You’re welcome.
One of the Scouts’more remarkable feats was a swing and a miss that resulted in no bloodshed at all but was possibly record-breaking nontheless.
January of 1879, in one of those incidents pop history says didn’t happen, Mescalero Apaches from New Mexico were raiding clear across to Fredericksburg Texas. At that time the Mescalero Reservation was centered around Fort Stanton, 450 miles west of Fredericksburg as the crow flies. I suspect there were Lipans in the bunch revisiting an area they had occupied a generation earlier. Also, 1879 was a late date for raids that far east.
On January 31, 1879, Lieutenant Bullis with 15 cavalryman 12 civilian Packers and 39 Seminole scouts, including Jose Tafoya and three Lipans rode after some renegade Mescalero Apaches stealing, some stock near Fredericksburg.
The column relentlessly trailed them for 34 days, moving west across the barren desert. The men and horses suffered severely from thirst. At one point nearly all perished. But on February 28, Sergeant David Bowlegs discovered a sleeping spring. With great care and skill, he successfully made the water flow freely again. Bullis gratefully named the place Salvation Spring.Expert trackers trying to elude pursuit in part by covering the most hostile terrain possible trailed by expert trackers trying to catch them.
Although the troops traced the raiders to within 2 miles of the reservation, the Indian agent was unable to locate the guilty parties and refused to allow Bullis to search for them on the reservation. So the unit returned to Fort Clark empty-handed having been gone for 81 days and covering 1266 miles.That had to involve at least 500 miles of tracking a single group of Indians, if there was anything else like it across our entire frontier history I dunno what it was.
Closest I can think of is a near legendary Indian account of an early 18th Century Chickasaw “Wizard” being chased hundreds of miles by a group of Seneca and killing some of his pursuers during the process.
