Comanches The History of a People by T R Fehrenbach
“ …Colonel Richard Irving Dodge wrote unhappily in the 1850s, American troops were inferior in every respect to Plains warriors except one: their disciplined constancy. A Texas Ranger expressed it more cruelly : the Indians were in no danger from dragoons,unless their gaudy appearance and clumsy horsemanship caused them to laugh themselves to death” (page 400)
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Comanches The History of a People by T R Fehrenbach
When I first read this book it was a welcome diversion from a thesis I was completing at the time. It contributed to my developing interest in the American West which has lasted the thirty years which have since elapsed.
If I have one criticism it is the amount of general information about native Americans of the Plains which one has to read to find out about the Comanche. As interesting as it is I was hoping for 553 pages about the title subject. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating book about a fascinating people, explaining clearly why they were so feared but why they were eventually overcome by the new Americans. It also underlines what a paucity of sources exist about them, and T.R. Fehrenbach makes the most of the ones available to write a most interesting account of these little known people of the southern Plains.
Some of the detail he includes is particularly interesting, for example that the Comanche could ride 50 miles in seven hours and 100 miles without stopping. Also, it appears that Jefferson Davis experimented with using camels against the Comanche on the arid Texas terrain in the 1850s.
T.R Fehrenbach is remarkably detached from his subject and seemingly fatalistic about their demise, seeing it as an inevitable consequence of their clash with a more highly developed technological culture.
This emotional detachment seems to derive from his desire to be historically objective as much as from his judgment that the Comanche were unrelenting and capable of great brutality. Fehrenbach’s objectivity does lead him to condemn atrocities like that perpetrated by Major van Doorn’s 2nd Cavalry regiment of the U.S. army in 1858 when they attacked a camp north of the Red River and indiscriminately killed women and children, as well as the men.
One of the most interesting parts of the book to me relates to ‘Nigger’ Britt Johnson, who lived and worked on the Fitzpatrick ranch in northern Texas. In 1864, while Johnson was away with the other menfolk, bringing supplies from the Weatherford trading post, Comanche raiders killed his eldest son and carried off his wife, Mary, his other two children and Mrs Fitzpatrick. When Britt returned he trailed the Comanche sixty miles, confronted them and somehow engaged their support. He learned from the captive Mrs Fitzpatrick that the others had been taken by Kiowa warriors. Subsequently ‘Nigger’ Britt Johnson made four trips into the Comanche heartlands, buying Mrs Fitzpatrick’s freedom from the Comanche on one occasion and his own wife and children on another.
Most books on the native Americans of the Plains concentrate on events further north, so Fehrenbach offers us useful insights into these resolute and proud people from the far south. Their relations with Texans was always fraught. They distinguished between them and the Americans, who, by and large, they left alone. Punitive raids by the Texas Rangers anticipated U.S. military strategy masterminded by Sherman and Sheridan by twenty five years. It was pioneered by Jack ‘Coffee’ Hayes in the 1840s. Comanche raiding parties were followed back to their villages and attacked there, with some degree of success.
This book offers several such insights which put the whole history of the American West into perspective. It is a fully researched, scholarly work, a welcome addition to previous studies which have tended to centre on events further north.
