The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (11 page)

As the Indians reached the Colorado, a norther blew in, and they sought shelter in a cedar brake. Confident Mrs. Hibbons would not escape and leave her three-year-old behind, they didn’t bother to tie her up or post a guard. Realizing her only hope for herself or her son was escape, she waited until they were asleep and slipped away. The following night, she found the camp.

The Rangers finished their supper and prepared to ride. Their host, Reuben Hornsby, knew the country and acted as guide. They rode through the night until they judged they were near the Indian trail, then halted and waited until daylight, so they wouldn’t miss it in the dark. Scouts went out at first light and soon found the trail. Smithwick remembered it was “fresh and well defined as if the marauders were exercising neither haste nor caution . . . having no doubt spent a good portion of the previous day in a fruitless search for their escaped prisoner.”

They tracked the Indians to Walnut Creek, about ten miles northwest of Austin, and found them preparing to break camp. The surprised Comanches dashed for shelter in one of the numerous cedar brakes, leaving everything except weapons. Smithwick’s horse took him right in among them, and one warrior barely missed him with a musket shot. Knowing the Comanche’s gun was empty, Smithwick jumped off his horse and fired at him. The Indian dropped, and, presuming he was dead, Smithwick reloaded and ran after the others.

The warrior, however, was only wounded, and managed to reload his musket while lying on the ground. He fired at Tumlinson, killing his horse. Another Ranger grabbed the musket away and smashed the Comanche’s head with it. The other Comanches managed to get into the brakes, where, according to Smithwick, “it was worse than useless to follow them.”

A tragedy almost occurred when a Ranger prepared to fire on what appeared to be a bundled Indian fleeing on a mule. As he pulled the trigger, another Ranger knocked the barrel up, and the ball went over the rider’s head. The mule was recovered and the rider proved to be the Hibbons boy, who had been bundled Indian-fashion and tied to the mule. When the Rangers attacked, the frightened mule had bolted, giving the impression of fleeing.

The dead Comanche’s scalp was awarded to Smithwick, because the Rangers determined the wound from his shot would have been mortal. He wasn’t necessarily pleased with the honor, but kept the scalp, “thinking it might afford the poor woman, whose family its owner had helped to murder, some satisfaction to see that gory evidence that one of the wretches had paid the penalty of his crime.”
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Eventually, Tumlinson’s company reached Brushy Creek and built the blockhouse. Their stay was uneventful. Two months later, they were recalled to the settlements to cover the rear of the army as it retreated eastward after the fall of the Alamo. Nevertheless, their fight on Walnut Creek was a turning point in Texas history, because it opened almost forty years of war with the Comanche nation.
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IT IS SOMETIMES
said that the only battle that really matters is the last one. Such was the case of Texas. Despite losses at the Alamo, Goliad, and Refugio, the Texans won their independence on the bloody afternoon of April 21, 1836, when a ragtag army under Maj. Gen. Sam Houston overwhelmed Santa Anna’s forces at San Jacinto. Although several Mexican armies were still undefeated and in the field, Santa Anna himself was a prisoner, and initially this did much to discourage the generals from any further campaigning. Santa Anna’s influence was declining, however, and the detention of Texas peace commissioners in Matamoros on the Rio Grande raised suspicions that Mexico was planning another invasion. Gen. Thomas J. Rusk, who assumed command of the army after Houston was wounded at San Jacinto, ordered Capt. Isaac Burton’s Ranger company to scout the area from the Guadalupe River to Refugio near the coastal bend.

On June 2, Burton learned that a suspicious vessel had put in at Copano Bay. Burton had his twenty-man force in position on the beach by dawn the next day. At 8
A.M.
, they signaled the ship to send a boat ashore. The ship’s unsuspecting captain sent five men, who were taken prisoner on landing. Sixteen Rangers rowed out and captured the ship, which proved to be the
Watchman,
loaded with provisions for the Mexican army.

Burton wanted to send the ship up the coast to Velasco, but she was held in Copano Bay by contrary winds. During the wait, the
Camanche
[
sic
] and
Fanny Butler,
also loaded with freight consigned for the Mexicans, anchored off the bar. On Burton’s orders, the captain of the
Watchman
decoyed their commanders, and their ships were captured as well. All three ships eventually were taken to Velasco, where they were condemned. Value of the prizes came to $25,000, a substantial amount to support the beleaguered Texas Army. Burton and his Rangers became known as the “Horse Marines.”
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If one views the War of Independence purely in terms of the Mexican front, the Rangers might seem peripheral; the only ranging company involved in that campaign was the one from Gonzales, whose members died at the Alamo. The purpose of the Rangers, however, was not to fight Mexico but to defend the frontier. And while a serious Indian threat never really materialized, they remained ready to perform their duty, allowing the army to concentrate on Santa Anna.

PART 2

BIRTH OF A LEGEND

Chapter 3

Serving the Republic

May 1836 was deceptively quiet. The immediate Mexican threat
was over, and despite sporadic Indian raids in the vicinity of the Brazos settlements, the tribes were relatively peaceful. Yet, the sporadic raids were the early signs of a general uprising brought on in part by the Ranger attacks of the previous year. The death of Chief Canoma at the hands of Burleson’s men had alienated the Caddos. The raid by the Brazos settlers against the Keechi village and Coleman and Moore’s campaigns had brought sporadic retaliatory attacks in the vicinity. One Indian told settler Daniel Parker that about five hundred tribesmen had gathered on the Trinity River and were sporting two captive white women and several children, but the Parkers did not try to ascertain whether this was true.¹

Daniel and his brother Silas Parker were among those who had been authorized by the Permanent Council to form Ranger companies to defend the frontier during the Mexican crisis. In private life, they and their other brothers headed a fortified settlement that had many characteristics of a religious commune; most of the settlers were either Parker kin or followers of a Predestinarian Baptist movement headed by Daniel. Originally from Virginia, the clan and its congregation had migrated to Texas from Illinois in the early 1830s. By the spring of 1834, they had chosen their land, staked their claims, completed their fort, and cleared and planted their fields. Surviving floods and Indian scares, they prospered, and in the fall of 1835 the War of Independence brought Silas and Daniel to prominence with the convention.²

Because the Rangers of this era were citizen volunteers, they used periods of relative peace to return home and tend their crops and handle other chores. With the frontier reasonably quiet and the immediate Mexican emergency over, May 1836 found Silas Parker back at the family seat of Parker’s Fort near the headwaters of the Navasota River. The fort was not a military post but a fortified settlement of several families such as were built on the Indian frontier up through the 1860s. The modern reconstruction, erected on the original site based on archaeology and contemporary accounts, is a stockade of upright cedar logs enclosing a communal square and stock pens. The families lived in cabins built against the interior of the stockade. Between each cabin and the next was a rifle stage and loopholes for defense. Blockhouses were built over the northeast and southwest corners. The northeast blockhouse covered the main gate, and the southeast blockhouse overlooked the “spring gate,” a waist-high portal that led to the springs where the families drew their water.

On May 19, 1836, most of the men were working in their fields some distance away, leaving only a handful of men in the fort with the women and children. The day was hot, and the main gate, which closed would have made the stockade virtually impregnable, was open to catch the breeze. About mid-morning, a large band of Indians appeared outside the gate, and before a defense could be prepared, they overran the fort. By the time the men arrived from the fields, the fort had been sacked. Five were dead, including Silas Parker; one was badly wounded, and five were taken captive.³

Eventually, every captive of the raid was ransomed except Silas’s daughter, Cynthia Ann. For the next quarter of a century, whenever the Texas Rangers recovered a female white captive of the appropriate age, the question in everyone’s mind was: Is this Cynthia Ann Parker?

NEWS OF THE
attack on Parker’s Fort created a sensation on the frontier. Many settlers in the outlying farms and ranches moved in closer to the settlements for protection. Indian depredations spread, and Bastrop County, about sixty miles northeast of San Antonio, suffered especially badly. Even as the financially battered Republic cut back on its army, it had to raise new Ranger units from those scattered after the War of Independence. On August 12, 1836, Acting Secretary of War F. A. Sawyer ordered Robert Coleman “to raise for the term of one year three companies of mounted men for the Special purpose of protecting frontier inhabitants. . . .” Many of these were Rangers from Tumlinson’s company, called back into service because their previous enlistments had not expired. Among them was the twenty-eight-year-old Noah Smithwick, who appeared at a dance during this period “resplendent in a brand new buckskin suit, consisting of hunting shirt, pantaloons and moccasins, all elaborately fringed.”
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Buckskin, which was common attire in those days, made good, durable clothing in dry weather. But when saturated in a heavy rain, the leather stretched and trouser legs might lengthen as much as a foot, then would shrink on drying. Wet buckskins also had a slimy, clammy feel that made their wearers uncomfortable. In an effort to clothe the Rangers, the Texas government made one of history’s few attempts to provide them uniforms, buying them surplus from the United States. When they arrived, the uniforms were all too small. Smithwick recalled:

Isaac Casner, who tipped the beam at 200 [pounds], got a suit that would have been a snug fit for a man of 140. . . . Wolfenberger, who would have measured six feet barefooted, got a suit of which the bottoms of the pantaloons struck him about half way to his knees, the jacket failing to connect with them by full six inches, and his arms protruding a foot beyond the end of the sleeves.
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The Rangers were promised $25 a month as well as 1,280 acres of public land for every year of service. Men were expected to provide their own horses and arms. Horses and equipment were major expenditures.

Austrian-born Ranger George Bernard Erath remembered more than one man who had to promise his land rights and pay in advance to procure a horse, bridle, and saddle. Noah Smithwick traded one of his 1,280-acre land certificates “for a horse which the Indians relieved me of in less than a week.”
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The government theoretically furnished ammunition and rations, but in fact government support was largely limited to ammunition. According to Erath, the only rations were “some beef now and then.” The rest of the time they fed themselves by hunting.
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The food shortage was chronic in the early years. John C. Duval, a soldier in the War of Independence who became one of Texas’s first men of letters, remembered encountering a company of Rangers who had been in service six months, subsisting solely on beef and game without any bread the entire time. Duval and his party shared their supply of moldy, worm-eaten hardtack, which the Rangers “devoured . . . with as keen a relish as if it had been the greatest delicacy.”
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COLEMAN’S RANGERS BROKE
up into two detachments. Coleman took the main body to build a fort at the junction of Walnut Creek and the Colorado about six miles below the present site ofAustin, while Erath was detailed with two sergeants and twenty men to build a fort on the Leon River. Similar to Parker’s Fort, these posts consisted of stockades enclosing some log cabins with blockhouses on opposite corners.
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Much of the duty appears to have been routine. Recalling the construction of his fort on the Leon River, Erath remarked:

My memory for details on almost all subjects is good, but I am at a loss how to account for the amount of work done that winter [1836–37] by men who had to guard, hunt, cook, dress deerskin, and make clothes of it, particularly moccasins, and in all ways provide everything, and yet in six weeks time, by Christmas, I had up seven or eight houses with wooden chimneys, well covered, and with buffalo hide carpets down.
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