Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (30 page)

The best examples were the army’s new “elite” fighters in the West: the dragoons. They were a heavily mounted infantry who rode horses to the scene of battle, but fought dismounted. They were undoubtedly effective against comparably mounted and armed opponents, but on the Texas frontier they were a shocking anachronism, like something out of Louis XIV’s court. They were clad in “French-inspired blue jackets, orange forage caps, white pantaloons, and sweeping mustaches.”
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Like Louis’s old musketeers, too, they were self-consciously gallant, in ways that would soon seem nearly comical.

They were armed with weapons that the Spanish and Mexicans had long ago discovered to be useless against horse tribes: single-shot pistols (apparently the army, unlike its Mexican War victims, had not quite grasped the meaning or value of the Walker Colt), gleaming swords that had no particular application against Indians with fourteen-foot lances and rapid-fire arrows, and, oddest of all, the Springfield Arsenal Musketoon, Model 1842, a truly atrocious weapon that was unreliable at any distance. Heavy in the
saddle, and not a real cavalry anyway, the splendidly arrayed horse infantry could barely manage twenty-five miles a day in pursuit of Indians. They often had to walk by their horses, so as not to exhaust them. The warriors they pursued—pursuit being something the army in the West did not do very much of—could ride fifty miles in seven hours, and one hundred miles without stopping, abilities the plodding, weighed-down dragoons simply refused to believe. The only way the Indians could ever be in danger from these soldiers, observed one Texas Ranger, was if their ridiculous appearance and ungainly horsemanship caused the Indians to laugh themselves to death.
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“It was rather an unfortunate experiment to mount infantry soldiers,” wrote a Ranger captain, “many of whom had never been on horse in their lives, to operate against the best horsemen in the United States—the Comanche. Yet the United States Army tried it.”
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One can only speculate on how long it would have taken Rangers under Hays or Walker or McCulloch to leave such soldiers in pieces on the ground. It is not surprising that they never caught any Indians.

They were still far more efficient than the infantry, which made up the largest part of the troops then stationed on the frontier. The choice was a curious one, since the best an infantryman could do in such a vast and wide open country, against a fleet, mounted opponent, was to shoot his weapon from the gun portals of a stockade fence. Such a defensive notion was reasonable enough in places more civilized than the western frontier. But it had nothing to do with fighting horse Indians, who were never stupid or desperate enough to attack federal forts. They quickly learned to bypass them. Even before the posts were complete, citizens in some towns were calling for protection by Rangers. In 1849 one Texas newspaper stated that “The idea of repelling mounted Indians, the most expert horsemen in the world, with a force of foot soldiers, is ridiculous.”
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It did not help that most of these men were foreign-born German and Irish, that many of them were criminals, led miserably demoralizing lives, and suffered greatly from disease, poor sanitation, and alcoholism.

Yet this was the policy that seeped forth from Washington. That policy was deeply ambivalent. In 1849 the Home Department (later to become the Department of the Interior) had taken over the Office of Indian Affairs from the army. In principle, this was a reasonable idea. But it set up two conflicting authorities. The Office of Indian Affairs was deeply committed to avoiding Indian wars in the West. It distrusted the army, and tended to
disbelieve cries of wolf from the settlements, believing that the whites’ problems with the Indians were of their own doing. They liked the idea of treaties, the more the better. They liked the notion of an enduring peace, in spite of the headlong rush of settlers into Indian territory who wanted peace only if it meant complete capitulation by Indians. The army knew better, but could do nothing about it. The Indian office was moreover deeply corrupt, full of agents who saw nothing wrong with cheating Indians of gifts or annuities or food allotments—acts that often led to bloodshed. The result was a policy of breathtaking passivity that lasted from 1849 to 1858. Soldiers were not to fight Indians unless attacked, or unless they had clear evidence that the Indians had been involved in a criminal act.

The government’s approach was purely defensive. Thus the new line of forts, built one hundred miles to the west and finished by 1852,
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were not much more effective than the first ones. Not at first, anyway. Though they had been built at great expense, they were typically understaffed and underfunded. Infantrymen could do little more than drill and march about the parade ground. Pursuit of mounted Comanches by foot troops was pointless. The forts were built to stop Indian raids on both the Texas frontier and northern Mexico, yet through most of the 1850s they were ineffective. As Wallace and Hoebel wrote, “Officers and troops were strangely ignorant of the rudiments of warfare as carried on by the Indians of the plains.”
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The failure at the federal level also extended to treaties, which were no different from any of the failed treaties signed by the government of the United States from its earliest days. One historian has estimated the number of treaties made and broken by the government at 378.
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The outcome of nearly every treaty was the same: White civilization advanced, aboriginal civilization was destroyed, subsumed, pushed out. The government made claims it could never enforce and never intended to enforce, and Indians died. This is a dreary history. The Five Civilized Tribes were chased westward by a series of treaties, each of which guaranteed that this time government promises would be kept, that this time the trail of tears would end. Some of this treaty-making was pure hypocrisy; some of it, as in the case of Texas Indian agent Robert Neighbors, was earnest and well-meaning naïveté. Indians always wanted agreements that would last for all eternity; no white man who ever signed one could have possibly believed that the government could make such promises.

An enormous amount of energy was expended making pointless trea
ties with Comanches. A brief summary will suffice to make the point. The first treaty was made in 1847, with the Penatekas, who of course could not enforce any of its provisions on the other bands. Its terms were typical: Indians were to give up captives and restore stolen goods, accept the jurisdiction of the United States, and trade only with licensed traders. In exchange, the government promised that no whites would be permitted to go among the Indians without a pass signed personally by the president of the United States, that they would give them blacksmiths to repair guns and tools, and would give them gifts worth $10,000.
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The whites, of course, never upheld the treaty. One wonders who came up with the ridiculous idea of making President James K. Polk approve passes for every settler who wanted to cross into the Indian country. As usual, the Indians were not allowed beyond a certain established line. Whites, meanwhile, clamored forward. Another similar treaty followed in 1850, which the Senate would not ratify, making all of the promises of the Indian office meaningless.

The treaty of 1853 was pure fraud, on both sides. This agreement, signed by “representatives” of the northern Comanches, Kiowas, and Kiowa Apaches that had no tribal power to agree to anything, allowed the United States to build roads in Indian territory, establish depots and posts, and protect immigrants passing through. As compensation for this, the agents promised goods in the amount of $18,000 annually. The Indians pledged to cease their attacks both in the United States and Mexico, and to give back all of their captives.
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Neither side abided by the agreement, nor had they any intention of doing so. The annuity goods were not delivered, though someone in the Indian office undoubtedly made a tidy profit. The Indians, wise perhaps now to the ways of the white man, never had any intention of honoring their promises. They liked the idea of gifts, and wanted to see how much they could get. The whites inevitably got something out of these treaties: The Indians could be painted as treaty-breakers. They had after all signed a document saying they would not raid and would give up captives, and then they had, treacherously, refused to keep it, notwithstanding that settlers ignored it as they ignored every other treaty. Manifest Destiny, as a notion and as a blueprint for expanding empire, meant that the land, all of it, belonged to the white man. And white men did what they had done ever since they landed in Virginia in the seventeenth century: They pushed as far into Indian country as their courage, or Indian war parties, would let them. Imagine the alternative:
the U.S. government sending troops to shoot down God-fearing settlers who simply wanted a piece of the American dream. It never happened.

The best idea the U.S. government could muster was to put four hundred starving Penatekas and a thousand other mostly Wichita-Caddoan remnants on to reservations on the Brazos River in 1855. The plan was hatched by Jefferson Davis, the new secretary of war in the Franklin Pierce administration. The Penatekas, decimated by waves of diseases, their hunting lands emptied of game, and their culture polluted by the white invaders, were literally starving to death; the other Indians who remained were simply being overrun.

This plan backfired, too. The Comanches were given about twenty thousand acres on the Clear Fork of the Brazos between present-day Abilene and Wichita Falls. For nomadic hunters, this was an absurdly small plot, too small to raise stock and mostly impossible to farm. Only about four hundred of the remaining twelve hundred Penatekas came in; the rest, scared off by rumors that they would be killed, fled north of the Red River with the ubiquitous Buffalo Hump. For those who stayed, the idea was that they would become happy, well-adjusted farmers. But no Comanche had ever wanted to plant seeds. The Indian agent, Robert Neighbors, was forced to give them cattle. The reaction of Sanaco, one of the chiefs who came in, sums up the bitter resignation of the Penatekas:

You come into our country and select a small patch of ground, around which you run a line, and tell us the President will make us a present of this to live on, when everybody knows that the whole of this entire country, from the Red River to the Colorado, is ours and always had been from time immemorial. I suppose, however, if the President tells us to confine ourselves to these narrow limits, we shall be forced to do so.
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But the main problem with the Texas reservations was the white people who lived next to them. By 1858 white farms and ranches surrounded the reservations. And soon the whites were blaming the reservation Indians for raids that were being carried out by northern bands. In the fall of 1858 there were a series of savage raids all along the frontier—a settlement twenty-five miles from Fredericksburg was completely annihilated. Under the leadership of the Indian-hating newspaper editor John Baylor, settlers organized themselves and threatened to kill all of the Indians on both reservations. On December 27, 1858, a party of seventeen peaceful Indians from the reservation—Anadarkos and Caddoans—were attacked by white men while they
slept. The white men fired on them, killing four men and three women. The six men who were guilty of the murders were identified but never charged. The feeling was that no jury would ever convict them, and that their arrest might stir the border into full-scale revolt. Meanwhile Baylor continued to stir up trouble, even going so far as to say that he would kill any soldier who tried to stand in his way. By the spring of 1859 the area around the reservations was in full panic. Groups of whites went about armed and looking for Indians. In May, some whites opened fire on a group of Indians. There was little doubt now that if the Indians stayed there, there would a full-scale war. Or, more likely, a full-scale slaughter.

On July 31, Agent Neighbors and three companies of federal troops led a long, strange, and colorful procession of Indians out of the Brazos reservations, never to return. The sight was at once magnificent and pathetic. There were 384 Comanches and 1,112 Indians from the other tribes.
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They moved in a slow procession in the shimmering heat of the prairie, dragging their travois behind them as they had for hundreds of years; they crossed the Red River on August 8, and on August 16 arrived at their new reservation on the Washita River near present-day Fort Cobb, Oklahoma. The next day agent Neighbors returned to Texas to file a report. While he was at Fort Belknap, a man named Edward Cornett, who disagreed with his Indian policies, walked up to him and shot him in the back.

By almost any measure, John Salmon “Rip” Ford was one of the West’s most remarkable characters. He was at various times a medical doctor, a newspaper editor, a state representative and state senator, a flamboyant proponent of the Confederacy, and an explorer who blazed the San Antonio to El Paso trail, which later bore his name. He served as mayor of Brownsville, delegate to the 1875 Constitutional Convention, and superintendent of the state’s Deaf and Dumb School. He was a peacekeeper, too. He once protected the Brazos Reservation Indians against false accusations from the local whites, but later refused to arrest the men responsible for killing the innocent Caddoans and Anadarkos, in spite of an order by a state district judge to do so.
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Rip Ford was a man of many opinions, all of them strong.

But he was most famous as a fighter of Indians and Mexicans. He had joined Jack Hays’s upstart Rangers in 1836, rising to the rank of first lieutenant. He served under Hays again as his adjutant during the Mexican War, where he earned his nickname. It was his job to send death notices
to soldiers’ families, and he often included the postscript “Rest in Peace.” Since he ended up writing so many such reports, he shortened the message to “R.I.P.” Many people believed the initials stood for all of the Indians he had killed. After the war he rejoined the Rangers, was promoted to captain, and spent time on the border hunting Mexican bandits and Indians. Though he was literate and cultured, he was a hard-looking man; you could imagine him in a cold camp in the limestone breaks of the hill country with Hays and McCulloch and the others, waking in a frozen dawn to track and kill Comanches. He had a broad face with deep-set eyes, a crooked nose, jug-handle ears, and a thin, hard mouth. He liked to wear buckskins and a long and narrowly cut beard. Sometimes he wore a stovepipe hat. He was known to be a hard drillmaster.