Comanches

“The event was magnificent, surreal, doomed, absurd and bizarre, and surely one of the greatest displays of pure western pageantry ever seen.” So writes S.C. Gwynne in his marvelous book on the Comanche Indians, “Empire of the Summer Moon.” Gwynne is describing a conference which was the last great gathering of free Indians in the American West. It took place at Medicine Lodge Creek, a place where the Kiowa Indians held medicine dances, in October 1867.  In addition to the 4,000 Indians in attendance from the Comanche, Arapaho, Kiowa and Kiowa Apache tribes with their hundreds of lodges set up across the Plains, members of the U.S. peace commission had arrived with a wagon train of supplies. Also arriving was William Tecumseh Sherman fresh from his destruction of the South in the just ended Civil War.  Sherman brought with him the Army of the West – 500 mounted soldiers in dress uniform who, to add finality to the event, dragged their lethal snub-nosed mountain howitzers behind.

The conference began with an address by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and then according to Alfred A. Taylor, at the council as a reporter and later to become governor of Tennessee, a most extraordinary thing happened. Quoting from Taylor:

“By this time, thousands of mounted warriors could be seen concentrating and forming themselves into a wedge-shaped mass, the edge of the wedge pointing towards us. In this sort of mass formation, with all their war paraphernalia, their horses striped with war paint, the riders bedecked with war bonnets and their faces painted red, they came charging in full speed towards our columns…
When within a mile of the head of our procession, the wedge, without hitch or break, quickly threw itself into the shape of a huge ring or wheel without hub or spokes, whose rim consisted of five distinct lines of these wild, untutored, yet inimitable horsemen. This ring, winding around and around with the regularity and precision of well-oiled machinery, approached nearer and nearer to us with every revolution. Reaching within a hundred yards of us at breakneck speed, the giant wheel or ring ceased to turn and suddenly came to a standstill.”

This display greatly impressed the whites and required not a little faith as the soldiers quietly sat their mounts while the Indians galloped towards them at full speed. The remarkable performance was at once heroic and very sad. It recreated the spectacle of Plains warfare engaged in since the coming of the horse and also signaled the end of this culture of nomadic hunter-gatherers who were now being told they must abandon their ways and move to reservations. Many Indians chose not to comply, but a tragedy was in the making. The buffalo hunters arrived and between 1868 and 1882 thirty million bison were exterminated across the Great Plains. The Indians’ sustenance was no more.

Now buffalo were gone, gold was discovered and an unending stream of Easterners had arrived. These whites had crisscrossed their land with wagon trails. They were looking to homestead the Plains or cross the Indians’ homeland on their way to the newly opened west coast. More forts were built and the white man’s towns were encroaching.

Historically, if you were a Comanche Indian boy of five or six, you had two jobs. You did not gather wood nor tote water. You did not dress buffalo, tan hides, sew clothes, prepare food, set or break camp. Your responsibilities were to ride a horse and shoot a bow and arrow. The Comanches were a tribe of warriors and in subjugating many tribes of the southern Plains they showed their prowess. Their wealth was in land controlled and horses owned.

And so it was of little concern when foot soldiers arrived west of the Mississippi in the 1850’s and set up a string of isolated forts to protect those moving west. The Comanches were on horseback and would attack soldiers, prospectors, homesteaders, wagon trains, and all others invading their country. At this time whites carried weapons that could get off one shot a minute with muzzle-loading long rifles. As Alfred Taylor had witnessed, the Indians on attack would gallop in ever tightening concentric circles. At close range these remarkable horsemen would then drop to the far side of their horse’s neck, protected from rifle fire, and in quick succession shoot five well-aimed arrows in that same minute of time. For hand-to-hand combat, Indians carried shields and nine-foot lances.

So the Indian Wars were balanced in the Indians’ favor at the start, but the whites kept coming, especially after the Civil War ended, and their weaponry improved. Samuel Colt developed his 6-shooter when he was told that his first gun’s barrel was too short and to be more effective against Indians it needed one more chamber. His initial revolver had carried five shots. And the newly deployed mountain howitzer was a nasty gun that had saved Kit Carson and his men from certain annihilation at the Battle of Adobe Walls. Without it they would have faced the same fate as Custer.

 

The Plains Indians retain a special place in the history of the U.S. – even from the first absurd Buffalo Bill Wild West Show that toured in this country and in Europe. It’s the story of supremely well-adapted aboriginals whose place we usurped. Following a successful buffalo hunt, the Comanches would return to the downed animals. The belly of a freshly killed buffalo would be opened and the liver and gallbladder removed. The still warm offal was then offered as a gift. The gallbladder was pierced and a stream of its bile was squirted over the raw liver and then the liver was eaten. This was often given to the children who relished the treat. The next time you are offered liver, ask for it raw and remember the Comanches.

 

Landforms

When observing the world’s topography, one sees the results, occurring over millennia, of uplifts and erosions interspersed with advances and retreats of the world’s oceans.

Helping to explain this and built on the concept of continental drift is the theory of Plate Techtonics. This theory describes 16 large and small rigid plates of the earth’s crust anywhere from 3 to 60 miles thick floating on the hot liquid mantle below. As our home hurtles through space, these crustal plates run into each other, pull apart, run into each other time and again. The most famous of their unions was the super-continent, Pangea.

What typically happens at the Plates’ conjoining is an Orogeny or mountain building phase, examples being the Himalayas formed by the butting of the Indian and Eurasian Plates, the Andes by the Nazca and South American Plate. When Plates pull apart the opposite happens. The earth’s crust is rent, ripped like taffy, one recent tear becoming the Atlantic Ocean. When earth’s Plates join or part, this contortion at the earth’s surface understandably creates opportunities for the mantle below to find weaknesses and bring its magma, molten rock, to the surface often in the form of volcanoes.

So volcanism as well as continental crunch is a player in mountain building. Among the present-day Rocky Mountains, formed during the Laramide Orogeny, there is an outlier in Colorado’s southwest corner, the San Juan Mountains. These are volcanic mountains comprised of some lava but mostly Welded Tuff formed during the Tertiary volcanic episode. Welded Tuff is hot ash that, when blown out of a volcano, falls and fuses as it lays then further solidifies as subsequent layers fall upon it. This is the stuff that buried Pompeii in 79 A.D. and left corpses frozen in their agony. Following deposition, the Welded Tuff of the San Juans then saw as much as 5,000 feet of uplift giving rivers, streams and glaciers the power to create the landform we see today.

And so, unlikely to be found anywhere else in the Rocky Mountains, the Man from Welded Tuff appears high in the San Juans. With a wave of greeting, he makes his way towards us along a narrow cleft of rock looking like the mountain man, Bill Williams, for whom the creek below is named.

Peanuts and Cotton

Fenced grasslands morphed to unending tilled fields as we neared Lamesa Texas and the Bell’s cotton farm… also former charter customers. The monochromatic newly planted crops of cotton and peanuts reminded me of the gentle rolling open ocean, boring to look at unless weather comes in! Sure enough, our first afternoon on the farm a powerfully fierce golden sand storm kicks up, with high winds, full rainbow, lightning and thunder that got lost in the vastness of it all.

This 2000 acre farm is a family affair which dad, mom, son and daughter work. When we first met on ‘Surprise’, Corky shook their hands and flipped over the kids’ hands to see huge calluses from the field work… never had we seen that in all the years of running our summer youth camp, Awesome Adventures, on the kids from the leafy suburbs of Connecticut!

150 lambs are to be delivered next week. New efforts to make life easier and more lucrative… sort of. Issues of training 2 sheep dogs, the health of the herd, feeding, weighing, sorting, dousing and dipping, and protecting from coyotes, snakes and bobcat seems overwhelming. Then there is the manure which will attract flies, maybe by the thousands. But Melissa is planting copious lavender which repels flies, she says.
These ‘salt of the earth’ folks deserve the pot at the end of the rainbow!