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

23. Chiquito

222 Three hundred Comanches raided Goliad one night in early 1847 and drove off the horses. Lipans, camped nearby, gave chase along with some settlers. A shortcut brought them ahead of the raiders, and they hid in the tall grass. Lipans fired on the Comanches, who were riding in their direction, then slipped away, took up a new position, and fired again. Like wraiths, they appeared and disappeared with each volley . The Comanches abandoned their prizes.2 This event was one of the last gestures of friendship. After this, relations with Texans began to deteriorate. May 1847 marks a turning point. Sixty or seventy Lipans stole several hundred horses and mules from a hacienda near Parras, Coahuila, and killed several men. The owner sought help from occupying American troops, and they hid in a corral at El Pozo, which had the only well in fifty miles. When the Lipans rode in, soldiers rushed out, and the Lipans “received them with contempt,” according to physician A. Wislizenus . The American riflemen did little damage in the first charge, but after they dismounted, their aim improved. The Lipans fought with determination. Bravest of all was their medicine man, wearing a headdress of feathers and thorns. 23 CHAPTER Chiquito Unless some measures are adopted to check the disposition of the rangers to attack parties of friendly Indians whom they meet, it must ere long, involve us in a war with them. — Robert S. Neighbors, 18481 Chiquito 223 As their losses mounted, the Lipans retreated, leaving fifteen dead, along with thirteen captives and all their booty. The fallen Indians were well proportioned and very muscular, the physician wrote. Mexicans stripped the bodies, and Wislizenus himself took the slain medicine man’s skull, which he sent to a craniologist in Philadelphia. Mexicans said the Lipans lived in the mountains of the Bolsón and raided far to the south. They often passed through El Pozo and were so arrogant, they notified the Mexicans in advance to fill basins for their arrival. The Mexicans were afraid to disobey. One irony of the war was that Mexicans feared tribes more than they did Americans. Decades of attacks by Comanches, Kiowas and Apaches had so depopulated and weakened the northern Mexican states that they could muster little resistance during the Mexican War, wrote historian Brian DeLay.3 A month after the fight at El Pozo, Lipans on a revenge raid attacked a courier on the Laredo road bearing dispatches from Jack Hays to General Taylor. Hays sent rangers to recover the materials, and they fired on Lipans, wounding one or two, but the Lipans escaped. Neighbors was helpless. The Lipans were living on the Rio Grande and the Nueces, beyond his control. He sent for their chiefs,4 but before they could communicate, rangers led by Captain Bezaleel W. Armstrong attacked a Lipan camp, killing more than thirty Lipans in their sleep. They fled to the Pecos, joining other Apaches far from the reach of the rangers or Neighbors.5 Just four years earlier, in the emotional wake of Flacco’s murder, the rangers had promised to protect his people. Armstrong’s attack introduced a long period of conflict between Lipans and rangers—all protested furiously by Neighbors and other agents. The rangers were also gaining notoriety for their excesses along the border and their mistreatment of Hispanic people. “These blood-thirsty men, who have neither faith nor moral feeling, massacred a whole division of the Lipan tribe, who were quietly encamped near Castroville: they slew all, neither woman nor child was spared,” wrote Father Domenech. “They rifled the dead bodies of their clothing, in which half the assassins clothed 224 I FOUGHT A GOOD FIGHT themselves, and then amused themselves by a sham battle.” The priest considered rangers “the very dregs of society, and the most degraded of human creatures.”6 InJanuary1848therangercompanyofCaptainJ.B.Gillett,whoused an Apache scalp as a holster cover, lost some horses, so he and his men attacked a small Lipan camp, killing seven people. A passing Comanche raiding party had taken the horses. After two more unwarranted attacks, Neighbors protested that rangers, instead of recovering a stolen horse through an agent, attacked and massacred the first Indians they found. Any more attacks “must involve us in difficulties with the wild Indians that it would be impossible to adjust without much blood.”7 Q R The white people multiplied like mosquitos after a...