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I wondered when you'd bring up the Lehmans! Awesome story.

BN

OTOH Cynthia Anne Parker seems to have led a happy life among 'em (unless it was a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome).

I've never seen any account of her captivity that did not include the fact that she was beaten and enslaved...it would certainly be "torture" by modern standards. After she became the wife of a powerful man, she probably had as good a life as any woman could among the Comanches. But it was a hard life even for a chief's wife.

BTW, I attended Cynthia Anne Parker Elementary School in Houston.

It wasn't unusual for white girls to be raised as "their own" after they kidnapped them, from their families which they almost alway tortured, unmercifully, before killing. I especially enjoy the stories about the Cherokee's favorite passtime of throwing the white babies into the air and watching them bounce off the rocks until dead.

And indicative of an important truth... that being we only get a bit of the whole story.

Fer example, earlier in this thread the Kiowas was brung up... and the famous three... Satanta, Settank and Big Tree, oughtta throw in Lone Wolf too.... FOUR GUYS, collectively taken by us as representative of Kiowa history when there were like what? one thousand OTHER Kiowas quietly going about the business of survival in those years.

I'd guess their history might read different then ours.

This crops uo with Hermann Lehmann too. Weren't he roaming alone and desperate for months on the Texas Panhandle after leaving the Apaches? No longer safe with the Apaches, alientated by years of captivity from returning to the Whites.

Finally in 1875 (??) he walks up one night on a Comanche camp. It should be understood this was AFTER Palo Duro Canyon, By this time the whole Comanche universe was collapsing, NOWHERE on the Plains was safe for them, and they were subject to attack by cavalry patrol or buffalo hunters at any time.

This skinny White youth walks in on their camp one night, and after almost getting killed in the original alarm, becomes the subject of curious interest when it becomes apparent he spoke bad English but fluent Apache.

Getting a guy in camp who could speak Apache, they hear Lehmann out. Finally concluding with a good-natured and merciful (as Fehrenbach puts it) "You'd better come with us".

Not how Comanches generally come across in popular Texas lore.

Birdwatcher

"spoke bad English but fluent Apache."

Curious, I wonder if his German was any better??????


BN

Or White boys either, a major problem often being getting these people to come back to White society later, especially back East. It seems the sort who most relished going out and knocking heads often weren't the same folks who did the adopting back in camp.

Of course intermarriage was so common whereever the Frontier stabilized for any length of time that by the time of Removal there were generally two distinct factions; full-blood and mixed.



White baby tossing? a favorite pastime? expound please...

So what, I mean the kids who attended C. Estes Kefauver High School (National Lampoon yearbook parody) knew Jack about C. Estes..

"Ahem"... and your buddy Fehrenback writes, of Cynthia Anne, and I quote...

"There is no evidence that she was unhappy on the Plains..."

...but, ya know how I feel about Fehrenbach, nice guy maybe, but hardly a credible Historian...

Birdwatcher

"a major problem often being getting these people to come back to White society later,"

BIG problem for Lehman!

One of my few (healthy) hobbies is reading accounts of pioneering Texas, via writings of the time. As others have indicated, life during the 1800's was hard at best, but the actual, factual accounts of savagery (for lack of a better term) at the hands of Texas indians will make you sick at your stomach. I don't trust history, written two, much less ten, generations later.

can you say, Stockholm Syndrome? and he was talking about at the time of her repatriation....when she was a married woman with three children and at the top of the Comanche pecking order, not when she was a frightened child, beaten, tortured, and enslaved by a strange savage people who had just murdered her family and kidnapped her.

People can get used to a lot in couple of decades, particularly when there appears to be no alternative available.

Comes down to this....


...about most any people we get two sorts of accounts, those that spent a considerable amount of time around 'em, and those that didn't.

I mean, can one imagine a youthful Sam Houston saying to his Cherokee buddies....

"I'm bored, lets go indulge in that favorite Cherokee pastime of tossing White babies on rocks...."

...or alternatively, a grown-up Sam Houston saying to his Cherokee buddies....

"I'm bored, lets go get drunk.... and then go toss some White babies on rocks....."

Ain't saying that other thing didn't happen, I mean I'm the guy who pointed out them estimated THREE THOUSAND White settlers tortured and killed in Pennsylvania during the French and Indian War, and those EIGHT HUNDRED White settlers knocked off by the Santee Sioux twenty-four years before Wounded Knee.

Take that as the whole story? No more than them hundreds of non-combatants murdered in Mexico duting the Mexican War (according to a book given to me by a poster here ) tell the whole story about Texans.

Birdwatcher

"Empire of the Summer Moon" does spend a considerable time on the subject of white captives and the Comanches. I don't recall having any particular quarrel with that aspect of the book, except for a certain amount of repetetiveness.

Harder than the lot of a Frontier woman? Patently not true in the case of tbe Eastern Tribes (see the Heckewelder reference), as fer Comanches FWIW...

...one of them struggling Comanches on the Plains, one of the most famous fat Indians in history... Mountain of Rocks... circa 1834, courtesy of George Catlin...



And Smithwick on family life, his being an account of someone who spent considerable time in their company...

http://www.oldcardboard.com/lsj/olbooks/smithwic/otd12.htm

There were six prisoners in camp: one white woman and two white boys, and one Mexican woman and two Mexican boys. The Mexican woman was the only one of the lot that evinced any desire to return to her people. She was not permitted to talk to me in private, and policy prevented her giving vent to her feelings in the presence of her captors.

After I had been some time among them, they relaxed their espionage somewhat, and she managed to tell me that she was very homesick, having been captured after she was grown. The poor woman cried bitterly over her situation, she having been appropriated by one of the bucks.

The white woman said she was very small when taken, and remembered nothing of the circumstances. She had an Indian husband and several children.

None of the boys remembered anything of their homes. One of the white boys, a youth of eighteen or thereabouts, I recognized as a prisoner we had twice recaptured, once at Gonzales and again at Victoria. Each time he stayed a few days, apparently quite satisfied with his surroundings, but, when he got a good chance, decamped, taking several of the best horses along.

The other white child was a bright little fellow, five or six years old. Loath to leave him to grow up a savage, I tried to buy him, offering a fine horse in exchange, but the squaw who had adopted him gathered him close to her bosom with every show of affection. "No," said she, "he is mine; my own child." That was plainly a falsehood, but the love she manifested toward the hapless boy was some palliation therefor....

The utmost harmony prevailed among the various divisions of the polygamous families. The oldest wife seemed to be the mistress of the harem. There was one large central lodge used in common by all the families, each squaw having a smaller one for herself and children, the latter never numerous....

But taking them all around they were the most peaceable community I ever lived in. Their criminal laws were as inexorable as those of the Medes and Persians, and the code was so simply worded there was no excuse for ignorance. It was simply the old Mosaic law, "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."

In cases of dispute, a council of the old men decided it, and from their decision there was no appeal. And when one died, all his belongings were destroyed, precluding all possibility of a family quarrel over the estate.

During the whole period of my sojourn among the tribe -- three months -- I did not hear a single wrangle among the adult members. The youngsters had an occasional scrimmage, which they were allowed to fight out to the amusement of the onlookers.

Notwithstanding their inhuman treatment of the helpless prisoners that fell into their hands, I never saw a woman or child abused. The women, as in all savage tribes, were abject slaves, but their inferiority was their protection from the chastisement which "civilized" husbands sometimes visit on their wives.

An Indian brave would have felt it a burning disgrace to strike a woman. I don't think they ever resorted to corporal punishment within the tribe. Like the ancient Jews, however, tribal law didn't apply to "the stranger Without the gates," nor within, either, when the stranger was a captive.

The women, of course, performed all the labor, aside from killing and bringing in the game; stripping the skins from the animals, dressing and ornamenting them with beads or paint, a process which interested me very much. The skins were first staked down to the ground, flesh side up. With a sharp bone the squaw then scraped off every particle of flesh; next the scraped surface was spread with lime to absorb the grease, after which the surface was spread with the brains of the animal, rubbing it in and working it over till the skin became soft and pliable, the process requiring days and days of hard work.

Then with paint, which they manufactured from colored chalks, and brushes made of tufts of hair, the artist, with the earth for an easel, beginning in the center, drew symbolic designs, the most conspicuous of which was the sun, executed with a skill truly remarkable.

A multitude of different colored rays commingling in a common center and radiating out in finely drawn lines, the spaces made by the divergence again and again filled in, taking as much time as a work by the old masters. Time was no object, life leaving nothing to offer beyond the gratification of this single vanity.

These painted robes were worn over the shoulders like shawls, the fur side underneath.

The old people of both sexes were treated with deference, another sign of their benighted state. Little notice was taken of the female children by either parent, all their pride and affection being centered on the embryo warriors, fitting them out with bows and lances, with which they fought imaginary foes and "mimic frays,"....

The little Indian girls, brought up in the way they should go, played at dressing skills, setting up lodges, etc. Yes, and they played with dolls, too. I was never allowed to inspect those Indian doll babies, so I can't tell how they were made; but the little Indian maids bound them on pieces of bark, setting them up against trees, swinging them in hammocks or carrying them on their backs just as their mothers had done with them....

Birdwatcher

Just got done with "Empire...".

Gwynne does a fine job, like he wrote Fehrenbach's "Comanche" book better. But I'm gonna nit-pick.

Starts out with the phrase "the Tonkawas were always losing"...

Near as I can tell the original of that sentiment is a 1930's Texan account of Ford's 1858 battle against Comanches in Oklahoma wherein the author says Ford's Tonkawa scouts fought the Comanches in individual duels but that Ford got disgusted because the Tonks were losing every one.

Interestingly, Fehrenbach (alos from Texas) also has Ford at that fight with 113 mostly Tonkawa Scouts but then discounts almost entirely their role, resorting to the stereotype of a 'few grim Texans checking their priming'. Ford hisself in "RIP Fords Texas" mentions mostly 100+ Caddos with him on that expedition, and gives them full credit for their very active role, including the shooting of Iron Jacket (Fehrenbach says Texans did it). Why the Texan authors felt it necessary to rewrite history that way is open to speculation.

Anyhoo... the Tonkawas were infamously cannibalistic. Yet for a people that were "always losing" (as per Gwynne's "Empire") they sure were a persistent bunch.

Their remnant survivors of massive epidemics (the usual cause of such things) lived entirely within raiding range of the Comanches throught the late 18th/19th Centuries, and we know the numerous and collectively powerful Comanches despised them more than most anyone until the very end (having their kinfolk get eaten does that to folks).... yet there they were.... still around in numbers as late as 1871, enough to lead Mackenzie out to whup Comanches as Gwynne begins.

Interestingly, accounts have it that what REALLY PO'd the Comanches in the afermath of the 1840 Council House Fight in San Antonio (where more'n 50 Comanches men, women and children who had come in peaceably were killed by the Texans, although in truth, they were fighting back) was the thought that those same Texans were butchering and eating the dead.

The collective fighting power of the Comanches is way overblown. 700 on the great Linnville Raid in the aftermath of the Council House Fight, and yet only a relative handful of White casualties, most caught by surprise. And then a defeat of that same party at Plum Creek by a lesser number of Texans, fighting WITHOUT revolvers (more on that myth later).

Also hundreds of Comanches on the infamous Elm Creek raid of 1864, yet only a relative handful of White casualties.

Where the Comanches excelled was at catching the helpless and/or hugely outnumbered by surprise, and where conditions were such that there was a steady supply of victims the body count mounted up, as it did on the Texan Frontier and in Mexico for decades.

In the same vein, Gwynne calls Quanah Parker "brilliant", perpetrating the myth. While QP was a remarkable guy, especially in the reservation period, I can't see where he ever did anything during the fighting times that weren't standard, run-of-the-mill Plains Indian tactics.

More later.

Birdwatcher

I was doing a little reading last night about the Osage. I hadn't realized that they were so tall. And of course, when they chose to go over and do a little raiding, they routinely kicked Commanche and Kiowa arse.

I got the impression that Gwynne's characterization of Parker as "brilliant" was more in respect to his ability to bring the Comanche in to the reservations, keep them there, and play the politics necessary to be successful thereafter. The fact that he had been a warband leader prior to that, but made the transition so well, speaks volumes as to his ability to adapt to changing times. Brilliance? Perhaps, perhaps not. But he was certainly a remarkable individual to have done as well as he did.

Fehrenbach to his credit does include reference to the Comanches closely tying uo the tails of their horses when going to war. Apparently the Osage were noted for the tactic of sprinting out on foot from cover, grabbing the tail of the horse their foe rode on, and pulling the horse off of its feet, tumbling the rider to the ground.

Birdwatcher

The Osages got the last laugh on everybody when Phoenix Oil Co. made the first well in Oklahoma on the Osage reservation just before the turn of the century, and the tribe members became fabulously wealthy. Some still are.

Doc, gonna nit-pick here....

Three quarters of those Comanches still living were ALREADY on reservations around 1870, when Quanah Parker was just hitting his stride on the National stage, by the time Quanah gave up there were really no alternatives.

What I find fascinationg is Isa-tai, the guy who conjured up the famous "bulletproof" medicine prior to Adobe Walls wherein Quanah's followers, under his personal planning and direction, were shot to pieces by some of the most skilled and best-armed riflemen on the planet.

Isa-tai didn't have the advantage of being half-White, ergo conjuring up a lot of White sponsors after the shooting times were passing into legend, but still we find the guy opposing Quanah in tribal elections: Radical fringe-group Shaman and Prophet to mainstream tribal politician.... aguing such things as grazing allotments. Now THAT sounds like a transformation.

I'm gonna digress a little and talk about the 'unprecedented' Comanche mobility in that the same Comanches could raid 400 miles one way and 400 miles in another.

One of the most persistent myths in our popular history is that we tend to immobilized our Indians, as if they were stuck to the parts of those maps where the tribal name is written in those posters.

100 years prior to all of this, the Iroquois in Upstate New York were conducting a decades-long war with the Cherokees.... in Georgia.... routinely making about a 2,000 mile round trip, on foot yet. Likewise the Mississagua from the North side of Lake Erie were complaining about the dastardly and cunning Chickasaw... from Mississippi.

In the F&I War, it was the grave misfortune of a few captured Colonials up on Lake Champlain in northern New York State to be butchered, cooked and eaten by backwoods hick (they were still using bows and arrows) Odawas (Ottowas)... from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Likewise one of the more fortunate White captives from Lake Champlain was hauled across Lakes Ontario and Erie and clear down the Ohio and across to Louisiana when his Shawnee (IIRC) captors went to visit their kin among the Choctaws. And this was all in the early 1760's.

The all-time champions here maybe being them four Nez Perce who in 1831 took it upon themselves to travel upstream along the flood of Whites (ergo downstream along the Yellowstone, Missouri and Mississippi) on what is portrayed as seeking Christian instruction but seems certainly to have been a fact-finding tour: 2,000 miles one way from Idaho clear down to Saint Louis (by which time they had presumably seen enough) and then back again.

So it ain't surprising that a mounted Comanche from present-day Amarillo might visit San Antonio, or even Houston. What IS surprising is that long-term misery among the highly mobile Comanches should have been so localized.

A full thirty-five years before the last holdouts among the remote High Plains Comanches would be facing their final cultural annihalation, Gwynne points out the episode of impoverished, starving Southern Comanches from North of San Antonio visiting Sam Houston in 1839.

Why on earth these miserable folk didn't merely ride West for a week and take up residence with the next bunch of Comanches is a mystery... unless the vaunted Comanche plains-wide solidarity across the Plains was a myth.

Indeed the "next bunch" of Comanches would be suffering from deprivation and constant White hostility in their own turn, while confined by the 1850's on Texas reservations, still a full twenty years before Mackenzie attacked Palo Duro Canyon.

The conclusion seems inescapable... those people must have run out of options, notwithstanding their still-free kin a few hundred miles West.

There musta been a lot going on here that we are only dimly aware of.

Birwatcher

If they can't be googled,they don't exist.Thought you knew that.