Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Comancheria

Pekka Hamalainen is the author, a Finn, turns out he's a Professor at UC Santa Barbara. I bought the book for this thread, shoulda bought it couple of years back when Sycamore pm'ed me about it. Little did I know it weren't one more of the same'ol same'ol Texan-centic versions which I was familiar with.

But again, in the context of twenty thousand Comanches extant in 1840, most of whom lived hundreds of miles away, the Great Comanche Raid, at a loss of maybe eighty dead, maybe weren't in itself that major an event, leastways not like it looms in our Texas history.

It did at least demonstrate that Texas was a whole different kettle of fish than Mexico. Comanches would still sporadically steal horses, plunder and kill at least as far as Bexar and Travis Counties for the next two decades or more, but always in small and elusive parties.

Anyhoo... I have a better map with more relevant place names, unfortunately with modern county lines and names obscuring things a bit...



We left off on the night of the ninth, following Tumlinson's Raiders who had picked up the trail on the 6th, followed it south to Victoria while expecting the Comanches to return hell-for-leather at any time as they typically did. These Rangers then finally coming upon the Comanches just north of Linnville (the site of Linnville located just outside where Port Lavaca now stands), east of Victoria on the morning of the 9th.

For future reference, the Battle of Plum Creek would be fought shortly after sunrise on the 12th, four days after the sack of Linnville. The battle site lies just outside the present town of Lockhart.

Mounting alarms had gone out, and doubtless many unheralded individuals had hastened home to carry word to kin and to protect their loved ones, heedless of the risk to themselves. In that age before mass communcation each messenger carried the news as they had experienced or heard it prior to their departure. Likewise men mustered as they were able, some limited by a lack of horses, others doubtless tending to their own affairs first. The community of Gonzales for example would muster at least three separate groups of rangers over these few days.

So it is that word of the attack on Victoria reached the Lavaca River settlements near modern-day Halletsville on the evening of the 7th. A group of twenty-two men elected one Lafayette Ward as their Captain and headed due west, like everyone else anticipating that the Comanche war party would be speedily running back home.

Coming across the two day-old Comanche trail going south, and seeing no sign of their return, they concluded as Tumlinson and his volunteers had done that the Comanches would return on a more westward route and pushed on to Gonzales on the Guadalupe, arriving there on the morning of the 9th, at about the same time Tumlinson and his men were engaging the Comanches perhaps sixty or seventy miles away down by Linnville.

Most all Texans of that era would have wondered at the absence in this narrative of one of the most prominent and active of border defenders; Captain Matthew "Old Paint" Caldwell, then 42 years of age. Hard to do justice to the man here, suffice to say Caldwell had been one of the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence and at the time of the raid held the rank of Captain in the Texas First Regiment of Infantry.

As such, it does seem possible that he had access in 1839 to one of those new Paterson Colts but no mention is made of it. Certainly Patersons figure scarcely at all in accounts of Plum Creek.

Earlier in 1840, Caldwell had been outside the Council House and unarmed when that lethal fracas broke out and was reduced to defending himself by throwing rocks. He did receive a leg wound, possible from friendly fire. The following year he would lead a company in the ill-fated Santa-Fe Expedition (the basis for "Dead Man's Walk") and endure months of brutal captivity. Back in Texas by 1842, he would lead a Texas force to victory against Mexican General Woll's forces outside of San Antonio. He collapsed and died at home later that same year, some said as a result of hardships endured.

As we shall see later, Caldwell did have a knack for short and to-the-point speeches prior to battle. It was Matthew Caldwell that Ben McCulloch had probably been hoping to find when he left Tumlinson's party trailing the Comanches on the evening of the 9th and ridden all night to Gonzales.

Ironically, when word of the huge war party had first reached Gonzales via the mail carrier on the 6th, Caldwell had been away... leading a party in response to another Comanche War party to the west, returning to Gonzales on the 9th to find all hell broken loose, at least by word of courier and rumor.

That same day Caldwell met Ward and the Lavaca men in Gonzales who informed him that the Comanches had not come back up to the east after their attack on Victoria. Like everyone else, Caldwell assumed that time was of the essence as the Comanches must certainly be even then riding hard up-country. Since they were not east, and had not come up the Guadalupe, Caldwell concluded they must be coming up west of that river. Furthermore, they were most likely to ford that stream going north at the ford on the Camino Real, where New Braunfels now stands, the same ford where Smithwick had his brush with death earlier in this thread.

Nothwithstanding the oppressive August heat and the prior labors of everyone present, Ward's party joined Caldwell's, and within a hour of their meeting fifty-nine men under Caldwell hurried westward, directly away from the actual route being followed by the Comanches. The force rode through the night, reaching Seguin on the morning of the 10th. The very same morning Ben McCulloch and his three companions reached Gonzales.

Fortunately for all concerned, word of the Comanche attack on Linnville on the 8th had reached Gonzales on the 9th, some hours after Caldwell's departure. Immediately an active young man on a fast horse was dispatched to catch Caldwell's party.

As Caldwell and Ward's companies reached the Seguin area on the morning of August 10th they encountered courier Robert Hall, another Gonzales man. He was sent to find Caldwell's men to relay the word of the attacks on Victoria and Linnville.

John Henry Brown noted that Hall arrived "on foaming steed" to announce that the Indians were retreating directly up the trail they had made on the way down.

Next we get an example of that seemingly remarkable consensus common to all the disparate and separate parties of Texans in the field when they heard the Comanches were indeed coming back up east of Gonzales after all....

Captain Caldwell announced that his forces must move at once to meet the Indians at Plum Creek. "After rest and breakfast and strengthened by a few recruits," wrote Brown, "we moved on and camped that night on the Old San Antonio crossing of the San Marcos."

Note that on the map the course of the San Marcos River determines the squiggly line between modern Guadalupe and Caldwell Counties, perhaps twenty miles northeast of Seguin en route to Plum Creek.

Interesting the common urge of EVERYONE in this narrative to hurry, even though their destinations lay hours away. Their seemed to be a consensus that just minutes could count even after an all-day ride on failing horses.

Such would prove to be tbe case at Plum Creek.

Birdwatcher