Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Comancheria

I dunno, like I said, ask Sam Houston, he spent years among 'em.

Sadistic Cherokees? Sure. Sadistic Whites? Naaah.... never happen... ask Chivington, or Andy Jackson's bunch in the Creek War, or the Paxton Boys, or the Plymouth militia....

And if'n it DID happen, surely them Whites roasting scalps to preserve 'em or riding around with vaginas on sticks or whatnot represent our whole history. Musta been ALL of us was that way.

Birdwatcher

You sure as hell knocked the straw man flat on his ass.

As far as the point Pat MADE , however............

?? A straw man is someone who doesn't exist, I was pointing out just some of numerous historical examples, as fully documented as Pat's accounts.

But... I suspect you have little interest in the facts.

As for "making you sick to your stomach", one of the worst and most detailed accounts we have is what Jacob Greathouse and his buddies did to a party of famously friendly Iroquois on the Ohio in 1777 after said Indians had been invited across the Ohio to Greathouse's camp.

The White guys shot 'em in cold blood, and then clubbed a young, pregnant Indian woman and cut the squirming late-term infant out of her belly and hung it up. An act which, if nothing else, also got scores of OTHER White folks killed in the aftermath.

Greathouse hisself escaped retribution, but, a full fourteen years later when he happened to fall into Shawnee hands they knew EXACTLY who he was, and acted accordingly.

If those White folks in Pat's account had gone on to murder Cherokees indiscrimantly I expect you'd give 'em a walk. I mean, even now YOU are willing to condemn the whole bunch and you weren't there, not even close.

OK, what do you suppose the family history with respect to White folks was of a displaced Cherokee in 1830's Texas?

Greathouse hisself likely grew up in Pennsylania in the F&I years when around 3,000 White folks were butchered by Indians in just that one State.

(So did Daniel Boone, but he remained a famously humane man).

I ain't excusing anything, and once again here's the issue you aint answered... do you suppose the folks that Sam Houston held in such high regard were routinely tossing little White kids around until they died?

Birdwatcher

. I mean, even now YOU are willing to condemn the whole bunch and you weren't there, not even close."

What in Hell are you talking about?

I remark on Pat's fondness for firsthand accounts , and you have this to say?

Speaking of straw men....

Well hey, here's something that IS googled (as opposed to the books with cited sources or the first-hand accounts referenced prior to this). But a wiki will serve here, on account of the Texas Hill Country Germans' fair treatment of Comanches and the resultant truce that ensued after they took the unprecedented step of politely asking permission to settle is still celebrated every year in Frederickburg TX to this very day, the modern-day Comanches coming down from Oklahoma each year for an annual celebration...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meusebach%E2%80%93Comanche_Treaty

Fehrenbach gives a version of events that agree with this, Gwynne skips it entire other than to mention that Comanches would freely and amicably enter German homes on occasion.

This brings up ANOTHER must-read, Frederick Law Olmstead's "A Journey Through Texas"

http://books.google.com/books/about/A_journey_through_Texas_or_A_saddle_trip.html?id=oJ3jKrAtW8wC

Olmstead was the guy who later went on to design Central Park. In 1857-58 he came in through Louisiana and traversed the State to across the Rio Grande and back. His account is probably the best snapshot we have of conditions across Texas at that time. Amid the general dirt floors and general illiteracy common everywhere else, the principled, hard-working German settlers in Texas was playing pianos and singing opera out there in the boonies.

They would pay dearly for their predominantly anti-slavery sentiments just a few years later, when the Confederate hanging squads came around.

But I digress... the REAL reason for me mentioning Meusenbach's Treaty was the prominence two Eastern Tribes, the Shawnee and the still-reclusive Kickapoos play in the account; present in numbers across putative "Comancheria" and travelling freely (although there was never even remotely close to "60,000 Kickapoos" even back on the 18th Century Ohio Frontier, surely them Shawnee Scouts didn't want the Germans moving in).

Look at period accounts (including Ford's and Smithwick's), and you'll find Delawares, Kickapoos, Shawnees and Cherokees show up all over the Plains

So many Cherokees in fact crossed the Texas Plains to take up residence in the Border Country that the famous Alabama Silversmith and prominent Cherokee syllabarist Sequoya hisself was to die down there while looking for lost kin.

We find Delawares and Shawnees frequently hired on as scouts, valued for their multilingual abilities as well as their first-hand knowledge of the terrain, of Comancheria. And ya can't get first-hand knowledge without seeing it first-hand, even if it was in the middle of a place where Comanches supposedly excluded all intruders.

The reclusive Kickapoos had/have a history of avoiding outside contact, so much so that even today their bloodlines, language and culture have survived better than any of the 18th Century Ohio Tribes, especially at their old settlement in Mexico south of Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras. Anyhow, back then, the Kickapoos didn't hire on as scouts for anyone, but they DO figure in one of the major whuppings ever handed out to Texans.

Neither were the Comanches friendly with all these people all the time, in fact there's references to a number of shooting altercations, many of which likely escaped our history entirely. One gets the impression that basically, the wandering Eastern Tribes wandered wherever the hell they wanted across the West.

(and further North, Iroquois tribesmen from NY and Eastern Canada formed a major component of the trappers during the heyday of the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade)

In the 1850's, about 500 Seminoles and Black Seminoles, late of Florida and then the Indian Territory, took up residence in West-Central Texas long enough to get in a corn crop, this about fifty miles WEST of the White settlement line, smack dab in Comancheria, and at the time these people were NOT buddies with the Comanches, in fact they would shortly move to Mexico and hunt Comanche war parties in exchange for land.

Fehrenbach writes all these folks off entirely as "pathetic remnants". Even Gwynne barely mentions them. Remnants they may have been, but they still came in groups of hundreds, and they DID have rifles, and knew how to use 'em. And basically the Comanches couldn't do much about it.

Birdwatcher

Interesting stuff, Mike. Thanks for posting that! I'm gonna look for Olmstead's book.

Hey Doc, you must also get "RIP Ford's Texas", Ranger Captain John Salmon Ford's collected memoirs, hard to say enough good things about it, tho' it is written in the sometimes tedious 19th Century idiom.

A book notification here, tho' I only thumbed through it so cannot give an opinion on it, some here may already know of it....

"The American Rifle: A Biography" (2008)

http://www.amazon.com/American-Rifle-Biography-Alexander-Rose/dp/0553805177

Found it yesterday in Austin, at that bastion of Liberalism "Book People", which despite themselves have offered some remarkably Politically Incorrect titles on their shelves over the years (fer example... most everything I have read on Roger's Rangers I found on their shelves).

Pertinent to this thread what the book DOES lay out is the early spread of rifles into Indian hands, a process underway by the 1740's. Such that by that time the Upstate New York Iroquois were already complaining about losses in their ranks inflicted by the rifles of the Chickasaws... from Mississippi.

The gist of what seems to be an emerging consensus can be found written by te serious folks at www.americanlongrifles.com .

No technological development occurs in a vacuum, and the American longrifle as a technological as well as an artistic development was no exception. It is generally accepted that the American longrifle evolved from the Jaeger rifle brought to the colonies by German gunsmiths in the early 1700�s and most certainly imported in some quantity along with English arms up until the American Revolution...

At one time, some thought that rifling and a patched ball were innovations unique to the American longrifle. They weren�t. These things were known to European gunsmiths for at least two centuries before the American longrifle and were incorporated into the Jaeger.

Some also have the impression that the Jaeger was heavy and hard to handle. They were not. From personal experience, I know that Jaegers were surprisingly light and easy to handle. In fact, I would much prefer to carry a Jaeger in the woods than a typical longrifle....

That begs the question, why were changes made? Well, the standard answer has been something along the lines that the American longhunter needed an economical, accurate, and long range gun to put food on the table, take skins for cash, and protect their families from Indian raiders.

The Jaeger rifle was accurate but it was not necessarily a long range gun or economical in terms of lead. It has been thought that in order to accommodate the needs of the longhunter, the early gunsmiths started to elongate the barrel and reduce the caliber of their rifles.

At least, this is the standard answer that you will glean from some of the earlier research.

While I have generally accepted this explanation for the elongation of the barrel and reduction in bore size in the American longrifle, the argument has always seemed to be a little too contrived and does have some problems....

While no one denies the influence of the Jaeger on the development of the American longrifle, Peter Alexander proposes that the English trade gun had as much influence as the Jaeger. The argument goes that there were not enough white longhunters to account for all the rifles we know were made....

Who then, owned all those early longrifles. The answer, according to Alexander, is the Indians. He contends that, as the primary harvesters of furs and skins on the North American continent at the time, the Indians had the most need of rifles and the wealth from the fur trade to buy them. This argument has the ring of truth to me.

According to Alexander, the real reason for the longer barreled American rifle, was that the Indians had become accustomed to the long barreled English trade guns and wanted rifles of similar form. The German gunsmiths here, and possibly in Germany, supplied what their customers wanted. There may have been more style than substance at work in the evolution of the American longrifle. Imagine that!

Since buying one I have become a whole lot more familiar with 18th Century-style flinters, and a long-barreled smoothbore is capable of a surprising amount of accuracy when a careful load is worked up, in terms of "minute of deer" or "minute of redcoat" about equivalent to many rifles out past 100 yards, in an arm far more versatile.

I bought a smoothie on account of this is what MOST Colonials/Americans were carrying in the 18th. My 9lb fowler is a club however compared to accurate recreations of the contemporary Indian Trade gun. A builder named Mike Brooks makes the best...

www.fowlingguns.com

His 20 guage early 18th Century Carolina Trade Gun replica has a 48" barrel and weighs in at just 6 pounds.

I've handled one and compared to my 9lb 18th Century Mossberg-equivalent, a Carolina gun handles about like a magic wand AND shoots just as well as my fowler

THAT being the sort of gun common to the Southeast Tribes by the early 18th, and FAR from crude as per popular beliefs relating to Indian guns in general.

Not hard to imagine that general preference in form being transferred to rifles, as the guy at americanlongrifles suggests.

This supposition of rifles appearing first on the Frontier in Indian hands is backed by a number of period accounts and remaining records. To the point that if you are a reenactor, anymore if you are going to re-enact ANYONE White from 18th Century New York/Vermont/New England, you'd most likely be carrying a smoothbore... UNLESS you're playing an Indian from those same areas. Lots of rifles in Iroquois hands documented fer example, almost none that early from the whole Mohawk Frontier in the hands of White folks.

What is probable is that Indians were commonly carrying longrifles in the Kentucky/Ohio Country a full generation before the likes of the Boones and Kentons showed up, the longrifle being adopted by the Longhunters much as leggings, breechclouts and tomohawks were, for similarly practical reasons.

No one questions the importance of the rifle tradition in our own culture, the point relevant to this thread being that them Eastern Indians across Texas had that same tradition, and used their rifles to lethal effect, essentially whupping the Comanches at every turn WE know about.

They fought no major conflicts with Whites during the Texas era (other than the forcible eviction of Chief Bowles's East Texas Cherokees). But, given that while some Shawnees for example were guiding Hill Country settlers, OTHER Shawnees 700 miles to the west were collecting Apache scalps for bounty, and in light of the fact of Lt. Pat's accounting of Texas Cherokee atrocities, it seems probable that at least some White travellers out on the Plains were quietly "disappeared" over the years .

Ford in his memoirs relates the 1850's episode of a crack shot among the Comanches raiding South Texas who was "armed with a Swiss rifle" and commenced to picking off his Rangers. I dont recall him describing the rifle, or if they ever saw it, tbe range being extreme. But the Indian MOST likely to be shooting it, if Indian it was, would most likely be a member of one of the Eastern Tribes.

In early 1865 a combined party of nearly 500 Texans set out from the settlements on a punitive expedition against the Comanches and Kiowas but, to their misfortune, found Kickapoos instead. see...

http://cvassanangelo.org/uploads/The_Battle_of_Dove_Creek_wbiblio.pdf


and...

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/btd01

Now, one could theorise that the Texas Confederates were fielding their "B" teams on the Frontier, especially by that late date, and that the flower of Texas manhood had already gone East to fight. But really, there seems nothing wrong with their tactics that day... an advance on the unsuspecting Indian camp on one side, combined with a mounted rush to steal their horses on another.

Shoulda been a route, and likely would have been with archtypical Plains Indians like Comanches.

I dunno the extent to which the Kickapoos were carrying Enfields, doesn't really matter, the REAL point being by that time they had been using rifles for at least three generations.

Can't say the Texans were exactly shot to pieces, they suffered less than 20% total casualties. OTOH the Kickapoos gave worse than they got, and the Texan surprise attacks were swiftly blunted by accurate and effective rifle fire. At any rate, the Texans faced a long and miserable walk home.

Funny how this whole episode seemed to disappear entirely from Texas popular history...

An interesting "what if" to contemplate being "what if it had been Kickapoos beseiging Adobe Walls and not Comanches?". At the very least, things probably woulda turned out different.

Birdwatcher

Flash back to the 1760's; a vivid account from Ben Franklin no less, concerning tbe construction of Frontier forts along the Delaware River about the time of Braddock's catastrophic defeat. At that battle the Recoats beng methodically picked off by a mostly Indian and most-likely rifle-armed force....

http://books.google.com/books?id=95...=0CCEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

Just before we left Bethlehem, eleven farmers, who had been driven from their plantations by the Indians, came to me requesting a supply of firearms, that they may go back and fetch off their cattle. I gave them each a gun with suitable ammunition.

We had not march'd many miles before it began to rain and it continued raining all day; there were no habitations on the road to shelter us, until we arriv'd near night at the house of a German, where, and in his barn, we all huddled together, as wet as water could make us.

It was well we were not attack'd on our March, for our arms were of the most ordinary sort, and our men could not keep their gun locks dry. The Indians are dextrous with contrivances for that purpose, which we had not. They met that day the eleven poor farmers above mentioned, and killed ten of them. The one who escaped inform'd that his and his companions' guns would not go off, the priming being wet with the rain.

..and from that same account a cool example of Native woodcraft, most likely Delawares...

We met with no Indians [while building a fort], but we found the places on the neighboring hills where they had lain to watch our proceedings. There was an art in the contrivance of those places, that seems worth mention.

It being winter, a fire was necessary for them; but a common fire on the surface of the ground would by its light have discovered their position from a distance. They had therefore dug holes in the ground about three feet in diameter, and somewhat deeper; we saw where they had dug with their hatchets cut off the charcoal from the sides of burnt logs lying in the woods.

With these coals they had made small fires in the bottom of the holes, and we observ'd among the weeds and grass tbe prints of their bodies, made by their laying all round, with their legs hanging down in the holes to keep their feet warm, which, with them, is an essential point.

This kind of fire, so managed, could not discover them, either by its light, flame, sparks, or even smoke: It appears that their number was not great, and it seems they saw we were too many to be attacked by them with propect of advantage.

Charcoal fires in pits, and dry feet. I will say that digging a three foot-deep hole in the rocky hilltops in that area seems like no mean feat, perhaps he meant the slope.

Birdwatcher

Mike have you read the account of Herman Lehman?

Excellent thread. I learned much.

Actually, almost all Texas tribes committed atrocities against the white settlers. They thought of the new arrivals as a novelty at first, good for slaves, cool stuff and basically a "good time". Not just Cherokees...my bad.

Have to disagree. Many ethnic groups were much worse than the Europeans when it came to wanton blood shed
Gengis Khan, Pol Pot and Stalin made the Comanches look like girl scouts.

Book sounds interesting will order it.

Thanks . Very informative

By the Texan era, no Cherokee in their right mind, nor any other displaced Eastern Tribe, would view Whites as a "novelty". Hatred maybe, with abundant cause, but not novelty.

Then too, every Texas tribe would be generally aware of the looming tidal wave of Whites, so fast were the times changing.

An elderly Delaware matron in Texas in 1820 could easily have been born on the Alleghany River in Western Pa. in 1760, or even on the actual Delaware at the Water Gap (about 80 miles from Manhattan Island) in 1750.

Her children would have been born in the Ohio Territory, their children in Missouri or Oklahoma, the stories of all three generations a litany of pretty much constant loss and massive tragedy. Weren't just that they had to move, but also that a return to remembered haunts was out of the question; if they weren't shot out of hand at the very least they would find the whole place gone under.

Ain't nothing that engenders bitterness quite like the thought of a lost Homeland.

Neither by that date was the connection between Whites and catastrophic disease lost on the Indians, the Comanches reportedly excluding White traders for that very reason (the Delaware seem to a large extent have taken up the slack as traders).

Had to be patently obvious to the Comanches and Lipans, who had watched the San Antonio Missions fail mostly on account of most all the Native congregations perished, more than once.

Meanwhile, not mentioned by Gwynne or Fehrenbach, those same Comanches were making treaties with the Spanish in San Antonio as early as 1800. Good-faith treaties, at least by some bands wherein livestock raided by other bands was returned. In fact, so prosaic is REAL Comanche history that it makes flat boring reading.

And note the term "settler"; from a Native point of view surely that puts things in a whole different ball game. Sorta like if diseased illegal immigrants were moving here, a few at a time at first, and then in waves, taking over the whole place.

Specific to the Parkers, one thing most all accounts fail to mention is that by 1836, their fort on the Navasota was just two years old and during that time had been used at least TWICE as a staging area by Ranging Companies to go against surrounding Indians.

Doesn't make any difference to the Cindy Ann Parker story maybe, they could have just as well fallen victim in a reg'lar cabin or something, but it IS relevant to the story, and odd that the exceptional history of that place is generally ommitted in accounts.

Yet, once again the people who actually LIVED with Indians mostly sing a different tune than your'n. This holds true even up to and including the Apache Wars, and the likes of Lieutentants Gatewood and Davis.

I already mentioned Sam Houston, even RIP Ford speaks little ill of Indians (nor Mexicans either) and he warred on them pretty often. In fact, as Gwynne notes, he referred to his Caddo allies in the 1858 Comanche campaign as "men of more than ordinary intellect who possessed minute information concerning the geography and topography of that country".

Ford was one of the most remarkable men of his era and, like Smithwick, gives the lie to the old Frontier stereotypes. His "Old Reliables" in the War Between the States that WON the last battle of that war were largely Texas Hispanics (AKA "Mexicans") and his literal right-hand man in many close scrapes with Comanche war parties was his scout Roque; a half Mexican-half Comanche hisself. Ford wonders aloud in his memoirs just why Roque would have it in so hard against his own people, but apparently never pressed him on that question at the time.

And finally let us not forget Meusenbach's Hill Country Germans, who even Fehrenbach has it, and both parties still believe today, that these people were famously spared by the supposedly intractable Comanches, but who WERE murdered in numbers just a few years later by the Confederate Home Guard.

Hey, aint gonna change your mind I know but way-cool info nontheless

Birdwatcher

Comanche Empire, by Pekka H�m�l�inen is good, but written in Academic language (or maybe just very formal English). Fairly recent, too (2008)

Sycamore

You are correct, as usual. I meant Comanche, not Cherokee. I didn't think Cherokee ever came around. I was refering to the indigenous tribes of Texas. With few exceptions, they bore little resemblance to the farming, gathering tribes of the east.

The Eastern tribes have fascinated me and lately I've began to study them more. What I am learning and was only dimly aware of in the past is how, for lack of a better term, "civilized" they were. I had known that they farmed and lived in settled communities instead of teepees like the plains indians, but I had never really grasped the full depth of it. Not only did they live in towns, but many in many of these towns they had actual cabins with streets. And in some of the towns closest to the British trading posts, some of the chiefs actually had cabins with glass windows and furnishings and goods imported from Europe.

That knowledge brings a whole new perspective on things. Part of this was undoubtedly due to the fact that by the late 18th Century they had been living cheek to jowl with whites for the better part of 200 years and as a result, they had adopted some of their ways. But, a bigger part of it was that they were simply more advanced than we ever think of North American Indians being when we think of them today.

Had they been able to unite more effectively as a single force and had their British allies been more constant and reliable, they may have been able to hold white immigration in check and if they couldn't force the whites back across the mountains, at least they may have been able to carve out a large territory for themselves in the East. It wasn't, as it seems today, a dream necessarily doomed from the start. It could have been done.

It certainly could have been done IF the various tribes and confederations had been able to overcome millinea of mutual hate and distrust of their neighboring tribes and confederations.
Somehow I doubt that could have been accomplished though.

It actually came fairly close. The tribes all recognized the danger. It wasn't so much their mutual distrust and hate that got them, it was that they had differing ideas on how to deal with the white threat. Some wanted to fight to the end, some always wanted to move west as long as there was land there to do it, and some wanted to try and live in peace with the whites and not move. Usually, they would unite and then a defeat or a setback would fracture the coalition. Just another victory or two here or there would have gone a long way towards cementing the various confederacies that arose between the Indians.