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The behavior of the Comanches through all of this is something of a mystery. One really wishes that someone woulda thought to visit with Buffalo Hump and write his biography, surely he would have had much to contribute to our knowledge of the OTHER side of the Texas frontier in those years. Prob'ly wouldn't have been hard to do, the guy was quite accessible in his later years...
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fbu12In 1859 Buffalo Hump settled his remaining followers on the Kiowa-Comanche reservation near Fort Cobb in Indian Territory. There, in spite of his distress at the demise of the Comanches' traditional way of life, he asked for a house and farmland so that he could set an example for his people. He died in 1870.
The fact that several hundred Comanches could be 100 miles behind the settlement line before anyone really knew it is not surprising. Clearly Victoria and Linnville were the objectives from the beginning. It is entirely possible too that the route had been carefully scouted beforehand, it would have been hardly difficult for a handful of Comanches to perform this task.
As for the timing of the raid, Moore has it that may have been as the result of the advice of Mexican agents. It seems just as likely to me that the big treaty conference up at Bent's Fort that same summer coulda held things up.
I'm wondering too at what time of year were the warehouses at Linnville likely to be the most full and if that could have affected the timing of the raid. Seems like the purchasing power of their Texan customer base would peak in the late summer/fall after the harvests were in. But then the folks at Linnville must have traded extensively with Mexicans and Tejanos too, hence their initial assumption that the approaching Comanches that morning with their large herd of horses and mules were Mexican traders.
Up until they sacked Linnville on the 8th the tightly choreographed discipline in the Comanche ranks can be explained. What puzzles is afterwards, on the way back. A frequent MO of later frontier raids would be that the Comanches would arrive in a body, set up camp, and fan out to simultaneously hit separate ranches.
On this raid we get NO reports of groups of Comanches fanning out on their own hook, despite the relatively enormous group of warriors on hand. Consider that the aforementioned John Menifree was able to walk and crawl to a ranch after being stuck with seven arrows down by Linnville, said ranch being left intact despite the huge number of Comanche warriors in the immediate area (if they ran off their horses too nobody recorded it).
And though the Comanches were driving about 2,000 stolen horses and mules at this point, the seeming enormity of that haul dimishes considerably in the light of the fact that the herd would presumably be divided among the at the very least 400 warriors participating.
Might be that the quantity and quality of the loot garnered from the warehouses at Linnville was enough to keep their collective attention on the way home, such that defending the pack train became a primary objective. I'll leave it to a real Historian to research the size of that haul and compare it to the volume of goods available, say, at a Comanchero trade fair and the value thereof.
Tumlinson's men, doggedly tailing the Comanches through three whole days in the endless heat on weary mounts, would miss participating in the fight at Plum Creek entirely. That fight would turn into a running skirmish, running AWAY from Tumlinson, perhaps nine out of ten of the Indians getting away clean, at least with their lives. But if Tumlinson had kept the Comanches worried about their loot and therefore close to the driven herd during their return trip throught the settlements, he may have saved some lives.
If the Comanches even threw out any scouts in advance on their way back, such is not recorded. A puzzle fer example that Henry McCulloch had been able to occupy that high solitary hill unopposed on the morning of the 11th and see the whole body of Indians. Were I Henry, I would have expected Comanche lookouts to be already up there.
Actually I'm sure he was keenly aware of that possibility at the time, his solo ride towards the biggest bunch of raiding Indians anyone had ever seen being one of those acts easy to relate after the fact, but probably a cause of no little anxiety at the time.
The Comanches made pretty good time on the return trip, considering they were driving 2,000 head of stock plus what must have been at least 1,000 horses they had brung with 'em. Multiple mounts were common on Comanche Raids, as they were soon to be among the rangers going out against them.
A straight line from Linnville to the Plum Creek fight site is about 100 miles long, prob'ly a bit more. The morning of the ninth the Comanches were down by Linnville, the morning of the 12th they were crossing Plum Creek, meaning they were covering 30-40 miles a day, in the same heat written about by the Texans.
Nobody seems to mention unusual thirst in their accounts, indicating that 1840 had not been a drought year, in which case water and forage along the route would have been largely absent. Still, watering 3,000 head on that return journey must have been time-consuming.
Birdwatcher
