![]() The troops were now going back, because enough was enough, because President Grant's vaunted "Peace Policy" toward the remaining Indians, run by his gentle Quaker appointees, had failed utterly to bring peace, and finally because the exasperated general in chief of the army, William Tecumseh Sherman, had ordered it so. He had survived it, but had come within a whisker of watching his three companies of cavalry and infantry destroyed. In 1864, Kit Carson had led a large force of federal troops from Santa Fe and attacked a Comanche band at a trading post called Adobe Walls, north of modern-day Amarillo. The llano was a place of extreme desolation, a vast, trackless, and featureless ocean of grass where white men became lost and disoriented and died of thirst a place where the imperial Spanish had once marched confidently forth to hunt Comanches, only to find that they themselves were the hunted, the ones to be slaughtered. The white men were grunts, bluecoats, cavalry, and dragoons mostly veterans of the War Between the States who now found themselves at the edge of the known universe, ascending to the turreted rock towers that gated the fabled Llano Estacado - Coronado's term for it, meaning "palisaded plains" of West Texas, a country populated exclusively by the most hostile Indians on the continent, where few U.S. ![]() It was the end of anything like tolerance, the beginning of the final solution. That had changed, and on October 3, the change assumed the form of an order, barked out through the lines of command to the men of the Fourth Cavalry and Eleventh Infantry, to go forth and kill Comanches. But in those days there was no real attempt to destroy the tribes on a larger scale, no stomach for it. Chivington's and George Armstrong Custer's savage massacres of Cheyennes in 18 were examples. There had been brief spasms of official vengeance and retribution before: J. Time would be yet required to round them all up, or starve them out, or exterminate their sources of food, or run them to ground in shallow canyons, or kill them outright.įor the moment the question was one of hard, unalloyed will. The final destruction of the last of the hostile tribes would not take place for a few more years. Though they did not know it at the time - the idea would have seemed preposterous - the sounding of "boots and saddle" that morning marked the beginning of the end of the Indian wars in America, of fully two hundred fifty years of bloody combat that had begun almost with the first landing of the first ship on the first fatal shore in Virginia. Now they were breaking camp, moving out in a long, snaking line through the high cutbanks and quicksand streams. Six hundred soldiers and twenty Tonkawa scouts had bivouacked on a lovely bend of the Clear Fork of the Brazos, in a rolling, scarred prairie of grama grass, scrub oak, sage, and chaparral, about one hundred fifty miles west of Fort Worth, Texas. ![]() Come home soon to your own chick-a-biddy!" Cavalrymen remember such moments: dust swirling behind the pack mules, regimental bugles shattering the air, horses snorting and riders' tack creaking through the ranks, their old company song rising on the wind: "Come home, John! Don't stay long.
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