Defender of the Texas Frontier by David R. Gross

Author:David R. Gross [Gross, David R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781532071904
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2019-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

The life of a Ranger was hard. Most who enlisted failed to reenlisted. Fifty percent of the Rangers were killed by Indians, Mexican bandits, horse thieves, or Mexican soldiers or, more commonly, succumbed to illness. They lived, except for brief respites, outdoors, camping in the unforgiving heat and humidity of summer or the biting cold wind and sleet of winter. Those Rangers who persevered built a legendary esprit de corps and heroic reputations.

I am called Buffalo Hump by the Texans. I am a war chief of the Penateka. In the year 1800 by the counting of the Anglos, there were an estimated eight thousand Penateka. In 1816, a smallpox epidemic took at least half of our population. In 1839, there was another outbreak of smallpox that further decimated my people, including four of the most successful war chiefs. The Council House Massacre removed a dozen more war chiefs. I managed to escape all of those disasters and became even more powerful and respected. Instead of the normal dozen or two dozen warriors willing to follow me, there are a hundred, sometimes more. I am a shrewd judge of character, I think, and speak fluent Spanish and passable English.

My name is transliterated by the Texans as Po-cha-na-quar-hip. In Comanche, my name means “erection that won’t go down.” The Anglos will not, or cannot, accept that as a name, no matter that it is a perfectly respectable one for the Comanche. Texans claim Po-cha-na-quar-hip means “buffalo bull’s back.”

In 1840, when our band was significantly weakened, the Republic of Texas demanded that the Penateka remove themselves from Central Texas, release all our white captives, and stay away from all white settlements. Thirty-three Penateka warriors and leaders arrived at the Council House in San Antonio to negotiate and sign a treaty with the Texans. They brought several captives with them, but one of the returned captives told the Texans that the chiefs had not brought all of their captives. When accused of holding back, we explained that the captives in question were the property of other bands. There was nothing we could do to force the other bands to return them. The Texans didn’t believe our explanation. The nonreturn of captives proved to be the excuse the Texans were hoping for. The Council House was surrounded, and almost all the Comanche within were slaughtered. I was one of the few warriors who managed fight my way out and escape.

My response to the Anglo’s duplicity was to recruit warriors for the raid that reached as far as the Texas Gulf Coast and ended with the battle at Plum Creek. I got away with only minor wounds from Plum Creek and continued to organize and lead successful raiding parties. Devil Yack Hays and I are enemies. We do our best to kill each other whenever we come in contact.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.