Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Comancheria

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

Birdwatcher,
You do a masterful job of condensing the most interesting parts of the books you discuss. Thank you for taking the time to do this.




Johnny $

The Comanches' skill with their bows was well-described. I think, as I'm sure you do as well, that the claim that a Comanche warrior could shoot 10 arrows in less than 30 seconds from under the neck of his galloping horse and split a willow stick 10 out of 10 shots was an exaggeration.

As John Geirach says, when you ask the locals what the average fish out of Frenchmans' Creek is, they'll describe the best fish ever taken out of said creek by the best fisherman on the best day he ever had.

Yes, the Comanch' could shoot arrows from a galloping horse. But they wasn't all of 'em ever that good.

"As for closing with revolvers..." Elmer Keith, who would know, put the revolver as a damned effective weapon for shooting running coyotes and rabbits from the back of a running horse if the revolver was "thrown" at the target, like casting a flyrod. He said he learned the "trick" from other working cowboys in Montana and Idaho at the turn of the last century, some of whom had used the "trick" to shoot their enemies while chasing them on horseback.

I can't say I've proven Elmer right in my own experience, primarily due to the lack of access to non-gunshy horses for me to work with, not to mention the time needed to acquire the skill. But Elmer says he did it regular, and folk who knew him have attested on all manner of occasions as how he could do it, so I tend to believe what he said was true.

So if we go back to the days of the early Rangers, and their Colt's Walker revolvers and the later Dragoon models, I expect that the work they did with those guns was as RIP Ford says, equal to what the Comanches could do with their bows.

As for your comment on "how familiar we are today with how hard handguns are to hit with under stress at any sort of range", I think you may be selling the skill of our better handgunners a few dollars short. I don't brag upon the good and fast shots I've made in competition or in the field very often, nor do any of the men who exceed me in handgun skills and personal integrity who post on these forums. But I think you may be selling short the skill of men who are truly motivated as well as blessed with the God-given skills to shoot well with their handguns, then as well as now.

What IS true is that every Comanche boy had been playing with/making bows and arrows since about the time they could walk, and had grown up in a setting where, in the absense of x-boxes, video games and TV there weren't a whole lot to do BUT practice the skills they would need as men (as William Penn said of the Delaware men 100 years earlier, "by their pleasures do they live", referring to hunting and fishing).

Furthermore the common expectation would have been eventual death in combat against enemies who were similarly adept (unless, possibly, they were going up against Europeans). The emphasis Indians commonly placed upon skill with weaponry was noted by many contemporary observers in differnt times and places, whether we are talking thrown tomahawks, blowguns, bows and arrows, smootbore muskets and trade guns through longrifles and repeating rifles.

With respect to bows, the COMMON level of virtuousity taken for granted in an old-time Indian camp was 1) bows were commonly shot by "feel", often held flat as Ford states, not by aiming down the arrow and 2) such things as knocking flying birds out of the air were considered not unusual skills.

Just recently I was talking online to an older Native guy who related that as Rez kids in the '50s', he and his friends would hit thrown quarters in the air with arrows for tips outside of bars regularly, and thats in the modern era. Well sort of, he did say his grandkids mostly play electronic games today.

Likewise, for Plains Indian kids who had begun riding about the time they walked, hanging off of a horse and firing under the neck would not be regarded as a particularly unusual stunt.

Hitting a willow stick weren't necessary, people are bigger than that. So, Ford's claim of rough parity could hold true. Dunno what distances/conditions those cowboys you mentioned were hitting rabbits. Unlike arrows, which could be used over and over and made for free by people with lots of time on their hands, bullets and powder cost money, a commodity generally in short supply among those most likely to need them.

But point taken that a guy who was adept with a revolver might hit another man on a running horse out to fifty yards, especially if he had five or six tries literally on-hand.

Jack Hayes is reported to have shot the head off of a rooster across the plaza in San Antonio with a Paterson Colt (while he was standing on the ground), and we know he personally had been using revolvers in combat for at least three years prior to the famous inaugural fight at Walker's Creek. The one comment though we have from Hays hisself on the topic of the correct range to shoot at while running after Comanches on horseback, that all sources seem to agree on, is that his instruction to his revolver-armed men trying this new mode of combat out at Walker's Creek was....

"Powder burn them!".

Birdwatcher

I know a sample of one don't mean anything but back when we had jackrabbits I used to shoot them with a 38 while I was mowing cotton stalks in the fall. Not a horse but a tractor bounces pretty good while you stear with one hand and shoot with the other. I got to be a fair hand at the game after some practice and Elmer was right about throwing the pistol at the target. Also, when I was a very small kid, I used to watch my grandfather lope his horse by the garden fence and shoot tin cans of the fence posts at @ 25 yards.

Birdy one thing I have noticed in many many of the accounts is that when stuck with arrows many of the stickees just pulled them out. Makes me wonder if the Comanch either didn't or couldn't full draw while shooting from horseback. I know Indian bows were by todays standards relatively weak but still and all.

W/O me having to look it up which one of the old boys said never to ride up on the left side of a Comanche.

Browsing the 'net I didn't find a photo of the Red Fork of the Colorado. But perhaps this one will do, somewhere in Texas, overlooking the Red River (found on a way-cool website BTW).

http://frontierjustice.tumblr.com/page/2




The slaughter of the Comanche camp at first light was efficiently done. The Comanches having unwittingly contributed to their own demise by locating the camp in a protected hollow, but really, that deep inside Comancheria they could have had no reasonable expectation that a bunch of Lipans would show up guiding 100 White guys with rifles. Warfare against them on that scale would not occur again until MacKenzie, more than thirty years hence.

On his approach, Moore halted on the rise overlooking the camp. It is worth pausing the narrative here to imagine the moment. Two weeks and 250 miles deep into the Plains, in an era where most of everything between Bastrop and El Paso was a sea of grass.

Wilderness, must have been stunning.

A chill morning, tipis clustered in the shadows below. The Lipan scouts had estimated "sixty families", whether that equated to a like number of tipis I dunno, seems likely . Old Castro likely had abundant reason to have been worried the evening before, to see the camp in its hollow the two Lipan scouts dispatched for the purpose probably had to crawl pretty close, in daylight.

Perhaps a pall of smoke hung in the air around the tipis down below that morning, Moore and his men shivering and tired, but keyed up with anticipation, prob'ly a sense of unreality about their situation and what they were about to do. The air so cold it kept even the camp dogs curled up and silent. It could have been someone stepping outside to pee who first noted the thumping of horses' hooves coming down the hillside in the half-light and moved out to where they could see.

Sizing up the terrain, Moore detached a squad of picked men from the among the ranks and placed them under the separate command of an officer. As the action commenced, this small force circled around to the right of the clustered tipis, crossed the river and ascended the steep hill on the other side. From that vantage point they would rain lethal rifle fire upon the heads of those people splashing across the frigid river below. Capt. Moore would write...

In this, the gallant Lieutenant succeeded admirably.

Moore doesn't say so, but its likely his dispositions that morning were given in a subdued tone of voice....

I soon ascended the hill, and ordered Lieut Clark L. Owen to take command of fifteen men taken from the companies, to act as cavalry, to cut off any retreat of the enemy.

I ordered Capt. Thomas J. Rabb, with his company, up the right, Lieut. Owen in the center and Capt. Nicholas M. Dawson, with his command, upon the left. Just before reaching the village, I had to descend the hill, which brought us withing two hundred paces of the enemy. I then ordered Lieut. Owen with his command to the right of Capt. Rabb's command.

The force was all the way down the slope before an alarm was raised, upon which Moore gave the order to charge, more than eighty mounted men rushing the cluster of maybe sixty tipis. All Hell doubtless broke loose.

A general, effective fire was opened upon the enemy, who soon commenced falling upon the right and left...

Surprise was total, Moore later estimated only two Comanches so much as mounted a horse, those two horses having been tied up in camp, everybody else fled on foot.

The first rush was over pretty quick, the subsequent pursuit using up about another half-hour...

The river and its banks now presented every evidence of a total defeat of our savage foes. The bodies of men, women and children were to be seen on every hand, wounded, dying and dead.

Having found that the work of death and destruction had been fully consumated here, I accordingly ordered my troops to cross the river, and a portion to act in concert with Lieut. Owen.

With the residue, I ordered a general charge in pursuit of the Indians who were attempting to effect thier escape. My men were soon seen flying in every direction through the prairie, and their valor told that the enemy was entirely defeated.

The pursuit ceased at a distance of four miles from the point of attack, and finding that the enemy was entirely overthrown, I ordered my men to the encampment.

Only two Texans were as much as slightly wounded, plus two of their horses.

Upon returning to camp, Moore made a conservative estimate of the Comanche dead...

From the best information, there were 48 killed upon the ground and 80 killed and drowned in the river.

Modern estimates have placed the total as more than 140 shot on dry ground, and perhaps an equal number dead by rifle fire, drowning or exposure suffered while crossing the Colorado. In any case, it prob'ly weren't pretty.

Thirty-seven Comanches, mainly women and children, were taken alive, mostly unhurt, including one youth spared for his conspicuous courage and two teenage Mexican boys who had been taken from the settlements along the Rio Grande the previous summer.

Everything of value, including buffalo robes, that could be carried off on horseback was taken. Many items that had come from the Linnville Raid were noted, taken as proof that these very Comanches had been among those responsible.

The haul included the entire horse herd less the aforementioned two animals, 500 horses, evidence of just how complete the victory had been.

Most everything else, except a couple of tipis for those captured Comanches deemed too old or too seriously hurt to travel, was collected into piles and burned.

Birdwatcher

I would guess a sample of one, plus your grandfather, means quite a lot

For Comanche bows, might have been Fehrenbach but somewhere I'm recalling a figure of 30-40 pounds. Come to think of it, surviving Indian arrows often look often look sort of slight.

Ford writes....

Never ride upon a bowman's left; if you do, ten to one that he will pop an arrow through you. When mounted, an Indian cannot use his bow against an object behind and to his right.

Hmm... other Indians must've known this too, one would think a Lefty could clean up the opposition that way. Maybe there were cultural inhibitions like in many societies, one hand for eating one for "other stuff".

The bow is placed horizontally in shooting; a number of arrows are held in the left hand; the bow operates as a rest to the arrow.

The distance - the curve the missile has to describe in reaching the object - is determined by the eye without taking aim. Arrows are sped after each other in rapid succession.

At the distance of sixty yards and over, arrows can be dodged, if but one Indian shoots at you at one time. Under forty yards the revolver has but little advantage over the bow.

So... did Ford mean that OVER forty yards the revolver was better?

Um... I'm gonna plead the Fifth...

...and more seriously ask you to point out when the Texans started piling up dead Comanches after they got this new superweapon.

Ford does state elsewhere re: the Walker Colt during the Mexican War...

While at this camp the men made a trial between the Mississippi rifle and the six-shooter of Colt's latest pattern. The six-shooter threw a ball a greater distance than the rifle. .
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Odd, he seems so lucid everywhere else.....

Birdwatcher

Just a quick note to say "Yer welcome"...

Rest assured that I too am learning on this topic as I go, turns out I can speed-read pretty quick.

thanks...I've got the flu, been up since 3 or so, great read...

While I'm on a roll....

After years of reading history I find myself far more impressed by acts of forebearance rather than bloody mayhem, both being common I suppose but the blood generally getting all the attention.

Fer example, Adam Payne, the Black Seminole referenced a few posts earlier. About whom one of Mac Kenzie's troopers wrote "I shall never forget a big black, wearing horns". For all I know Payne roasted lonely travellers for breakfast, however history attaches no tint of cruelty to the man, just an exuberant, fatalistic bravado of the sort one commonly associates with fighting men in a number of times and places.

It turns out it was Payne's own horse that got shot by Comanches, while he was covering the retreat of two other Black Seminoles and two Tonkawas, Payne then killing the lead Comanche and taking his horse, making it back to MacKenzie's camp just as the horse was collapsing.

Turns out too that Medal of Honor winner Claron Windus was the deputy rather than the sheriff present when they were backed down by Payne in the Brackettville Saloon.

At that moment in time the by then elderly John Horse was recovering from a near-fatal bullet wound, delivered anonymously from ambush.

It is known that John "King" Fisher especially despised the Black Seminoles, himself having narrowly escaped death in a bar while in a fight with one (the bullet creased his scalp), and a bullet from ambush was certainly the sort of thing Fisher could have had done.

One suspects that a man of Adam Payne's abilities could have handily waylaid Sheriff Crowell and Deputy Windus from ambush on their way home, but he didn't, despite the death warrant undoubtedly already hanging over his own head and despite the de-facto state of war that existed with the King faction.

Niether did Payne flee the area. Crowell, Windus and two other armed men quietly entered the Black Seminole community late on New years Eve 1876. Windus shotgunned Payne point blank, not in the back, but immediately after he turned around when called by name.

I suppose a near-instantaneous death while drunk and celebrating with friends and family was as good an end as Payne could have hoped for.

I dunno if MacKenzie had given a medal to Payne on account of he was a Black guy. I have no evidence of that. A guy like MacKenzie surely knew "habitual boldness" when he saw it, and Payne surely was that.

Political correctness might possibly have been the case in the case of the other three Medal of Honor winners interred in that little cemetery.

Though Major John Lapham Bullis was a celebrated Indian fighter in his day, this former Quaker aint much recollected in popular Texas history today, despite the fact that he led his Black Seminole Scouts on the longest tracking duel ever recorded (500 miles, against Apaches, clear across Texas to New Mexico) and apprehended and killed the responsible parties in the last recorded Indian raid in Texas (1883, the scouts picking up the two week-old trail after local posses had failed, and following it across the Pecos and Rio Grande into Mexico).

The occasion the other three guys in that cemetery each got their medal was this: On April 25th, 1875, Bullis was on patrol in company with three Black Seminole scouts when they came across the trail of seventy five horses. Following it, they came across a party of twenty five Comanches all of whom were carrying Winchester rifles (bought with the proceeds from trading stolen cattle in New Mexico??).

Bullis opted to attack anyway, taking a gamble they could bluff the Comanches into running away. It didn't work, not for long enough anyhow. Forty-five minutes and four dead Comanches later the herd of stolen horses had changed hands four times and Bullis and the three scouts were obliged to retreat in the face of much superior firepower.

In their final scramble for their horses it was Bullis's horse that got away from him. The three scouts returning into the teeth of heavy rifle fire to rescue Bullis; Pompey Factor and Isaac Payne laying down covering fire while John Ward swung Bullis up behind him on his own horse, the sling and stock of Ward's carbine being cut and shattered respectively by flying bullets in the process.

All three scouts got their medal, and all are buried in that little cemetery.

Isaac Payne had been especially close in life to his crazy older cousin Adam, and was present when he was shot down that night. Isaac's wife later recalled...

We like to go crazy the night Adam was killed. There was a frolic, but I didn't want to go. Along about midnight I heard the shooting, and then I heard a horse galloping, and my husband fell off - he was drunk - and said "Julia, they've killed Adam!".

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, and in response to that and the general climate in the area, several Black Seminole scouts fled back to Mexico, including all three surviving Medal of Honor winners.

All eventually returned to service, and all were later buried there. Isaac right next to his cousin Adam. Hey, one of the more remarkable sagas in the whole history of the West, even if they were Black.



Everyone is dead now of course. Former Sheriff and then Deputy Marshall Lorenzo C. Crowell contracted a fatal case of smallpox in 1879, reportedly while heroically aiding others afflicted with the malady.

John "King" Fisher famously died by the very same sword he lived by, gunned down alongside Ben Thompson in 1884 inside a San Antonio vaudeville theater. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Claron Windus likewise became a Deputy Marshall. Turns out in his early teens he had been a drummer boy on the Union Side in the Civil War before winning his medal in service against the Kiowas. Later on he would go back into uniform again, serving as a Captain in the Spanish American War. He died an old man in Brackettsville in 1927 and is buried there too, but across town in the Masonic Cemetery.

By now God has surely sorted them all out.

Claron Windus lived most of his long life in the Brackettville/Uvalde area, presumably entirely without the benefit of air conditioning. So if he DIDN'T make it into Heaven, his present climate is likely familiar



Darn, got sidetracked and nearly forgot the particular act of compassion I was thinking of...

... back to the Red Fork of the Colorado, on the early morning of October 24th 1840, this from Moore the modern author...

During the charge, Isaac Mitchell's bridle bit parted and his mule rushed widly headlong into the midst of the Indians. It then halted and sulked, refusing to move.

A angry Comanche Woman [I woulda said "frantic", almost certainly she had children with her] with a log of firewood smashed Mitchell in the head, knocking him from his mule to the ground.

Dazed, Mitchell sprang to his feet and saw the Indian woman rushing at him with a knife. "Kill her, Mitchell!", his buddies shouted.

"Oh no boys, I can't kill a woman!" he protested. Mitchell was forced to knock her down and snatch the knife from her hands to save himself.

I dunno if we know what became of that woman or if she was among the captured or not, or what became of her children, if any. Neither am I suggesting that those doing bloody execution that morning were necessarily bad people.

I do feel reasonably sure however that Isaac Mitchell was an exceptionally good man

Birdwatcher

Like you said Birdy, blood and thunder get written up in the history books, acts of mercy not so much.

"During the charge, Isaac Mitchell's bridle bit parted and his mule rushed widly headlong into the midst of the Indians. It then halted and sulked, refusing to move.

A angry Comanche Woman [I woulda said "frantic", almost certainly she had children with her] with a log of firewood smashed Mitchell in the head, knocking him from his mule to the ground.

Dazed, Mitchell sprang to his feet and saw the Indian woman rushing at him with a knife. "Kill her, Mitchell!", his buddies shouted.

"Oh no boys, I can't kill a woman!" he protested. Mitchell was forced to knock her down and snatch the knife from her hands to save himself.

I dunno if we know what became of that woman or if she was among the captured or not, or what became of her children, if any. Neither am I suggesting that those doing bloody execution that morning were necessarily bad people.

I do feel reasonably sure however that Isaac Mitchell was an exceptionally good man "


Sort of like, and you really have to hunt for this, when Sul Ross recaptured Cynthia Ann and killed Peta Nocona there was an indian boy child @ eight years old that more or less attached himself to Ross's leg and would not be separated. Sully took him home with him and raised him. Kid never wanted to go back to his people desite many offers.

"What IS true is that every Comanche boy had been playing with/making bows and arrows since about the time they could walk."

Interesting note concerning the SE tribes referencing the above statement. And knowing many of these folk ended up in these parts. In 1790 a Methodist minister among the Choctaw in Northern Mississippi wrote in his memoirs that he never met a single Choctaw male who still knew how to use a bow and arrow. That same year the Choctaw council purchased 20,000 pair of buckle shoes for the tribe.

It is often overlooked but by the 1830's, having heeded the words of Tommy Jefferson, many in the five civilized tribes had become more "white" than many of their "white" neighbors..... Unfortunately for them the Supreme Court of the United States had no standing army...

BN

A number of posts ago my theme was looking for the first use of Patersons.

There was at least one documented in use at Moore's 1840 fight (from "Savage Frontier")...

Micah Andrews, a former ranger captain, had used a new Colt Paterson five-shot repeating rifle in Moore's Comanche fight. He reported that he was able to fire his rifle ten times while his companions were able to fire their rifles only twice.

I suppose "new" being the operative word here. I'm not sure Colt would have the metallurgy squared away until the 1850's, not so much for the cylinder and barrel (although the Walker for one blew up cylinders regularly, resulting IIRC in a shorter chamgers for a lesser load in the subsequent .44 Dragoon pistols.) but the internal lock mechanism.

Moore rounded up his horses and prisoners and headed back to where he had left the cattle. Moore reports that the weather on the return journey was "unfavorable", and that at one point they had to stop for two days on account of freezing rains.

No word on the specifics of moving thirty-four captive Comanches in all that time. The column was followed, apparently at least in part by some survivors of the attack. Stories here surely, of people looking for their missing kin.

Seven captives did succeed in slipping away into the darkness on the Pedernales, the occasion being when four Comanches snuck in among the horse herd and attempted a stampede, getting away with a few head.

But for the main part there was no significant response from the Comanches, no assembled body of warriors, no rescue attempts. Perhaps Comancheria was just too far-flung for a rapid response on that scale.

No big retaliatory raids either. It may be as some have written that the Comanches were chastised and chose thereafter to leave the Texan settlements alone.

Possibly, but within a couple of months after Moore's expedition, Jack Hays and his rangers would be busy down around San Antonio, and incessant minor raids would continue on the settlements, indeed, some of Moore's men on this raid would end up left afoot in Austin after their horses were stolen during a celebration in their honor.

These were the opening years of the big raids into Mexico, and it does seem that raiding in Mexico became a hugely profitable affair.

Of the Comanche captives brung back, not much word, some were sent to houses as domestic servants, most probably slipped away. One lad, as told above in the case of the Cynthia Parker recovery, did become attached to his foster family. One other, spared on the field of battle because of his courage, was sent to live with the French Minister to Texas. THAT lad later slipped away on one of the minister's best horses.

So, there it was, perhaps the heaviest single blow by violence suffered by the Comanches ever, and certainly one of the major bloodlettings of our whoel Frontier history. I was wrong when I said such would not be attempted again until MacKenzie. Ford would go against Comanches again in 1860.

WHY a Moore expedition might not occur again for twenty years might be explained by the fact that they Moore and his men were never paid. Houston, after he took office and long after the raid, ruled that the horses that were taken should have been payment enough. I dunno that much about Houston beyond the popular biography "The Raven", but that seems a distinctly ungracious ruling to me.

It would be misleading too to conclude that folks just laid down after that and took what the Comanches were dishing out. Along with an absence of big raids, Mexico would again invade in 1842, and then came statehood after which organized frontier defense became largely a Federal responsibility.

That last might sound like a reference to our present Border situation, but actually, it ain't. IIRC in the 1850's fully one quarter of all our army would be stationed in Texas, with interdiction of Comanches being their #1 mission. The thinking at that time was the famously ineffective line of Forts though, and elsewhere for all its field perambulations and famous officer corps (Lee hisself was in charge by 1860, and his officers read like a who's who of famous Southern Generals), the US Second Cavalry, pioneering though it was, never did come up on that many Comanches, certainly not on the scale of a MacKenzie.

And of course, when it came to whittling down the Comanches, ALL of these efforts pale to near insignificance relative to the great cholera epidemic of '49/'50.

Birdwatcher

"And of course, when it came to whittling down the Comanches, ALL of these efforts pale to near insignificance relative to the great cholera epidemic of '49/'50."

Glad you mentioned the above Birdy. I don't know how it could ever be proven but I would venture to bet that introduced white diseases killed more Indians than white bullets by a ratio of ten to one.

As to federal ineptness viz plains indian fighting it is imposssible for me to guess how effective infantry was going to be but they kept sending the infantry out there.

At least, these threads all run together in memory and I dunno if I mentioned it earlier, but estimates run that the Indian population in the Southeast at the beginning of the 18th was still only about 20% of what it was when DeSoto, his men and his hogs infected the place 260 years earlier.

I knew the 18th Century Creeks were regarded as surviving remnants, but I was surprised to learn recently that even the Cherokees as we know them in our own history were assembled as a tribe from the remnants of earlier peoples in the aftermath of the catastrophic post-DeSoto round of epidemics (Kaywoodie, feel free to step in here if I err).

Not always Euro bugs either, the CDC estimates 20 million dead Indians in Mexico in the 20 years after Cortez landed, much of it caused by a native rodent borne virus ...

http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/4/01-0175_article.htm


After disease, prob'ly other Indians, right up until the end.

Again, I dunno the last time I posted it but referencing the famous Little Big Horn.... the Crows guided Custer in on the Lakotas and Cheyennes because those tribes were even then killing more Crows than the Whites ever did.

That winter after Custer's defeat, when the last Lakota holdouts were living a fugitive existence, chased relentlessly all over, their days clearly numbered, Crook was able to catch one camp by surprise because the Lakotas had been up late celebrating the taking of thirty Shoshone scalps.

Really, one has to wonder, what on earth were they thinking?

Sorta like that, we know that rather than Adobe Walls, Quanah Parker had wanted to go after the Tonkawas in revenge for their guiding MacKenzie onto them so many times. But he got out-voted on that occasion, and the rest as they say, is history.

On another topic...

Down in Texas, one thing I find interesting about those "anti-Comanche Infantry" you mentioned is that at least some of them got minie rifle conversions of the smoothbore 1842 Springfield Musket (wiki has a good description of this strange and forgotten arm).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Model_1842

Like the earlier Model 1840, the Model 1842 was produced with an intentionally thicker barrel than necessary, with the assumption that it would likely be rifled later. As the designers anticipated, many of the Model 1842 muskets had their barrels rifled later so that they could fire the newly developed Minie Ball.

This was not a round ball, as the name implies, but was in fact a conical shaped bullet with a skirt which inflated when fired so that it tightly gripped the barrel to take advantage of the rifling. The conical shape of the bullet, combined with the spin imparted by a rifled barrel, made the Minie Ball much more accurate than the round ball that it replaced. Tests conducted by the U.S. Army showed that the .69 caliber musket was not as accurate as the smaller bore rifled muskets. Also, the Minie Ball, being conical and elongated, had much more mass than a round ball of the same caliber.

A smaller caliber Minie Ball could be used to provide as much mass on target as the larger .69 caliber round ball. For these reasons, the Model 1842 was the last .69 caliber musket. The Army later standardized on the .58 caliber Minie Ball, as used in the Springfield Model 1855 and Springfield Model 1861.

McBride's in Austin had a Pedersoli (??) repro of one of these interestingly odd weapons in stock for some time, someone finally bought it tho...

Birdwatcher

The Texans attempted a third major expedition that same year, Ed Burleson assembling Lipan and Tonkawa scouts in Austin, the goal of this third expedition intended to have been the Perdenales/Llano/San Saba country recently swept by Captain George Howard and his hundred men. What Burleson had wanted to do was establish a line of blockhouses, forts really, to claim the country for settlement.

Didn't happen, almost certainly due to lack of funds, the fledgling Republic being perennially broke. IIRC it would eventually fall to a bunch of foreigners, Germans, to settle that country, beginning seven years hence.

Down in San Antonio, Howard was ordered to send out patrols south and west to watch for signs of a Mexican invasion. He was unable to do so, for want of supplies, powder, and horses.

Howard did take to the field in December of 1840 with just ten or fifteen men, going after Comanches that were raiding around San Antonio, and succeeded in surprising the raiders at their camp. Among Howard's small party was one Tejano Ranger Captain Salvadore Flores. Of the group, Howard and Flores were the best mounted, their horses running ahead so that they ended up charging together in among the Comanches.

A pity we dont know where this was, because the surviving descriptions are among the more dynamic we have of any fight in this era.

From an old account in "Savage Frontier", incorporating quotes from Howard's own account....

..disconcerted at finding themselves charged upon, but perceiving their assailants to be only two in number, they immediately wheeled and fired upon them.

Captain Howard's horse was wounded, he himself was severely wounded by an arrow in the abdomen. He had thus been thrown among the enemy from his horse.

While thus wounded, his antagonist attempted to take the horse from him. A scuffle ensued in which the Capt. however was victorious. He had a revolving pistol. One cap busted. He tried another barrel, his foe fell dead.

There it is, the first recorded save by a Colt revolver in Texas

Meanwhile Flores, as best I can piece together, was armed with either multiple old-style pistols, or two Colts, or a combination of the same. I'm inclined to guess the first option.

Salvador Flores closed the gap rapidly on his fleet horse. One of the volunteers managed to shoot and kill the horse being ridden by a fleeing Comanche woman. Several of the Comanches, however, quickly turned and fired upon Flores. "Flores' horse was shot dead, and in falling, fell upon the rider."

While pinned under his dead horse, Flores suddenly found himself under attack by the Comanche woman who had also been thrown from her horse. "She siezed Flores' empty gun and was laying it heavily over the prostrate warrior's head."

Knowing the gun was empty, Flores managed to shoot two other Comanches who had approached with their weapons to help finish off the fallen Tejano.

Seeing the Indian woman holding the pistol at Flores, another Texan fired and killed her. "It was unavoidable", wrote Howard.

At that point the Comanches, numbers not given, fled leaving behind three dead, including the woman.

A wild and woolly scrape if ever there was one. Musta taken a cool (if sore) head to look past the woman beating you with your own empty pistol and accurately target other Comanches arriving on the scene.

Says good things about all of 'em too that the killing of that same woman would be remarked upon as "unavoidable".

Birdwatcher

Yeah, I'd say killing a woman who was doing her dead level best to kill you would be unavoiadable.

You got to admire those old boys some going out and knowing they probably were never going to get any pay for public service.

Talk about alternative history; I've often wondered how things would have been changed if some of the Indians common front initatives like Pontiac or Tecumpesah's plans had worked out.

Regarding the multiple pistols of Salvador Flores, one of my specific reservations about "empire of the summer moon" was that the author seemed unaware that Texan combatants carried redundant weaponry prior to the Colt.

BCR,

Somewhere in my magazine collection is a copy of "Primitive Archer" that references a study done of Plains Indian bows. This study measured original examples of Plains Indian bows including wood type, grain structure, string material, etc..., and then replicated the bows.

The average draw length was 26", with average pull weight of 40# at that draw length. Given the construction of the string, it is quite possible that they would draw even less as the strings were damp, aged, etc...

Add in points made either of stone or "trade iron" which may or may not have been very sharp, and you have a recipe for short range effectiveness.

Still wouldn't want to be shot with one!

Ed

They carried redundant weaponry after Col. Colt as well. I remember reading the letters of a Reconstruction agent in far northeast Texas and Southwest Arkansas. He said that every male above the age of fifteen or sixteen habitually went everywhere armed with two Colt revolvers.