Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (51 page)

Though his men were bone-weary from the long and muddy march, Mackenzie ordered them back in their saddles. They rode on in darkness, a long dark column moving under a bright harvest moon through thick buffalo grass that muffled the horses’ hooves.
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They followed the trail for five miles, expecting attack at any moment. Mackenzie was aware that his quarry was all around him, silent and elusive as ghosts. When his troops camped for the night, the horses were picketed under a strong guard. The men slept with their boots on and their weapons to hand. Mackenzie stayed in camp the next day, waiting for his supply train to catch up with him. That night, remembering the painful lessons of Blanco Canyon and Shaking Hand’s village, and sensing the presence of many Indians, Mackenzie redoubled his precautions. Under his orders, each horse was not only hobbled, meaning that its front legs were tied together, but also cross-sidelined, meaning that forefeet were tied to opposite hind feet. The horses were then secured with thirty-foot, one-inch-thick ropes, which were tied to fifteen-inch iron stakes driven deep into the ground.
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In addition, “sleeping parties” of twelve to twenty men each were posted around the horse herd.
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Mackenzie was taking no chances.

As he had expected, the Indians attacked in force that night. The first charge came at ten-thirty. Comanches under the command of Shaking Hand, Wild Horse, and Hears the Sunrise galloped through the perimeter of the camp, firing and yelling, trying to stampede the horses. When this did not work they regrouped and began circling, still hoping to steal the horses. But now they were facing a withering return fire from the horse guards. The Indians withdrew around one o’clock. The next morning, Mackenzie’s men rode out of camp to find a line of Comanches on high, level ground. Mackenzie attacked, the Indians retreated. Mackenzie lost only three horses. The only human casualty happened when a Tonkawa scout named Henry shot the horse out from under an elaborately feathered (in northern plains style) Comanche warrior. Henry rode in for the kill, but had forgotten to load his rifle. He was dragged down by his adversary, who began to beat him with his bow. The army troopers, standing nearby and watching, found this amusing. Each time another blow landed on the poor Tonkawa, he pleaded with
his friends: “Why you no shoot? Why you no shoot?” Tiring of the joke, one of the soldiers finally shot the Comanche. The Tonk scalped him.
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The Comanche, of course, knew he was going to die from the moment he lost his horse. While the troopers were snickering, he was fighting his death fight. Such casual cruelty was worthy of a Comanche. It is worth noting that the brave was not carrying a firearm of any kind.

Mackenzie now moved to offense. He ordered the mules loaded with twelve days’ rations. Once again he left his supply train—under guard of his infantry and one company of cavalry—then marched southwest, up Tule Canyon. His enemies were no doubt gratified to see him moving away from their camps.

But this was merely a feint executed by a commander who was intimately familiar, as no other white commander was, with the trails through the canyon lands. Mackenzie knew precisely where the Comanche camp was, and was traveling there by the most direct route possible. He had apparently learned of the location of the enemy camp from a captured Comanchero whom Mackenzie had stretched out, presumably painfully, on a wagon wheel. The scouts, riding twenty-five miles out from the main column, had then verified it. The troopers of the Fourth Cavalry held their course until dusk, when the Indians could no longer easily track their movement. They then turned abruptly north, crossing Tule Canyon in the tracks of Mackenzie’s 1872 exploration, and headed out across the muddy plains toward Palo Duro Canyon. He marched the men mercilessly through the night over rough terrain, covering the distance in twelve hours.
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As the sun was just lighting the eastern sky on September 28, the seven companies of the Fourth rode up to the abrupt edge of a yawning chasm in the earth: This was Palo Duro, six miles wide, just below its junction with a half-mile-wide side canyon known as Blanca Cita.

The men crept to the edge of the cliff, where the land fell away in a nine-hundred-foot vertical drop. They were astonished to see below them, stretching for three miles along a stream, five distinct Indian villages consisting of two hundred lodges and a large herd of horses. The white men were looking into the
sanctum sanctorum
of Comancheria. Inside this prodigious scar in the earth caused by ninety million years of erosion was a world unto itself, a graceful canyon split by a meandering river and greened with juniper, hackberry, wild cherry, mesquite, and cottonwood. At the bottom of the gorge was a stream of crystal-clear water that fell from a spring at the canyon’s edge.
Though the
taibos
did not know this at the time, camped there were Comanches under a chief named O-ha-ma-tai (the majority of them), Kiowas under Maman-ti, and a small group of Cheyennes under Iron Shirt.

Mackenzie now took what seemed to at least some of his men to be a huge risk. After wandering for a mile along the canyon rim, he discovered a small, precipitous goat trail leading to the canyon floor and into what one of his men later called “the jaws of death.”
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Standing at the head of the tiny trail, he turned to his lieutenant and said simply, “Mr. Thompson, take your men down and open the fight.”
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The men dismounted and, stumbling, slipping, and sliding, one by one eventually reached the bottom.

The risk lay in the exposure of the troops as they came down. It took nearly an hour to get all seven companies down. They got lucky. Maman-ti, the Kiowa chief and medicine man, had consulted the spirits and assured the Indians camped there that they were in no danger of attack from the bluecoats, so they slumbered without sentries that day. Once again their medicine had given away an enormous advantage to the whites. Most of the soldiers reached the valley floor before the Indians realized it. As soon as they spotted the soldiers descending the canyon walls, they responded as they usually did when their village was attacked: They fought fiercely in order to cover the escape of their families. Wrote Sergeant John Charlton:

[They] attacked us from every quarter, first by dozens, later by hundreds. . . . Many were concealed behind rocks while others were ambushed in the foliage of cedars. . . . The warriors held their ground for a time, fighting desperately to cover the exit of their squaws and pack animals, but under the persistent fire of the troops they soon began falling back.
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The troops advanced, with Mackenzie in the lead, through village after village of abandoned Indian lodges. The ground was littered with buffalo robes and dried buffalo meat but also a wide array of white men’s goods, evidence of the deep cultural contamination that had seeped into all corners of plains life: army blankets, tinner’s snips, stone china, cooking kettles, breech loaders with ammunition, bales of calico, and sacks of flour. The women had evidently gathered these items up in order to save them, then dropped them as they panicked and fled up the canyon on horseback. What ensued was a four-mile running fight, during which four Comanches were killed. But soon the troopers were surrounded by Indians again, who now fired down on them from the canyon walls, a circumstance that suggested they had trapped themselves. “How will we ever get out of here?” one frightened trooper
asked, afraid the command could be annihilated. Hearing this, Mackenzie snapped back: “I brought you in. I will take you out.”
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Mackenzie ordered the men forward into the teeth of the attack. His audacity worked: The Indians turned and retreated up the walls of Blanca Cita Canyon, following in the path of their families who had fled earlier.

Mackenzie did not follow. Instead, he turned back and ordered the villages burned. Bonfires roared; the scent of burning buffalo meat filled the air along with the smells of scorched Indian Department flour and sugar. Around three o’clock, his companies climbed back up the canyon walls, this time with 1,424 captured horses. Once up on the high plains again, the five hundred or so men formed a “hollow square,” a sort of living corral in which the captured herd was driven along. They marched twenty miles, returning to their supply camp in Tule Canyon at one a.m. The men, who had been awake and in the saddle for thirty-one of thirty-three hours, were exhausted. Sergeant Charlton, who tried to sleep, was awakened by Mackenzie’s voice “pitched to that high, fretful key,” saying “Wake up, Sergeant! Wake up your men and look after the horses!”
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After breakfast Mackenzie gave the best of the horses to his scouts, cut out a few for his own use, and then ordered the others—more than a thousand—shot. Custer had shot horses on the Washita in 1868, but that was mere expediency, since his column was in grave danger of annihilation. Mackenzie now did it as a military tactic, a way to take away the Indians’ means of survival. It was a gruesome job, and it took time. The infantry roped the crazed horses and led them into firing squads. As more and more horses were killed, they became harder to handle. The last one was not shot until almost three o’clock in the afternoon. The result was a massive pile of dead horses. They rotted at the head of Tule Canyon, then turned to bleached bones that remained there for many years, becoming both a navigational landmark and a grotesque monument marking the end of the horse tribes’ dominion on the plains. Eventually some enterprising person gathered what was left up and sold it for fertilizer. Mackenzie’s slaughter of the Comanche horses also spawned a legend. On certain nights, it is said, a phantom herd can be seen galloping through the canyon, riderless, their spectral manes flying in the wind.

Thus ended the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon. Only four Indians had been killed, but Mackenzie had dealt them a devastating blow. No one knows how many of them were camped in the village, but the number of lodges suggests perhaps a thousand. And these Indians now faced a terrible new reality. They
were mostly afoot, without shelter, food, or clothing, facing winter on the high plains where the buffalo herds were being quickly thinned out by the hide men. They had been routed, in large number, from their last important hideout. Most of the Indians who escaped through Blanca Cita Canyon that day straggled back to Fort Sill in the following weeks, thoroughly beaten and never to roam off the reservation again.
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Sheridan’s great campaign was soon over. The hide-and-seek game continued through the winter, with ever fewer Indians as players. A large number of Indians had returned to Fort Sill in the fall. Those who had not were short of food; some were starving to death. In February, Lone Wolf and the last of the Kiowas came in. In March, 825 Southern Cheyennes gave up. Small groups and individuals streamed in continuously. In April the Comanche bands of Shaking Hand, Hears the Sunrise, and Wild Horse surrendered with thirty-five warriors, one hundred forty women and children, and seven hundred horses. They were disarmed, and had their horses and mules taken from them. They were initially put into internment camps west of Fort Sill. Chiefs who had broken treaties or promises were often dealt with harshly. The Kiowa Satanta was sent to a prison in Huntsville, Texas, where he committed suicide by diving headfirst from a second-floor window of the prison hospital. Others were sent by rail to exile in Florida. When the authorities realized how thoroughly broken the horse tribes were, they allowed most of the chiefs to come back. For all of its lack of large-scale drama, Sheridan in his report for 1875 called the Red River War “the most successful of any Indian campaign in this country since its settlement by the whites.”

By the end of April there were only a few bands of southern Plains Indians that had not surrendered, by far the largest of which were Quanah’s Quahadis. As far as the army could tell, the band had completely disappeared after the Battle of Adobe Walls.
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There were four hundred of them, including one hundred able-bodied fighting men. In spite of their numbers, and a large horse herd, they had accomplished the signal feat of completely evading the white man’s incessant patrols. They had done this by quick and agile movement. They had also stayed well south of the other concentrations of Indians in the panhandle, spending most of their time camped southeast of present-day Lubbock, near the towns of Gail and Snyder, just on the eastern side of the caprock. Mackenzie searched for them twice there, acting on intelligence from captured Kiowas. He had found nothing. He had in fact
spent a good deal of time looking for Quanah. In his third and last scouting trip in December 1874 he had spent seventeen days and traveled two hundred fifty-five miles, all in the southern part of the Llano Estacado. His men had trudged through deep snow and ice storms from today’s Floydada to Snyder, during which time they had killed exactly three Indians. They did find a fresh trail heading across the high plains to the Mucha-que country, a favorite trading site near today’s Gail. Mackenzie followed. He was so sure that he had Quanah’s band in his sights that he requested that an immediate detachment of troops be sent from Fort Concho to intercept it. Nothing came of that, either. Bogged down in yet another snowstorm, Mackenzie received a message from Sheridan that his war duties were over. He was to report to Fort Sill and assume command of the Comanche-Kiowa and Cheyenne-Arapaho reservations.
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In a later interview, Quanah confirmed that he had in fact spent the entire fall and winter playing cat and mouse with the federals. “Having several hundred good horses,” he said, “we kept a good watch for the approach of the enemy, and when we would learn that they were coming in our direction we would quickly move. Several of my men, with our families, kept up that kind of tactic all winter. . . . During that time we were almost continuously going, as the soldiers were after us and many times they were almost upon us.”
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They hunted buffalo when they could, and when they could not eat buffalo or horse meat they reverted to the old Comanche ways of the prehorse days in Wyoming, eating nuts, grubs, and rodents. They most likely traded with Comancheros who had slipped through Mackenzie’s blockade. They had a very hard time.