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I just received in the mail volume three of Stephen Moore's "Savage Frontier" series, this being "Savage Frontier Volume III 1840-1841"

http://www.amazon.com/Savage-Frontier-1840-1841-Rangers-Riflemen/dp/1574412280

This four-volume series has been sadly underserved by marketing. I have had Volume I for years, but did not fully appreciate the value until this thread. Moore's narratives at first appear chaotic, but this is largely because he incorporates and references a huge amount of detail glossed over in more easily readable works.

Case in point, the famous Council House fight of 1840, wherein twelve Comanche leaders came into San Antonio for a peace treaty, bringing with them just two captives, notably the unfortunate Matilda Lockhart.

From Moore we learn that the gambit of seizing the chiefs as hostages against the return of ALL White captives in the Comanche camps had been ordered among ther Texans from the first contact prior to the actual meeting, months in advance.

For those out of the loop, a quick primer on the Council House Fight can be found here..

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/btc01

Just to throw in a photo or two, the actual council house meeting might have occurred here, in what is now known as the "Spanish Governor's Palace", one fo the few original Spanish buildings surviving downtown...





The old market square between that row of buildings and San Fernando Cathedral is now occupied by city hall. A WHOLE bunch of history played out here, including the very first public demonstration of barbed wire (1873?), bringing a whole new era to the West. For Lonesome Dove fans, this is wher Gus and Call would have met their second cook, the guy cooking grasshoppers, and the bar where they broke the bartender's nos would have been set adjacent.





Moore gives a detailed account of the first arrivals of Colt's patented weapons. At least one officer in the room when the fight broke out was, according to Moore, equipped with a revolving rifle.

And here, from the book, we have what really may be the oft looked-for "first" use of revolvers against Comanches, this at the Council House Fight (a full FOUR YEARS before Jack Hays and his men famously used revolvers at Walker's Creek), at this point the fighting that started inside the room had just spilled out into the street.

From page 28...

Colonel Lysander Wells, head of the army cavalry, carried one of the new Colt repeating pistols. Ill-trained on how to shoot this new pistol, the startled Texan had his wedge improperly placed and the gun would not fire. An Indian grabbed the barrel, jerked it loose, and left Wells cursing his luck and the new gun.

In the continuing fight, Wells fought hand to hand with his Comanche foe. He finally pulled one of his lap pistols and "fired into the Indian's body," killing him. Another of Wells' cavalrymen, young Henry Clay Davis, used his new Colt pistol to kill another Comanche who was wielding an arrow as a dagger.

So, I nominate Henry Clay Davis as first recorded to have used a Colt's revolver on a Comanche, tho' its true not on horseback. I just started the book, perhaps another incidence will arise. And it should be borne in mind that revolvers were already in use during that time in the Seminole War over in Florida.

...and maybe Lysander Well's as the first documented user of a "backup" pocket pistol when the primary handgun failed, a strategem that continues to occasionally save the lives of a few Cops up until the present.

As to Wells' Colt jamming on account of the wedge, just the other day I finally disassembled an Uberti Colt '51 Navy replica I've had sitting around unfired for years. Much to my surprise, when you tap the barrel wedge back into place, if you tap in in too far it will drive the barrel assembly back onto the cylinder, tying up the gun, as was likely the case with Wells's revolver.

I'm just glad I weren't wrestling with a wild Comanche when I found that out...

Reading further, most histories go from that fight to the incidence of 200 infuriated Comanches surrounding the Texan garrison at Mission San Jose, and then leave off entirely everything between then and the Great Comanche Raid under Buffalo Hump some months later.

Moore OTOH describes at least five separate occasions in the aftermath of the Council House fight where two indivudal Comanche leaders came in to trade White and Mexican captives for Comanche women and children held captive by the Texans, on one ocasion Texans even riding out to the Comanche camp to choose the captives to be traded (thirteen captives had already been horribly tortured to death in the immediate aftermath of the fight in revenge by the Comanches).

Said individual Comanches were reportedly well-known by the inhabitants of San Antonio, indicative of interactions and commerce between ordinary San Antonio residents and the Comanches before these events.

Birdwatcher