The view from the top of the road east of the Fort at sunset was breathtaking beyond belief.
Pardon my cynicism, but you just got here, try that drive again in August
Heck, folks deserved medals back then for just getting to places like that on foot, horseback and in wagons. In summer the heat must have been excrutiating by our modern standards, and the water both warm and foul.
And reeked? I suspect the term "reeked" just scratched the surface. Way-old sweat, long-term unwashed bodies and clothing (wool) mixed with the odor of old horse sweat.
I mean, it might even have been as smelly as riding public transportation was in England back the the sixties....
Thanks for the map suggestion.
Just a brief return to the narrative to keep it rolling along, and I'll say again, if not for the writings of Moore ("Savage Frontier") we'd have lost the trail entire by this point.
Turns out there was another Moore, apparently unrelated to the writer (tho said writer is of Old Texas stock and does number a Ranger Captain among his antecedents).
John Henry Moore. Ran to Texas as far back as 1818 to avoid studying Latin (hey, I can relate
)
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fmo30If nothing else, the guy deserves fame for designing the "Come and Take It" flag.
Moore was the leader of the 1839 San Saba expedition against the Comanches, said expedition villified as a colossal failure in the "revolvers-changed-everything" sort of popular histories.
Actually Moore did everything right, advancing in the middle of winter behind a screen of Lipan Apaches. Surprise was complete. Smithwick was along on that expedition and wrote several memorable passages about it.
http://www.lsjunction.com/olbooks/smithwic/otd16.htmMoore lost his horses, and everyone had to walk back, but most everyone DID make it back, if skinnier and a tad worse for wear.
The next year Moore narrowly missed Plum Creek, arriving from LaGrange at that place the same day as the fight, after it was over. In fact Moore almost didn't go out again after Comanches that fall, but decided to go at the last minute.
An extraordinary expedition, flawlessly executed, far up the Colorado on past the San Saba, maybe against the very same Comanches as 1839, this time securely encamped in the very heart of Comancheria.
Much has been made of the bad blood between Moore and the Lipan Chief Castro following the 1839 San Saba fight. If bad blood there was, it was forgotten entire by 1840.
The memory of popular history is selective: Everyone remembers Wounded Knee, nobody recalls eight times that number of settlers dead at the hands of the Santee Sioux two decades earlier. The Washita and Custer are notorious, yet probably ten times that many Blackfeet dead in the Marias River massacre in Montana just two years later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marias_MassacreNearly two hundred Comanche dead after Moore succeeded in surprising them in 1840, a figure even exceeding Sand Creek. Possibly the heaviest loss of Comanche lives ever in any single recorded action, and just to erase his earlier embarassment Moore came back to Austin driving FIVE HUNDRED Comanche horses. As complete a victory as one could possibly ask for.
Hardly anyone remembers today.
Maybe one or two revolvers among Moore and his men, the rest single-shot muzzleloaders, presumably a LOT of flintlocks in the mix, rifles again doing most of the execution.
Gotta run, more later.
Birdwatcher
