At this point its appropriate to look at the performance of those thirteen Tonkawas under Placido who arrived with Burleson.
The night before the battle, they had all run thirty miles, possibly while carrying the heavy rifles of the era and the accountrements that went with them.
On a historical scale, the ability to run thirty miles at a stretch ain't that unusual. Scottish Highlanders are reported to have run those sort of distances regularly, weapons in hand, across steep terrain during their intercine conflicts and cattle raids. The over-thirty regiment of Zulus that attacked Rourke's Drift had run fifty miles to get there. And closer to Plum Creek, metioned earlier in this thread is the account of a group of rifle-armed Delawares running for two days after a much larger group of mounted Comanches, at the end of which run they avenged the death of one of their party, inflicting several casualities on tbe Comanches.
Still, even though such was more or less usual in Native warfare, the thirty-mile run of the Tonkawas prior to Plum Creek was extraordinary, thirteen of these men (who Gwynne in "
Empire of the Summer Moon" has it were "always losing" in one of his more egregious errors), going up against several times their number of Comanches.
Why the Tonkawas chose to go into the fight on foot is a mystery, unless of course they lacked horses which seems unlikely. Reading up on the Tonkawas, what comes across is the idea that these were some pretty bad dudes. More extraordinary than their run was the performance of these men in the battle after that run. Moore writes...
Cheif Placido and his twelve horseless Tonkawas were especially brave during the battle. They could only mount themselves by vaulting into the saddle of slain Comanches. According to one eyewitness, Placido and the Tonkawas "were all mounted in a marvellously short time after the action commenced."In that light, the running to battle on foot and mounting yourself on a dead enemy's horse comes across as being possibly one of those demonstration-of-fortitude foibles of Indian warfare; like counting coup on a dangerous enemy with a harmless stick or staking onesself out in the path of a charging enemy, or even tackling grizzly bears with a knife just to wear the claws.
In the Texas era the Tonkawas were outnumbered as a nation perhaps twenty-to-one by their Comanche arch enemies, yet resisted extermination in all that time. We know the Comanches and their Kiowa allies reserved a special hatred for them because of their habitual cannibalism.
Indeed, the Tonkawas appear to have clung to and even celebrated that ritual cannibalism until their virtual annihalation at the end of the Frontier period. Among people as famously driven by contact with spirits and as mindful of witchcraft as were the Indian nations, the habit of comsuming one's enemies would presumably have dark occultic implications indeed. Ain't physically possible to demean and belittle a dead enemy more than by dismembering, cooking and eating them and turning them into feces.
I suspect the Comanches actually feared the Tonkawas, in common with a number of neighboring tribes, which may be exactly why the Tonkawas clung to cannibalism for so long (all of this JMHO of course).
That morning the thirteen Tonkawas would have had to physically run towards a much larger number of expert horsemen and skilled warriors...
http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/badam2.htmMultiple accounts of the Battle of Plum Creek give great praise to Placido and his Tonkawas who arrived on foot, but swiftly became mounted warriors by sometimes in one motion killing and swinging onto a Comanche warrior�s horse. Author Wilberger noted that Placido himself was "in the hottest part of the battle, dealing death on every hand, while the arrows and balls of the enemy were flying thick and fast around him." ...and of Chief Placido....
Placido, his son and Tonkawa associates were close and honored friends of the Burleson family and visited the Burleson homestead often near current San Marcos on the head springs of the San Marcos River. The Tonkawa chief boasted that he never shed the blood of a white man. The Comanches likely had no fiercer enemy than this hereditary one.
The Chief was implicitly trusted by the Burlesons and others with which he served including Texas Ranger Colonel John S. (Old Rip) Ford and Captains S.P. Ross, W.A. Pitts, Preston and Tankersley....
Wilberger and author John Henry Brown both agreed that he was "the soul of honor and never betrayed a trust. He rendered invaluable services in behalf of Texas, in recognition of which he never received any reward of a material nature, beyond a few paltry pounds of gun powder and salt. Imperial Texas should rear a monument commemorative of his memory. He was the more than Tammany of Texas." Worth noting that Placido's own mother was a Comanche, captured in war, and that his wife was a captured Comanche woman too. Aint too many people could use the Comanches as a source of women like that, the way the Comanches themselves did to the Mexicans.
If those thirteen Tonkawas really did each kill a Comanche for a horse and then go on to kill more, man-for man as compared to the Texan force, they did a disproportional amount of the killing that day.
Birdwatcher
