Lone Star (4 page)

Above the country of the Coahuiltecans, over the Balcones Escarpment, lived the Tonkawas, whose name for themselves was Tickanwatick, or "the most human of men." They ranged across the great Edwards Plateau to the Brazos valley. The Tonkawas were not one tribe, but a group of tribes; their language was apparently unrelated to any other Amerind stock, but perhaps derived from Hokan. So far as can be told, Tonkawas had lived on the central plateau from time immemorial; they may have replaced the first Old Americans. They lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering fruits, nuts, and berries. The Tonkawa culture was that typical of the pre-horse southern Plains Indians; they lived on the edge of bison country, in buffalo-hide tepees, and they used large dogs as beasts of burden. They had evolved the clan organization, with both civil and military authorities. Like most Texas natives, they tattooed their bodies, wore breechclouts and long hide moccasins; in winter they donned buckskin shirts and warm buffalo robes. They carried bows, their principal weapon, and long Plains lances, and they dipped their dart heads in mistletoe juice—presumably in the hope of poisoning them. Fray Morfi, a Spanish priest who wrote about Tonkawas in the middle of the 18th century, called them "a terrible and bellicose nation . . . they live for warfare, robbery, and the chase."

The Tonkawas, however, did not hunt or raid very high on the Texas plains; they were confined to the Edwards Plateau. Another, fiercer tribe was lord of the rich buffalo grounds.

At some recent but unknown date, a new race appeared out of the north to harry the spreading Puebloan cultures of the Rocky Mountains. The new men spoke Athapaskan, a language whose traditional homeland was the far Northwest, Canada, and Alaska. These tribes must have wandered for many years south across the Great Plains, finally entering the eastern Rockies. In the passage, they had become exceedingly warlike and unusually fierce and skilled at fighting. These were the Apaches, who looked on all other Amerinds as enemies.

The Apache invasion of the Southwest caused reverberations that still lingered in tribal wars and tribal hatreds until the last years of the 19th century. Apaches raided through a vast region, from modern Kansas to Arizona to deep in Mexico. They pushed out some of the former tribes, exterminated others, and settled down in their new homeland to ceaseless warfare with the rest. They split into two great divisions, the Eastern and Western Apaches. The Western tribes, Navaho, San Carlos, Chiricahua, and Mescalero, carved out a place in the southern Rockies; they became Arizona- and New Mexico–based. They ceased to be wholly nomadic; they learned rudimentary agriculture from the various Puebloan cultures, which they continually harassed, but they never lost their traditional warlike spirit. They remained raiders and marauders to the last.

Each Apache tribe or group was influenced by its new locale. The Eastern Apaches—Jicarillas, Palomas, Carlanas, Lipans, and others—apparently destroyed the Puebloan cultures of the Texas Panhandle, forced the town-dwellers back into the mountains of New Mexico, and made themselves masters of the High Plains. They ranged as far north as the Dismal River in Nebraska, and south into Mexico. They harried all the surviving Puebloan tribes, and began to exterminate the Jumanos of the Trans-Pecos Texas area. They kept Tonkawas and others far to the east and south, away from the richest of the bison plains. Halfway between the endless plains and the eastern Rockies, they made semipermanent settlements. One tribe, the Jicarillas, even began to use irrigation on their fields of corn. But, above all else, the Eastern Apaches learned to live off the buffalo.

As during the Pleistocene, the richest game area in North America lay on the High Plains that ended almost indiscernibly in the central Texas plateau. Here there were millions upon millions of American bison, as well as elk, deer, and antelope. Each spring and fall the bison congregated on the southern plains, moving north in a seemingly aimless pattern during the summer. Anthropologists believe that the typical buffalo-hunting cultures of the Plains evolved first in Texas, then spread north; the Eastern Apaches were certainly the dominant prototype.

The plainsman based his life and culture—aside from war, which was already deep-seated—upon the bison. The great hunts took place in spring and fall, when small herds were surrounded by men on foot and shot with arrows until all beasts were dead. The bison was a remarkably vulnerable animal in many ways. It did not frighten or stampede unless it smelled the scent of an enemy, and men downwind from a herd could sometimes kill hundreds of beasts in one spot; the sight of falling buffalo, or the odor of blood, did not start the rest. Sometimes herds were deliberately stampeded into canyons, or over deep furrows in the ground, where the trapped or injured animals could be killed and skinned at leisure.

Immediately, the dead bison were opened with flint knives, and raw livers and other delicacies eaten on the spot. This work—in fact, all work—was done by women, either of the tribe or slaves; men's labor was confined to the hunt or war. Buffalo carcasses were then roasted. The intestines were often cooked whole, as a special treat. Some lean flesh was sun-dried, or jerked, to carry over the winter or on the trail. Buffalo guts were cleaned out and used as bags to store precious water. Buffalo bones made picks and tools.

The hides were used for shelter, clothing, and blankets. The Apaches made comfortable and ingenious tepees of buffalo skins, with light frames of sotol poles. These tents, actually dryer, warmer, and more airy than log cabins, were flapped with bearskins for doors, and open at the top for escaping smoke. Four to twelve people lived in one tepee. Wood or dung fires were built in their centers, and they were furnished with hide blankets spread over soft beds of dry grass. Tepees shone red and white against the sun, and the bison hide was tanned so fine that rain could not penetrate or even stiffen it.

In the hot months, Apaches wore very little—breechclouts or buckskin skirts and moccasins. Their coppery skin, like that of all Amerinds, was sun-resistant. In winter, they put on deerskin shirts or wore heavy buffalo robes. Outside of his clothing, his flint-edged weapons, and his tents, the Apache owned nothing. It was simple, a matter of minutes, to strike his tents and move, and so far as possible, during the hunting seasons, the tribes formed long caravans and followed the migrating bison herds. Shaggy dogs pulled the ingenious Plains travois, while scouts and warriors ranged far ahead.

But Apaches on foot were simply not equipped to exploit the Plains to the fullest. The High Plains were beautiful and flowering in spring or after the widely scattered summer rains, but other times, and in summer, they turned to broiling near-desert. The water holes dried and the grass withered. The buffalo followed the rain and grass, and in the hottest months, heavy-hided, they went north to avoid the terrible sun. The herds moved too far and too fast across endless, almost waterless country for walking hunters to follow. The Apaches prized deer, antelope, and bear for their meat and fine hides, and the bear especially for its fat. But these animals, while numerous, were not so easily killed as the staple buffalo.

Therefore, the first Plains Amerinds had to supplement their economy with other foods. They learned rudimentary agriculture from the harassed Puebloan cultures of the upper Rio Grande, and planted beans, maize, squash, and pumpkins, usually on small plots alongside the infrequent rivers and streams. While these crops ripened, Apache bands settled down for long periods in tent villages beside the waters. The Spaniards gave these semipermanent camps the name
rancherías
, which clung, just as they gave the Athapaskans the title Apache, from the Puebloan Zuñi word meaning "enemy." A Spanish explorer claimed to have seen a
ranchería
of "five thousand souls" on the headwaters of the Arkansas—probably a gross exaggeration.

Although they had one foot on the Great Plains and the other imperfectly affixed to the land, the Apaches clearly were the lords of high Texas. They dominated the region, and their power extended so far as they cared to bring it. Apache bands roamed as far as the Red River in northeastern Texas, and warred with the Tonkawas along the Balcones Escarpment. The areas they did not penetrate (the barren Karankawa coastal bend, the pine woods of the Caddos, and the Coahuiltecan southern triangle between the Gulf and the Rio Grande) they simply did not want.

The Apache society never climbed to true barbarism, but remained savage throughout its independent history. The borders of the rich bison plains acted as a brake upon agriculture. The culture continued half hunting, half farming, unable, or unwilling, to make the most of either way of life.

More important, Apache society was remarkably fragmented, even by Amerind standards. The "nations" the Spaniards continually wrote about were nations only in the Spanish descriptive term: they could not even be called true tribes. These uncommonly fierce warriors took no orders, not even from their own kind. Their social organization never evolved beyond the kinship band, nor political organization beyond the warrior and his sometime leader, the band chief. The T'Inde, or People, were only several thousands of men, women, and children who shared a common language and a common way of life—and in the Southwest, even these began to shatter and separate. The Navajos soon ceased to consider themselves Apaches, though they were still nomadic and Athapaskan-speaking. Important cultural differences developed between the Eastern and the Western tribal groups.

In this intensely democratic way of life, all warriors were not only theoretically but actually equal. The center of society was the warrior and his personal family group: wives, children, slaves. Each family group was self-sufficient; brothers espoused dead brothers' wives, because in a society devoid of organization there could be no orphans or widows. There were both civil and war chiefs, but no one appointed them. A warrior became a chief through exploits, experience, and his prestige, which might attract other warriors around him. Warriors obeyed a chief implicitly on the war trail—a taboo with discernible logical roots—but they joined his war party purely at their own option. A chief who failed, or made unwise decisions, was quickly abandoned. Any male who disliked or disagreed with a band leader could find a more congenial band, or start his own. Thus chieftainship in the Apaches was elective in the truest sense.

Women were not exactly chattels, though they did the labor and were expected to serve warriors. They had to be protected and provided for. The Apaches, like most tribes, often found wives by raiding other Amerinds; boys, as well as girls, were frequently carried away into captivity to augment the numbers of a band. While the first Europeans, accustomed to chattel slavery, called the Apache captives slaves, these prisoners were usually adopted into the tribe with full rights. Women were married to warriors; young males were allowed to become Apache warriors. Ironically, this Amerind lack of prejudice dismayed and horrified European women captives as much as the Apache custom of physical torture of captured males.

Apaches had strict moral codes and taboos, which made as much sense, in their circumstances, as such codes everywhere. Children were treated permissively until they began to develop; then they were taught the disciplines of work or war, according to sex. Boys were trained and hardened for the chase and fighting. Boys became warriors when they were old enough; the words man and warrior were synonymous.

The Apaches had a vague belief in a supreme being, but their religion was largely shamanistic and revolved around certain folkloric deities, such as the Killer of Enemies, a powerful, supernatural creature that befriended Apaches. The Apaches were children of the sun, sprung from mother earth, finely attuned to the mysterious world around them. They were more influenced by the land than by ideas. They did have a supernatural horror of the dead, or the spirits of the dead, an Athapaskan cultural residue carried down from the gloomy Northwest.

The only genuine socializing acts of the Apaches were the hunt and war, because here numbers and cooperation counted. But both were sporadic actions, and never cemented the bands together. Families and bands of Apaches lived beside each other along streams, or on the hunting grounds, but always in individual states of splendid isolation. The Apaches feared nothing that walked or breathed, and thus there was no external force, even danger, to hold the tribes together or to keep the People strong.

Chapter 2

CORONADO AND COMANCHES

I have done all that I could possibly do to serve Your Majesty and to discover a country where God our Lord might be served and the royal patrimony of Your Majesty increased . . .

FROM THE REPORT OF DON FRANCISCO VÁSQUEZ DE CORONADO TO THE KING OF SPAIN

IN the burning midsummer of the year 1540, a new and powerful invader burst into the American Southwest, not from the north but out of Mexico. This was the fateful expedition of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, Governor of Nueva Galicia, who rode in golden armor at the van of a powerful army: more than three hundred Spaniards in shining steel, accompanied by conquered Mexican Indian allies and women, with priests walking in the apostolic fashion, and with the red and gold banners of Spain, and the Cross, going on before.

This, with Hernando de Soto's expedition proceeding further east, was the last and largest of the great
entradas
of the
conquistadores
. It was an extension of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and for many decades afterward marked its limits.