Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Texas Rangers vs Comanches

No doubt! 😁

You’re just profiling ‘cause you’re a Cop

OK, so they did pin old Grandma Parker to the ground with a lance at Parker’s Fort before gang-raping her.

I mean sure, they also bashed the Hibbon’s infant’s brains out against a tree in front of Mrs Hibbons where Austin now stands and sure, Fehrenbach tells us they horribly tortured to death a bunch of White women and kids in their camps after the Council House Fight which was likely true,

and sure they did capture that poor guy during the Great Comanche Raid and made him walk on the soles of his skinned feet before killing him, all the while getting him to call out to his companion hiding not far off to turn himself in (didn't work)

But they did leave that wealthy young wife captured on that same raid relatively unhurt except for sunburn, tied to a tree naked except for her whalebone corset.

True, they might have MEANT to kill her, they did shoot arrows into her corset, they were still stuck to it like it was a pincushion when she was rescued.

But seriously, was a guy like Noah Smithwick just ignoring that stuff when he lived among them? What about Sam Houston, former resident among the Cherokees?

I dunno.

You mean they weren't mystic sages of the plains and forests, peacefully communing with nature and each other in perfect harmony until despicable white people showed up and stole their land?

Comanche women were in charge of torture, dreaming up newer, more gruesome ways to slowly kill captives. They weren't Christians, but Herman Lehman (?) felt they were even more pious and devout in their religious life. Indian brutality was a shade different than industrialized, white genocide. Never mind European infectious diseases. Supposedly Comanches have adapted better to the new order than all other tribes.

The did a pretty good number on Matilda Lockhart too!

Yes the squaws were in charge of torture. When a raiding party brought a captive 18 year old white girl back to camp, the captive had no rights. She was a slave and the squaws made her do the nastiest menial jobs around the camp. She also was a sex slave and any warrior could bang her, any time he felt like it.

A squaw might get jealous because her husband was spending more time with the captive white girl, than with her, and the next morning the squaws held the captive girl down and sliced off one ear. Or staked her down and burned her nose off with hot coals. Then, she was back up on her feet, scraping buffalo hides and carrying firewood all day.

It was a fate worse than death, to be an adult captured by the Comanche.

1840 was an eventful year.

Winter of 1839 Ranging Company Captain John Moore led an expedition against the Comanches and hit them on the San Saba River.

Moore disregarded the advice of his Lipan Apache scouts and attacked the sleeping camp on foot, leaving a few guards with their horses. The surprised Comanches recovered quickly, almost all escaped with light casualties, and stole the expedition’s horses, it was a long walk home.

Still, the attack prompted the Comanches to put out inquiries for a meeting in San Antonio. Unlike the Mexicans, Texians commonly shot back, were increasing in number and taking the initiative, carrying the war to the Comanches.

A thing that really bothered Americans back then was the thought of White women and kids in the hands of the savages, so the deal was peace might be made IF the Comanches brought in their captives, a thing difficult for any Comanche leader to enforce.

In the actual event, March of 1840, they only brought in two, a Mexican boy who quickly escaped back to the Comanches and the horribly disfigured and abused 15 or 16yo Matilda Lockhart, captured two years earlier.

The enraged Texians then informed the Comanche chiefs they would be held prisoners until all the captives were freed. All hell broke loose, this was the Council House Fight...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_House_Fight

Matilda died a year or so thereafter, some said of shame.

Now days women pay thousands of dollars for Nose reductions. They gave Matilda one for free

Steven L. Moore, Savage Frontier Volume I 1835 -1837 devote seven pages to this fight, calling it the Stone Houses Fight.

He gives as a partial cause the killing and scalping of a Kichai Indian by one Felix McCluskey (Smithwick, mentions this guy as getting many of his companions killed.) The Kichai and Toweash mentioned here were subsets of the Wichita’s, by this time there were numerous Indian groups in Texas

That particular Kichai was guiding a party of Cherokees bringing powder and lead to the Comanches in return for horses.

From the Captain of the Rangers....

I fell in with a large body of Indians... I first supposed them to be Keechis, but was afterwards informed that they were Toweash, Waco’s, and a few Keechis and Caddos. I got this information from the Shawnees and Delawares.

I judged the Indians to be about one hundred and fifty strong. About fifty or sixty of them were armed with rifles and the balance had bows and arrows.

The 19 Rangers fall back to a deep ravine, the Indians demand that McCluskey be handed over, the shooting conmences when this was refused.

Early on, one of the Indian leaders tries the old ride m-along-line-to-get-them-to-empty-their-rifles trick and is shot and killed for his trouble.

The Rangers try a similar ploy, hat on a stick perforated by as many as a half-dozen rifle balls immediately after which they would raise to fire. At this point four Rangers dead, one fatally wounded Ranger fires three more times, dies in the process of loading a fourth time.

Then the Indians set fire to the ravine, the rangers choose to make a break for it in the direction where the Indian riflemen were rather than the mounted bow and arrow guys on account of the lower rate of fire of rifles.

Their horses won’t run through the fire so they have to charge on foot, six more rangers shot down, the remaining nine, including McCloskey, make their escape but it’s a long walk home.

IIRC Smithwick later states that McCluskey was killed in a brawl.

"IIRC Smithwick later states that McCluskey was killed in a brawl."

Yes he did! Remember not much nice things he had to say about the guy.

The Rangers were using rifles in that fight in 1837. Would that have been a percussion lock Hawken?

The Shawnees were involved peripherally in this fight. I have studied up on them, fighting Daniel Boone and, yes, Simon Kenton in Ohio, in 1780. By 1837 the Shawnee had all been run out of Ohio, and now I see some wound up in N. Texas involved in the Comanche wars.

Really a sad story for those eastern tribes, disposessed of their land and the few survivors, sent out West. In fact I live in formerly Cherokee land in the NC mountains.

She wasn’t the only one.

Steven L. Moore. Savage Frontier. Vol. III: 1840 -1841

April 3rd, a full two weeks after the Council House Fight, about thirty Comanches show up looking to trade captives in return for the 30+ Comanche women and children captured during that fracas.

In the words of one Captain George Howard...

I marched to the town with the company of Captain Kennymore and my own, early on the morning of yesterday, the fifth instant.

The Indian called Piava, well known as a crafty and treacherous Comanche, of some influence, came in and proposed an exchange of prisoners. I assented and requested him to bring in such taxi and prisoners as they had, and we would exchange one for one.

Two local Tejanos, Damasco and Antonio Sanchez, accompanied Piava back to his camp and returned with six year old Elizabeth Putman and a 12yo Mexican boy. Little Elizabeth was covered in bruises with a scarred nose.

In subsequent negotiations three five more Mexican girls and a young Booker Webster “returned with a shaved head and painted in Indian colors.”

It was from Booker Webster that we get an account of the reaction to the killing or capture of fifty or more prominent Comanches at the Council House.

As described by Booker the Indians howled and cut them selves with knives and killed horses for several days. They then took 13 of their American captives and roasted and butchered them to death with horrible cruelties.

Booker and the Putnam girl were spared on account of already having been adopted, as were three other Putnam children with other bands.

I have read that about 80% of flintlock longarms were eventually converted to percussion, and by the 1830’s St Louis merchants were advertised they had thousands of percussion caps in stock.

The thing is though if you ran out of caps you were out of beer, but rocks were free. David Crockett himself traded his percussion rifle for a flinter when arriving in Texas.

IIRC the Republic of Texas was issuing percussion caps AND flints to ranging companies as late as 1842 in numbers suggesting as many as half of the longarms could have still been flintlocks.

Hawkens do not appear prominently in Texas lore like they do in the Mountain Man era, in fact half-stock plains rifles are generally frowned upon as “farb” by Texian reenactors, especially in percussion form.

I do have a half-stock percussion Tryon plains rifle, but only use it for 1850’s events.

This Park Service piece about the Amistad National Recreation Area is a long but informative piece broken down by historic periods.

Amistad NRA

Note the presence of Cherokees and Shawnees contracted to protect Mexican settlements along the Rio Grande by the 1820’s.

IIRC Cherokees were established in Northern Mexico beginning in the 1790’s. Fifty years later Sequoia himself, the author of the Cherokee alphabet, would die across the Rio Grande of a fever. He was down there from our Indian Territories seeking to establish contact with the Mexican Cherokeesz

This has to be among the best of the best Campfire threads ever with many good books referenced.

I’ve got a knee replacement coming up and I’ll have some good reading to pass the time.

Shipping receipts from as early as 1831 show that percussion caps were very available and a hot item in in San Felipe. Matter of fact several cans of caps have shown up in archaeological excavations at the townsite in the locations of at least one of the merchants.

I don’t know why everyone immediately has to brings up Hawken rifles instead of discussing the infinitely many other types of rifles that were used west of the mississippi. Even tho Hawken rifles were a fine rifle and to many the benchmark of the mountain rifle, they were not that many actually produced considering the number of people going west.

A truer rifle would have been the cheaper Pennsylvania built trade rifles produced by such makers as Deringer, Tryon, Leman, Dickert, and a dozen other makers. These rifles were made literally by the thousands, for the government, trade companies, and assorted merchant houses. Cheap yet of decent quality that the average man could afford. I imagine the bulk of these rifles were flintlocks. Speaking with site manager at Ft. McKavett he stated he ran across a note in ressarch of an old settler of the area that was still using his flintlock ( circa 1855) due to the difficulty in obtaining percussion caps in their locale. Long drive to town! 🤣

Smithwick, mentions that it was a full time job for him to keep some rifles in adequate working condition for extremely poor folks moving into Texas. He made mention and I paraphrase, that had he seen some of these guns laying in the ditch along the road, he would have left them be!

With respect to the Texas Rev period, the Refugio Militia from the Goliad era is one of the most respected re-enacting outfits.

Here’s their take on available weaponry ca. 1836. Keep in mind tho they are talking regular settlers, ie farmers and tradesmen, not Rangers or members of ranging companies. For example there were a lot of muskets around, but I might pack something different for heading out across the plains to pick fights with Indians.

Weapons of the Refugio Militia

They were living on the very cusp of change tho, the flintlock era was on the way out.

that Amistad link. wow i could literally get lost in there for days soaking that up

I would think that a Hawken Rifle would have been pretty rare and hard to come by on the TX Frontier.
Every novice that ever watched Redford in Jeremiah Johnson think the Hawken was what everyone had. 🤪

No doubt a Hawken or two made it to Texas. But they were not norm. Jeremiah’s Johnson did much for the Hawken’s popularity.

And Birdy is right. Lots of muskets as well as shotguns were used. Probably way more shotguns than we give credit for.

One of the enigmas of the period is what did the New Orleans Greys carry?? They were issued a military rifle. But, was it a Model 1817 Common rifle or,,,,, was it a Hall Breechloading rifle??? 😁😁😁

Or a mixture of both?

Who knows ??? We just don’t know? Oh well. Matters not to me. But fun contemplation. 😁