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Apparently it was the custom to place historical markers in the "old days" (1890's thru the 1930's), as close to the approx. location of the actual incident as possible.

The Coleman massacre marker here (Smithwick gives a great account of this incident) was for years out in the middle of a cotton field close to Coleman's branch, where the homestead was located. When the Hwy dept upgraded the closest county road to a state maintained farm to market (FM 969) in the early 60's, the marker was moved to state ROW.

I know of another marker in Tom Green county like this. Least it was still at the battle site in the 80's . Out in the middle of the pasture.

BN

Oh... maybe Fehrenbach wrote it...

...who IIRC has N. Britt's body unmutilated and left covered with a buffalo robe as a sign of respect. That part coulda happened, especially if they recognized him.

Santana is worth mention, on account of he did jump to his death out of a second story window, but at Huntsville Prison and without dragging a guard with him.



I always figured that was the source of tbe Blue Duck episode on Lonesome Dove, but perhaps there was another guy too as someone suggested here just recently.

By this time things were sure closing in on the Kiowas. After all, Santana and the other two guys were basically picked up by the Army at home afterwards, on the reservation, called in by their Quaker Indian Agent.

Old Satank (about seventy at the time) never made it to trial...



This account of his demise agrees with Ferhenbach. I'd like to think that I would have the steel to chew the flesh off of my own hand to slip a set of irons so that I could go out fighting (heck, I'd like to think I'll still have TEETH if I reach that age)...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitting_Bear

The REAL moral of that episode being never to underestimate anyone whom a people like the Kiowas would call one of the "Ten Bravest", ESPECIALLY when that guy knew that the whole tribe was watching, and especially at that point in their history.

(..and don't ever pull a mean-spirited joke like that Peacock guy did either )

Birdwatcher

The date on the small marker we found,1898,makes no reference as to who placed it.It's granite,so obviously expensive.

Mr'Nash said "somebody came thru here along about then with a wagonload of them markers , asking around to find the places they belonged."

The larger "monument"- In fact that whole area just west of Cox mountain is still referred to as the "Monument Community",even had a church called that- marking the Warren event was placed at a different time.Some individual was credited with the placement of it in one account I found.

Hi Bob,

Ordered the book from Amazon. Are there other good books to read about that era? No romance real history. I can order them by mail. Many thanks.
Dom

Hey Dom! Another good book that I've always enjoyed was Wilbargers "Indian Depredations in Texas". Lot's of good reading. And mostly from the 1830's & 40's. Originally published in the 1890's. It should be back in print!

Bob

I need to find Willbarger's book again, if only to tally up a body count, so exaustive and valuable today is his collection of accounts.

Was it Willbarger's own father who was scalped by Comanches, eventually dying from the exposed skull left by the wound more'n ten years later?

Surely a lot of suffering in that interval.

Birdwatcher

The marker for Wilbarger's scalping and the deaths of his two companions is at the corner of 51st and Berkman Dr. in Austin hiding in plain sight. I've never seen anybody but me looking at it.

I'm re-reading Alan Eckert's biography of Tecumseh, "A Sorrow in our Heart". Even though its narrative style makes it more akin to fiction than an actual biography, it is very enjoyable and enlightening.

I've always been more fascinated with the Eastern Indians than the plains Indians. It would seem that they were far more advanced and better fighters than the plains Indians, and the wars they fought with the whites more brutal, bloody, and much longer than those of the plains Indians.

It is also worth noting that while they were very savage and effective warriors, their society was pretty advanced. Had Tecumseh been successful in rallying all of the Eastern tribes into the confederacy he wanted, the US might largely be confined to the Eastern seaboard to this day and our relation to the interior Indian tribes would be more like the British in India than our current model.

Read Empire of the Summer Moon a couple of months ago, and liked it tremendously.

Now I'd like to read a good (accurate) book about the history of the Texas Rangers.

Any recommendations?

Rip Ford

http://www.amazon.com/Fords-Texas-Personal-Narratives-West/dp/0292770340

The Texas Rangers
Walter Prescott Webb.

To Bob and other campers: thanks for the infos on books. Like most of you, i enjoyed Lonesome Dove (we had it in France, and, as old west firearms fan, i'm interested in that period of your country.
Dom

Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso

http://www.amazon.com/Texas-Rangers-Wearing-Cinco-1821-1900/dp/0312873867

No it was his brother Josiah who was scalped. Two of my Great Aunts lived in the Wilbarger house for years in Bastrop, there on Main st. north of "downtown". Then two old maid cousins....

Across the road from my place is the old Roger's place. One of the original settlers of Austin's "Little Colony". One of the Rogers boys was killed by Indians cutting wood down on Wilbarger creek. Story is in Wilbargers book.

A Sorrow in our heart by Eckert is an awesome read, as are most of his books. I suppose my all time fav of his is "The Frontiersman" about Simon Kenton.

BN

Eckert is not taken seriously by that most unforgiving of modern-day Historians: the serious 18th Century reenactors.

But like Fehrenbach in Texas he is to be credited for making that history, at least in a broadly correct form, available to a wide audience. Its just that a lot of specifics of what Eckert wrote are eiter contrary to other sources, or not mentioned in original documentation.

As for the "better fighting" thing, maybe its explained in part by population demographics. IIRC in the early 18th Century there were still 25,000 Cherokees alone in Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina. By contrast, out west, there might not have been that many Plains Indians between Mexico and Canada, even in the height of the horse period and before the Nineteenth Century epidemics hit.

Then too, Americans was increasing back then at a rate approximating that of modern-day Kenyans. Overwhelming as the flood of settlers was to the Ohio Tribes in the 18th Century, that was increased into a tidal wave of settlement through the Nineteenth Century when we was spreading across the Continent.

A couple of things not often pointed out however (tho' touched upon earlier on this thread); Hostile Indians scared the begeezus out of average Americans throughout most of our Frontier Period (with good reason).

The other is specific to the 18th Century East. Turns out that trade and Indian preferences likely had a great deal of influence on the style of the longrifle, beginning in the first half of the Eighteenth Century. And even when using smoothbores devoted an inordinate amount of time and shot to developing proficiency with the same.

One of the more interesting tribes is the Lenape AKA Delawares, present and surviving across tbe Frontier throughout the frontier era. Not bad when a 17th Century New Jersey group ends up lending their name 200 years later to a mountain range in West Texas (the Delaware Mountains, sharing top-billing there with the Apache Mountains).

John Heckewelder lived among the Delawares on the Ohio as a Moravian Missionary for more than 20 years (1760's - 1780's) and published an account of those people that is a valued primary source today...

http://www.archive.org/details/historymannersa00heckgoog

Accounts of ordinary folks for the most part, in day to day life.

I'm recalling the account of a grizzled veteran warrior of wide renown, face almost entirely covered with tattoos referencing scalps taken and war victories, who later got Christianity and when asked about his prior war exploits would only recount his capture by Jesus.

Unfortunately this guy ended up among the ninety-six unresisting Christian Delawares later clubbed to death by some Pennsylvania Militia at Gnaddenhutten.

Birdwatcher

Yeah, from what I read the Delawares were just "bad to the bone". Their was most always some included in the major trapping and exploring expeditions. They apparently loved to fight and plunder. There's a Delaware Creek between Fredricksburg and Kerrville I suspect was not a family name. At the Taos pueblo uprising when Price(I think) stormed the church it was said one Delaware "Big [bleep]" (that word again) put up the most courageous defense. That part came from "Wah-to-Yah and the Spanish Peaks" by Lewis Garrard, another of my favorite books.

A Spanish account estimates 100 Delaware families settled in far Northeast Texas in 1820, with larger numbers in neighboring Missouri and Oklahoma.

And you are right, they DID get around. One source has it that by the time Jedediah Smith found a route to California in 1826, there were Oklahoma Delawares who had already made that same trip several times. A thing almost to be expected when you read up on the mobility of individual Natives all over.(I mean, Lewis and Clarks were guided about half-way across the Continent by an illerate teenage mother).

Maybe if'n the Indians had newspapers and books by then, they would have been making a big deal out of all their "discoveries" too.

RIP Ford used Delawares as scouts, as did Robert E. Lee hisself. Which brings up another must-have Texas history book...

Jeff Davis's Own: Cavalry, Comanches and the Battle for the Texas Frontier

http://www.amazon.com/Jeff-Daviss-Own-Comanches-Frontier/dp/0471333646

The Second US Cavalry, Jeff Davis's project, and THE prototypical Western cavalry outfit.... modelled after the French experience in North Africa (Davis brung in camels too).

Has to be said though, despite all their considerable perambulations, this outfit seems to have intercepted considerably fewer Comanche raiding parties than did the Seminoles and Black Seminoles working South of the Border under treaty to the Mexicans during that same time period.

Birdwatcher

Might be so, although it was Shawnees who were prominent in the Southwestern scalps-for-bounty trade in the 1840's.

Just as often, if you'll overlook the 3,000 White settlers killed by Indians in Pennsylvania in the French and Indian War, individual Delawares turn up in Frontier accounts as friendly and multilingual.

Heckewelder of course, who lived with them in times of peace, mentions a bunch, and F&I era capive Highlander Robert Kirk ran into one at Fort Duquense shortly after his capture

(ANOTHER remarkable book see...
http://www.amazon.com/Through-So-Many-Dangers-Adventures/dp/193009860X )




Here in Texas the most famous Delaware was Jim Shaw.

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fsh11

Jim Shaw, a Delaware Indian, was noted as a valuable frontier scout, interpreter, and diplomat during the period of the Republic of Texas and in antebellum Texas....

He appeared on the frontier of the Red River as early as 1841, when he was in his twenties or early thirties. At that time he reportedly saw the botched Texan Santa Fe expedition as the party turned west at the Wichita River, which they mistook for the Red River.

Shaw later claimed that if he had not been leery of the Texans on account of President Mirabeau B. Lamar's harsh Indian policy, he would have offered his services and guided them to Santa Fe, thus perhaps changing the course of history. At any rate, Shaw was obviously familiar with the vast plains and breaks of West Texas

Birdwatcher

Mike, have you ever read or seen Jean Louis Berlandier's Report (1835)to the Mexican Govt on the Natives in Texas???? It's a damn hard book to find as I believe there was a re-print during the Texas Sesquincentennial. Archaeologist son does have a copy. Excellent read on the SE tribes that ended up here. I believe it was the Mexican Lt. Teran that did watercolors of the natives in the report. He also mentions Comanche women copulating with dogs, although I don't believe he ever witnessed it. Only heresay from Mexican officers.... ;-)


BN

I dunno about the copulating with dogs thing, tho I suppose anything is possible.

Poor Matilda Lockhart was infamously abused and mutilated horribly while in Comanche capitivity, her pitiable condition famously sparking the Council House Fight here in San Antonio in 1840. OTOH Cynthia Anne Parker seems to have led a happy life among 'em (unless it was a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome).

RIP Ford mentions the episode of the Comanche mother who travelled alone off of the Plains to the Texas Ranger base at Fort Ringgold (Laredo?) to inquired after her teenage son Carne Muerte ("Dead Meat", the name the youth had given at the time of his capture, which I think was either sarcasm or resignation on his part) .

Young Carne had been brung back severely wounded by the Rangers after a skirmish, and after he healed was given tbe run of the place. Ford mentions how the men, touched by his mother's devotion, loaded them with gifts when they left. One of them episodes that makes Ford memoirs ("RIP Ford's Texas" mentioned above) so compelling.

Back East in the 18th Century, Heckewelder recounts four suicides among the Delawares. Two were young men who killed themslves after their beloveds chose another. One other was an older guy who, driven to distraction by his wife's nagging, took poison.

The last was a frequent visitor of Heckewelder's, who seeing his wife's growing attraction and time spent with another man, and desparing of losing his children who would be leaving with her (children belonged to the mother's clan), visited Heckwelder with a gift one last time, and then went out and killed himself.

Here in Texas I believe its in Hermann Lehmann's account of his years with the Comanche where a young Comanche man, despairing after catching his wife in bed with a trader, committed "suicide by White man"; charging a White guy armed with a rifle in the vicinity of present-day Castroville.

So while I dunno if they had sex with dogs, Comanche women apparently did possess the universal female ability to rip some guy's beating heart from his chest.....

Now, GUYS having sex with domestic animals of various sorts, in various times and places, I'd lend credence to

Birdwatcher