Ain’t saying it didn’t happen in some form, but 100 dead Indians at a time would rank as one of the major bloodlettings of the West, that including women and children let alone all fighting men in their prime
“Devil Yack” Hays was undoubtedly the real deal, but he didn’t file reports or write anything down. It has been suggested that he didn’t file reports because he lost so many men, one of his company in the early 1840’s gave the chances of surviving a year in service at around 50%.
Seems like such an unprecedented one-sided victory with so many survivors to tell the tale woulda been all over the press.
I dunno where accounts of the Paint Rock Battle first surfaced, IIRC Hays’ reputed Bandera Pass battle comes from a single account given decades after the fact.
I forget the name of the guy who wrote it (Calallen?) but a close associate of Hays who had relocated with him to California retired to his boyhood home in Kentucky and wrote a dime novel greatly embellishing Hays’ exploits (when I looked some years back only one copy survived, in the collection of a California library).
It is from that we probably get the tale of Hays joining a hunting party of Delaware Indians and running on foot for two days straight to catch up to and attack a mounted Comanche war party. I’d believe that of Delawares raised into the life but an off-the-cuff ultra-ultra marathon sounds a bit much for someone who weren’t.
It might be significant that the Texas State Historical Association makes no mention of a Battle of Paint Rock either in connection to Paint Rock itself or in their bio. of Jack Hays.
