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

I had to add to the post about the arrow heads Neal.
Digging is frowned on by the property owners, but goes
on anyways.

I’ll have to find Camp Ben, the Onion Creek exit is a familiar landmark coming and going from Austin, all built up, I’m sure those Confederate Veterans wouldn’t recognize the place now.

Back to 1840....

There seems to have been a small number of men, skilled in arms, who enjoyed the rush of killing a man in a duel. Andrew Jackson, then age 33, killed one of these men, Charles Dickinson, in a duel in Kentucky in 1806. At age 26 Dickinson had already killed more than twenty men in duels.

His method was to insult a man, inciting a challenge. As the challenged party he got choice of weapons, his own pistols with which he was very fast and accurate,, dropping his opponent with a bullet in the heart every time.

This frequent dueling among earlier generations might have spawned the movie convention of the Old West gunfighter.

In the Jackson/Dickinson duel, Jackson used Dickinson’s marksmanship against him by wearing a large overcoat and inconspicuously twisting his torso so as to move his heart out of the way.

It worked, barely, Dickinson’s ball broke two of Jackson’s ribs and hit so close to his heart it could never be removed, paining him for life.

Jackson’s return shot misfired on the first attempt, at which time the Code Duello specified the duel was over until the next round. Jackson, likely believing himself mortally wounded, recocked the pistol, mortally wounding Dickinson on this second attempt.

Rueben Ross, leader of a gang of 200 mostly outlaws, appears to have been one of these killer/duelist figures.

MONDAY AUGUST 10 continued.....

While couriers rushed about and forces mustered, Captain Tumlinson, now with a force of 160 men, continued his methodical trailing the Comanche force, awaiting an opportunity and seeking to be the anvil at such time the Comanches might be attacked from the front.

during the day on August 10, his 160 men found the Indians....

.....“drawn up in a very imposing line, upon the crest of a ridge, to our left. We make for them – they fly in disorder, man and beast, bag and baggage - their object is what we apprehended, to elude us by flight.”

The inferior horses ridden by most of Tumlinson’s command made swift pursuit impossible, however a few men, well mounted, were dispatched to the north. These men would be repeating Ben McCulloch’s task of the previous night but Tumlinson of course had no way of knowing if McCulloch had made it through.

One thing I do find interesting is how all the separate commands, widely scattered, seem to have arrived at the same conclusion that Plum Creek outside of present-day Lockhart but at the time sparsely settled, would the best location to confront the Comanches.

some of the fleeing Comanches dropped their plunder along the trail. Tumlinson ordered the Texans with the freshest horses to ride hard through the night to get ahead of the advancing Indians. The best option now seemed to move the men ahead who had the best horses and set up an ambush at Plum Creek.

Birdy,

Do something ( if you haven’t already) on Walker’s Creek fight. On the Pinta Trails crossing. Out here close to my new stomping grounds.

Have any of y’all read the Boy Captives? I believe that’s the title anyway.. it was about two brothers that got kidnapped by the Comanche and lived with them.

Yes I have. Although there was good factual stuff in it, I felt on several occasions there was a bit of artistic license in the story. Concerns the Smith brothers taken in modern Comal county. One brother lived with Comanches, the other with Apaches.

I think a better book would be Herman Lehmann’s account of his captivity. His is pretty spot on and many of his accounts check out with additional sources. I know Birdy mentions him in his account earlier in the thread on James B. Gillett.

I thought it was interesting nonetheless.

Oh yes!!! No doubt

What? Have you been reading Fehrenbach again? 🙂

Never mind him, that was all in 1844, just now it’s 1840.

The 1840’s marked a high point for the Comanches, 20,000 strong. But even then they didn’t have it all their own way, not even in their home range, a number of tribes customarily raiding into Comancheria on foot, returning with Comanche scalps on Comanche horses.

What drove the Comanches to the negotiating table at the Council House in 1840 was the exploding immigration of Americans into Texas, that flood of extra people we call the “Frontier”.

1836- 30,000 Americans, 1840- 70,000 Americans, 1842- 100,000 Americans, 1860- 600,000 Americans in Texas.

Buffalo Hump, age about 40 in 1840, apparently the chief organizer of the raid, had already met with Texas officials in 1838, would do so again in 1843, these Comanche delegations always trying to fix a permanent line of settlement.

If most American freebooters in Texas in 1840 were turning their attention to the ongoing Mexican Civil War along the Border to the tune of organized forces of hundreds of men going there, so was this Comanche raid, except working for the other side, specifically hitting Victoria and Linnville, home of the Mexican Federalists in exile.

During the 1840’s, the Comanches, including Buffalo Hump, went on to launch devastating, bloody raids into Mexico on a massive scale, on at least one occasion being supplied with cattle on the way down by none other than Jack Hays hisself.

Buffalo Hump continued to treat with the Texans and their burgeoning population impinging from the East, recognizing the inevitable, playing for time. Meeting with US negotiators in 1846, concluding a lasting peace treaty with the Hill Country Germans in ‘47, and actually guiding a US/Texan party across Texas to El Paso in 1849. This is where Buffalo Hump became acquainted with Ranger Captain John Salmon Ford.

What’s notable in that 1849 expedition is that the party was encountering Comanches that had still never seen a White man.

That winter of ‘49, catastrophe struck, the ‘49ers rushing to California seeded cholera across the plains, about half the tribe, 10,000 Comanches perished. Buffalo Hump caught it too but survived.

After the massive die off further catastrophe struck in the form of a major drought, both buffalo and cattle perished in droves, Buffalo Hump and his band finally accepting a small reservation in Texas around 1856.

Somewhere in the middle of all this Buffalo Hump, hearing that Jack Hays’ wife in California had given birth to their first child, sent them an engraved silver cup.

The Brazos Reserve didn’t last, Buffalo Hump removed to the Indian Territory along with the other Indians on that reserve when they were kicked out in ‘58.

The last we hear of Buffalo Hump was in 1858, when Ranger Captain Ford led an expedition of 90 Rangers and 100 Tonkawa allies against Buffalo Hump’s band in the Wichita Mountains.

The circumstances of Buffalo Hump’s actual demise are unknown, sometime before 1867, by which time the last free remnants of the Comanches and Kiowas up on the Panhandle had of necessity largely switched to a pastoralist economy, herding horses and cattle.

Just an addendum; Buffalo Hump’s own cousin, Yellow Wolf was along on the Great Raid. Whereas Buffalo Hump at least attempted to negotiate with the Texians and later the US, Yellow Wolf remained
unremittingly hostile throughout.

Which might explain why it would be Yellow Wolf who it was said opposed Jack Hays along the Guadaloupe River in those famous 1844 fights.

It was always hazardous being a Comanche, even a major War Chief. Yellow Wolf suffered a fatal encounter with a hunting party of Lipan Apaches in 1854.

Monday August 10 continued......

Gonzales must have been a remarkable place in 1840, or maybe the sort of people that first settled frontiers were remarkable.

Residing in the little town itself you had people ranging from the likes of the McCulloch brothers all the way down to the lethal Rueben Ross. Texas was a rough neighborhood for a long time, the Indians being but a part of the problem and an increasingly insignificant one as time went by.

By the numbers, the biggest threat to Texians was other Texians, a lot of rough characters running loose. Four years earlier, right before the siege of the Alamo, Captain Almeron Dickinson had brought his young wife Susanna and their infant child Angelina to the Alamo for her own safety from Gonzales after a band of American outlaws had roughed her up and plundered their farmstead.

One of the notable Gonzales men, a good guy, was Mathew “Old Paint” Caldwell. The relative youth of the Texas population at that time might be inferred from Caldwell’s “Old Paint” moniker, applied to a guy who was just 42.

In the same way, if there had been a Moses Rose who was the only guy to opt to escape from the Alamo, it was likely one Louis Rose, a French guy in his fifties, called “Moses” by the others on account of his age.

It seems likely that Caldwell was afflicted with vitiligo although we are told the nickname came from his unusually colored beard. He must have been a dynamic character, his name comes up as the “go to” guy in the accounts of his peers.

On Monday the 10th, Caldwell was west of Gonzales leading 32 men, having assumed like most everyone else that the Comanches would follow usual practice and escape by a different route from where they came in. Riders sent out to recall him would find him that day in Seguin.

Caldwell was one of those guys who’s life demonstrates the precariousness of a life in those days even without Comanches or outlaws. He lost his first wife, mother of his three children, when he was thirty five. Caldwell himself passed away at home in 1842, at just 44 years of age, cause of death not given.

I wonder if the author meant "vitiligo."

Please use Buffalo Hump’s true name 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 when referring to him! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

No extracurricular reading here Birdy. Was just reading up on the Walker creek fight as it was a local thang around here. Well fairly local.

Indeed I did, tks. Changed it in the original. my free time on the Fire is if I wake up early, didn’t take the time to Google it.

What was Buffalo Hump's real name. I did read that some of the Indians had "dirty" names. But then the book wouldn't say what the names were.

Nice read, anyways, and thanks for posting. 👍

His real name translates out to something like “walking erection” or “He who is always erect”. And it wasn’t in reference to his posture. 😉

So the guy’s name properly translates to “Hard On” or something like that. I gotta observe tho, it musta took exceptional men on either side of this conflict to inspire 100+ men to follow them at a time when all could come and go as they pleased.

There was a Comanche leader of that era, an older guy called “Amorous Man” which is open to translation.

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

Same year, 1840, a Comanche was born somewhere to the west who, thirty-four years later, would create bullet-proof medicine for the warriors attacking Adobe Walls. Isa-Tai, which popular history has it translates to “Coyote A$$hole”.

The medicine didn’t work, but Isa-Tai did go on to a notable career in Tribal elections on the reservation. Maybe politicians and some medicine men were similar sorts of people.

The fact that Comanche hostility wouldn’t end for another thirty-four years after 1840 is also notable. I dunno of any other tribe able to hold out that long.

Edited to add: Actually I do, the enigmatic Kickapoo, originally of the 18th Century Ohio Country who never made any treaties with the Whites but who did administer a sound drubbing to a joint Texas and Confederate force. Dove Creek 1864.

Also heard it translated out to “Coyote Vagina”. 🤣 suppose same general area.