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EMPIRE
SUMMER MOON
Quanah Parker and the Rising and Fall of the
Comanches, the Well-nigh Powerful Indian
Tribe in American History
Southward. C. Gwynne
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Volume design by Kelvin P. Oden/Oh Snap! Design
Manufactured in the The states of America
i 3 five 7 9 10 viii 6 4 ii
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009049747
ISBN 978-1-4165-9105-4
ISBN 978-ane-4165-9715-v (ebook)
Insert photograph credits: 1, 4, 12 courtesy of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, Academy of Texas, Joseph Due east. Taulman Collection; 3, vi–8, ten courtesy of the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum; ix, 13, 15, 17 courtesy of the Fort Sill Museum; 14, 16, 18 courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society; ii courtesy of the Library of Congress; v courtesy of the Baylor University Library, Waco Texas
To Katie and Maisie
The desert wind would salt their ruins and at that place would be zippo, no ghost or scribe, to tell any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place had died.
—Cormac McCarthy
CONTENTS
Ane NEW KIND OF State of war
Two A LETHAL PARADISE
Three WORLDS IN COLLISION
Iv HIGH LONESOME
Five THE WOLF'Southward HOWL
Six Claret AND Fume
7 DREAM VISIONS AND APOCALYPSE
Eight WHITE SQUAW
Nine CHASING THE Air current
Ten Expiry'S INNOCENT FACE
Xi State of war TO THE KNIFE
Twelve WHITE QUEEN OF THE COMANCHES
Thirteen THE Ascent OF QUANAH
Fourteen UNCIVIL WARS
Fifteen PEACE, AND OTHER HORRORS
Sixteen THE ANTI-CUSTER
Seventeen MACKENZIE UNBOUND
Eighteen THE Hide MEN AND THE MESSIAH
Nineteen THE Cerise RIVER WAR
20 Forwards, IN DEFEAT
Twenty-one THIS WAS A Homo
Twenty-two RESTING HERE UNTIL Twenty-four hours BREAKS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alphabetize
EMPIRE OF THE Summer MOON
One
A NEW KIND OF State of war
CAVALRYMEN REMEMBER SUCH moments: dust swirling backside the pack mules, regimental bugles shattering the air, horses snorting and riders' tack creaking through the ranks, their old company song ascension on the air current: "Come home, John! Don't stay long. Come up home soon to your own chick-a-biddy!"ane The appointment was October 3, 1871. Six hundred soldiers and xx Tonkawa scouts had bivouacked on a lovely curve of the Clear Fork of the Brazos, in a rolling, scarred prairie of grama grass, scrub oak, sage, and chaparral, about one hundred fifty miles west of Fort Worth, Texas. Now they were breaking camp, moving out in a long, snaking line through the high cutbanks and quicksand streams. Though they did non know it at the fourth dimension—the thought would have seemed preposterous—the sounding of "boots and saddle" that morning marked the start of the stop of the Indian wars in America, of fully two hundred l years of encarmine combat that had begun almost with the starting time landing of the kickoff ship on the start fatal shore in Virginia. The final destruction of the last of the hostile tribes would not take identify for a few more years. Time would be yet required to round them all up, or starve them out, or exterminate their sources of food, or run them to ground in shallow canyons, or kill them outright. For the moment the question was 1 of hard, unalloyed volition. At that place had been brief spasms of official vengeance and retribution before: J. M. Chivington's and George Armstrong Custer'south savage massacres of Cheyennes in 1864 and 1868 were examples. Just in those days there was no real attempt to destroy the tribes on a larger scale, no stomach for it. That had changed, and on October iii, the change causeless the form of an guild, barked out through the lines of command to the men of the 4th Cavalry and Eleventh Infantry, to become along and kill Comanches. It was the end of anything like tolerance, the start of the final solution.
The white men were grunts, bluecoats, cavalry, and dragoons; mostly veterans of the War Between the States who now constitute themselves at the edge of the known universe, ascending to the turreted stone towers that gated the fabled Llano Estacado—Coronado's term for information technology, meaning "palisaded plains" of West Texas, a land populated exclusively by the most hostile Indians on the continent, where few U.S. soldiers had ever gone earlier. The llano was a place of farthermost pathos, a vast, trackless, and featureless sea of grass where white men became lost and disoriented and died of thirst; a identify where the royal Spanish had in one case marched confidently forth to hunt Comanches, only to detect that they themselves were the hunted, the ones to be slaughtered. In 1864, Kit Carson had led a large force of federal troops from Santa Fe and attacked a Comanche ring at a trading post called Adobe Walls, north of modernistic-twenty-four hours Amarillo. He had survived it, merely had come up within a whisker of watching his iii companies of cavalry and infantry destroyed.two
The troops were now going back, because enough was plenty, considering President Grant's vaunted "Peace Policy" toward the remaining Indians, run by his gentle Quaker appointees, had failed utterly to bring peace, and finally because the exasperated general in chief of the army, William Tecumseh Sherman, had ordered it so. Sherman's chosen agent of devastation was a civil state of war hero named Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, a difficult, moody, and implacable young man who had graduated first in his class from W Point in 1862 and had finished the Civil War, remarkably, as a brevet brigadier full general. Because his hand was gruesomely disfigured from war wounds, the Indians called him No-Finger Chief, or Bad Manus. A complex destiny awaited him. Within 4 years he would prove himself the most brutally effective Indian fighter in American history. In roughly that aforementioned time period, while General George Armstrong Custer achieved world fame in failure and catastrophe, Mackenzie would get obscure in victory. But it was Mackenzie, not Custer, who would teach the rest of the regular army how to fight Indians. As he moved his men across the broken, stream-crossed country, past immense herds of buffalo and prairie-dog towns that stretched to the horizon, Colonel Mackenzie did not have a articulate idea of what he was doing, where precisely he was going, or how to fight Plains Indians in their homelands. Neither did he have the faintest thought that he would be the one largely responsible for defeating the final of the hostile Indians. He was new to this sort of Indian fighting, and would make many mistakes in the coming weeks. He would learn from them.
For now, Mackenzie was the instrument of retr
ibution. He had been dispatched to kill Comanches in their Nifty Plains fastness considering, six years after the end of the Civil State of war, the western frontier was an open and bleeding wound, a smoking ruin littered with corpses and charred chimneys, a identify where chaos and torture killings had replaced the rule of law, where Indians and especially Comanches raided at will. Victorious in war, unchallenged by foreign foes in North America for the first fourth dimension in its history, the Union now establish itself unable to deal with the handful of remaining Indian tribes that had not been destroyed, assimilated, or forced to retreat meekly onto reservations where they apace learned the meaning of abject subjugation and starvation. The hostiles were all residents of the Not bad Plains; all were mounted, well armed, and driven now past a mixture of vengeance and political desperation. They were Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and Western Sioux. For Mackenzie on the southern plains, Comanches were the obvious target: No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever acquired so much havoc and death. None was fifty-fifty a close 2d.
Just how bad things were in 1871 forth this razor edge of civilization could exist seen in the numbers of settlers who had abandoned their lands. The frontier, carried west with so much sweat and blood and toil, was now rolling backward, retreating. Colonel Randolph Marcy, who accompanied Sherman on a western tour in the spring, and who had known the country intimately for decades, had been shocked to detect that in many places there were fewer people than 18 years before. "If the Indian marauders are non punished," he wrote, "the whole country seems in a off-white way of condign totally depopulated."3 This phenomenon was non entirely unknown in the history of the New Earth. The Comanches had as well stopped cold the northward accelerate of the Spanish empire in the eighteenth century—an empire that had, up to that betoken, easily subdued and killed millions of Indians in Mexico and moved at will through the continent. Now, subsequently more than a century of relentless westward motility, they were rolling back civilization'south advance once again, merely on a much larger calibration. Whole areas of the borderlands were simply emptying out, melting back due east toward the safety of the forests. Ane county—Wise—had seen its population drop from iii,160 in the year 1860 to i,450 in 1870. In some places the line of settlements had been driven back a hundred miles.iv If General Sherman wondered about the cause—as he in one case did—his tour with Marcy relieved him of his doubts. That bound they had narrowly missed existence killed themselves by a political party of raiding Indians. The Indians, mostly Kiowas, passed them over because of a shaman's superstitions and had instead attacked a nearby wagon train. What happened was typical of the savage, revenge-driven attacks past Comanches and Kiowas in Texas in the postwar years. What was non typical was Sherman's proximity and his own very personal and mortal sense that he might have been a victim, too. Because of that the raid became famous, known to history equally the Common salt Creek Massacre.5
Seven men were killed in the raid, though that does non brainstorm to depict the horror of what Mackenzie found at the scene. According to Helm Robert G. Carter, Mackenzie'southward subordinate, who witnessed its aftermath, the victims were stripped, scalped, and mutilated. Some had been beheaded and others had their brains scooped out. "Their fingers, toes and private parts had been cut off and stuck in their mouths," wrote Carter, "and their bodies, now lying in several inches of water and swollen or bloated beyond all chance of recognition, were filled full of arrows, which made them resemble porcupines." They had clearly been tortured, too. "Upon each exposed abdomen had been placed a mass of live dress-down. . . . One wretched human being, Samuel Elliott, who, fighting hard to the final, had evidently been wounded, was found chained betwixt 2 railroad vehicle wheels and, a fire having been made from the wagon pole, he had been slowly roasted to death—'burnt to a crisp.' "six
Thus the settlers' headlong flight due east, specially on the Texas frontier, where such raiding was at its worst. After then many long and successful wars of conquest and dominion, it seemed implausible that the west rush of Anglo-European civilization would stall in the prairies of central Texas. No tribe had ever managed to resist for very long the surge of nascent American civilization with its harquebuses and blunderbusses and muskets and eventually lethal repeating weapons and its endless stocks of eager, country-greedy settlers, its elegant moral double standards and its complete disregard for native interests. Start with the subjection of the Atlantic coastal tribes (Pequots, Penobscots, Pamunkeys, Wampanoags, et al), hundreds of tribes and bands had either perished from the earth, been driven due west into territories, or forcibly assimilated. This included the Iroquois and their enormous, warlike confederation that ruled the area of present-day New York; the in one case powerful Delawares, driven w into the lands of their enemies; the Iroquois, then all the same farther west into even more murderous foes on the plains. The Shawnees of the Ohio Country had fought a desperate rearguard activity starting in the 1750s. The great nations of the south—Chicasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, and Choctaw—saw their reservation lands expropriated in spite of a string of treaties; they were coerced westward into lands given them in nevertheless more treaties that were violated earlier they were even signed; hounded forth a trail of tears until they, too, landed in "Indian Territory" (present-twenty-four hours Oklahoma), a land controlled past Comanches, Kiowas, Araphoes, and Cheyennes.
Even stranger was that the Comanches' stunning success was happening amid phenomenal technological and social changes in the due west. In 1869 the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, linking the industrializing east with the developing west and rendering the sometime trails—Oregon, Santa Fe, and tributaries—instantly obsolete. With the rails came cattle, herded northward in epic drives to railheads by Texans who could make fast fortunes getting them to Chicago markets. With the runway, too, came buffalo hunters carrying mortiferous accurate .l-caliber Sharps rifles that could impale effectively at extreme range—grim, violent, opportunistic men blessed at present past both a marketplace in the east for buffalo leather and the ways of getting it there. In 1871 the buffalo still roamed the plains: Earlier that year a herd of four million had been spotted near the Arkansas River in nowadays-day southern Kansas. The main body was l miles deep and twenty-five miles wide.7 But the slaughter had already begun. It would soon become the greatest mass destruction of warm-blooded animals in man history. In Kansas lonely the bones of thirty-one million buffalo were sold for fertilizer betwixt 1868 and 1881.8 All of these profound changes were under way as Mackenzie's Raiders departed their camps on the Clear Fork. The nation was booming; a railroad had finally stitched it together. There was but this i obstacle left: the warlike and unreconstructed Indian tribes who inhabited the physical wastes of the Groovy Plains.
Of those, the most remote, primitive, and irredeemably hostile were a band of Comanches known as the Quahadis. Similar all Plains Indians, they were nomadic. They hunted primarily the southernmost part of the loftier plains, a place known to the Spanish, who had been abjectly driven from it, as Comancheria. The Llano Estacado, located within Comancheria, was a dead-flat tableland larger than New England and rising, in its highest elevations, to more five thousand feet. For Europeans, the land was similar a bad hallucination. "Although I traveled over them for more than than 300 leagues," wrote Coronado in a alphabetic character to the king of Espana on October 20, 1541, "[there were] no more than landmarks than if we had been swallowed upward by the body of water . . . there was non a stone, nor a bit of rising footing, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor annihilation to get past."9 The Canadian River formed its northern boundary. In the eastward was the sharp Caprock Escarpment, a cliff rise somewhere between two hundred and one g feet that demarcates the loftier plains from the lower Permian Plains beneath, giving the Quahadis something that approximated a gigantic, nearly impregnable fortress. Unlike almost all of the other tribal bands on the plains, the Quahadis had e'er shunned contact with Anglos. They would not even merchandise with them, equally a full general principle, preferring the Mexican traders from Santa Iron, known as Comancheros. Then aloof were they that in the numerous Indian ethnographies compiled from 1758 o
nward chronicling the various Comanche bands (there were as many every bit thirteen), they do non fifty-fifty show upwardly until 1872.ten For this reason they had largely avoided the cholera plagues of 1816 and 1849 that had ravaged western tribes and had destroyed fully one-half of all Comanches. Near alone among all bands of all tribes in North America, they never signed a treaty. Quahadis were the hardest, fiercest, least yielding component of a tribe that had long had the reputation as the most violent and warlike on the continent; if they ran low on water, they were known to drink the contents of a dead horse'south stomach, something even the toughest Texas Ranger would non do. Even other Comanches feared them. They were the richest of all plains bands in the currency by which Indians measured wealth—horses—and in the years subsequently the Civil War managed a herd of some 15 one thousand. They also owned "Texas cattle without number."eleven
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