Ungentlemanly Acts Page 5

  Two days later General Sherman received a delegation from Jack and Parker Counties.l Marcy described their message in language redolent of the views of nineteenth-century white settlers:

  [They] represented the exact condition of affairs, growing out of the infamous and suicidal government policy of rewarding these savage brutes for murdering the whites, and assured him that unless decisive action was taken, and the Indians put down, that Northwest Texas would soon become depopulated, the labor and industry and accumulations of years would be lost, families scattered, important interests sacrificed, society ruined, and a delightful and improving country given over to the blight of these demons.

  For Marcy, the issue came down to this: “The border settlers of Texas must all be annihilated, or the Indian chastised and disarmed.”3

  The apocalyptic language reflects the way Texans talked about the warlike southern Plains Indians, whose way of life was based on raiding. They struck at will, running off horses and cattle, killing settlers, taking women and children captive, and eluding pursuers. Indians discovered, in fact, that it was far more prof-itable to capture a woman or a child than several horses or mules.4 Herman Lehmann, who spent his teenage years in the 1870s as a captive of the Mescalero Apaches and then as a willing member of a Comanche tribe, noted that “nearly every band had white and Mexican captive children … there were hundreds of captives in the various tribes.” In particular, he added, “there were many white children and women captured in South and West Texas.”5

  In the Indians’ view Texas had been their land from time immemorial, and they were accustomed to ranging freely over its vast territory and on into Mexico. In 1853, when Frederick Law Olmsted and his brother travelled across Texas, they observed that the Indians were already in a lamentable condition, “permanently on the verge of starvation. Having been forced back, step by step, from the hunting-grounds and the fertile soil of Lower Texas to the bare and arid plains, it is no wonder they are driven to violence and angry depredations.”6

  Although government policy was to relocate Indian tribes to reservations and persuade them to exchange their nomadic culture for a sedentary, agriculture-based life, as early as 1858 an officer in Texas, Brevet Major Earl Van Dorn, complained that one such reservation was too small. “It cannot reasonably be expected,” he wrote to his superiors, “that they, as wild and as free as the eagle, would voluntarily shut themselves up in such a coop, or that they would be driven there without a violent struggle.” He added, with the kind of empathy rarely found on the frontier: “Who would?”7

  Major Van Dorn was prescient: the final defeat of the various Indian tribes in the region—the Comanche, Kiowa, Apache, Lipan, and Kickapoo—would not be accomplished without another quarter century of violence and bloodshed. Speaking, grimly, to his state legislature in 1875, Texas Governor Richard Coke described how official government policy and the unofficial actions of surreptitious traders conjoined to encourage Indian violence:

  Under the present Indian policy of the general government the Texas frontier has suffered more than it ever did before and the country near the reservations has suffered worst. Permits are granted the Indians to leave the reservations sometimes to hunt; sometimes on one pretext then on another, and they invariably come into Texas, steal horses, drive off cattle, and very frequently kill and scalp men, women, and children, and when they return, it is a fact that can be substantiated with abundant proof, that white men, on or near the reservation, are always ready with guns and ammunition, blankets, and other things desired by the Indians to trade for stolen stock and other plunder gotten from Texas.8

  Settlers on the frontier had little use for “Mr. Lo,” a designation derived from Alexander Pope, who had written in his poem An Essay on Man, “Lo, the poor Indian.” Pope had intended lo as an interjection meaning “behold,” but on the frontier it became an ironic noun. Colonel John A. Wilcox, who fought Indians in Texas, wrote some verses titled “Owed (Ode) to Lo! The Poor Indian” that express the common feeling:

  Bedecked with paint, they go to war, with frantic, hideous yell,

  Remorseless, cruel, vengeful, they are merciless as hell.

  You’ll never find upon this earth wherever you may go,

  A meaner, dirtier, murdering thief, than you will find in Lo!9

  To members of the U.S. military there was a meaningful distinction between a “civilized enemy,” like the British in the War of 1812 or the Confederates in the Civil War, and Indians. The civilized enemy fought the way you did but in a different uniform. You and he shared a common culture, the Judeo-Christian tradition and a European intellectual heritage that went back to ancient Greece. Indians were Other—hence uncivilized, inferior, fiendish. History might hold examples of whites who had all the characteristics Colonel Wilcox attributed to Lo, and it might produce examples of oppressive white rulers, but these would be considered aberrations. Whites observed that it was not one warrior who exhibited merciless cruelty; it was the Indian way of warfare. It had to be eradicated, or instead of expansion, the great mantra of the nineteenth century, Texas would experience the often invoked “depopulation”—the very opposite of what Americans regarded as progress.

  Although the Indians could usually elude pursuing troops, they could not at the same time hunt enough to stay alive. In 1874, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie surprised a large group of Comanche in Palo Duro Canyon in northern Texas. The Indians got away but lost an enormous horse herd: Mackenzie slaughtered some two thousand ponies and destroyed large quantities of Indian goods. Such losses could be remedied less easily as time passed and the once plentiful buffalo became virtually extinct. The Indians would learn, as General Sherman once said, “that when the Government commands, they must obey.” 10

  By 1879, General Ord could note with satisfaction in his annual report for the Department of Texas that in the Pecos District “all Indians penetrating the country have been so hotly pressed by the troops as to prevent their doing much damage—only three murders, by marauders, during the year. Last year there were seventeen in the region referred to.”11 Ord’s rejoicing was a little premature: in the early 1880s there would be one more big campaign against the stubborn Apaches, but the trend was unmistakable. Even the wild country of West Texas and the volatile border were settling down.

  Supposedly, General Sherman once remarked that if he owned hell and Texas, he would live in hell and rent out Texas. The remark, perhaps made soon after he narrowly escaped being killed by Indians in Texas, expressed a widely held sentiment, even if a patriotic Texas editor retorted that the general was just standing up for his own country. 12 Another Texas patriot, the writer Larry McMurtry, contrasts the nation’s romantic image of the South with its view of his home state: “Texas is only scenery, and poor scenery at that.”13 West Texas in particular, with its lawless desert expanses, was not regarded as a desirable military posting: when Colonel Benjamin Grierson, commanding officer of the Tenth Cavalry, was sent there from Indian Territory in 1875, he felt both disappointed and slighted. His brother pronounced it “the most God-forsaken part of Uncle Sam’s Dominions.”14

  Army wives who penned their memoirs held similar views. When Lydia Spencer Lane received the “dreadful news” that her husband was being transferred from Missouri to West Texas, she had to summon all of her personal resources—trust in Providence, her commitment to the life of a soldier, and the fatalistic realization that “there was no escape.” She and her husband travelled to their destination “through a dreary, desolate country, where nothing lived but Indians, snakes, and other venomous reptiles.” Indeed, she never went to bed “without making a thorough search for a snake, tarantula, or centipede.” At Fort McIntosh, twelve days’ journey from San Antonio, the litany continues: “Not a green thing was to be seen but a few ragged mesquite-trees … . Back of our quarters was quite a large yard, but there was not a living thing in it, except tarantulas, scorpions, and centipedes, with an occasional rattlesnake for variety.”15

  I
f this seems like the overreaction of a complaining wife, here is the dispassionate report of Assistant Surgeons W. M. Notson and W. F. Buchanan,m made in 1875:

  Tarantulas and lesser spiders lurk under every cactus shrub, and the centipede brings forth its interesting brood in every pile of chips or lumber about one’s quarters. Small scorpions, from two to three inches in length, are found, though less frequently than either the centipede or the tarantula. Indians, believed to be chiefly Comanches and Kiowas, commit frequent depredations in the vicinity.16

  The casual coupling of Indians with noxious vermin by the army doctors and Mrs. Lane was a commonplace of frontier writing.

  In 1872, Major Zenas R. Bliss accompanied some officers and their families from Fort Clark to Fort Stockton. “When the ladies first got a sight of the Post that some of them were to live in,” he wrote, “the sight caused many sad hearts. The post looked in the distance like a camp of Mexican carts,” in other words, a stark collection of boxlike structures. Moreover, “there was not a tree to be seen … . There was little if any grass, and the whole landscape had a grayish appearance.” Once they became accustomed to the fort, Major Bliss admitted, they came to think of it as “a very desirable station.”17

  In fact, compared to other frontier posts, Fort Stockton had some advantages, notably, a flourishing garden that one proud officer pronounced “inestimable” in value, “not only the best garden on this frontier but it would compare favorably with any in the States.” It produced a variety of sorely needed fresh vegetables: onions, carrots, beets, turnips, pumpkins, squash, yams, peas, radishes, cucumbers, beans, corn, lettuce, cabbage, watermelons, and cantaloupes. The creek that bordered the post on one side furnished “an inexhaustible supply of water-cresses … invaluable” for counteracting scurvy. During the fall and winter numerous water fowl populated first the marshes of Comanche Creek and then the tables of the fort.18

  The bounty of nature could be disrupted by the violence of weather. On May 30, 1875, a severe hailstorm completely destroyed that year’s garden as well as breaking ten window lights in the hospital and stripping the post’s roofs of shingles. Many of the hailstones were “as large as a man’s closed hands.” They averaged eight to the pound and covered the parade ground to a depth of three inches.19

  Any frontier fort, newspaper reporter Randolph Keim thought, suggested a ship at sea, “isolation within and desolation without.” The landscape of West Texas, so flat and dusty that riders could be seen approaching from miles away, eloquently defined desolation. San Antonio, the hub of the military Department of Texas, was almost 392 miles away. The nearest military post, Fort Davis, was 70 miles, or a day’s journey by stage. As for the isolation within, an army chaplain at Fort Davis remarked that it “tends to superinduce a restive spirit, and creates a cheerless atmosphere—which render temptations to intemperance very strong.”20

  No army post was immune to the twinned evils of alcohol and gambling, and few were so removed that they eluded opportunities to acquire venereal disease. Commenting on an increase in such ailments among the troops, a Fort Stockton doctor recommended that a Mexican prostitute named Maria “be induced to leave the vicinity.” (He didn’t suggest what form this inducement might take.) Beyond these communal effects of isolation lay the kind that Joseph Conrad wrote about in The Heart of Darkness, the darkness within that could unmoor a man, casting him adrift on an uncharted inner sea that mirrored the “appallingly wide-open world called West Texas.”21

  The officers of Fort Stockton, and whatever family they had with them, constituted the society of the post, a handful of people who saw each other constantly. Shared hardships and dangers—the desolation without—united them, creating, as one frontier army officer wrote in his memoirs, “a bond that is never loosened.” Yet at times the isolation within bred deep hatreds that fed on these same hardships and dangers. Commenting on a case of two feuding officers, historian Shirley Leckie observes:

  Such filings of charges and countercharges were only too common in this period and absorbed a great deal of the time and energy of commanding officers. Many of the accusations stemmed from the frustration brought on by the lack of promotion opportunities and the relatively low army pay.

  The fort’s small social group also knew, for good or for ill, “the intimate details of one another’s lives.” As one army wife remarked of such frontier posts, “Gossip, malicious and otherwise, throve.”22

  The 1870 census had found a population of 582 in the Fort Stockton region, 429 of whom were civilians, Anglos and Mexicans. The area might have seemed lacking in promise to all but the hardiest adventurer: attacks of Indians and outlaw gangs, aided by the convenience of retreat across the border into Mexico, made agriculture a venture that was “one half planting and plowing and one half killing Indians”—or being killed by them, the chronicler might have added. “No man removed more than his coat or brush jacket when he lay down to sleep,” cowboy James Cook writes of his experience herding cattle in the region: “There was danger on all sides and from many sources.” This was just the kind of place to appeal to General Ord, who clearly took some pleasure in warning away the faint-hearted: “Educated Englishmen, or men to whom English home comforts are necessary, farmers accustomed to good neighbors and to certain security for life and property and unable to cope with the wild rough border people or … occasional torrid heat in summer had better stay away from West Texas.”23

  Nevertheless, Fort Stockton was on the move. In 1875 Pecos County was carved out of the immensity of Presidio County, and Saint Gall, the little town that had grown up around the fort, became the county seat and eventually the town of Fort Stockton. By 1877, eight thousand acres were under cultivation, and by 1880, because of promising developments like irrigation, the waning of Indian attacks, and the imminent arrival of railroads, Pecos County had almost four times as many civilians as in 1870—1,689. (Texas during this decade almost doubled its population.) The fort itself had a total of 254 army personnel in 1879.24

  Fort Stockton was located at Comanche Springs, a major source of water on the north-south Comanche War Trail sweeping down from North Texas and Oklahoma into Mexico. On an east-west axis, the post straddled the road between El Paso and San Antonio, taking its place as part of a string of forts intended to establish a military presence in the sparsely populated immensities of West Texas.25

  With the eruption of the Civil War two years after its founding, Fort Stockton was evacuated by the United States Army, then briefly occupied, abandoned, and burned by the Confederates. When Federal troops reclaimed it in 1867, the post had to be entirely rebuilt—of adobe, a common building material of the treeless area. (Lumber had to be hauled 160 miles and was thus prohibitively expensive for the construction of a military base.) The fort would ultimately consist of twenty-six buildings, all of adobe except the stone guardhouse and magazine. The 960 acres of land, which was owned by a San Antonio landowner rather than the government, was described as worth about ten cents an acre, not a great deal at a time when a quarter would buy a full meal, but a reasonable valuation of the unpromising land.26

  Fort Stockton in 1879 might not have resembled a group of Mexican carts, as Major Bliss imagined, but it was an unimpressive square of buildings arranged around a central parade ground, the typical unfortifiedn military post with a few other civilian buildings nearby and a group of “miserable little mud houses often without fireplace or windows” in which Mexicans lived.27 Since the surrounding land was flat and treeless, there was nothing to give the place particular character.

  Life at a frontier fort was structured and routine, or, as an article in The Army and Navy Journal put it, “the rule is monotony and stagnation.” There were three daily roll calls: reveille early in the morning was balanced by tattoo at around nine at night, with retreat at sunset. For cavalry there were morning and afternoon stable calls to care for horses. Dinner was at noon, while “lunch” was the evening meal. In between these fixed occurrences the men might dr
ill or go on fatigue details, that is, work constructing roads or post buildings. This practice was so widespread at the time that a citizen charged the Army with requiring “unsoldierly and penitentiary-like work” from enlisted men. He asked the military affairs committees of both houses of Congress to investigate.28

  At times units would be sent into the field to pursue marauding Indians. They rarely found them. Although there was little possibility of success, there was great chance of danger, and even greater chance of suffering long periods of monotonous field duty and cruel deprivation. There was always more at stake in Indian fighting because the Indians took no prisoners and might torture those who fell into their hands. As one experienced Indian fighter observed,

  The life of a soldier in time of war has scarcely a compensating feature; but he ordinarily expects palatable food whenever obtainable, and good warm quarters during the winter season. In campaigning against the Indians, if anxious to gain success, he must lay aside every idea of good food and comfortable lodgings, and make up his mind to undergo with cheerfulness privations from which other soldiers would shrink back dismayed.

  The Army logged thousands of miles over the unfriendly terrain of West Texas, killing an Indian here and there, but rarely matching the Indians’ record for killing settlers. As Olmsted remarked, “The inefficiency of regular troops for Indian warfare needs no evidence. Wherever posted, they are the standing butt of the frontiersmen.”29