A number of posts ago my theme was looking for the first use of Patersons.
There was at least one documented in use at Moore's 1840 fight (from "Savage Frontier")...
Micah Andrews, a former ranger captain, had used a new Colt Paterson five-shot repeating rifle in Moore's Comanche fight. He reported that he was able to fire his rifle ten times while his companions were able to fire their rifles only twice.
I suppose "new" being the operative word here. I'm not sure Colt would have the metallurgy squared away until the 1850's, not so much for the cylinder and barrel (although the Walker for one blew up cylinders regularly, resulting IIRC in a shorter chamgers for a lesser load in the subsequent .44 Dragoon pistols.) but the internal lock mechanism.
Moore rounded up his horses and prisoners and headed back to where he had left the cattle. Moore reports that the weather on the return journey was "unfavorable", and that at one point they had to stop for two days on account of freezing rains.
No word on the specifics of moving thirty-four captive Comanches in all that time. The column was followed, apparently at least in part by some survivors of the attack. Stories here surely, of people looking for their missing kin.
Seven captives did succeed in slipping away into the darkness on the Pedernales, the occasion being when four Comanches snuck in among the horse herd and attempted a stampede, getting away with a few head.
But for the main part there was no significant response from the Comanches, no assembled body of warriors, no rescue attempts. Perhaps Comancheria was just too far-flung for a rapid response on that scale.
No big retaliatory raids either. It may be as some have written that the Comanches were chastised and chose thereafter to leave the Texan settlements alone.
Possibly, but within a couple of months after Moore's expedition, Jack Hays and his rangers would be busy down around San Antonio, and incessant minor raids would continue on the settlements, indeed, some of Moore's men on this raid would end up left afoot in Austin after their horses were stolen during a celebration in their honor.
These were the opening years of the big raids into Mexico, and it does seem that raiding in Mexico became a hugely profitable affair.
Of the Comanche captives brung back, not much word, some were sent to houses as domestic servants, most probably slipped away. One lad, as told above in the case of the Cynthia Parker recovery, did become attached to his foster family. One other, spared on the field of battle because of his courage, was sent to live with the French Minister to Texas. THAT lad later slipped away on one of the minister's best horses.
So, there it was, perhaps the heaviest single blow by violence suffered by the Comanches ever, and certainly one of the major bloodlettings of our whoel Frontier history. I was wrong when I said such would not be attempted again until MacKenzie. Ford would go against Comanches again in 1860.
WHY a Moore expedition might not occur again for twenty years might be explained by the fact that they Moore and his men were never paid. Houston, after he took office and long after the raid, ruled that the horses that were taken should have been payment enough. I dunno that much about Houston beyond the popular biography "The Raven", but that seems a distinctly ungracious ruling to me.
It would be misleading too to conclude that folks just laid down after that and took what the Comanches were dishing out. Along with an absence of big raids, Mexico would again invade in 1842, and then came statehood after which organized frontier defense became largely a Federal responsibility.
That last might sound like a reference to our present Border situation, but actually, it ain't. IIRC in the 1850's fully one quarter of all our army would be stationed in Texas, with interdiction of Comanches being their #1 mission. The thinking at that time was the famously ineffective line of Forts though, and elsewhere for all its field perambulations and famous officer corps (Lee hisself was in charge by 1860, and his officers read like a who's who of famous Southern Generals), the US Second Cavalry, pioneering though it was, never did come up on that many Comanches, certainly not on the scale of a MacKenzie.
And of course, when it came to whittling down the Comanches, ALL of these efforts pale to near insignificance relative to the great cholera epidemic of '49/'50.
Birdwatcher
