The Searchers by Glenn Frankel Page A

Neighbors, who infuriated the settlers because he sought to protect the reservation Indians, was finally compelled to organize the expulsion of all the tribesmen to Indian Territory north of the Red River in September 1859. Upon his return, Neighbors was shot in the back at close range on a street in Fort Belknap by a settler. Few Texans mourned his demise.
    The expulsions did nothing to quell the violence or the state of panic that gripped settlers by the fall of 1860. The pioneers may have had history and progress on their side, but neither provided any protection when Comanche raiders showed up at their doorstep. Their fear, anger, and sense of desperation were captured in the pages of the
White Man
newspaper, published in Weatherford by Baylor, who railed against both the Army and the Rangers. A typical article in September 1860 reported that the roads of northern Texas were choked with settlers fleeing the region. “The federal government has displayed a cold indifference to our condition that would do credit to the Czar of Russia,” opined the newspaper.
    The Rangers always seemed one day late and one step behind. B. F. Gholson, a ranch hand who served for a time as a Ranger, recalled trailing a band of Indians through the Nones Valley. The Rangers came across a man’s body, pierced like a pincushion with dozens of arrows, and five hundred yards away a small wagon with the body of a seven-year-old boy, the dead man’s son, “ with both eyes shot out and his throat cut, lying on his back.” A short distance farther was his mother’s mangled corpse. “The throat had been cut and the head scalped … and two large wounds were made with a knife in her left side, near her heart. Her body was horribly mutilated and she had been raped.”
    Perhaps the worst moment came that November when a raiding party of some fifty Kiowas and Comanches rampaged through the rolling limestone plains of four counties in Northeast Texas, killing at leastsix settlers, five of them women. The Indians attacked the Sherman homestead in Parker County, raping, torturing, and scalping Martha Sherman, a pregnant mother of two, who lingered for three days before dying. Then they killed a woman and her husband at the Lynn homestead along the Upper Keechi River. When Charles Goodnight, a young Ranger scout, got to the Lynn house, he walked in on the dead woman’s father. The man was hunched over “a large log fire in the old-fashioned fireplace with a long forked dogwood stick on which was an Indian scalp thoroughly salted . The hair was tucked inside. As he turned it carefully over the fire, the grease oozed out of it, and it had drawn up until it looked as thick as a buffalo bull’s scalp. As I entered he looked back over his shoulder and bid me good morning, and then turned to his work of roasting the scalp. I don’t think I ever looked at so sad a face.”
    Goodnight and a local posse attempted to track down the raiders. They came back reporting they had located a large encampment of Comanches along the Pease River to the north.
    The task of pursuing them fell to Lawrence Sullivan Ross, Shapley’s son, a fresh-faced, energetic, and supremely ambitious twenty-two-year-old rancher from Waco. He had been commissioned as a captain in the Texas Rangers by Sam Houston, who had recently returned to the governor’s mansion after thirteen years in the U.S. Senate. Sul Ross was described by fellow Ranger James Thomas Pollard as “ a fine horseman and a good shot and was not afraid of anything except a rattlesnake.” But Ross was not well loved by local settlers, who viewed him as too sympathetic to the reservation Indians.
    Ross, mindful that his own reputation and that of the Rangers as Indian fighters were none too high, declared his intention “to curb the insolence of these implacable hereditary enemies of Texas” and to “carry the war into their own homes.” His unit of