sense, to surrounding rocks and hollows and prairies, and think less of them, so that the old names get lost. I don’t know whether they still call that the Indian Hole or not, or even if anyone knows just where it is. A friend of mine and I walked a couple of miles up the creek once, trespassing, and thought we’d found it but were never sure.… There, in 1858, an old fellow named Choctaw Tom, together with a band of his relatives and friends, learned what an ineluctably sweet privilege it was to be a red man on the white man’s fringe of settlement. The lesson didn’t do most of them much good because they didn’t survive it, but they learned it anyhow.
They had all been jammed together on a reservation up the river by then, scraps of ten or a dozen tribes—all but the Comanches and Kiowas, a few of whom were resisting agricultural education on their own reserve up the Clear Fork while the rest ran as freely as ever in West Texas and Oklahoma, raiding down into the settlements occasionally for horses, or for cattle to trade to the New Mexican comancheros at plains rendezvous, but not usually for scalps. Not yet … It had been a number of years since any major bloodshed, and that had been farther to the south.
Major Robert Neighbors, cataloguing Indians in ’47, and General Cooper three or four years later, had liked the peaceful Ionies and Wichitas and Kichais and Caddoes and the others in their villages along the Brazos, and had dreamed of little Utopias for them. The first settlers, tough but knowledgeable Texans for the most part, had tolerated them well enough, swapping horses and food with them and letting them hang around the log barns to beg milk. An Anadarko chief named José María used to take white children for wild rides on his pony, and his squaws made moccasins for them, and other pleasant tales have come down from those brief friendly years. Nobody liked the Comanches and Kiowas, but nobody ever had, and they were little in evidence except when they came, on the full moon, to steal and hoot in the nights.…
Less knowledgeable whites came cramming in soon, though, and wanted the Indian farmland in the bends and the valleys, and got it. Major Neighbors, trapped by his sympathies into taking charge, herded the farming tribes up to their reservation (God knows they must have been pessimists by then, some of them having been driven from as far away as the Mississippi in one generation) and taught them by his own example that good white men existed, which was about the least useful thing he could have taught them at that point in history. It seems now much like those ladies who train titmice and chickadees to eat from their hands, that the next brat who comes wandering down the alley may have a sitting target for his air rifle.… They loved Neighbors, and the stories that have filtered down of how they labored to make the Brazos Reserve a model of agronomic efficiency have a pathos, in the light of what was to follow, that twists in you like a knife.
Neighbors had sorrier luck with the Penateka Comanches on the Clear Fork, but one wonders if he expected much ofthem. Maybe so. It would have taken more than his pure kind of humanitarianism, though, to make plowmen out of The People. They ate up the seed corn and the brood stock that were furnished them, converted their tools to arrowheads and battle axes, and on horseback drifted in and out of their reservation pretty much at will. The great Comanche Trail, ancestral route of thievery and rapine, lay near. In the fifties buffalo, the big southern herd, still teemed on the plains to the west. Two centuries of sweet wild tradition urged the Comanche to follow them, to ride and hunt and fight. Hand mirrors and hoes and occasional begged whisky and strings of colored beads and the stink of a mule’s behind were not a fair trade for that.…
The newer frontiersmen didn’t distinguish much among the different kinds of Indians. Likely they didn’t want
They had all been jammed together on a reservation up the river by then, scraps of ten or a dozen tribes—all but the Comanches and Kiowas, a few of whom were resisting agricultural education on their own reserve up the Clear Fork while the rest ran as freely as ever in West Texas and Oklahoma, raiding down into the settlements occasionally for horses, or for cattle to trade to the New Mexican comancheros at plains rendezvous, but not usually for scalps. Not yet … It had been a number of years since any major bloodshed, and that had been farther to the south.
Major Robert Neighbors, cataloguing Indians in ’47, and General Cooper three or four years later, had liked the peaceful Ionies and Wichitas and Kichais and Caddoes and the others in their villages along the Brazos, and had dreamed of little Utopias for them. The first settlers, tough but knowledgeable Texans for the most part, had tolerated them well enough, swapping horses and food with them and letting them hang around the log barns to beg milk. An Anadarko chief named José María used to take white children for wild rides on his pony, and his squaws made moccasins for them, and other pleasant tales have come down from those brief friendly years. Nobody liked the Comanches and Kiowas, but nobody ever had, and they were little in evidence except when they came, on the full moon, to steal and hoot in the nights.…
Less knowledgeable whites came cramming in soon, though, and wanted the Indian farmland in the bends and the valleys, and got it. Major Neighbors, trapped by his sympathies into taking charge, herded the farming tribes up to their reservation (God knows they must have been pessimists by then, some of them having been driven from as far away as the Mississippi in one generation) and taught them by his own example that good white men existed, which was about the least useful thing he could have taught them at that point in history. It seems now much like those ladies who train titmice and chickadees to eat from their hands, that the next brat who comes wandering down the alley may have a sitting target for his air rifle.… They loved Neighbors, and the stories that have filtered down of how they labored to make the Brazos Reserve a model of agronomic efficiency have a pathos, in the light of what was to follow, that twists in you like a knife.
Neighbors had sorrier luck with the Penateka Comanches on the Clear Fork, but one wonders if he expected much ofthem. Maybe so. It would have taken more than his pure kind of humanitarianism, though, to make plowmen out of The People. They ate up the seed corn and the brood stock that were furnished them, converted their tools to arrowheads and battle axes, and on horseback drifted in and out of their reservation pretty much at will. The great Comanche Trail, ancestral route of thievery and rapine, lay near. In the fifties buffalo, the big southern herd, still teemed on the plains to the west. Two centuries of sweet wild tradition urged the Comanche to follow them, to ride and hunt and fight. Hand mirrors and hoes and occasional begged whisky and strings of colored beads and the stink of a mule’s behind were not a fair trade for that.…
The newer frontiersmen didn’t distinguish much among the different kinds of Indians. Likely they didn’t want
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