Fort Griffin and the Prairie-Plains Frontier

By historical reckoning, the rolling fields and pastures between the West Fork of the Trinity River and the Clear Fork of the Brazos embrace the most dangerous ground in northern Texas. The traveler from Jacksboro to Throckmorton does not have to deviate far from U.S. Highway 380 to discover why. The headings on state historical markers tell the story:

Warren Wagon Train Massacre.

Little Salt Creek Indian Fight.

Grave of Negro Frontiersman Britt Johnson.

Indian Raid on Elm Creek, C.S.A.

A drive totaling less than 150 miles will bring the traveler also upon the more substantial evidence of a 30-year struggle over this country. Forts Belknap and Phantom Hill, along with Camp Cooper, represent the U.S. Army's attempts, first, to shield white settlements from Indian raids, then to contain hostile bands on Texas reservations. Forts Richardson and Griffin are testaments to the army's ultimate solution to the problem of Indian-white relations on the northwestern Texas frontier.

This country had comprised the easternmost portion of the southern Plains bison range. In prehistoric times, it had been something of a crossroads for plains and woodland peoples, and in the early 1800s Comanche, Wichita, and Caddo could be encountered there. By mid-century, a number of Comanche bands were prominent in the area.

The Nokoni plied the region between the Brazos River and the Red. Their chief, usually called Peta Nocona by Anglo-Texans, took the white captive Cynthia Ann Parker as his wife. The band was among the most nomadic of the Comanche, and after Peta's death they became known as "The Wanderers." They may have been related to the band least known to the whites, the Quahadi, whose home range lay to the west, high on the plains of the Llano Estacado. The last war leader of the Quahadi would be Quanah—memorialized in Texas history as Quanah Parker, the son of Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker. Quanah's band would be the last of the Comanche to submit to white dominion.

Farther north were the lands of the Kotsoteka band, who preferred the lands drained by the Canadian River. Farther still were the Yamparika, whose villages usually lay between the Canadian River and the Arkansas in the southwestern quarter of modern Kansas.

By the early 1800s, the Comanche had formed a strong alliance with the Kiowa, with whom they shared the bison range. Although numerically weaker than the aggregate of the Comanche bands, the Kiowa were somewhat more cohesive and even more fierce and brutal raiders.

Fingers of white settlement crept up the Trinity and Brazos rivers toward this country in the early 1840s. In 1841 Edward H. Tarrant led a company of militia against settlements of Caddo, Cherokee and Tonkawa along a tributary of the upper Trinity River known as Village Creek. The badly outnumbered attackers withdrew after inflicting and receiving light casualties, but when Tarrant and a larger force returned a few months later, the villages had been abandoned.

In that year, the land-rich but cash-poor Republic of Texas authorized a number of empresario arrangements to increase immigration. One of the recipients of the new land grants was William S. Peters, who initially contracted to settle 200 families in an area drained by the upper Trinity. Additional contracts expanded the size of the grant to an enormous block of territory running from the Red River to southeast of modern Dallas, then west nearly to modern Abilene, then north to the Red River again.

As white settlement moved onto the prairies after the end of the Mexican War, the northwestern frontier of Texas was especially vulnerable to the northern Comanche and Kiowa bands. With the war concluded, the army was charged with protecting a vast expanse of new territory, and Texas politicians were agitating for a defensive screen between the white settlements and Comanchería—the Spanish-Mexican term for the Comanche range.

In 1849, a company of the U.S. Army's 2nd Dragoons established a post on the West Fork of the Trinity River. It was named Fort Worth, in honor of Brevet Major General William Jenkins Worth, commander of the 8th Military Department (later, the Department of Texas). Until its abandonment in 1853, Fort Worth was a link in a chain of forts that included Fort Graham and Fort Gates in the northern prairie region, and extended south to the Alsatian and German immigrant settlements west of San Antonio.

The concept of the 1849 line was fatally flawed. The posts were too close to the settlements and manned primarily by infantry who lacked the ability to intercept incoming Comanche and Kiowa raiders or to effectively pursue them. The army's answer to this problem was a new defensive line, this one well in advance of the westernmost settlements. Army Captain Randolph B. Marcy had been dispatched to determine a direct military route from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to Santa Fe in 1849. His return route crossed the prairie-plains of western Texas, and in 1851 that route inspired a new chain of frontier forts.

The northernmost of these was Fort Belknap, about 80 miles northwest of Fort Worth on the Brazos River. Roughly 80 miles southwest of Belknap—just north of modern Abilene—was a post on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, known unofficially as Fort Phantom Hill. About the same distance further to the southwest, Fort Chadbourne was established on a tributary of the Colorado River.

None of these posts—those of the new "second line" any more than those of the earlier "first line"—inconvenienced the Comanche and the Kiowa in the slightest degree. During the years 1848-1855, only two engagements with Indians were fought by troops from any of these posts. One of those was an Indian attack on soldiers at Fort Chadbourne. Phantom Hill, with poor wood and worse water, was soon abandoned by the army. Fort Belknap was relegated to guarding the reservations the state had established for some of its Indians.

After years of prodding by U.S. officials, the Texas legislature in 1854 authorized the creation of two reservations, one on the Brazos River below Fort Belknap, and the other, the "Upper Reserve," on the Clear Fork. The Brazos Reservation housed some 1,000 Anadarko, Caddo,Tawakoni,Tonkawa, and Waco Indians. The Upper Reserve was able to attract only about 450 of the Penateka Comanche—"Honey Eaters"—who had ranged mostly south of the Brazos River. The job of the army was to keep these Indians on their reservations, and to keep white settlers away from them.

The forts in the region soon took on a new role, however. The arrival of the army's 2nd Cavalry late in 1855 presaged a dramatic change in military strategy. Its commanding officer was Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, a veteran of several Indian campaigns and a former secretary of war of the Republic of Texas. Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee was second in command.

The companies of the 2nd Cavalry were dispersed along a line that mimicked the "second line" of forts, but generally placed the horse soldiers closer to established settlements where grain for the regiment's animals was more available. Lee, who was effectively in command for much of the regiment's tour in Texas, took station at Camp Cooper, established in 1856 on the Clear Fork near the heart of the Upper Reserve. Most of the "second line" forts then became bivouac, rendezvous, and supply points for the wide-ranging troopers as they scouted for Indian trails, intercepting and pursuing the raiders they could find.

Another strategic change was a policy of striking the non-reservation Indians where they lived-in the Indian Territory north of the Red River. The most ambitious of these campaigns followed a Texas ranger model. In the spring of 1858, veteran Indian fighter John S. "Rip" Ford received a gubernatorial appointment as "senior captain commanding Texas frontier." With a hundred or so rangers, and about an equal number of Brazos reservation Indians led by agent Shapley Ross, Ford struck the Canadian River camp of the Kotsoteka chief Iron Jacket in the Antelope Hills of the Indian Territory. Iron Jacket and 75 other Comanche were killed by the combined attack force, which lost two killed and three wounded. An additional 18 Indians were captured, mostly women and children, as well as about 300 horses. The village and its contents were destroyed.

Four months after Ford's return, a force of 2nd Cavalry under senior Captain Earl Van Dorn moved into the Indian Territory with a detachment of the 1st Infantry and 60 Indian auxiliaries from the Brazos agency. The Indians were led by the agent's 20-year-old son, Lawrence S. "Sul" Ross. They spied a large number of Comanche-—Buffalo Hump and his Penateka band—camped near a Wichita village in the valley of Rush Creek. Van Dorn struck the Comanche camp at dawn. The fight lasted for more than an hour, and when the surviving Comanches fled, they left 56 warriors and two women dead on the field. Van Dorn lost one officer and four enlisted men killed. He, Ross, and nine enlisted men were seriously wounded.

In the Spring of 1859, Van Dorn again led a force beyond the Red River, this time attacking a Kotsoteka village on Crooked Creek, in modern Kansas. Two enlisted men died and 10 were wounded, along with two officers and two Indian scouts. None of the Comanches escaped; 50 were killed, 50 were wounded, and 37 (32 of them women) were captured.

The army's aggressiveness did not stop Comanches from raiding in Texas, nor their Kiowa allies. But on the eve of the Civil War, the army and Texas rangers were trading the Indians blow for blow. In mid-December of 1860, a company of rangers under "Sul" Ross combined with a detachment of the 2nd Cavalry to attack a Comanche camp on the Pease River. The captured villagers included Cynthia Ann Parker and her daughter. Ross reported that Peta Nocona was among the 14 Comanche dead. Although his son, Quanah, later disputed that assertion, evidence suggests that Peta died at or about that time, perhaps from wounds received in that battle.

One of the last large undertakings of the 2nd Cavalry was to assist in the removal of the Texas reservation Indians to the Indian Territory. Almost from the beginning, white settlers had coveted the reservation lands. Raids by northern Comanche and Kiowa, as well as white thievery, were blamed on the reservation Indians. The bands living on the Brazos Reserve—the Tonkawa especially—were doubly wronged, as they probably were innocent of most charges and had served as valued scouts and warriors with the rangers and the army.

Attacks on the reservation Indians increased nonetheless, and in 1859 agent Robert Neighbors succeeded in obtaining new lands for them north of the Red River. The 2nd Cavalry's Major George Thomas led an army escort that accompanied the Indians on their journey. Texas authorities were so anxious to have the Indians gone that, in the abruptness of their departure, they were forced to leave most of their possessions behind. It would not be the last time the Tonkawa were so rewarded for their fealty to Texans.

Secession and the Civil War threw frontier settlers back onto their own resources and methods. The state's efforts—establishment of the Frontier Regiment of full-time soldiers and, later, the militia-style Frontier Organization—were significant, but they were not nearly enough to protect the settlers from the newly emboldened Indian raiders. At war's end, settlement clung tenuously to the outlying counties. With state-financed defenses prohibited during the Reconstruction period, the frontier began to depopulate and dissolve.

The October, 1864, Elm Creek Raid in Young County was typical of the trauma of those years. A force of Kiowa and Comanche estimated at 700 warriors struck a string of farmsteads along Elm Creek near its confluence with the Brazos River above Fort Belknap . Eleven settlers—men, women, and children, black and white—were killed, and seven women and children, including the wife and two of the children of black frontiersman Britton Johnson, were carried away. Eleven houses were sacked or burned. The raiders eluded pursuit and returned to the Indian Territory.

Johnson would make four trips into the Comancheria to recover what remained of his family (the Indians had killed his oldest son during the raid). All the white captives but one also would be returned. Other frontier folk would not be so courageous, skillful, resolute, or lucky as Johnson. A compilation of reports from several—but not all—frontier counties showed 163 settlers killed by Indians, 24 wounded, and 43 carried off from the summer of 1865 through the summer of 1867.

Although returning to Texas en masse in mid-1865, the U.S. Army was slow to either recognize or respond to the frontier situation. Mounted troops did not return to the upper Brazos area until 1866, with modest detachments of the 6th Cavalry posted at civilian settlements at Jacksboro, Weatherford, and Waco.

A year later, the 6th Cavalry established Fort Griffin (originally known as Camp Wilson) on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, downstream from old Camp Cooper and the site of the former Comanche reservation. The Jacksboro post was named Fort Richardson in 1868. The forts were first garrisoned primarily by the 6th Cavalry. Infantry companies were added in 1869, and companies of the 4th Cavalry arrived at both posts in 1870.

The 6th Cavalry did not distinguish itself during its Texas tour of duty, although it fought more than 20 engagements in five years. In 1870, a 60-man command attacked the Kiowa camp of Kicking Bird, quickly found itself outnumbered and outflanked, and was forced into a six-hour fighting retreat. The army awarded 18 Congressional Medals of Honor for this action. One historian has, nonetheless, described the regiment's performance in Texas as "lethargic."

Unlike the free rein given to the 2nd Cavalry before the Civil War, the post-war Army was constrained to some degree by the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 and President U.S. Grant's so-called "Peace Policy." The treaty called for the Comanche and Kiowa to go onto a combined reservation at the southwestern corner of the Indian Territory, just north of the Red River. The U.S. government was to provide them rations and other essentials, and they were to leave the reservation only to hunt buffalo. The army had authority to enforce this policy, but only against the chiefs that had signed the treaty, and even then only to the extent of rounding up and returning the bands caught off the reservation.

The situation changed dramatically in 1871. As the raids against Texas settlements continued unabated, Texas politicians complained to the Grant administration. No traveler on the northwestern prairie was safe. In January, about 25 Kiowa ambushed Britton Johnson and three other black freighters. Teamsters who found their mutilated bodies reported 173 spent rifle shells at the spot where Britt Johnson's skill, resolve, and courage finally were not enough.

William T. Sherman, commanding general of the army, embarked on a tour of inspection across the Texas frontier in the spring, on the new "line" of forts—McKavett and Concho on the Edwards Plateau, Griffin and Richardson on the northern prairie. He traveled through Young County with a light escort, although 14 settlers had been reported killed there since January. He was accompanied by Colonel Randolph Marcy who, on May 17, wrote in his journal that the prairie-plains country did not contain as many white settlers as it had when he was last there in 1853.

The day after Marcy's entry, more than 100 Indians, mostly Kiowa led by Satanta, Satank, and Big Tree, let Sherman's entourage pass the Little Salt Creek Prairie unmolested, then attacked a train of wagons owned by freighter Henry Warren. The wagon master and five teamsters were killed outright. A sixth was tortured to death. Five escaped. One of the escapees reached Fort Richardson and told the story to Sherman and Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie, the new commander of the 4th Cavalry, headquartered at the post.

Sherman sent Mackenzie in pursuit of the raiders, then continued on to Fort Sill, on the Comanche-Kiowa reservation, where Indian agent Lawrie Tatum expressed his concern that his charges had been marauding in Texas. Summoned by Tatum, Satanta boasted of his role in the Warren wagon train massacre. After a tense confrontation in which 10th Cavalry commander Benjamin Grierson saved Sherman from a Kiowa bullet, Satanta, Satank, and Big Tree were arrested. Mackenzie came in shortly thereafter to report that the Indians' trail had been lost in the rain near the Red River.

The three Kiowa leaders were sent by wagon to Jacksboro to stand trial for murder. While en route, Satank overpowered and badly wounded a guard, then was killed trying to escape. Satanta and Big Tree were tried with the expected result-both were sentenced to hang. Eastern "peace politics" intervened, however, and Reconstruction Governor Edmund J. Davis commuted the sentences to life imprisonment. Within two years, both Indians were paroled.

But the significance of events on the Little Salt Creek Prairie—"the most dangerous prairie in Texas"—was that they were the beginning of the end of the Peace Policy. Sherman dispatched Mackenzie on a series of expeditions to the unmapped Llano Estacado. The Quahadi and Kotsoteka were harried from their camps and, more importantly, Mackenzie learned the Caprock's plains and canyons and Quanah's ways and wiles. That information would serve him well at the Palo Duro Canyon in 1874, the site of the climactic engagement of the campaign to be known as the Red River War.

Mackenzie's expeditions did not take him into the Indian Territory, bust in all other meaningful respects they were replications of the 1858 and 1859 campaigns of "Rip" Ford and Earl Van Dorn. They involved primarily mounted troops, operating at long distance from fixed supply bases. They relied on Indian auxiliaries —especially Tonkawa—to scout the unfamiliar territory and find the Comanche camps. They killed few Indians, but they visited destruction and devastation on those camps, on the shelters, the supplies, the horse herds.

The result was that all of the Comanche and Kiowa bands were on the reservation by the end of 1875. Only sporadic fights between the soldiers of the U.S. army and the northern Indians occurred in Texas thereafter. The army abandoned Fort Richardson in 1878, Fort Griffin in 1881.

The war for the southern Plains was over.