father and discuss peace.⁷ Just downriver, moreover, was another camp of mostly Quahadis, so close that they could hear the shooting. In Mackenzie’s official report, he noted without elaboration that “the lodges were generally burned, and a large amount of other property was destroyed.”⁸ There would, in any case, be nothing left for the Indians to use.
In historical terms, Mackenzie’s victory was stunning. He had achieved it by daring to go where white men had not gone, by using his Indian scouts well, and then by attacking in force the moment he had intelligence of the camp. He had attacked with fury. Unlike Chivington’s drunken thugs, though, his men also knew restraint. They had been under orders to try to avoid killing women, children, and old men—Mackenzie was unusually attentive to this, for a western officer—but as he himself noted, many of the people in those categories “were too badly wounded to be moved.”⁹ And the Tonks had done plenty of damage before he could rein them in. The other side, predictably, had a somewhat different account. Captive Herman Lehmann, who was with the Comanches at the time, wrote:
We arrived the next day after the fight and found the dead bodies scattered about. I remember finding the body of Batsena, a very brave warrior, lying mutilated and scalped, and alongside of him was the horribly mangled remains of his daughter, Nooki, a beautiful Indian maiden, who had been disemboweled and scalped. The bodies presented a revolting sight. . . . Other bodies were mutilated too, which showed the hand of the Tonkaway in the battle.¹⁰
Mackenzie had achieved what Plains Indians valued more than anything: surprise. He was learning from them to exploit weakness. That night he took pains to place his captives inside a well-guarded circle of supply wagons. They were amazingly representative of the larger tribe: there were thirty-four Kotsotekas, thirty Quahadis, eighteen Yamparikas, eleven Nokonis, and nine Penatekas, showing just how fluid the exchange between the “reservation” and the “wild” Comanches really was and suggesting that the old band structures were dissolving. (One or possibly two of the Quahadis were wives of Quanah.)
He ordered the pony herd to be taken a mile away from the burned village, and placed the horses under the guard of the one of his lieutenants and the Tonkawas. Incredibly, Mackenzie, so roughly schooled in Comanche horse culture, had made another mistake. He still did not understand Comanches and horses, or the fact that a handful of Tonks were still no match for Comanche riders. After dark, the Comanches made short work of it, stampeding the horses and not only getting most of their own back, but also those of the Tonkawas, who arrived in the main camp the next day looking sheepish and unhappy, leading a small burro.¹¹ The following night, when the command made another camp eighteen miles distant, the Comanches took back most of the horses that were left. All that remained of the remuda were fifty horses and nine mules.¹² Mackenzie was furious. He would never again make the mistake of believing he could hang on to Comanche horses. According to his sergeant John Charlton, “No effort after that was ever made to hold a herd of wild captured Indian ponies. They were all shot.”¹³
For the People, the Battle of the North Fork of the Red River (sometimes called the Battle of McClellan Creek) was a shattering experience. Nothing like this had happened to them before, and the depth of their grief was startling. They were inconsolable. Wrote former captive Clinton Smith, who was with the tribe:
Every night for a long time I could hear the old squaws crying away out from the camp, mourning for their dead. They would gash themselves with knives, and when they returned to the camp their faces and arms and breasts showed signs of the mutilation which they underwent in their agony.¹⁴
The worst of it was their utter powerlessness to get the captives back. The Comanches, famous for their arrogance, were abject and helpless in their grief. This was amply shown a few weeks later when Bull Bear, the chief of the wild, unbowed Quahadis and the only chief who had never signed a treaty or reported to the agency, humbly brought his band to the vicinity of Fort Sill to beg for the release of the women and children. He told agent Lawrie Tatum, known to him as Bald Head, that he had lost the fight with the soldiers, accepted his final defeat, and was now ready for peace. He would come into the reservation, put his children in the white man’s school, and become a farmer, as long as he got his women and children back. Bull Bear was lying. His views on the subject were well known. He believed in fighting to the death. But at the moment he just wanted his people released.
He got his wish. In June 1873, one hundred sixteen women and children and a few old men were brought back from their imprisonment at Fort Concho to Fort Still and returned to freedom. The release did not resolve anything. Soon large numbers of Comanches, including Bull Bear and his Quahadis, were back in their old camps, doing what they had always done. That year they got a reprieve: Mackenzie, who was ready to mount a final campaign against them, was sent instead to the Mexican borderlands to stop the cross-border raiding of Texas settlements by Kickapoos and Apaches. Acting on unofficial orders from Sheridan, Mackenzie and his Fourth Cavalry crossed eighty miles into Mexico—in violation of every conceivable international treaty—and destroyed three Kickapoo Apache settlements.¹⁵ His attack caused an international furor, and he maintained all along the fiction that he had taken the action on his own authority. When one of his men then asked what Mackenzie would have done if he had refused to cross the border, the colonel answered: “I would have had you shot.” When he returned in August he had a violent attack of rheumatism that kept him out of the field until January 1874.
It meant that the Comanche problem would have to wait another year.
