Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Comancheria

It is hard for us to grasp exactly what these Texas guys looked like.

Beards and long hair are mentioned alot, these guys were young and single for the most part after all. Attire from all over the map: Trousers and shirts with buttons one would assume, but frequent mention is made of leggings, mocassins and breechclouts, especially on long scouts after reg'lar clothes had worn out.

Serapes are mentioned, and IIRC Smithwick traded a fine cloak with a red velvet lining for the mule he skipped town on in 1839. The one given being a broad-brimmed hat. But even that weren't a given according to Smithwick. I would argue it sure as heck would have been for anyone who spent much time in the open.

The weaponry, like the clothing styles a mix of things we popularly associate with other more famous time periods. Muzzleloading rifles still the primary offersive/defensive weapon, prob'ly at least half still flinters in 1840. Mention of multiple pistols being carried too.

Alongside flinlocks of a sort instantly familiar to a Daniel Boone, caplock technology was moving in, and the first generation of revolving arms, which must have seemed practically space-age (remember that term?) at the time.

Besides firearms, knives were general of course, and mention is made as late as 1861 of tomahawks as common implements carried by Texas Rangers.

Must be an easy period to re-enact for, basically anything ya got from other periods would fit SOMEWHERE in this era

Weren't your average guy on these things either.

Accounts dating from the Mexican War on mention wild-looking, heavily armed and mounted Texans. But compared to their apparent numbers, hardly any of these guys ventured out into the wilds of Comancheria. Odd but apparently true, even those guys were blocked by that "impenetrable wall of Comanche violence".

So why were these guys commonly armed to the teeth?

I'm gonna quote one John D. McAdoo, in 1864 appointed Brigadier General in charge of keeping the peace and preserving order in the Sixth Military Distict. Here he is commenting on conditions around Fredericksburg at that time (as given in Smith "Frontier Defense in the Civil War"...

I found almost the entire population of a large part of the district laboring under the greatest excitement. Within a few months, twenty men had perished by violence. Some had been waylaid and shot; others taken from their homes at the dead hour of midnight and hung, and their houses robbed; and some had been mobbed and murdered in jail and in irons.

No man felt secure-even at home. The Indians seemed to be the least talked of, the least thought of, and the least dreaded of all the evils that threatened and afflicted the Frontier.

Now granted, this was during the war, but a number of areas of Texas had been noted for lawlessness, fueds and assorted violence for years, before and after that war. And most of them many armed guys on horses simply were not chasing Wild Indians.

Might be the driving force on BOTH sides of the Frontier was simple profit. Most White folks weren't voluntarily putting their lives at risk UNLESS there was money to be made. People set out boldly across Comancheria often enough in '49 on their way to the Gold Rush, RIP Ford even writing about encountering single travellers on foot crossing the plains.

On the Comanche side; small parties continued their lucrative raids on the settlements, steady immigration likely providing an ever-increasing pool of potential victims. But these raids were stealthy and quick, followed immediately by a rapid retreat.

We know the BIG raids during the '40's and 50's were pointed south, into Mexico. Easy for us to view Comanches the same way we popularly view Vikings; all raiding, all the time. Perhaps things weren't that simple with the Comanches any more than we know they weren't with the Vikings.

The big, lucrative raids into Mexico make perfect sense if we put them in the context of the economic and social forces operating on Comanche society as outlined by Hamanlienen in "Comanche Empire".

Anyhoo... back to John Henry Moore.

Captain Moore deserves far more fame than he apparently has at present. By 1840 he had been chasing and fighting Indians for nearly twenty years.

Two years later, at age 42, he would again be prominent in opposing Woll's invasion from Mexico, twenty-five years later he would lose most all of his considerable accumulated material wealth in the defeat of '65, but succeed in rebuilding his fortunes at the age in life that most of us would call retirement.

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fmo30

Given his extensive experience, it seems no accident that Moore's expedition went as well at it did. To appreciate exactly HOW deep into Comancheria he snuck his 100 men in October/November of 1840 you have to peruse the map below.



About 250 miles northwest of Austin as the crow flies, a 500 mile round-trip, through the midst of perhaps the most populous and powerful tribe in North America at that time.

But let us not forget it was a small group of Lipan Apaches what snuck him in.

Birdwatcher