Before moving on from Plum Creek, an incident of closure of a sort for some at the fight.
Its been thirty-five years since I first read Fehrenbach's book, while sleeping in a park waiting for the college dorms at Geneseo to open the next day, me having hitch-hiked the 300 miles to get there that same day (young people did stuff like that back then). Never would have occurred to me at the time that I'd end up spending most of my adult life down in far-off Texas.
At first reading the sadism of the Comanches skinning a man's feet and having him walk stood out in memory, Moore's book gives him a name; Tucker Foley.
And here from the TAMU website, the closure of that sad episode...
http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/badam2.htmEllen McKinney Arnold, daughter of John McKinney, related the incident told to her by her father in 1905:
"Tucker Foley was killed in about two miles of where Moulton now stands, and was buried under a big live oak tree. Father dug his grave with a butcher knife and wrapped him in a saddle blanket made out of cotton.
When father found him, he was naked, had been scalped, and was hanging to a tree, tied up by his hamstrings. Nearly all the people in Lavaca County pursued the Indians, over took them and had a big fight. There were about thirty-seven men from Gonzales; my father was among the number who were joined by other volunteers.
Mason Foley brought back his brother's horse and rifle; he said he killed the Indian that had them, and that he believed he was the one that killed his brother. I saw the horse and rifle several years afterward; the horse was a bay, and the rifle was a flint-rock rifle. Mase told me after the fight was over he killed all the squaws and tried to find his brother's scalp, but it was lost." A whole lot of story there in that one passage.
Birdwatcher
