Read Online Lone Star Nation by H.W. Brands - Free Book Online

of Juan Antonio Gutiérrez. We recognized the former by his head and the latter by a leg, which the flames had not completely consumed. We buried the bodies in the cemetery near the church. The ground was strewn with smoldering debris from its ruins. We moved onward to inspect the other buildings, only to find them all destroyed and the wreckage still burning. . . . As we continued our search, we came upon the corpse of Juan Antonio Gutiérrez, without eyes or scalp, for it is the custom of the barbarous Indians, when celebrating a triumph, to take the scalps of their victims. We buried this corpse also. Then we went on with our exploration and found 18 dead oxen, and even the cats were dead also.

    The debacle on the San Sabá cured the Spanish of any desire to tangle with the Comanches. The Texas frontier retreated to the line of the Camino Real, which became the de facto southern boundary of the Comanchería, or Comanche lands. Not that the Comanches respected that boundary, or any other: they continued to raid, more or less at will, to the Rio Grande and beyond. Their warriors would visit San Antonio and saunter about the streets of the town, frightening the inhabitants and seizing whatever caught their eye. So cowed were the Spanish that the Comanches, despite a new and especially devastating outbreak of smallpox, were able to win a treaty from the Spanish in 1785 that specified large payments of tribute in the form of trade goods. The treaty didn’t preserve the Spanish settlements from horse raids, but it did buy some protection for human life and limb.
    The lopsided peace lasted till the end of the century, when the diplomacy of the Atlantic world delivered Louisiana to the United States and made the Americans near neighbors of the Comanches. Thomas Jefferson, amateur scientist as well as professional politician, was interested in the Comanches as much for their anthropological characteristics as for their military prowess, and he directed American explorers in the vicinity of the Comanchería and American officers and agents around its borders to report to him what they observed of the tribe. John Sibley, a Louisiana-based army surgeon and Indian agent, in 1808 licensed a trader, Anthony Glass, to deal in Comanche horses. Glass traveled to Texas, keeping a journal along the way. On the Trinity River he encountered a Comanche camp. “We found about twenty tents,” he wrote. “They are made of different sizes of buffalo skins and supported with poles made of red cedar, light and neat which they carry with them. Their tents are round like a wheatstack, and they carry their tents always with them.” On the upper Colorado River, Glass and the group he was traveling with were overtaken by a large party of Comanches—he called them “Hietans,” after the Wichita word for the Comanches—who had learned that he was in the area and who wanted to do business. By day the Comanches bartered; after sunset they played. “They amused themselves at night by a kind of gambling at which a great number of horses and mules were lost and won. The game was very simple and called Hiding the Bullet; and the adverse party guesses which hand it was in. They were very dexterous at this kind of gaming.”
    With each day, more Comanches appeared. “We have with us now ten chiefs and near six hundred men with a large portion of women and children,” Glass wrote. “I meet with them every day and we hold long conversations together. They profess great friendship for the Americans, or Anglos as they call us.” Some of the Comanches had visited Sibley at Natchitoches the previous year and had appreciated his friendliness. “They are very desirous of trading with us but say Nackitosh [the prevailing pronunciation for Natchitoches] is too far off.”
    This last comment explained the Comanches’ friendliness—and also explained something that struck Glass more than once on