The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (12 page)

There were some farms abandoned by settlers fleeing the Indian outbreak, and foraging parties managed to procure autumn corn growing untended in the fields. Erath issued the men one ear apiece per day for cornbread, and they ground it in a steel mill. Cooking utensils and other household wares were gathered from deserted cabins. “Our meat was wild game which was plentiful,” he said. “Honey had to be kept in rawhide or deerskin sacks with the hair outside, and at Christmas we had several hundred pounds of it about the Fort.” Coffee was scarce and brewed sparingly.
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Colemen’s men had more trouble supplying themselves. The area surrounding his fort was more settled, perhaps because, as Smithwick commented, “the Indians were not depredating in our beat.” Whereas Erath’s foragers could supply themselves without complaint from abandoned farms, Coleman had to requisition food and supplies from the settlers, and his high-handed methods made him unpopular.

Matters came to a head when a Lieutenant Robel, a martinet who some said was a deserter from the U.S. Army, ordered a drunken Ranger tied to a post overnight. The man passed out, slumped away from the post, and was strangled to death by the cord around his neck. The death created a furor that frightened Robel into deserting the Rangers, leaving Coleman to bear the responsibility. Coleman was relieved of command and ordered to report to the War Department in the provisional capital at Columbia, where he drowned in a boating accident while awaiting investigation.
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Local and internal disputes aside, service at Coleman’s Fort appears largely to have been tranquil, although occasionally the Indians provided some distraction. One evening in the spring of 1837, the men were relaxing on the parade ground, smoking, swapping stories, and dancing to Smithwick’s fiddle, when a flame suddenly burst from a high knoll across the river, and shadows were seen dancing around it. “Our scouts had seen no sign of Indians,” Smithwick wrote, “still, we knew no white men would so recklessly expose themselves in an Indian country, and at once decided they were Indians.”

Lt. Nicholas Wren took fifteen mounted men across the river. By the time they assembled on the opposite side, the fire had gone out, and Wren, Smithwick, and Ranger Jo Weeks scouted in the direction from which it had been seen. Locating the vicinity, they returned for the others and moved ahead, and in the darkness blundered into the Indian pony herd. They calmed the nervous ponies, hoping the animals’ pawing and snorting had not given them away, then moved into a cedar grove.

The Rangers were completely lost in the darkness until one Indian coughed in his sleep, revealing the location of the camp. The whites crept forward and saw the sleeping forms, but hesitated because they still could not identify them. Finally, one of the sleepers turned over, revealing them to be warriors. Suddenly, one jumped to his feet and appeared to be listening.

“Plug him, Weeks!” Ranger Tom McKarnan whispered. Weeks fired, and the Indian fell. The others stampeded into a dense thicket as the Rangers ran into the camp. One turned and fired, hitting Ranger Philip Martin in the mouth and killing him instantly. The others escaped, including Weeks’s victim, who apparently was only wounded. The Rangers were left in possession of the camp, its equipment, and the pony herd. They returned with their prizes to the fort, where they buried Martin next to the man who had strangled on the post.
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Soon afterward, the Indians made a retaliatory raid on the pasture where the Rangers’ horses were grazing, stampeding the herd and making off with many of the animals. The Rangers chased them for three days before finally giving up. Lieutenant Wren was suspended, unjustly in the minds of his men, and they successfully petitioned for his reinstatement. The Rangers continued to occupy Coleman’s Fort, sporadically skirmishing with Indians, until the post was abandoned in November 1838. After that, the settlers organized scouting parties, patrolling the district in turns much like a twentieth-century neighborhood watch.
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ONE REASON FOR
the vehement hatred whites held for Indians was the cruelty with which the Indians waged war. It is remarkable that the whites, with their own heritage of atrocity in the ThirtyYears War and the religious upheavals of Europe, should have been so sensitive. Nevertheless, by the nineteenth century, battle was viewed as a set-piece, almost drillfield affair, and the Indian customs of mutilation, torture, rape, and wanton murder were seen as total depravity. Marauding Indians generally killed their victims outright or tortured them to death soon after capture. They rarely kept prisoners, because they did not have the means to confine them and very often did not even have the means to feed them. Those who were kept alive were spared because of the disposition of their individual captors or because they might be useful around camp. Boys and girls beyond the age of infancy were spared because they were useful—the boys to be groomed as warriors and the girls as wives. Infants, however, often were killed as liabilities.
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Captive women and even young girls could expect to be gang-raped, although sometimes a warrior with prestige might claim a captive as exclusively his own. Girls placed under the supervision of Indian women might be subject to routine acts of sadism, such as burning with firebrands or hot irons, or laceration.

Nelson Lee, who occasionally served as a Texas Ranger, spent three years as a Comanche captive and described the fate of three English-women brought into his camp. The women told Lee the men in their train had been massacred, the children separated and carried away, and crying babies killed by cutting a hole under their chins and hanging them “on the point of a broken limb.” Already, the women had been repeatedly raped. Once in camp, Lee wrote:

The mother, whose health had broken down under the hardships and sufferings she had endured, was made a common drudge in the camp, while the daughters were appropriated by two burly warriors, and compelled to serve them, both in the capacity of slaves and wives.
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Lee was the rare case of an adult male captive who managed to avoid a slow, excruciating death. Herman Lehmann, a German captured as a boy and reared as a warrior, recalled one joint Apache-Comanche raid near the headwaters of the Llano River. “We burned a house and killed a man, his wife and four or five children. We tortured them before we killed them,” he commented matter-of-factly.
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THE EFFORT TO
organize an effective frontier defense force was difficult because the government itself was barely organized. During the first months of the Republic, a provisional government functioned under the Permanent Council, with David G. Burnet as interim president and Lorenzo de Zavala as vice president. Then, on the first Monday in September 1836, Texans went to the polls, approving a constitution and electing Sam Houston to a two-year term as president, and Mirabeau B. Lamar, whom Houston detested, as vice president. The legislature consisted of a bicameral congress modeled on that of the United States. Voters also approved a resolution to seek annexation to the United States, which the American government, concerned about relations with Mexico as well as the admission of another slave state, politely ignored. As time passed and the American attitude remained tepid, the mood of many Texans changed to favor continued independence from any power.
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Houston and Lamar were inaugurated October 22 in Columbia, which served as capital until April 1, 1837, when the government was moved to the newly established city of Houston. One of the last official functions in Columbia was the state funeral of Stephen F. Austin, who died of pneumonia on December 27. The body lay in state for two days, then was carried aboard the steamer
Yellowstone
for the trip down the Brazos to the Austin family seat at Peach Point for burial.
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AMONG THE MYRIAD
problems facing the new republic was frontier defense. On December 10, 1836, the Texas Congress passed a bill giving official sanction and establishing pay for all Rangers who had been in service since July of the previous year, as well as those who might enter the service in the future. Captains were to receive $75 a month; first lieutenants, $60; second lieutenants, $50; orderly sergeants, $40; and riflemen (i.e., privates), $25. Besides pay, Rangers and their officers were entitled to bonuses in the form of “bounties of land.”
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Legislation aside, information on the Rangers for the remainder of the 1830s is at best sketchy, in part because of the confused conditions in the Republic in general and on the frontier in particular, and in part because so many records of the era have been lost. Although a national Ranger Corps existed in theory, the government often was not able to continually maintain it. When the terms of service specified in Ranger legislation expired, companies were mustered out and the cost-conscious Texas Congress did not always attempt to replace them or organize new Ranger companies until some crisis on the frontier required it. Often it appears to have been more expedient for the government to give official sanction and assume financial responsibility for locally organized companies. The activities of some of these local Ranger companies are recorded in official reports, diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts. Others are known only through muster rolls and pay sheets on file in the State Library and Archive in Austin. Nevertheless, such records as do remain indicate the Rangers were active throughout the decade.

WHETHER ORGANIZED BY
the general government or by their own communities, Rangers revised their attitudes and tactics to fit changes in the nature and scope of Indian fighting. Houston obtained a permanent treaty with the Lipans and the Tonkawas, securing their aid as scouts against the Comanches and other Plains tribes. Although they had occasionally conflicted with the early settlers, the two tribes had been more of a nuisance than a threat. Overall, they remained friendly, and their goodwill increased in direct proportion to the growing hostility between the whites and the Plains tribes.
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Describing the Lipans of the 1830s and 1840s, Ranger Robert Hall said:

They were great friends to the Texans, and were a great help to us. They were always after the wild [Plains] Indians, and whenever they caught them they killed them. They were brave warriors in battle.
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The Tonkawas especially were interested in assisting the whites; generations earlier, the Comanches had driven them from their ancient homeland along the fringes of the Hill Country west of Austin, and now they looked to even the score. For the next forty years, until the end of the Indian Wars in Texas, the Tonkawas remained steadfast allies.
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Although the whites were grateful for the support from these Indians, they found some Lipan and Tonkawa customs unsettling, particularly the practice of eating the corpses of slain enemies. Hall was invited to a cannibal feast after one Lipan skirmish with the Comanches. “They offered me a choice slice of Comanche,” he remarked, “but I politely informed them that I had just eaten a rattlesnake and was too full to eat any more.”
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It was all the more horrifying when the whites themselves, by necessity of war, became unwilling contributors to the feast. Noah Smithwick recalled one incident when a band of Tonkawas joined settlers chasing Comanche horse thieves. Spotting the Comanche rear guard, three of the Tonkawas galloped ahead and killed a warrior. With the body as a trophy, they rode to one of the neighboring farms.

Having fleeced off the flesh of the dead Comanche, they borrowed a big wash kettle . . . into which they put the Comanche meat, together with a lot of corn and potatoes—the most revolting mess my eyes ever rested on. When the stew was sufficiently cooked and cooled to allow of its being ladled out with the hands the whole tribe gathered round, dipping it up with their hands and eating it as greedily as hogs. Having gorged themselves on this delectable feast they lay down and slept till night, when the entertainment was concluded with the scalp dance.
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HOUSTON’S TERM EXPIRED
in the fall of 1838, and he was constitutionally prohibited from succeeding himself. Subsequent presidents, though still bound to the nonsuccession clause, would serve three years. Even before the election, it was obvious Vice President Lamar would become the next head of state. He had widespread support in the Texas Senate and with the public, and Houston’s anti-Lamar faction was unable to find a viable candidate.
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Modern historians often view Lamar as the buffoon of the Republic. He was, however, no worse suited for the presidency than Sam Houston, and in many ways he was well qualified to lead Texas into the 1840s. Lamar was shrewd, and his selection of cabinet ministers not only pleased the various political factions but assembled a broad array of education and talent. More cultured than the average frontiersman, Lamar became the father of public education in Texas, and his policies toward Indians, Mexico, and the United States reflected the public attitude.
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Affronted by the indifferent American attitude toward Texas, Lamar hoped to negotiate a peace with Mexico and obtain recognition of its independence. War, he believed, not only placed an excessive economic burden on both countries, but also threatened to disrupt a potentially profitable trade along the border. Because Santa Annawas back in power, however, peace was highly unlikely. If the differences could not be resolved, Lamar felt, Texas should aid revolutionary groups in Mexico.