In 1835, the Texas frontier was a killing ground. The Republic of Texas was barely born, and the Comanche held the land west of the settlements through relentless raiding. On a ranch fifteen miles west of Gonzales, John Castleman woke before dawn to a blood-curdling scream. Through his window he saw a group of Comanche warriors locked in a brutal close-quarters fight with a camp of French and Mexican fur traders who had set up on the edge of his property the night before.
Castleman had warned them. He had invited them into his cabin, telling them that Comanche raiding parties plagued the area and that sleeping in the open was suicide. The party’s leader, a hot-headed Frenchman, had refused, insisting his men were heavily armed and unconcerned. Now Castleman watched as those men died one by one.
The fight lasted until nearly ten in the morning. When the screaming stopped, the Comanche took their scalps and trophies. Castleman and his wife braced for the attack on their cabin, but the warriors simply rode past, uninterested in further bloodshed that day. When Castleman finally ventured to the campsite, he found all eleven traders dead, their bodies mutilated, arrows jutting from the corpses and the surrounding oak trees, their weapons and mules taken.
There were no survivors. Castleman made the dangerous ride to Gonzales and alerted the Texas Rangers. Within hours, a force of rangers and volunteers elected Captain B. D.
McClure and took up the trail. The Comanche were moving northwest at speed, leaving an obvious trail in their haste to reach the open plains where they would vanish. The Texans pushed hard, following the Guadalupe River Valley, heartened at one point by the sight of two crows flying low in the same direction, picking at scraps the raiders had dropped. They camped near modern-day San Marcos.
During the night, a skilled scout named Andrew Soul reported hearing high-pitched singing from a nearby ridge, which he believed to be Comanche war songs. Captain McClure listened but dismissed the faint cries as coyotes. The next morning, the party found a freshly vacated Comanche camp with a tall wooden pole driven into the ground: the site of a war dance celebrating the raid. Disheartened, they pressed on.
Deep in the Texas Hill Country, they made camp on the Blanco River through a thick morning fog. When the sun burned it off, a lone Comanche warrior appeared on a hill a few hundred yards away, decked in the regalia of war. He let out a string of shrill war cries. Seconds later, dozens more answered, and suddenly warriors flooded down into the river valley and attacked.
The Texans expected this tactic, and Captain McClure ordered his men to advance rather than retreat. A thick grove of timber separated the two forces, too dense for horses. The Texans dismounted and led their mounts into the thicket on foot, sending scouts Alman Dickinson and James Darst ahead. The scouts quickly came sprinting back, shouting warnings as Comanche rifles cracked around them.
The warriors pursued them into the brush, and the Texans only got clear shots when Dickinson and Darst split left and right, giving their comrades a lane of fire. Captain McClure dropped the lead warrior. John Castleman, the rancher who had raised the alarm, shot the next. Andrew Soul attempted to fire but his rifle misfired, having blocked the weapon’s flash hole against the morning fog and forgotten to clear it.
A warrior closed on him before another Texan rifle brought the man down. The Comanche pulled back, regrouped, and the fight moved to the banks of the Blanco River. The Comanche were fearsome fighters, but they were also pragmatic. Their goal had always been to return home with their spoils, and a drawn-out fight offered no honor in a lost cause.
After losing several more warriors, they withdrew north across the river, heading back toward the open plains. Andrew Soul killed one last warrior caught on a steep riverbank. It was the final fatality. Miraculously, not a single Texan was killed.
One man disappeared during the fight and was presumed dead, weeks later returning with no weapon, hat, or boots, unable to account for himself except to say he could not stand the firing and yelling and had fled in terror. The men collected the abandoned spoils and made their way back toward Gonzales. Many of these men would become legends. Andrew Soul went on to a storied career as a Texas Ranger.
Matthew Caldwell, known as Old Paint, became a legendary ranger for whom Caldwell County is named. Alman Dickinson, one of the scouts, would die at the Battle of the Alamo roughly a year later. Within weeks, the Comanche raided again, and the cycle of violence would continue unabated. The fight became known as the Battle of El Blanco.
Four years later, in 1841, another legendary ranger, Captain Jack Hayes, found himself in an equally desperate situation near Enchanted Rock in central Texas. Hayes, a slim, boyish twenty-something with cold black eyes, had earned a reputation across the frontier as a man who feared nothing. He had been accompanying a party of land surveyors sent by the Republic of Texas to demarcate territory west of Austin. The land belonged to the Comanche, who had watched the surveyors and intended to punish them.
Hayes rode off alone to get a closer look at the famous rock. Unbeknownst to him, a sizable force of Comanche had been trailing the party, waiting for just such an opportunity. When the war whoops split the afternoon air, Hayes knew he had no hope of retreating to his companions. He spurred his horse to the base of Enchanted Rock, dismounted, and scrambled up the face of the granite monolith, intent on making the highest ground his final defensive position.
In the words of one author, he was determined to sell his life at the highest market price. He found a crevice and built a makeshift defensive position, holding a single-shot rifle with two Colt Patterson revolvers on his hips. The Comanche attacked, raining arrows down on his position. Hayes held his fire, knowing his one rifle shot had to count.
He brandished the barrel at each charging warrior, dissuading them, waiting for a terminal charge. When it came, he squeezed the trigger and dropped the leading warrior. The Comanche pulled back to the base of the rock. Hayes used the lull to reload.
They attacked again, and Hayes emptied one of his five-shot revolvers into the surrounding warriors. Then he heard the welcome sound of his comrades’ guns. They had been fighting an even larger body of Comanche and had only discovered his position when they heard his shots echoing from the rock. Seeing the much larger Texan force, the Comanche collected their wounded and withdrew.
Hayes survived and went on to lead the Rangers in the Mexican-American War and countless campaigns against the Comanche. His reputation grew to such an extent that the Comanche bestowed on him the grudgingly respectful nickname Bravo Too Much, meaning brave too much. In 1849, he moved to California, where he became sheriff of San Francisco. In 1853, a small package arrived for him in the mail: a golden spoon sent by the legendary Comanche chief Buffalo Hump, engraved with the words Buffalo Hump Jr.
In the summer of 1844, four rangers on a reconnaissance mission near the Nueces River found themselves in one of the grimmest survival stories in Texas history. Sent by Captain Jack Hayes to investigate a recent battle site, they stopped for lunch on a creek. While two of the men swam and the others rested, a hidden party of Comanche launched a vicious ambush. Rufus Perry was hit by three arrows.
Kit Acklin took multiple bullets to the torso and an arrow to the mouth that knocked out several teeth. Despite his wounds, Acklin pulled his revolver and killed one warrior, then another, while Perry, bleeding heavily, rolled onto his side and fired into the attackers. The charge was repulsed, and Acklin heaved Perry onto his shoulders and ran for the riverbank. The other two rangers, James Dunn and John Carlin, had watched from across the river.
They insisted that charging into the fight would have been suicide, that they would have been cut off before reaching their comrades. The men crossed the river, and Dunn climbed a tree for a better vantage point. He saw hundreds of warriors approaching. There was no hope of a stand.
The two uninjured men decided to ride for San Antonio for reinforcements, leaving Perry and Acklin, both gravely wounded and horseless, for dead. Alone, nearly blind with blood-caked eyes, and armed only with Bowie knives, the two men were left with a simple question: die fighting or be captured. They resolved to save themselves or die trying. Acklin carried Perry into a large driftwood thicket, where the two men shook hands and split up.
The Comanche walked directly over Perry’s position but did not find him. He crawled to the river, washed the blood from his eyes, and began the 120-mile trek to San Antonio on foot. Perry staggered into San Antonio six days later, so disfigured from his wounds and covered in gore that his comrades did not recognize him. Dunn and Carlin had already arrived and reported both men as assuredly dead.
Two hours after Perry appeared, Kit Acklin was spotted on the outskirts of town, nearly unrecognizable. Both men recovered and rejoined the Rangers. Dunn was formally censured by Captain Hayes, though the author of the account defended him as one of the most daring men Hayes had. In January 1837, eighteen-year-old Abram England, a survivor of the devastating raid on Parker’s Fort, was riding with a small group of rangers toward the Trinity River.
Their mission was mundane: retrieve a pack of hogs that had wandered off from Fort Houston. After finding some of the animals, two men returned them to the fort, promising to bring a canoe the next day so the party could cross the river. The remaining men, bored and cold, built a makeshift raft and crossed anyway. Exhausted, they took shelter under a rocky embankment.
Within minutes of falling asleep, they were awakened by war cries. Roughly thirty Comanche warriors bore down on them, scarcely fifteen feet away. A volley of bullets and arrows tore through the camp. David Faulkenberry was mortally wounded, and Columbus Anderson took two arrows in the neck.
Faulkenberry shouted for the men to go, and those who could dove into the Trinity River. England was wounded in the thigh, but made it across. David Faulkenberry died on the bank. England ran until he met one of the rangers returning from the fort, who pulled him onto his horse and raced back to safety.
A rescue party found Anderson’s body two miles upstream, still bleeding, with arrows embedded in his neck. Evan Faulkenberry was never found. A Comanche account later claimed he had fought desperately, killing two warriors and wounding a third before, mortally wounded, he dove into the river and sank, choosing not to leave his body to be mutilated. President Sam Houston himself issued a formal reprimand, insisting the attack could have been avoided if his instructions to build blockhouses and an official ferry at the crossing had been followed.
Abram England rejoined another ranger company weeks later and served for years before settling in Texas. By the time the Texas Revolution had ended, the fight with the Comanche had only grown more brutal. In January 1836, a party of rangers camped near Hornsby’s Bend east of Austin was greeted by a young woman crawling over the riverbank, her clothes torn, weeping uncontrollably. She was Mrs.
Hibbins. Days earlier, a Comanche war party had killed her husband and brother and taken her and her two children captive. When she could not quiet her infant, a warrior snatched the child from her arms and killed it in front of her. She left her remaining son in camp and slipped away to find help.
The rangers, including a young man named Noah Smithwick, crossed the Colorado River at first light and pursued the raiding party. They came upon the camp at ten in the morning, taking the Comanche completely by surprise. The warriors fled, leaving their goods behind. Smithwick’s horse carried him among the fleeing warriors, and he shot one with his rifle.
The fight devolved into chaos. One ranger nearly shot Smithwick, mistaking his dark hair for a Comanche’s, saved only by another man shoving the rifle barrel into the dirt. The wounded warrior Smithwick had shot managed to fire at Captain John Tumlinson, killing his horse. Another ranger, Conrad Rohrer, tore the weapon from the warrior and beat him to death.
Meanwhile, the Hibbins boy had been wrapped in a buffalo robe and tied to a mule that bolted with the fleeing Comanche. Rohrer pursued and fired at the rider, but his gun misfired twice. On the third attempt, as he squeezed the trigger, his comrade noticed the rider was the boy and pulled Rohrer’s arm. The shot sailed over the child’s head.
In Smithwick’s words, Providence seemed to have interposed to save him. The rangers recovered the boy and returned to Austin. In the brutal logic of the frontier, the rangers had adopted the scalp-taking customs of their enemies. Smithwick was awarded the scalp of the warrior he had killed, which he allowed to be tied to his saddle.
The men rode into the station late in the afternoon, where the overjoyed mother clasped her only remaining treasure to her heart. The Texas Rangers were perpetually undermanned and underfunded, learning their tactics in blood. The Comanche were suffering catastrophic losses of their own, devastated by smallpox throughout the 1830s. Texas governors like Mirabeau Lamar called for outright extermination of native tribes.
The war would only intensify. In the 1840s, the invention of Samuel Colt’s five and six-shot revolvers changed the nature of warfare, particularly after ranger Samuel Walker worked with Colt to refine the design. The Rangers would be disbanded and reconvened repeatedly as Texas moved from republic to statehood. The violence on the frontier did not end with the Texas Revolution.
The battles continued for decades, and the stories of men like Andrew Soul, Jack Hayes, Rufus Perry, Kit Acklin, and Noah Smithwick were paid for in blood on the rocky, cedar-strewn ground of generations-long conflict.