Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston requested a conference with the Southern
Comanches in an attempt to recover dozens of Texas captives. Twelve
principal chiefs came to San Antonio expecting such tribute as the Mexican
and Spanish had always provided at these gatherings. They hoped to receive
some Colt revolving pistols that provided Hays and his men "a
shot for every finger" in their stunning victories against their
tribe. They were told there would be an exchange of captives, so they
brought two stolen children to start negotiations. The revulsion
the Texans felt when confronted with these mutilated, half-living creatures
incited immediate and bloody revenge.
The two peoples also had utterly divergent concepts of honor. Comanches
believed themselves honorable warriors. The Texans considered them
vicious savages. The Comanches, like all Plains Indians, lived by
codes and customs that allowed people to wage the most ferocious wars
of extermination against each other, but also required them to honor
declared truces. Whites had similar codes, but the Texans were not
really prepared to sit down and bargain with a folk they saw as either
wild beasts or cunning criminals.
Sketch by painter Henry Arthur McArdle from the book, Savage Frontier II, by Stephen L. Moore
The attitude of Texan officers was starkly revealed in the report
that Henry Karnes filed with his superior, Albert Sidney Johnston,
Texas secretary of war. Colonel Karnes wrote that he had no faith
in these Indians, and the only reason he had not arrested the three
Comanche chiefs on the spot was because "they were too few to
assure the future"--that is, the bulk of the Comanche murderers
were still free, and three chiefs were insufficient hostages to guarantee
the tribe's conduct. Karnes, like most Texans, could never see a Comanche,
even under the most friendly conditions, without visualizing the barbarities
the Indian had done, or might do under different circumstances. The
colonel had no taste for bargaining with the savages. He understood
government policy, however, and therefore he recommended that commissioners
be appointed to deal with the Comanches-but that these officials be
empowered to act decisively, without pussyfooting, and further, that
troops of the regular Texas army be sent to watch over the council.
He urged that if the Comanches did not surrender the prisoners, all
the Indians who came to council be seized and held as hostages until
the captives were released.
Johnston, a superior soldier but an officer with little sympathy
for or understanding of Amerindians, agreed fully. On his recommendations,
President Lamar appointed Colonel William G. Cooke, acting secretary
of war, Colonel Hugh McLeod, the Texas adjutant general, and Lieutenant
Colonel William S. Fisher of the 1st Texas Regiment, as Indian commissioners.
Three companies of regular troops under Fisher's command were dispatched
to San Antonio. The commission was therefore completely military,
and reflected the Lamar-Johnston attitude toward Amerindians. The
three officers received detailed instructions: if the Comanches brought
in all white captives, this was to be taken as a sign of good faith;
the commissioners could then offer them the Texas terms. The Comanches
might have peace on three conditions: they must remain west of a line
drawn through central Texas; they must never again approach settlements
or white communities; and they must not interfere with any white efforts
to settle "vacant" lands anywhere in Texas. Further, the
custom of giving presents was to be "dispensed with." There
would be no ransoming of captives, and if the captives were not freely
offered up, Fisher and his soldiers were to seize the chiefs and hold
them until the captives had been released.
If these terms were arrogant, actually an ultimatum, the great men
of Pehnahterkuh approached the Anglo-Texans with no less arrogance.
They believed that the Texans, like the Mexicans, were eager to buy
peace, and that they could wring a great price from the white men
for the captives. Mook-war-ruh, the Spirit Talker, a great par-riah-boh
or civil chief, convinced the band leaders that the captives should
be offered up one by one, with hard bargaining. The old, bald headman,
like all his rank, was a facile orator, and he was to be group spokesman.
The Comanches who had by then attended many councils with enemies
both European and Amerindian, never envisioned violence or treachery.
A declared council was sacred. Therefore, the twelve war chiefs who
accompanied Mook-war-ruh to San Antonio on March 19, 1840, brought
their wives and families. Councils were normally lengthy affairs;
sixty-five Comanches arrived to set up their lodges.
Pursuant to their strategy, they brought in only two captives. One
was a Mexican boy, who meant nothing to the Texans; the other was
a sixteen-year-old girl, Matilda Lockhart, who had been carried away
with her three-year-old sister in 1838. The release of the Lockhart
girl to the Texan authorities at San Antonio was a terrible blunder;
it would have been far better had the chiefs brought in no captives
at all. For Matilda Lockhart had been hideously abused in her captivity,
and her very appearance was to turn this day, as one of the ladies
of the town, Mary Maverick, wrote, into a "day of horrors."
The wife of Samuel Maverick, a prominent merchant, she was one of
the women who bathed and dressed Matilda after her release. She described
the girl's condition: "Her head, arms, and face were full of
bruises, and sores, and her nose was actually burnt off to the bone.
Both nostrils were wide open and denuded of flesh." Among the
women, the girl broke into tears and said she was "utterly degraded,
and could not hold up her head again." She described the horrors
she had endured. Beyond her sexual humiliations, she had been tortured
terribly by the women, who had held torches to her face to make her
scream. Her whole thin body bore scars from fire. To make things worse,
she was an extremely intelligent girl; she had learned the Comanche
tongue and had actually overhead the Comanches discussing their council
strategy. She knew of some fifteen more white captives in the camp
she came from. She revealed this, while begging that she be hid away
from curious eyes.
When the council was opened in the small, one-story limestone building
next to the San Antonio jail on the main plaza--a courtroom that ever
afterward was called the "Council House"--all was ostensibly
calm and peaceful. The twelve war chiefs, led by Mook-war-ruh, arrived
in their finest attire, painted for a ceremonial occasion. They squatted
on the dirt floor across from the delegation of Texan commissioners
and local officials, exchanging greetings through an interpreter.
Outside, in the courtyard, the Comanche women, also painted and dressed
in their most colorful costumes, squatted patiently; the young boys
began to play war games in the dusty street. A large crowd of curious
spectators, Anglos and native San Antonio Mexicans, gathered to watch
the proceedings. Men tossed coins in the air for the Comanche boys
to use as marks for their miniature arrows. The mood of the onlookers
was not hostile, but overwhelmingly curious-everyone wanted to see
the strange and dreaded Indians.
But inside the Council House, the Texas officials were seething with
barely suppressed fury. The treatment of the Lockhart girl was in
no way unusual; the Comanches were oblivious of its stunning effect
on the Texans. Most of the Texans came from the southern states and
had experience with various tribes of Amerindians-but in all the wars
and troubles of the nineteenth century, they had not encountered the
forms of savagery that were virtually second nature to the Plains
Indians. The "semicivilized" tribes of the East, while they
had burned men, since the previous century had almost never abducted,
raped, or tortured white women. Such practices were unknown among
Choctaws and Cherokees and the more advanced Amerindians. And the
fury was by no means peculiar to the Texans; it was a common American
reaction. The settlers on the Mankato in Minnesota, in 1862, reacted
with hysterical cruelty against the Santee Sioux who raped and killed
captive women. A similar hysteria pervaded Denver in the summer of
1864, when scalped and mutilated bodies of settlers and their wives
and children, victims of the Cheyennes, were put on public display-an
event that led to Chivington's expedition.
The chiefs settled themselves comfortably on the packed earth, fondling
their favorite weapons, watching the white commissioners impassively.
The Texans immediately asked why no more captives had been returned.
Mook-war-ruh spoke up eloquently and evasively: there were more captives,
but they were in the camps of Comanches over whom he had no jurisdiction.
This was a partial truth, for many of the captives had been taken
by other bands than Pehnahterkuh. Then Mook-war-ruh stated that he
believed that all the captives could be ransomed. It never occurred
to him that the captives were anything but spoils of war, or that
the Texans had any inherent right to claim them. He began to indicate
the price: a great store of goods, ammunition, blankets, and vermilion.
Mook-war-ruh honestly believed his argument was impregnable. He ended
his oration calmly with a question: "How do you like that answer?"
Colonel Fisher showed how he liked it by ordering a file of Texas
soldiers into the Council House. These men took up positions along
the walls, one guarding the door, while the chiefs stirred restively.
Then Colonel Coke, the senior officer, instructed the interpreter
to tell Mook-war-ruh that he and the other chiefs were to be made
captives, to be detained until every white prisoner of the Comanches
was returned. Only after the captives were released would it be proper
to discuss presents; the Texans would not be held to ransom.
The interpreter, a former captive of Comanches, turned pale, obviously
frightened. He refused to deliver such a message. He said the chiefs
would fight to the death before they allowed themselves to be made
captive. Cooke was adamant. The man finally translated the Texan statement,
then ran from the room before anyone could stop him.
The thirteen prominent Comanches shrieked their war cries, leaping
up in outrage. One rushed to the doorway and pushed his knife into
the sentinel who barred it. Someone screamed for the troops to fire.
The soldiers' rifles filled the room with noise and smoke and ricocheting
balls; both white men and Amerindians were struck down. Old Mook-war-ruh
stabbed a Ranger captain, Tom Howard, in the side before he was shot
to death. Another Ranger, Matthew Caldwell, a mere onlooker at the
council and unarmed, was struck in the leg by a wild bullet, but he
grabbed a musket from one of the chiefs, blew his head off with it, then
beat another Comanche to death with the butt. The Council House reverberated
with shots and screams, and reeked of hot blood and powder smoke.
In the melee, several of the chiefs made a valiant effort to fight
their way outside. As they emerged, their shouts aroused the Comanches
in the courtyard to fury. While the white onlookers, confused and
understanding nothing of what was happening, stood dazed, the Comanche
women and children seized weapons and turned on them. A child shot
a toy arrow into the heart of a visiting circuit judge, killing him
instantly. The soldiers who surrounded the area but who had kept in
the background then opened fire on all the Indians milling in the
courtyard. Indian women and children fell, but the fusillade also
killed or wounded several fleeing spectators.
The Comanches, heavily outnumbered, always fearful of fighting in
closed spaces, tried to flee. Most ran for the river, while a few
tried to seize horses, or take shelter in nearby houses, but by now
all the population in the streets, most of whom habitually went armed,
were firing on the Comanches. The flight became a bloody slaughter.
The soldiers, idle Rangers, and townspeople instinctively took up
the chase, killing without thinking. Several warriors died in the
streets, trying to cover the retreat. Others were shot down as they
attempted to enter houses. Comanche women and children were shot down
with the chiefs and men-but as all observers agreed, the women and
children fought viciously, and were as dangerous as the warriors themselves.
The whites killed every frightened Comanche who did not surrender.
In the last stages, the fight became a hunt. Two warriors who barricaded
themselves in a cookhouse were surrounded by angry whites. When they
refused to come out, the little building was set afire with turpentine.
As the two were forced out by the flames, one's head was split by
an ax, the other shot. No Comanche escaped the soldiers and mob.
Thirty-three chiefs, women, and children died in this massacre. Thirty-two,
all women and children, many wounded, were seized and thrown into
jail. Seven whites had been killed, including an army officer and
the San Antonio sheriff. Ten others were badly wounded, and many whites,
officials and onlookers, had suffered minor hurts. In the shocked
aftermath of the bloodbath, the single surgeon in San Antonio, an
immigrant German, worked through the night to save the injured whites.
Early the following morning, while San Antonio still buzzed with
shock and rumor and the great mass of the people stayed behind barred
doors, the commissioners took one woman-the wife of one of the greatest
dead chiefs-from the jail and put her on a horse. She was given food
and instructed to seek the camps of her people, to tell them that
the survivors of the "Council House Fight" would be put
to death unless the Comanche bands released the white captives described
by the Lockhart girl. From where the sun now stood, she had twelve
days to give this word to the Comanche nation. The woman listened
impassively and was released to ride out of San Antonio. But, though
no Texas understood it, from where the sun now stood there would never
again be true peace between the tejanos and the People of the plains.
The Council House Fight would be seen by all of the People as nothing
but the vilest treachery-the breaking of a solemn truce, a crime almost
beyond the Amerindians' comprehension.
The chief's widow appeared howling and wailing in the great Comanche
encampment set up many miles from San Antonio. She had begun her mourning
rites, but she was coherent enough to inform all in the camp of the
fate of the delegation. The Comanches were thrown into the most violent
confusion. The losses-for the camp counted prisoners held in San Antonio
as lost, too-were horrendous by Comanche standards. All but one of
the greatest chiefs of the Pehnahterkuh band were dead-a loss from
which, in fact, the southern Comanches never recovered.
The women, wives, daughters, and mothers, practiced the rites of
mourning. They wailed and screamed through the night, ripping open
faces and breasts, chopping off fingers; some injured themselves fatally.
The men rocked and moaned in their robes; they sheared their sacred
hair. The profound shock of the massacre at San Antonio upon the Pehnahterkuh
was shown in the immolation of the dead chiefs' horse herds, which
took two days. Such destructive rites had long gone out of style on
the plains, but were now revived in the excess of grief.
The grief soon turned to fury against the Texans, and vengeance was
wreaked upon the hapless captives in the camp. One white woman-a Mrs.
Webster, who had been taken with her son and infant daughter a year
before during a raid in which her husband and several other men were
killed-stole a horse and escaped, riding into San Antonio on March
26th. She rescued her baby but had to leave her son, Booker Webster,
behind. However, the boy had been formally adopted into a Comanche
family, and, of all the captives in the camp, only he and an adopted
five-year-old girl named Putnam survived. Booker Webster later revealed
what happened to the other whites.
They were tortured to death. One by one, the children and young women
were pegged out naked beside the camp fire. They were skinned, sliced,
and horribly mutilated, and finally burned alive by vengeful women
determined to wring the last shriek and convulsion from their agonized
bodies. Matilda Lockhart's six-year-old sister was among these unfortunates
who died screaming under the high plains moon.
When the moon set over the charred corpses, there could never again
be peace between the People and the Texans, so long as any of the People
stood on Texan soil.
A second version of the famous Council House Fight appears in J.W. Wilbarger's book, Indian Depredations in Texas:
