In 1841, a small group of land surveyors working for the Republic of Texas moved through territory near what is today Fredericksburg, Texas. They had been sent roughly 95 miles west of Austin to survey and legally mark land grants and territorial claims.
The job sounded routine. It was not. At that time, this was possibly the most dangerous place on Earth, because it was the territory of the Comanche.
The Comanche called themselves the Numunu, meaning "the people." Their enemies knew them by a name derived from a Ute phrase meaning "those who fight us all the time."
The Comanche had migrated to the plains of Texas and Oklahoma after struggling to survive as hunter-gatherers in the northern Rocky Mountains. They were an offshoot of the Shoshone who had been forced out by stronger tribes.
Their rise began with the horse. The Spanish brought horses to the continent in the 16th century and closely guarded the secrets of horsemanship, but those secrets spread through raiding, escaped trainees, and cultural mixing.
The Apache were the first to introduce the horse in a meaningful way to the Texas frontier. It was the Comanche, however, who formed a connection with the horse that transformed them completely.
Within a few decades, they had mastered riding skills to rival almost any horsemen on the planet. They became a highly mobile society of hunters who lived almost entirely on buffalo.
Where they had once been poor in material wealth, they became possibly the wealthiest tribe on the American continent in terms of horse flesh. Where they had once been the underdogs of their neighbors, they became a fighting and raiding force feared from Denver saloons to the Capitol in Mexico City.
They drove the Apache out of Texas, fought Spanish, French, English, Mexican, and American expansion for centuries, and wiped out smaller tribes that opposed them.
Comanche warfare was brutally violent and ruthlessly pragmatic. Many warriors wore animal head caps made from foxes, cranes, or buffalo instead of large feathered headdresses, and often painted themselves pitch black, which they believed to be the color of death.
Raids were often conducted during full moons. A full moon became known across the Texas frontier as a Comanche Moon, a much-dreaded sight.
The Republic of Texas owed its existence in many ways to the Comanche threat. The Mexican government had hoped Anglo immigrant settlers would serve as a buffer who would bear the brunt of Comanche raids before they reached deeper into Mexico.
For decades, settlers from America had flooded into Texas on the condition that they convert to Catholicism and become Mexican citizens. Many came, and many died brutally.
Despite the cost, settlement attempts from Mexicans and Texans alike persisted from the Rio Grande Valley to present-day Fort Worth. So did Comanche raiding.
The Texas government still faced routine administrative tasks, including marking out plots of its newly won homeland. Surveying parties of 15 to 20 men scattered across the Texas Hill Country northwest of San Antonio and Austin.
They kept descriptive logs, surveyed prospective plots, and hoped to return to Austin with a clearer picture of Texas's territories. Any interlopers west of the major settlements were likely under the watchful eye of the Comanche.
The Comanche observed the surveying parties from the start. They knew the surveys were how the white men in Austin laid claim to their lands, and they hated them with an unfettered passion.
Surveying parties were targeted with especially harsh and unremitting attacks. The Comanche preference was to take them alive and reserve their most sadistic tortures for them.
Still they came. Young men from the backwoods of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Alabama flooded into Texas after the Texas Revolution.
Many had just missed the bloodshed at Goliad, the Alamo, and San Jacinto. They were thirsting for a fight, and for many, joining a surveyor team was an enticing employment option.
Such was the case for a party of young Texians in the shadow of Enchanted Rock, the limestone monolith in Central Texas.
For time immemorial, Enchanted Rock had been considered sacred by the tribes in the area. It was said to be the home of discontented spirits, from slain warriors to shamed chiefs.
It was said that native tribes practiced sacrifices at its base. It was well known that any incursion into the territory surrounding Enchanted Rock would be met with the utmost hostility.
The threat of violent, painful ends was not enough to dissuade this group of combat-hungry 20-somethings who had come to Texas for the express purpose of tempting such a fate.
For all their bluster, these newly minted Texans were no fools. This party of 15 to 20 surveyors was among the most well-armed groups of men on the planet at the time.
Many carried the .36 caliber Colt Paterson revolver, considered by many firearm collectors to be a seminal pistol in Old West history. It had been patented by Samuel Colt in 1836 and produced in Paterson, New Jersey.
It was originally a .28 caliber pistol but was changed to .36 caliber in 1837. It held five shots, not the usual six of later models, and was loaded by detaching the cylinder, manually loading the cartridges, and reassembling it to fire.
A combatant would have to pre-load several five-shot cylinders and was left with a relatively cumbersome reloading process compared with later models. The weapon weighed two pounds, 12 ounces, with a 9-inch barrel.
It was a very large, very loud, and understandably terrifying weapon to enemy combatants. With an effective range of roughly 65 yards, it was well suited to the horseback, high-speed, up-close fighting that was the new norm on the Texas frontier.
For longer-range work, many of the Texans were armed with .42 caliber Edwin Wesson percussion cap rifles. These single-shot rifles used small copper caps filled with mercuric fulminate as the ignition source.
The cap was placed on a plug under the hammer. When the hammer was released, the percussion ignited the fulminate, firing the projectile.
These rifles were highly effective at ranges up to 150 yards and could be fired slightly faster than their flintlock predecessors, at up to three to four rounds per minute.
These advances in weaponry came at a fortunate time for the Texans, particularly those in land surveying parties and for the organization from which Stephen F. Austin so often chose to draw his surveyors: the still-young but already legendary Texas Rangers.
It was Stephen F. Austin himself, the legendary Texas statesman for whom the capital is named, who fostered the original concept for the predecessors of the Rangers in the 1830s.
The Texas mounted rifles were born largely of necessity. They patrolled the ranges of the Texas frontier and presented the only available organized resistance against Mexican governmental harassment, banditry, and Comanche raiding.
In 1835, the organization was codified into a state-sponsored military and law enforcement hybrid force uniquely capable of close-quarter combat and long-distance pursuit.
In the intervening years, their legend grew from the dusty settlements of Texas to the finest parlors of New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia. The Rangers presented virtually the only consequential resistance to the violence that plagued the flatland prairies, river valley bottoms, and Hill Country homesteads.
Tales of their daring and ferocity spread like wildfire among Texans, Mexicans, Americans, and the Comanche alike. Perhaps none among the Rangers, in ranks full of giant, strapping, bellicose young men, garnered more respect or fear than Captain John Coffee Hays.
He was born in Little Cedar Lick, Tennessee, in 1817 to a military family. His father, Harmon A. Hays, had fought in the War of 1812 under Andrew Jackson and named his son after Jackson's legendary brigadier general, John Coffee.
John Coffee Hays, known by those close to him as Jack, made his way to Texas in 1836 at the age of 19 in search of fortune, adventure, and war. He had missed his chance to participate in the Texas Revolution, but he found a home with the Texas Rangers.
The Rangers had a casualty rate that at times reached 50 percent. It was assumed that a fair number of their fresh-faced recruits who proudly rode out of San Antonio and Austin would never be seen again.
Even in the austere, hyper-violent world of the Rangers, Jack Hays stood out. In an occupation replete with large, burly men, he was a slender 5-foot-6 20-something with a boyish face and a quiet, affable demeanor.
But one look at his eyes, even from more than a century and a half removed, makes it apparent that the man was no slave to fear. His affable demeanor and unremarkable stature were transformed in countless eyewitness accounts into the striking figure of the unshakable, irascible Uber Ranger.
He feared no hardship, thrived in the chaos of combat, and possessed an innate and undeniable ability to lead men who had proven otherwise ungovernable by the vast majority of society. His legend had spread far and wide through Texas even in the short time he had been there.
That made him an ideal member for the surveying party Stephen F. Austin needed to send out to Enchanted Rock. And so it was that Jack Hays, legendary Ranger, found himself at Enchanted Rock on a fall afternoon.
As the survey team went about its laborious tasks of unspooling a few hundred yards of steel ribbon and demarcating its location on a map, Hays and a number of other Ranger companions stood watch.
At some point during their endeavors, Hays decided to ride out toward Enchanted Rock to get a better up-close view of the legendary landmark. Thinking himself secure because no Comanche had been spotted in the area, Hays rode off alone.
It was an example of just how cunning and tactically brilliant the Comanche truly were. Even the experienced Ranger and his cohorts had failed to notice a sizable number of warriors trailing them.
Hays's departure from the main party was just the opportunity the Comanche force had been waiting for. They had been watching from the overlooking limestone cliffs and oak-strewn hills.
As Hays neared the base of the rock, the sound of Comanche war whoops cracked the still afternoon air. His brain, highly conditioned to the rigors of fast-paced frontier combat, likely surmised almost instantly that he had no hope of retreating to his party before being caught and overrun.
Now quite literally caught between a rock and a hard place, Hays rode hard to the base of Enchanted Rock, dismounted, and began a desperate scramble up the face. His intent was to gain a position on the highest ground in the area.
In the words of author J. W. Wilbarger in "Indian Depredations in Texas," Hays was determined to sell his life at the highest market price.
Hays's reputation, combined with his notable dark hair and moderate stature, made him a prize target among the Comanche. He was pursued up the side of the giant rock with the utmost gusto by several warriors intent on harvesting his scalp.
Hays managed to ensconce himself in a crevice in the limestone and construct a haphazard defensive position. There he hunkered down with his .42 caliber rifle aimed outward toward his pursuers and two Colt Paterson revolvers in holsters on either hip.
A less experienced frontier fighter might have made a fatal tactical miscalculation at this juncture. As reliable and powerful as the Wesson percussion rifle was, it was still a single-shot weapon.
Any defender in Hays's position would have essentially one shot at his pursuers, and he had to make it count. After that, he would be forced into a loading process that would let the enemy close the gap and capture or kill him.
Hays had seen many a young Ranger comrade fall victim to poor decision-making in such an instance, only to miss their single shot and be cruelly ended by the Comanche. So even as his pursuers rained arrows upon his claustrophobic position, Hays forced himself to hold his fire.
Anytime a warrior attempted a terminal charge on his position, Hays would brandish the rifle barrel at him, managing each time to dissuade his attackers.
Hays knew that for all their tactical prowess and combative ferocity, the Comanche approach to warfare did not entail enduring casualties on mass to obtain a victory. In the mind of the plains warrior, it was always better, if possible, to fight another day.
Such prudence, though understandable, left an exploitable gap for those caught in the ire of their attack. Even though he was alone and armed with a single-shot weapon, survival for the experienced Ranger was not wholly impossible.
So Hays hunkered down and fought on. The Comanche soon tired of this hated intruder keeping them at bay from atop their own sacred landmark.
Again in the words of J. W. Wilbarger, they resolved to make their attack in earnest. Hays steadied himself behind the makeshift rock wall he had hastily constructed and waited what must have been an agonizing few minutes.
The Comanche surrounded the base of the rock and began a charge on mass toward his position. Hays waited unmoved, still hunkered down, until the leading warrior was within a few yards.
At the last second, Hays rose up, brought the warrior into the sights of his rifle, and squeezed the trigger, sending a lead ball into the Comanche's torso. The Comanche momentarily stopped to assess the damage to their fallen comrade and to shield themselves from any more gunfire.
When it was discovered the lead warrior was dead, the cry was put out, and long, wolf-like howls signaled a move back to the base of the rock. The Comanche did as Hays used the brief respite to reload and refit his rifle.
He also rechecked the pair of Colt Paterson revolvers holstered on either hip, ensuring himself at least 10 additional shots once his initial, and this time likely final, rifle shot had been fired.
In short order, the Comanche contingent made another, even more vociferous attack on Hays's position. Comanche war cries flooded the air with high-pitched, blood-curdling screeches that would have shaken almost any Texan to their core.
But not Jack Hays. He again coolly received the charge until the Comanche were within range, popping up from his position at the last second.
This time, sensing it to be his proverbial last hurrah, Hays pulled his revolvers and emptied the entirety of one's five-shot cylinder into the Comanche surrounding him. This again brought another Comanche retreat.
As Hays hunkered down and began hurriedly reloading for what he assumed was an inevitable third Comanche assault, he heard what must have been the very welcome sound of his comrades firing their weapons and making their way toward Enchanted Rock.
They had been fighting an even larger body of Comanche during Hays's fight and had only discovered his position when they heard the shots of his rifle and revolvers coming from high up on Enchanted Rock.
Seeing this much larger force of Texians advancing, the Comanche force surrounding Enchanted Rock took their wounded and withdrew into the canyons and sagebrush of the Hill Country, leaving their dead for the vultures and Texans.
Hays and his cohorts reunited at the base of the rock and, under undoubtedly more vigilant watch, continued their work until the next day.
Hays would go on to carry out countless more adventures, from leading the Rangers in the Mexican-American War to chasing down Comanche raiders. His legend among the Comanche grew to such an extent that they bestowed upon him the begrudgingly respectful nicknames of Captain Jack, pronounced "Captain Yak," and "Bravo Too Much," or "Brave Too Much."
In a culture like the Comanche, where courage and martial prowess were the ultimate masculine virtues, even a vowed enemy like Jack Hays was due his wages in reference.
Hays married Susan Calvert, daughter of a wealthy local hotel owner in Seguin, Texas, in 1847. In 1849, the young couple moved to California along with millions of other Americans hoping to capitalize on the Gold Rush.
He did not strike it rich in gold, but Hays became a successful rancher and businessman and was elected sheriff of San Francisco in 1850.
In 1853, not long after Hays's first son, John Caperton Hays, was born in California, a peculiar package arrived in the mail for the new father. Inside was a small golden spoon sent as a gift by the legendary Comanche chief Buffalo Hump.
The spoon came with a small engraving on the handle that read "Buffalo Hump Jr." Such was the level of respect Hays had earned even among his longtime enemy.
Hays passed away in 1883 at the age of 66 and is buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California.
His life was replete with accounts of Comanche battles, suicidal attacks during the Mexican-American War, and countless other legendary escapades. The fight at Enchanted Rock remains one of the most storied episodes of his early years on the Texas frontier.