The particular tribe of Comanche led by Chief Matark, a forty-year-old veteran of the plains wars, had for many generations occupied the rolling areas west of Bear Creek, and from this sanctuary, had ranged two hundred miles north into Oklahoma lands and five hundred miles south into Mexico. They had ravaged competing tribes of Indians and plundered white settlements, including El Paso and Saltillo. Whole decades would pass without a major defeat, for under Matark’s strategies the Comanche eluded pursuit by the army, avoided pitched battles, and struck whenever a position stood exposed. They were cruel and crafty enemies, well able to defend themselves and remorseless when an isolated ranch seemed unprotected.
In the autumn of 1868 the bold appearance of the Larkin clan at the confluence of Bear Creek and the Brazos troubled Chief Matark so much that he did an unusual thing: he convened a war council; it was unusual because customarily he made all military decisions himself.
‘How many are they?’
‘Four grown men, all good with the rifle. Three wives who can also shoot. Nine children, some old enough to use guns.’
‘How do they dare move onto our land?’
‘They expect the fort they call Richardson to protect them.’
‘How far are they from the fort?’
‘Their huts stand three days’ walk to the west.’
‘Three days!’ the chief cried. ‘In that time we could wipe them out.’ But then he grew cautious: ‘Could they have an arrangement with the soldiers there? Detachments hiding in the gullies? Waiting for us to attack?’
‘No soldier has visited the three sod huts. Never.’
‘But could there be a secret? Something we can’t see?’
‘There is no secret. If we strike now, as we should, the army cannot reach us in two days.’
Matark, not wholly satisfied with the reports of his younger braves, sought counsel from two old men who had seen many battles, and the older of the two, a man with no teeth who stayed alive by will power, said: ‘It is not the army. It is not how many guns they have in the three sod houses. What will destroy us is the way they kill our buffalo.’
Said the second old man: ‘With each moon the animals move farther away.’
‘And fewer of them.’
‘If they stay at Bear Creek …’
‘And if more come, as they always do …’
‘What shall we do?’
‘Now, there we face trouble,’ the first old man said. ‘If we could only pray that the fort at Jacksborough would be the last …’
‘Always they push the forts closer,’ his associate pointed out. ‘That’s how it always has been. That’s how it always will be.’
‘Until we are pushed where?’ Matark cried in what was for him close to desperation.
The two old men looked at each other, well aware of what must be spoken but each afraid to utter the doleful words. Finally the older spoke: ‘We shall be pushed to the sunset death.’
‘But not quickly,’ Matark said, betraying the tragic strategy he intended following.
‘No!’ the younger of the two sages cried, happy to hear the courage in his chieftain’s voice. ‘It will be like the old days, when every hand was raised against us. Kiowa, Apache, Mexican, Texan. We shall strike them all.’
With these fighting words, re-creating the bravery the Comanche had displayed against all enemies, a grand euphoria filled the air and imaginary arrows whistled around the conspirators. The Comanche would strike again. They would strike again and again. They would battle the entire blue-clad army. They would protect their range, they would expel invaders, now and forever.
‘We will destroy them!’ Matark decreed, and with a mixture of fear and joy the old men ran out to reveal the decision to the braves. They knew that judged by the long years, this strategy must fail, but they also knew that it was a gesture which had to be made. The odds against them were tremendous, for they knew how few in number they were and how powerful that line of Texas forts could be, crammed with blue-clad soldiers. The Comanche could recite the fearful names: Fort Richardson in the north, the new Fort Griffin, Fort McKavett, Fort Concho where the many rivers met, Fort Stockton to the west, Fort Davis, strongest of all beneath the mountains, Fort Bliss at the Rio Grande, and a dozen more.
There were also forts in New Mexico, in Arizona and California, so placed that cavalry troops could strike at Indians from any direction. The old men knew they were doomed, but they also knew that they had no alternative but to defend their rolling plains as they had always defended them. And they were proud that a young chief whom they had helped train was willing to assume the burden. So they moved among the warriors, crying: ‘It’s to be war!’ and they kept their voices strong to mask their fears.
One hundred and nineteen Comanche braves left their camp at the headwaters of the Brazos River and rode in three separate groups, quietly and with sullen determination, toward Bear Creek, and on the morning of the third day, just after dawn on 15 October 1869, they came thundering down upon three sod huts.
Catching Absalom as he tended his horses, they tomahawked him immediately and made off with about half the animals. They then struck the westernmost of the huts before the occupants could organize its defense, and with total superiority, overwhelmed it, killing the wife and her two children but saving the husband for ritual tortures.
With the second house they ran into real trouble, for here Micah Larkin and his wife were ready with a full arsenal, with which they held off the attackers for more than an hour. In the end the defenders were helpless; the Indians rode their horses right up to the walls and fired into the openings. Again, the wife was killed with her child but the man was spared for attention later.
At the somewhat larger home of Joshua Larkin the defense was formidable, with father, mother and two children firing guns with deadly result. Nine Indians died while circling this house, until finally Matark himself had to lead a charge which set fire to the grass roof, forcing the occupants out. When Joshua appeared, he was slain instantly, but the wife was captured alive. Of the six children in the hut, three were killed with tomahawk blows to the head, two were lanced, and the girl Emma Larkin, twelve years old, was taken alive to serve as a plaything for the younger braves.
Because the nature of Indian warfare on the Texas range must be understood if the history of Texas is to be appreciated, it must be recorded that during a span of about thirty years dozens of farmers and ranchers and traders were killed each year by the Indians, an awesome total. But it was the manner in which they were killed that enraged the settlers and made any peace with the Indians impossible.
At Bear Creek, two of the youngest children were grabbed by the heels and bashed against rocks, three were hatcheted and three were lanced. Absalom and a brother were tomahawked in what might have been called fair fight, and two of the wives were also slain in the heat of battle. But even the bodies of these four were sought after the slaughter and ceremoniously mutilated, appendages being cut off and sexual organs defiled in savage and repulsive ways.
It was the four living prisoners, three adults and a young girl, who suffered the real terrors of Indian warfare, because the two men were staked out in the embers of their burned homes, and living coals were edged about them while their extremities were painfully hacked off. Their genitals were amputated, dragged across eyes from which the lids had been cut away, and then stuffed into their mouths. Their eyes were then blinded, and slowly they were roasted to death.
The third wife was saved till last, and even the official reports of the massacre, compiled by Captain Reed from Jacksborough, refrained from spelling out in detail what she had suffered, for it was too horrible for him to write.
Not one of the fifteen dead bodies was left whole. Heads were cut off. Arms and legs were chopped into pieces. Breasts were severed. Eyes were gouged out. And not even torsos were entire. From the evidence I saw, I must conclude that four adults were burned alive after the most terrible tortures.
I cannot
imagine that a chief as wise as Matark is supposed to be can think that by such actions he can frighten away our legitimate settlers or deter our army from retaliation. When I buried the fifteen bodies I stood beside their common grave and took an oath, which I required the men at Fort Richardson to take with me when I returned last night: ‘I will hunt down this savage killer, even though he hides at the ends of the earth. These dead shall be revenged, or I shall die in the attempt.’
But after the oath was taken, a soldier who had kept records of settlers passing through reminded us that the Larkin family had consisted of sixteen members, which meant that one must still be alive, and with help of my men who assisted at the burial, we reconstructed the family and concluded that a girl named Emma, about twelve years old, was not among the dead. She must be with them, and with God’s help we shall win her back.
As he forwarded his report to Department headquarters in San Antonio, which in turn would send it along to Divisional offices in Chicago, the girl Emma was indeed alive. She was in a camp out toward the canyons, where she had already been raped repeatedly by young braves and where jealous women and sportive young men had begun the slow, playful process of burning off her ears and her nose.
The orders initiated by four-star General William Tecumseh Sherman in Washington for Captain George Reed, Company T, 14th Infantry at Fort Richardson near Jacksborough, Texas, were concise:
You will proceed immediately to the spot where Bear Creek joins the Brazos and there establish a fort of the type common in Texas and the Indian Territory. You will take with you two companies of the 14th Infantry and two from the 10th Cavalry, plus such supporting cadre as may be required, not to exceed the authorized complement of 12 officers, 58 non-commissioned officers and 220 privates, 8 musicians and 14 auxiliary personnel (total 312). The fort is to be named, with appropriate ceremony, in honor of the Texas Ranger captain who distinguished himself so heroically at Monterrey, Sam Garner. Your mission is to protect American settlers, to establish working relations with the Indian reservation at Camp Hope in the Indian Territory, and to capture and punish Chief Matark of the Comanche if he strays into Texas.
At the end of October 1869, Captain Reed, thirty-three years old, crop-headed, clean-shaven, underweight, and the owner of an unblemished military record, led his contingent west. Symbolic of the condition in which he would find himself during the next three decades of his command, his paper allotment of 312 effectives was 66 short, including a Lieutenant Renfro, whose energetic and conniving wife, Daisy, had succeeded in gaining him a third extension of his temporary desk assignment in Washington. Since the conclusion of the Civil War, Renfro had avoided any frontier duty and seemed on his way to avoiding this stint as well.
Several aspects of Fort Sam Garner were noteworthy. First, it was not a fort in the accepted sense of that romantic word, for it boasted no encircling walls and provided no secure defense against an enemy. It was instead a collection of some two dozen buildings laid out neatly on a large expanse of open ground. Second, the buildings were not of stone or brick but of timber, adobe, fieldstone or whatever else might be at hand. Third, even these miserable accommodations were not in existence when the 246 effectives arrived on the scene; the enlisted men would have to erect them in haphazard fashion as time passed. Until then the men would live in tents, and since winter was approaching, the men worked diligently, requiring little urging from their officers, because until houses of some sort were slapped together, they were going to freeze at night, regardless of how much they sweated during the day. Fourth, when General Sherman assigned two companies of the 10th Cavalry to the fort, he knew that he was creating permanent trouble for Captain Reed, because the 10th Cavalry was an all-Negro regiment, which meant it would generate not only the customary animosity which existed between foot and horse soldiers, but also the more serious viciousness stemming from the difference in color.
One aspect of the typical Texas fort in 1869 would have surprised the Northern troops who built it had they known the facts. Their wall-less, adobe, unfortified assembly of buildings resembled strikingly the old presidio which the Spanish military had erected in San Antonio a century and a half earlier. Like sensible men, the Spanish and the American soldiers reacted almost identically to similar geographical and logistical problems.
But the outstanding characteristic of the fort was the nature of its officer cadre, as revealed by the roster:
One interesting thing to be noted was that none of the officers—and only an occasional black enlisted man—came from the South, because that region had recently been in rebellion, with even its West Point sons like Generals Lee and Davis rejecting their oath to defend the Union: ‘You cain’t never trust no Southron, and we won’t tolerate ’em in our army.’ Of the many forts that would protect Texas in these years, none would be manned by Texans.
The presence of a German and an Irishman at Fort Garner was not unusual; thousands of such volunteers had served in the Union forces, usually with distinction, and not infrequently it was these European veterans who formed the backbone of the frontier army. They were belligerent, sticklers for proper drill, and dependable. In Hermann Wetzel and Jim Logan, Fort Garner had two of the best: the former a Prussian disciplinarian in charge of all foot soldiers; the latter a daring, laughing horseman who worked with the black troops.
It was the last column of the roster that showed the heartache of a peacetime fort, because, as can be seen, all the officers except Lieutenant Toomey had enjoyed, during the Great War, a brevet or temporary rank considerably higher than what they now held. A brevet promotion could have been conferred in one of many ways: a new regiment would be formed, requiring colonels and majors, so officers much lower in rank would be temporarily promoted to meet the emergency, it being understood that when peace came, they would revert to their lower rank. A senior officer would be killed in battle, and a replacement would be breveted. Often in the heat of battle some extremely brave lieutenant would be breveted to colonel, and he would be addressed as colonel and treated like one, but his real rank would remain lieutenant. Now it was peacetime, and military personnel was savagely reduced—1,000,516 men in 1865; 37,313 now—and even the slowest-witted officer could foresee that he was going to remain in his lowered permanent rank for years and years. During the war an able soldier like Reed had almost leaped from second lieutenant to brigadier general, six promotions in heady sequence; he, George Reed, a schoolteacher from Vermont, had actually been a general in charge of a flank attack on Petersburg, and now he was a lowly captain, four demotions downward, with every expectation of remaining indefinitely at that level. During the war the leap from lieutenant to major had required, in his case, five months, for attrition had been great. In peacetime the slow crawl back to major would require at least a quarter of a century, if it was ever attained.
Yet all except young Elmer Toomey could remember when they had been officers of distinguished rank. Johnny Minor had been a full colonel and a good one, but now and for as long as he could see into the future he would be a captain in charge of one company of black troops, and he could not reasonably anticipate higher promotion, not ever. White officers who served with black troops were contaminated, and scorned by their fellow officers; to such men few promotions fell.
However, within the security of these remote forts, it was customary when speaking directly to an officer to award him the highest rank he had held as brevet, so although the adjutant, when reporting in writing to Washington, had to write: ‘Captain Reed, Commanding Officer, Fort Garner, wishes to inform …’ when that same adjutant addressed Reed within the fort he would say: ‘General Reed, I wish to report …’ It was a delicate game, where sensitivities were constantly exposed and where imagined insults rankled for years, and nowhere was it played out with richer variation than on the vast expanses of Texas. Actual duels were forbidden, but they sometimes occurred; what was more likely, some disgruntled first lieutenant who had once been a lieutenant colonel would nurture in sec
ret a grudge against a lieutenant who had been only a brevet major, and on some hate-filled day would find an excuse to bring court-martial charges against him. This then became an affair of honor, dragging on year after year; often each officer would publish a small book giving his True Account of What Transpired at Richards Crossing, proving that it was his accuser, not he, who had been craven.
This was Fort Garner in 1869, a collection of makeshift and undistinguished buildings, but each laid out with that compass-point precision which would have prevailed had they been built of marble. Reed had insisted on this, and during the planning he had appeared everywhere with his chalk line, squaring walls and ensuring that buildings of the same character stood in orderly array: ‘It may be an unholy mess now, but it won’t always be.’
After consultation with Wetzel, who had a keen sense of tactics, he had decided that the fort would be built east of Bear Creek, so that any Indians coming at it from the west would have to attack across that stream or across the Brazos. To safeguard against flooding, he had his men spend two weeks deepening each stream, and then he strengthened the mud dam with which the Larkins had constructed their tank.
Fort Garner would stand fifty-eight miles west of Jacksborough, same distance south of Camp Hope in the Indian Territory. The five officers’ buildings, each with detached kitchen and privy, would form the eastern boundary of the long parade ground; the enlisted men’s quarters, the western. The northern limit was hemmed in by the service buildings, while the southern was defined by the hospital and the store run by the post sutler.
As if to give protection from the west, where the enemy roamed, the stables were located there as a kind of bulwark, north of which stood one of the curiosities of the western fort, Suds Row, where the hired laundresses, sometimes Mexican, sometimes reformed prostitutes, but most often the wives of enlisted men, washed uniforms six days a week. When the men of Fort Garner were at their home station they were a natty lot, especially the Buffalo Soldiers, as the blacks were called because their knotted hair was supposed to resemble that of the buffalo.