Comanche Indians Cut Off Finger When a Family Deid?

Empire of the Summer Moon
By S. C. Gwynne
Paperback, 384 pages
Scribner
List price: $sixteen

A New Kind of War

Cavalrymen remember such moments: grit swirling backside the pack mules, regimental bugles shattering the air, horses snorting and riders' tack creaking through the ranks, their old visitor song ascent on the wind: "Come home, John! Don't stay long. Come abode soon to your own chick-a-biddy!"

The date was Oct 3, 1871. Six hundred soldiers and xx Tonkawa scouts had bivouacked on a lovely bend of the Articulate Fork of the Brazos, in a rolling, scarred prairie of grama grass, scrub oak, sage, and chaparral, about one hundred 50 miles west of Fort Worth, Texas. Now they were breaking camp, moving out in a long, snaking line through the high cutbanks and quicksand streams. Though they did non know it at the time — the idea would accept seemed preposterous — the sounding of "boots and saddle" that morning marked the offset of the end of the Indian wars in America, of fully two hundred fifty years of bloody combat that had begun almost with the first landing of the starting time ship on the first fatal shore in Virginia. The concluding destruction of the last of the hostile tribes would non take place for a few more years. Time would be yet required to round them all up, or starve them out, or exterminate their sources of nutrient, or run them to ground in shallow canyons, or impale them outright.

For the moment the question was 1 of difficult, unalloyed will. There had been brief spasms of official vengeance and retribution before: J. M. Chivington's and George Armstrong Custer's savage massacres of Cheyennes in 1864 and 1868 were examples. But in those days there was no real endeavour to destroy the tribes on a larger scale, no tum for it. That had changed, and on Oct iii, the change assumed the form of an society, barked out through the lines of command to the men of the Fourth Cavalry and Eleventh Infantry, to go forth and impale Comanches. It was the end of anything like tolerance, the get-go of the final solution.

The white men were grunts, bluecoats, cavalry, and dragoons; more often than not veterans of the War Between the States who now found themselves at the border of the known universe, ascending to the turreted rock towers that gated the fabled Llano Estacado — Coronado's term for it, pregnant "palisaded plains" of West Texas, a country populated exclusively past the most hostile Indians on the continent, where few U.Due south. soldiers had always gone earlier. The llano was a place of extreme pathos, a vast, trackless, and featureless ocean of grass where white men became lost and disoriented and died of thirst; a identify where the regal Spanish had once marched confidently forth to hunt Comanches, only to find that they themselves were the hunted, the ones to be slaughtered. In 1864, Kit Carson had led a big forcefulness of federal troops from Santa Fe and attacked a Comanche band at a trading post called Adobe Walls, due north of modern-mean solar day Amarillo. He had survived it, just had come up within a whisker of watching his three companies of cavalry and infantry destroyed.

The troops were now going back, because enough was enough, because President Grant'south vaunted "Peace Policy" toward the remaining Indians, run by his gentle Quaker appointees, had failed utterly to bring peace, and finally because the exasperated general in principal of the army, William Tecumseh Sherman, had ordered it so. Sherman's chosen agent of devastation was a civil war hero named Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, a difficult, moody, and implacable immature man who had graduated showtime in his class from West Point in 1862 and had finished the Civil War, remarkably, as a brevet brigadier full general. Because his paw was gruesomely disfigured from war wounds, the Indians chosen him No-Finger Main, or Bad Hand. A complex destiny awaited him. Within four years he would prove himself the most brutally effective Indian fighter in American history. In roughly that aforementioned time flow, while Full general George Armstrong Custer achieved globe fame in failure and catastrophe, Mackenzie would become obscure in victory. Just it was Mackenzie, non Custer, who would teach the rest of the army how to fight Indians. Equally he moved his men across the broken, stream-crossed land, past immense herds of buffalo and prairie-dog towns that stretched to the horizon, Colonel Mackenzie did not take a articulate idea of what he was doing, where precisely he was going, or how to fight Plains Indians in their homelands. Neither did he have the faintest thought that he would be the one largely responsible for defeating the terminal of the hostile Indians. He was new to this sort of Indian fighting, and would brand many mistakes in the coming weeks. He would learn from them.

For now, Mackenzie was the instrument of retribution. He had been dispatched to kill Comanches in their Great Plains fastness because, 6 years afterward the terminate of the Civil War, the western frontier was an open and bleeding wound, a smoking ruin littered with corpses and charred chimneys, a place where chaos and torture killings had replaced the rule of law, where Indians and especially Comanches raided at will. Victorious in war, unchallenged by strange foes in North America for the first time in its history, the Union now found itself unable to deal with the handful of remaining Indian tribes that had not been destroyed, assimilated, or forced to retreat meekly onto reservations where they quickly learned the meaning of abject subjugation and starvation. The hostiles were all residents of the Keen Plains; all were mounted, well armed, and driven now by a mixture of vengeance and political desperation. They were Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and Western Sioux. For Mackenzie on the southern plains, Comanches were the obvious target: No tribe in the history of the Castilian, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this state had ever acquired so much havoc and decease. None was even a shut 2d.

Simply how bad things were in 1871 forth this razor border of civilization could exist seen in the numbers of settlers who had abandoned their lands. The frontier, carried westward with so much sweat and claret and toil, was at present rolling backward, retreating. Colonel Randolph Marcy, who accompanied Sherman on a western tour in the spring, and who had known the country intimately for decades, had been shocked to find that in many places at that place were fewer people than eighteen years before. "If the Indian marauders are not punished," he wrote, "the whole country seems in a fair way of becoming totally depopulated."three This phenomenon was not entirely unknown in the history of the New Earth. The Comanches had also stopped cold the northward advance of the Castilian empire in the eighteenth century — an empire that had, up to that signal, easily subdued and killed millions of Indians in Mexico and moved at will through the continent. At present, after more than than a century of relentless westward movement, they were rolling back civilization'south advance again, just on a much larger calibration. Whole areas of the borderlands were simply elimination out, melting back e toward the safety of the forests. One canton — Wise — had seen its population drop from 3,160 in the year 1860 to 1,450 in 1870. In some places the line of settlements had been driven back a hundred miles.4 If General Sherman wondered virtually the cause — as he in one case did — his tour with Marcy relieved him of his doubts. That spring they had narrowly missed being killed themselves past a party of raiding Indians. The Indians, more often than not Kiowas, passed them over because of a shaman'southward superstitions and had instead attacked a nearby wagon train. What happened was typical of the savage, revenge-driven attacks by Comanches and Kiowas in Texas in the postwar years. What was non typical was Sherman'southward proximity and his ain very personal and mortal sense that he might accept been a victim, too. Because of that the raid became famous, known to history as the Salt Creek Massacre.

Vii men were killed in the raid, though that does not brainstorm to describe the horror of what Mackenzie found at the scene. According to Captain Robert G. Carter, Mackenzie'southward subordinate, who witnessed its aftermath, the victims were stripped, scalped, and mutilated. Some had been beheaded and others had their brains scooped out. "Their fingers, toes and private parts had been cut off and stuck in their mouths," wrote Carter, "and their bodies, at present lying in several inches of water and swollen or bloated across all chance of recognition, were filled full of arrows, which fabricated them resemble porcupines." They had clearly been tortured, too. "Upon each exposed abdomen had been placed a mass of live dress-down. . . . One wretched man, Samuel Elliott, who, fighting hard to the concluding, had manifestly been wounded, was establish chained between 2 wagon wheels and, a burn having been made from the wagon pole, he had been slowly roasted to death — 'burnt to a crisp.' "

Thus the settlers' headlong flight eastward, especially on the Texas frontier, where such raiding was at its worst. After so many long and successful wars of conquest and rule, it seemed implausible that the westward rush of Anglo-European civilisation would stall in the prairies of primal Texas. No tribe had ever managed to resist for very long the surge of nascent American civilization with its harquebuses and blunderbusses and muskets and somewhen lethal repeating weapons and its endless stocks of eager, landgreedy settlers, its elegant moral double standards and its complete condone for native interests. Start with the subjection of the Atlantic coastal tribes (Pequots, Penobscots, Pamunkeys, Wampanoags, et al), hundreds of tribes and bands had either perished from the globe, been driven west into territories, or forcibly alloyed. This included the Iroquois and their enormous, warlike confederation that ruled the area of present-twenty-four hour period New York; the one time powerful Delawares, driven westward into the lands of their enemies; the Iroquois, and so notwithstanding farther west into even more than murderous foes on the plains. The Shawnees of the Ohio Country had fought a desperate rearguard action starting in the 1750s. The great nations of the s — Chicasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, and Choctaw — saw their reservation lands expropriated in spite of a string of treaties; they were coerced westward into lands given them in yet more treaties that were violated before they were even signed; hounded forth a trail of tears until they, too, landed in "Indian Territory" (presentday Oklahoma), a country controlled by Comanches, Kiowas, Araphoes, and Cheyennes.

Even stranger was that the Comanches' stunning success was happening among phenomenal technological and social changes in the due west. In 1869 the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, linking the industrializing eastward with the developing w and rendering the one-time trails — Oregon, Santa Atomic number 26, and tributaries — instantly obsolete. With the rail came cattle, herded north in epic drives to railheads past Texans who could make fast fortunes getting them to Chicago markets. With the rails, as well, came buffalo hunters conveying mortiferous accurate .l-caliber Sharps rifles that could kill finer at extreme range — grim, vehement, opportunistic men blessed now by both a market place in the east for buffalo leather and the ways of getting information technology there. In 1871 the buffalo still roamed the plains: Before that year a herd of four 1000000 had been spotted near the Arkansas River in present-day southern Kansas. The main body was fifty miles deep and twenty-five miles wide.7 But the slaughter had already begun. Information technology would soon go the greatest mass destruction of warm-blooded animals in human history. In Kansas lonely the bones of 30-one million buffalo were sold for fertilizer between 1868 and 1881.eight All of these profound changes were under way as Mackenzie's Raiders departed their camps on the Articulate Fork. The nation was booming; a railroad had finally stitched information technology together. There was but this one obstacle left: the warlike and unreconstructed Indian tribes who inhabited the physical wastes of the Great Plains.

Of those, the about remote, primitive, and irredeemably hostile were a band of Comanches known as the Quahadis. Like all Plains Indians, they were nomadic. They hunted primarily the southernmost function of the high plains, a identify known to the Spanish, who had been abjectly driven from information technology, as Comancheria. The Llano Estacado, located inside Comancheria, was a dead-apartment tableland larger than New England and rising, in its highest elevations, to more than five chiliad anxiety. For Europeans, the land was like a bad hallucination. "Although I traveled over them for more than than 300 leagues," wrote Coronado in a letter to the king of Espana on October xx, 1541, "[there were] no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed upwardly by the sea . . . at that place was non a stone, nor a bit of ascent basis, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor annihilation to go by."9 The Canadian River formed its northern boundary. In the east was the precipitous Caprock Escarpment, a cliff ascent somewhere betwixt two hundred and one m anxiety that demarcates the high plains from the lower Permian Plains below, giving the Quahadis something that approximated a gigantic, nearly impregnable fortress. Unlike almost all of the other tribal bands on the plains, the Quahadis had ever shunned contact with Anglos. They would non even trade with them, as a general principle, preferring the Mexican traders from Santa Fe, known as Comancheros. So aloof were they that in the numerous Indian ethnographies compiled from 1758 onward chronicling the various Comanche bands (there were as many as 13), they do not even prove up until 1872.ten For this reason they had largely avoided the cholera plagues of 1816 and 1849 that had ravaged western tribes and had destroyed fully half of all Comanches. Virtually alone amongst all bands of all tribes in Due north America, they never signed a treaty. Quahadis were the hardest, fiercest, to the lowest degree yielding component of a tribe that had long had the reputation as the most violent and warlike on the continent; if they ran low on water, they were known to drink the contents of a dead horse's tum, something even the toughest Texas Ranger would not practise. Even other Comanches feared them. They were the richest of all plains bands in the currency past which Indians measured wealth — horses — and in the years after the Ceremonious War managed a herd of some fifteen thousand. They also owned "Texas cattle without number."

On that articulate autumn twenty-four hour period in 1871, Mackenzie'south troops were hunting Quahadis. Because they were nomadic, it was not possible to ready their location. One could know only their general ranges, their hunting grounds, perchance erstwhile camp locations. They were known to hunt the Llano Estacado; they liked to military camp in the depths of Palo Duro Canyon, the 2nd-largest coulee in North America afterwards the Chiliad Canyon; they often stayed most the head-waters of the Pease River and McClellan's Creek; and in Blanco Coulee, all within a roughly hundred-mile ambit of present-day Amarillo in the upper Texas Panhandle. If you were pursuing them, as Mackenzie was, you lot had your Tonkawa scouts fan out far in accelerate of the column. The Tonks, as they were called, members of an occasionally cannibalistic Indian tribe that had nearly been exterminated by Comanches and whose remaining members lusted for vengeance, would look for signs, try to cut trails, then follow the trails to the lodges. Without them the regular army would never have had the shadow of a chance against these or whatsoever Indians on the open plains.

By the afternoon of the 2d day, the Tonks had found a trail. They reported to Mackenzie that they were tracking a Quahadi band under the leadership of a vivid young war chief named Quanah — a Comanche word that meant "odor" or "fragrance." The idea was to discover and destroy Quanah's hamlet. Mackenzie had a certain advantage in that no white man had ever dared effort such a affair before; not in the panhandle plains, not against the Quahadis.

Mackenzie and his men did non know much about Quanah. No one did. Though there is an intimacy of information on the frontier — opposing sides often had a surprisingly detailed understanding of one some other, in spite of the enormous physical distances betwixt them and the fact that they were trying to kill one another — Quanah was simply also immature for anyone to know much about him yet, where he had been, or what he had done. Though no 1 would be able to even estimate the date of his birth until many years later, it was mostly likely in 1848, making him twenty-three that year and 8 years younger than Mackenzie, who was also so young that few people in Texas, Indian or white, knew much near him at the fourth dimension. Both men achieved their fame simply in the final, brutal Indian wars of the mid-1870s. Quanah was exceptionally young to be a chief. He was reputed to be ruthless, clever, and fearless in battle.

Simply in that location was something else about Quanah, as well. He was a half-breed, the son of a Comanche chief and a white woman. People on the Texas frontier would presently acquire this about him, partly because the fact was so exceptional. Comanche warriors had for centuries taken female captives — Indian, French, English, Spanish, Mexican, and American — and fathered children by them who were raised equally Comanches. Merely in that location is no record of whatsoever prominent half-white Comanche war chief. Past the time Mackenzie was hunting him in 1871, Quanah'due south mother had long been famous. She was the best known of all Indian captives of the era, discussed in cartoon rooms in New York and London as "the white squaw" because she had refused on repeated occasions to render to her people, thus challenging ane of the well-nigh key of the Eurocentric assumptions near Indian ways: that given the choice betwixt the sophisticated, industrialized, Christian civilization of Europe and the vicious, encarmine, and morally backward ways of the Indians, no sane person would ever choose the latter. Few, other than Quanah's mother, did. Her name was Cynthia Ann Parker. She was the girl of 1 of early Texas's most prominent families, one that included Texas Ranger captains, politicians, and prominent Baptists who founded the country's offset Protestant church. In 1836, at the historic period of nine, she had been kidnapped in a Comanche raid at Parker's Fort, 90 miles southward of present Dallas. She soon forgot her mother natural language, learned Indian ways, and became a full member of the tribe. She married Peta Nocona, a prominent war chief, and had three children by him, of whom Quanah was the eldest. In 1860, when Quanah was twelve, Cynthia Ann was recaptured during an attack by Texas Rangers on her village, during which everyone but her and her infant girl, Prairie Flower, were killed. Mackenzie and his soldiers most likely knew the story of Cynthia Ann Parker — most everyone on the frontier did — but they had no idea that her blood ran in Quanah'southward veins. They would not learn this until 1875. For at present they knew only that he was the target of the largest anti-Indian expedition mounted since 1865, ane of the largest ever undertaken.

Mackenzie'southward Quaternary Cavalry, which he would soon build into a grimly efficient mobile assault force, for the moment consisted largely of timeservers who were unprepared to encounter the likes of Quanah and his hardened plains warriors. The soldiers were operating well beyond the ranges of civilization, across anything similar a trail they could follow or any landmarks they could possibly have recognized. They were dismayed to learn that their principal water sources were buffalo wallow holes that, co-ordinate to Carter, were "stagnant, warm, nauseating, odorous with smells, and covered with green slime that had to exist pushed aside." Their inexperience was evident during their start night on the trail. Sometime around midnight, above the din of a W Texas windstorm, the men heard "a tremendous tramping and an unmistakable snorting and bellowing." That sound, as they soon discovered, was made by stampeding buffalo. The soldiers had fabricated the horrendous mistake of making camp betwixt a large herd of buffalo and its water source. Panicked, the men emerged from their tents in darkness, screaming and waving blankets and trying desperately to turn the stampeding animals. They succeeded, merely by the smallest of margins. "The immense herds of brownish monsters were caromed off and they stampeded to our left at breakneck speed," wrote Carter, "rushing and jostling but flushing but the edge of one of our horse herds. . . . one could inappreciably repress a shudder of what might have been the upshot of this nocturnal visit, for although the horses were strongly 'lariated out,' 'staked,' or 'picketed,' nothing could have saved them from the terror which this headlong accuse would take inevitably created, had nosotros not heard them but in time to turn the leading herds."

Miraculously spared the consequences of their own ignorance, the bluecoats rounded up the stray horses, broke camp at dawn, and spent the twenty-four hour period riding westward over a rolling mesquite prairie pocked with prairie-dog towns. The latter were common in the Texas Panhandle and extremely unsafe to horses and mules. Think of enormous anthills populated by oversized rodents, stretching for miles. The troopers passed more herds of buffalo, vast and odorous, and rivers whose gypsum-infused h2o was impossible to drink. They passed curious-looking trading stations, abandoned at present, consisting of caves built into the sides of cliffs and reinforced with poles that looked similar prison confined.

On the 2nd day they ran into more than trouble. Mackenzie ordered a night march, hoping to surprise the enemy in its camps. His men struggled through steep terrain, dumbo brush, ravines, and arroyos. After hours of what Carter described as "trials and tribulations and much hard talk verging on profanity" and "many rather comical scenes," they fetched upwardly bruised and battered in the dead stop of a modest coulee and had to await until daybreak to observe their way out. A few hours afterwards they reached the Freshwater Fork of the Brazos, deep in Indian territory, in a broad, shallow thirty-mile-long valley that averaged fifteen hundred feet in width and was cutting past smaller side canyons. The place was known equally Blanco Canyon and was located just to the due east of present-day Lubbock, one of the Quahadis' favorite campgrounds.

Any surprise Mackenzie had hoped for was gone. On the 3rd day the Tonkawa scouts realized they were being adumbral by a group of iv Comanche warriors, who had been watching their every motility, presumably including what must have seemed to them the comical blunders of the dark march. The Tonks gave chase, just "the hostiles being better mounted soon distanced their pursuers and vanished into the hills." This was not surprising: In two hundred years of enmity, the Tonkawas had never been shut to matching the horsemanship of the Comanches. They always lost. The result was that, while the cavalrymen and dragoons had no thought where the Comanches were camped, Quanah knew precisely what Mackenzie was doing and where he was. The next night Mackenzie compounded the error past allowing the men the indulgence of campfires, tantamount to painting a large pointer in the canyon pointing to their military camp. Some of the companies blundered yet again by declining to identify "sleeping parties" amid the horses.

At around midnight, the regiment was awakened by a succession of unearthly, loftier-pitched yells. Those were followed past shots, and more than yells, and suddenly the camp was alive with Comanches riding at total gallop. Exactly what the Indians were doing was soon apparent: Mingled with the screams and gunshots and general mayhem of the army camp was another sound, only barely audible at offset, and so ascension apace to something similar rolling thunder. The men quickly realized, to their horror, that information technology was the sound of stampeding horses. Their horses. Amid shouts of "Every man to his lariat!" half dozen hundred panicked horses tore loose through the camp, rearing, jumping, and plunging at full speed. Lariats snapped with the audio of pistol shots; iron spotter pins that a few minutes before had been used to secure the horses now whirled and snapped about their necks like airborne sabres. Men tried to take hold of them and were thrown to the ground and dragged among the horses, their easily lacerated and bleeding.

When it was all over, the soldiers discovered that Quanah and his warriors had made off with seventy of their best horses and mules, including Colonel Mackenzie'south magnificent gray pacer. In west Texas in 1871, stealing someone'south horse was ofttimes equivalent to a capital punishment. It was an old Indian tactic, specially on the high plains, to simply steal white men'southward horses and leave them to die of thirst or starvation. Comanches had used it to lethal outcome against the Spanish in the early eighteenth century. In whatever case, an unmounted army regular stood little take chances against a mounted Comanche.

This midnight raid was Quanah'southward calling card, a clear bulletin that hunting him and his Comanche warriors in their homeland was going to be a difficult and treacherous business. Thus began what would become known to history every bit the Battle of Blanco Canyon, which was in turn the opening salvo in a bloody Indian war in the highlands of west Texas that would concluding 4 years and culminate in the final destruction of the Comanche nation. Blanco Coulee would also provide the U.Southward. Army with its first await at Quanah. Captain Carter, who would win the Congressional Medal of Honour for his bravery in Blanco Canyon, offered this description of the young war main in boxing on the solar day after the midnight stampede:

A large and powerfully built master led the bunch, on a coal black racing pony. Leaning forward upon his mane, his heels nervously working in the animal's side, with 6-shooter poised in the air, he seemed the incarnation of roughshod, brutal joy. His face was smeared with blackness warpaint, which gave his features a satanic expect. . . . A full-length headdress or state of war bonnet of eagle's feathers, spreading out as he rode, and descending from his forehead, over head and back, to his pony's tail, almost swept the basis. Large contumely hoops were in his ears; he was naked to the waist, wearing just leggings, moccasins and a breechclout. A necklace of beare'south claws hung about his neck. . . . Bells jingled as he rode at headlong speed, followed by the leading warriors, all eager to outstrip him in the race. Information technology was Quanah, chief warchief of the Qua-ha-das.

Moments afterwards, Quanah wheeled his horse in the management of an unfortunate private named Seander Gregg and, as Carter and his men watched, blew Gregg'southward brains out.

Excerpted from Empire of the Summer Moon past S.C. Gwynne. Copyright 2010 past Due south.C. Gwynne. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2011/05/20/136438816/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-comanche-empire

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