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

I figured there were more shotguns than anything.
But I’ve been wrong before. 😬

I have read everything in this thread including all of the links, it is the most interesting thread on the forum.

I am surprised at how man of the mentioned incidents were woven into the Lonesome Dove series (prequel and sequel).

I have read everything I could find about Smithfield and am unsure where fact and fiction begin and end with him - there seems to be a lot "what I did" in his stories and I have some doubts that he may have actually done some of the things he says.

Great thread - I look forward to more of it.

drover

Drover,

That was a big question back in the day. Just how much Smithwick really remembered. He was blind and like 96 (?) years old when he dictated his memoirs to his daughter. When scholars later researched his stories and compared them with those of other who were involved in many of the same affairs they discovered very little variance in the dialogs. Birdy can expound upon this much more than myself.

But his stories are generally accepted as quite factual by the majority of historians. And he is quoted quite often. The old gentleman had quite a mind!!!

Who the heck is Smithfield???

Neal, I believe he was referring to Smithwick

OK. Lost me there for a minute. 🤠

With respect to Indians in popular perception our own famous White guys can wander freely all over the map but we have a tendency to nail our Indians in place, so it comes as a surprise when they show up all over also.

For example a party of Crows, down from the Northern Plains, accompanied a group of Kiowas into Mexico and got far enough south to see parrots and monkeys.

One group that gets me is the Potawatomi, originally from the friggin’ Great Lakes but in the Texian period on the Texas High Plains.

Among the most remarkable tho are the Florida Seminoles and in particular a leader named Wildcat. Second Seminole War in Florida, in the dense swamps of Southern Florida they fight the US to a standstill (As an aside, Wildcat has been credited by some as being the author of the US Army’s “hooagh!”, that being Wildcat’s toast when invited to Army celebrations.)

1842 (??) the Seminoles agree to removal to the Indian territory along with their Black Seminole allies but things do not go well for them there, the Indian Nations was a rough place.

Within ten years Wildcat, the former swamp guerilla fighter, was roaming all across the Texas Plains, alternately fighting and seeking to unite the tribes, greatly alarming US and Texan officials.

Finally he brokers a deal in the 1850’s wherein return for land in Mexico south of Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras a mixed group of Seminoles, Black Seminoles and Kickapoo agree to interdict Apache, Comanche and Kiowa war parties

This they commence to do with an efficacy that likely far eclipsed that of the contemporary Texas Rangers. Wildcat died of smallpox 1857, after which most of his Seminole followers returned to Oklahoma.

The Black Seminoles, for obvious reasons, chose to remain in Mexico where, going on 20 years later they were invited to move to Texas and serve as scouts for the US Cavalry.

I did mean Smithwick, I have no idea how it came out as Smithfield.

drover

"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"

Yes! I saw Jeremiah Johnson at the theater in January 1973. This movie just blew me away. My buddy and I traveled in June from Atlanta to the wilderness of Ft. Nelson British Columbia. We rented horses from an outfitter and we spent the summer camping out, and riding through the wilderness like Jeremiah Johnson. Of course we had a pack horse, and panniers, and we knew how to throw our own diamond hitch. Fortunately we were not attacked by any Crow Indians. Thankfully we were not attacked by griz, though there are many grizzlies up there. We were way out in the wilderness.

I still have my TC Hawken. I have killed 6 whitetail with it. That .490 round ball is murder on deer. One shot to the lungs is all it takes. Never had one go over 50 yards when hit with the round ball, where I have had to track blood trails for well over 100 yards, with a deer hit in the lungs with a 30-06.

Jeremiah Johnson is set in the Rockies in 1847, so I didn't know if the Hawken had made it down to the plains of Texas in 1837. Having used the Hawken quite a bit, I can assure you that it would have been a perfect weapon against the Comanche, and with the shorter barrel, it would have been easier to carry in a saddle scabbard than the Pennsylvania long rifles that y'all mentioned.

Sorry to offend some of you guys with my question.

Morning SK7!

This rifle here has probably taken more deer and hogs than any other rifle I own. The late wife gave it to me as my wedding rifle in 1979. It is a Henry Leman style 1/2 stock trade rifle from Green River Rifle Works. It is deadly with 70 grains FFFG and a .490 round ball!



I decorated it up after my last OTC NM mule deer hunt up by Sheridan Peak in 1984. We took a tumble down a hillside while on horseback when a trail we were traveling on gave way. None of us any the worse for wear. 😊

Rifles were the thing to have, what you did was ride in groups and dismount to aim, not firing all at once so as always to have some rifles loaded. This was the tactic the Delawares and other Eastern tribes used to cut a wide swathe into the Comanches and other plains tribes.

Pop history had it that revolvers revolutionized plains combat. The challenge then becomes finding incidents where this was true outside of Jack Hays’ poorly reported 1844 fights, surprising the Indians with this new technology.

I’m going to jump out of sequence to 1865, Battle of Dove Creek, close to 500 mounted Confederates and Frontier Militia, out looking for Comanches, decide to surprise a Kickapoo camp instead.

The Kickapoos had rifles, had been using them for generations, in this case many had Enfield Rifle-muskets, difficult guns to range but they knew how to shoot. The Texans got decisively whupped.

I’m sure there were revolvers present, especially on the Texas side, but they were handguns.

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

So, close to 500 Texans at one place going up against about an equal numbers of Indians. In terms of numbers engaged possibly THE major Indian fight in Texas history.

Nobody has ever heard of it, doesn’t fit the popular narrative.

There’s five missions in modern San Antonio, the Alamo (AKA Mission San Antonio de Valero, longtime home of a mounted military unit from Alamo de Parras in Mexico proper, giving the nickname prevalent in 1836), all placed 2-3 miles apart along the San Antonio River.

Alamo northmost, third one down is Mission San Jose y San Miguel de Aguayo, maybe five miles downriver from Old San Antonio. Today Mission San Jose sits in the middle of the South Side, along Roosevelt Drive, which used to be a main north-south drag into town before the Interstates.

Today, thanks to the Works Progress Administration it’s the most intact of the five missions, big compound, 10ft walls maybe 100yds on a side. In the middle of the city now, looking at it you’d never guess that, March 28th of 1840, 200+ Comanche Warriors surrounded those walls, challenging the Texians inside to come out and fight.

Unfortunately no one had a camera, must have been a colorful sight.

From Steven L. Moore. Savage Frontier.

Nine days after their council house losses, a war party of at least 200 Comanches rode down to San Antonio on March 28 looking for a fight.

Chief Isomania, veteran of an earlier fight with frontiersman Jack Hayes, boldly came into town with another Comanche. They rode into the San Antonio Public Square, tauntingly circling around the plaza on the horses. Rising in his stirrups, he angrily shook his clenched fist....

The citizens, through an interpreter, told him the soldiers were all down the river at Mission San Jose and if you went there Colonel Fisher would give him fight enough.

Isomania did just that. He and his war party rode up to the mission, located four miles below town, and dared the soldiers to come out and fight. Colonel Fisher was confined to his bed due to a fall from his horse and Captain William Redd was in acting command of the post.

Captain Redd stated that he must hold true to the twelve day truce promised at the Council House. Redd hoped to work out the release of other American captives. He would be happy to fight after the twelve days. The disgusted Indians denounced Redd’s men as liars and cowards and rode away, Isomania being the last to leave town.

Redd’s command decision was not a popular one with the men behind the mission walls. It was hard enough even to get a glimpse of Comanche raiders, and here were two hundred in plain sight asking to be shot at.

Turns out Redd’s decision was a correct one, six days later the Comanche leader Piava came in looking to exchange more captives including the Booker boy.

The Comanches under Isomania went away frustrated but it turns out they actually did precipitate the deaths of two Texian Officers.

Colonel Lysander Wells, also on the scene, accused Captain Redd of cowardice. Both men had fought at San Jacinto so had nothing to prove on that score. Could have been a duel, Texians shot each other that way rather a lot, but Redd refused to be provoked.

Colonel Wells wouldn’t let it rest, continuing to slander Captain Redd. The duel happened on May 7th, possibly fought with Paterson Colts but resolved with a single shot on both sides, both men died.

At one time there were sizeable populations of Cherokee, Shawnee, Delaware, Kickapoo and who knows what else residing in Texas prior to 1857 having been either displaced from their native range or moved in when they saw the writing on the wall prior to the Trail of Tears.

Caplock,

You’re at Atoka. I got a good friend up as Sasakwa! Missed a get together he had last February.

Approximate population of Texas 1836 - 30,000
1842 - 100,000
1850 - 200,00
1860 - 600,000
1870 - 800,000
Last major Indian War being the Red River War of 1874.

The point being, only a minority of residents at any given time lived within the reach of Indian raids, the proportion of those who did steadily decreasing as the population boomed and the settlement line moved west. Figure slaves were about 25% of the whole, at least at one point in time, so multiply the above numbers by 0.75 to get an estimate of the Anglo population.

Back when women were still having kids the rule of thumb was 20% of the population would be active men and youths of combat age. So in 1836 this estimate would be 4,500 White men and youths, 1842 - 15,000 White men and youths... etc. A good number of these in 1836 were involved in the events of the Texas Revolution, especially when Santa Anna's columns moved into East Texas subsequent to the Alamo.

Other than that, if 100 guys were actively involved in the field against Indians at any given point in time during that whole 40 years, that was a lot. Being a Texas Ranger was expensive, dangerous work and few men cared for it.

OTOH, in the early years of Texas, the threat of a Mexican invasion was very real. If nothing else the fact that upon independence the new Republic of Texas had unilaterally presumed to annex a 150 mile-wide strip of land between Corpus Christi and the Rio Grande, land that was at that time part of the Mexican States of Taumalipas and Coahuila, guaranteed there would be problems.

The Mexican Civil War over the Constitution of 1824 that Santa Anna kicked off when he abolished it in 1835 would not be over in Mexico until 1840. Meanwhile, the government of the pro-Constitution Federalista side was actually given uneasy sanctuary in Texas, the seat of the Federalista government in exile being Victoria TX, and the Federalista arsenal being located in Linnville TX on the Gulf Coast. Much of the muscle for the Federalista side here was supplied by the mercenary Texian Reuben Ross and his band of 200 outlaws.

Reuben Ross was apparently not a nice guy and among other things instigated frequent duels. In 1839 he crippled the arm of famed Texas Ranger Ben McCullough in such a duel and subsequently demanded a rematch to finish the deal, whereupon Ben's older and somewhat less-famous brother Henry shot down Ross in Gonzales under poorly-recorded circumstances. A pity, there was likely a good story there.

When the Constitution War ended in 1840, some of the defeated Federalista elements would attempt a short lived Republic of the Rio Grande, incorporating the states of Northern Mexico including what is present-day Texas south of Corpus Christi. As conceived, the Republic of the Rio Grande would have immediately been in conflict with Texas over real estate. Nevertheless the Republic of Texas President Mirabeau Lamar, seeking a buffer State between Mexico and Texas, supplied arms and ammunition and actively encouraged Texans to take up arms to support the cause. More than 400 did, which was a very large number at that place and time. Didn't work though and the project failed within the year.

The threat from Mexico was not an idle one, everybody knows a Mexican Army took the Alamo in 1836, most people don't know that a 1,500 man Mexican Army, under orders from El Presidente Santa Anna himself, would take San Antonio and the Alamo all over again in 1842. Didn't stick, in 1836 there were 30,000 Americans in Texas and that was too many, in 1842 there were 100,000.

Ironically, this second Mexican invasion would be a major catalyst in overcoming the widespread Northern opposition to the annexation of Texas into the Union, that 1845 event precipitating the Mexican War.

Meanwhile, throughout this whole period, Mexican government agents were actively fermenting unrest among the Indians in Texas, including probably the Comanches as events turned out.

Bird’s Creek, Texas, 1839, as noted in the link, was the longest recorded fatal hit by a single aimed arrow in North America. 200 yards.

With regards to flintlock longrifles firing round lead balls the longest popularly known shot was during our own Rev War with one Col. Edward Hanger, a British Redcoat, observed a prone Virginia Rifleman aiming at his group from 400 yards away. The result was a near miss, killed a horse.

Fewer people are aware of the 1835 Battle of Withlacootchie, one of the opening battles of the 2nd Seminole War.

This from N.B. Bosworth’s “A Treatise on the Rifle” (1846), still in print.

when General Gains was entrenched against the Seminole Indians in Florida, he stated in his report to the War Department, that his sentries on duty, were wounded, and killed, by single shots from the Seminole rifle, at the distance of four and 500 yards!

Edmund P. Gaines is one of our great unsung American heroes. More to the point, in this context, he had previously surveyed across most of the Southeast and so was a competent judge of distance.

So, the longest record hit with a bow and arrow? 200 yards, by an Indian. Texas 1839.

Longest recorded hits with a flintlock longrifle? Four and five hundred yards, by Indians. Florida 1835.

After the Council House debacle in March of 1840 things got strangely quiet. Sure the Comanche leader Isomania had ridden into town the following week with 200 warriors at his back seeking combat, but he had left when none was offered.

What’s interesting about that episode is that there was no reports of widespread death, destruction and general havoc around the town, as if the Comanches were drawing a distinction between Tejano and Texan.

So where’d all the Comanches go? That summer the Bent brothers were throwing a huge party at Bent’s Fort way up on the Arkansas River in Colorado in the form of a treaty gathering to make a peace between the Kiowas and Comanches on the one hand, and the Cheyennes an Arapahoes on the other.

Not being aware of their future role in pop history, the Indians had been killing and skinning tens of thousands of buffalo each year in return for tons of trade goods laboriously poled upriver on flatboats to the Fort.

Intertribal hostilities were bad for business, William Bent, who had married into the Cheyennes, was instrumental in arranging a peace treaty gathering.

If travelling 600 miles to attend this gathering seems excessive, consider the case of Rachel Plummer, captured by Comanches during the Parker’s Fort massacre, 200 miles northeast of San Antonio in 1836. The following year she was rescued by Mexican traders operating out of Santa Fe, NM.

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/plummer-rachel-parker

What a great thread!

I didn't realize until not all that long ago that the tribes I was familiar with as a kid back east (Deleware, Shawnee, etc) had sufficient numbers to have an impact down there. The plains and badlands are a whole lotta different from the eastern hardwoods. Pretty cool they adapted and kicked ass down there too.

I have read that by the time the first White trappers blazed a trail to California, Delawares from Missouri had already been there and back five times.

Also there’s a range of mountains way out in West Texas up against the NM State Line. They’re called the Delaware Mountains. They ain’t named after the State.

You may already know of the Delaware Black Beaver...

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

The Great Comanche Raid in August of 1840 is understood to have been in response to the deaths and capture of Comanches at the Council House Fight in March of that year. Base treachery in the eyes of the Comanches.

But it wasn’t the first time a huge number of Indians had gathered together to attack the Texians. The first one was four years earlier in May of ‘36, Parker’s Fort, five hundred to seven hundred Caddos and Comanches.

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/fort-parker

The Caddo Confederacy is generally forgotten today, if the exponential tide of settlement had reached them in the 1720’s instead of the 1820’s perhaps they would have loomed larger in our history, like the Eastern tribes, but by the 1820’s the Frontier was advancing like a tsunami, sweeping all before it. Interesting trivia; Charles Goodnight said he learned his woodcraft skills as a boy from an elderly Caddo living along the Trinity River.

Whoever those Indians were it must have taken some time and effort to get them all to congregate at that one place. They hit the fort, killed or captured all they could of the eighteen inhabitants then living there, including nine year-old Cynthia Ann Parker, and then left.

A bit of a puzzle, apparently this army of warriors then doesn’t go on to wreak any more havoc than usual along the Texas Frontier, from our perspective they seem to disband.

Parker’s Fort of course is part of Texas legend because little Cynthia Ann goes on to become Quanah Parker’s mom. But the question isn’t usually asked why that place was singled out for such attention.

Fort Parker was completed the year before, 1835, and almost immediately was used as the staging point for the first major offensive by the Texians against the Indians.

August of ‘35, John H Moore led 98 men on a tremendous swing and a miss. Guys started leaving early as horses and patience wore out but Moore and about 30 men stayed out for nearly two months.

All they had to show for it was two dead Indians, four if you count a woman who stabbed her young child and herself some time after being captured, three other Indians captured who did not commit suicide, sixty acres of burned Indian corn, and one dead Ranger accidentally shot by another.

This was Moore’s first big expedition, a failure, winter of 1839 he would attack a Comanche camp on the San Saba and end up walking home, but the third time was the charm, winter of 1840, as many as 180 Comanches killed on the Colorado.

So Parker’s Fort certainly was an imminent threat, but author Steven Moore (Savage Frontier) throws in another detail associated with this expedition...

Adjutant James Neil took up his own little experiment for returning destruction to the enemy tribes. He had procured some type of smallpox virus and had this injected into one of the Indians his men had captured. This Indian was then released and allowed to carry the infection back to his tribe. Neil was never able to ascertain the success or failure of his little experiment.

Neither was anybody else, but I guess the thought might count, James Neill must have really hated Indians. We have no information whether the Indians assembled to attack the fort in 1836 were aware of this attempted epidemic. It is possible that they did, word has a way of getting around. For example years later Buffalo Hump in Oklahoma, the same guy who led the Great Raid, would hear of the birth of Jack Hays’ first child, in California, and send him an engraved silver cup, so word did get around.

Today’s MSM might present the massacre as an attack on a bioweapons facility.

Anyways, Cynthia Ann’s story is well known but that of her equally remarkable brother John, six years old at the time of capture, is generally overlooked.

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/parker-john