LAND GRAB: The disenfranchisement of a
people
“My heart is filled with joy when I see you
here, as the brooks fill with water when the snows melt in the spring; and I
feel glad, as the ponies do when the fresh grass starts in the beginning of the
year. My people have never first drawn a bow or gun against whites. There has
been trouble on the line between us, and my young men have danced the war
dance. But it was not begun by us. It was you who sent out the first soldier
and we who sent out the second. The blue dressed soldiers and the Utes came out
from the night when it was dark and still, and for campfires they lit our
lodges. Instead of hunting game, they killed my braves, and the warriors of the
tribe cut their hair for the dead. So it was in Texas. They made sorrow come in
our camps, and we went out like the buffalo bulls when the cows are attacked.
When we found them we killed them and their scalps hang in our lodges.
The Comanche are not weak and blind, like
pups or a dog when seven sleeps old. They are strong and farsighted, like grown
horses. We took their road and we went on it. The white women cried and our
women laughed. But there are things which you have said which I do not like.
They are not sweet like sugar, but bitter like gourds. You said that you wanted
to put us upon a reservation, to build us houses and make us medicine lodges. I
do not want them. I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and
there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I lived like my fathers before
me, and like them I lived happily.”
These words were spoken in 1867 by the Chief Paruasemena (Young Bear) of the Yamparikas Comanche at the Medicine Lodge Treaty negotiations. There were three treaties signed at Medicine Lodge, Kansas, and all were abysmal failures. [i]
Settlers, the
United States military and the tribes all failed to honor a number of articles
in the treaties. The agreements were caught up in a bitter dispute between the
House of Representatives and the Senate over which body had control of treaty
making with the Nations. Then as now, politics was the fly in the ointment.
Unresolved acrimony and political posturing spelled an end to treaty attempts
after 1870. It also disrupted promised appropriations and rations for
reservations. This made a bad situation worse as the rations were wholly
inadequate in the first place. The result was famine and sickness for the
natives on the reservations. Discontented young men left the reservation with
their families, returning to the old way of raiding settlements, both out of
anger for the dishonesty of the government’s agents, and to alleviate their
starving conditions. It wasn’t long before the wars reached fevered pitch.
The previous
brief history describes the beginning of the end of the story. The origin of
the story harkens from prehistoric times. Abundant evidence has been unearthed
suggesting that primitive human society existed on the American continents for
some 12 millennia, but with their origins remaining somewhat a mystery. [ii]
Evidence of these
peoples has been found in scattered locations across the North American Great
Plains. For several years we called these natives the Clovis people. The first
and most abundant evidence was discovered near that New Mexico city. We have
since determined that there were three separate and unrelated DNA lines that
appeared on these continents within a few thousand years of each other. They
were of different bloodlines, but all were foot nomads. It was the Clovis
bloodline that was ancestor to the Shoshonean nations, from which the Comanche
are descendant.
The early nomads
were hunters who ventured onto the plains in search of large game. They hunted
mammoth, musk ox, reindeer, elk, bear and primitive horses. After about 3,000
years the focus shifted to the early bison; predecessor of the buffalo. The
people migrated in search of game, but returned every year to traditional, high
ground locations to prepare for the coming winter. These traditional camps and
the artifacts found there are where much of our knowledge originates.
This lifestyle
continued in one form or another for centuries, but then along came the
European invasion.
It started with
the Spanish, followed soon afterwards with the French, Dutch and English. The
western march of settlements brought strangers with strange customs into
regular contact with native tribes. Many of the tribes and bands were friendly
to the newcomers, receiving the new settlers with good grace and offering
trade. Other resisted contact and simply moved further west. The Euro-Christian
concept of Manifest Destiny and the Homestead Act of 1862 provided false
justification for settlers to push further west, creating more competition for
a finite lands and hunting, creating tension between the settlers and the
Natives.
Many treaties
were signed in futile efforts to assuage conflict, promising land, rations and
peace, but the treaties were almost never honored. The Christian concept of
manifest destiny manifested as bigotry in these situations, and the natives
were treated as savages. The natives responded in kind.
The Comanche
tribe provided one of the main sources of resistance. The Comanche were famous
for their horsemanship and ferocity. The roving bands became notorious for
raids on homesteads and towns, and for kidnapping settler women and children,
the most famous of whom was Cynthia Parker; mother of Quanah Parker. This
resistance served only to heighten tensions between the settlers and the
natives.
With the
outbreak of the Civil War, some Indian tribes attempted to align themselves
with what they believed would be the winning side. In the case of the Comanche,
that side was the Confederacy. When the war ended with the Greycoats losers,
the Comanche were brought to Fort Smith in Arkansas and made to swear loyalty to
the United States government.
The humiliation
did not long last and soon came a resurgence of the Comanche as rulers of the
plain. They spread out over large expanses of the southern plains, took what
they had learned from the white man and began to expand both militarily and
economically. They fought both diplomatically and violently to maintain power
in their areas of control. In the Treaty of Little Arkansas in 1865, the tribe
was awarded a large piece of land spanning parts of Oklahoma and Texas. Some
parts of this region, known as Comancheria, later became part of the
reservation system.
The tribe
continued their raids and soon the United States government took action. The
Comanche Campaign is a term used by the government to describe the organized effort
to drive the Comanche off their land. The Comanche redoubled their resistance
in a series of violent clashes with the settlers between 1867 and 1875.
The government
was intent on taking the Comanche land. In 1871 Col. Ranald “Bad Hand”
Mackenzie was given command of the Fourth Cavalry Regiment and sent to Texas to
force the Comanche onto the reservation. Over the next few years, using large
bodies of troops, Mackenzie engaged in dozens skirmishes with the Comanche in
the area known as the Llano Estacado. Mackenzie was determined to force the
tribe off its land. [iii]
In the early morning
hours of Monday, September 28, 1874, in a deep Red River canyon in the Texas
Panhandle, 400 troops led by Mackenzie attacked a still sleeping camp of Kiowa,
Comanche and Cheyenne. The women and children not killed in the initial attack
retreated up the canyon while the men engaged the soldiers allowing their
families to escape. The engagement lasted hours, and by noon the surviving
natives had escaped. They left lodges, horses and supplies gathered for the
coming winter behind. Mackenzie ordered the lodges burned and the supplies
destroyed. Next he slaughtered 1,048 horses and mules leaving the natives afoot.
Without horses, shelter or food, the natives faced a killing winter. [iv]
The Palo Duro
Canyon fight was the largest engagement in the Red River Wars. It marked the
end of the Southern Plains Indians' military resistance. The once proud
Comanche surrendered and were forcibly resettled onto the reservation. A proud
people was dispossessed of land that had been their ancestral birthright for
over 12,000 years. To this day locals visit the Palo Duro to collect meal from
the decomposed bones of the horses, many of them oblivious to the history upon
which they stand.
[i]
Jacki Thompson Rand, “Medicine Lodge
Treaty (1867),” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, <http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/M/ME005.html>
(Accessed 2014.04.27).
[ii]
W. Fitzhugh, I. Goddard, S. Ousley, D. Owsley, D. Stanford. "Paleoamerican
Origins." Encyclopedia Smithsonian, Science and Technology. Anthropology
Outreach Office, Smithsonian Institution, 1999. <http://www.si.edu/Encyclopedia_SI/nmnh/origin.htm>
(Accessed 2014.04.27).
[iii] Ernest Wallace, "MACKENZIE, RANALD SLIDELL," Handbook of Texas Online
<http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fma07> (accessed 2014.04.27),
Uploaded on 2010.06.15, Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
[iv]
T. R. Fehrenbach, Comanches: The
Destruction of a People”, 1974, LCCN 73-20761. Republished in 2003 as Comanches: The History of a People, ISBN
1-4000-3049-8, LCCN 2003-267713
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