Sacrifice: Chapter 11
Embarkations (NORTH) – Chapter 4. Antelope Hill
As the Ranger told his tale, the others stood in rapt silence, following his every word. A distant light played in Tenner’s eyes at various points of it, and sometimes a curve at the corner of his mouth, but he did not speak until the end. Here is what he told.
Ranger Lieutenant Witherington and his division, led by the courageous and intrepid Captain John S. Ford and accompanied by good men of the Texas militia and Rangers, some hundred souls in all, had set out in spring of 1858 and fared northward. They were joined by a hundred more braves of the reservation known as Cottonwood Springs – “Injuns,” said the Lieutenant, “who despite their fearsome savag’ry are ready to forego their heathenish ways and to join in the great cause of Christian civilization.” These Indians drifted up on the road, red-skinned apparitions who seemed to manifest there on the desert floor like phantoms and to coalesce with the white men by some unspoken pledge; and this twining confluence of pale and rusty clay had lain out from there at a dead march through the upper lands and the desert lands of the unknown half of the state of Texas, and thence into the very heart of the Comancheria, where they aimed to strike a vicious blow to that ragtag empire and to dislodge its tenuous wandering claims to that land.
They had been commissioned for this expedition by no lesser a man than the governor of Texas himself, Hardin R. Runnels, who had instructed them to employ all means at their disposal to hunt down and flush out and eliminate any hostile Indians in those parts, “which is the on’y kind of Injun those devilish lands ever did know.” Energy and action the governor had commanded of them, and energy and action they intended to exert upon those wild lands and their wild denizens. The federal government of the United States itself thought differently on these matters, and in what the Lieutenant called its “bedeviled ignorance” (consequence, he insisted, of its distance from the frontier), had believed it could come to terms with these red demons via treaties, so little did it understand the mentality of these illiterate Indians, their violent ways, their ruthlessness, their recalcitrance to the mark of law and the hand of the lawman alike. “Let them fool politicians up in Washington deal in scraps of paper and set what rules they please, it is all of a kind to a true-hearted Texan, who knows the lay of this land and the critters that inhabit it and will not be lured into a idiotic complacency by ‘agreements’ and ‘accords’ with a race that is innately incapable of holding to its promises.”
The white folk were united in their fear and hatred of the Comanche and their willingness to massacre the entire tribe if they could manage it, and they were ready to die for the cause of their land and their nation if called upon to do so. As for their Indian allies, these had been subject tribes there in the Comancheria long before the white man had ever come, and the memory of blood shed and indignities sustained and ancient feuds burned in them with a heady fire and infused them with the will to see the rival Comanches brought low, even as the Comanches had brought them.
Three full weeks this mixed assemblage had travelled north through territory unknown, moving through the delirium of the sunbaked days and sleeping in the company of inchoate nocturnal monsters, until they came one day upon an buffalo, escaped from some posse of hunters and fled out onto the desert floor until its arrow wounds had crippled it and left it stranded there on the broad light-harrowed plain. They shot the beast dead and drew out the bloody barbs and confirmed with their Indian comrades that the obsidian and agate tips bore the mark of Comanche workmanship. They left the corpse to rot where it had fallen and proceeded on.
The day following, Captain Ford and Ranger Witherington himself squatted with several other men out on a hillock rise behind a screen of juniper and stone, and witnessed a scene that despite the Ranger’s brevity of description appeared in vivid color to Tenner’s second-sight: Comanche braves hunting bison on the vales of the northward hills. They watched the Indians hunt and they watched them bring down the bison, and then they watched them go. As they went, the white men marked the line of their easy traverse, inferring the direction in which the encampments lay. They carried this news back to their fellows, and at that point Captain Ford ordered that the wagons should stay put, guarded by an escort of men, and that they should proceed as much in silence as possible. Late that same day, one of their own Indian trackers returned with news that he had located the encampment. As the light was already hard upon its wane, it was settled that they should attack on the morrow in the dawn and bring the massacre before the shame-giving sun could bear testimony to these bloody deeds.
The task of this first skirmish was given to the redskin braves, the Tonkawas, led by one Chief Placido, “though ne’er was a name so misfit to its bearer. Tweren’t nothin’ placido about him, for he was a veritable fury of hell in combat.” Come first light, these rode out and discovered the encampment, a mere five lodges, and engaged the Comanches there. Nor did one of these Comanche warrior braves turn to flee or to warn his fellows of the assault, “imbeciles that they are, that have not a scrap of sound reason and evidently cannot even count in their ignorance, as they do not have the least sense when they are so vast outnumbered.” At which words, Tenner frowned, but did not speak.
While this lesser battle was underway, the larger contingent of forces under the command of Captain Ford proceeded onward, and their advance scouts soon sighted a larger encampment, “a true den of barbarism, some seventy tipis in all, pullulatin’ with the varmints.” It was across the Canadian River, and it should have been a hard struggle to ford their men to the other side, save that at this very moment they spotted a lone Comanche rider heading for the embattled encampment where the Tonkawas were still at their bloodsport. An effort was made to intercept him; but he, perceiving the oncoming enemy, turned around and raced to the tipis across the river to warn his kin. The warparty set to pursuit, but the lone rider was riding a fresh horse and he moved far too fast for them. He braced the river at its weakest point and thus revealed to the Texans and their Indian allies the safe passage; and so he that had been the bearer of the alarums betrayed those he would save. The troops proceeded across the Canadian and over toward the encampment with its seventy lodges, ready at last for the harrow of bloodfall and the lust of the battle.
The Comanches were shortly forewarned by the lone rider and already were hastening to shepherd their women and children away. Messages of the coming danger were being sent off as well to the further villages deeper in Comanche land, but the Texans could do naught about that now. The Comanche warriors who remained formed a line before the crumbling village and invoked the spirits of their ancestors that they might fall in battle as men. But one from their ranks suddenly rode forward alone, his spear tied with a white banner, and he himself glittering in the sun as though his skin were wrought of silver scales. This was the chief known as Iron Jacket, “a ignorant redskin if ever thar was one, rife with superstition of the most incredible kind.” For he believed that he was endowed with a magic aegis peculiar to him which would protect him from harm, and cause bullet and arrow alike to fall harmless about his feet. He approached with several of his warriors in tow bearing aloft the sign of truce but Captain Ford ordered his men to open fire. The Comanche had used such ruses before to draw in the white man, “for they are a scurvy race without honor and untrustworthy as a lightnin’ storm, and their word don’t hold for but a spit in the air.” A volley of fire reigned down on the riders, but though his men fell beneath it Iron Jacket rode unscathed through it, “no doubt for that armor he wore,” a coat of Spanish mail that he had claimed for his own trophy in some long distant skirmish with some southern tribesman who himself had gained it likewise, and so in unbroken lineage of plunder back to the very Spaniard who had worn it hence on the ship which had been scuttled by Cortés’ own hand and left to drag in the undertow where fish would mindlessly cross over its hull and dart about its useless riggings. This Spaniard had died there in that foreign land and his name vanished to memory, and now all that remained of him in the world was this, the heirloom of his passing, christened who could say how many times in blood and cladding now the back of a savage in a savage land how many thousands of miles from the fire where it had been forged.
Having survived this first onslaught Iron Jacket turned and fired several arrows into the company, and so slew a man of the militia, driving the arrow hard through his neck and severing his carotid artery; and his companions could do nothing to staunch that crimson fount. But the attackers fired their rounds, and the inevitable bullet at last found its way through the armor of the red man and struck inward to his life, and he fell before them. “It was said af’erwards that a injun had fired that shot, one Jim Pockmark of the Anadarko. I do not set much store by this, for the redskins are in the main poor marksmen; more like it was one of our own Texas rangers as done it. For it took a keen eye to fit a mark between the chinks in this man’s armor.”
At these words, the Lieutenant suddenly broke off his recounting and dug about in his pockets, and drew forth a slender gleaming scale of sliver, which he held into the air before him like a talisman to catch the rays of the sun, and the men gathered round and gazed at it as upon a thing of wonder. This was, he vaunted, a piece of Iron Jacket’s armor, which after the battle had been divvied out among the men, in memory of their triumph there. After a moment he pocketed the piece with a quick gesture as though jealous that too many eyes should look upon it, and continued with his tale at the point that Iron Jacket fell before them.
Even as that lone brave lay bleeding out and shimmering in his red and silvern husk, the Rangers and their company charged. “The injuns that remained fell away at once and made a break for the hills, cowards that they are, and we were compelled to ride in hot pursuit.” Ride they did, pursuing the fleeing Indians into the hill country beyond, the ravines and gulches and bosks which seemed to swallow them up, and the combat thus was spread thin across the countryside. “We rode ’em down without mercy and began the hard work a pluckin’ these foul weeds out from the ground.”
“And the women and youngins?” suddenly put in the same lad who had spoken before.
Sam Witherington smiled an uncouth smile. “Son, could you distinguish between a brave and a squaw of them Comanche? Why, those are just about the handsomest women I e’er laid eyes on.” Several men in the company laughed. Tenner listened on somberly, arms crossed before him. “Jestin’ aside, gentlemen,” continued the Lieutenant, “let us never forget that a womb is fit to carry a cub, that the cub will become a bear, the pup a wolf and the viper a viper, and it is but a loan against time if a man will not see to this matter sooner and not later.”
Nearing early afternoon, a call was put up the Rangers began urgently to regroup in the clearing where the battle had begun. The hillsides about them were swarming with Indians, a mighty line of reinforcements which had arrived and was proceeding now in a battle line all about them, closing in on them, “some five hundred savages, all reckoned.” The Tonkawa were just returning from their first engagement at the smaller encampment across the river, but they together with the rest of their Indian allies set themselves aside, for while they had ridden into the earlier battle wearing white kerchiefs upon their brow “so as to distinguish our redskins from the rest,” they had shed these in the course of the fight, and would not risk being slain by their own white companions. “It takes a canny eye to discern the subtle difference twixt one red race and another, and in the heat of battle the time is short for such niceties.” And so the Rangers and militiamen, left to their own devices and vastly outnumbered, stood the flatland and awaited the coming host.
The Indians rode forth in small forays and fired arrows at the invaders and then feigned retreat, attempting to draw the white men forth and to entrap them in small companies, “but we knew their thievin’ ways, and would not be duped.” Suddenly Lieutenant Nelson commanded a flanking maneuver, which “quick as a fast flood” spearheaded into the Comanche line and shattered it. Again the host fled into the countryside with the Rangers and their Indian comrades in hot hunt.
“I reckon the remainin’ battle cost us maybe upwards of a hour at most. Them redskins killed another of our boys, a brave lad of Lieutenant Nelson’s troop, there in a gulch, done surrounded him and set upon him in a ambuscade, but he put up a glorious fight. Beyond that they wounded three othern. Most of them braves just up and run out, the poltroons, but we got ourselves a good number of ’em pinned into a ravine there, a canyon all lined with timbers, and that was where most of the battle was fought out. We routed the injuns and took prisoner them’s we didn’t kill, and lighted out back for our wagons, for Captain Ford was rightly afeared of a counterassault. Yet they never did attack us again, despite that they were in numbers far superior; but bein’ a race a lily-livered scoundrelly spineless curs they kept to their hills, and we set back to Camp Runnels, and our Indian allies, those honorable friends of the white man, back to their reservation. Brought our kilt boys back, buried ’em in Christian land.
“And that, gentlemen, was how the Battle of Antelope Hill come ended.”
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