Hey Doc, what I meant was, the Rangers were merely following standard common-sense modes of travel for most EVERYONE crossing hostile country; travelling fast, wary and light, actually not a whole lot different from the common practice of illegals trying to cross our wild country today.
One thing I'm ready to be disproved on here is the legendary and oft-quoted role of the Colt's revolver in Ranger hands in "changing the balance of power on the Plains".
I have got to dig up my much thumbed-through copy of Ford's "RIP Fords Texas", in it he gives a sober assessment of the revolver vs. the Comanche bow.
First off, most everyone here will correctly pronounce even a modern handgun as a short-range weapon even when deployed on foot from a two-handed Weaver stance. In the case of the Colt's revolver in the hands of Rangers the common supposition seems to be that the Rangers on running horses were somehow knocking off opponents at a distance.
Jack Hay's hisself acknowldeged the fact that revolvers were a short-range proposition at best with his famous command of "powder-burn them!" at Walker's Creek.
Where revolvers DO excel is in reports of exceedingly close-range actions, as in Hays at Walker's Creek in 1844 and the action of future Confederate General John Bell Hood on the Devil's River in 1857...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Devil's_River
In both instances the Indians closing to hand-to-hand range. The other instances being when charging a camp of an enemy caught by surprise, riding in and amongst the tipis doing rapid-fire execution (sorta like where Gus in "
Lonesome Dove" "reads them from the book" in that famous scene where he surprises the renegade Comanche camp at night).
In his biography Ford states how Comanche archers fired purely by instinct, from a bow held flat, and how they could fire several arrows in rapid succession and with a considerable degree of accuracy hit another running horse at 100 yards and reliably hit a mounted opponent from 50 yards or less. Ford hisself puts the bow-mounted Comanche and the revolver-armed Ranger essentially on a par.
Which leads to the conclusion that a bunch of Rangers charging and shooting in the open at a full gallop about like the Lone Ranger and Tonto in the opening of that show would end up with quickly-emptied revolvers while suffering at least as many casualties as their opponents.
OTOH both Fehrenbach and Gwynn cite the famous 1839 incident where Ranger Captain John Bird found himself facing far-superior numbers as the textbook case of the supposed inefficacy of the rifle.
In that fight Bird and the thirty-one rifle-armed men in his company pursued a like number of Comanches out onto the open plain only to find themselves facing a whole bunch. Gwynne gives a figure of forty rangers vs 300 Comanches, Fehrenbach has fifty rangers encountering 200 Comanches, I myself tend to give credence to the "Texas History Online", it being put out by UT. That account gives thirty-one rangers vs. 300 Comanches.
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fbi15Frankly, per Fehrenbach I find the spectacle of FIFTY Rangers abjectly fleeing from just four times their number of Comanches to be a tad improbable, given the customarily near-suicidal boldness of rangers when facing superior numbers in other actions we know of.
Bird's REAL problems seems to have been that his horses played out, and that he turned and fled, inviting mounted attack from the rear by far superior numbers.
There are a number of printed accounts of rifle-armed Eastern Indians out on the Plains standing off and inflicting heavy losses against mounted Plains Indians even while both parties were engaged in the open... by dismounting and reserving their fire such that all the rifles were not emptied at one time.
Neither are guys on horseback with rifles necessarily immobile and static as those accounts espousing the virtues of the revolver are prone to state. Heck, in fiction I'll give you both Robert Duvall and Jason Patrick dismounting, rifle in hand, to take out mounted Indian opponents in "
Geronimo, an American Legend" AND a dismounted Robert Duvall doing the same again against mounted Comanches in "Lonesome Dove".
Hays and his fifteen revolver-armed companions in 1844 at Walker's Creek suffered about 30% casualties while facing seventy five Comanches. Bird and his thirty-one rifle-armed companions suffered a similar casualty rate against three hundred Comanches while, like Hays at Walker's Creek, inflicting about SIX TIMES their own losses on the Comanches.
The only real difference being that Bird hisself died in his battle, one wonders how that fight would be percieved if he had not. Seems a safe assumption that the Comanches themselves would much prefer that either engagement never happened.
Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, Hay's famous revolver victories occurred that same year of 1844, against opponents as-yet ignorant of the existence of repeating firearms, said Indians colsing on what they logically assumed were emptied handguns.
Birdwatcher
