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One of the most remarkable and longest sagas in our history; the partnership of the Seminole leader Widcat and the nominal slave Juan Caballo AKA John Horse, a Black guy.

The Black Seminoles in Florida were runaways and their descendants who were allowed to live in Seminole territory paying some tribute in the form of crop yields. There was a lot of intermarriage, Osceola himself said to be a mix of White, Back and Seminole.

Second Seminole War, 1840’s, the Seminoles and their Black Seminole allies fought the US to a standstill. So much so that 500 Black Seminoles, who had recently been at war with the US Government, were actually allowed while still bearing arms, to remove with the Seminoles to Oklahoma.

The pretext was this they were called slaves of the Seminoles.

Things did not go well in the Indian Territory, tribal conflicts between tribes and slave raids on the Black Seminoles by neighboring Creeks who were selling them into actual slavery. 1850’s, the US passed a law forbidding slaves to bear arms, making things worse.

Wildcat and John Horse cut a deal with Mexico; a land grant in Mexico south of Eagle Pass in return for intercepting Indian raids. They did this, in the 1850’s intercepting more Indian raids than did the US Cavalry or Texas Rangers.

1857 Wildcat died of smallpox, most of the Seminoles subsequently returned to the US, the Black Seminoles remained in Mexico.

Twenty years later the US Army is sucking wind for Indian Scouts in Texas, Texas having chased out most all their Indians.

So they contract out to the Black Seminoles, a bunch of whom, including their aging leader John Horse, move up from Mexico and settle around Fort Clark.

Four Medal of Honor winners buried in that little “Seminole Indian Scout Cemetery”, highest per capita rate in the world.

“ Texas was a paradise for men and dogs, but a hell for women and horses.“

You can find that quote around, that one is cited from Illinois in 1847. Horses And their condition certainly were a limiting factor in this campaign, with the Indians being better mounted and covering shorter distances since leaving Linville.

Back to Monday August 10th.

The errant Captain Mathew Caldwell of Gonzales, who had gone west from Gonzales some days earlier to intercept the Indians on their probable return route, was finally located that morning in Seguin by a messenger from Gonzales “on a foaming steed”.

Caldwell had fifty-eight men with him and, notwithstanding their previous exertions, announced that they would set out for Plum Creek immediately after breakfast, 33 miles to the northeast.

It was probably a reflection of their horses and the excessively hot weather that they would only make about twenty miles that day. Camping for the night on the San Marcos River.

Meanwhile, that same evening of the 10th, those among Tumlinson’s command trailing the Comanches who were well mounted, pushed ahead through the night to get around and ahead of the Indians.

With most of our horses worn down with the extraordinary fatigue of yesterday and last night, having traveled some 60 or 70 miles. Here we quit the trail, and made for Gonzales for the purpose of feeding our horses, and as many of us can, joining the force supposed to be on Plum Creek.

Note: The implication was that not all of these guys would be able to make it depending upon how wore out their horses were.

It is plain that our sole reliance is to take advantage of them at Plum Creek bottom, where they will little expect to see us, and which is looked to as the ground where, of all others, they may effectually be chastised.

The converging Texian forces would start assembling at Plum Creek the following day, one day ahead of the Indians.

THanks, Birdie

Three of the four MoH winners in that little cemetery, won them in the same action. They used to award Medals of Honor more liberally back then. For a period of time the White Officer in charge of the Black Seminoles was a twice-wounded Battle of Gettysburg veteran named Lt. John Latham Bullis, a lot more famous back then, they even named Camp Bullis after him.

Bullis and three scouts were out on patrol when they located a camp of twenty-five Comanches returning from Mexico with a herd of stolen horses.

Bullis decided to try and bluff them into running off so as to recover the horses, the four of them opening fire from a hillside above the camp. However the Comanches, well armed, quickly realize the ruse and began to flank them.

Bullis and the scouts fled back to their horses to escape, but in the confusion Bullis lost his horse, being left behind afoot. The scouts turned and charged back under heavy fire, the one lifting Bullis up behind him on his horse having the stock of his carbine shattered and a rein cut by gunfire.

The fourth Medal of Honor winner was a different fish entirely; Adam Payne, tall and outspoken, went to war in a buffalo headdress. Ranald McKenzie awarded Payne a MoH for “habitual boldness” and for “invaluable service” during the Palo Duro campaign.

One time Payne and some Creek scouts were out ahead of McKenzies’ column tracking a Comanche band until after dark. First light revealed the Comanches had likewise made a cold camp not far away, said Comanches charging upon the scouts.

One Creek scout lost his horse, Payne gave him his own and then knocked one Comanche horse down with the butt of his rifle, shot another Comanche off his horse and made his escape on that horse.

Payne left the service, got in a brawl in a Brownsville saloon and killed a soldier with a knife. The Sheriff of Brackettsville (outside of Ft Clark) and a deputy, Clarence Windus, attempted to arrest Payne in a Brackettsville saloon but backed down despite the two against one odds as Payne was armed with a revolver and had his rifle on the bar, Payne brazenly challenging them to either “have a drink or give him the door”.

Windus shot and killed Payne in the early hours of the morning New Year’s Day 1877,stepped out of the darkness at a New Year’s celebration and gave him both barrels of a shotgun point blank in the back, Payne being considered too formidable an adversary to apprehend any other way.

Payne was the cousin and close companion of the sergeant who had lifted Bullis onto his horse during that earlier skirmish, they are buried right next to each other in that cemetery.

Clarence Windus had previously been awarded a MoH serving with the cavalry against the Kiowa.

The shooting of Adam Payne was the only time in our history that one MoH winner killed another.

A quick addendum to the Black Seminole Scouts.

April 18th 1881, called the “last Indian raid in Texas”, the McLauren massacre, Frio River Canyon.

http://www.texasescapes.com/LindaKirkpatrick/Conflict-on-the-Frio-McLaurin-Story.htm

Said to be Lipan Apaches, surprised while looting a house. Maybe they were revisiting the scenes of their youth.

What is not usually mentioned is that local posses formed up but lost the trail. Several days later Bullis and his Black Seminoles were called in, picked up the cold trail, followed it all the way across Texas and into the Burro Mountains in Mexico south of El Paso.

There they surprised the Apache camp and killed several, returning with a woman prisoner.

Again not usually mentioned, about that same year (1880?) IIRC Lipan Apaches out of New Mexico were stealing livestock around Mason TX in the Texas Hill Country. That was WAY late for an Indian raid that far east . Again ya gotta wonder if those Lipans, coming all that way, were revisiting old haunts.

Bullis and his scouts were called in. What followed was the longest epic pursuit/tracking duel I am aware of in our history. Expert trackers trying to elude expert trackers. Six hundred miles winding across West Texas into New Mexico.

The Apaches made it back to their New Mexico reservation less than a half-day ahead of their pursuers, where the Indian Agent refused to recognize Bullis’s jurisdiction.

The whole remarkable Seminole/Black Seminole story is almost always written out of the script of pop Texas history.

Most likely because they were Black, just the way it was. And nowadays they ain’t PC because they mostly fought and killed Indians.

Bullis himself had come up from the ranks during the War Over Secession, beginning as a Private in a NY Infantry regiment. Wounded twice, captured twice, Harper’s Ferry and Gettysburg. Battlefield promotions.

One gets the feeling Bullis loved being on the Frontier, loved the adventure, and his partnership with the Black Seminoles was the means to make that happen.

Shortly thereafter he would be stationed in Arizona during the Apache Wars, and finished his military career in the Spanish-American War.

When he died, some of his by then-elderly and impoverished former scouts travelled unheralded from the Fort Clark area to San Antonio for his funeral.

I dunno if anyone’s still following this but it’s now Tuesday August 11th, 1840.

Close to 1,000 Comanches are three days and maybe 75 miles out heading NNW away from the coast, intending to make a wide left turn northeast of Gonzales and that high hill and then head directly northwest to escape towards the Texas Hill Country which at that time was still in Comanche hands.

Meanwhile, it seems to independently occur the everyone in a number of widely scattered locations that the best place to intercept them was at the “Plum Creek bottom”.

Why that would be so is not readily apparent today, native prairie was already going under by the 1870’s and in the absence of fire, overgrown pastures and wooded areas are the norm where it ain’t actively farmed.

Used to be scarcely a tree other than along the watercourses between Austin and San Antonio though.

One Robert Hall, twenty six at the time, on of the founders of Seguin a tough sumbich who would ranch the lawless Nueces Strip of far South Texas, riding in from the southwest with Caldwell’s men from Seguin towards Plum Creek reports the following...

The 11th was intensely hot, and our ride was chiefly over a burnt Prairie, the flying ashes being blinding to the eyes. Waiting some hours at noon, watching for the approach of the enemy after night, we arrived at goods cabin, on the Gonzales and Austin Road, a little east of Plum Creek.

We know that the country was open enough that one could see for miles from the Big Hill fifteen miles east of Gonzales, we also know that west of Plum Creek lay open prairie all the way west to El Paso and Chihuahuan desert country.

Yet around Plum Creek...

From the big hill near Gonzales on to Plum Creek, this area of Texas was heavily wooded. Beyond Plum Creek, there was an open prairie which led towards the Hill Country area of Austin.

That describes a band of woodland about thirty miles long stretching NW-SE in otherwise open country. Much of it laying along Plum Creek.

Sorta related, posted by a friend on Facebook who has access to the 1839 “Diary of a Campaign Against the Comanches” J.W. Benedict.

September ‘39, three years after the Alamo, eleven months before the Great Comanche Raid.

Sunday morning 20th. Left San Antonio for the San Saba hills and mountains. About 40 or 50 Mexicans joined us under Colonel Karnes together with some surveyors, scientific gentleman making discoveries and getting specimens of geology, mineralogy etc. making in all upwards of 100 persons which together with our pack mules extra horses for the spies gave us quite a formidable appearance....

Wednesday 23 - Went 3 miles across another ravine and camped in consequence of the man who was wounded being carried on a hand hearse. Thursday 24 - Went 5 miles encamped on the Guadalupe River about 100 miles above our first crossing. We were now forbidden to fire a gun at any account whatsoever except in seeing Indians. Wild game past almost within our reach.

We had several beeves provided on starting but by this time they were either killed and eaten or had escaped us. We had no bread stuffs provided. Within five days from starting from Bexar are only stock of provisions consisted and coffee and salt.

Five or six Mexicans were employed as hunters provided with spears bows and arrows and extra horses on those we were to depend for sustenance.


A party of maybe 60 mostly Texians/Americans and 40 Tejanos provisioned by five or six Tejanos on horseback expert enough with spears and bows to feed the rest. Buffalo had to be the main quarry.

One of two major punitive expeditions launched from Texas against the Comanches in ‘39, both of which were largely swings and misses. In response the Comanches initiate a treaty meeting in March of 1840, resulting in the Council House debacle, base treachery in the eyes of the Comanches.

In response the Comanches launched the Great Raid in August of 1840, we hit them back in turn the following December, resulting in the death of as many as 180 Comanches in winter camp on the Colorado.

Wasn’t decisive though, best estimates are there were about 20,000 Comanches in 1840. The cholera epidemic of ‘49 would take out an estimated 10,000 Comanches, dwarfing anything we did directly, things would go rapidly downhill for the Comanches after that.

Henry Wax Karnes at age 27 already had pull enough to summon 40 or 50 Tejanos to his call. Two years later Jack Hays would be riding out of San Antonio with similar forces of Tejanos, the majority of whom would shortly be dispossessed by the flood tide of settlement.

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/karnes-henry-wax

Born in Tennessee, raised in Arkansas and taught woodcraft by his Hunter and Trapper father, Karnes first came to Texas at age 16, returned to Texas just one year before the Alamo age 22. He must have been a larger than life personality because this backwoods character rises rapidly to the fore.

IIRC Karnes was mostly illiterate, like so many of these guys, he was taken out early, this time by yellow fever, San Antonio 1840, 27 years of age. Buried outside the cemetery wall because he weren’t Catholic, which says much about San Antonio at that particular moment in time tho big demographic changes were about to arrive.

Like Tejanos going after buffalo with spears and bows, Karnes ain’t much remembered in popular History today. He was in his day though, there’s a town and a county named after him.

One guy absent from this fight, and also indicative of the perilous nature of life in those times was Erastus “Deaf” Smith, originally from Dutchess County NY by way of Mississippi. His popular moniker (which reenactors take pains to point out was pronounced “Deef” back then) was as a result of hearing loss from a childhood infection.

Deef was a livestock guy, a stockman, who moved to Texas in 1821 at 34 years of age. Not much is known of his earlier life or his exact movements during the 15 years prior to the Alamo. It is believed in he traveled over much of Texas in advance of the Frontier. It is known that he partnered with the Ruiz clan around Mission San Jose here in San Antonio in moving livestock to trade in Louisiana.

1822 he married one Guadeloupe Ruiz Duran, a widowed daughter of the Ruiz patriarch whose late Vaquero husband have been killed in a fall from a horse. It appears to have been a love match, Smith became a stepfather to her four children and she would bear him two more.

If you’re looking for a politically correct Frontiersman, Deef is your guy. One of his adopted daughters married a free Black man named Hendrick Arnold, Deef and Arnold we’re 100 miles out of town hunting Buffalo in 1835 when the Mexican army occupied San Antonio. Being married to a Tejano Deef was politically neutral until upon his return to San Antonio he was severely beaten by a detail Mexican cavalry, at which point Deef and Arnold went over to the Texian side.

Both men were described in glowing terms by their contemporaries, William Barrett Travis himself described Deef as being “the bravest of the brave”. At the beginning of the campaign to drive the Mexican army out of San Antonio and capture the Alamo the attack was stalled because many of the men refused to begin unless Hendrick Arnold was present.

Deef was seriously wounded in this attack in November of 1835 but remained in service and of course famously burned the bridge at San Jacinto the following April, which burning resulted in the capture of Santa Anna himself.

Prior to that battle, Deef was credited with capturing the Mexican Courier bearing dispatches from Santa Anna that informed the Texians that Santa Anna was headed for San Jacinto with only 800 troops, setting the stage for subsequent events.

In the months after San Jacinto both Deef and Arnold led ranging companies down to the Rio Grande against Mexican bandits. The following year, 1837, Deef Smith died of an illness at just 50 years of age, his widow granted a home site and a pension in San Antonio.

Hendrick Arnold’s father had been a white man and his mother probably enslaved. Prior to his marriage to Smith’s stepdaughter he had fathered a child by a black woman, probably one of the family slaves. Much might be made of the fact that he held his own daughter as his slave until you consider the fact that it was illegal in the Texas Republic for free Blacks to reside there, Hendrick himself having been given special dispensation in this regard.

Arnold was granted a large tract of land north west of present day Bandera in the Texas Hill country where he settled his mother. Arnold took no part that we know of in the fight against the great Comanche raid. At that time he was operating a Gristmill at Mission San Juan south of San Antonio.

Arnold’s birthdate is unknown, but he perished in the great cholera epidemic of 1849, the same epidemic that killed off about 10,000 Comanches, most likely he would have been in his 40s at the time. Prior to his death Arnold had made arrangements for his enslaved daughter to be freed after a period of indentured servitude, said freedom being subsequently challenged by his daughter from the Ruiz family, Outcome of the case unknown.

Probably because they had Boomer parents and grandparents that spent more time chasing the dollar than raising their kids. It's a narrative that goes across many genres, not just history learning. Might be the reason for a lot of the problems we face today. Everyone here talks about how the democraps have been ruining this country for such a long time, but they did nothing to stop it. Instead, they just blame the product and claim a holier than thou status.

Great posts Birdman.

Tuesday August 11th 1840, five days after the first reports, close to 400 men were hurrying from all points of the surrounding compass to the strip of woodlands and marshy areas along Plum Creek close to present-day Lockhart, that location by common consensus being the best spot to waylay the returning Comanche horde, although there seems nothing unique about that particular area as it toisday.

The guy who who be conceded command of the assembled militia the following day was heading down from the brand-new City of Austin, said city until just the year before an otherwise largely unsettled area thirty miles to the north of Plum Creek. Austin had six hundred fifty residents already in a community designated as the Capitol of the Republic even before it was settled, although that designation would be shortly challenged by Sam Houston hisself.

Curiously, one reads of no organized militia descending from Austin, although the indefagitable Reverend Ezakiah Morell who had driven his ox team and wagon a possible world record 30 miles in a day on the 6th to bring the news to Ed Burleson at Bastrop and then ridden to Austin on the 7th probably arrived at Plum Creek from that location along with others.

Who was also coming down from Austin was one Felix Huston, Major General of Texas Militia. Huston generally rates but passing mention today as the guy who screwed up at Plum Creek and allowed most of the Indians to escape unscathed, although I believe that popular assumption with respect to his chosen tactics is incorrect.

Huston was a major player in Texas at that time although none of the 254 counties in present-day Texas bear his name, neither does there appear to be a single Huston TX anywhere that Google can find. An oversight that in this particular incidence may be justified.

Forty-years old at the time of Plum Creek, Huston was a high roller, like the Bowie brothers operating on a financial scale way beyond the norm of the common man. If the Bowie brothers had made the equivalent of millions today smuggling African-born slaves into Louisiana via Galveston Island and Texas, Huston had made his fortune in the rough company of Nachez MS lawyering, brokering slaves and speculating in plantations.

1836, when the Second Texas Revolution broke out, Huston raised funds from investors and contributed $40,000 in personal funds (if one uses the conventional 50X ballpark that $40,000 equates to two million in today's dollars) to raise, arm and equip an estimated 700 men. Accompanied by Jim Bowie's brother Rezin he didn't arrive in Texas until July, too late for the revolution but in command of possibly the largest force in the field in Texas at that time.

Political divisions were rife and acrimonious among the Texians from the very beginning. Shortly after his arrival, Huston had joined the Sam Houston faction in resisting an attempt by Mirabeau Lamar to take command of the nominally 2,000 man Texian Army. In return, Houston placed Huston in command.

Under Huston, the Texian Army became loaded with "adventurers and men of little discipline". The lethal duellist and outlaw leader Reuben Ross, the same guy later shot by Henry McCulloch after he had crippled Ben McCulloch in a duel, became Huston's Aide de Camp and Land Agent.

The following year, 1837, Houston replaced Huston by appointing West Point Graduate and future Confederate General Albert Sydney Johnson in command, Huston refused to concede before challenging Johnson to a duel wherein he shot Johnson in the hip. Politically Huston had switched camps, 1838 the new President Mirabeau Lamar appointed Huston Secretary of War. 1839 Huston was elected Major General of the Texas Militia. Huston had wanted to move south to engage in a further war of opportunity against Mexico, indeed his former Aid de Camp Reuben Ross led a band of 200 outlaws, probably drawn from the ranks, in that direction with the tacit approval of then President Mirabeau Lamar.

It was his position as Major General, and possibly his reputation for duelling, that led Ed Burleson and others to concede command the next day despite Huston's limited experience in organised combat.

Later that same year, his ambitions for further opportunities on the Border thwarted by the collapse of the Mexican Federalist faction and the failure of the Republic of the Rio Grande, Huston left Texas to set up a law practice in New Orleans, never to return.

Awesome thread...My family settled in Texas way back in the 1800's around the area of the Salt Creek Massacre, Graham, TX. .That Massacre by the Kiowas and possibly Comanches on a wagon train was basically the beginning of the end for the violent tribes in Texas..The US government had enough after that and sent in the calvary...

I always wondered, when thinking of my ancestors, it must have been really dang sketchy back in them days just going out to hunt food for the family hoping and probably praying not to run into hostile Indians in the thick brush and Post Oaks and Live Oaks in that area...Probably a lot more worrisome than thinking about a griz or mountain lion stalking you in the mountains....Must have been some kind of crazy life, and some really tough folks to survive it back then...It was definitely land worth fighting to keep in that area. Really nice cattle ranches and farms..That's the only reason I can think of they wouldn't have left like a lot of the other settlers in the area back then with all the raids going on..


The Salt Creek ran right through my dad's ranch outside of Graham and a lot of times when it would flood and recede back we would find a few Indian artifacts...Several arrowheads, mostly...

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