Lone Star (7 page)

The authorities of New Mexico mounted many an expedition in reprisal—but out on the vast and unmarked plains of Texas these punitive raids had no success. One expedition penetrated halfway across Texas, without finding Indians, who obviously did not care to be found. Another, ironically, had its own horses stolen and nearly perished. The fearful Spanish
¡Adelante!
was one thing to Puebloans or even Aztecs drawn up in ranks on foot with clubs or bows; it was laughable to Indians who could ride away in all directions. The Spanish war cry
¡Sant'Iago!
was swallowed in the vastness of the endless West Texas plateaus.

For the first time in history, American Indians were equipped to meet European invaders on equal, and even superior, terms, on their own land. The history of the Southwest, so very different from that of Mexico or the English-settled Atlantic coast, was the result. Here, on the edge of mountain and semidesert, Amerinds were to hold out, and even conquer, for three hundred years.

The Puebloans had survived intermittent Apache warfare for many years, perhaps centuries, but now the conflict reached a new intensity. Apaches did not breed their own horses; with considerable common sense, they came to look upon the Spanish
ranchos
as a permanent source of supply. Their sudden swoops and raids harried the conquered Puebloans unmercifully. Puebloan villages subject to the Spanish were wiped out. Mission Indians in some localities were exterminated. Caught between Spanish priests who ordered them whipped if they failed to work or ran away and Apaches who tortured and killed them whether they ran or stayed, the Puebloans finally rose in one last, despairing revolt in 1680. One reason was the forced imposition of Christianity and the suppression of their age-old customs, such as the rain dance. More important was the failure of Spanish protection.

The Spanish fled the upper Rio Grande amid scenes of massacre and horror; only eleven priests and about 2,000 Europeans escaped. They left many thousands of sheep, cattle, and horses behind. The Puebloans had no need for horses, and the evidence is that these herds were traded to, or seized by, marauding Indians from the north and east. When the Spanish, ten years later, returned with fire, sword, burning stake, and smallpox, not only were the horses gone but many of the southern Pueblo villages were already wiped out by Apache terror.

On their vengeful return, the Spanish pragmatically solved the religious problem by closing their eyes to Amerind religious customs practiced alongside the Mass; the majority of the Pueblo tribes were thus never fully Christianized.
Apachería
, however, as they called the dread stretches away from the Rio Grande, could not be handled so simply. The ironic fact was that it was not the European Spaniards but another American Indian people who destroyed the power of the Eastern Apaches, drove them from the plains, and pushed the Western Apaches deep into the mountains of Arizona.

With the great horse dispersal of 1680, all the Texas tribes had learned about horses; the knowledge reached the Caddo country. But the knowledge, and the use, spread. A generation later, certainly by 1750, mounted Indians were common as far north as Saskatchewan in Canada. The seat of the horse culture, however, remained in the Southwest, near the Spanish
ranchos
on the edge of the Texas plains. Like a magnet, this area began to draw Amerind tribes, who heard of the new wealth to the south. In the year 1705 the first Utes appeared from out of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, begging horses from the Spanish. With these Utes came a few representatives of another mountain tribe—who, significantly, stole a horse herd before they left, and thus rode victoriously away, and into bloody history.

The mountain Utes called these people by a word meaning "enemy." They called themselves The Human Beings. They were alien to the Southwest, speaking Shoshone, the language of the Rocky Mountains of the north; they
 
lived somewhere beyond the headwaters of the Arkansas, in old Wyoming. They were a poor tribe, fruit- and berry-pickers, wanderers, and living off the scant game of the eastern Rockies. Their life was probably better than that of the Coahuiltecans in only small degree, and it was undoubtedly made worse by the bitter winters.

The designation in the universal Plains sign language for these people was a backward, wriggling movement of the index finger, meaning "snake." The Spanish did not call them the Snake People, but named them from the Ute word
Komantcia
, or Comanches.

The horse made the Apaches infinitely more dangerous to the Spanish frontier, but it completely revolutionized the entire life of the Comanches. They took to horseback as few people in history ever did; they not only rode, they made a fetish of the horse; man, woman, and child virtually lived in the saddle. Like certain other tribes that had lived on the fringes of the Great Plains—Dakotas, Cheyennes, Crows, Kiowas—they abandoned their old homelands and moved out on the plains themselves. The horse gave them freedom to become completely nomadic and follow the buffalo on its peregrinations; the buffalo gave them complete economic freedom. It became their food and clothing, meat and drink. Buffalo carcasses, hides, and bones, even buffalo chips, supplied everything the Plains Indian's primitive culture required, except the horse itself. Ironically, despite the popular belief, the horse created certain economic problems for the Comanche tribes. Horses became wealth, the only medium of value or exchange the Indians knew, and the Comanches never completely settled the growing problems of horse dowries and above all, horse inheritance, before their extinction on the plains. Understandably, the Comanches became the greatest horse thieves of them all, a palm universally granted them by every other tribe.

The Comanches had never planted a seed, and they departed their cold mountain meadows—a country of incredible beauty but equal harshness for primitive people trying to eke a living from it—with no signs of regret. Instead, they gloried in their horses, and in the Plains. The new horse culture was intoxicating, for both the hunt and war. Astride a fleet horse, the skulking hunter and berry-picker now had both freedom and power. The horse gave many Amerind tribes a deep sense of pride and superiority, but apparently no people absorbed this feeling more thoroughly than the Comanches.

Now, bands could gallop across the vast plains in the full panoply of war, or thunder alongside the fleeing buffalo herds, killing prime animals at will. Mounted, with horse-drawn travois, the entire tribe could take to the plains, follow the bison winter and summer, and live permanently, exhilaratingly, on the move. The new culture, the new technique, as so often happens, was now exploited not by tribes who had lived with one foot on the plains, but by people who had no vested interest in their old way of life. Utes and Wichitas and Apaches learned to ride; Comanches came to live on horseback.

The Comanche horse culture was assiduously copied from the Spanish. The Indians mounted from the right, a habit the Spaniards had acquired from the Moors; they used crude replicas of Spanish bits, bridles, and saddles, made of bison hide. The only new—and deadly—development of the Comanches was the adoption of a thong by which a warrior could drop over the side of his horse while thundering in the circling charge, concealing and protecting himself from an enemy's shaft or bullet.

No one, not even the scientists who study them, knows why human cultures develop in certain ways, and diverge along strikingly different lines. All peoples seem to start at one time with about the same potential; yet, even within subspecies of man, development rarely follows a similar path. Anthropologists call these differences "cultures" and let it go at that. The possibilities for cultural difference have been proven infinite, and climate or habitat is not determining, only limiting. Men make cultural choices by band, tribe, and nation, then live or die by them.

Some cultures make fatal, if logical, mistakes. The Apaches had acquired a taste for beans and corn, and even after the coming of the horse, they continued to live in their comfortable
rancherias
beside rivers and streams. They sent warriors out to hunt the buffalo, but the tribes themselves did not cast loose their territorial anchors and move into the sea of grass. And now once again, just as when the fearsome Eastern Apaches had come upon the nascent Puebloan culture of Texas like a deadly plague, there were bloody scenes of cultural life and death on the High Plains.

The stunted Comanches—they were always the shortest and smallest of Texas tribes—reveled in new riches. There was suddenly meat for all, a never-ending supply of food that only need be ridden down. A chief or strong warrior who had had one woman now could take two, or three, or four. There were few hungry winters, and no more infanticide. The dozen Comanche bands swelled. Soon each could mount five hundred or more warriors, and they pushed south toward the richest prize of all—the southern bison plains.

They brushed certain other tribes, Wichitas and Pawnees, out of their way. Hardened by this skirmishing, the Comanches rode south, away from the Eastern Rockies, following the herds and the sun, driving deep into Apachería.

The Comanche hordes debouched on the Texas plains around the year 1725. They came like a thunderbolt; one historian compared them with the mounted hordes of Genghis Khan. Man, woman, and child, they were among the finest horsemen ever known. They were armed with the long Plains lance and bison-hide shield, hard enough to turn a musket ball, and they could fire a shower of arrows with deadly accuracy from the gallop. There were probably more Eastern Apaches in those days than Comanches, but the Athapaskans were fragmented, and worse, they lived in scattered, semipermanent villages. Comanches rode to war by the light of the moon; their favorite tactic was to strike deep into enemy territory, two or even three hundred miles or more away, kill, despoil, take prisoners, and gallop back to the trackless plains.

Indian wars are sometimes thought of as a sort of game, courage rites in which not much damage was ever done. Since Amerind society was not highly organized anywhere, its warfare could not be highly organized or regimented, either. Like all warfare, it developed customs and taboos, such as counting coups (touching an armed enemy in battle), taking scalps, and assessing the portents of one's "medicine," or luck. But this did not mean it was not vicious or bloody, or not fought for a basic purpose: to kill or despoil the enemy with the least damage to oneself, and to assume control of the hunting grounds, or land. The sum of a hundred small war parties in Apachería was the same as the result of pitched battles in Europe: someone won, someone lost, some people died or were driven away, some tribe took over the richest ground.

Disaster out of the north overtook the Apaches, who had been lords of the plains from the Balcones Escarpment to Colorado, and who had had villages in far Nebraska. Entire tribes, known to the Spanish in New Mexico, suddenly disappeared from history. Others lost their separate identities. All Apaches were driven from the plains.

The Western Apaches moved further into the
despoblada
of the Southwest, Arizona and New Mexico; the Eastern tribes were nearly exterminated. The Eastern remnants abandoned the High Plains. Some were pushed deep into the bare and ugly mountains of the Trans-Pecos region, and others scattered along the fringe lands just above the Balcones Escarpment. These survivors ceased to be a Plains tribe. They became hill and mountain Indians, and the remnants of several bands became the Lipan Apaches, or
Ipa 'Nde
, the people of Ipa's Tribe. They lost none of the primordial Apache fierceness, but they no longer possessed the former Apache power.

Ironically, however, pushed into greater proximity to the Spanish and other weaker tribes, such as the Coahuiltecans, they now became an even greater scourge to these neighbors. They had lost the rich hunting lands; now the Lipan Apaches had to live more and more by raiding. But their numbers were in decline, and the Lipans were already heading toward their final status, a despised, impoverished border tribe, before eventual extinction.

The hard-riding Comanches had seized a vast new kingdom: all the high plains and central plateaus of Texas.

This land, from the Llano Estacado to the Balcones Scarp, had the highest concentration of large game on the continent. The Llano itself was an eastern-sloping high mesa or tableland, rising out of the Great Plains. It began south of the Canadian River in the Panhandle; it was bounded on the east and north by another escarpment, the Cap Rock, and on the west by the beginnings of the Rockies. This was an immense, high, flat region, broken only by infrequent rivers such as the Brazos, the Colorado, and the Red. Its broad plains held scattered playa lakes, or ephemeral ponds, and here and there rose sand dunes.

To its south, the Llano Estacado merged imperceptibly into another plateau, the Edwards, which spread for hundreds of miles south and east, and which finally ended in the mountains of the Big Bend country—part of the Rocky system—and fell away along the Balcones Escarpment, below which there were coastal prairies and rolling savannah plains. The fringes of this great plateau formed the Texas hill country, where the streams and rivers carved deep canyons and dramatic scenery through the fraying limestone. On the southern end, the plateau was covered less with tall grass than with brush and cedar brakes on the rolling hills.

North of the Edwards Plateau, east from the Cap Rock to the Cross Timbers (west of Fort Worth), was a vast stretch of dark, level prairie land, ending in the belts of oak on the east.

All this area was part of the Great Plains of North America, which swept down from Canada to the Gulf. It was a rich section of the great American sea of grass, and it comprised the Texas bison range, one of the most splendid big-game regions upon the earth. Between the timber on the east, the mountains on the west, and the increasingly hot, dry savannahs of the south, this series of plateaus and prairies, hills and valleys, was incredibly fertile for grazing animals.