The Comanche Threat in Brown County and the Secession Crisis, 1857 – 1861

Written by Carl Bodiford – On February 23, 1861, sixteen men met at the home of Welcome Chandler and voted unanimously to support the Ordinance of Secession which had been approved in state convention at the beginning of the month. Tradition tells us that Chandler’s wife sewed a Confederate flag that was then raised on a pole fashioned by two of his slaves. A vivid imagination might allow a scene depicting enthusiasm, patriotism and unity as this small band rallied to the southern cause.

My research over the last few months suggests a different portrait.  Frontier defense against marauding Comanche warriors monopolized the thoughts of Brown County residents from early settlement in 1857, during the secession crisis and through the duration of the Civil War. Self – preservation and economic livelihood assumed priority over the relatively distant and less threatening issues accompanying sectional division.    

Since 1750 Comanche bands exerted dominance over the South Plains region. Through skillful horsemanship and merciless warfare the Comanche won control over a region that the Spanish named Comanchería. From 1750 until 1840 Comanche warriors maintained unquestioned ownership within boundaries that stretched from San Antonio in the south to present day Kansas City in the north and from modern Oklahoma City to Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

T.R. Fehrenbach, Comanches: The History of a People. P. 143

Map Enhanced by Jonathan Dunlap at ASAP Creative Arts 

George Catlin    Comanche Warrior with Shield, Lance and Bow and Arrows, 1835 

Beginning in the late 1830s, leaders of the Texas Republic decided to defeat the Comanche in Texas. In his inaugural address before the Congress of the Republic Mirabeau B. Lamar said: 

“The white man and the red man cannot dwell in harmony together. Nature forbids it … knowing these things, I experience no difficulty in deciding the proper policy to be pursued … It is to push a rigorous war against them, pursuing them to their hiding places without mitigation or compassion …”

The brunt of the Texan attack fell on the southern – most (Panateka) Comanche band. By 1855, battle attrition and disease had reduced the Panateka to the point that they accepted peace and moved to a reservation on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River.(near present day Graham) In 1856, the State Legislature created Brown County and by next year settlers had begun to flow into the area. It is likely that these migrants poured west in the mistaken impression that the Indian threat had been removed, that the Comanche were safely ensconced up north and that a few companies of cavalry would suffice to control any random renegade attacks. This optimism was, however,  quickly dispelled. The first recorded raid in Brown County occurred in November 1858 when a raiding party drove off several horses and killed a man named Lewis. A second raid in the month led to the wounding of a ranger by the name of Holman. Then in December four members of the Jackson family were brutally murdered by a marauding war party. 

Experience taught Texas frontiersmen the bitter truth of the limits of attempting diplomacy with Indians. The Panateka represented only one of five distinct Comanche bands. Groups to the north felt no obligation to abide by the Panateka Treaty. Moreover, many Panateka warriors refused to move on to the reservation while others used the reservation as a sanctuary  from which they launched raiding forays as far south as Mexico. Brown County lay directly in the path of these seasonal sorties of death and destruction.

Western Texans fumed with indignation at the apparent inability or unwillingness of both national and state leaders to appreciate the severity of the problem. Parsimonious politicians embraced protection of frontier settlements in campaign speeches, but once in office, viewed frontier defense as an expense that yielded very little future political benefit. One such politician, Hardin R. Runnels, in his 1857 run for the governorship against Sam Houston promised a vigorous program of Indian pacification. But after assuming the governorship, in a letter dated March of 1858, questioned the value of frontier defense when he said:

 “If they lose a cow or a jackass occasionally, it is because they place themselves where such losses are expected. In reality the state could better afford to pay for a cow or a jackass than to spend ten times their price for troops.” 

Captain Edmund Kirby Smith who commanded a detachment of cavalry at Camp Colorado (on the northern border of Brown County) also belittled the settler’s fears calling the “wild Comanche, the great bugbear of Texas.” Smith commented further:

“Judging from newspaper accounts, one might suppose the country laid waste and devastated by a savage foe, yet, go where you will along the frontier, you everywhere find settlers scattered, often ten, twenty or thirty miles from a neighbor, without any means of defence or thought of danger. They leave their women and children at home alone sometimes for days. Yet such a thing as murder seldom occurs. …No more than three or four cases have come under my notice in the last six years.”

 Frontiersmen who had a personal connection with these acts of terrorism fumed with anger at the apparent relaxed attitude of government and military officials. Victories scored against the Comanche by the 2^nd Cavalry and Ranger companies did little to assuage fears because such patrols necessarily left ranches teeming with livestock vulnerable to attack. In the three years between November 1858 and November 1861, five Brown County settlers were murdered at the hands of Comanche warriors, another had been severely wounded and two children had been kidnapped. And while the casualty count was relatively low, the economic impact in lost livestock devastated the stockmen of frontier counties.  In the years 1858 and 1859, an estimated 7,000 horses were lost in frontier counties of Texas as a result of Indian depredations and most of this amount was the direct result of Comanche raids. Captain Smith, who while unimpressed by the loss of human life, wrote in July 1860 from his posting at Camp Colorado:

“Small parties of Indians are passing down towards the settlements, … These Indians are Comanches and Kioways  from the Arkansas and Canadian region of the country. They are prairie Indians and expert horse thieves. … In the counties just below us, some fifteen hundred or two thousand head of horses have been carried off in the past season.” 

So, while attention of the rest of the nation was riveted on the presidential election and the prospect of disunion, the citizens of Brown County and other frontier counties were fighting to preserve their way of life. Most of the settlers who had migrated to Brown County were from the south. Any sentiment in favor of “southern cause” was, however, diluted by the much greater crisis.  In March 1860, Captain Smith wrote to his mother that the sense of ‘irrepressible conflict” had not reached the frontier saying: 

“The waves of sectional sentiment do not reach here, and we are probably better – certainly more dispassionately – able to judge the future; to reason of the past.”

Frustration over the inability of the federal government to pacify the Comanche may have been influenced the vote for secession in Brown County. The Declaration of Causes approved by the secession convention in Austin on February 2^nd, indicted the federal government for its inability to:  

“… protect the lives and property of the people of Texas against the Indian savages on our border…”

For those frontiersmen who voted, secession was desperately viewed as the best means to solve the Comanche problem. Either a restored Texas Republic or a southern confederacy could do no worse than the federal government and might actually establish order. 

It is also quite possible that the “unanimous” vote for secession did not accurately reflect the opinion of the majority of eligible voters of the county. Consider that the sixteen votes recorded on February 23^rd represented only twenty – five percent of the sixty – three men who were then eligible to vote. The interval between February 2^nd and February 23^rd allowed ample time for even widely scattered voters in the County to become informed and make the trip to Brownwood for the vote. Consider also that in the presidential election of the previous November, Brown County voter participation reached a much higher seventy – six percent level. Based on these facts, we are left with a likely scenario that the seventy – five percent who chose not to vote on the secession referendum either saw no benefit in recording their opposition to secession or simply didn’t care. Enthusiasm for secession and the Confederate cause in Brown County was a myth that would develop long after the Comanche threat had been removed.