Fort Worth: A Frontier Triumph

5. Minutemen

CHAPTER 5 Minutemen INDIAN hostilities almost depopulated North Texas after 1839. It dwindled to less than half. Those men courageous enough to remain, rarely experienced the joyful excitement of welcoming the arrival of new settlers. They joined companies of minutemen, the title given the volunteers authorized for frontier defense in the session of the Fifth Congress of the Republic of Texas. The act was signed in February 1841. The act authorized the settlers in the frontier counties to organize companies of not less than twenty nor more than fifty-six minutemen, rank and file. Each company elected its own officers. The Republic's Congress had made extravagant provisions for the military, according to the amount of money in the national treasury, but the number of troops was inadequate for the immensity of the northern wilderness. Texas was fInancially embarrassed. The creation of companies of minutemen therefore was a provident measure for frontier defense. Prime essentials for a minuteman were not only character, but also the means to provide himself with a horse, saddle, and a gun with 100 rounds of ammunition, besides furnishing his food rations in the amount which his captain deemed prudent for the expedition. The sternest requirement was that he must at all times be prepared to ride promptly when the summons came. 22 BOOK I Compensation for such rigid demands was ample. Minutemen were exempt from performing any other kind of military service, from working on the public road, and from paying taxes: state, county, corporation , poll; also on saddle horses. Then there was financial compensation of one dollar a day for not more than fifteen days of service for one expedition ; and during one year their service on expeditions was not to exceed four months. Word had come to the minutemen of Fannin and Red River counties to ride promptly to Choctaw Bayou in what was then Fannin County, but later became Grayson. It was May 4, 1841, the busy season for plowing and planting, when the men began to rendezvous at the bayou. Early arrivals relieved the tediousness of waiting for others by talking of crops, cattle, trade and Indian raids. A recent atrocity had called these men from their plows. In March Captain Yeary and his wife had been wounded when ten Indians stormed their home in southeast Fannin County. Captain Yeary became an eager member of the minutemen at Choctaw Bayou. Indian raids were becoming not only more frequent, but more daring. Kickapoos were driving herds of horses from the Red River Valley settlements. Scouts had reported that the villages of these Indians were at the headwaters of the Trinity. Henry Stout, the famous scout of General Dyer's Fourth Brigade, who had gone with him in 1838 as related earlier, became informer of the massacre details perpetrated upon the Ripley family in Red River County, later Titus County. His story was a bloody one. Mr. Ripley had been absent from home. Young Ripley, twenty years of age, had been entrusted with the care of the family and the plowing. A band of Indians found the lone plowman in the field. The family heard a shot. Looking out they saw their brother dead in the furrow, and the Indians rushing upon the house. The family fled from their home toward a thicket. On the way the eldest daughter, sixteen, was shot and killed. Two younger daughters reached the thicket and survived to relate the tragedy. Mrs. Ripley, with her smaller children running to hide in a canebrake, were overtaken and beaten to death with clubs. After raiding the house, the Indians applied the torch. Ripley's infant child, asleep in his crib, was consumed in the flames. Raids upon the Yeary and Ripley families, horse thieving by the Kickapoos , the vaunting boldness of the Indians, and a report that the villages of the marauders were on the headwaters of the Trinity prompted the assembling of the minutemen in Chocktaw Bayou. Sunrise of May 5 stirred the camp of volunteers in Chocktaw Bayou CHAPTER 5 23 to action. Since most of the citizen soldiers had arrived, the fIrst order of the day was to organize into a military company and elect officers. They elected James Bourland, captain, William C. Young, lieutenant, and Doctor Lemuel M. Cochran, orderly-sergeant. John B. Denton and Henry Stout were placed in charge of a few men as scouts. Edward H. Tarrant, General of the Fourth...