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| This drawing from the Sept. 27, 1972, Amarillo Daily News by staff artist George Turner shows Mow-Way's camp and an ominous cloud of dust in the distance. |
By Mike Haynes
Sometimes a class can affect you beyond the grade you
make, and today (April 25, 2015) the Texas History course I took in fall 1971
is resulting in my driving to Pampa.
Dr. Ernest Wallace assigned us to write a book report in
that Texas Tech University class. I chose “Ranald S. Mackenzie on the Texas
Frontier” for two reasons: (1) Dr. Wallace was the author and (2) it was the
shortest book on the list he gave us.
Little did I know that Chapter 5 of the book about Col.
Mackenzie’s exploits described a battle that took place a few miles from the
house where I grew up – and possibly on my family’s ranch.
In the half-hour Battle of the North Fork of the Red
River on Sept. 29, 1872, the Fourth
Cavalry attacked a 262-tepee village of Chief Mow-Way, killing 52 Comanche Indians while losing four soldiers. Wallace wrote that the event in current Gray County “was not only Mackenzie’s greatest in a long career of Indian warfare but it also stands as one of the major Anglo-American triumphs over the Indians on the Southern Plains.”
Inspired by the location of the attack, my grandfather,
John C. Haynes, and I got two historical markers placed on highways between
McLean and Lefors in 1972, a century after the battle. Dr. Wallace composed the
inscription.
Today, another historian who wrote a chapter on the
battle will be at the First National Bank building in Pampa for a 6 p.m.
program and 7:30 p.m. book signing hosted by the White Deer Land Museum. S.C.
Gwynne of Austin will talk about his 2010 book, “Empire of the Summer Moon:
Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian
Tribe in American History.”
Gwynne lives in Austin, where he has been a writer and
editor for Texas Monthly magazine. He wrote 2014’s “Rebel Yell,” about Civil
War Gen. Stonewall Jackson, and is working on a book about college football.
He also is scheduled to speak at 7 p.m. May 4 at
Amarillo’s Globe-News Center for the Performing Arts, sponsored by the Amarillo
Public Library.
Chapter 17 of Gwynne’s Comanche book covers that same
North Fork battle, although his volume, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is more
wide-ranging – thematically and geographically – than that of Wallace, who died
in 1985.
Gwynne says the various branches of the Comanche people were
the main reason the Spanish and French halted their expansion into the New
World and why the American West remained dangerous for Anglo settlers until the
late 1870s. Comanche horsemen were considered the best in the world, and their
response to Anglo trespassing on their tribal lands was vicious, as the author
details.
Most of us are more empathetic today to the native
tribes’ loss of their land and heritage to the Manifest Destiny of the white
population, and in this region we certainly place Quanah Parker on a pedestal
based on his leadership after the 1874-75 Red River War that finally restricted
the Indians to reservations. But I have to admit that Gwynne’s description of
Comanche atrocities leaves me with little sympathy for those native warriors.
Unlike the more peaceful southwestern tribes who were
evangelized by Spanish priests, the Comanches allowed few outsiders onto the
Plains, much less any effective influence of the Christian church. The most
celebrated Protestant settlement in the Texas Panhandle was Clarendon, settled
by Methodist minister the Rev. L.H. Carhart in 1878. The establishment of that
Christian colony was possible only because the Comanches had been confined to such
reservations as Fort Still, Okla.
In Europe, Christianity has been around since St. Paul preached
in Rome in the first century. In our Panhandle-Plains region, a completely
different culture reigned until just 140 years ago. The current Bible Belt was
the southern tip of a Comanche empire, visible now only in museums, in the
giant steel arrows recently erected to mark the Quanah Parker Trail and in real
arrowheads dug up in pastures and cotton fields.
However unfair, that battle near my home was the
beginning of the end for a powerful American society. It led to Charles
Goodnight bringing cattle to the Panhandle in 1876, white settlements from
Mobeetie to Tascosa and the planting of churches across the plains.
Hearing S.C. Gwynne today might put a new perspective on
how we got here.
* * *
Mike Haynes teaches journalism at Amarillo
College. He can be reached at AC, the Amarillo Globe-News or haynescolumn@hotmail.com. Go to www.haynescolumn.blogspot.com for other recent columns.
