Lesson 7: Quakers, Red Cloud, Southern Plains War, and a New President
Kill a Buffalo, Starve an Indian
By the end of the 1860s, Texas, along the Mexican border, was in a state of war. The Rio Grande gave the Mescaleros, Lipans, and Kickapoos a sanctuary where they could reach Mexican communities to dispose of stolen loot. Because of the depredations of the Indians, the country above Eagle Pass and southward past Laredo was quickly losing its white population.
In August 1870, one Texas newspaper reported that the savages were swarming through the counties of Llano, Mason, and Gillespie. Farmers were being shot down in their fields, their cattle and horses being stolen while they could only watch. Other counties in Texas reported the same, telling of travelers being attack and scalped, farmhouses being entered and women being raped and slaughtered, as well as numerous white children being carried off.
Homestead
Such reports as these piled up on the desk of Secretary of the Interior Delano, but no action was taken. It was the general consensus, in political circles, that all of these tales were exaggerations. Some, no doubt, were, due to the long-standing hatred of the Texans for the Indians who were often termed as “red fiends from hell.”
Of the white captives taken, many were eventually ransomed out of Oklahoma. One young woman captive who testified that she’d been raped numerous times had learned some of the Comanche language. One day she overheard one Comanche woman tell another:
“Didn’t these damned fools, the Americanos, give us fine things for the few Texas rats we delivered to them?”
This taking of white captives, then ransoming them for gifts, had become a game for profit to the Indians. But what else was the government to do?
By 1870, the white man was nearly barred from almost half of Texas due to the actions of the Comanches, Kiowas, Kiowa-Apaches, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes. It was realized that the Indians must be destroyed. To do this meant destroying their major means of support and substance — the buffalo.
Annihilating the countless thousands of bison that roamed the Plains in the early 1870s would not be an easy task even though it was estimated that an efficient hunter could kill between twenty-five and forty head per day with a high-powered rifle. But, in time, the job could be done.
Buffalo Hides Stacked and Waiting to be Shipped East
When the hide hunters moved in on this bloody job, a herd was singled-out, the hunters killed them, then moved on. Waiting for their turn in the process were the skinners and their wagons. The skinners stripped off the bloody hides then left the carcasses to rot on the Plains.
Dead Buffalo
After the hide hunters and skinners finished their wasteful massacre, they moved on to the next herd. Then the hot summer winds blew across Plains and plateaus. For miles and miles, the air reeked of putrid decay. Not a morsel was left that could be used for food, except to gorge the hideous vultures and slinking wolfs.
How did the buffalo wind up in the American West? The article noted below will tell you all about it.
Tatonka--Spirit Animal By Lisa Perkins http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/hist... Around 25,000 years ago, bison came across the land bridge that used to connect Siberia to Alaska. They were monstrous, weighing up to 5,000 lbs., with horns that could span up to six feet across.
Source for this section:
Fehrenbach, T.R. Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. Collier Books, New York, 1968.
