I Fought a Good Fight: A History of the Lipan Apaches

25. Refuge

239 The Americans decided, as the Spanish had before them, that they needed a line of forts. By late 1849 the army had 1,205 soldiers at thirteen posts to watch over 2,000 miles of frontier. Most were new recruits with no knowledge of Texas, and three-fourths were foot soldiers who were useless against mounted Indian parties. It wasn’t difficult for tribes to monitor their comings and goings. As citizens clamored for greater protection, the War Department responded with more troops and more forts. By 1852 Texas accounted for 3,016 out of 10,000 of the army’s soldiers. The millions spent were mostly wasted, groused Houston. He was certain he could keep peace for $100,000 a year, but peace, however inexpensive, was unpopular. “The Indians must be pursued, hunted, run down, and killed, driven beyond the limits of the State,” thundered the Texas State Gazette.2 With “the tide of western migration still flowing” and the war over, wrote anthropologist Morris Opler, the army’s next mission was to “precede and protect the western line of settlement and to drive out any Indian occupants of lands claimed or coveted by the white man.” During the 1850s the Lipans often found themselves on the defensive, and yet they could still draw on allies for strength and refuge. Their numbers 25 CHAPTER Refuge I believe that the white man’s God is a very rich God, and he gives the white man everything he wants; but the Indian’s God is a very poor God and he has nothing to give us, and the Indians have got nothing. That is the difference between the white man and the Indian. — Lipan chief to Sam Houston, 18531 240 I FOUGHT A GOOD FIGHT were smaller, but they weren’t necessarily weak. Population estimates, which typically tallied one group and failed to account for distant groups, are unreliable. As one observer predicted their demise, another, like W. B. Parker, who accompanied the Marcy expedition during the summer of 1854, said: “The Apaches and Lipans are very numerous, fierce and warlike. They are more generally supplied with firearms than other tribes and are in a state of constant hostility to the whites.”3 Q R In December 1852 “Indians” attacked a ranch forty miles south on the San Antonio River. They announced defiantly that they were Lipans and challenged their victims to a fight before wounding several men and making off with twenty-five horses. One man said he recognized Chief Manuel. Capron and Howard were suspicious; it just wasn’t the way Lipans fought, and they knew Manuel was at Fort Mason. The commander and others could vouch for him. The agents informed General William S. Harney the intruders were more likely Mexicans and Americans dressed as Indians. Regardless, Harney gave the order to kill all the men and take the women and children captive. Deploying troops from Fort McKavett, Fort Chadbourne and Fort Terrett to block their retreat to the north, west and south, Major Philip St. George Cooke forced the fleeing Lipans southeast. On January 12, 1853, at the Guadalupe River, Manuel and his people appeared willing to surrender but then slipped past troops, who overtook them. Most escaped, but Cooke took eighteen prisoners and more than a hundred horses and burned their lodges. Soldiers killed several men and captured a few women and children. The rest scattered, “stripped of their horses and mules, their clothing and wampum; their camp burned, and even the presents lately distributed among them by the Indian Agents, and their blankets, have been taken from them as trophies of war,” Capron wrote. He called the attack “shocking to every feeling of humanity.” The survivors, driven from their winter camp, were now loose on the border “destitute and Refuge 241 fired with revenge,” Capron said.4 The following month, he persuaded a few Lipans to meet Howard at Fort Martin Scott, where Major James Longstreet returned captured horses and supplies.5 Q R Neighbors returned in August 1853 as supervising agent for Texas and assigned Howard to the Lipans, Mescaleros and Tonkawas. Large groups of Lipans and Mescaleros were then on the upper Nueces. They wanted to plant corn but hesitated. “In every attempt we have ever made to raise a crop, we have been driven from them before they could mature by the encroachment of the white man,” they told...