Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (29 page)

When they finally took to the field, three hundred strong, they could not find any Indians. During the summer Johnson and his men were out
foxed, outrun, and generally humiliated in ways that would have amazed the old Rangers. According to one account, after one of their unsuccessful forays, they had started for home. Though they could not find Peta Nocona, he apparently had no trouble finding them. At night the Indians charged the Ranger camp, stampeded the horses, and drove them away, leaving the white men to return home across the plains on foot.
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On another occasion, while the Rangers were riding north toward Oklahoma, Indians swept around south of them, stealing seventy-five horses and killing several settlers during a four-day spree. The Rangers turned, vowing to “wipe them out.” Instead, the Indians set the prairie on fire, destroying horse forage and causing the white men to return to Fort Belknap.
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The failure of Johnson’s unit illustrated an old truth in the West: that knowledge of how to fight Comanches spread, at best, sporadically and unevenly along the frontier. There were things that Jack Hays knew in 1839 that Rangers in general still had not learned twenty years later.

The people on the frontier were furious. John Baylor, the flamboyant, vehemently anti-Indian editor of the Weatherford paper,
The White Man,
insulted the Rangers by calling them “perfectly harmless,” declaring that their hiring was “the most stupendous sell practiced on the frontier people” and that all of their expectations “have resulted only in the rangers’s eating twice their weight in beef at 11 cents a pound . . . drinking bad water, and cursing the day they were induced to soldier for glory, in a campaign that has resulted in the killing of two citizens, and the marriage of the Colonel of the regiment.” It further stated that if he and his people found one of them, especially Johnson, they would hang him.”
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Johnson, meanwhile, seemed more interested in his blossoming love affair with the lovely socialite Louisa Power Givens.
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His unsuccessful expeditions that summer offer a good example of what happened when white men wrote the history of the Indian wars. Johnson gets scant mention in Ranger histories. There is very little detail on his expeditions. He is dismissed with a shrug. No one is much interested in the abject humiliation of the institution of the Texas Rangers. If Indians had been writing about the northwest frontier of Texas in 1860, they might have characterized Peta Nocona’s attacks as tactically brilliant guerrilla warfare, in the same way historians would later speak of the daring exploits of Confederate raider Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Flush with victory, scalps, cattle, and horses, Nocona returned to his camp on Mule Creek and rejoined his wife and three children. In late November he
rode eastward again to the frontier, this time at the head of fifty-five warriors. This time the raiding was worse, crueler, more vengeful even than it had been in the early fall. His war party swung west of Mesquiteville (now Jacksboro), and rode hard into the line of settlements, killing everyone they saw. Near Weatherford they attacked the ranch of John Brown, stealing his horses, killing him by driving lances through every part of his body, and cutting off his nose. They rode across open country in a torrential rain and arrived at a place called Stagg Prairie, on the western edge of Parker County.
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Here, on the very outermost edge of the bleeding frontier, in the most hazardous place in the state of Texas, a greenhorn name Ezra Sherman, who did not even own a gun, had decided to move his wife, Martha, and three children. On November 26, a group of seventeen braves from Nocona’s force arrived at the Sherman home. The Shermans were having dinner at the time. The Indians entered the cabin, actually shook hands with the family, then asked for something to eat.
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The Shermans, nervous and unsure what was happening, gave the Indians their table. Once they had eaten, the Indians turned the family out, though with continuing professions of goodwill. “Vamoose,” they said. “No hurt, vamoose.” The Shermans’ seven-year-old son fled and hid himself. The others got away as fast as they could, stumbling in the driving rain across their fields toward a nearby farm.
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They weren’t fast enough. Half a mile from their house, the Indians reappeared. Now they seized Martha, who was nine months pregnant. While Ezra and his two children continued on, they dragged Martha back to a point about two hundred yards from the cabin. There she was gang-raped. When they were finished, they shot several arrows into her and then did something that was unusually cruel, even for them. They scalped her alive by making deep cuts below her ears and, in effect, peeling the top of her head entirely off. As she later explained, this was difficult for the Indians to do, and took a long time to accomplish. Bleeding, she managed to drag herself back inside her house, which the heavy rain had prevented the Indians from burning, where her husband found her. She lived four days, during which time she was coherent enough to tell the story to her neighbors. She gave birth to a stillborn infant. She probably died of peritonitis: Comanches knew what it was and often aimed their arrows at a victim’s navel. Half a century later, a Palo Pinto County rancher recalled that her scalping left her a “fearful sight.”
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She was one of twenty-three people who died by the hand of Peta Nocona’s raiders over a span of two days, November 26 to November 28.

________

Frontier people saw Martha Sherman’s death as the random and senseless slaughter of a Christian woman by a tribe whose primitive, godless, and subhuman nature it was to do such things. Mrs. Sherman hadn’t hurt anyone. She had committed no acts of war. But her death was neither random nor senseless. She was as much a victim of colliding political and social forces as she was of the arrows and knives of Peta Nocona’s raiders. Her death did mean something. It was a consequence of the unprecedented invasion of Comancheria by white settlers that had taken place at the end of the 1850s. The land she lived on was not the hardscrabble hills of Edwards Plateau west of Austin and San Antonio where the buffalo herd rarely roamed. This was lush, open, long-grass prairie beyond the Cross Timbers in northern Texas, and encompassed the rich and ancient buffalo ground that Comanches had been fighting for since the early eighteenth century. Pioneers had been gradually pushing westward behind a line of federal forts that had been built in the early 1850s. But the big rush came at the end of the decade, when white settlement leapfrogged fifty miles to a line of longitude that passes through present-day Wichita Falls:
way
beyond where the white people had ever gone before.

The newly chinked cabins in Parker County were part of this swelling presence. And though Martha Sherman was undoubtedly a well-intentioned and God-fearing woman, she and Ezra were part of that clamorous, chaotic, and brazenly aggressive lunge into the enemy’s territory. The Comanches saw it that way, because there was no other way for them to see it. That fall the buffalo had moved south, bumping up against the white man’s homesteads, meaning that Comanches who stayed away from the frontier were going hungry. Peta Nocona’s brutal sweep through northern Texas was thus a political act, with political objectives. So was the Shermans’ decision to build their cabin in western Parker County, though less self-consciously so. Both coveted the same land, both wanted the other side to stop contesting it, and neither was willing to give anything meaningful in exchange. By comparison, what happened at Parker’s Fort was minor contact between picket lines. The raids of Peta Nocona in 1860 constituted outright war for territory. Everything was at stake now. Everything was changing.
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Exploding might be a better word. When Cynthia Ann Parker was taken from her family in 1836, the population of Texas was around 15,000. By 1860 it had grown to 604,215.
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In the 1850s alone, some 400,000 new people had arrived. Fully 42,422 of Texas’s residents that year were foreign born;
182,921 of them were slaves. San Antonio was a bustling town of 8,235.
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Galveston, Houston, and Austin were all booming, transforming themselves from mudtraps where pigs roamed the streets into something that began to look like urban civilization. In 1836 there were only a few rutted dirt wagon roads in Texas; by 1860 there were thousands of miles of such roads, plus 272 miles of railroad tracks.
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There were three newspapers when the Parker captives disappeared into the plains; now there were seventy-one.
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Still, the state’s population was mostly rural, and most of its citizens were subsistence farmers. On the outer frontier they built primitive dog-run cabins or sod huts, made everything themselves except for tools and weapons, and scratched out a hard and meager living from the land. They endured many of the horrors that settlers on the Appalachian frontier had endured a century before. And they kept coming on in spite of this, from Alabama and Tennessee and other points east, piling up by the thousands on the edge of the plains barrier that had stood inviolable for so long.

The problem, as Peta Nocona’s raid illustrated, was that they were still being eviscerated, tortured, raped, and made captive by Comanches, and there was little evidence that anyone in the Office of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., had the remotest idea of what to do about it. It seemed impossible that, twenty-one years after Jack Hays and the Rangers started fighting Indians in new ways, this could be the case. Every so often troops would be sent forth with the glorious task of breaking Comanche power forever. Every so often they would actually find Comanches and kill a significant number of them. But these expeditions never added up to anything. They didn’t stop anything. There was no concerted will to pursue the adversaries into their dark heartland, to destroy them.

And so the attacks continued, increasing in severity after 1857. Most came from the Yamparika, Kotsoteka, Nokoni, and Quahadi bands, who remained as free as ever in their strongholds in the far north or far west. Kiowas, equally untouchable above the Canadian River, were raiding, too, often in tandem with Comanches. The old patterns reasserted themselves, only slightly altered, and nothing really changed. The great wave of American settlement had swept forward from the eastern coastlands through the trans-Appalachian country and on past the Mississippi. It had had a brief moment of hope and optimism, sailing across the 98th meridian with the Shermans and other settlers. And suddenly it had crashed and burned yet
again on the same vast and deadly physical barrier that had stopped the Spanish, the French, the Mexicans, and the original Texans: the Great Plains. There, stretching clear to Canada, remained the formidable war machines of the Sioux, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne.

By the time he left Texas to seek his fortune in California in 1849, Jack Hays had proved a point. He had shown, many would have said incontrovertibly, that Comanches could be hunted, pursued to their villages, fought on their own terms, and beaten. He had invented a new form of warfare, and he had invented its implausible agent of destruction: a lightly armed and lightly mounted man on a fast horse who wore an old slouch hat and scraggy beard and spit tobacco and defied absurd numerical odds against him. Hays had adapted a weapon no one else had wanted and had turned it into the ultimate frontier sidearm, one that soon changed the very nature of the experience of the American West. By the time the Mexican War ended, a casual observer might have concluded that the tide had already turned against the Indians and that the Comanches, encased as they now were inside the pulsing American empire and facing a determined people who understood how to fight them, were going to meet their doom rather faster than one might have expected.

Nothing of the sort happened. It was as though the Rangers had never happened, as though no one remembered what they had spilled the blood of so many young men to learn. No Rangers were consulted by anyone in Washington. Hays, who had gone west with the Gold Rush and soon became sheriff of San Francisco County, was largely forgotten, at least for a time, as were his hard-riding comrades. The Rangers were disbanded, replaced by U.S. Army units. They were periodically re-formed, which usually meant that a single captain recruited a band of men for an expedition with limited state funding, in 1850, 1852, 1855, 1857, and 1858. But most of these companies did little Indian fighting. Some fought small skirmishes with Lipan Apache raiders in far south Texas. A few fought Comanches. One of them went renegade, joining an ill-fated expedition under the command of an infamous adventurer to overthrow the government of Mexico. They ended by burning the Mexican border town of Piedras Negras and covering themselves with shame.
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The 1857 recruits, wrote Walter Prescott Webb, “left practically no record of their presence on the frontier.” One of their compa
nies managed to find a small group of Indians, “but was completely deceived and worsted by them.”
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The notable exception to this was Rip Ford’s 1858 expedition north of the Red River, of which more will be said later.

But the inefficiency of the post-Hays Rangers paled next to the U.S. Army, which over a decade managed to engineer a retrogression of astounding scale and proportion. The cruel, lingering death of Martha Sherman in the fall of 1860 had another meaning as well: It was the harvest of a decade of federal incompetence, stupidity, and willful political blindness.

The failure took many forms. In 1848 and 1849 the army sent its engineers forth to build a line of five forts, stretching from Fort Worth (which was one of them) to San Antonio. They were obsolete the minute they were finished. The line of settlement had already engulfed them.

There was also the problem of the men who were sent to occupy them. When it had withdrawn its forces from Mexico, the United States had sent seven companies of regulars to replace the Texas state troops. These consisted of
infantry
in various forms. Considering the advances in Indian warfare on the Texas frontier in the previous ten years, this was a remarkable decision. It could only have been made by people in cravats and waistcoats who lunched at fancy hotels and lived two thousand miles from the border; people, moreover, who did not want Indian wars and therefore did not want professional killers like Bigfoot Wallace out hunting redskins in their home ranges. In almost every way, the new Indian fighters were the antithesis of Hays’s men.