"Jack Hayes was the first captain in Texas to recognize the potentialities of Colt's newfangled revolvers. Because of this, in early 1840 he fought the first successful mounted action against the Comanches. Riding beside the Pedernales River nw of San Antonio with only 14 men, Hays was ambushed by a party of seventy Comanches. Previously, the standard tactic was to race for cover, and hold off the Comanches with their long rifles- heretofore their only hope for survival.
Hays, however, wheeled and led his men in a charge against the howling, onrushing horse Indians; the fourteen Rangers rode through a blizzard of arrows and engaged the Comanches knee-to-knee with blazing revolvers. Hays lost several men to arrows, but his repeating pistols struck down dozens of warriors.
Startled, amazed by the white men who charged and whose guns seemed inexhaustible, horrified by heavy losses, the Comanche war band broke and fled. The Rangers killed thirty Comanches."
Comanches: The History of a People by TR Fehrenbach
Thanks for the link.
I first read that book close on fifty years ago in New York State, not suspecting at the time that I would end up spending most of my life in Texas.
Fehrenbach writes a story well, but in that book cherry-picks the history and worse, rearranges the timeline of events to build his narrative of an intrepid Jack Hayes striking terror into the Comanches with his game-changing revolvers.
Jack Hayes was indeed an intrepid guy, and the evidence suggests him and his fifteen guys, each armed with a brace of Paterson Colts did indeed get the drop on the surprised Comanches
twice, in the year 1844.
A much better source on the deployment of revolvers against Comanches is Texas Ranger Captain John Salmon Ford. Captain Ford stated that the bow and the revolver in mounted combat were about evenly matched. Even odds is not conducive to a long career, which imight be why Captain Ford did most of his Indian fighting (and he did a lot) with rifles, most often single shot muzzleloading rifles.
The largest slaughter of Comanches at the hands of Texians ever, one of the major bloodletting’s of the West, occurred in the winter of 1840 on the Colorado River, when IIRC a party of eighty Texians, scrupulously following the instructions of their Lipan Apache scouts, executed a perfect dawn ambush on a sleeping Comanche camp, killing as many as 180 Comanches.
Almost all the Texians were packing muzzleloading rifles, one guy did have one of those very expensive and fragile Paterson Colt carbines.
In building his revolver-as-superweapon narrative, Fehrenbach, like every other pop-Historian., all but ignores this epochal event.
JMHO
