Well hey, here's something that IS googled (as opposed to the books with cited sources or the first-hand accounts referenced prior to this). But a wiki will serve here, on account of the Texas Hill Country Germans' fair treatment of Comanches and the resultant truce that ensued after they took the unprecedented step of politely asking permission to settle is still celebrated every year in Frederickburg TX to this very day, the modern-day Comanches coming down from Oklahoma each year for an annual celebration...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meusebach%E2%80%93Comanche_Treaty
Fehrenbach gives a version of events that agree with this, Gwynne skips it entire other than to mention that Comanches would freely and amicably enter German homes on occasion.
This brings up ANOTHER must-read, Frederick Law Olmstead's
"A Journey Through Texas"http://books.google.com/books/about/A_journey_through_Texas_or_A_saddle_trip.html?id=oJ3jKrAtW8wCOlmstead was the guy who later went on to design Central Park. In 1857-58 he came in through Louisiana and traversed the State to across the Rio Grande and back. His account is probably the best snapshot we have of conditions across Texas at that time. Amid the general dirt floors and general illiteracy common everywhere else, the principled, hard-working German settlers in Texas was playing pianos and singing opera out there in the boonies.
They would pay dearly for their predominantly anti-slavery sentiments just a few years later, when the Confederate hanging squads came around.
But I digress... the REAL reason for me mentioning Meusenbach's Treaty was the prominence two Eastern Tribes, the Shawnee and the still-reclusive Kickapoos play in the account; present in numbers across putative "Comancheria" and travelling freely (although there was never even remotely close to "60,000 Kickapoos" even back on the 18th Century Ohio Frontier, surely them Shawnee Scouts didn't want the Germans moving in).
Look at period accounts (including Ford's and Smithwick's), and you'll find Delawares, Kickapoos, Shawnees and Cherokees show up all over the Plains
So many Cherokees in fact crossed the Texas Plains to take up residence in the Border Country that the famous Alabama Silversmith and prominent Cherokee syllabarist Sequoya hisself was to die down there while looking for lost kin.
We find Delawares and Shawnees frequently hired on as scouts, valued for their multilingual abilities as well as their first-hand knowledge of the terrain, of Comancheria. And ya can't get first-hand knowledge without seeing it first-hand, even if it was in the middle of a place where Comanches supposedly excluded all intruders.
The reclusive Kickapoos had/have a history of avoiding outside contact, so much so that even today their bloodlines, language and culture have survived better than any of the 18th Century Ohio Tribes, especially at their old settlement in Mexico south of Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras. Anyhow, back then, the Kickapoos didn't hire on as scouts for anyone, but they DO figure in one of the major whuppings ever handed out to Texans.
Neither were the Comanches friendly with all these people all the time, in fact there's references to a number of shooting altercations, many of which likely escaped our history entirely. One gets the impression that basically, the wandering Eastern Tribes wandered wherever the hell they wanted across the West.
(and further North, Iroquois tribesmen from NY and Eastern Canada formed a major component of the trappers during the heyday of the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade)
In the 1850's, about 500 Seminoles and Black Seminoles, late of Florida and then the Indian Territory, took up residence in West-Central Texas long enough to get in a corn crop, this about fifty miles WEST of the White settlement line, smack dab in Comancheria, and at the time these people were NOT buddies with the Comanches, in fact they would shortly move to Mexico and hunt Comanche war parties in exchange for land.
Fehrenbach writes all these folks off entirely as "pathetic remnants". Even Gwynne barely mentions them. Remnants they may have been, but they still came in groups of hundreds, and they DID have rifles, and knew how to use 'em. And basically the Comanches couldn't do much about it.
Birdwatcher
