Just to recap, just three days after first contact 60 miles away, around 165 men had assembled to intercept by far the largest assemblage of hostile Indians anyone had ever seen. A pretty swift response given the lack of means of long distance communication available at the time.
Of course the Comanche/Kiowas themselves did much to transmit the news by attacking Victoria and smaller settlements on their way down.
What is often lost in these accounts are individual heroics. Like the guy mentioned in passing who rode alone east across the predicted path of the Comanches to see what militia was assembled to the east.
Even in those times few men chose to be Rangers. Captain Tumlinson, who was, is gonna decline to engage at least five times his number of Indians upon contact, instead he’s going to elect to disengage and follow along behind.
Likely this was a realistic assessment of the armament, skills and dispositions of his scratch force and the condition of their mounts.
Ben McCullough, 28 years old, present in Tumlinson’s force, WAS one of that minority with the temperament for rangering. He must have had a good horse, frustrated by Tumlinson’s failure to order a headlong attack, he separates himself from the force that same evening (the 9th) and sets out on a grueling 60 mile ride northeast back to Gonzales to try to get ahead of the Comanches in time to raise a force sufficient to intercept them.
This notwithstanding the fact that he had already been on the trail for the previous three days and furthermore had received a crippling wound to the arm just six months earlier in a duel.
In the years subsequent to this raid Ben McCullough would be among that tiny minority of men who would care to go rangering with the likes of a Jack Hays.
"...if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we would take great care in their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them." Canasatego 1744
