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About the most surprising thing I’ve heard you write.

I don’t mind rattlesnakes I guess, and I’ve come across my share of ‘em.

Seen big rattlesnakes on the place, but amazingly the hogs keep em pretty much in check. Lost a big one coming into camp one night. Never found him!!!

As far a silver bullet and ball, I cannot remember running across any documentation, but that doesn’t mean much. Quite possible. I know the old Mountain Man Dick Wootten stated the Indians got copper ball from the Spaniards as he removed a few from his fellow compatriots.

Neal,

I remembered something else. There was a rumor floating around of a small scale gold operation going on up
Around Pontotoc. (Barry, you ever hear about it?). Even James Drury (yeah the Virginian) was suppose to be involved in it.

I hunted on a place up there that had old test holes (possible as old as the Spanish times) dug around on it. But the only other gold I’ve ever heard of in that area was the alleged shipment hid on the south end of Smoothing Iron Mountain. Which is an interesting but to me problimatic story.

Met James Drury a few years back at the Tulsa gunshow. Nice guy.

I had been on the road when this was started. Just read the entire thing. There is a lot of history in this thread.

On an unrelated note, I’ve met quite a few famous folks at the Tulsa Show over the years! Larry Potterfield of Midway Fame. Super Nice Guy!!!
The actor that played Grizzly Adams, Dan Haggerty if I got his name right. Later that evening he was staying in the same hotel there in Tulsa and had a drink with him in the bar.
Also ran into Hank jr aka “Bocefus” Williams. I knew him already though as he was one of my big customers when I was in the Wholesale Firearms Industry.
Also met the guy that does the Blue Book of Gun Values.
Fijestad??? He’s an asswipe.
And lots of famous knife makers.

Didn’t meet him at Tulsa, but at his old hang out as resident Gunsmith in Austin, at McBride’s Gun Store, our very own Kaywoodie aka Bob is the most famous Movie Star I’ve ever met ! 🤠

Bob, that’s Barry’s old stomping grounds. Maybe he could guide us to the Gold ! 😜😁🤠

Ha! I’m no movie star, and I sure as hell ain’t not gunsmith.

Gun plumber maybe. But not a gunsmith.

OK, boys, I read the reviews and I bought the books.
To be fair I did read the Lehmann book 8 or 9 years ago, liked it very much but have lost it.

Any book worth reading is worth reading twice.

I am from the Southeast and have studied up on our Cherokee Indians and the Creeks. When I started driving the Big Rig out west 9 years ago I gained a fascination for the Comanches. All in all it looks like they were the biggest, and baddest tribe of all.

Going west out of Ft. Worth I often imagined a herd of 200,000 buffalo covering the plains. When I saw a creek, I thought that quite probably in 1820 there was a Comanche camp right there, the tipis and the massive horse herd.

I did read a book back then, I have since lost it as well, easy to lose stuff when you are "on the road" and you change trucks every 9 months, but it was a book about the origins of the Comanche Nation, and the first Comanches to have a horse.
In 1690 they were a small impoverished tribe in the Wyoming mountains. About a thousand people.

But, one day they got a few horses. And they had sent out scouts, and they realized that in north Texas, where Amarillo is now, there were massive buffalo herds. And if they moved down there, two warriors could hunt, on horseback, for an hour and get enough food to last the tribe 3 weeks.

So down to Texas/Oklahoma they went and their horse herds increased as did the size of the tribe. They made a practice of kidnapping Apache children, and Spanish, and later American, and adopting them in to the tribe.

Anyway it was a great book, fiction, about the beginnings of the Comanche as an Indian supertribe.


"Little Spaniard" by George Catlin. A full fledged Comanche, ca. 1835, had been kidnapped as a young boy from a Mexican settlement.

Little Spaniard almost certainly led a much better life as a Comanche than he would have as a Mexican peon. OTOH in Josiah Gregg’s “Commerce of the Prairies”, (which like Noah Smithwick’s “Evolution of a State” is available entirely online)....

http://atlas.nmhum.org/pdfs/CommerceofthePrairies.pdf

Gregg at one point returns along the Santa Fe Trail with a Comanche in his party who had married a Mexican woman and lived in her village. At one point they were attacked by a party of Pawnees who, like the Tonkawas and the Omaha’s to name but two, raided deep into Comanche territory on foot with the intention of riding Comanche horses home.

Gregg’s guides on at least some trips were actually Mexicans from the New Mexico settlements who were also skilled with the bow and lance on horseback. Which brings up another significant presence on the plains almost completely overlooked in Pop History; Ciboleros, Mexican buffalo hunters from New Mexico and the El Paso settlements who drove their big ox-drawn two-wheeled carretas (carts) out onto onto the plains each fall to harvest buffalo on horseback with lances and bows.

When these same guys used those carts for trade we called em Comancheros. It was Mexican ox-cart guys who found Charles Goodnight’s delirious partner Oliver Loving wandering with his gangrenous arm wound up by the Pecos after that Comanche stand-off and who brung him in to Fort Sumner, this episode inspiring Mc Murty’s “Lonesome Dove”.

Even more written out of the Pop History script; San Antonio as the largest Mexican settlement in Texas also had its CIboleros, buffalo hides and meat being a major seasonal component of the household economy here.

For an insight into what made Comanches tick I highly recommend Pekka Hamalainen’s “Comanche Empire”

https://www.amazon.com/Comanche-Empire-Lamar-Western-History/dp/0300151179

Hamalainen has it that the large numbers of Comanches and their even larger numbers of horses and mules comprised an unsustainable ecological burden in their own territories by the early 19th Century. Also the first market hunters on the High Plains were the Indians themselves, the Bent brothers locating Bent’s Fort where they did for that very reason. The buffalo herds were in steady decline from disease and over hunting decades before White hunters arrived to drive he nails into the buffalo herds’ coffin.

Also generally overlooked is the devastating Cholera epidemic of ‘49/‘50 which carried off an estimated 10,000 Comanches, fully half the tribe it was at that time.

Then followed the devastating dry years of the 1850’s which hammered the buffalo herds to the extent that, even with half the tribe gone, it was starvation that drove large numbers of Comanches onto their first reservation.

But Columbus' "discovery" of America was bad and the white man was evil. There is a good chance the Comanches would have perished as a people due to these factors without the bad, evil reservations and being forced into the white man's ways. Just like nearly every other tribe.

Well one thing obvious is any Indian tribes version of history most likely differed considerably from our own.

For example, half of everybody dead of of a horrible disease like cholera in a single winter (seeded it is believed by the '49ers crossing Comancheria) was probably a major event to the Comanches, at the time it seems our guys hardly noticed, most likely because they didn't see it happen. Same thing with the extermination of vast numbers of Texas buffalo in that catastrophic drought.

Here is another exceptional book if you ate interested in the Santa Fe trail.

https://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Santa-Fe-Trade-1844-1847/dp/0803297726

And Webb, unlike Gregg, died of old age back east.

Another Classic read is

https://www.amazon.com/Wah-yah-Taos-Trail-Rancheros/dp/1429045523

this book like Gregg’s Commerce of the Prairie is an old standby!!!

While on Gregg, his last trip to Santa Fe he and his brother both had a pair of Patterson Colts and a Patterson revolving rifle, which gave the pair 36 consecutive shots!!! ( The revolving rifle were 8 shots apiece!).

Upon his return to St. Louis he doesn't mention the Pattersons again. He did loan his brother his two revolvers when they were about 60 miles out of Santa Fe as he went in early with two of the New Mexicans. Im sure they were sold for beaucoup gold. He does mention that he did carry a Cochran turret rifle on the way back that he finally managed to kill a buffalo with! I believe they were like .36-.40 calibre.

The wife's side is of the Parker family.

They moved up to this county back in 1902.

A time when there was more horses than people in this area.

The Parkers had a store around the FT.Worth area and there is a lot of relatives there as well.

Amazing all the paths that cross in these books! Currently reading Lt. James Aberts Canadian river exploration journal. All the way from the mouth of the “Picketwire on the Arkansas thru to Raton pass down the Canadian to where it runs into the Arkansas.

Thomas Fitzpatrick ol "Broken Hand" and John Hatcher were his guides and hunter!!! It was Fitzpatrick that sewed Jed Smith back up best he could after his run-in with ol Ephram (grizzly bear).