Thanks T, I have no idea what I wrote back then, perhaps you could send it to me, sounds good
Anyways, a quick blurb as I'm running out the door to move this thread along, a post I can make from memory.
It is said that Adam Paine the Black Seminole who's grave is in a photo up top had been captured/lived with the Comanches for awhile hence his habitual buffalo horned headdress while scouting for MacKenzie.
The act that finally prompted MacKenzie to give him his medal was this; Paine and a mixed group of Indian scouts were up on the Panhandle ahead of MacKenzie's force, on the trail of a Comanche camp. They stopped after dark.
The next morning the sun rose to reveal a whole bunch of Comanches who had also stopped for the night, not far away, the Comanches immediately mounted up and charged. In the confusion to mount up and get away, one of the Indian scout's horses got away from him and ran off.
Paine, seeing what had happened, gave THAT scout his own horse and stood alone to receive the Comanche charge. In a manner perhaps reminiscent of Placido at Plum Creek thirty three years earlier, Paine killed the first Comanche to arrive and immediately took the horse.
What followed then was a mad three-mile rush back to MacKenzie's camp, Paine's appropriated horse lathered up and at the point of collapse, Comanches close on his heels, when he finally made the safety of the cavalry camp.
After leaving Army service and in the same period as that bar fight, Paine partnered up with a White horse thief (Unwin??), the real problem being they were stealing from the major livestock thief in the area, John "King" Fisher, who's cowboy mafia at that time ruled the Uvalde/Eagle Pass region. The Sheriff of Uvalde necessarily being in King Fisher's back pocket.
The sheriff (also manifestly a brave man, a Medal of Honor winner after all) caught up with Paine in a Brackettville cantina, the sheriff blocking one door, a deputy the other, guns in hand.
Paine wore a revolver and had his rifle laid on the bar, the way Porter ("The Black Seminoles") tells it, Paine grinned and said "Well, are you gonna come in and have a drink, or are you gonna give me a door?". The Sheriff and the deputy backed down and let him leave, Paine must have been an obviously dangerous guy.
Sealed his fate though, they shot him at a dance in the Black Seminole community the following New Years Eve, the Sheriff stepped out of the shadows and fired both shotgun barrels into his back, contact distance.
Like I said, must have been a dangerous guy.
Birdwatcher
