The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (9 page)

“Are they air-conditioned?”

“They're just plain-Jane trucks,” she said. “No frills.”

I arranged to rent one for a week. It set me back $175, but when I went to pick it up, my heart soared with joy.

It was an orange-and-white 1974 Chevy Cheyenne with a GMC grille and a Cadillac hood ornament. A Dallas Cowboys sticker and a KPLX 99.5 sticker adorned the rear bumper. A six-inch crack zagged down the driver's side of the windshield like a lightning bolt, and a big round pockmark, made by a rock or a small-caliber bullet, marked the passenger side. The rear fenders were lacy with rust. An orange traffic cone and a couple of tree branches with dead leaves lay in the bed. The cab smelled of dust. The seat was worn and covered with a plaid cloth, which also was worn.

I knew that truck. It was a descendant of the pickups in my memory. I turned the key. The engine came to life without complaint. I turned on the radio. It was tuned to one of the country stations. George Strait was singing
Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind?
Oh my. Perfect.

I drove the LBJ. I drove the Tollway, windows down, hot wind in my face, looking down in disdain from my perch high above the peasants in their BMWs. I suddenly knew why so many city people love pickups: Driving one is like being a horseman among pedestrians, like being a cowboy among sissy dudes.

I drove to Keller's on Northwest Highway and parked under the awning with the other pickups and ordered a cheeseburger and fries and a Bud. I listened to the music of my radio, wishing I had something to haul.

“If this truck were really mine,” I thought, “I would name him Darrell, and he would never let me down.”

November 1990

FREEDOM FIGHTERS

One day I was driving along U.S. 90 just outside of Brackettville, Texas, and saw a sign: SEMINOLE SCOUT CEMETERY, with an arrow pointing off to the left. On an impulse, I turned and drove the country road out to the graveyard. It was a well-kept little cemetery of the type I want to be buried in someday - just the graves, covered with native grasses, with a fence around them. Many of the tombstones were military, with non-military stones grouped around them in families. Four of the stones belonged to winners of the Medal of Honor, our country's highest military decoration. I decided to find out more about the Seminole Scouts
.

T
HERE
WAS
A
BIG
STIR
IN
THE
PRESS
BACK
IN
1988
WHEN
L
EE
Y
OUNG
J
R
.
,
was made a Texas Ranger. He was the first black man ever to pin on a Ranger badge, everybody said, the first black ever to be elevated to that elite and legendary corps.

But one of his friends just laughed. “Hell, you're not the first
black
Ranger,” he said. “You're the first
Indian
Ranger.”

Sergeant. Young laughs, too, telling the story. “I like that,” he says.

Actually, both the friend and the press were correct. Sgt. Young, who serves at the Texas Department of Public Safety station in Garland, is a Black Seminole, a descendant of black people who refused to be slaves and became Indians instead.

“The old folks would tell us stories about them,” Sgt. Young says. “About all we had, history-wise, was the stories that had been passed on from generation to generation. Just the old people talking about what they heard from their fathers and grandfathers. They were stories about their lives and the things they endured.”

But one day not long ago in a secondhand bookstore, Sgt. Young picked up a volume about Indian scouts who had served with the U.S. Army. He opened it. There was a photograph of his great-grandfather, Benjamin July, standing with several other Black Seminoles, gazing solemnly at the camera.

“I bought the book,” Sgt. Young says. “I took it home and showed it to my son. My son took it and showed it to his teacher. And the teacher said, ‘We need to get your father over to speak to our class sometime.'”

What the children heard was a story not often told, of a fight for freedom that lasted more than 100 years, of an odyssey comparable to that of the Children of Israel from Egypt, and a proud history in danger of being forgotten, even by the descendants of those who lived it.

The odyssey ended on the West Texas frontier, at the place where the Rio Grande flows out of the Big Bend, meets the Pecos and the Devil's River, and then resumes its journey south toward the Gulf of Mexico, the place where Del Rio and Brackettville now stand. It had begun more than a century earlier in the British colonies of Georgia and the Carolinas.

Early in the 18th century a few slaves were escaping from the cotton plantations in the colonies and making their way into Spanish Florida, where the dense jungles, high grass, venomous reptiles and clouds of insects gave them refuge. About the same time, remnants of the Creek Nation who were unwilling to accept the white man's way fled to Florida, too.

The Creeks who stayed behind called these malcontents “seminole,” which was their word for “runaway” or “rebel.” Soon the runaway Creeks were thinking of themselves as a separate tribe. They got along better with their fellow fugitives than with their own kinsmen. They intermarried and formed alliances with the runaway Africans, who also started considering themselves Seminoles.

The slave owners were infuriated that just beyond their borders lived free black people raising their own cattle, riding their own horses, tending their own gardens, carrying guns and traveling long distances whenever they chose. Communities of free blacks so near by, they believed, would inspire other blacks to try to escape. If they were allowed to remain free, the Black Seminoles could become a threat to the whole slave system. But their former owners couldn't invade the Spanish colony to get them back.

In 1821, Spain—which had forbade slavery in its colonies—ceded Florida to the United States. Almost immediately, bands of white Americans and Creeks launched expeditions from Alabama and Georgia to try to capture the escaped slaves and place into bondage the younger generations of Black Seminoles who had been born free. But, with the help of their Indian Seminole friends and their knowledge of the Florida wilderness, the blacks repulsed the invaders.

When Congress declared in 1830 that all Indians were to be removed to a reservation west of the Mississippi, the Creeks and the other “Civilized Tribes” of the Southeast submitted and hit the “Trail of Tears” to Oklahoma. But the Seminoles, knowing their black relatives would go into bondage if they obeyed the law, refused to go. When the Army tried, first through negotiation and then by force, to separate the Indian Seminoles from their black friends and kinsmen, it succeeded only in igniting a bloody war.

After 11 years of unsuccessful fighting Gen. William J. Worth, the commander at the time (and the man for whom Fort Worth later would be named), concluded that the Army couldn't whip the rebels.

“Ten resolute Negroes, with a knowledge of the country, are sufficient to desolate the frontier…” one of his aides warned. So the government told the Seminoles that if they would end their resistance, the blacks could go with them to Oklahoma.

In Oklahoma, the government, whose Indian policy was based on almost total ignorance of Indians, immediately blundered. It decided the Seminoles were merely a branch of the Creek Nation and settled them on the Creek reservation. The Creeks regarded them as subject to Creek government and laws, but the Seminoles considered themselves a separate nation. They refused to submit to Creek authority.

Furthermore, the Creeks owned slaves and regarded the Black Seminoles as slaves. When dealing with whites, the Seminoles sometimes called their black relatives slaves, to keep them safe in a land where any free black could be captured and sold into servitude. But selling a black person was against Seminole law, and the Black Seminoles lived in their own villages and were governed by their own chiefs.

The Creeks tried to force the Seminole Nation to disarm its black people and treat them as slaves, but the Seminoles defied them just as they had defied the federal government. Then some of the Creeks claimed that
they
owned the Black Seminoles, and sold fraudulent titles to slave speculators.

When the Seminoles refused to turn over their black tribesmen to the speculators, Creeks and white slave-catchers raided the black villages, captured some of the people and took them away to the slave markets.

Predictably, the U.S. government backed the slavers. “All the difficulties between individuals of the Creek and Seminole nations have grown out of the condition of these slaves,” the Army reported to Washington, “and the Negro chiefs have exercised a controlling influence over the Seminoles, and have induced them to resist the government and the laws of the Creek Nation…. All of the intelligent Creeks and licensed traders in the nation agree in the statement that these Negroes exercise a most pernicious influence over the Seminoles.”

By the winter of 1849, a Seminole chief named Wild Cat and a Black Seminole chief named John Horse were fed up with the Creeks and the government. Together with about 35 Indians and 30 blacks, they stole away from the reservation and crossed the Red River into Texas. In the spring, they crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico, where there was no slavery, and set up camp just south of the river.

A little later, about 200 more Black Seminoles, led by Jim Bowlegs, described by the Army as “an intelligent Negro,” started to join Wild Cat and John Horse in Mexico, but an armed party of Creeks and slavers overtook and attacked them. Several Black Seminoles were killed, and most of the rest were herded back to the reservation. But a few escaped and continued on to Mexico. From time to time others would jump the reservation and join them there.

One who made the trek was a teenager named Sampson July, who would become the grandfather of Miss Charles Wilson. She's a retired schoolteacher who lives in Brackettville. She's 82 now.

“Wild Cat said to the Mexican government, ‘You just give us some corn and some guns and let us stay where we are, and we'll get rid of the Apaches and Comanches for you,'” Miss Wilson says. “Of course, he might have been drunk when he said it. He was a drunkard. He had a reputation for that. John Horse did, too. We would sit and listen to the old people talk about them. We just listened, and they talked. But the kids don't listen now. They've thrown the history away.”

The Mexican government gave the Seminoles permission to stay. In return, they protected the border from Comanches, Apaches and various mad Texans who kept invading Mexico, hoping to establish an empire there. Wild Cat and John Horse were named colonels in the Mexican Army.

“Years later, they moved on farther south about 100 miles, around Nacimiento and Musquiz,” Sgt. Young says. “They moved because they were in close proximity to the border, and slavers would cross the border and pick up anyone they wanted and bring them back and put them in bondage. They said, ‘Hey, we're too close to Texas. Let's move south.'”

The Seminoles, who eventually numbered a few hundred, proved to be excellent fighters, and they got along well with the Mexicans. But in 1859, a smallpox epidemic killed more than 50 members of the band, including Wild Cat. The Indian Seminoles quarreled over who should succeed him as their chief, and soon they began to drift back to Oklahoma. By 1861, nearly all the Indian Seminoles had left Mexico. But the Black Seminoles, still in danger of becoming slaves if they crossed the Rio Grande, remained.

When the Civil War ended the threat of slavery, some returned to the reservation in Oklahoma. Others moved closer to the Texas border. In 1870, the Army at Fort Duncan, near Eagle Pass, received a letter from the secretary of war, authorizing “the employment of such a number of Indian-Negroes as may be found useful as scouts, provided no more than 200 are kept in service.” A few months later, Maj. Zenas Bliss signed up the first seven members of the unit that would become known as the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts, which would be headquartered at Fort Clark, near Brackettville.

They were in the Army, but they didn't always look like soldiers. They dressed in a modified Indian style. Some even wore buffalo-horn war bonnets into battle. They could speak both English and Spanish as well as their own language, English mixed with West African dialects, called Gullah. They knew the border country in which they were operating, and understood the ways of their adversaries. They could find and follow trails that were a month old across hundreds of miles of desert and mountains. They could ride for days without water. In his reports, Maj. Bliss praised their dependability and described them as “excellent hunters and trailers, and brave scouts…splendid fighters.”

According to several military historians, never more than 50 Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts served in the Army at the same time. Only 116 in their entire history. But their impact on the Indian wars was immense. Some military historians credit them, more than any other Army unit, with the conquering of the Southwestern frontier.

Between 1873, when a young white lieutenant named John Bullis—who would become their most famous leader—took command of the scouts, and 1881, when the last Indian battle was fought in Texas, the Black Seminoles participated in 26 expeditions against the Comanches and Apaches, ranging from a few days to several months duration. In battle they often were outnumbered six or eight to one. Yet they never lost a man in battle. Never was one even wounded seriously.

After the battle at Palo Duro Canyon in 1874, which finally destroyed the might of Quanah Parker and his Comanches, one of the scouts, Pvt. Adam Paine, became the first of the group to receive the Medal of Honor, the country's highest military decoration.

Seven months later, on April 25, 1875, Lt. Bullis and three scouts—Sgt. John Ward, Trumpeter Isaac Payne and a 16-year-old private named Pompey Factor—attacked a party of about 30 Comanches who had stolen a herd of cattle and were driving it through the desert. The Comanches were armed with Winchester repeating rifles. Concluding that four men with single-shot carbines were no match for such a force, the scouts mounted their horses and were fleeing when they glanced back and discovered that Lt. Bullis had lost his horse, and the Comanches were riding down upon him.