guess its as good a time as any to make my first post on here.
as i sit here typing this catching a break from this oppresive heat and the frustration of trying to weld this cat roller frame up, im staring at a rather unimpressive set of 2 knobs across a pasture..
i wouldnt have wanted to make a stand against the horse people here. believe id have made for a creek bottom
https://www.decaturtx.com/battle-of-the-knobsThat was 30 miles north of present day Ft. Worth. In 1837 that was way up in Comanche land. I wonder if those Rangers had six shooters.
Steven L. Moore, Savage Frontier Volume I 1835 -1837 devote seven pages to this fight, calling it the Stone Houses Fight.
He gives as a partial cause the killing and scalping of a Kichai Indian by one Felix McCluskey (Smithwick, mentions this guy as getting many of his companions killed.) The Kichai and Toweash mentioned here were subsets of the Wichita’s, by this time there were numerous Indian groups in Texas
That particular Kichai was guiding a party of Cherokees bringing powder and lead to the Comanches in return for horses.
From the Captain of the Rangers....
I fell in with a large body of Indians... I first supposed them to be Keechis, but was afterwards informed that they were Toweash, Waco’s, and a few Keechis and Caddos. I got this information from the Shawnees and Delawares.
I judged the Indians to be about one hundred and fifty strong. About fifty or sixty of them were armed with rifles and the balance had bows and arrows.The 19 Rangers fall back to a deep ravine, the Indians demand that McCluskey be handed over, the shooting conmences when this was refused.
Early on, one of the Indian leaders tries the old ride m-along-line-to-get-them-to-empty-their-rifles trick and is shot and killed for his trouble.
The Rangers try a similar ploy, hat on a stick perforated by as many as a half-dozen rifle balls immediately after which they would raise to fire. At this point four Rangers dead, one fatally wounded Ranger fires three more times, dies in the process of loading a fourth time.
Then the Indians set fire to the ravine, the rangers choose to make a break for it in the direction where the Indian riflemen were rather than the mounted bow and arrow guys on account of the lower rate of fire of rifles.
Their horses won’t run through the fire so they have to charge on foot, six more rangers shot down, the remaining nine, including McCloskey, make their escape but it’s a long walk home.
IIRC Smithwick later states that McCluskey was killed in a brawl.
