Lone Star (93 page)

Very soon, the Rangers had certain marked characteristics, which they did not soon lose. They were not typical Texas farmers—the man with a farm and family could not spend his time riding the wild frontier. They were for the most part extremely young. Most great Ranger leaders earned their fame long before the age of thirty. That they were adventurous and uniformly courageous needs no explanation; they were all volunteers. More significant was the repeated assertion by observers that the Ranger captains were unusual men—not merely brave, but officers who showed an utter absence of fear. This breed of captain was called forth both by the rough nature of the men he led, and the incredibly perilous situation of the tiny Ranger bands on the war frontier. Historians have made much of the fact that Anglo-Texans outnumbered the Indians and Mexicans with whom they were in contact; but the farming population was not on the frontier. Throughout his whole existence as a fighting man, the Texas Ranger was outnumbered by his foes. This produced not caution but canniness, and an almost incredible aggressiveness. The Ranger found his best defense was to attack, dominate, subdue.

The Ranger captains had to be not only field generals but superb psychologists, understanding the enemy and their own men. They found their greatest strength in a legend of superiority, which in the early years they genuinely won.

To fight Indians and Mexicans, Ranger leaders had to learn to think like both, or at least, to understand what Mexicans and Indians feared. The collision between the Anglo-American and the Mexican on the southern frontier was inevitable, but some aspects of this were unfortunate. Contact did not improve either race; it seemed to strengthen and enhance the vices of both. The Ranger arrived with instinctive Teutonic directness, preferring the honest smash of the bullet to the subtlety of the knife. But against the Mexican, bluntness turned into brutality, because it was almost impossible for the Protestant Anglo-Celt to understand the Hispanic mind. Impatient with Mexican deviousness, the Ranger reacted with straight force. But the Mexican, to keep the records straight, slipped from deviousness to outright treachery; history records that Mexicans killed more Texans by the result of parleys than on all the battlefields. Each side felt themselves justified because of the incomprehensible and despised cultural attributes of the foe. The Rangers seemed barbaric Nordics, devoid of all gentlemanly intrigue or guile; they saw the Mexicans as treacherous, lying people, who never wanted to do the obvious, which was to call their play and fight.

One factor in this conflict must not be ignored. The Texas border breed had no real taint of cruelty; human torture for its own or any sake was an abomination to the Anglo-Celt. But among other painful lessons the Texans learned was that they could not surrender with war honors to either foe. This attribute of Indian warfare was already known, but the fact that Mexicans, out of their revolutionary brutalizations, also abused, tortured, and shot a significant percentage of all their captives made a lasting impression on the Texan mind. Moving into enemy country, Texans not only adopted the horse, but adapted their warfare to reply in kind.

The morality of this opening border warfare was meaningless, because morality could only be defined within a culture, never across two cultures. The moral, upstanding Comanche who lived by the laws and gods of his tribe enjoyed heaping live coals on a staked-out white man's genitals; a moral Mexican, for a fancied insult, would slip his knife into an Anglo back. The moral Texan, who lived in peace and amity with his fellows, would bash an Indian infant's head against a tree, or gut-shoot a "greaser" if he blinked. Relations between disparate cultures were to be determined, as always, by the relative strength and weakness of each, and by the dynamic or regressive nature displayed by Anglos, Indians, and Mexicans. Relations could not be governed by individual, internal ethics or morals any more than history had been determined by such parameters in the past. The great change the frontier Texan made from the Anglo-American mainstream in these years was the real, if unarticulated, understanding that his enemies were "different."

This was unfortunately much more true than mere prejudice implied. It was a factor in the success of all the great frontier captains, who never made the fundamental, and possibly fatal, error of believing their enemies were, or thought like, Anglo-Americans in red or brown skins.

The emergence of ranging-company leaders was apparent in the latter stages of President Lamar's wars. Moore's successes in the far West came only because he fought like a Comanche; he sneaked up on Indian villages exactly as a Comanche war band stalked an unsuspecting farmhouse. "Old Paint," Matthew Caldwell, was thinking like an Indian, or ahead of the Indians, at Plum Creek. The Ranger learned to seek out the enemies' weakness, then strike it without mercy. They played their own strengths against such weakness of discipline or mind as successfully as William the Conqueror disposed of Saxon thanes.

Still, there was one final, decisive factor in the winning of the Texas West. This was the invention of the revolving pistol by Samuel Colt, and the manufacture of this revolver at Paterson, New Jersey, by 1838.

It is a fact of history that Colt could not market his revolvers in the East. There was no civilian need, or market, nor could he interest the military in their use. The U.S. Army was still forest-bound and had no true cavalry arm. Colt's only outlet was in the West, and significantly enough, his first working model was called "The Texas." Somehow, almost immediately, while Colt's enterprise sank slowly into bankruptcy, some of these firearms arrived in the Republic.

The U.S. Army ordnance experts saw no need for them; but those experts had never seen a Comanche band. The Texas partisans riding the frontier between Austin and San Antonio saw the Colt's significance at once. Every Texan tried to beg, borrow, or steal a Texas model Colt's in any way he could. This early gun had many faults; it was too light, a civilian rather than a military arm, and to load it, it had to be broken down into three component parts—a maddeningly ticklish operation at the gallop by a man with only two hands.
But it shot six times
. It gave one Texan horseman the firepower of six.

Just when and how the first revolving pistols—they were never called revolvers in Texas, but six-shooters, six-guns, and a host of other names—arrived is not known. They were certainly in some use by 1839. Captain Jack Hays, who first proved the six-shooter in Comanche combat, was stationed at San Antonio, the junction of the Mexican and Indian frontier, in 1840.

Hays was twenty-three, a Tennesseean from the same region as Andrew Jackson, the Texas McCulloch family, and General Houston; Jackson bought his "Hermitage" estate from Hays's grandfather. He drifted into Texas as a surveyor; being a borderer, he logically ended up against the far frontier. He fought at Plum Creek, and that same year was appointed Captain of Rangers at San Antonio by Mirabeau Lamar. Hays, handsome, quiet, "a gentleman of purest character" as the citizens of San Antonio described him, was important to history and to his state. He set an indelible stamp upon the Texas Rangers, and by doing so, upon the whole Anglo-American southwestern frontier. For almost a century, every Texas Ranger wanted to be "like Jack Hays"—a monumental epitaph for a man who ended his service at the age of thirty-four. Three things stand out about John Coffee Hays above all others: he was no talker, but a born partisan who liked to ride the wild country by the North Star; he was not a great gunman, but a leader without fear who rose by sheer ability from among his peers; and he was a superb psychologist, who could bend both friend and foe to his will. In some way, Ben McCulloch, Sam Walker, L. H. McNelly, John B. Jones, John H. Rogers, and even Big Foot Wallace were similar, and McCulloch, Walker, and Wallace were Hays-trained.

Jack Hays was the first man to use Colt's six-shooter on Plains Indians. He was jumped on the Pedernales River, probably in Kendall County, by a party of seventy Comanches. Hays had fourteen men. He turned and fought a desperate, running battle on horseback, carrying the fight to the enemy. He lost several Rangers, but killed thirty Indians. Caperton, who wrote an account of this battle, said: "That was considered the best-contested fight that ever took place in Texas, and it showed that they could whip the Indians on horseback . . . the pistols gave them the advantage."

Hays, according to Mary Maverick, back at San Antonio gave full credit to his new firepower and to the total surprise of the Comanches. He now rode with confidence, convinced that six-shooting Texans could defeat any Comanche band alive. Shortly afterward, Hays's company encountered another heavily superior force of Comanches west of San Antonio, in the Nueces canyon.

The Indians, shrieking and shooting arrows, swept around and surrounded the mounted Rangers. At Hays's order, the Texans emptied their long rifles, then leaped into the saddle. Hays yelled "Charge!" in his high, clear voice. The Rangers were at close quarters before the startled Indians—who had rarely known white men to do anything but fort up or run—could turn their horses.

"Powder-burn them!" Hays screamed, as Rangers rode between the Comanche ranks, knocking down Indians to either side. Comanches were entirely brave; they turned to stand, only to see the Rangers coming on, fire spitting again and again from their fists, striking down milling horsemen on all sides.

The Indians fled, and Hays chased them three miles. At the end, the demoralized Comanches were throwing aside their useless shields, lances, and bows and leaning low over their horses in routed flight. The Comanche war chief stated later that he lost half his people, and that wounded warriors died on the trail for a hundred miles to the Devil's River. "I will never again fight Jack Hays, who has a shot for every finger on the hand," the Indian moaned.

Hays, and all the Rangers of his time, never tried to downplay the crucial role of the revolvers in mounted combat. "They are the only weapon which enabled the experienced frontiersmen to defeat the mounted Indian in his own peculiar mode of warfare. . . ." a testimonial read. The Rangers learned to love and handle their new pistols with all the reverence the Anglo-American had lavished on his long German rifle. Every culture or subculture has had its distinctive arm: the Macedonians their 18-foot phalanx pike, the Romans their Spanish short-sword. In the 1840s the name of Texas became indelibly linked with the Colt's revolver.

The six-shooter was important beyond the romanticism and enduring symbolism it produced. A superb horseman in open country, armed with one or more long-barreled Colts, represented the most effective weapons system known to the middle 19th century. At one step, the Texas borderers achieved at least parity with the Plains Indians, and a marked superiority over the Mexican cuirassier's lance and the
vaquero's
rope. They would hold both until the dispersion of an effective,
accurate
breechloading rifle, which did not appear until the 1870s.

The revolver, very simply, meant power in southwest Texas, and long after the power was no longer needed, its symbol remained, much as the gentleman's sword was retained into the 19th century in parts of France and Ireland.

Hays and his comrades did not of course destroy the Comanche danger. The history of the frontier was that, as the Rangers became better Comanche fighters, the Comanches took up better "Indian" tactics, avoiding open combat, resorting more and more to the hit-and-run murder and stock-stealing raid. This was not to be ended until Texas again resorted to striking at the source from which Indian depredations flowed.

The Ranger and his revolver were to win enduring fame in 19th-century America, however, not against Indians, but in the long Mexican wars.

Hays had served with Henry Karnes's spy service on the Nueces in 1839; in 1841 he was sent to Laredo to check on the possibility of imminent Mexican invasion. Hays rode boldly into the town, which at this time was wholly Mexican and garrisoned with Mexican troops. He stared down the Mexican soldiery, calmly ran off a few horses, and camped on the edge of town. Then, he gave the horses back with a warning to the Mexican commandant that in case there were any robberies or raids north of the Nueces the Mexicans knew what to expect. Later, when a band of brigands attacked one of the wagon trains constantly plying between San Antonio and Laredo despite the international tension, Hays set out again for Laredo, with a dozen Texans and thirteen San Antonio Mexicans under Antonio Pérez, a noted Indian-fighter.

Ten miles from Laredo, a party of thirty-five Mexican cavalry charged Hays with the bugle. At the end of the battle, the Mexican force grounded arms and asked for quarter, with the exception, as Webb wrote, "of the captain and three wise men who remained on horseback." The mayor or
alcalde
of Laredo came to meet Hays with a white flag and asked the town be spared. Hays spared it, again demanding that raids be stopped. Then he marched the hapless prisoners he had taken back over the dusty miles to San Antonio.

In these same months, Jack Hays fought too many combats with the Penatekas and other southern bands to be related in detail. He learned to ride into Indian country and locate Indian camps by the circling flock of buzzards that always hung over them, no matter how well they might be concealed in canyons. He hit them in bed and brush, where the Comanche bow was a useless weapon. He mauled Indians from the Nueces to the Llano, and never with more than fifty men. The remark of the Lipan ally Chief Flacco, who scouted for Hays on some of these raids, still stands: "Me and Red Wing not afraid to go to hell together. Captain Jack heap brave; not afraid to go to hell by himself."

"You may depend," General Houston wrote, "on the gallant Hays and his companions." Lamar's papers indicate that much of the success against the southern Comanches circa 1840 was due to Hays's detachment of Rangers.