A quick addendum to the Black Seminole Scouts.
April 18th 1881, called the “last Indian raid in Texas”, the McLauren massacre, Frio River Canyon.
http://www.texasescapes.com/LindaKirkpatrick/Conflict-on-the-Frio-McLaurin-Story.htmSaid to be Lipan Apaches, surprised while looting a house. Maybe they were revisiting the scenes of their youth.
What is not usually mentioned is that local posses formed up but lost the trail. Several days later Bullis and his Black Seminoles were called in, picked up the cold trail, followed it all the way across Texas and into the Burro Mountains in Mexico south of El Paso.
There they surprised the Apache camp and killed several, returning with a woman prisoner.
Again not usually mentioned, about that same year (1880?) IIRC Lipan Apaches out of New Mexico were stealing livestock around Mason TX in the Texas Hill Country. That was WAY late for an Indian raid that far east . Again ya gotta wonder if those Lipans, coming all that way, were revisiting old haunts.
Bullis and his scouts were called in. What followed was the longest epic pursuit/tracking duel I am aware of in our history. Expert trackers trying to elude expert trackers. Six hundred miles winding across West Texas into New Mexico.
The Apaches made it back to their New Mexico reservation less than a half-day ahead of their pursuers, where the Indian Agent refused to recognize Bullis’s jurisdiction.
The whole remarkable Seminole/Black Seminole story is almost always written out of the script of pop Texas history.
Most likely because they were Black, just the way it was. And nowadays they ain’t PC because they mostly fought and killed Indians.
Bullis himself had come up from the ranks during the War Over Secession, beginning as a Private in a NY Infantry regiment. Wounded twice, captured twice, Harper’s Ferry and Gettysburg. Battlefield promotions.
One gets the feeling Bullis loved being on the Frontier, loved the adventure, and his partnership with the Black Seminoles was the means to make that happen.
Shortly thereafter he would be stationed in Arizona during the Apache Wars, and finished his military career in the Spanish-American War.
When he died, some of his by then-elderly and impoverished former scouts travelled unheralded from the Fort Clark area to San Antonio for his funeral.
