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Give me a heads up of course...

back to the thread...

Time constraints and the late hour do not permit quotes and photos on this one but one thing we oft forget in popular history is that, in the 1840's when Jack Hays and his men were hanging out there, San Antonio de Bexar as a community was already more than 100 years old.

Popular history has it that Bexarenos led a precarious, fugitive existence in thrall to the surrounding tribes, Lipan Apaches and then the Comanches.

Partly true.

By the late Eighteenth Century, feral cattle and horses had almost completely displaced the buffalo from the surrounding area, such that, as was true in the 1830's when Smithwick was in the area, San Antonio residents had to travel as far as the Pedernales and Colorado, seventy to one hundred miles north of town, to find buffalo herds.

Yet travel to these places they did, twice each year, spring and fall, to harvest buffalo in suficient numbers that this became a vital part of the annual domestic economy. By the year 1800 there were around 2,000 residents in San Antonio.

Harvesting buffalo on that scale by these people of course weren't supposed to be possibe, hostile Indians and all that, yet they did it, every year.

One thing that ain't changed is the mercurial Texas climate. In the 1840's, the Hay's years, the Rangers enjoyed the benefit of a wet period. Transportation in that era was powered by grass.

The decade AFTER Hays left a drought struck, severe enough to drive the central bands of Comanche to reservations after their economy evaporated.

So the fortunes of San Antonio in the century before Jack Hays rose and fell dramatically with the climate. Why San Antonio could survive drought at all was due to the 50 miles of irrigation canals from diversion dams along the river, irrigating (IIRC) about 2,000 acres.

In perennially cash-poor San Antonio there were two means of obtaining actual moneys (as opposed to local barter). One was agricultural exports south to Mexico, most often corn.

The other was from cattle. Actually being out on the plains working cattle was dangerous enough that a vaquero earned about three times the wage of a farm laborer, but people did it. The most common use of these feral cattle was slaughter on the spot for the production of tallow, hides and jerked beef. These products then traded in Mexico.

Alternatively, group of Bexarenos would organize for cooperative cattle drives, either south into Mexico or clear to New Orleans, 600 miles to the east. These drives being already an established practice by the time that George Washington, futher east again, was having a go at the British in the cause of Independence.

So, whatever their recurring losses to Indians, it aint like the original Bexarenos prior to the arrival of the White Texians were a bunch of shrinking violets when it came to crossing the plains.

What DID hammer the San Antonio economy was drought, even irrigated farmland produced less in dry years, such that the export of locally grown corn was actively forbidden so as to avoid general famine. The numbers of local wild cattle also plummetted, either due to starvation or emigration. Worse, trade and the associated travel of any sort became difficult as there was little grass to sustain pack or riding animals on long journeys.

Between 1800 and 1840 the San Antonio population more than tripled, mostly one assumes due to a greatly increased volume of trade between Mexicans to the south and Americans to the north and east.

The volume of routine trade from and to Mexico in these years absolutely dwarfs the military campaigns that we usually focus on.

Recall that, earlier in this thread, on the Great Raid the Comanches stole a herd of hundreds of horses outside of Victoria that belonged to a party of Mexican traders. Likewise when the Comanches approached Linnville driving as many as 1,500 horses and mules, it was initially assumed that they were Mexicans, come from the south to trade at this port.

The German naturalist Ferdinand Roemer in 1846 observed the arrival in San Antonio of a pack train from Mexico consisting of more than 100 mules laden with bundles of woven blankets. Roemer further observed that this caravan was but one of "several".

Ten years later Frederick Law Olmstead observed that the principal occupation of the Texano community in San Antonio was freighting goods from Mexico.

Needless to say there's a WHOLE lot of stories lost here. Somehow droves of Mexican traders were successfully dealing with the threat posed by the Indians, decade after decade, while travelling at least in groups pretty freely across the plains.


Against this major, long-established trade network, in place for decades prior to the Jack Hays years, and by the 1840's involving the routine movement of thousands of stock of different sorts....

...I'm just gonna juxtapose what our popular history focuses on from this period...

Jack Hays accompanied by maybe fifteen guys riding out to pick fights with Indians, exchanging fire in these expeditions with maybe one half of one percent of the total Comanche population of that era....

No flies on Hays and his men, and they cheerfully went up against long odds indeed, just gotta keep 'em in context is all.

Birdwatcher

One of Gentilz's better pieces (these pics here are all somewhat distorted to to the angle of the camera so as to avoid the flash).

Here showing the form of the two-wheeled Mexican cart. On this one the wheels have spokes, I dunno the proportion that had solid wheels.

Note also that Gentilz persistently paints somberos as taller and narrower than what we would expect today, or even compared to those in late Nineteenth Century photographs...



A street scene on market day. Until the coming of the railroad in 1877, lumber was in perennially short supply in San Antonio, and frame houses of sawn timbers something of a rareity.



Wood was also the fuel for cooking, and after a century of settlement also in short supply in the vicinity of town. There were those who made a living providing it for household fuel...



Another one of Gentilz's smaller pieces, a local horseman...




Gentilz paints his White guys in that setting in distinctly different wardrobes, of sorts instantly familiar from early daguerrotypes...



One of his more interesting works, this depicting the funeral on an infant. In theory at least, these were supposed to be less somber occasions, the child having died innocent and therefore having certainly gone straight to Heaven. Note the blue-painted coffin, perhaps symbolizing heaven, and the guys firing their firearms into the air.

Also note San Fernando Cathedral in the background, still there today.



Another San Antonio street scene. Accounts from wherever Americans of that era encountered Mexican Borderland communities from Texas to California mention the frequency of dances, fandangos and fetes of various sorts, and the popularity of these things with all parties one the scene.

I believe Gentilz entitled this one "Invitation to a Dance" or some such, his only work depicting a nighttime scene...


[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v148/Sharpshin/hays19.jpg[/img]

Unfortunately what Gentilz does not give is are detailed portraits of the women. San Antonio even today is a fine place to be a young and single male, and historical figures as diverse as Kit Carson, Jim Bowie and William Bonney famously succumbed to the charms of the senoritas at different locations across the West. Even Santa Anna "married" a local girl in a staged wedding (one of his officers pretending to be a priest) during the Alamo siege.

Doubtless the availability of such company and the lively night life was a major part of the appeal of the place to the sort of footloose young men who comprised the early ranging companies. In later decades the rapidly dwindling Texano community in San Antonio would be mostly supplanted in this regards by a large and notorious red light district "west of the creek", San Pedro Creek.

Birdwatcher

Found it! My copy of Olmstead's "A Journey Through Texas"

One of the absolute must-reads for anyone interested in Texas history. Here's his description of San Antonio, albeit ten years after the Hays era...

The street life of San Antonio is more varied than might be supposed. Hardly a day passes without some noise. If there is no personal affray to talk about, there is some government train to be seen, with the hundreds of mules, on its way from the coast to the fort above; or a Mexican ox-train from the coast, with an interesting supply of ice, flour, or matches, or of whatever the shops find themselves short.

Hard to imagine carrying ice in the Texas heat, even on wagons, but especially the notoriously slow ox-drawn wagons.

A government express clatters off, or news arrives from from some exposed outpost... An Indian in his finery appears on some shaggy horse, in search of blankets, powder and lead. Or at the least, a stagecoach with the "States" or the Austin mail, rolls into the plaza and discharges its load of passengers and newspapers.

Street affrays are numerous and characteristic, I have seen, for a year or more, a San Antonio weekly, and hardly a number fails to have its fight or its murder. More often than otherwise, the parties meet upon the plaza by chance, and each, on catching sight of his enemy, draws a revolver, and fires away.

As the actors are under more or less excitement, their aim is not apt to be of the most careful or sure, consequently it is not seldom, the passers-by who suffer. Sometimes it is a young man at a quiet dinner in a restaurant, who receives a ball in the head; sometimes an old negro woman, returning from market, who gets winged...

Where borderers and idle soldiers are hanging about drinking-places, and where two different races mingle upon unequal terms, assassinations must be expected. Murders, from avarice or revenge, are common here. Most are charged upon Mexicans, whose passionate motives are not rare, and to whom escape over the border is easiest and most natural....

...in 1856... [the population of San Antonio] is estimated at 10,500. Of these, about 4,000 are Mexican, 3,500 Germans, and 3,500 Americans. The money-capital is in the hands of the Americans, as well as te officers and the government. Most of the mechanics and the smaller shopkeepers are German.

The Mexicans appear to have almost no other business than that of carting goods. Almost the entire transportation of the country is carried on by them, with oxen and two-wheeled carts. Some of them have small shops for the supply of their own countrymen, and some live upon the produce of farms and cattle ranches owned in the neighborhood....

Their tools are of the rudest sort. The old Mexican wheel, of hewn blocks of wood is still constantly in use, though supplanted, to some extent, by Yankee wheels, sent in pairs from New York. The carts are always hewn of heavy wood, and are covered with white cotton stretched over hoops. In these they live, on the road, as independently as in their own house. The cattle are yoked by the horns, with raw-hide thongs, or which they make great use.

Their livelyhood is, for the most part, exceedingly meagre, made up chiefly of corn and beans.

Point of interest, it was travelling Mexicans like this who found and carried the wounded and mortally infected Oliver Loving to Fort Stanton (??) after Loving's fight on the Pecos against Comanches while he and a companion were scouting ahead of a cattle drive. The companion took off on foot for help in the night, Loving also commencing to walk the next morning when it became apparent the Comanches had left.

A similar incident of course being woven into the fictional narrative of "Lonesome Dove", though I believe Loving was hit in the arm by an arrow rather than his thigh.

The only place in popular Texas lore such big-wheeled Mexian ox-drawn carts figure is with the Comancheros, Mexican traders out of New Mexico. Completely overlooking the fact that these carts must have turned up all over, and that by those years (1870's) the Comanches were mostly selling herds of rustled Texas cattle.

In Hays' time, ten years earlier than Olmstead's journey, a total population estimate from San Antonio of around 7,000. Proporionately more Mexicans, few established Germans yet (they were just arriving in those years), no regular stages or mail yet that I have heard of.

Fewer revlovers yet too, but perhaps almost as much lead flying around the bars and main plaza.

IIRC, as with the case of Jake Spoon in "Lonesome Dove", accidental shootings were not considered murder, and the responsible parties were rarely charged as such. One imagines revenge by the kin of the dead or maimed might be a whole different matter tho.

And of the women (a vitally important consideration for young men)...

The complexion of the girls is clear, and sometimes fair, usually a blushing olive. The variety of feature and color is very striking, and is naturally referred to three sources - the old Spanish, the Creole Mexican, and the Indian, with sometimes a suspicion of Anglo-Saxon or Teuton. The hair is coarse, but glossy, and very luxuriant, the eye, deep, dark, liquid and well-set.

Their modesty, though real, was not proof against a long courtship of flattering attentions and rich presents. The constancy of the married women was made very light of, not that their favors were purchasable, but they are sometime siezed by a strong penchant for some other than their lord.

Which might account for some of that lead flying around....

Birdwatcher

Been browsing through a book called "On the Border, an Environmental History", here an author quotes from the 1850 US Census....

While Kendall and others were forced to adapt to a series of ecological forces [besides Indians killing the shepherds, he means] that complicated their early attempts to establish grazing on the Edwards Plateau [AKA Texas Hill Country], contemporaries were establishing much larger flocks on the more southerly Rio Grande Plain.

Of the 100,000 sheep in Texas denoted in the US 1850 census, half of these were located to the south and west of San Antonio. Within twenty years the Callaghan Ranch alone near Encinal [on I35 30 miles north of Laredo] ran 100,000 head.

By 1886 the Rio Grande Plain contained nearly 4 million sheep and goats (five times the number of cattle). The land could not sustain such spectacular numbers "The practice of herding one sheep per acre proved too taxing for the buffalo grass and gramma grass.... turning the once-lush South Texas grassland into the veritable scrub brush and barren waste that it remains today.... In 1900 there were but a quarter-million sheep remaining.

A sheep economy dominating all of South Texas, once the home of the original cowboys, all this underway by the year 1850, BEFORE Ranger Captain RIP Ford and his stalwart companions were chasing Comanches and Mexican Bandits around that very same region.

Who'd a thunk it?

Birdwatcher

Moving this thread along some more....

Fear not, folks will start shooting each other directly.

Resuming with the seemingly unlikely but apparently true concept of, to paraphrase a recent trucking commercial, 'the economy of Texas rolling upon Mexican wheels', as per Olmstead...

The Mexicans appear to have almost no other business than that of carting goods. Almost the entire transportation of the country is carried on by them, with oxen and two-wheeled carts.

Can't talk about Jack Hay's San Antonio period without talking about Mexicans, sort of the "silent majority" with respect to the nearly total lack of mention of them in popular Texas history, despite the fact that, in the 1840's, they were most-likely the single largest population block in San Antonio.

This is what Olmstead has to say, of San Antonio in 1857...

We had, before we left, opportunities of visiting familiarly several Mexican dwellings.... Within, we found usually a single room, open to the roof, and having a floor of beaten clay... There was little furniture, huge beds being the inevitable piece de resistance. These were used by day as a sofa and table. Sometimes there were chairs and a table besides; but frequently only a bench, with a few earthen utensils for cooking, which is carried on outside.

A dog or a cat appears on or under the bed, or on the clothes chest, a saint on the wall, and frequently a game-cock fastened in a corner, supplied with dishes of corn and water.

We were invariably received with the most gracious and beaming politeness and dignity. Their manner towards one another is engaging, and that of parents and children most affectionate.

Maybe idealized, but Olmstead ain't shy elsewhere of describing folks, including Mexicans, in harsh terms.

Here's two contemporary paintings by Gentilz, overall, in his paintings a general sense of affection for these people seems obvious. Here, his focus ain't the wattle-and-daub huts, but the people who lived in 'em.






Birdwatcher

Dang Sheepmen messed up the whole state of Texas.:)

Wanted to throw this cool link up before I lose it....

http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/gabrmetz/gabr000a.htm

At the Battle of Kadesh, Ramses II revolutionized Egyptian logistics by introducing the ox-drawn cart, which quickly became the standard mode of military logistical transport for almost a thousand years. Xenophon recorded that the normal pack load for a single ox-drawn cart in Greek armies was 25 talents, or approximately 1,450 pounds.

Studies from World War I by the British War Office note that a mule could carry about three hundred pounds, and the camel just slightly less. The Persians used teams of oxen to haul their large wooden siege and mobile towers. Xenophon noted that 16 oxen were required to pull the tower, which weighed approximately 13,920 pounds!


While the ox-cart allowed armies to move larger loads, it slowed their rate of movement to a crawl. It is important to remember that there were few packed roads and none of the paved roads that were later introduced by the Romans....

Under the best of conditions an ox-cart could travel two miles an hour for 5 hours before the animals became exhausted.


Even allowing for a perfect rate of travel of ten miles a day, just a trip to the nearest coastal ports from San Antonio would require a round-trip of about a month, two weeks or more either way. A similar time required for travel to Laredo on the Rio Grande, longer to points of commerce further south.

Had to be hard and exceedingly monotonous work, maybe explaining why Mexican Texans were able to stay in it in numbers for so long.

The railroad certainly killed off a lot of it, along with such events like the Cart War of the later 1850's...

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/jcc01

The so called "Cart War" erupted in 1857 and had national and international repercussions. The underlying causes of the event, historians believe, were ethnic and racial hostilities of Texans toward Mexican Texans, exacerbated by the ethnocentrism of the Know-Nothing party and the white anger over Mexican sympathy with black slaves.

By the mid-1850s, Mexicans and Tejanos had built a successful business of hauling food and merchandise from the port of Indianola to San Antonio and other towns in the interior of Texas. Using oxcarts, Mexicans moved freight more rapidly and cheaply than their Anglo competitors.

Some Anglos retaliated by destroying the Mexicans' oxcarts, stealing their freight, and reportedly killing and wounding a number of Mexican carters. An attack on Mexican carters occurred in 1855 near Seguin, but sustained violence did not begin until July 1857. Local authorities made no serious effort to apprehend the criminals, and violence increased so much that some feared that a "campaign of death" against Mexicans was under way.

Public opinion in some counties between San Antonio and the coast ran heavily against the carters, who were regarded as an "intolerable nuisance." Some newspapers, however, spoke out against the violence. The Austin Southern Intelligencer and the San Antonio Herald expressed concern that the "war" would raise prices. The Intelligencer also worried that if attacks on a "weak race" were permitted, the next victims would be the German Texans, and that finally "a war between the poor and the rich" might occur.

Some humanitarians also expressed concern for the Mexicans, notwithstanding "the fact of their being low in the scale of intelligence," as the Nueces Valley Weekly of Corpus Christi stated.

News of the violence in Texas soon reached the Mexican minister in Washington, Manuel Robles y Pezuela, who on October 14 protested the affair to Secretary of State Lewis Cass. Cass urged Texas governor Elisha M. Pease to end the hostilities. In a message to the state legislature of November 30, 1857, Pease declared: "It is now very evident that there is no security for the lives of citizens of Mexican origin engaged in the business of transportation, along the road from San Antonio to the Gulf."

Pease asked for a special appropriation for the militia, and the legislators approved the expenditure with little opposition. Though some citizens of Karnes County, who wanted the "peon Mexican teamsters" out of business, were angry at the arrival of armed escorts for Tejano carters, the "war" subsided in December of 1857.


Birdwatcher

Texas was and is a whole 'nother country for the most part. God love their independence!

Well, Bee County fer one weren't a place to be a Mexican with an ox cart in 1857.

Point of interest, while almost all roadside Texas Historical Markers are pretty good, this one down by Victoria, written in the 1940's or '50's, has been famously egregious among Texas ecological types for at least thirty years. First pointed out to me by a Texas A&M Agricultural Professor back in the '80's.



'tweren't a "war" in the sense that the Mexican carters started it, or maybe even shot back, more like a series of bushwackings.

Not remarkable, some areas of Texas in those times were dangerous for EVERYONE, let alone Mexicans.

The famously egregious part was also blaming mesquite on Mexicans

Meanwhile I'm still bending my mind around the concept of hauling ICE this way from the coast to San Antonio as described by Olmstead.

Given the climate, it musta been about the most popular cargo among the teamsters there was Tho sobering to watch the profits drip away all during the trip.

Birdwatcher

Hi-jackin', robbery and murder. In Mexico it was the victims and perps were reversed. It was kinda like a Road Tax. If you didn't like it, you could always pay a lot more.

Thanks fer the segue... (segway???)

Its gonna turn out that one of Hay's first missions as Captain of a Ranging Company was protecting this same sort of commerce on the San Antonio-Laredo road against MEXICAN bandits....

Did you ever read "Adventures in Mexico and The Rockie Mountains" by George Ruxton? He traveled all over, much of the time alone. It's a good read.

Been close to ten weeks since this thread went dormant. About the time it took for a wagon train to move down the Santa Fe trail, across the other side of Comancheria.

Back on the eastern fringe, in the 1830's and 1840's an unstoppable tide of American immigration. Out West seemingly yet remote, but George Bent was already influential enough to broker a major truce between tribes in 1840 while serving an Indian costomer base of perhaps 30,000, taking in buffalo hides, furs and horses in return for Euro consumer goods.

Unexpected destruction coming down that trail too in terms of diseases; livestock and human.

We are lucky in having a great source for the Santa Fe trail at this time online, the journals of Josiah Gregg....

COMMERCE OF THE PRAIRIES

Gregg came to the Plains from Tennesse by way of Missouri, choosing the region for its effect of health, him suffering from a serious case of tuberculosis at the time. In his case it worked, Gregg remaining out west for the better part of twenty years.

Better yet he wrote all about it, publishing this account in 1844. IIRC he later worked as a newspaper correspondent in the Mexican War but was killed in a fall from his horse in the 1850's while on an expedition.

Birdwatcher

The thing that makes for great history.... details

OK, so what do you take when hauling maybe 3,000 pounds in a wagon for the next two months over 900 miles of roadless wilderness?



This from Gregg (and BTW, the scientific name of the autumn sage growing in my garden is Salvia greggi, him being the one who first identified it as something different, and collected it for science)...

http://www.kancoll.org/books/gregg/gr_ch02_1.htm

The ordinary supplies for each man's consumption during the journey, are about fifty pounds of flour, as many more of bacon, ten of coffee and twenty of sugar, and a little salt.


Interesting to ponder that these guys could have carried my Corolla to Santa Fe in one of those wagons...

The wagons now most in use upon the Prairies are manufactured in Pittsburg; and are usually drawn by eight mules or the same number of oxen. Of late years, however, I have seen much larger vehicles employed, with ten or twelve mules harnessed to each, and a cargo of goods of about five thousand pounds in weight.

At an early period the horse was more frequently in use, as mules were not found in great abundance; but as soon as the means for procuring these animals increased, the horse was gradually and finally discarded, except occasionally for riding and the chase. Oxen having been employed by Major Riley for the baggage wagons of the escort which was furnished the caravan of 1829, they were found, to the surprise of the traders, to perform almost equal to mules.

Since that time, upon an average, about half of the wa-gons in these expeditions have been drawn by oxen. They possess many advantages, such as pulling heavier loads than the same number of mules, particularly through muddy or sandy places; but they generally fall off in strength as the prairie grass becomes drier and shorter, and often arrive at their destination in a most shocking plight.

In this condition I have seen them sacrificed at Santa Fe for ten dollars the pair; though in more favorable seasons, they sometimes remain strong enough to be driven back to the United States the same fall. Therefore, although the original cost of a team of mules is much greater, the loss ultimately sustained by them is considerably less, to say nothing of the comfort of being able to travel faster and more at ease.

The inferiority of oxen as regards endurance is partially owing to the tenderness of their feet; for there are very few among the thousands who have travelled on the Prairies that ever knew how to shoe them properly. Many have resorted to the curious expedient of shoeing their animals with 'moccasins' made of raw buffalo skin, which does remarkably well as long as the weather remains dry; but when wet, they are soon worn through.

Even mules, for the most part, perform the entire trip without being shod at all, unless the hoofs become very smooth, which sometimes renders all their movements on the dry grassy surface as laborious as if they were treading upon ice.

The thing that interests me is, being as the digestive system of equines is so much less efficient w/respect to grass than that of cattle, how come those mules were holding up so much better than oxen?

Birdwatcher

My guess is that foot-sore oxen simply were not able to forage widely enough to restore the energy that they expended during the day. In addition, it is likely that the oxen were two to three times the mass of mules, reducing the energy needs in favor of the bovines from a 6:1 ratio to about 2:1. Add to this the fact that equines are non-selective foragers compared to ruminants, so the mules were probably getting all the nutrition that they needed to maintain condition, while the bovines were exhausting their fat reserves and then burning up proteins to stay alive.

As mudhen said it had a lot to do with how the oxen had to eat. Cattle can grab a belly full of grass quick but then they MUST lay down to digest it over several hours. To do that they have to be awake. Graze out you ox late in the day and he just won't have time to digest his meal before he goes to sleep and he has to sleep or he won't go the next day as he's too tired.

A horse or mule can digest as they go.

Would you believe that years ago I sold as scrap iron a half keg of ox shoes that had been on the place forever. How many times have I figuratively kicked my dumb butt for doing that.

Still have the two sets of ox yokes though.

Thank you gentlemen, just the sort of input I was hoping for

Before continuing I would like to make an observation if I ain't already. Used to be before I got older I woulda thought 1830 was way-early on the Plains Frontier, heck even the 1850's seemed early.

See, the fundamental nature of America hasn't changed all that much in the forty odd years I've been living here. Cities and suburbs then, more suburbs and more minorities now, but the basic nature of our society aint changed all that much, not yet. Might be still be about the same situation twenty years from now should I live to my seventies.

But consider, Josiah Gregg was born in 1808 in Tennessee, at a time maybe half of the country north of the Ohio was still Indian Country in the time of Tecumseh.

By the time Gregg was twenty, and heading out to Santa Fe, that was all done with, the tide of settlement having moved across the Mississippi.

Lets take a Comanche of the same age in that same era and give him a 75 year life span: When he was born, the Comanches were at their zenith, in control of maybe two-thirds of Texas, fabulous wealth in horses and buffalo.

In his twenties, a sudden pouring of traders across their country down the Santa Fe trail, and the establishment of Bent's Fort. Immigrating White folks like the Bents greatly changing Comanche society, even as the Indians welcomed those changes at the time. By the time he was 30 that Comanche could be attending huge trade fairs at Bent's Fort, said fairs fed by tons of Euro trade goods carried on steamboats ascending into Missouri.

Two years later he could have been on the Linnville Raid and seen a huge swath of East Central Texas lost to White settlement.

By his thirties he could have been raiding into Mexico after enormous quantities of slaves and livestock. Said livestock traded north and east. All this time Comanche numbers would be steadily whittled by conflict and disease.

Around his 40th birthday the great cholera epidemic of '49 would have arrived, carrying off as many as 10,000 Comanches within a single year, half the tribe.

In his fortiestoo major drought and accompanying famine, pushing whole bands to accept handouts, the White settlement line now encompassing perhaps the whole Eastern Third of the Comancheria he had known as a teenager. Most people he had known from his teenage years would likely be long dead. A steady stream of immigrants now crossing Comancheria.

In his fifties, if he weren't already on a reservation, a reprieve of sorts, the War Between the States. And a shift in economy too, raiding the Texas Frontier for livestock to be traded to those OTHER Whites now running New Mexico.

In his sixties the end of independence. I would say the end of a way of life but that way of life had already changed radically in his lifetime.

Also in his sixties, the utter transformation of what had been Comancheria: The final extermination of the remnant buffalo herds, the arrival of the cattle ranchers even on the Llano Estacado, and the crossing of the continent by the railroads.

By the time he was 75? 1883, Prob'ly wouldn't hardly recognize the place, the conditions of his raising like a figment of his imagination.

Reminds me of that legendary Chinese curse... "May you live in interesting times."


Birdwatcher

Truly interesting when you consider it ain't it. Also I'd add old Lo's ( ;)) increasing contact/interaction with thoroughly acculturated eastern Indians like Cherokee, Semminole, Caddo, Delaware, etc. I mean he'd recognize them as Indians but they acted just like white men. Wouldn't that be confusing as hell.

Very well-reasoned summary, Birdwatcher. Thanks.

Not intended to be an argument akin to angels on a pinhead, just an observation....

I expect them Seminoles, Cherokees etc would strongly contest, even today, that they ever "acted like White men"
I dunno that the Indians ever confused the implements with the culture. Mostly them Easterners didn't belong either, and worse, they could shoot good. Could track too, hence their frequent employment as scouts.

W/regards to that famous (and still funny) old 19th Century Plains sarcasm "Lo, the Poor Indian."

Turns it goes all the way back to 1734, Alexander Pope. He starts strong, gets fuzzy in the middle, but I like the way he closes with mentioning of the dog. I mean, most of us here would like to see our dogs in Heaven too.

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;

His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way;

Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv'n,
Behind the cloud-topp'd hill, a humbler heav'n;

Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd,
Some happier island in the wat'ry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!
To be, contents his natural desire;

He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire:
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.

Mr Pope, sure had a way with words, check out some of his other quotes...

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alexanderp166681.html

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.


Birdwatcher