Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Nine years a Captive

Glad to be of help kaywoodie. Nothing more frustrating than trying to remember the title or author of a book and not being able to come up with it.

There was a case where Lehmann said they had been on a raid and raised some hell, but had the Rangers on their tail. They found a trail of some white-friendly Lipans and followed it only to peel off one at a time and the raiding party regrouped later. The Lipans paid the price and in white history the raiding Indians were punished. The actual raiders got away though.

Also interesting is how the captives, especially the males, once they got past the rough initial treatment, favored the Indian life. Riding, hunting, raiding, always on the move, adventure just over the horizon, would have to be better than guiding a plow towed by oxen waiting for a hail storm to wipe out your food supply. Many former captives said they had more to eat and life was easier with the Indians than living in a frontier cabin on starvation rations working from daylight to dark.

Quanah indeed took Herman under his wing so to speak and the quarter section he received is only a few miles west of our place here. This area was and still is known as "The Big Pasture" from the days the Comanche and Kiowas rented out this area to Burk Burnett and other cattlemen basically overseen by Quanah.

I first read Lehman's book out of the library in Grandfield OK but do have it on Kindle too.

I have a very good friend, an old man now, who is “Comanche”. His grandmother was a captive who was adopted and put on the roll at Ft Sill. He has told me in secret that although he’s held tribal office and is officially a member he actually has no Indian blood.

Interestingly, he recently transferred title to the half section that was his mother’s Indian allotment over to his sister. He did so because he has no grandchildren and upon his death it would have reverted back to the Comanche tribe for them to do as they saw fit. But since his sister has grandchildren it can stay in the family and be passed down.

You must live pretty close to the Star House.

When it comes to ethnic stuff IMHO you do tend to take a simplistic views of things, real people are somewhat more complex.



I dunno that a tall, skinny, starving German kid would resemble an Apache, who as a group tend to be shorter, barrel-chested, bow- legged and decidedly brown. There’s a reason the Ashanti’s call us “Obruni Cocor” (red white men).

It is true that Lehman may have been fortunate that there was an Apache-speaker among even that small band of Comanches, which brings up an interesting point:

Apaches and Comanches were enemies, and yet here you have an Apache-speaking Comanche. Sorta in the same vien, in the 1850’s Texas Ranger Captain RIP Ford’s scout and compadre under fire in many combats was a local called Roque. Roque was half Mexican half Comanche and actively warring against the Comanches. Ford say that, out of politeness I guess, he never asked him why.

Same time period as Lehmann, same area, the tall, ebullient Black Seminole Scout Adam Payne was winning a Medal of Honor while guiding Ranald McKenzie and the 4th US Cavalry against the Comanches, the very same tribe that it is believed had captured Payne in his youth, such that the already tall Payne went into battle wearing a Comanche buffalo horn headdress. (read Thomas Porter’s “The Black Seminoles” next , it’s excellent).

According to the Pop History Plains Indian Rule Book, these things weren’t supposed to happen.



Possibly, and/or maybe they thought they could receive a reward for reuniting him with his family as was happening among the Comanches at that time. Far from reading strictly from the Pop History Plains Indian Rulebook, MOST Comanches were settled down and getting into ranching about that time, to the tune of selling 30,000 head of cattle in 1873 to the US Army in New Mexico. So many at least knew the value of a dollar at least as much they did the value of a Buffalo.



Who doesn’t? (apart from our rampant Progessives, Liberals and Feminists I mean).

Possibly THE most respected White guy among the Comanches was JJ “Doc” Sturm, a gentle German botanist who had first been assigned to the Comanches on the Brazos Reserve twenty years earlier as an agricultural advisor and remained with them in some capacity ever since.

Ranald MacKenzie broke the resistance of the last Comanche holdouts in the Red River War by capturing their women and children. At MacKenzies’ own request it was Doc Sturm who rode out alone onto the high plains, found their camp where the warriors were hiding and brung back the hostiles with him, this on the strength of his word alone.

Ain’t too many people who coulda done that. The following year Sturm and the former Comanche War Chief Mow-ray travelled all over the Texas Plains finding and bringing home fearful Comanche refugees.

Late in life Sturm married a literate Caddo woman and they were highly esteemed in Indian Country for their medical help and many acts of kindness. It is said that no one hungry and homeless was ever turned away from their door.

A different sort of Frontier story I know, ain’t saying the blood-and-guts stuff didn’t happen, just that the whole truth was more complex than that.

Hey, one of the most famous Apaches of all, Naiche, son of Cochise, front and center in the most famous Apache War of them all, later became an Elder in the Methodist Church, and earnestly tried to get Geronimo to convert.

Filibusters out of Louisiana (likes of Anthony Glass and Philip Nolan) were trading with the Comanches just the other side of the crosstimbers right after the turn of the 18th/19th century for horses and mules. Big damn trade going on right under the Spaniards noses. Not that our old pal Wilkenson had any pull in this escapade. But Nolan was at one time his “secretary” and the Spaniards did catch up with him.

Also during Col. Dodge’s First Dragoon expedition to the western Indian territory they were welcomed and camped with the Comanches. (Love that Catlin drawing of Dodge done on that expedition! With his round hat and hunting frock).

Here you go!

For a quite different take on the Comanches I recommend Finnish Professor Pekka Hamalainen’s recent “The Comanche Empire”, Texas History from a more Comanche-centric perspective, including the immense amounts of horses and mules they were trading to Americans.

...and no worries, not politically correct at all....

https://www.amazon.com/Comanche-Emp...hy=9028068&hvtargid=pla-561430305496

I don't remember the source but remember reading where someone asked one of the Smith brothers who was the meanest comanche and they said Adoloh Korn

Prolly relation to Corn Pop.

I believe it was in Clinton Smith’s book.

As soon as I finish Lehmann, I’m starting this one



Birdy, I think Abert had a wren(?) named after him. Right?

i just got through with this book on kindle, and mentioned it to my wife. her family goes back into the 1840's in texas. she is also 81 now to give time perspective, but again mentioned a story told by her grandmother. it was either the grandmother, or a friend, noticed movement under a bed in the house, about the same time an indian appeared at the door of the house. turned out a black guy was hiding under the bed from some white people. he evidently said he would take care of the indian, if he was left along, which was agreed to. point of this, those times were not so far ago. there is a painting in a museum in sweetwater, texas, of one of her ancestors roping a steam engine chugging along, it was scaring the cows. Both my wife and her mother had/have facial features that make you think of cherokee, and there was definite intermixing in there at some point. Lehmanns book brings out that life was not walden's pond, but was savage for lack of a better way to put it.

Thanks for sharing that Ron.

you dont have to go very far out of phoenix to get into country where this stuff happened, bloody basin is only about 40 miles north. My dad had a ranch in that area in the 20's. and he described to me areas where there were skeletons still laying on the ground.

Stillbirth of a Nation
James Lafond
https://smile.amazon.com/Stillbirth...oding=UTF8&qid=1593373380&sr=8-2

Primary source history is the best history, and James LaFond gives us primary source material that will sear your undies.

This is the story of Peter Williamson, a child captured/kidnapped in Scotland and sold into bondage ("indentured servitude") with the help of the local Scottish law judges at the age of 12 years. He Served out his indenture (unlike so many who died indentured) and started a family...and was then captured by indians in New England. He survived them, fought them for years, then went back to Scotland and told his tale, whereupon he was imprisoned by local Scotish law judges (some of whom were the ones who help sell him into bondage) and others who wanted to maintain the profitable racket of white slavery. He eventually sued them and depsed many witnesses to their crimes and was eventually freed and then wrote his autobiography.

And a squirrel perhaps?

Abert's towhee I believe, a large desert sparrow.

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Aberts_Towhee/overview#

...and a squirrel.

Clearly I was smarter in 2012......

https://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php/topics/6170946/24


In popular Texas lore, the Great Comanche Raid of 1840 was a unique event, the Southern Comanche Nation mustering all their forces to strike the Texans a mighty revenge blow.

I suppose there was a lot of that in it, but raids on that scale certainly weren't unprecedented elsewhere, and a number of major raids involving hundreds of Comanches and Kiowas were launched in those years, all those OTHER big raids targeting Mexico.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche%E2%80%93Mexico_Wars

Though we view them primarily as sadistic raiders, as the wiki link above and Hamaleinen ("Comanche Empire") point out, there was a strong commercial aspect to these raids, This from Hamaleinen...

Early nineteenth-century Comancheria was a dense and dynamic marketplace, the center of a far-flung trading empire that covered much of North America's heartland... The Comanche trade pump sent massive amounts of horses and mules to the north and east, enough to support the numerous equestrian societies elsewhere on the Great Plains and enough to contribute to the western expansion of the American settlement frontier.

In return for their extensive commercial services Comanches imported enough horticultural produce to sustain a population of twenty to thirty thousand and enough guns, lead and powder to defend a vast territory against Native enemies as well as the growing, expansionist Texas Republic.

But that thriving exchange system was rapidly approaching the limits of its productive foundation... By the 1820's, the traditional raiding domains [to acquire livestock for trade] had become either exhausted or unavailable... Comanches continued sporadic raiding in Texas... but the returns failed to meet their expansive livestock demands, which skyrocketed in the late 1830's and early 1840's when the opened trade with the populous nations recently arrived in the Indian Territory.

To keep their commercial system running, Comanches needed new, unexhausted raiding fields, and they found them in Northern Mexico... Comanche raiding thus generated a massive northward flow of property from Mexico, a development promoted by many interest groups in North America... By the late 1830s it had become a common belief that "enterprising American capitalists' had established trading posts on the Comanche-Texas border in order to tap the "immense booty" that the Comanches, "the most wealthy as well as the most powerful of the most savage nations of North America", were hauling from northern Mexico.

Texas officials provided Comanche war parties free access through their state, hoping to direct the raids into Mexico, and even supplied southbound war bands with beef and other provisions.

Probly relevant that one of the early Jack Hays stories has him and his Rangers meeting with and providing beef cows to a Comanche raiding party going south, in that version "attempting to dissuade them from raiding"..

Many internet sources have it that the Great Comanche Raid of 1840 killed "hundreds of Texans". All of the authors we have been quoting here, even Fehrenbach, agree that the actual death toll was low; about twenty people all told. What the raid DID target however was horses, about two thousand rounded up and taken along during the five-day raid before Plum Creek. Horses, and as it turned out, large quantities of trade goods looted from Linnville.

Why a raid on that scale was never again attempted against the Texans may have had something to do with the heavy casualties the Indians suffered at Plum Creek (more than eighty dead, if you've been to Cabelas in Buda on I 35, the fleeing Comanches drove their stolen stock through that area). OTOH Comanches, right up until the end, were never noted for timidity.

Actual conditions at that time seem to agree with Hamalienen's account, by 1840 it may be that the Texan settlements at the edge of the plains were pretty much picked over. Small-scale livestock raids were incessant during those years. During the Great Raid, Ben McCullough, attempting to raise a body of men, sent word around the Gonzales TX area seeking for volunteers to assemble. One volunteer later recalled....

A larger number would have moved out, but for the very short notice of the intended expedition and the great difficulty of procuring horses the Indians having about a week before stolen a majority of the best in the neighborhood.

Noah Smithwick, at that time living on Webber's Prairie over by Bastrop, expounds at length on the topic of the innumerable thefts of horses around the settlements at that time, and his exasperation when his own last two horses were taken "in the year of the Comet" (1843).

http://www.lsjunction.com/olbooks/smithwic/otd18.htm

My stock of horses had been depleted till I had none left except a blind mare and a colt, the latter a fine little fellow, of which I was very proud. That being the year of a brilliant comet, I called my colt Comet. The mare being stone blind I had no apprehension of their being stolen, so I let them run loose, they seldom being out of sight of the house. But there came a morning when the blaze of the Comet failed to catch my eye when I sallied forth in search of it. Looking about I found moccasin tracks and at once divined that the horses were stolen.

When I found by the trail that there were only two Indians, I thought I could manage them, so I took my rifle and struck out on the trail, to which the colt's tracks gave me the clue. Crossing Coleman's creek I found where the mare had apparently stumbled in going up the bank and fallen. Coming to a clump of cedars a short distance beyond the creek and not daring to venture into it, I skirted around and picked up the trail on the further side, where the Indians, seemingly disgusted with the smallness of the haul, turned back toward the prairie. I kept right along the trail, and on gaining the top of the rise above "Half Acre," discovered the missing animals feeding.

I looked to the priming of my gun, and then scanning the vicinity without perceiving any sign of Indians, went to the mare, near by which on a tree I found a piece of dried bear meat, of which I took possession. It was then quite late in the afternoon and I had left home without eating any breakfast, but I had recovered my horses and felt in a good humor with the world. I went to the village, where I recounted the adventure, exhibiting the bear meat as a witness thereto. The boys swore that when the Indians found that the horses were mine they brought them back and left the meat as a gift of atonement.

The sequel, however, which came a few days later, developed the fact that they only abandoned the mare and colt to get a bigger haul, which they made in Well's prairie, and coming on back again, picked up the mare and colt, which they failed to return.

I was mad to recklessness. Taking my rifle on my shoulder and my saddle on my back, I walked four miles to Colonel Jones' to borrow a horse to pursue the marauders. With others who had suffered by the raid we followed on up to Hoover's bend on the Colorado, ten miles above Burnet, where upon breaking camp, they scattered in every direction; but here my Comanche lore came to direct the search.

Going to the ashes where the camp fire had been, I found a twig stuck in the ground with a small branch pointing northward, it having been so placed to guide stragglers. Taking the course indicated, we soon had the satisfaction of seeing the trail increasing, and presently some one called out: "Here's the Comets track." Guided by the Comet, we kept on to the Leon river, where were encamped the Lipan and Tonkawas, friendly tribes. They were in a state of commotion over the loss of their horses, the Keechis, who were the marauders in this instance, having taken them as they passed.

We followed them twenty days but never came up with them.

So it wasn't as if the Comanches were driven off in the aftermath of the Plum Creek fight, just that conditions on the Texan side of the plains probably weren't conducive to large raiding parties.

...and Noah Smithwick was a good man.

Wasn’t the squirrel named for his father! John James Abert

Apparently so:

https://www.coniferousforest.com/aberts-squirrel.htm

I wish they'd get these things right, and call them Abert Sr's squirrel

"Crossing Coleman's creek I found where the mare had apparently stumbled in going up the bank and fallen. Coming to a clump of cedars a short distance........”

Birdy I think I showed you Coleman’s creek on the way to the Manor Hill cemetery when you were here that day. The creek runs behind that cemetery and on up crossing the old Blake-Manor road twice in the post oak thicket.

It runs past the old Coleman homestead, where some of the Colonels family was killed in a Comanche raid.

His oldest son and wife were killed. His children who escaped said their brother was shouting numerous names to make it sound as if he had armed confederates in the house with him. ( the other children had made good an escape threw a trapdoor and into nearby woods.).

The boy was allegedly aremed with a "breechloading yager” rifle. Which most suspect was a Hall breechloading flintlock. They were known here.