[Texas Rangers 01] - The Buckskin Line

LONE STAR RISING:
THE TEXAS RANGERS TRILOGY
(comprising The Buckskin Line, Badger Boy, and The Way of the Coyote)

By Elmer Kelton

The Alamo, the cowboy on horseback, the towering oil derrick are powerful Texas icons. Another, just as universally recognized, is the Texas Ranger. In the public imagination he is a mythic figure seven feet tall, unflinching in the face of danger, sticking to the trail ... through hell and high water until he gets his man. Folklore is replete with stories such as one about a single ranger being sent to quell a riot. One riot, one ranger.

In reality, of course, the ranger historically has been a common man with virtues and faults reflecting his time and the environment in which he lived. He has had courage and endurance when the need arose, but he has known frustration and uncertainty as well. Just the fact of his being a ranger has given him a moral advantage in confrontations, inspiring awe and fear in those who opposed him. On the other hand he has not been immune to mistakes in judgment. In reflecting the views and mores of his time he has sometimes been intolerant. He has sometimes been arbitrary.

In short, he was and is a human being.

He was not the first ranger in American history. Others came before him, such as Rogers's Rangers during the time of the revolution. The word ranger has implied someone who ranges widely and freely. Usually the term has been applied to keepers of the peace, though in Australia the "bush ranger" was an outlaw on the loose.

Texas's first rangers were a horseback force organized by colonizer Stephen F. Austin in 1823, when Texas still belonged to Mexico and Americans there were scarce. The rangers' primary duty was to protect colonists from Indian raiders, though they were instrumental in putting down the ill-conceived Fredonian rebellion of 1825, a less-than-honorable prelude to Texas's revolution against Mexico.

A small ranger force existed during the revolution, primarily serving as scouts for Sam Houston's army. They helped refugees escape into Louisiana during the so-called runaway scrape when it appeared that Mexican General Santa Anna's troops would overrun all of Texas and repeat the wholesale slaughter already demonstrated at the Alamo and Goliad.

Texas won its freedom from Mexico in the Battle of San Jacinto and the capture of Santa Anna. During the ten years that it was an independent republic it faced not only a constant threat of Indian raids but also Mexico's attempts to reinvade and regain possession of its former province. The rangers remained in service, their fortunes rising and falling with the ups and downs of the new nation's meager treasury and the vagaries of its politicians.

Though authorized by the Texas Congress, the rangers during that time were more like a loose local militia than the centralized professional force they would eventually become. There was no uniform, not even an official badge to demonstrate their authority. Pay was low and often deferred, sometimes not delivered at all. Enlistments were limited to comparatively short periods, usually in response to a specific Indian raid or prospect of hostilities. Ranger turnover was high.

From the time of the republic until the chaos of the Civil War, ranger energy was largely devoted to Indian fighting. The larger tribes were considered hostile, especially Comanches and Kiowas, in the western and central part of the state, and Apaches, in the southwestern and extreme western part. They frequently raided the settlements of Texas and northern Mexico, running off with horses and mules, taking scalps when and wherever they could. Reckless was the frontier farmer who went to his fields unarmed.

The rangers set up outposts beyond the settlements, constantly guarding against Indian incursions. This buckskin line was Texas's first line of defense. When the line was breached, the rangers often led local volunteers in pursuit of the invaders, occasionally following them far into Indian strongholds.

In 1840, a peace conference between Comanche chiefs and Texans turned ugly. The Council House Fight burst out into the streets of San Antonio and caused heavy casualties on both sides. A thirst for vengeance led to a huge and unprecedented Comanche raid all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. In the port town of Linnville, white survivors of the surprise attack jumped into rowboats and fled out into the surf, pursued by Indians on horseback. The devastated town never recovered. However, rangers and area volunteers followed the retreating raiders. Though badly outnumbered, they surprised and routed the invaders in a reckless counterattack at Plum Creek.

That is where this story begins.

The Texas Rangers had their beginnings in 1823, when land impresario Steven F. Austin raised a volunteer company of ten men to act in defense of his colony in Mexican Texas. Rangers served during the decade of the Texas Republic and rode alongside the United States Army in the war against Mexico. Later in the years before and during the Civil War, volunteers manned a ragged picket line along the western frontier, guarding against Indian incursions. They had no official title but were commonly called rangers or ranging companies, minutemen, or spies.

During Reconstruction they were disbanded and replaced by a state police force, which did some good work but was badly stained by internal corruption and unwarranted cruelties. When the Confederate Texans finally regained the right to vote they dissolved the hated state police.

The reorganized state legislature created two battalions of Texas Rangers in 1874, giving them for the first time their official name and the famous star-in-a-circle badge, which was to become the stuff of legend.

This is a story of the early days, when small companies of poorly paid, poorly fed volunteers in homespun cloth and buckskin rode an unmarked frontier line for a primitive Texas that had only a toenail hold on survival. They had no uniform, no badge, not even an official name. But they had a job to do, and against all odds they managed to do it.

The story begins with one of the most unlikely events in early Texas history, the great Comanche raid that led to the sacking of Linnville town on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.

TEXAS GULF COAST, AUGUST 1840

.

He was Comanche, and he was known among The People as Buffalo Caller. Once in a time of hunger, when he was a fledgling on one of his first hunts, the older and more experienced men had ridden their horses to exhaustion without scaring up so much as one lone, lame bull. But Buffalo Caller, riding alone, had heard a faint and distant bellow. He had responded in the voice of a buffalo, and the buffalo had answered him. The calls led him to a small herd in a hidden canyon.

It was not buffalo he hunted now. He scouted as a wolf for the largest assembly of raiders the Penateka band had ever put together, moving to strike the land-greedy, hair-faced American settlers of Texas. Beside him against the Texans rode Swift as the Antelope, so named for his fleetness of foot.

Buffalo Caller tingled with excitement over the sights he was about to behold. He had never seen an ocean or even a boat, so it strained his imagination to visualize what old men had described around their campfires. If the veterans had not let fanciful dreams overcome the realities of memory, those wonders lay no more than half a day's horseback journey ahead of him. It was claimed that the great water stretched so far one could not see all the way across. None of The People had ever ventured out upon it to determine how far it extended, for they were of the land, not of the sea. It was said that white men's boats might travel for many days without touching shore and that fish larger than horses lived in the dark and frightening depths.

Buffalo Caller doubted much of what he had heard. It sounded typical of the white
teibos
' lies. He had forded many rivers, and he had visited lakes wider than the rivers, but none were so wide that he could not see the opposite side.

Where he rode now was far to the south and east of the short-grass prairie and the limestone hill hunting grounds he was accustomed to roaming. A journey of many days had brought the massive Comanche war column into a gently rolling land of sandy soil and tall, summer-cured grass much different from the higher, drier land the Penatekas claimed as home. The hot, humid wind carried a smell foreign to his experience and left a faint suggestion of salt upon his lips. Summer heat sent sweat rolling down from beneath his buffalo-horn headdress and into his paint-streaked face, burning his eyes.

The foreignness of this land made him uneasy despite the persistent gnawing of curiosity. Though he wanted to see the great water for himself, he would be relieved when they finished what they came to do so they could return to country more suited to his experience.

What they were about was vengeance, blood for blood. In the early spring many tribal leaders and warriors had met with white chiefs in San Antonio de Bejar's council house to discuss an earlier agreement by the Comanches to free all their captives. Some had reconsidered the promise and balked, holding out for stronger terms. Talk had led to quarrel, and quarrel to the loosing of arrows and an explosion of gunfire. When the smoke drifted away, more than thirty Indians lay dead and dying in the council house and in the foul dirt of San Antonio's narrow streets.

In retaliation The People had killed most of the remaining white captives, but those had not bled enough to wash away the stain of the San Antonio disaster. The indignant Penatekas had undertaken this huge punitive expedition, carrying them far beyond their normal range, all the way eastward to the Gulf of Mexico. He did not know how many of The People were on this grand adventure. He had attempted to count them on his fingers and thumbs, but the task overwhelmed him. They were so many that they defied his understanding of numbers. Their horses left the grass beaten down and the ground scarred in their wake like the slow passage of a large buffalo herd. Though the object was war, many women and children had come along to watch and cheer as their warriors carried calamity to the white enemy.

Mexican allies guided them, for they knew the route. They knew how to pick their way through the sparsely settled region and avoid detection until time for the great force to loose its thunder and lightning. Buffalo caller understood that the Americans had won this land from the Mexicans in a fierce war. Mexico wanted to take it back and had sent emissaries to the tribes, promising many good things in return for their aid. Buffalo Caller cared nothing for Mexico, for the first raid in which he had ridden had been against Mexicans. He had fought them often and had killed many. But he welcomed any chance to strike the Texans. A temporary alliance with a former adversary was justifiable if it promised victory over an enemy hated even more.

Antelope pulled up on his rawhide reins. "The wind brings the smell of smoke." He raised his head, sniffing, testing.

Antelope was notoriously subject to quick judgments and quick action without considering where they might lead. Buffalo Caller smelled only dust, for the ground was so dry it had cracked open in places. The soil would all be up and moving on the wind were it not bound by a heavy stand of brittle grass, the result of last spring's rains. He drew the skin taut at the edge of his right eye, trying to sharpen his vision. He decided Antelope was right, this time. "I think I see a house. It is beyond the timber, there."

His companion thumped the heels of his moccasins against his mount's ribs, putting him into a trot. "If they have horses, we shall take them."

Buffalo Caller feared that Antelope's zeal would make him forget their real mission. "Taking horses is not what you and I have been sent to do."

The principal concern so far had been to avoid premature detection as the army of warriors moved along. The wolves were to overtake and kill any whites who might observe their passage before the trap was sprung. That precaution seemed less important now because scouts had reported that the town of Victoria lay only a short distance ahead. The Americans would soon know of the column's coming. One Mexican guide had lived in Victoria until the Texans drove him out, and he itched for retribution. Victoria had been chosen as the first target.

Buffalo Caller recognized Antelope's determination. He relented, knowing Antelope would do whatever he wanted, regardless of advice to the contrary. "If we find horses, there is no reason they should not be ours." He set his dun horse into a trot that matched Antelope's pace.

Antelope grunted. "If we find any
teibos
, we will take their scalps as well as their horses." His taste for vengeance was strong. A brother's blood had soaked into the floor of the San Antonio council house.

"So long as we do not leave our own."

Emerging from a small patch of timber, they saw a man afoot in a cornfield, wielding a curved knife to cut heads from the stalks, tossing them into the bed of a wagon drawn by two horses. His back turned, he did not see the warriors' approach.