Lone Star (106 page)

That night, quietly, Sherman gave his word to citizens of Parker and Jack Counties who came in a delegation to see him, that he would do everything within his power to reform the national military policy. Then, he rode on to Fort Sill and asked the agent, Laurie Tatum, if any Indians were off the reservation. Tatum believed that Satanta and some others were gone, but he expected them to be back, since it was time for issue of rations.

Tatum, who was known to the Indians as Bald Head, was a Quaker, but he told Sherman that for some time he had been trying to convince his superiors that military force would have to be used against the Kiowas, but they insisted that a policy of kindness would eventually succeed. He strenuously denied that he had sold any rifles or carbines to the tribes.

When Satanta appeared, Tatum questioned him in his office. Satanta, with some arrogance, admitted he had led the Salt Creek raid. He gave his reasons: he had asked for arms and ammunition, and they had not been given. None of the Indian requests had been granted; "You do not listen to my talk." Satanta said he had no intention of raiding "around here," but would raid in Texas when he felt like it. He wanted no more talk about it.

Tatum repeated this to Sherman, and the resident Army officer, Colonel (Brevet Major General) B. H. Grierson. With a file of soldiers, in a scuffle, the two officers arrested Satanta, Satank, and Big Tree, identified as the war party chiefs. When Mackenzie, who had had trouble following the war trail in the rain, but had finally traced it into Sill, arrived, Sherman ordered him to take the three Kiowas back to Texas for public trial.

This was the first time an Indian agent had ever allowed a reservation Indian to be arrested; by law, one could only be arrested on a reservation with the agent's consent. The Sill Indians fled in some consternation. The news caused wild jubilation in Texas.

An escort of soldiers, with a wagon, took the three accused Indians south into Texas; they were to be tried in the civil courts for murder. Satank, who was very old, boasted about his greatness as a chief, and complained that he should not be humiliated in this way. He was fastened in hand irons, wrapped in a blanket, and ignored. A few miles out of Fort Sill, the old Indian began to wail his death song:

O Sun, you remain forever, but we Koitsenko must die.

O Earth, you remain forever, but we Koitsenko must die.

The soldiers guarding him were recruits detailed for this kind of duty; they were new to the frontier. They ignored the warnings of Caddo George, a scout, and did not see that the other two prisoners remained frozen, watching Satank.

Beneath the concealing blanket, the old chief gnawed at the flesh of his hand and wrist until he was able to slip off his chain. Suddenly he leaped upon his guards. He badly wounded one, before another put a bullet through his lungs. Thus he died fighting, a
Koitsenko
, one of the ten greatest warriors of the Kiowas.

For the other two Indians a great farce began at Jacksboro. The murder trial was a national sensation, for precedent, for lurid testimony, and for the crawling hatred that lay in the courtroom behind red man and white. The trial could not establish true justice, because the accused were not guilty of crimes under the codes of their own people. Both Kiowas expected to be killed; neither begged for mercy. Satanta, who was about fifty, denied nothing, and said that if he were killed by the Texans, his tribe would take revenge. The younger warrior, Big Tree, said little.

At this trial, Prosecutor W. T. Lanham began the career that was eventually to make him governor of Texas. The two white defense lawyers went through the motions, defending the Indians at the risk of their careers, even, on this gun-slung frontier, their own lives. Due process was served; the jury found the prisoners guilty, and the judge condemned them to death by hanging.

But the great farce had just begun. Back in the East, a number of people were influenced by sentimentalism, or—in some government circles—by fear of an Indian war in retaliation. Enoch Hoag, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, begged President Grant to set the sentences aside. Grant could not do this; murder was not a federal offense; and Grant had no jurisdiction over a Texas court. But he did wire Governor E. J. Davis of Texas, asking that the sentences be commuted to life imprisonment. Davis, knowing that Grant was under much Eastern pressure, did this. Both Indians were sent to the state prison at Huntsville—actually, for a Plains Indian, a fate worse than death.

From Fort Sill agent Tatum reported that the Kiowas were agitated and uncontrollable, and that the warning that the future fate of their chiefs depended on peace was unheeded. By 1872, there was much evidence that all the Southern Plains tribes were planning for war. Worried, President Grant ordered a great conference of tribes to be held at St. Louis. Representatives from all the restive tribes were sent to hear the federal Commissioner of Indian Affairs; at Presidential request, the two Kiowas at Huntsville were sent to St. Louis under guard. At this conference, incredibly, federal agents promised the tribes that Satanta and Big Tree would be released in return for peace. This, whether judicious or not, was absolutely beyond the powers of the President. When the promise was made public, reaction in Texas was violent. The commutation of the death sentences had been widely disapproved; now, the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a resolution stating that under no conditions whatever would the two Indians ever be freed.

General Sherman was furious at the actions of the Indian agency. He penned Secretary Delano a strong letter, prophesying that if released, both Indians would kill again. Despite this, Delano began to put pressure on Governor Davis, both through official and Party circles. Davis, now approaching his own political crisis in Texas, hoped for favors from the federal government. On October 8, 1873, he paroled both Kiowas and let them leave the state. When General Sherman heard this, he wrote Davis an absolutely vitriolic letter, stating that the parolees would raid again, and that "if they are to have scalps, yours is the first that should be taken."

Sherman was only half right. Satanta did take the warpath again; he was an old warrior and could not learn new ways. It was proved that he attacked a party of buffalo hunters; the fact that the hunters were on ground barred to them by treaty was ruled irrelevant. Satanta was arrested and returned to Texas in 1874. In prison, the Kiowa was like an animal caged. He cut his wrists, but a white doctor kept him from dying. Then, he leaped from the second-story prison hospital window, head-first into the prison courtyard. This time he prevailed, and died.

Big Tree, however, was an Indian cowed in spirit. Big Tree did not fight again. He took up Christianity, taught a Baptist Sunday-school class among the Indians, and lived to be eighty.

But meanwhile, total Indian policy was changing. Agent Laurie Tatum found his Quaker beliefs strained beyond endurance. He began to deny rations to Indians who left the reservation, only to find this forced his charges to raid all the more. He reported that: "They have taken one young woman and two children captives and murdered in Texas twenty-one persons that I have heard of . . . They brought in two of the captives, Susanna and Milly F. Lee . . . They promised to bring in [the girls'] brother in two weeks. . . ." He stated that, unless directly ordered, he intended never to issue food to these particular Indians again.

Meanwhile, other records show that 1872 was a bad year. The Indian Commissioner admitted to 100 murders, and the theft of 1,000 horses by reservation Indians; this was a remarkable report to come out of Washington, since Tatum alone reported that the Fort Sill reservation Indians alone took 16,500 horses and mules out of Texas. In April, another wagon train was attacked in Crockett County, this time with the killing of sixteen white men. These raiders held off two companies of cavalry, finally escaping north across the Red River onto the reservation.

But something was happening, without as yet an official change of policy. Generals Sherman and Sheridan had agreed privately that the army must take the initiative. They quietly gave Colonel Ranald MacKenzie freedom of action to do something about the situation in Texas.

Mackenzie was an experienced officer, probably the best Indian-fighter at that time in the West. He was not flamboyant or headline-seeking, like Custer, nor did he have the sympathy for Indians attributed to Miles. He was a hard, thoroughly professional soldier. He knew how to select officers and men for particular jobs. He would use his own judgment without fear of consequences, whether to send his command into Mexico in hot pursuit of raiding Mescaleros, or to spread an enlisted slacker against a wagon wheel and have him flogged. He was no book soldier, and Sherman could not have had a better agent on the frontier.

In 1871, Mackenzie had raided far up into the Llano Estacado, far beyond the country where his Tonkawa scouts had been. He knew more about the Texas Panhandle than any other officer in service. From one expedition into this
terra incognita
, he was carried back on a litter, a Comanche arrow embedded in him. In 1872, Sherman could not give Mackenzie instructions to cross over into Oklahoma, but he could and did order the Colonel to hunt, hound, and harass every Indian on the High Plains of Texas.

Mackenzie took the field, now hunting the recalcitrant Quahadis, who had never gone on the reservation, and whose war chief, Quanah, was beginning to win a great name. Mackenzie's troopers did not defeat the Comanches, but they hurt them. Mackenzie gave the Quahadis summer and winter war, patrolling so vigorously that for some months the frontier was almost quiet.

This was the beginning of brutal times for the proud Quahadis, the fiercest of Texan tribes, and the beginning of the end. If the Comanches went to the reservation, they would be fed—but never enough. One of the minor corruptions of the Grant Administration was the starving of Indians; Indian agents who were against violence and capital punishment were not above graft. If the Comanches remained on the bison plains, their last great game preserve, they were in danger from Mackenzie, who hunted them, man, women, and child, implacably.

Worst of all, the game, the vital buffalo, the Indians' staff of life, was fast disappearing. The hide hunters' war against the vast herds was reaching its climax. The buffalo were being exterminated at a fearful rate; for days, at times, Indian hunting parties rode for miles, seeing no live buffalo, only swarms of vultures and rotting flesh. These Indians of the Plains knew what was happening to them.

The Comanches and the Kiowas were already declining and disintegrating as hopeful societies when Isa-Tai, a prophet, appeared among them. Isa-Tai, the messiah, was a recognizable phenomenon of social decay on these vast, lonely plains; his like was appearing in other places throughout the Amerind West.

Isa-Tai the medicine man prophesied that the Real Human Beings were doomed if they submitted to the white man. But if they fought, and drove all whites from the Plains, then the buffalo would come back. Amerind leaders were ignorant of many things, but they were not stupid. The chiefs of the five remaining Southern Plains tribes heard Isa-Tai.

The Quahadi Comanches, the Kiowas, the Kiowa-Apaches, the Southern Cheyennes, and the Arapahoes held a common council. Quanah of the Comanches, Lone Wolf and Woman's Heart of the Kiowas, and Stone Calf and White Shield of the Cheyenne, many of them former enemies, met and made a fragile alliance. Two things were agreed. The tribes would unite, as Isa-Tai urged, to destroy all the buffalo hunters in Texas. The Quahadi chief, Quanah, would be paramount leader.

This coalition could raise 700 warriors, no more. Of all the Comanches, only the Quahadis or Antelopes were still powerful; the zenith of Comanche power had passed. The other tribes were really already remnants. The 1870s, to be forever marked in the white American mind as the time of maximum Indian power because in these years there was so much war, did not mark high noon in Comanchería. For the Amerinds, it was nearly sunset.

Behind Quanah (Fragrance), the greatest war chief of the Quahadis, lay a significant and moving story. Quanah was half white; his mother had been Cynthia Ann Parker of Parker's Fort. The Texans took a bitter pride in this, even while Quanah scourged the frontier. He was never called anything but Quanah Parker in Texas.

Quanah was born in 1847, eleven years after the abduction of the nine-year-old Cynthia Ann. Tragedy seemed to dog the Parker blood. Cynthia Ann became a true Comanche, but she was not allowed to live out her destiny in peace.

The father of Quanah was Peta Nacona, a respected warrior, chief of his own band. Quanah had a brother, Pecos, and a sister, Flower. They formed a strong, and happy, Comanche family.

In the fall of 1860, however, Peta Nacona led a war party back into Parker County, near the old fort. As the Indians withdrew, Sul Ross, a competent Ranger captain, raised 60 riders and pursued them. Ross had Tonkawa scouts, 20 troopers from the 2d Cavalry under a sergeant, and 70 citizen volunteers. He decided to stay in the field, and strike a punitive blow to teach these particular raiders a lesson. He pressed on into Comanche country, persisting in the hunt into December.

On December 17, Sul Ross's "Tonk" scouts found an Indian camp on the Pease River, near the later town of Quanah. In this camp were only women and children, and some Mexican slaves. It was the camp of Peta Nacona, but Peta and the men were off hunting.

Ross rode down on the camp behind the dust clouds and noise kicked up by a howling norther, or cold front. The usual killing that marked a Texan punitive expedition took place. Accounts vary; however, Sul Ross believed that he killed Peta Nacona and several Comanche women. It is certain that the man Ross thought to be Peta was a Mexican slave named Joe, who tried to protect the women.