Lone Star (107 page)

In the melee, while the Rangers fired at fleeing Indian forms, Charles Goodnight saw the wind blow back the blanket from one face. He saw dirty yellow hair and blue eyes. "Don't shoot her!" Goodnight yelled. "She's white!"

The blue-eyed woman was taken prisoner. Captain Ross agreed that she was undoubtedly Caucasian, although her skin was sun-darkened and her light hair was greased with buffalo dung. She carried an eighteen-month-old baby girl. She could speak no English; her name was Naduah, and her daughter's name was Topsanah, or Flower. Ross carried her back to civilization by force. Here she was positively identified as Cynthia Ann Parker—she recognized the name.

The Parker family had become prominent and respected in Texas. The family took her back, and did everything they could for her. The state of Texas voted her a pension of $100 a year, and granted her a league of land. But Cynthia Ann had lived as a Comanche for twenty-five years. Her husband and children were Comanche. She tried to escape, and had to be put under guard.

Topsanah died from civilization four years after she was taken; the little girl never adjusted. Naduah, to the horror of her relatives, behaved like an Indian mother. She scarified her breast in self-mutilation, prayed to the Amerind spirits, and starved herself to death.

Out on the plains, Peta Nacona took no other wife. He died from an infected wound. His younger son, Pecos or Peanut, succumbed to disease; Comanche lives were always apt to be short. Quanah, however, grew tall and strong. He showed great intelligence and force of character. In his twenties, he was the acknowledged leader of the tribe. Blood, the Texans said, would tell.

In 1874, while the remnants of the Southern tribes were holding council, hide hunters descended into the Panhandle from Dodge City, Kansas. Dodge was the nearest railhead, and the starting point for most hunters at this time. To find bison, however, the hunters were having to range further and further south, out onto the Staked Plains, the last great buffalo grounds. By the Treaty of Medicine Lodge this area was forbidden to white hunters, but the hunters had tacit army approval. They erected a base camp called Adobe Walls, because it was the site of an old trading post built by William Bent in 1844, when Americans and Comanches were still at peace. Adobe Walls grew into a small fortified town, while the hide hunters based there made a shambles of the richest game area left in North America.

They precipitated the last great Indian war in Texas.

On the night of June 27, 1874, Quanah led the five tribes against Adobe Walls. There were twenty-eight hunters and one white woman in the camp. Quanah struck in the early hours of morning, but, quite by accident, a hunter saw them coming and gave the warning. Failing to achieve surprise, the Indians still pressed the attack. Here they made a great mistake. The white men were superb shots, who made their living handling .50-caliber Sharps. From behind cover, the heavy rifles smashed back the Indian assault. One brave was knocked from his horse by a spent ball at a range of more than 1,500 yards.

Quanah and many of the most prominent warriors were shot from their horses in the charge. Quanah lived only because he crawled behind a mouldering bison carcass outside the walls. For three days, unable to ride the camp down, the assembled bands laid siege. They were well armed with carbines, but they were no match for buffalo hunters in this kind of war. The tribes lost heart; the alliance came apart. One Cheyenne struck the disgraced prophet, Isa-Tai, with his quirt, when the medicine man claimed the attack had failed because a Cheyenne, the day before, had destroyed the Indian medicine by killing a skunk.

The Indians departed, carrying fifteen dead and many more wounded by the terrible buffalo guns.

However, the hide hunters suffered. The battle at Adobe Walls marked the beginning of a widespread war. The bands split up, but they carried death and destruction across five territories and states. Parties of hunters were caught in the open and butchered; all of them fled into Texas or back to Dodge. The hunting season closed abruptly. From Texas to Colorado and from New Mexico to Kansas, this last great uprising killed 190 whites.

Large numbers of Plains Indians left the Territory reservations. One chief of the Comanches, Tabananica, stated he would live on the Plains even if he had to eat dung.

This uprising, and the attack on the buffalo hunters, broke the dam of official opposition to removing
all
Indians from the Plains. The "Quaker Peace Policy," as it was always called in Texas, came to an end. The new policy was to drive the Indians onto the reservations, and to keep them there by force. The freedom of all Indians was to be ended, and the Plains culture destroyed. After thirty years of contact, the leaders of the army convinced the government that President Lamar of Texas had been right. Nature forbade the Amerind from living in peace with the white man, and future peace was to be wholly on Anglo-American terms.

Mackenzie was at Fort Clark in August 1874. He was ordered to move against the Indians, intercept them wherever he found them on the Plains, and to "break up their camps." The Army was now allowed to pursue and fight on the allotted reservations. There was to be no sanctuary—something the army had demanded for years. Mackenzie received orders to command the "Southern column" and march from Fort Concho, in conjunction with Miles, moving from Leavenworth, and Davidson and Buell, operating out of Sill.
 

Price was to attack east from New Mexico. The Panhandle Indians were to be encircled and ground down from all sides.

Not the Texans, nor the Rangers, nor even the pressure of population was to bring a final end to the Indian wars. It was to be done by the regular army, a fact not always clearly understood in later years. But until the 1870s, the U.S. government failed to take the steps that the State of Texas had been demanding for decades. The new policy was essentially the same that had been carried out in the Jacksonian years: a removal of the Indians. It was the culmination of a conflict that had begun three hundred years before.

In the next few years, there were to be campaigns and conflicts all over the West, reaching to the Dakotas and Montana. But Mackenzie opened the last great struggle. He moved out onto the Plains with powerful forces, well mounted, well supplied, well armed. This was no longer a mere punitive expedition, but a well-planned, coordinated, and sustained campaign.

Finding the Kiowas and Comanches, however, was like finding a few ships on the vast sea. At first the Indians more often found Mackenzie. They circled his columns by moonlight—a "wonderful spectacle . . . in gaudy paint and feathers" as one of his officers wrote. There were brushes and light contact battles. The volatile Comanches struck, and "disappeared as if by magic." They harassed the infantry, which the army still stubbornly insisted on dispatching along with the cavalry, until the foot troops were mounted in wagons pulled by mules. The wagons could not pursue, but they made excellent forts.

Ranald Mackenzie had had long and frustrating experience on the Comanche frontier. He knew there was only one solution to this kind of war, which was to press the Indians without mercy, find their camps, and destroy them. The Indians were vulnerable in one way; they carried their women, children, and all their own supplies with them on campaign. Mackenzie knew it was almost impossible to defeat all the bands in open battle, because the Indians did not fight that way. Somewhere, he already knew, in the unmapped stretches of the Panhandle, the Indians had a great camp.

The official records of the Southern Column do not tell the whole story of how Mackenzie found Quanah Parker and Lone Wolf. The true tale had to come from the civilian and Tonkawa scouts. The only "civilized" men who knew the Comanche country, and had contact with the hostiles, were the despised half-breed Comancheros, who had traded out of New Mexico with the tribes for generations. These Comancheros, who were partly Mexican, with the blood of several tribes, took the horses, loot, and sometimes captives of the Comanches, in exchange for ammunition and guns. The sale of Texas horses, and sometimes Texas cattle, was a large business in the New Mexico settlements in these years. The army had come to look on the Comancheros much as the Texans did—as renegades beyond all civilized law. Mackenzie caught a Comanchero, José Tafoya, who knew Quanah well. He had Tafoya spread against a wagon wheel, and finally, the Comanchero talked. None of the soldiers mentioned this; no horse soldier in Texas would make trouble for Ranald Mackenzie. But Quanah Parker, later, said grimly. "if he ever laid eyes on Tafoya, he would broil him in the fire." Tafoya told the scouts, led by Lieutenant Thompson and Sergeant John Charlton, where Quanah and the main body of the Comanches were hidden.

On September 27, 1874, Charlton rode out with Johnson and Job, two Tonkawa scouts from the thirty-five Texan plainsmen and Indians Mackenzie had hired. They moved some twenty-five miles from the column, seeing nothing but leagues of waving, rich grass. The Staked Plains were an almost perfectly level, high plateau, mile after endless mile—but they were cut with awe-inspiring canyons, fissured by centuries of stream erosion through the Tertiary soils down into the limestone.

Charlton and the two Indians reached the Palo Duro, a tremendous ditch cut below the surface of the Plains by a small stream. The three men crawled on hands and knees to the lip of this vast crevasse and peered over. Far below, on the canyon meadows, they could see hundreds of horses grazing, and Indian teepees strung out along the stream bed for three miles. "Heap Injun," Johnson, the Tonkawa, told Charlton. Charlton agreed. The scouts carefully slipped back to their horses and rode as fast as they could to tell Mackenzie.

Mackenzie had six hundred soldiers. He left one company of cavalry to protect his supply train at Tule Canyon, and mounted all the rest at dark. He marched all night, and at dawn on September 28 reached the edge of the Palo Duro.

The scouts were in advance of the main column, as always. The Colonel rode up to the point, and told Lieutenant William Thompson, his chief of scouts; "Mr. Thompson, take your men down and open the fight." There was a single trail leading down the canyon, which could only be traversed by men on foot, leading their horses. Mackenzie, wisely, wanted the scouts to reach the valley first.

The scouts went down, knocking off the sentries, but before they reached bottom, the Indian camp was aroused. Behind the scouts, in single file, passed company after company of cavalry, forming into line as quickly as they could on the valley floor. Mackenzie sent the first company formed, A, to stampede the Indian horse herd. Mackenzie himself attacked with L and H.

The Comanches, peerless on horseback, were caught in their teepees, away from the horseherd. Beaumont, with A Company, reached the
caballado
first. He drove it before him, while many of the screaming braves fruitlessly pursued the horses on foot. The Comanches then followed their usual tactics. The warriors set up a heavy covering fire along the stream, delaying the cavalry until the women and children could flee. The Comanches executed this well; all of the women were able to escape down the canyon. Then, the warriors, a huge swarm, followed. Mackenzie was not able to pursue, nor did he venture.

Thus, at dawn on September 28, 1874, the battle on the surface seemed an indecisive action. Only four Indians were killed, and several cavalrymen wounded. Mackenzie, however, had struck the death blow of the Comanche nation. He gave orders to burn all the teepees and Comanche supplies. Although the Tonkawas did much looting, huge stocks of food and provisions were set afire. Mackenzie burned flour, sugar, blankets, meat, and many new repeating rifles, which the startled Indians had abandoned.

Charlton and the scouts drove the captured remuda, 1,400 horses, back up the canyon trail, and across the plains to Tule Canyon. Charlton had been in the saddle now for forty-eight hours, and once Mackenzie snarled at him to wake up. He had fallen asleep, and was dozing as he rode.

"Shoot the Indian horses," Mackenzie said. There was no other way; the Army could not manage them, and it was imperative, as Mackenzie wrote, for the Indians not to get them. The shrieking animals were shot down in a thunderous roar of firing, more shooting than had been done in Palo Duro. For years afterward, thousands of horse bones lay whitening here, a stark monument on the Plains.

Ironically, few people appreciated Ranald Mackenzie's victory. He had not destroyed Quanah Parker with blaring bugles and flashing sabers, and all the things the Eastern papers loved to print. As Sergeant Charlton wrote much later: "My thoughts . . . go back to the grey dawn . . . when a column of blue-clad, tired, hungry men drew rein on the brow of Palo Duro Cañon, went down into the jaws of death; fought a winning fight and rode back unheralded. . . ."

Mackenzie, who was probably the single most effective Indian fighter on the Plains, never became an American hero like Custer. He did not fight like a Civil War hero; he fought Indians their own way, until they sickened of it.

At the Palo Duro, the Indians got away; women scrambled up the canyon walls, warriors helped each other climb the bluffs. But out on the Plains, although Mackenzie's troopers were too used up to pursue, the Indian plight was desperate. A dehorsed Plains Indian was a pitiable thing; he could not fight or find food; a part of his manhood was taken away. The Cheyennes and Kiowas who had been with Quanah Parker went their separate ways; the last fragile alliance of the southern tribes ended here. On the Plains, the Indians could not even carry the few supplies and goods they had salvaged from the canyon. Their trails were strewn with abandoned possessions.