‘Away!’ Macnab shouted, and according to plan, three of the Rangers tried to shoot the Mexican horses, but failed. In a wild exit, during which one of the daring Texans was picked off, fifteen Rangers including Macnab made their escape from within the high walls and started their ride of desperation toward the river.
At four o’clock that morning the sixteen-year-old Ranger began looking at Captain Macnab’s watch, and at four-thirty he followed instructions. Galloping his horse past the sentries, he pulled up at Captain Wetzel’s tent and shouted: ‘The Rangers are attacking El Solitario!’
‘When?’ Wetzel cried as he left his tent with a sheet about his shoulders.
‘Right now!’
‘Why wasn’t I warned?’
‘I am warning you. Captain Macnab told me: “Tell him at four-thirty. I don’t want him to worry all night.” ’
‘Bugler, sound assembly!’ and in the darkness Wetzel mustered his men, ordering them into full battle gear.
‘Are we going across to help?’ Sergeant Gerton asked, and Wetzel said: ‘No.’
At dawn he mounted his black charger and rode about supervising the placement of his troops, putting his best sharpshooters along the American bank of the Rio Grande. He personally directed Gerton and his two men where to place their Gatling gun to command the crossing. He called for volunteers to wade out into the shallow river and point their guns to where the fleeing Rangers would probably appear, and then he rode to where his Buffalo Soldiers were encamped, some distance from the white troops. Almost contemptuously he dismissed Lieutenant Asperson with a curt order: ‘Take half your company and guard that other crossing.’ Then he rode to where Sergeant Jaxifer waited with ten mounted troopers, and started this crucial conversation:
WETZEL: You know what’s happening over there?
JAXIFER: I can guess.
WETZEL: You know my orders?
JAXIFER: Yes, sir.
WETZEL: When those Rangers come galloping to that river, what will you and your men do?
JAXIFER: Wait for orders.
WETZEL: Will you be ready to cross and hold back the Mexicans?
JAXIFER: We ready right now.
WETZEL (listening for the sound of gunfire to begin): I’ve learned respect for you on this trip, Jaxifer. Why do we have so much trouble with our white infantry and so little with your black cavalry?
JAXIFER: Because we black.
WETZEL: What does that mean?
JAXIFER: You white officers never understand.
WETZEL: Tell me.
JAXIFER: In the whole United States ain’t nothin’ a black man can hope for half as good as bein’ in the Buffalo Soldiers. Black mens dream of this, they pray, they do almost anything for white mens, just to get in the Tenth Cavalry. I’m the biggest black man in Texas, because I’m a sergeant in the Tenth. Colonel Wetzel, I will die rather than lose that job.
WETZEL: Why didn’t you tell me this before?
JAXIFER: Because it’s our secret. We ain’t never before had honor, but we got it now, and we will not risk it.
WETZEL: What does that mean to me this morning?
JAXIFER: Without orders from you, we don’t move. With orders, we’ll ride to Mexico City or die tryin’.
WETZEL: Everything ready?
JAXIFER: When you sent Asperson away, I kept the best men with me. We all want to be on the far side of that river.
WETZEL: If the Mexicans make one wrong move, I’ll lead you.
JAXIFER: We hungry to go.
The two men remained astride their horses, immobilized by the great traditions of their army. Jaxifer desperately wanted to lead his men in a charge to rescue the white fighters; that was the whole purpose of his cavalry and the reason for his being in uniform, but he could not move, even though the Rangers died, unless he had an order. And Captain Wetzel, who had followed soldiering since a boy, in both Germany and America, longed for battle. He loved it, loved the excitement of the chase, the fury of the sudden explosion when armies met. But he had unmistakable orders to refrain unless the United States was invaded.
But then the secret words of Major Comstock echoed: ‘The officer will be expected to follow the highest traditions of the army.’ That had to mean the rescue of fellow Americans in danger, and for such action he was more than prepared. Spurring his horse toward the river, with Jaxifer following, he turned and said: ‘I hope those Mexicans make one mistake, fire one bullet into our territory.’
The tangled reflections of the two impatient soldiers were broken by the appearance of the young Ranger. ‘Where are you going?’ Wetzel asked and the boy replied: ‘To lead the niggers to where the trails meet.’
‘Who told you to do that?’
‘Captain Macnab. He was sure that when you heard gunfire you’d send them, no matter what your orders said.’
Disgusted by this unprofessional behavior on the part of the Rangers and wishing to rid himself of the boy, Wetzel growled: ‘They’re down there,’ indicating the other crossing, where lanky Lieutenant Asperson sat grinning with a smaller group of Buffalo Soldiers.
While Wetzel and Jaxifer were agonizing over their alternatives, Otto Macnab and his Rangers were in full retreat, fighting a rear-guard action of desperation, and they might have escaped without help from the hesitant soldiers had not a daring Mexican bandit, accompanied by six others, known of a shortcut to the river. Pounding down its narrow turns, these determined men reached a point on the escape route just before Macnab, and a furious gun battle raged, forcing the Rangers to move downriver from their planned route.
This threw them onto a trail which would bring them to the lesser crossing of the Rio Grande, guarded by the lesser black cavalry, and as the Rangers and their pursuers approached the river, Asperson could hear the sound of gunfire. Excited by the likelihood of his first battle, he started his Buffalo Soldiers toward the river, then stopped them in obedience to the orders he had memorized. The young Ranger, watching with dismay as the rescue operation halted, pulled a clever trick. Throwing a sharp pebble at Asperson’s horse, he made the horse rear, and the nervous lieutenant cried in a high voice: ‘My God, we’re under attack!’
Consulting no one, waiting for no verification, he waved his revolver in the air as if it were a sword, and shouted: ‘To the rescue.’ For him there was no anxiety, no nagging moral problem. Americans were under attack by foreigners, and by God he was going to do something about it. With a roar, his black troops followed.
During the disorganized charge, in which black cavalrymen passed and repassed their ungainly leader, he did retain enough control to order the bugler to sound ‘Charge’ so that the beleaguered Rangers would know of their coming. Because of the uneven terrain, the bugle kept slipping from the bugler’s lips, but the broken sounds did reach the battle area, giving the Rangers hope and throwing their pursuers into confusion.
Macnab said later: ‘The Buffalo Soldiers came roaring out of the mesquite like six different armies. They were a mob, but they were magnificent.’
The confused battle—more like a riot, really—lasted only a few minutes. Not many Mexicans were killed and no Americans, but when it was over, Macnab and Asperson rode like Roman victors down to the Rio Grande, and as they splashed their horses into that shallow, muddy stream, the regular army on the American side went berserk. The advance guard, standing in the river, fired indiscriminately. Sergeant Gerton and his Gatling gun sprayed the empty Mexican shore, the others cheered, and Wetzel looked on in amazement.
By ten that morning he had a telegram started on its way to headquarters: IN OBEDIENCE HIGHEST TRADITIONS US ARMY 10TH CAVALRY 2ND LT. ASPERSON UNDER ATTACK BY MEXICAN BANDITS RETALIATED WITH GREAT GALLANTRY STOP BENITO GARZA DEAD ONE RANGER CASUALTY, NO ARMY MANY MEXICAN
When Sergeant Jaxifer read his men a copy of this precious verification of their victory, one of his troopers said: ‘Cain’t understand. They tell me Macnab just kill his best friend, but he act like nothin’ happened. Look!’ And the cavalryme
n watched as Macnab unfolded his white linen duster, threw it about his shoulders, and started that day’s routine.
With Captain Wetzel and Lieutenant Asperson absent on detached duty along the Rio Grande, Fort Garner was hurting for officers, and what made the deficiency most painful was that clever Lewis Renfro still malingered in Washington. In some anger Captain Reed dispatched an urgent appeal to St. Louis: ‘Tort Garner has acute need services First Lieutenant Lewis Renfro, Brevet Colonel, currently on detached duty Washington.’
In the capital there was a good deal of dickering with Congress before Renfro could be released for active duty, because both he and his wife pulled strings to prevent him from being moved out of his socially pleasing job as liaison with the omnipotent Quartermaster Corps. Mrs. Renfro was especially effective in this campaign, for she knew several senators and representatives on the military committees, and she lobbied to keep her husband in the capital: ‘Senator, you served during the late war. You know that speeding supplies to the troops, it wins many a battle.’ Since she was pretty as well as clever, her arguments were almost irresistible, but when a gruff colonel who had behaved with distinction at both Gettysburg and the Wilderness presented the Congressional committee with the record of Lieutenant Renfro, they had to pay attention: ‘Gentlemen, since that day at Appomattox your Lieutenant Renfro has been constantly assigned to battle stations on the frontier, that’s a period of seven years, and during that time he has maneuvered detached desk assignments for all but five weeks. Renfro is another fighting man who never fights.’
One senator, who had been impressed by Mrs. Renfro’s defense of her husband, asked: ‘But doesn’t he make a crucial contribution here? Assuring your men their supplies?’
The colonel refrained from pointing out that anyone with a fifth-grade education could do as well; instead he made a clever observation: ‘Senator! I am not for one minute denigrating Renfro’s enviable record in the late war. I am thinking only of his career.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Unless he can show on his record proof of command in the field, how can he ever be promoted to the high rank which every fighting man aspires to? If he doesn’t include active duty in a position of importance, he can never become general.’
Such argument made sense to the congressmen with military records, and shortly thereafter Renfro received orders to report at once to his assigned Company S, 10th Cavalry at Fort Sam Garner on the Texas frontier, to serve under the command of Captain George Reed (Brevet Brigadier General).
When Daisy Renfro heard the doleful news she stormed: ‘A nigger regiment! It scars a man for life. Lewis, you will not be in that fort six weeks, I promise. We did it before, we can do it again.’ And she started immediately the intense campaign to recall her husband to his preferred job in Washington.
Before the Renfros had time to report, two inspection teams visited Fort Garner, for the army feared that something fundamental might be wrong at this lonely command; newspaper stories had begun asking questions which had to be answered.
The first visit came from regimental headquarters at Fort Sill, and it was led by one of the splendid, tragic figures of the Civil War. Benjamin Grierson, a Pennsylvania farm boy, had been serving as an underpaid music teacher in Illinois when the late war started. Distrustful of horses after having been kicked in the face by one, he protested when assigned to a cavalry unit, of which he became the commander. Soon thereafter, finding no one else eligible, the quiet music teacher was summoned for a most difficult and dangerous mission: ‘We must prevent the Confederates from moving reinforcements to the defense of Vicksburg. Take your troops as a raiding party. Move behind enemy lines on the east bank of the Mississippi and disrupt communications as much as possible.’
With no fixed headquarters and no reliable supply, the thirty-seven-year-old music teacher ran wild for sixteen days, always on the verge of capture by superior Confederate forces, always on hand at some surprising moment to wreck a train or burn a stores depot. He fought innumerable small battles, fleeing always to some new position from which to make his next assault. At the conclusion of these incredible raids, his men reported: ‘Seventeen hundred of us rode six hundred miles behind enemy lines, losing only three killed, nine missing. We killed about a hundred of the enemy, captured and paroled over five hundred, destroyed more than sixty miles of railroad, captured three thousand stand of arms, and took over a thousand mules and horses.’
Grierson had been a military phenomenon, an untrained layman who intuitively understood the most subtle arts of mounted warfare. His men loved him, for they knew him to be both lucky and brave, an irresistible combination, and he achieved a much greater success in the backwoods of Mississippi and Louisiana than more notable cavalry commanders like Jeb Stuart did in the East. He was one of the foremost cavalry commanders in American history, and as a consequence he had risen to the rank of brevet general.
But when peace came he faced the unalterable opposition of all West Point officers, who leveled four charges against him: he was a civilian; he was a music teacher; on the Texas frontier he tried to treat Indians as if they were honorable opponents like Frenchmen or Englishmen; and he was soiled by being personally responsible for the black troops of the 10th Cavalry, an unacceptable command with which he would be stuck for twenty-two years.
Grierson was a talented man, a true genius, and he suffered the contempt of his fellow officers without complaint. He did believe that if Indians were treated justly, they could be brought into full citizenship, and he did defend the bravery and competency of his Negro troops, for he knew from frontier reports how well the latter performed under fire. It was headquarters that did not believe; most critically, it was the newspapers in Texas that deplored having Negro troops protecting the Texas frontier. Their attacks were savage: ‘We need no niggers here. Give us fifty Rangers and we can clear the plains all the way to California.’
When General Grierson, his brevet rank honored along the frontier, arrived at Fort Garner he was forty-six, still lean, still alert. He was stigmatized immediately by the Prussian Wetzel, back from the Rio Grande, as a man deficient in discipline, one of those weaklings who try to rule by the affection of troops rather than by rigorous command, and Wetzel had watched too many times as such officers came to a bad end. Wetzel, like most of the regulars, held the former music teacher in contempt.
The other officers, especially those in the 10th Cavalry, did not. They knew from personal experience that he was a gallant leader who defended the prerogatives of his men and who led them to one quiet success after another; some actually loved him for the legendary heroics he had performed during the war, but most of the infantry officers and men, who could not believe what this quiet man had accomplished, dismissed him as another eccentric leader of colored troops.
In a tremendously concentrated half-day General Grierson satisfied himself on many points, which he stated in the report he wrote that night:
At the Battle of Three Cairns units of the 10th Cavalry deported themselves according to the highest traditions of the service. 2nd Lt. Elmer Toomey directed his men properly and died gallantly at their head, 1st Sgt. John Jaxifer assumed command as expected, and defended an exposed position with valor. I can give no credence to charges made by the Cavin & Clark drivers that Sgt. Jaxifer was in any way deficient. This battle will shine brightly among the laurels gained by this Regiment.
The death of 2nd Lt. Jim Logan, one of our most accomplished horsemen from Ireland, and the scandal attaching thereto, is the kind of tragedy which can overtake any unit of any kind, civilian or military. I treasured Logan as a brave man and I mourn his death.
In all respects I find these units of the 10th Cavalry in good condition, battle-ready and well led. Their desertion rate is 1 in 300. Desertion rate of the white troops at the fort, 48 in 100 over a period of four and a half years. I especially commend these enlisted men who serve so faithfully and with such enthusiasm, and I applaud Capt. Reed’s leadership
, finding nothing to censure.
On the next day General Grierson reviewed his troops and then asked Sergeant Jaxifer to lead him out to where Jim Logan and Johnny Minor’s wife had died. Jaxifer told his men later: ‘General, when he see the spot, and the water, and the birds, he dismounts and stands by the spot weepin’. I stayed clear, but he motion me to dismount, and together we placed some stones. “Two good men,” he said a couple times, meanin’ Logan and Minor. He never mention Miss Nellie.’
That night the Reeds held a gala for the visitors, and one of the Mexicans whom the soldiers employed to work the horses appeared with a violin, one of the laundresses beat a tambourine, and there was dancing, and the best food possible purchased from the post sutler, and much conversation about the old days. Even Wetzel relaxed, telling of his unit’s exploits at various battles, and it was ‘General This,’ and ‘Colonel That’ as if the old ranks still pertained, as if the old salary scale were still being paid instead of the miserly pay accorded these heroic veterans: once a lieutenant colonel, now a first lieutenant, $1,500 a year; once a general, now a captain, $1,800 a year.
Grierson was at his best, even joking with dour Hermann Wetzel: ‘Your boys over in Prussia are going to conquer all Europe one of these days,’ to which Wetzel replied: ‘They will certainly conquer France.’
That night Reed could not sleep, and when his wife heard his restless turning she asked why, and he said: ‘My mother was an educated woman, you know, and she made us memorize poetry. She taught us that the finest single line comes at the end of Milton’s sonnet to his dead wife.’
‘I don’t know that,’ Louise said.
‘The first thirteen lines tell of how the blind poet dreams that she has come back from the grave to speak with him. “Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined,” that was my mother, too. But then came the fourteenth line, and everything fell apart. Mother said its ten short words were arrows pointed at the heart, showing what blindness meant: “I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.” ’