February 1863; Harper, Texas: Judge James M. Hunter, who came to Texas from North Carolina in 1851, had several scrapes with the Indians, including one while working as a mail conductor (see El Muerto Springs, 15 November 1854). He quit the mail service in 1856 and worked as a surveyor until the Civil War, when Governor Francis R. Lubbock appointed him captain of a ranger company.
In February 1863 Hunter's Rangers, many of whom were from the Guadalupe Valley, got word of Indian marauders in the area. Hunter led eleven rangers out of Camp Davis, near White Oak Creek and the Pedernales River, to find them. They picked up a trail on the Llano River and traced it up the James River to its source, then went east toward the headwaters of the Pedernales, west of present-day Harper, Texas. Here, Hunter suddenly came upon eleven Comanches, but with only two horses among the--evidently they were just entering horse country in search of ponies to steal.
Hunter charged. The Comanches stood their ground until about half of them were hit and a warrior who appeared to be the leader was killed. The Indians then fled in all directions. The Comanches stopped for a moment to fight, but they took off again when the rangers paused to reload their guns. During the fight, ranger John Benson took an arrow in the hip, and the spike curled around the bone like a fishhook--a doctor later extracted it with much difficulty.
Hunter reported six Indians killed in the skirmish. He believed that the rangers could have killed all of them but for the fact that the rangers were using what Hunter called "Confederate powder," a substance made in the South from salvaged components and apparently too coarse and dirty to produce good results."
