1 DEVIL YACK
Yellow Wolf knew the Pinta Trail well, as had his ancestors and the Spanish and the Lipan Apaches and other tribes. Now at least some Anglos who had come to the Texas Hill Country knew it too. From a wooded hill above, he could see a group of about fifteen riders who had stopped where the trail crossed the Guadalupe River. The whites below were no match for his several dozen Comanches of the Penateka band. He would take them.
His warriors were armed, as they usually were, with lances and arrows, which they could launch repeatedly and with precision. Also, as usual, the whites had guns, fearsome weapons that roared and struck with power even at a distance, but each had to be painstakingly reloaded after a single shot. Comanches knew about guns; more than a few had them. They also knew that what the gun boasted in mightiness it lacked in versatility. At this moment in American history, a gun was not that great a threat when matched against flocks of incoming arrows.
What the Comanches could not know was that on this early June day in 1844, warfare on the plains would change forever. The Industrial Revolution had arrived in Texas in the form of a small piece of handheld weaponry born from the genius of Samuel Colt just a few years before. This gun would not exhaust itself after one shot. It would fire again in a second. And again. And again. And again. Each of the fifteen white riders had at least one of Colt’s inventions, probably two, tucked into his belt.
* * *
More than a century before, the Comanches had swept into Texas Hill Country from the north and the west, bringing their adaptable culture with them, on horses introduced onto the continent by imperial Spain. Now, thanks to these fleet and strong animals as well as their adaptive, resilient culture, Comanches were lords of the plains, having pushed aside the Spanish and other Indian nations to set up an empire of their own.
At first the vast domain called Comanchería had little problem with Anglos arriving from the East at the invitation of Spanish-speakers in now independent Mexico, for the fair-skinned newcomers brought trade that could enrich the Comanche empire’s powerful reach. Now things were different. The new Republic of Texas granted land to an influx of settlers who took over territory the Comanches thought Texas had no right to claim. Surveyors cut the plains into parcels on maps that would define whose property was whose, ready to be transformed from “wilderness” to “civilization” by newcomers’ willing hands.
For Yellow Wolf and his people, these surveyors and settlers had become the enemy. His and other Comanche raiding parties attacked white homesteads hard, killing many, taking captives, and generally making life on the Texas plains a risky undertaking for alien families intent on taking root in or near Comanchería. No Hill Country settler felt secure. All knew of homesteads raided by Comanches, who treated harshly many of those they encountered. Even though they may not have known her personally, Texians were familiar with the story of Matilda Lockhart.
In the autumn of 1838, thirteen-year-old Matilda and four children from the neighboring Putnam family had just finished gathering pecans in the bottomland near the Lockharts’ homestead on the Guadalupe River when Comanche raiders grabbed them, lashed them with rawhide thongs to Indian horses, and whisked them away to the Guadalupe Mountains. Two rescue expeditions into Indian country ended in failure. More than a year would pass before Matilda was reunited with her family. By then she was unrecognizable.
Matilda arrived in San Antonio in March of 1840 with a delegation of Penateka chiefs and warriors interested in negotiating a treaty with the Texians. Setbacks suffered in their domain made the Comanches see this as a time to make peace. Cheyenne and Arapaho parties had threatened Comanchería’s northern frontier, and Rangers had successfully harassed Comanches elsewhere, preferring to catch the Indians by surprise in their villages, as the Indians were doing to white settlements. And then there were cholera and smallpox, several recent epidemics having ripped through the Penateka community. The Comanches were ready for calmer relations with the Texians.
Return of captives was among the demands made by the Texians two months before, so Matilda Lockhart was with the Comanche peace delegation led by a chieftain named Muk-wah-ruh. A woman who helped bathe and dress the now-sixteen-year-old Matilda on her return found her “utterly degraded,” a girl who “could never hold her head up again.” It was not just what Matilda told them that enraged the Texians. It was what they saw.
“Her head, arms and face were full of bruises, and sores, and her nose actually burnt off to the bone—all the fleshy end gone, and a great scab formed on the end of the bone,” wrote Mary Ann Maverick, who cared for the newly released captive. “Both nostrils were wide open and denuded of flesh. She told a piteous tale of how dreadfully the Indians had beaten her, and how they would wake her from sleep by sticking a chunk of fire to her flesh, especially to her nose, and how they would shout and laugh like fiends when she cried.”
Matilda told the Texas commissioners negotiating with the Penatekas about a dozen or more additional white captives, whom the Comanches planned to offer up, one at a time, in exchange for various supplies. That was not part of the deal, the Texians told Muk-wah-ruh in the Council House, a one-story, flat-roofed stone building with an earthen floor, which was the usual place in San Antonio for serious talks between whites and Indians; he was supposed to have brought all prisoners at once. This was impossible, Muk-wah-ruh explained. Those captives were held by other Comanche bands—not the Penateka—over whom he had no authority. The commissioners, enraged by Matilda’s treatment and fearful that other children were being tortured, were not going to renegotiate. On their order soldiers entered the Council House to hold the Indian negotiators hostage until all white captives had been freed. The Comanches inside tried to escape, calling on tribesmen outside to help. Gunfighting erupted, killing most of the Indians inside the Council House, including Muk-wah-ruh. In the end the Texians seized more than two dozen Comanches, whom they offered to return once the white captives came safely home. Penateka leaders ignored the offer, and most of the Indians held by the Texians eventually managed to escape. There was no more talk of peace.
Broken by her ordeals, Matilda Lockhart never recovered. She died before she turned twenty. Texians would remember.
The Penateka would also remember. For them, the slaughter of peace ambassadors was unforgivable. They believed that the treacherous Texians’ plan all along was to hold Muk-wah-ruh and his negotiators at gunpoint until every white captive was freed. The ones who had done this evil and those who benefitted from it would pay. There would be no suspension of raids into Texas—another of the demands Texians made at the beginning of the failed peace negotiations. Instead violence would escalate, as Comanchería clashed with the new Anglo empire taking hold in what the Indians considered their domain.
* * *
Wildflowers and greenery roused from a Hill Country winter had given way to early summer, June warming the tough terrain eighty miles northwest of San Antonio, a land of limestone and clear streams over which many battles had already been fought. The white men Yellow Wolf watched on the Pinta Trail by the Guadalupe River wore no uniforms, carried no flags, but the Penateka veteran of many skirmishes recognized them as Texas Rangers, a loosely bound collection of stalwarts deserving of Comanche respect, something the Indians did not give freely. The respect was for the Rangers’ hardiness in combat, not for their role in protecting or avenging those the Comanches saw as intruders.
Despite the Rangers’ fighting abilities and horsemanship skill that rivaled the Comanches’, Yellow Wolf knew that numbers gave him the edge. He and a handful of his men would make their presence known. The rest would lie in wait above the river, obscured from view by live oaks, hardy trees that held most of their leaves through the harshest of prairie winters and were now bursting with foliage perfect for concealment. Tricked into thinking they faced only a few Comanches, the Rangers would go after Yellow Wolf, only to be slaughtered when they reached the oaks. It was a common tactic; if played right, it would work.
The fighting on the Pinta Trail would likely be fierce. The Texas Rangers knew that Comanches gave no quarter. But neither did the Rangers, who understood that surrender was never an option for them, because it only meant death often preceded by something worse.
* * *
Captain John Coffee “Jack” Hays and the fourteen Rangers Yellow Wolf was watching had left San Antonio a week before to scout for Indian bands—possibly Mexicans, too—who had been raiding white settlements. Now, after no Indians had been found, they headed back.
A slender, five-foot-eight, naturally pale fellow with a boyishly smooth face and gaunt cheeks weathered by the frontier, Hays did not look like a man to lead Texas Rangers—and lead was the right word, for they couldn’t be commanded. Nor did he sound the part, with a quiet voice fitting his gentlemanly Tennessee upbringing. He tended not to talk much anyway. His clothing style was as modest as his demeanor—often a black leather cap with a blue roundabout jacket and black trousers—yet another contrast to the brawny Rangers and their broad-brimmed hats, which protected them from the Texas sun. It was said that his restless hazel eyes often looked sad. On foot Captain Jack walked slightly stooped, a tendency some thought made him look nervous, though losing nerve was not among his traits.
Orphaned at fifteen, Hays had headed west to Texas four years later in 1836, the year the Alamo fell and Texians rose in righteous fervor to wrest their independence from Mexico. He worked first as a surveyor and soon joined the Rangers, where he rose quickly to the rank of captain. By then Hays had proven his ability as well as any man to withstand the terror of battle and the hardship of long sojourns over the plains and show no strain for his trouble. At one with the terrain, Hays could divine the presence of passing Indians from the tiny pebbles displaced by their horses, even reading there the direction in which they rode. According to a Ranger who had served with him from the early days, “no officer ever possessed more completely the esteem, the confidence, and the love of his men.”
Indians agreed that Hays was a man of substance. The Lipan Apaches, who were no friends of the Comanches and often allied themselves with the Rangers, called him bravo-too-much. “Me and Red Wing not afraid to go to hell together,” explained Lipan chief Flacco, who sometimes fought alongside Hays. “Captain Jack heap brave, not afraid to go to hell by himself.” The Comanches also had a name for him: Devil Yack.
* * *
On their journey back to San Antonio, Jack Hays and his men crossed the Guadalupe River near a smaller flow of water later called Walker’s Creek. When the Rangers saw a beehive hanging from a tree at the crossing, they decided to take advantage of their good fortune. Honey was a delicious luxury. Its sweetness would complement nicely the meager rations each man had brought with him and the venison the plains provided.
The day was still fresh, and so were the Texas Rangers. Rangers traveled light, as they had to, even though their sturdy, mixed-breed mounts could support weight over long rides. They tended to be big men and brought no more than they needed, so their horses could be agile in battle. The Rangers were armed, of course, mostly with pistols and long knives but also with rifles. But on this mission each man had a new weapon: a different kind of pistol, one with a nine-inch barrel leading to a revolving cylinder just above and in front of the grip. Aside from the barrel and the method of holding the weapon, this handgun—a ballet of rods, screws, plates, and a couple of curved projections flowing into an elegant handle of American walnut—was unlike any used before in combat.
Its inventor was the flamboyantly driven Samuel Colt, who claimed he got the idea as a teenager by watching a ship’s wheel or windlass turn and be locked into place by a wooden stave. In Colt’s imagination, so he said, the spaces between the spokes became five hollow chambers, each closed at one end. The stave became a ratchet holding the cylinder firm at precise intervals as it turned. Fill each chamber with gunpowder and a lead ball a bit over a third of an inch thick and line up the chambers one by one with a long tube as you cocked the hammer, and you had a gun whose trigger would pop out beneath the cylinder. This was a gun that could shoot five times without reloading, its cylinder revolving after each shot—provided it worked as intended. Colt’s creation did tend to be finicky compared with the less complicated mechanism of a single-shot pistol. Sometimes the mechanism failed. Or all five chambers would go off at once in a conflagration that endangered the man who pulled the trigger.
Whether Colt’s idea came to him aboard ship or, more likely, from seeing a flintlock pistol with a hand-turned cylinder containing chambers, the truth is elusive. Whatever the inspiration, Colt started making his “revolver” in 1837 at a factory in Paterson, New Jersey, a hub of early industrialization where he had family contacts, but he could not entice the United States government, his target market, into buying it in bulk. Less than a year after production began, he personally took ninety of his “Paterson” rifles to Florida to convince the Army that they would help defeat Indians in the Second Seminole War. Colt sold more than half his supply, but although they performed well enough, he got no serious contracts. His efforts included giving personal “inducements” to powerful individuals, including the Army’s chief of ordnance in 1839. This led the Colt firm’s treasurer—Sam’s cousin and a major shareholder—to declare in writing, “I will not become a party to a negotiation with a public officer to allow him compensation for aid in securing a contract with Govet.” Colt paid him no mind and continued to offer inducements. He would do anything for success.
Colt did persuade one government to buy three hundred sixty of his revolving carbines and handguns: the Republic of Texas. When the Texian Navy was decommissioned in 1843, a number of Colt’s small industrial masterpieces came into the hands of the republic’s Rangers, though never as standard equipment for an entire company until Jack Hays found them appealing. Now, on their June 1844 mission in Indian country, every Ranger with Hays on the Pinta Trail had at least one, plus a loaded second cylinder that could be swapped for an expended one even in battle, if the gunman had the calm fortitude to do the necessary tinkering while under fire. Reloading a spent cylinder, however, was a task that needed quiet time. And a revolver without a loaded cylinder was no better than a club.
* * *
Yellow Wolf could see the Rangers in the distance but not the pistols stuck in their belts. Even if he had been able to make them out, it wouldn’t have made any difference. A gun was a gun: one shot and done. When it went off, it had to be reloaded, and that required time and attention, which a warrior would exploit. As the white men fiddled, the Comanches would launch their arrows. Yellow Wolf ordered a contingent to ride ahead and bait the white men into an ambush.
* * *
On Hays’s orders, two Rangers had lagged behind to see if their group was being followed—a standard Indian practice Hays had adopted. While Ranger Noah Cherry was mining the beehive atop the tree, the pair came galloping back to camp to report that there were, indeed, Comanches on their way. Then Cherry saw them too.
“Jerusalem!” he shouted from his perch. “Captain, yonder comes a thousand Indians!”
Cherry exaggerated; there were only about ten. Hays ordered his men to mount. The Rangers turned toward the Indians, who pivoted for the nearby hill thick with oak. Hays, familiar with Comanche tactics, knew this was a trap.
When he saw the Rangers holding to a slow walk, Yellow Wolf and the entire seventy-five-man Penateka band emerged from the hilltop oaks. Neither retreating nor charging, Hays and his men continued moving slowly forward, in no apparent hurry to engage the warriors. Seeing no assault coming, the Indians taunted the Rangers with shouts of “Charge! Charge!” in both English and Spanish, with a few epithets thrown in.
The Rangers then wheeled and launched into full gallop—not in reverse, but splitting into two groups across a shallow ravine out of sight of the Indians. The groups took opposite sides of the hill, circling behind their enemy and, despite a five-to-one disadvantage in manpower, broke cover and charged into the Comanches’ midst.
After receiving several bullets from the Rangers’ single-shot rifles, the warriors counterattacked. But by that time, the highly disciplined Rangers had regathered, circled their horses rump to rump, and begun firing their five-shot Colts at the charging Comanches, as the Indians shot arrows and thrust lances on the gallop. Rangers Robert Addison “Ad” Gillespie, a Tennessean like Hays, and Samuel H. Walker, a transplanted Marylander a month younger than the captain, were lanced but kept fighting.
In mid-battle, the Rangers replaced their spent cylinders with loaded ones. Some men who had fired all their ten shots even maintained enough composure between Comanche charges to reload cylinders still warm from having fired themselves empty. Yellow Wolf’s band now realized that the Rangers were more dangerous than before. One Penateka later complained that their white adversaries “had a shot for every finger on the hand.”
Copyright © 2022 by John Bainbridge, Jr.