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).
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 story there in that one passage.
Birdwatcher
