Part 2

During 1858 and 1859, Captain Earl Van Dorn, soon to be a member of the Confederate High Command, vigorously carried the war to the Indians and pushed them north, back across the Red River. They didn’t remain there long. Texas seceded from the Union in 1861 and the Federal soldiers marched out of the forts and left them to the Confederate forces. Again the proper manpower was lacking. Some forts were abandoned so as to shorten the defense line and some of these, as at Lancaster, were burned by the Indians. The Indians, now spurred on by Union agents, carried on a still more bloody and aggressive warfare on the Texas frontier. Confederates, and Ranger Companies, coupled with frontiersmen reacted promptly and vigorously, but it was a long line of defense from the Red River to the Rio Grande. Defend it they did, against the Indians, and against lawless elements such as deserters and others renegades, hostile Union sympathizers and border ruffians from without the state.

The Negro slave was emancipated by proclamation in Texas on June 19, 1865 (June’teenth), about two months after General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House.[3] The last land battle of the Civil War was fought on May 13, 1865, in Cameron County, Texas when invading Federal forces were routed near Brownsville. That engagement is known as the Battle of Palmito Ranch.

From the end of the war until 1867, the frontier settlements had no organized military forces to protect them from the Indians, and it was against the law for Texans to carry guns. Added to this were the turmoils of Reconstruction which were about as bitter in the populated parts of the state as they were in other parts of the South.

The occupying United States Army under General Phil Sheridan was now mostly recruited from among the Negroes, and the army was not used against the Indians until 1867, when orders went out to get busy and put the forts and camps in order.[4] General Sheridan’s name was about as popular in Virginia and Texas as General W. T. Sherman’s was in Georgia and Mississippi.

But both Sherman and Sheridan came to Texas, and Sherman, after narrowly escaping the loss of his scalp on the Texas frontier, finally realized the necessity of a last organized military effort to either rid the country of the Indians or give it back to them. That was in 1871. However, in 1869, a new alignment of the forts had been seen as necessary. Never again reoccupied were certain of the interior ones such as Worth, Graham, Gates, Croghan, Martin Scott, Lincoln, Chadbourne and Ewell (La Salle County). Fort Belknap, on the Salt Fork of the Brazos River in Young County, had been the largest military post in North Texas prior to the Civil War. In 1867, the 6th Cavalry was ordered to prepare it for reoccupation. They worked for five months, but then this fort was ordered evacuated and its place was taken by a new one, Fort Griffin, some thirty-seven miles up the Clear Fork of the Brazos from Belknap.

Now to extend the northeasterly trending line of forts closer to the Indian Territory, the Army built Fort Richardson near the present town of Jacksboro.

The site chosen as the replacement for Fort Chadbourne, to be called Fort Concho, was at the confluence of the North Concho River with the combined waters of the Middle Concho, Spring Creek, Dove Creek and the South Concho, the last three named streams being fed by bountiful springs. This abundance of water and the geographically central location marked the spot as the natural convergence of trails from East, Northeast and South Texas before they headed westward for Horsehead Crossing and El Paso. Nature had been kind to this oasis in an otherwise desolate region. The fishing was extremely good and the clear waters of the streams supported mussels, the variety that produces gem pearls, hence the Spanish name of Concho. Herds of buffalo grazed within sight of the new fort. Quail and turkey were plentiful.

These three new positions, Concho, Griffin and Richardson, located on a line 220 miles long, as yet unconnected by either telegraph or rail, would soon be the centers of men, supplies and animals for the campaigns that finally broke the concerted powers of the Indians. These campaigns carried the soldiers from the Indian Territory and the New Mexico Territory on the North, to the actual interior of Old Mexico on the South.

From the times in 1866 and 1867 when Richardson and Concho were ordered built until 1871, the troops undertook no organized campaigns against the Indians. The settlers suffered constantly and the Indians learned new tricks. Many more learned how to live off government bounty on the reservations in Indian Territory, then hit the war path along with their wild brethren from the Texas Panhandle. They were amply protected on their return to the reservations by the Indian agents in charge, who believed their wards could do no wrong. Why, they would ask, would an Indian steal cattle when he had all the buffalo meat he wanted?

A cavalry expedition out of Fort Concho working the edges of the Llano Estacado in 1872, captured a Comanchero who told how he and his companions traded the Indian arms, ammunition and supplies for cattle, horses and sheep that they had stolen during their raids. He even showed the soldiers the well worn trails across the Llano Estacado towards Santa Fe and the valley of the Rio Grande. Thus the secret was finally revealed to the Army. It seems unbelievable at this time that such ignorance could prevail over the cries and protests of the Texas ranchmen who were losing cattle by the tens of thousands.[5] But such was the case, and in 1867, the Comanches even stole horses from the post herd at Fort Concho. We must remember that in that same year the mild policies of President Andrew Johnson in Washington were overruled by the radicals in the United States Congress, and the bitter years of reconstruction followed for the Southern States. All former Confederate soldiers were deprived of the vote, and radicals, carpetbaggers, scalawags from the South and freed Negroes ruled the State. The Army was used, not to fight Indians, but to guard the new social system.

The prospect appeared brighter for the settlers when in the Fall of 1869, one hundred soldiers from Fort Concho managed to engage an Indian force on the Salt Fork of the Brazos River. It was a drawn fight, but immediately thereafter a larger force from the same fort engaged and defeated the Indians in the same area. Texans were cheered by the news of this new tone of aggressiveness shown by the Army. It was the only way. The war had to be carried to the Indians the same way Earl Van Dorn had carried the fight to them on the eve of the Civil War.

But the time for real action had not arrived even as late as 1869. On February 18, 1870, a citizen was killed and scalped within one-quarter of a mile of the post limits at Fort Concho. In January of the same year, eighteen mules were stolen from the Q.M. corral at that same post. The same year, 1870, while Colonel Grierson was building Fort Sill in the Indian Territory, Chief Kicking Bird, a Kiowa, defeated the Command of Captain C. B. McClellan near the present town of Seymour. As late as March of 1872, a wagon train was waylaid near Grierson Springs in Reagan County and the teamsters killed by the Indians. Two companies of the 9th Cavalry came upon the scene by accident, engaged the Indians but withdrew before a decision was reached.[6]

The lamentations of the border people were finally heard in Washington and in April, 1871, General W. T. Sherman came to San Antonio. The next month, accompanied by General Randolph B. Marcy and an escort of seventeen men, he left for an inspection of the frontier. General Marcy was the same officer (then, Captain Marcy) who, in 1849 and later, had played such an important part in exploring and reporting to Congress on trails through Texas. The great explorer was still an outdoor man of action.

The little expedition proceeded by way of Boerne, Fredericksburg, the old Spanish Fort on the San Saba which had withstood a great Comanche Indian siege in 1758, Fort McKavett, Kickapoo Springs and Fort Concho. From Fort Concho it followed the military trail on northeasterly by the remains of Fort Chadbourne and Phantom Hill and on towards Belknap.

General Marcy’s journal is of great interest. He relates:

“We crossed immense herds of cattle today, which are allowed to run wild upon the prairies, and they multiply very rapidly. The only attention the owners give them is to brand the calves and occasionally go out to see where they range. The remains of several ranches were observed, the occupants of which have either been killed or driven off to the more dense settlements, by the Indians. Indeed, this rich and beautiful section does not contain, today (May 17, 1871), as many white people as it did when I visited it eighteen years ago, and if the Indian marauders are not punished, the whole country seems to be in a fair way of being totally depopulated.” He continues:

“May 18th, 1871—This morning five teamsters, who, with seven others, had been with a mule wagon train en route to Fort Griffin (Captain Henry Warren’s) with corn for the post, were attacked on the open prairie, about ten miles east of Salt Creek, by 100 Indians, and seven of the teamsters were killed and one wounded. General Sherman immediately ordered Colonel Mackenzie to take a force of 150 cavalry, with thirty days’ rations on pack mules, and pursue and chastise the marauders.”

An interesting angle to this affair was that Sherman’s party had been observed by the same Indians who murdered the teamsters, but were unmolested by them because they were waiting for the wagon train which they considered nearer top priority. Sherman realized later that he had nearly lost his scalp.[7]

This Colonel Mackenzie had reported in at Fort Concho as commanding officer on September 6, 1869. Born in New York, July 27, 1840, and christened RANALD SLIDELL, he had graduated first in his class at West Point in 1862. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War, received several wounds in action, and was a brigadier general when that war closed. The remainder of his professional life was devoted to active high command in the Indian wars. At various times he served at Forts Brown, Clark, McKavett, Concho and Richardson, engaging in his last Indian fight at Willow Creek, Wyoming in 1876. He was retired from the Army for disability in 1884 and died a bachelor at New Brighton, New York in 1889.

Along with Mackenzie, Colonel William Rufus Shafter who arrived to command at Fort Concho in January, 1870, the War Department had its two best young officers serving in the West Texas theatre.

Shafter had no West Point training. Born in Michigan on October 16, 1835, he entered the Union Army in the Civil War as a first lieutenant and by the end of that war had been breveted brigadier general of volunteers. He was later awarded The Congressional Medal of Honor for service during that war. He was commissioned lieutenant colonel of regulars in 1869 and first saw service in West Texas with the 24th Infantry at Fort McKavett. Later in life he was to command the American armies in Cuba during the Spanish American War.

During the summer of 1871, while commanding forces at Fort Davis, he set out with cavalry from both Forts Davis and Stockton and pursued a large raiding party of Indians from the Fort Davis area northeasterly until the trail moved into the great sand dune country near where the city of Monahans now stands. He spent fourteen days in this pursuit but as was usual in such matters, could never force an engagement. However, he learned that the heretofore dreaded sand dunes contained fresh water a few feet below the surface in several places, and that the area was a great refuge for Indians and was one of those rendezvous where horse-and-cattle stealing Indians met the Comanchero traders from New Mexico.

The command at Fort Concho, as at the other forts, rotated in a perpetual manner. After service elsewhere, Mackenzie returned to Concho to organize five companies of the 4th Cavalry and a headquarters company for service at Fort Richardson, nearer the Indian Territory. His column moved out March 27, 1871, cavalry, pack mules and wagons. The bachelor commander even allowed wives of the men to accompany the expedition as far as the new headquarters at Fort Richardson.

The weather was crisp and cold as they forded the North Concho and soon passed Mt. Margaret, named after “the most accomplished, loving and devoted wife of one of our favorite captains, E. B. Beaumont”—(Beaumont-Beautiful Mountain), so wrote Captain Robert G. Carter, historian and winner of The Congressional Medal of Honor in the Indian Wars, who was a member of the expedition. (Mt. Margaret is the outstanding hill at Tennison.) They pitched camp the first night at old Fort Chadbourne, from where they followed the military trail passing en route huge herds of buffalo, as they went on by old Forts Phantom Hill, Belknap and on into Richardson.

Two months later, in May, Colonel Mackenzie roused his 4th Cavalry at Fort Richardson and set out to obey General Sherman’s orders issued after the killing of the teamsters at Salt Creek. But it began to rain. After a futile chase Colonel Mackenzie headed for Fort Sill, commanded by Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson. There he learned that Sherman had left but not before the Chiefs Satank (Sitting Bear), Big Tree and Satanta (White Bear) had returned to the reservation at Sill and boasted of murdering the teamsters. Mackenzie arrested and escorted the three Indians to Jacksboro for trial in the Texas court. Satank purposely got himself killed by a guard on the march, but Satanta and Big Tree were later sentenced to prison in the state penitentiary at Huntsville. The duplicity of these reservation Indians should now have been apparent to even Grierson and the Indian lovers in Washington and Austin, but it was not.

A good insight into the Indian problem of the times, and of which we have a written record, appeared at the trial of the two Indian chiefs during July of 1871 in the little log courthouse on the public square of Jacksboro. Charles Soward was the presiding judge. Samuel W. T. Lanham, later to be a two term Governor of Texas, was the district attorney. The court appointed Thomas Fall and Joe Woolfork of the Weatherford Bar to represent the defendants.

Thomas Williams, the foreman of the Jury, was a frontier citizen and a brother of the Governor of Indiana.

The principal witnesses against the defendants were Colonel Mackenzie, Lawrie (or Lowerie) Tatum, the Indian Agent who had heard their statements at Fort Sill and Thomas Brazeal, the teamster who had escaped from the Salt Creek massacre.

Our Captain Carter wrote:

“Under a strong guard accompanied by his counsel and an interpreter, the Chief, clanking his chain, walked to the little log courthouse on the public square. The jury had been impaneled and the District Attorney bustled and flourished around. The whole country armed to the teeth crowded the courthouse and stood outside listening through the open windows. The Chief’s attorneys made a plea for him, and referred to the wrongs the red man had suffered. How he had been cheated and dispoiled of his lands and driven westward until it seemed there was no limit to the greed of the white man. They excused his crime as just retaliation for centuries of wrong. The jurors sat on long benches, each in his shirt sleeves and with shooting irons strapped to his hip.”

Satanta got up to defend himself before his accusers. Over six feet tall, the perfect figure of an athlete and well known as the orator of the plains who could sway councils of both whites and Indians, he could well have influenced the jury by mute silence, but instead he lied and dissembled to save his life. He never mentioned the wrongs done his people by the whites. Instead, speaking through the interpreter, he proceeded as follows:

... “I have never been so near the Tehannas (Texans) before. I look around me and see your braves, squaws and papooses, and I have said in my heart, if I ever get back to my people, I will never make war upon you. I have always been the friend of the white man, ever since I was so high (indicating by sign the height of a boy). My tribe have taunted me and called me a squaw because I have been the friend of the Tehannas. I am suffering now for the crimes of bad Indians—of Satank and Lone Wolf and Kicking Bird and Big Bow and Fast Bear and Eagle Heart, and if you will let me go, I will kill the three latter with my own hand....”

The evidence against the two Chiefs was debated by the jury and both were sentenced to death. This sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

Now, a few statements from the court record as to what the District Attorney had to say point to some of the misunderstandings of the times when it came to the Indian problems on the western frontiers.

The following excerpts from his plea before the court show clearly, not only the feelings of the frontiersmen towards the uncontrolled Indians, but also the contempt in which they, both frontiersmen and Indians, held the people who by appeasement, crookedness and ignorance tried to manage the Indian affairs of the nation from a far away city:

“Satanta, the veteran council chief of the Kiowas—the orator—the diplomat—the counselor of his tribe—the pulse of his race; Big Tree, the young war chief, who leads in the thickest of the fight, and follows no one in the chase—the mighty warrior, with the speed of the deer and the eye of the eagle, are before this bar in the charge of the law! So they would be described by Indian admirers, who live in more secured and favored lands, remote from the frontier—where ‘distance lends enchantment’ to the imagination—where the story of Pocohantas and the speech of Logan, the Mingo, are read, and the dread sound of the warwhoop is not heard. We who see them today, disrobed of all their fancied graces exposed in the light of reality, behold them through far different lenses. We recognize in Satanta the arch fiend of treachery and blood, the cunning Cataline—the promoter of strife—the breaker of treaties signed by his own hand—the inciter of his fellows to rapine and murder, as well as the most canting and double-tongued hypocrite where detected and overcome! In Big Tree, we perceive the tiger-demon who tasted blood and loved it as his own food—who stops at no crime how black soever—who is swift at every species of ferocity and pities not at any sight of agony or death—he can scalp, burn, torture, mangle and deface his victims, with all the superlatives of cruelty, and have no feeling of sympathy or remorse. We look in vain to see, in them, anything to be admired or even endured. Powerful legislative influences have been brought to bear to procure for them annuities, reservations and supplies. Federal munificence has fostered and nourished them, fed and clothed them; from their strongholds of protection they have come down upon us ‘like wolves on the fold’; treaties have been solemnly made with them, wherein they have been considered with all the formalities of quasi nationalities; immense financial ‘rings’ have had their origin in, and draw their vitality from, the ‘Indian question’; unblushing corruption has stalked abroad, created and kept alive through

“‘—the poor Indian, whose untutored mind, Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.’

“... For many years, predatory and numerous bands of these ‘pets of the government’ have waged the most relentless and heart-rending warfare upon our frontier, stealing our property and killing our citizens. We have cried aloud for help.... It is a fact, well known in Texas, that stolen property has been traced to the very doors of the reservation and there identified by our people, to no purpose....”

Mackenzie realized those things and knew he could receive no cooperation from Grierson at Fort Sill, so in September, acting on orders, concentrated a force of eight companies of the 4th Cavalry, two companies of the 11th Infantry and thirty Tonkawa Indian scouts at old Camp Cooper near Fort Griffin. The infantry would be used to guard the supply bases as he moved northwesterly in the hope of engaging the wild brethren under Chief Quanah. He bivouaced in the mouth of Blanco Canyon and lost sixty odd horses to an Indian raid that night. The next day the command moved up the canyon and later came out on the flat prairie of the Llano Estacado. A large retreating body of Indians was sighted but a Norther blew up, and Mackenzie was forced back down the canyon by the cold weather. He withdrew to Fort Richardson where the command arrived in late November. He accomplished nothing and as for himself, he received an arrow wound during a small skirmish in the canyon.

With the coming of spring, things picked up. Mackenzie received orders in May to establish a camp of cavalry and infantry on the Fresh Fork of the Brazos, from which his cavalry should operate in pursuit of hostile Indians. He moved out of Fort Richardson in June while Shafter at Fort Concho organized wagon trains and supplies, these coming from as far away as Fort Brown. He was to meet Mackenzie near the mouth of Blanco Canyon, where the base was to be established. By September, 1872, Mackenzie and his cavalry had moved from Blanco Canyon to Fort Sumner (New Mexico), thence north to Fort Bascom (New Mexico), then southeasterly to Palo Duro Canyon and south to his base camp in Blanco Canyon. He had found no Indians or Comancheros, but he had followed well marked Comanchero trails across the Llano Estacado and had no trouble in finding water holes. The Staked Plains were not nearly so tough as the high army echelons had been led to believe.

Puzzled by the lack of Indians he set out for the headwaters of the Red River and on September 29, discovered a large camp on a tributary of the Red, northeast of Palo Duro. He immediately attacked with five companies of cavalry, routed the braves, burned 262 Indian lodges, and captured 127 women and children, and an estimated 3,000 head of horses. His own losses were light if we except the fact that the Indian braves returned that night and recovered all of their horses by stampeding them. Mackenzie never forgot that midnight raid.

This drubbing had a salutary effect on the Indians. The captives were sent to Fort Concho for prisoner exchange, and many warriors sought safety on the reservations. Their Chief Satank was dead and Chiefs Satanta and Big Tree were in the penitentiary at Huntsville. The next spring the remaining one hundred captive women and children at Fort Concho were delivered back to the reservation at Fort Sill amid great rejoicing by the braves. They began to feel that the pale face was not such a bad hombre after all. Evetts Haley says that some of the braves so seriously considered settling down that they even sent their women into the fields to see what work was like.

Things now looked better and the Indian lovers persuaded Governor Edmund J. Davis to issue pardons to Satanta and Big Tree. This infuriated General Sherman. That was in April of 1873. Trouble immediately started again.