West Texas, November, 1855.
West Texas, November. 1855. As the cool autumn wind whips around them, a large party of Comanche men, women and children make their way northeast through the barren country, on their way to the seasonal roaming territory of their most important source of sustenance: the huge herds of American bison, or buffalo, that roam the Great Plains. Though their austere surroundings would be enough to drive almost any mortal being to the brink of endurance, the Comanche seem wholly unbothered as they plod their way across the open prairie.
One among their party, however, is visibly bedraggled by the incessant pace and omnipresent cloud of dust stirred up by the Comanche horses and mules. He is a captive of the Comanche, taken as a human spoil of war in their on-going conflict with the Texas Rangers and cattle ranchers who ventured out further onto the frontier with every passing year. His name is Nelson Lee.
Only months prior, he had been a member of a group of enterprising horse traders who had been making the treacherous journey to Southern California to sell their vast herd of valuable horses and mules at a markedly higher price than they might garner in Texas, Louisiana or East of The Mississippi.
The party of 27 men had been set upon by the Comanche, and only Lee and William Aikens, Thomas Martin and Johnathan Stewart had managed to survive.
Aikens and Lee had been forced to watch as Martin and Stewart were subjected to vicious, hours long torture killings at the hands of the Comanche. They had then been divided up amongst the warchiefs, and Lee had been designated as a slave to the renowned warrior Spotted Leopard. Lee will be relegated to the menial tasks of completing chores in camp, as well as the gory, stinking work of skinning and gutting the hulking buffalo that are harvested. His only hopes for survival are to comply with his captors in the Comanche.
Though the nearly unbearable pangs of loneliness and isolation incessantly tear at his psyche, Lee’s experience is not entirely unique on the Texas frontier.
For decades now, across the whole of Central Texas, entire families had been killed or carried off, and entire farmsteads laid waste to by Comanche raiders intent on driving out any and all intruders from their hard-won lands.
This policy is not necessarily driven as much by racial motives, as it is by cultural ones, as the Comanche reserve the same treatment for any and all of their enemies, be they anglo-Texans, Tejanos, Mexicans, Spanish, Americans or members of rival tribes like the Tonkawa, Caddo, and Cheyenne.
The Comanche have risen to prominence in this harsh land after migrating southward, from the Northern ranges of the Rocky Mountains, after acquiring the horse in the 17th century. In the ensuing time period, they had swept through the Southern Plains, and wrested virtually the whole of Texas from the control of perhaps their most hated enemy: The Apache.
Though the vast majority of their encounters on the open expanses of the frontier have gone unrecorded in the annals of Western posterity, the results of the sheer brutality of this conflict were on clear display to the Spanish friars who inhabited the Catholic mission of San Saba, near today’s town of the same name.
Here, the resident priests saw what amounted to veritable hordes of Apache fleeing into the confines and comparative safety of the mission walls, in search of salvation from the incessant attacks of the Comanche.
The Apache, too, have unleashed countless attacks on Comanche villages, killing men, women and children, and taking any spoils and captives that they could. This cycle of violence is also not at all unique to the Southern Plains, but what is about to take place will be one of the few glimpses garnered by captive sources of the brutal realities of intertribal warfare.
Now, unbeknownst to this Comanche band now traveling through these vast expanses, a group of Apache, also out on a hunting trip in hopes of fortifying their stock of meat for the winter ahead, is in the immediate vicinity.
As the Comanche band, traveling in a group spread out over roughly a quarter of a mile, makes their way through a short expanse of hills and streams the dots the otherwise flat country, both parties are woefully unaware of the other’s presence. What happens next- as it is recorded in the autobiography of the captive Nelson Lee- is one of the most shockingly brutal instances of intertribal warfare known in the bloody history of the Old West.
Do not miss this very special episode on one of the most important, and little-known, conflicts in the whole of North American history, brought to you only by History At The OK Corral : Home Of History's Greatest Shootouts & Showdowns!
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