Read Ebook: Fort Concho: Its Why and Wherefore by Gregory James N James Noble

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A cavalry expedition out of Fort Concho working the edges of the Llano Estacado in 1872, captured a Comanchero who told how he and his companions traded the Indian arms, ammunition and supplies for cattle, horses and sheep that they had stolen during their raids. He even showed the soldiers the well worn trails across the Llano Estacado towards Santa Fe and the valley of the Rio Grande. Thus the secret was finally revealed to the Army. It seems unbelievable at this time that such ignorance could prevail over the cries and protests of the Texas ranchmen who were losing cattle by the tens of thousands. But such was the case, and in 1867, the Comanches even stole horses from the post herd at Fort Concho. We must remember that in that same year the mild policies of President Andrew Johnson in Washington were overruled by the radicals in the United States Congress, and the bitter years of reconstruction followed for the Southern States. All former Confederate soldiers were deprived of the vote, and radicals, carpetbaggers, scalawags from the South and freed Negroes ruled the State. The Army was used, not to fight Indians, but to guard the new social system.

The prospect appeared brighter for the settlers when in the Fall of 1869, one hundred soldiers from Fort Concho managed to engage an Indian force on the Salt Fork of the Brazos River. It was a drawn fight, but immediately thereafter a larger force from the same fort engaged and defeated the Indians in the same area. Texans were cheered by the news of this new tone of aggressiveness shown by the Army. It was the only way. The war had to be carried to the Indians the same way Earl Van Dorn had carried the fight to them on the eve of the Civil War.

But the time for real action had not arrived even as late as 1869. On February 18, 1870, a citizen was killed and scalped within one-quarter of a mile of the post limits at Fort Concho. In January of the same year, eighteen mules were stolen from the Q.M. corral at that same post. The same year, 1870, while Colonel Grierson was building Fort Sill in the Indian Territory, Chief Kicking Bird, a Kiowa, defeated the Command of Captain C. B. McClellan near the present town of Seymour. As late as March of 1872, a wagon train was waylaid near Grierson Springs in Reagan County and the teamsters killed by the Indians. Two companies of the 9th Cavalry came upon the scene by accident, engaged the Indians but withdrew before a decision was reached.

The lamentations of the border people were finally heard in Washington and in April, 1871, General W. T. Sherman came to San Antonio. The next month, accompanied by General Randolph B. Marcy and an escort of seventeen men, he left for an inspection of the frontier. General Marcy was the same officer who, in 1849 and later, had played such an important part in exploring and reporting to Congress on trails through Texas. The great explorer was still an outdoor man of action.

The little expedition proceeded by way of Boerne, Fredericksburg, the old Spanish Fort on the San Saba which had withstood a great Comanche Indian siege in 1758, Fort McKavett, Kickapoo Springs and Fort Concho. From Fort Concho it followed the military trail on northeasterly by the remains of Fort Chadbourne and Phantom Hill and on towards Belknap.

General Marcy's journal is of great interest. He relates:

"We crossed immense herds of cattle today, which are allowed to run wild upon the prairies, and they multiply very rapidly. The only attention the owners give them is to brand the calves and occasionally go out to see where they range. The remains of several ranches were observed, the occupants of which have either been killed or driven off to the more dense settlements, by the Indians. Indeed, this rich and beautiful section does not contain, today , as many white people as it did when I visited it eighteen years ago, and if the Indian marauders are not punished, the whole country seems to be in a fair way of being totally depopulated." He continues:

"May 18th, 1871--This morning five teamsters, who, with seven others, had been with a mule wagon train en route to Fort Griffin with corn for the post, were attacked on the open prairie, about ten miles east of Salt Creek, by 100 Indians, and seven of the teamsters were killed and one wounded. General Sherman immediately ordered Colonel Mackenzie to take a force of 150 cavalry, with thirty days' rations on pack mules, and pursue and chastise the marauders."

An interesting angle to this affair was that Sherman's party had been observed by the same Indians who murdered the teamsters, but were unmolested by them because they were waiting for the wagon train which they considered nearer top priority. Sherman realized later that he had nearly lost his scalp.

This Colonel Mackenzie had reported in at Fort Concho as commanding officer on September 6, 1869. Born in New York, July 27, 1840, and christened RANALD SLIDELL, he had graduated first in his class at West Point in 1862. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War, received several wounds in action, and was a brigadier general when that war closed. The remainder of his professional life was devoted to active high command in the Indian wars. At various times he served at Forts Brown, Clark, McKavett, Concho and Richardson, engaging in his last Indian fight at Willow Creek, Wyoming in 1876. He was retired from the Army for disability in 1884 and died a bachelor at New Brighton, New York in 1889.

Along with Mackenzie, Colonel William Rufus Shafter who arrived to command at Fort Concho in January, 1870, the War Department had its two best young officers serving in the West Texas theatre.

Shafter had no West Point training. Born in Michigan on October 16, 1835, he entered the Union Army in the Civil War as a first lieutenant and by the end of that war had been breveted brigadier general of volunteers. He was later awarded The Congressional Medal of Honor for service during that war. He was commissioned lieutenant colonel of regulars in 1869 and first saw service in West Texas with the 24th Infantry at Fort McKavett. Later in life he was to command the American armies in Cuba during the Spanish American War.

During the summer of 1871, while commanding forces at Fort Davis, he set out with cavalry from both Forts Davis and Stockton and pursued a large raiding party of Indians from the Fort Davis area northeasterly until the trail moved into the great sand dune country near where the city of Monahans now stands. He spent fourteen days in this pursuit but as was usual in such matters, could never force an engagement. However, he learned that the heretofore dreaded sand dunes contained fresh water a few feet below the surface in several places, and that the area was a great refuge for Indians and was one of those rendezvous where horse-and-cattle stealing Indians met the Comanchero traders from New Mexico.

The command at Fort Concho, as at the other forts, rotated in a perpetual manner. After service elsewhere, Mackenzie returned to Concho to organize five companies of the 4th Cavalry and a headquarters company for service at Fort Richardson, nearer the Indian Territory. His column moved out March 27, 1871, cavalry, pack mules and wagons. The bachelor commander even allowed wives of the men to accompany the expedition as far as the new headquarters at Fort Richardson.

The weather was crisp and cold as they forded the North Concho and soon passed Mt. Margaret, named after "the most accomplished, loving and devoted wife of one of our favorite captains, E. B. Beaumont"--, so wrote Captain Robert G. Carter, historian and winner of The Congressional Medal of Honor in the Indian Wars, who was a member of the expedition. They pitched camp the first night at old Fort Chadbourne, from where they followed the military trail passing en route huge herds of buffalo, as they went on by old Forts Phantom Hill, Belknap and on into Richardson.

Two months later, in May, Colonel Mackenzie roused his 4th Cavalry at Fort Richardson and set out to obey General Sherman's orders issued after the killing of the teamsters at Salt Creek. But it began to rain. After a futile chase Colonel Mackenzie headed for Fort Sill, commanded by Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson. There he learned that Sherman had left but not before the Chiefs Satank , Big Tree and Satanta had returned to the reservation at Sill and boasted of murdering the teamsters. Mackenzie arrested and escorted the three Indians to Jacksboro for trial in the Texas court. Satank purposely got himself killed by a guard on the march, but Satanta and Big Tree were later sentenced to prison in the state penitentiary at Huntsville. The duplicity of these reservation Indians should now have been apparent to even Grierson and the Indian lovers in Washington and Austin, but it was not.

A good insight into the Indian problem of the times, and of which we have a written record, appeared at the trial of the two Indian chiefs during July of 1871 in the little log courthouse on the public square of Jacksboro. Charles Soward was the presiding judge. Samuel W. T. Lanham, later to be a two term Governor of Texas, was the district attorney. The court appointed Thomas Fall and Joe Woolfork of the Weatherford Bar to represent the defendants.

Thomas Williams, the foreman of the Jury, was a frontier citizen and a brother of the Governor of Indiana.

The principal witnesses against the defendants were Colonel Mackenzie, Lawrie Tatum, the Indian Agent who had heard their statements at Fort Sill and Thomas Brazeal, the teamster who had escaped from the Salt Creek massacre.

Our Captain Carter wrote:

"Under a strong guard accompanied by his counsel and an interpreter, the Chief, clanking his chain, walked to the little log courthouse on the public square. The jury had been impaneled and the District Attorney bustled and flourished around. The whole country armed to the teeth crowded the courthouse and stood outside listening through the open windows. The Chief's attorneys made a plea for him, and referred to the wrongs the red man had suffered. How he had been cheated and dispoiled of his lands and driven westward until it seemed there was no limit to the greed of the white man. They excused his crime as just retaliation for centuries of wrong. The jurors sat on long benches, each in his shirt sleeves and with shooting irons strapped to his hip."

Satanta got up to defend himself before his accusers. Over six feet tall, the perfect figure of an athlete and well known as the orator of the plains who could sway councils of both whites and Indians, he could well have influenced the jury by mute silence, but instead he lied and dissembled to save his life. He never mentioned the wrongs done his people by the whites. Instead, speaking through the interpreter, he proceeded as follows:

... "I have never been so near the Tehannas before. I look around me and see your braves, squaws and papooses, and I have said in my heart, if I ever get back to my people, I will never make war upon you. I have always been the friend of the white man, ever since I was so high . My tribe have taunted me and called me a squaw because I have been the friend of the Tehannas. I am suffering now for the crimes of bad Indians--of Satank and Lone Wolf and Kicking Bird and Big Bow and Fast Bear and Eagle Heart, and if you will let me go, I will kill the three latter with my own hand...."

The evidence against the two Chiefs was debated by the jury and both were sentenced to death. This sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

Now, a few statements from the court record as to what the District Attorney had to say point to some of the misunderstandings of the times when it came to the Indian problems on the western frontiers.

The following excerpts from his plea before the court show clearly, not only the feelings of the frontiersmen towards the uncontrolled Indians, but also the contempt in which they, both frontiersmen and Indians, held the people who by appeasement, crookedness and ignorance tried to manage the Indian affairs of the nation from a far away city:

"Satanta, the veteran council chief of the Kiowas--the orator--the diplomat--the counselor of his tribe--the pulse of his race; Big Tree, the young war chief, who leads in the thickest of the fight, and follows no one in the chase--the mighty warrior, with the speed of the deer and the eye of the eagle, are before this bar in the charge of the law! So they would be described by Indian admirers, who live in more secured and favored lands, remote from the frontier--where 'distance lends enchantment' to the imagination--where the story of Pocohantas and the speech of Logan, the Mingo, are read, and the dread sound of the warwhoop is not heard. We who see them today, disrobed of all their fancied graces exposed in the light of reality, behold them through far different lenses. We recognize in Satanta the arch fiend of treachery and blood, the cunning Cataline--the promoter of strife--the breaker of treaties signed by his own hand--the inciter of his fellows to rapine and murder, as well as the most canting and double-tongued hypocrite where detected and overcome! In Big Tree, we perceive the tiger-demon who tasted blood and loved it as his own food--who stops at no crime how black soever--who is swift at every species of ferocity and pities not at any sight of agony or death--he can scalp, burn, torture, mangle and deface his victims, with all the superlatives of cruelty, and have no feeling of sympathy or remorse. We look in vain to see, in them, anything to be admired or even endured. Powerful legislative influences have been brought to bear to procure for them annuities, reservations and supplies. Federal munificence has fostered and nourished them, fed and clothed them; from their strongholds of protection they have come down upon us 'like wolves on the fold'; treaties have been solemnly made with them, wherein they have been considered with all the formalities of quasi nationalities; immense financial 'rings' have had their origin in, and draw their vitality from, the 'Indian question'; unblushing corruption has stalked abroad, created and kept alive through

"'--the poor Indian, whose untutored mind, Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.'

"... For many years, predatory and numerous bands of these 'pets of the government' have waged the most relentless and heart-rending warfare upon our frontier, stealing our property and killing our citizens. We have cried aloud for help.... It is a fact, well known in Texas, that stolen property has been traced to the very doors of the reservation and there identified by our people, to no purpose...."

Mackenzie realized those things and knew he could receive no cooperation from Grierson at Fort Sill, so in September, acting on orders, concentrated a force of eight companies of the 4th Cavalry, two companies of the 11th Infantry and thirty Tonkawa Indian scouts at old Camp Cooper near Fort Griffin. The infantry would be used to guard the supply bases as he moved northwesterly in the hope of engaging the wild brethren under Chief Quanah. He bivouaced in the mouth of Blanco Canyon and lost sixty odd horses to an Indian raid that night. The next day the command moved up the canyon and later came out on the flat prairie of the Llano Estacado. A large retreating body of Indians was sighted but a Norther blew up, and Mackenzie was forced back down the canyon by the cold weather. He withdrew to Fort Richardson where the command arrived in late November. He accomplished nothing and as for himself, he received an arrow wound during a small skirmish in the canyon.

Puzzled by the lack of Indians he set out for the headwaters of the Red River and on September 29, discovered a large camp on a tributary of the Red, northeast of Palo Duro. He immediately attacked with five companies of cavalry, routed the braves, burned 262 Indian lodges, and captured 127 women and children, and an estimated 3,000 head of horses. His own losses were light if we except the fact that the Indian braves returned that night and recovered all of their horses by stampeding them. Mackenzie never forgot that midnight raid.

This drubbing had a salutary effect on the Indians. The captives were sent to Fort Concho for prisoner exchange, and many warriors sought safety on the reservations. Their Chief Satank was dead and Chiefs Satanta and Big Tree were in the penitentiary at Huntsville. The next spring the remaining one hundred captive women and children at Fort Concho were delivered back to the reservation at Fort Sill amid great rejoicing by the braves. They began to feel that the pale face was not such a bad hombre after all. Evetts Haley says that some of the braves so seriously considered settling down that they even sent their women into the fields to see what work was like.

Things now looked better and the Indian lovers persuaded Governor Edmund J. Davis to issue pardons to Satanta and Big Tree. This infuriated General Sherman. That was in April of 1873. Trouble immediately started again.

But meanwhile Mackenzie had returned to Fort Concho, where he arrived in January of that year, and set up the headquarters of the 4th Cavalry Regiment. Then in March, the 4th itself left Fort Richardson for Concho, and the 7th Cavalry took over at Richardson. The 4th headed for Fort Concho, the same column, soldiers, wagons, wives and their household plunder that had moved north to Richardson two years before. General Sherman had decided to do something about that other Texas frontier, the Rio Grande, and he wanted Mackenzie with his 4th Cavalry to handle the job.

Things were not, and never had been, peaceful along the Rio Grande. It was another frontier with two parts. From Ringgold Barracks, opposite the Mexican city of Camargo, on down to the mouth of the Rio Grande, a man by the name of Juan Cortina, once a general in the Mexican Army that had opposed General Zachary Taylor's invasion of Mexico, sought to make a living in the grand style. He was very successful as a bandit and became the "Robin Hood" of his side of the border. During the Civil War his banditry ceased. He became a trader and did well because the Rio Grande became the only outlet of the Southern Confederacy. But with the close of the war, he resumed his favorite role as a bandit and declared that the Nueces River and not the Rio Grande, was the border between his country and the United States.

The result was that he and other lesser bandits overran the entire country from the Rio Grande to the Nueces, killed for the pleasure of killing and drove into Mexico tens of thousands of Texas cattle. In 1875, one of his raids came within seven miles of Corpus Christi. Truly, his activities were as fearsome and as costly as were those of the Indians on the other frontiers of the state. But the United States Army did little about it, being unable to catch raiders in Texas, and unwilling to attack them in Mexico. The Texas Rangers, recreated in 1874, began to effectually take care of the matter. Thirty-one of these men, under their able commander Captain Leander H. McNelly, began to take a bite out of these raiders in 1875, killing them not only in Texas but pursuing and attacking them in Mexico itself.

General Porfirio Diaz came to power in Mexico about this time and ended the Cortina troubles by arresting and confining that gentleman to the environs of Mexico City. The Rangers took care of the rest of the gangs.

Along the upper Rio Grande, the raids into Texas were made by Indians: the Kickapoos, Lipans and Apaches. These tribes had settled in that great arid and sparsely inhabited area that extends south of the Rio Grande from Laredo to El Paso. That part of Mexico was a no-man's land. The small Mexican and Indian villages were a law unto themselves. The Mexicans often joined the Indians on their raids, and the cattle and horses brought back found a ready market in the Mexican villages.

The Lipans, like the Apaches, were natives of the Great Plains country. The Kickapoos were easterners, and had been termed "friendly Indians," upon their arrival west of the Mississippi River. The term "friendly Indian" often used in writings and reports of the times referred in the larger sense to those tribes such as the Kickapoos, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, Delawares and others that had once been powerful tribes in the eastern United States, but because of the encroachment of the white settlers, they had, by treaty, coercion or force during the early 1800's, been continually moved by the United States Government from their ancestral or reservation lands in the East. They finally ended up at various times on reservations assigned them in what is now Kansas and Oklahoma . Here they usually encountered hostility from the native tribes of the Great Plains whose superior numbers threatened their entire existence. They were considered intruders and were obliged to turn to the United States troops, where possible, for protection. Their natural ability as "trackers" made them a necessary unit in any force of troops that sought to engage hostile Indians.

The Seminoles from Florida were pretty well mixed with Negro blood upon their arrival in East Texas, and later in the Indian Territory. The reason for this was that prior to the Civil War many run-away Negro slaves had sought and found sanctuary among these Indians, living at that time in the fastnesses of the Everglades.

During the latter days of the Civil War, December of 1864, a company of frontier scouts out of Fort Belknap discovered a freshly abandoned Indian camp west of the ruins of old Fort Phantom Hill. The scouts estimated that perhaps 5,000 Indians had camped there.

During the preceding fall, Comanche and Kiowa Indians in large numbers had broken up the settlements on the northern frontier in Young County. Therefore, it was assumed, and assumed too hastily as it turned out, that these Indians had occupied the camp and were on the march to find a permanent spring and summer location from where they could further raid the settlements.

Actually these Indians were friendly Kickapoos from the Indian Territory, and as it turned out, they were probably peacefully moving themselves and their entire tribe to join a tiny remnant of the tribe that had, years before, settled in Old Mexico, some forty miles west of Laredo.

The hasty assumption that these Indians were hostile led to the Battle of Dove Creek fought on Sunday, the 8th of January, 1865. The scene of the battle was the Indian encampment on the south bank of Dove Creek about three miles above its confluence with Spring Creek, and fifteen miles southwest of the present Tom Green County court house.

After the discovery of the abandoned camp near Phantom Hill, the Indians were trailed by scouts. Confederate regulars had been concentrated at Camp Colorado, and militia had been moved from Erath, Brown, Comanche and Parker Counties.

These two columns of troops, numbering some 400 men, concentrated above the Indian encampment before daybreak. They attacked at daylight. It was an impetuous charge and was met by deadly fire from the Enfield rifles of 600 braves, well protected by the underbrush of the creek bottom. The militia, respectfully referred to by the regulars as the "flop eared militia," suffered heavily in their charge. They broke and fled and were of no more value in the field.

The regulars, now badly outnumbered and outflanked, were slowly forced back and withdrew towards Spring Creek, fighting from the shelters of the oak groves as they retired. This action continued all day, and they encamped that night with all their wounded and the reformed militia on Spring Creek, about eight miles from the original battle ground. They left twenty-two dead on the field and carried away about forty wounded.

The long retreat to the mouth of the Concho River started the next morning in a blinding snow storm that made pursuit by the Indians impossible. They resorted to captured Indian ponies as food supply.

It had been a most unfortunate affair. The Kickapoos crossed the Mexican border in the Eagle Pass area and settled down about forty miles inland. Always irked by memories of the unprovoked Dove Creek fight, they thereafter heartily joined future raids into Texas. They were no longer "friendly Indians."

It was this matter of raids into Texas in the upper Rio Grande country that attracted General Sherman's attention in March of 1873, when he ordered Colonel Mackenzie and his 4th Cavalry to Fort Concho. From Concho they moved to Fort Clark, only about thirty miles from the Mexican border. At Fort Clark a conference of high ranking officials was held, including apparently the Secretary of War, General Phil Sheridan, Mackenzie and others. No orders were issued but after the conference was over, the "brass" reviewed the 4th Cavalry. The "ten-year" men in the regiment knew that something big was brewing.

Dark and early, on the morning of May 17, 1873, Colonel Mackenzie led 400 men of his 4th Cavalry and twenty or thirty Seminole scouts under Lt. John L. Bullis, on a drive across the Rio Grande into Mexico.

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