The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (28 page)

Slowly, however, some effort was made to establish order out of the chaos. In May, two western lines of defense were established, with Henry McCulloch having the north line from the Red River south to the junction of the two branches of the Concho River (the site of modern San Angelo). The second line, under Rip Ford, covered the San Antonio– El Paso Road from Fort Bliss at El Paso to Camp Wood east of Uvalde.

The situation was less serious on the far western frontier, beyond the Pecos River, partly because few settlers had ventured to that extent, but largely because intertribal warfare kept the Comanches and Apaches too busy fighting each other to concern themselves with the whites. Although the specter of Cortina still loomed along the Rio Grande, the region remained relatively quiet.
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The critical area was the northwest frontier, where, according to Buck Barry,

[t]he settlements . . . had been moving westward a few miles each year but were subjected to constant depredations from the wild Indians of the plains. . . . Because of the very nature of the incursions of the Indians, their superb horsemanship, and rapid movements they could only be overtaken if immediately pursued. Even then when a pursuit was about to overtake them, they would often scatter and hide themselves.
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To counter this, McCulloch looked for horsemen of proven courage and physical stamina who were familiar with the country and with the Indians and who could take to the field at a moment’s notice. They not only were expected to patrol the line of defense, but to range far to the north, hunting out the Indians responsible for the depredations. Over the ensuing months, the different Ranger units made weekly scouts, overlapping and linking up with the scouting parties from other companies. They also furnished guards for wagon trains carrying supplies to other Ranger stations, and in July 1861, a ten-man detail returning to Camp Cooper from escorting a train to the Red River Station had a fight with almost fifty Indians on the Little Wichita River, some fifty miles north of Cooper. Seven Rangers were wounded, four seriously and one mortally, and five horses were killed during the fight, which lasted several hours.

Three days later, on July 29, Buck Barry and thirty-two Rangers got into a running battle with about seventy Indians. Over the fifteen-mile course of the fight, three Rangers died and, Barry estimated, at least a dozen Indians were killed. The Indians broke off and fled when their chief fell, and Barry followed them beyond the Wichita Mountains, where he lost the trail among the numerous buffalo herds.
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DESPITE SPORADIC OUTBURSTS,
raids were light during the opening months of 1862, because a smallpox epidemic had broken out among the Plains tribes. Thus Texas got a reprieve, although it was short-lived.
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By the middle of the year, raiding resumed. Both Union and Confederate agents attempted to keep the Indians stirred up, each hoping that Indian depredations on the frontier would harm the war effort of the other. As one Kiowa chief later observed, “Our people. . . carried war against Texas. We thought the Great Father would not be offended for the Texans had gone out from among his people and become his enemies.”
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Cattleman Oliver Loving reported to Governor Francis Lubbock that during a trip to Colorado in 1862,

I saw a large number of Comanche with some four or five thousand horses that have be[e]n stolen from Texas. These Indians are fed by the U.S. Posts at Fort Adams on the Arkansas and Fort Bent, and the Indians are paid by the U.S. Troops occupying these parts for all the scalps taken from Texas. They are perfectly friendly with the U.S. Troops an[d] in fact with all except Texans. I am satisfied that we will not have any rest from these Indians until we go to their general rendezvous and destroy them.

Loving recommended raising “three or four companies” of volunteer Rangers to augment the existing Frontier Regiment, not only to strike back at the Indians but to stop the raids at what he considered their source by capturing the U.S. posts in the area.
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The allegation that the United States was buying hair no doubt was an exaggeration, but there is no question that federal authorities did encourage raids—as did Confederates—as much to draw the Indians away from their own respective frontiers as to harass the enemy. And Loving’s belief that Texas frontier forces could take U.S. military installations, while overly optimistic, indicated that the people had far more faith in their Rangers than in the general government in faraway Richmond.

The Frontier Regiment that Loving’s hypothetical companies would augment had been authorized by the legislature at Governor Lubbock’s behest on December 21, 1861. It had two purposes: to carry the war to the Indians, and to make sure that these troops would remain under state control. The governor realized that McCulloch’s troops, attached as they were to the Confederate Army, were subject to Confederate authority and could be redeployed according to the military needs of the South. The Frontier Regiment, begun essentially as a Ranger outfit, would answer exclusively to the state. The act called for ten companies, nine of which would be raised from a list of specific counties on the northwest and western frontiers and one from throughout the state. They would be divided into detachments of twenty-five men, with each detachment maintaining a post one day’s ride from the next. In that fashion, the legislature hoped to secure the entire line from the Red River south and west to the Rio Grande.

The problem was supply and equipment. The state did not have the resources to equip this force of Rangers, any more than it had been able to provide for them under U.S. jurisdiction. Just as the Texans had hoped that the federal government would pay and provision the Rangers for assisting the army, so they now appealed to Richmond, and the Confederate Congress responded with appropriate legislation. The bill, however, was vetoed by President Davis on the grounds that the general government could not support an armed force that was under the exclusive jurisdiction of the state. During the two years of its existence as a state Ranger unit, the Frontier Regiment subsisted as best it could, while the politicians in Austin and Richmond argued over responsibility.
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THE FRONTIER REGIMENT
began organizing in January 1862. Col. James Norris was appointed commanding officer, with Lt. Col. Alfred J. Obenchain and Maj. James E. McCord subordinates. They would replace McCulloch’s Mounted Rifles, who, to their disgust, found their own enlistments extended on the Confederate draft and were reorganized into what later became the First Texas Cavalry. As McCulloch’s citizens-turned-soldiers reported to Fort Mason for reorganization, their places on the frontier were taken by Colonel Norris’s Rangers.
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Colonel Obenchain took direct command of Capt. J. J. Cureton’s Company B at Fort Belknap. Although he wanted to fight and his intentions were honorable, Obenchain was singularly unqualified for field command.

“He must have got the command because there was nobody else to get for an officer,” Ranger Charles Goodnight remarked. “He had no idea of frontier service and would give the scout enough work in one day to do for two. We did not pretend to obey orders. We would get out of his sight and do the best we could.”
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Obenchain’s spit-and-polish attitude and his insistence that officers should not associate with rank and file did not fit with the casual structure of Ranger units, nor with the close-knit society of the frontier. The colonel further infuriated them on scouting expeditions when he camped apart from the others in a tent. “Some of us scarcely had shirts,” Goodnight complained.

Cureton, on the other hand, was a frontiersman who was close to the men. Given the different backgrounds and personalities, trouble was bound to develop. Cureton openly defied orders he considered unnecessary and unreasonable, and he was supported by the men. Relations continued to deteriorate until June, when Obenchain placed Cureton under arrest for insubordination.

With Cureton confined to post, Obenchain alone led the next expedition against Indians. Knowing little about the terrain, he took his men out toward the waterless country of the Staked Plains, exhausting both Rangers and horses. After wandering through the area for several days, he decided to take a small party of volunteers and scout Blanco Canyon, leaving the main body in camp. About ten miles out, Obenchain and his volunteers—almost all of whom were raw recruits—were jumped by Indians. As the others held off the attack, Ranger Sid Davidson took a fast horse and rode for help. Several warriors chased him but could not catch him, and knowing Davidson had ridden for help, they broke off the fight and retreated. Upon arriving, the main company of Rangers took up the chase, finally losing the Indians in the rough country around Quitaque Canyon, about forty miles beyond.

When the company finally returned to the settlements, Obenchain filed formal charges against Captain Cureton. The men were now thoroughly disgusted, and there were murmurings in the ranks. Although technically Obenchain was in the right because of Cureton’s defiance, such discipline hardly applied in a Ranger company, where leadership was based on judgment, skill, valor, and confidence of the men.

Several weeks later, Obenchain started toward regimental headquarters at Camp Colorado accompanied by two Rangers who openly despised him. He never arrived, and a search party found his remains several days later. One of the two Rangers fled to Colorado Territory and the other was captured and died in the penitentiary. Two weeks later, Cureton was found guilty of the charges against him, and was suspended from rank and pay for three months and publicly reprimanded.
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AS THE WAR
progressed, recruitment for the frontier became increasingly difficult. Not that the Texans were adverse to Indian fighting—that was part of their character. But with the military situation in the East requiring more and more manpower, many were afraid that if they volunteered for Ranger service they ultimately would be drafted into the army “to leave homes and families unprotected.” After a particularly bad raid in Tarrant County in the summer of 1863, local Ranger companies were mustered only after Confederate officers gave assurances that they would be allowed to remain near their homes because the government “intended to defend every portion of the State.” Equally concerned, Governor Lubbock wrote Rip Ford, now commandant of conscripts in Texas, recommending that able-bodied men who joined the frontier defense force be exempted from the Confederate draft on the grounds “that they are necessary for the protection of the Frontier Counties, and that the time has come that their services are necessary for the purpose. . . .”
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The crisis was not due to lack of effort on the part of the Frontier Regiment. It was doing the best it could against an impossible situation. The problem was simply that a single regiment of six hundred to eight hundred Rangers was being expected to do what one quarter of the United States Army had been unable to do in the 1850s—maintain peace on the Texas frontier. And the military resources of the Confederacy were far less than those of the United States.

AS FAR AS
Indian raids were concerned, the closing days of 1863 and the year of 1864 were among the worst in the history of Texas. During the final weeks of December 1863, Indians crossed the Red River from Oklahoma and rampaged through the adjacent counties, burning and killing. This, however, was a portent of things to come in the long, bloody year of 1864 as the tribes took advantage of the chaotic conditions that the Civil War brought to the frontier. Both North and South had courted the Plains tribes, each attempting to make treaties to secure their own frontiers while directing the Indians against the other. By now, however, the tribes were entirely out of hand.

The situation in Texas was so bad that many families on the northwest frontier along the Clear Fork of the Brazos River abandoned their homes, moving to the comparative safety of the interior settlements. Several northern counties were almost completely deserted, and on March 26, Governor Pendleton Murrah, who succeeded Lubbock, issued a proclamation “forbidding the immigration to, and settlement in, any of the unorganized counties of this State” for the duration of the war. Anyone attempting to settle would be subject to military conscription, and the “officers of the frontier organization” were ordered to arrest offenders and turn them over to Confederate military authorities.
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Despite the best intentions of the Ranger forces, neither Texas nor the Confederacy had the military capacity to carry the war to the Indians. The federal government, however, did have that capacity, and with the Indians now raiding along the Santa Fe Trail as well as in Texas, U.S. troops in New Mexico prepared retaliatory expeditions against the Kiowas and Comanches. Throughout August and September, federal scouting expeditions reported the two tribes were assembling in large camps in remote areas of the Staked Plains of Texas and northeastern New Mexico and laying in substantial amounts of food and water. It was obvious they were planning some sort of major undertaking.
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The Indians in fact were preparing for what probably was the worst single raid in the history of Texas, a sweep through Young County in the vicinity of Fort Belknap. Most of the Rangers posted to Belknap were out on patrol, although a small detachment under Lt. N. Carson occupied Fort Murrah, a blockhouse outpost about thirteen miles west of Belknap. The first indication of trouble came about 11
A.M.
, October 13, when smoke signals were spotted in the distance. Peter and Perry Harmonson were herding their cattle near Fort Murrah as the Indians rode in from the north. Seeing them, the Harmonsons spurred their horses into a grove of timber and prepared to defend themselves. A small group of Indians broke away from the main band and charged the grove, but Perry shot one and the others paused to tend to him. Taking advantage of the delay, the Harmonsons dashed to a heavy thicket where they had more protection, and the exposed Indians returned to the main band.