IN LEGEND AND history, the Penatekas (Pen-’ah-took-uhs) were the largest and most powerful of all the Comanche bands. They had swept the Apaches into Mexico and fought the Spanish to a standstill in Texas. They raided, at will, deep into Mexico, and dominated the tribes of central Texas. They were also the one large Comanche band that had come into close and constant contact with the invaders and colonizers. The other main bands—Yamparika, Kotsoteka, Quahadi, and Nokoni—still held themselves largely aloof from settlements and soldiers, from their cultures and their invisible white man’s diseases. They stayed farther out on the Great Plains, following the buffalo herds. The Quahadis dealt extensively with the merchants of Santa Fe, but only through the Comanchero intermediaries.
This proximity to whites had changed the Penatekas. Profoundly. As Spirit Talker pointed out, they had seen the buffalo depart, never to come back to the southernmost reaches of the plains. They were thus forced to hunt different sorts of increasingly smaller game. And eventually, as the game thinned out, into trading for food with the white man or with farmers like the Wichitas or Wacos. As years passed, they had more and more contact with whites, not all of it unfriendly. They cadged food and stole small useful or ornamental things. Most had learned to speak Spanish and some had even learned English. They discovered that clothing made of cotton or wool was warmer in winter and cooler in summer than their traditional skins. They began, like the members of the Five Civilized Tribes, to adopt white clothing. Metal kettles were more practical than clay jars, and when they wore out could be used to make arrow points. Ready-made glass beads were brighter than handcrafted shell beads.¹ With every raid they accumulated the white man’s artifacts—his utensils and tools and weapons. It was a sort of cultural pollution that could not be stopped. There developed a casual intimacy between the cultures that was somehow interwoven with all the blood and violence and hostility.
Such intimacy could be seen in a story from the hill country a few years later. A woman who was part of a German settlement recalled a typical Comanche encounter. “One day while I was home,” she said, “in walked a big buck indian. I had just made a successful bake of bread and was exceedingly proud of it. . . . The big scamp sized up everything, spied my bread, picked it up and walked off with it. . . .” There is an interesting and almost funny offhandedness here: It would not have been surprising if she had picked up a rolling pin and beaned him with it. Other people in her town complained that Comanches would show up at mealtime expecting generous hospitality and would steal small items from around the house.² To a Yamparika, living in a village far to the north on the Arkansas River, such a scene would have been beyond imagining.
Texans, too, were beginning to understand this change. The following account was published in the Houston Telegraph and Texas Register on May 30, 1838, after a delegation of Comanches had visited President Sam Houston, at his invitation.
All expected to meet a band of fierce, athletic warriors with sinewy limbs and gigantic frames, but what was their astonishment on arriving at the President’s House, to behold paraded there about 25 diminutive, squalid, half-naked, poverty stricken savages, armed with bows and arrows, and mounted on wretched horses and mules! Every feeling of admiration was dispelled at once, and our citizens viewed them with mingled feelings of pity and contempt . . . their squaws and children were scattered in all directions through the city picking up old tin plates, iron hoops, clippings of tin, glass bottles, and similar rubbish which they appeared to consider extremely valuable. . . .
Mr. Legrand, who has resided several years among the Comanches, states that this party belongs to a portion of the tribe called “Comanches of the Woods”—who inhabit the hilly country northeast of Bexar [San Antonio]. They are a poor, degraded, sorry race and hardly have any resemblance to the Comanches of the prairie.³
This is a remarkable account in many ways. First, in its sneering, overtly racist dismissal of the Indians, and in its frank astonishment that real Indians were not like James Fenimore Cooper Indians. Second, in the fact that, minus the Anglocentrism, the writer is substantially correct in his observations. Comanches were short, and they were unimpressive physically, as almost all observers had noted. They were half-naked (it was summer in Houston, so they wore simple breechclouts), they did ride mustangs that were small, unshod, scrawny, and unattractive by European standards. They used bows and arrows as their main weapons. They were undoubtedly poor in the eyes of the average Texan, having no houses or real estate or bank accounts. And they of course loved to scavenge tin and iron: That was how they made arrows, knives, and lances.
The reporter got the larger sense of it right, too. The Penatekas, by virtue of years of cross-cultural pollination, were a decayed and degenerative version of the truly wild Comanches of the plains. The proximity had its physical effects as well. Smallpox epidemics had killed huge numbers of Penatekas in 1816 and 1839 (cholera would destroy most of what was left in 1849). Their hunting grounds had become so depleted by the influx of settlers that soon many in the band would be on the verge of starving to death. They had indeed become the Comanches of the Woods, dependent now on the alien culture for their livelihood, while the rest of the bands still rode free and wild on the high plains. In fact, while the Penatekas were being cross-pollinated out of existence and reeling from white man’s diseases, you could argue that the Comanches of the high plains were still at the peak of their historical power.⁴ Where the reporter was wrong was in the implied assumption that this decadent version of the pure plains warrior would not amount to much of a military threat. He was quite wrong about that. The pathetic little half-naked folks still constituted the greatest light cavalry on earth; no more than a handful of American or Texan soldiers were yet a match for them.
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Buffalo Hump had a vision. It had come to him in the night. It was a violent, mystical, all-encompassing, apocalyptic sort of dream vision in which the lying and treacherous Texans, perpetrators of the massacre at the Council House, were attacked and driven into the sea. Buffalo Hump was a Penateka chief. Until recently he was a lower sort of chief, the type that could recruit warriors for this or that raid but did not enjoy the jefe status of the big civil and war chiefs. But now many of the paraibos were dead. Some had been killed in the disastrous 1816 smallpox epidemic that swept through Comanche, Wichita, and Caddo villages and killed as many as four thousand Comanches,⁵ taking fully half of the estimated eight thousand band members at the turn of the nineteenth century. At least four headmen were lost during another smallpox epidemic in 1839; twelve more war chiefs were killed at the Council House Fight. Buffalo Hump was a survivor, a charismatic leader who spoke fluent Spanish and would live to fight many campaigns, even after most of his band had been destroyed. He happened to be Spirit Talker’s nephew.⁶ He had first encountered white colonists, taibos, at the Barton Springs settlement in Austin in 1828, where he conversed with them in Spanish and charmed them and was described as “a magnificent specimen of savage manhood.”⁷ That was before the Comanches had figured out how unfriendly and acquisitive the Anglo-Texans were. A German scientist who met him in the 1840s described him this way:
The pure, unadulterated picture of a North American Indian, who, unlike the rest of his tribe, scorned every form of European dress. His body naked, a buffalo robe around his loins, brass rings on his arms, a string of beads around his neck, and with his long, coarse black hair hanging down, he sat there with the serious facial expression of the North American Indian which seems to be apathetic to the Europeans.⁸
Though no photograph of Buffalo Hump exists, there is one of his son, who was said to look like him. It shows a strikingly handsome young man of perhaps twenty with shoulder-length hair; wise, calm eyes; epicene features; and the thousand-yard stare that Indians always assumed for the camera. Buffalo Hump had one of those Comanche names—there were a large number of them—that the prudish whites could not quite bring themselves to translate. His Nermernuh name, properly transliterated, was Po-cha-na-quar-hip, which meant “erection that won’t go down.”⁹
Buffalo Hump’s dream vision was uncommonly powerful. In the weeks of rage and mourning that followed the massacre in San Antonio, in the crushing heat of the high Texas summer, when riders spread the news throughout Comancheria, it held enormous, raw appeal. The vision, like many visions experienced by war chiefs, was, at its core, an idea for a raid. But this would not be just any raid. Driving the Texans into the sea would take a military expedition such as the Comanches seldom ever mounted.
Throughout July, Buffalo Hump gathered his forces. He sent messengers to the distant bands—Yamparika, Kotsoteka, Nokoni—but succeeded in getting only a few recruits. The northern bands were leery of the idea, both because of the magically powerful disease that had just swept through their southern brethren and because of the deaths of so many war chiefs. There was far too much bad medicine in the South. They also had their own troubles in the North: Cheyennes and Arapahoes had pushed southward into the buffalo ranges between the Arkansas and Canadians rivers, a direct assault on Comancheria. And perhaps they understood, too, what they would understand so well later on, which was that the Penatekas, in their proximity to the white man, were no longer traditional Comanches. They were becoming something different, something degraded.
But most of the other Penateka chiefs, including Isimanica, Little Wolf, and Santa Anna, agreed to follow. Some Kiowas came, too. Kiowas had trouble refusing a good fight; they had some mystical kinship with the Comanches even though they spoke a different language and had a culture that was more complex than anything the Comanches had. By midsummer Buffalo Hump had more than four hundred warriors and some six hundred camp followers. The latter—boys and women—were necessary, because driving all of the Texans into the sea and watching their blood spill into the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico was going to take longer than a few weeks. This was going to be a war against the Tejanos, and Buffalo Hump needed logistical support.
On August 1, they rode, one thousand of them, down from the hard, stream-crossed limestone battlements of the Balcones Escarpment, down along the gorgeous cypress-lined banks and crystalline pools of the Blanco River, down to its confluence with the spring-fed San Marcos and out onto the blackland prairie of south-central Texas.¹⁰ Their destination: the towns and settlements strung out along the rivers and creeks that swept southward toward the grassy plains and shallow bays of Texas’s coastal bend. As they got farther south they moved by night. On August 4 they rode by the light of the rising Comanche moon, penetrating beyond the line of the frontier and deep into the settlements of Anglo-Texas.
When Texas Ranger Ben McCulloch crossed their trail two days later near the town of Gonzales, he could scarcely believe his eyes. One thousand riders had passed almost completely unnoticed through territory that, while not thickly populated, contained many homesteads and settlements. No one in south Texas had ever seen anything like this. The people who had spotted the invaders were mostly dead. One of them was a man named Tucker Foley, who had encountered a screen of twenty-seven warriors. They cornered him at a water hole, roped him and dragged him out, cut the bottoms of his feet off, made him walk around the burned prairie for a while for their entertainment, then shot and scalped him.¹¹ McCulloch and a small force of volunteers shadowed the Indian force. There were far too many to fight.
What followed is known to Texans as the Great Linnville Raid. In history it is often twinned with the event that it precipitated, famous as the Battle of Plum Creek. They happened within the span of two weeks. Together they form a singular and often surreal piece of Texas history, a spasm of anger and violence on a scale rarely seen in the West. It was Buffalo Hump’s greatest—and worst—moment, and it was one of the first moments of true greatness for the men who were beginning to call themselves Texas Rangers and who would soon, in those very same hills and prairies, having learned how to fight from the Comanches themselves, change the nature of frontier warfare in North America.
At four p.m. on August 6, 1840, just short of five months after the Council House Fight, Buffalo Hump’s army slammed into the town of Victoria, about one hundred miles southeast of San Antonio and twenty-five miles from the coast. The town had received no warning, and the Indians entered easily. They killed a dozen people, swirled through the streets as the citizens fled to rooftops and windows, and opened up with rifle fire. Here, as usual, Comanche medicine detoured what might have been a wholesale slaughter. The Comanches did not close in for the kill and simply proceed, house by house, to kill all of Victoria. Instead, they circled the town as though it were a herd of buffalo, stole horses and cattle, carried off a small black girl, and generally made mischief. The sheer number of horses, which you can think of in modern terms as sequences of one-thousand-dollar bills deposited instantly into your checking account, distracted them. They were not materialistic except when it came to horses. Horses they valued, for themselves and for what they would bring in trade. Meanwhile, the residents of Victoria had time to build barricades. The Comanches attacked again in the morning, but were discouraged by rifle fire. They buzzed like hornets on the outskirts of town for a while, stole somewhere between fifteen hundred and two thousand horses, and, leaving thirteen corpses and many wounded behind, spurred on for the coastal road. They did not have any special idea where they were going, but they were following Buffalo Hump’s vision. They were riding to the sea, with as many as three thousand horses.
The tribe cut a bloody swath of violence across the coastal lowlands, looting, killing, and burning on their way to Matagorda Bay, and sweeping the entire country of horse stock as they went.¹² They took captives, too, including a Mrs. Nancy Crosby, the granddaughter of Daniel Boone, and her baby. Since she could not quiet the child, they killed it, spearing it in front of her.¹³ On August 8 the army rode in a spectacular crescent formation into the coastal town of Linnville, instantly enveloping it. Now, quickly, Buffalo Hump’s vision seemed to be fulfilled. The panicked inhabitants fled before the thundering Comanches in the only direction they could—toward the sea, and into the only possible safe haven—sailboats, several of them, anchored in shoal water about a hundred yards from shore.¹⁴ Many fleeing townspeople were cut down in the water, including one Major H. O. Watts, the young customs inspector, who had just gotten married. His wife, described by one witness as “a remarkably fine looking woman,”¹⁵ was captured. When the Indians tried to strip her, the usual first move with any captive, they encountered the mysterious and formidable obstacle of her whalebone corset, which they could not undo. Frustrated, they strapped her to the back of a horse and took her along with them. Many residents saved themselves by boarding a large schooner that was also anchored just offshore.
The Indians, meanwhile, had discovered the miraculous contents of the warehouses: cloth and fabric, umbrellas, hats, fine clothing, and hardware. Linnville was an important shipping center; the merchandise was destined for San Antonio and the Mexican trade. The Indians removed all they could carry from the warehouses, then set them on fire. The townspeople watched from the boats—there was not a breath of wind that day, so their boats were becalmed—as their homes, their business offices, and all but one of the warehouses went up in flames.¹⁶ As the town burned, the Indians whooped and danced and herded cattle into pens where they hacked and shot them to death. This description comes from John J. Linn, a resident of Victoria at the time of the raids:
These Indians made free with, and went dashing about the blazing village, amid their screeching squaws and “little Injuns,” like demons in a drunken saturnalia, with Robinson’s [a local merchant] hats on their heads and Robinson’s umbrellas bobbing about on every side like tipsy young balloons.¹⁷
After burning the town, which was so thoroughly destroyed that it was never rebuilt, the Indians departed, heading back the way they had come.¹⁸ If their antics in the town seemed like a bad dream, what happened next suggested a full-scale hallucination. The truth was that Buffalo Hump had lost control of his army. Vengeance had dissolved into something that more closely resembled pure fun. It had started with the orgy of horse-thieving in Victoria—even for Comanches, three thousand horses was an immense haul. Then came the astonishing discovery of the Linnville warehouses, stuffed with the accoutrements of bourgeois life. The Nermernuh had arrived in town in buckskins and breechclouts. They left wearing stovepipe hats, high leather boots, and expensive pigeon-tailed coats with bright brass buttons worn backward and buttoned up from behind.¹⁹ They had taken the calicoes and bright ribbons from the warehouses and festooned their lances with them and plaited them into the tails of their horses. The group that moved off down the Victoria road was not just picturesque, a splash of brilliant color in the thornscrub of south Texas, but heavy with all the swag they could carry, which included iron hoops and less frivolous hardware for making weapons. It was all packed on horses and mules. Whether Buffalo Hump believed that his vision had been fulfilled is not known. Whatever he thought, the plan for a glorious extended war against the Tejanos had been replaced by a singular urge to get back home with a previously unimaginable quantity of loot.
The Texans were completely aware of this. Such a huge train, packed with stolen goods and tipis and containing women and children and even a few old men, moving so ponderously across the wide-open, dun-colored prairie, was not something easily missed. Nor was it an opportunity to be squandered. Three separate companies of men were formed to fight the invaders. One of them, consisting of 125 recruits from the Guadalupe River settlements under Captain John J. Tumlinson, intercepted the army near Victoria. They did what most taibo soldiers of the era had been taught to do: They dismounted and prepared to fight. In a fight with Comanches, dismounting on open ground was like signing your own death warrant. Men on foot against mounted men moving at 20 or 30 miles per hour who could shoot twelve arrows in the time it took to reload a rifle and fire it once was not a fair fight. It was only a question of how long the men on foot might live, and how lucky they might get in shooting a few Comanches out of the saddle. Tumlinson’s men were quickly surrounded by swirling, circling Comanches. They should have been slaughtered where they stood. But on this day the Comanches had other interests. Mainly, the defense of their groaning caravan. Tumlinson’s men retreated as quickly as they could, and the Indians drew off, more concerned with their women and packhorses than with Tumlinson’s pathetic attack.
The army continued north, toward the hill country, in the searing heat that had turned most of the prairie brown. In a normal raid, especially a big one, Comanches would attack, then split up into small groups and ride hard for the hinterlands. This was old, established practice among mounted Plains Indians. Now they did neither; in their arrogance they lumbered up the most obvious trail home. Having absconded with such prodigious poundage of material goods, perhaps they had no choice. On August 12 they were spotted by scouts near present-day Lockhart, moving in a northwesterly direction through the long grasses and dark loam of one of Texas’s loveliest prairies. Eyewitness John Henry Brown describes the sight. They had
a full view of Indians passing diagonally across our front, about a mile distant. They were singing and gyrating in diverse grotesque ways, evidencing their great triumph, and utterly oblivious of danger. Up to the time they had lost but one warrior; they had killed 20 persons.²⁰
They had been expected. In addition to his other errors of command, Buffalo Hump had committed the sin of being perfectly predictable. The white men knew where he would cross the Guadalupe and other rivers. Awaiting him, thus, were an assortment of two hundred men who had arisen spontaneously from the towns of Gonzales, Lavaca, Victoria, Cuero, and Texana. (Tumlinson’s men would not make the battle.) None were soldiers in the normal sense of the word. They included in their ranks many young men who had arrived in Texas after the Battle of San Jacinto looking specifically for adventure, violence, and glory. They were not sodbusters who shouldered long rifles only when danger approached. They were sharp-eyed, audacious, and fearless twenty-four-year-olds with little sense of their own mortality and a distinct taste for combat. “They were drawn to the West by the wildness and danger and daring of the frontier life,” wrote Mary Maverick in her memoir.²¹ They were highly motivated to track Indians and kill them and happily did it without pay or reward. Comanches, of course, had never seen anything like this breed of men. There were Tonkawa Indians, too, spoiling as always for revenge. All were under the command of Major General Felix Huston, the head of the state militia, a soldier of the old school who had once fought a duel over military promotion with Secretary of War Albert Sidney Johnston.²²
Huston now proceeded to make his own large blunder. Perhaps predictably, it was the same one Tumlinson had made two days before: He ordered his men to dismount on the open plain, and form a “hollow square” battle line. As before, mounted warriors encircled them, firing arrows and using their thick, buffalo hide shields to deflect bullets (which they did quite effectively). Dismounted men were wounded, horses were killed. According to Brown
This was the fatal error of the day. There we remained for thirty or forty precious minutes, during which time the warriors were dexterously engaging us, while their squaws and unarmed men were pressing the immense cavalcade of pack animals and loose horses forward to the mountains of the Rio Blanco and San Marcos. At the same time, their sharpshooters were inflicting on us and our horses serious damage.²³
As things got worse, Major General Huston was implored by his more experienced Indian fighters, notably Ben McCulloch and Matthew Caldwell, to order a mounted charge. While Huston was pondering his deteriorating situation, something remarkable happened: One of the Comanche war chiefs, who had charged very close to the Texans, using his shield with great skill, was hit by a bullet and fell from his horse. He was soon seized by two comrades and carried away. There was a moment when the frenzy of the Comanche attack seemed to abate. From their ranks came an eerie, wolflike howling sound. Something had gone wrong with the medicine; perhaps, as was sometimes the case, the Indians believed that the warrior’s puha would make him invulnerable to bullets.
Caldwell, fully grasping the moment, yelled to Huston, “Now, General! Charge ’em! They are whipped!” And for perhaps the first time in history, a large group of nonuniformed, mounted, lightly armed men galloped forward to confront a mounted Plains Indian tribe on its own terms and in its own style of combat. Even more important, the attack marked the first time that a representative of traditional fighting—General Huston—had given way in military tactics to the buckskin-clad Indian fighters of the frontier, represented by McCulloch and Caldwell. The Battle of Plum Creek, as it would go down in history, signified the beginning of the shift in fighting style that would find its true form in the next few years in the Texas Rangers. It is noteworthy that one of the men fighting for Texas at Plum Creek was John Coffee Hays—one of those fearless young men who had come looking for adventure. He was destined to become the most legendary Ranger of them all.²⁴
Mounted now, and screaming like Comanches, the Texans spurred forward and crashed into the long column, holding their fire until the last moment, and unleashing a volley that dropped fifteen Indians. They stampeded the herd of loose horses, which then slammed broadside into the packhorses, many of whom were carrying heavy loads of iron and were bogged down on muddy ground. The pandemonium was such that Comanche warriors, already spooked by the bad medicine of the chief’s death, now found themselves unable to maneuver. They panicked and began to flee. What ensued was a fight between retreating Comanches and advancing Texans that straggled on over fifteen miles of ground. It was a bloody fight. The Indians stopped long enough to kill their captives, including Daniel Boone’s granddaughter Nancy Crosby, who was tied to a tree and drilled with arrows. Mrs. Watts was more fortunate. She, too, was tied to a tree and shot, but her whalebone corset deflected the arrow. She escaped the murderous events of the day with a flesh wound and terrible sunburn.²⁵ White soldiers could be equally unforgiving. One of them who came upon a dying Comanche woman was seen stamping her with his boot, then impaling her on an Indian lance.
The Texans considered the battle a major victory. Whether it was or not remains, to this day, very hard to tell, mainly because, as usual, the Indians never offered their own version of events. While historians agree that the Texans charged and the Indians fled and that one Texan was killed and seven wounded, there is little agreement on how many Indians died, or how successful their escape was. Estimates of Indian dead were variously given as 25, 50, 60, 80 and 138, though the number of bodies actually recovered was somewhere between 12 and 25.
But there is evidence that the Indian retreat was, in fact, tactically quite brilliant. The Comanches were most concerned with protecting their wives and children. This they seem to have done. Though they lost much of their loot, they held on to many of the horses. According to Linn, who was entirely of the glorious-victory-for-the-whites school of history, only “several hundred head of horses and mules were recovered.”²⁶ Out of three thousand. What this points to is a victory that was possibly not quite as magnificent as it is portrayed in Ranger histories and other accounts sympathetic to the Texans. In the view of historians Jodye and Thomas Schilz, the Comanche strategy during the battle consisted of a number of feints, executed on horseback at high speed, that confused the whites, screened their camp followers, and thus allowed them to escape.
The display of color and equestrian skill made for a dazzling distraction that gave the women and children time to begin herding the stolen livestock toward the northwest to get it out of Huston’s reach. . . . Despite suffering heavy losses, Buffalo Hump had led a raid all the way to the Texas coast and had brought most of his people safely home. . . . The Battle of Plum Creek was a tactical draw.²⁷
When the battle was over the Tonkawas, who by most reports had done a good deal of the heavy fighting, thus paying off their ancient blood debts, gathered around a big fire they had built. They began singing. Several men then dragged a dead Comanche toward the fire. They cut small fillets from his body, skewered them on sticks, thrust them into the fire, cooked them, and ate them. After a few mouthfuls, according to Robert Hall, who witnessed this, “They began to act as if they were very drunk. They danced, raved, howled and sang, and invited me to get up and eat a slice of Comanche. They said it would make me very brave.”²⁸
If some doubt lingers as to the magnificence of the Texans’ victory at Plum Creek, there is no disagreement at all about what happened two months later on the Upper Colorado River. Having convinced his superiors that the Comanches had not suffered enough for their atrocities of the Victoria and Linnville raids, Colonel John Moore, still smarting from his humiliation on the San Saba in 1839, drummed up a squad of volunteers for another punitive expedition. On October 5 he left with ninety white men and twelve Lipan Apaches and marched northwest up the Colorado River. By mid-October he had gone farther west than any Anglo-Texan had ever gone before, some three hundred miles west of Austin. There the Lipans found a Comanche camp of sixty lodges (eight to ten people in a lodge was normal). According to some accounts, this was Buffalo Hump’s camp.²⁹ The soldiers camped a few miles away. It was a clear, cold October night; the earth was white with frost.
They attacked at dawn, and because Moore had learned his lesson on the San Saba, they came on horseback. Once again, the Indians, who did not believe that taibos could possibly attack them so far inside Comancheria, were completely unprepared. What followed, as the Texans plunged into the village, was more butchery than battle. The Indians who managed to escape their burning tipis found that they were cornered against the Colorado River. Many died crossing it. Those who managed to crawl up the other bank were pursued, some for up to four miles, and shot down.³⁰ Many were left to die in burning tipis. Only two soldiers were killed, evidence that most of the Comanches never even got to their weapons. Moore himself dispensed with the usual niceties about trying to avoid killing women and children (a staple of western military reports), saying that he had left “the bodies of men, women and children—wounded, dying and dead on every hand.” He claimed to have killed one hundred thirty people in about half an hour and there is no reason to doubt him. He took thirty-four prisoners, captured five hundred horses, and destroyed the village by fire. Thus were the sins of Linnville and Victoria avenged. But the big war had just begun.
