Arroyo Seco Fight | |||||||
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Belligerents | |||||||
Republic of Texas | Comanche | ||||||
Commanders and leaders | |||||||
Henry Wax Karnes | Chief Essowakkenny | ||||||
Strength | |||||||
21 men | 200 warriors | ||||||
Casualties and losses | |||||||
1 wounded | 20 deceased and 20 wounded |
The Arroyo Seco Fight was a clash between militia and Rangers of the Republic of Texas and a large Comanche war party traveling with Chief Essowakkenny, which took place on the Seco Creek in Medina County, Texas, on August 10, 1838. [1]
On December 28, 1837, Colonel Henry Wax Karnes was authorized to raise eight companies of Texas Rangers to patrol and defend the frontier of Texas. [2] On August 10, 1838, Colonel Karnes and his men camped on Seco Creek. Members of the patrol included Jack Hays and Benjamin F. Cage.
While the twenty-one encamped on the Seco Creek rested their horses, the unit was suddenly attacked by about 200 Comanches on horseback. [3] Colonel Karnes alerted his men to take cover in the ravine, using the thick brush for cover. Though outnumbered about ten to one, the Texans returned fire in a rotating sequence of six or seven men at a time to give some time to reload as others fired. This allowed them to hold their ground. Although the Comanches fought fiercely, fighting, regrouping, and unleashing three separate attacks, Chief Isemani was killed and Chief Casemiro was badly wounded. [4] Twenty Comanches lay dead on the ground, with as many wounded. They then gathered them and returned to their village.
Although an overwhelming victory for the Texans, Karnes, who had been directing the battle from a bluff, was wounded, and several of the Rangers' horses were shot dead. [5]
Henry Eustace McCulloch was a soldier in the Texas Revolution, a Texas Ranger, and a brigadier general in the army of the Confederate States during the American Civil War.
Peta Nocona, also known as Puhtocnocony, or Tah-con-ne-ah-pe-ah, the son of Puhihwikwasu'u, or Iron Jacket, was a chief of the Comanche Quahadi band. He married Cynthia Ann Parker, who had been taken as a captive in a raid and was adopted into the tribe by Tabby-nocca's family. Among their children was Quanah Parker, the last war chief of the Comanche.
The Comanche Wars were a series of armed conflicts fought between Comanche peoples and Spanish, Mexican, and American militaries and civilians in the United States and Mexico from as early as 1706 until at least the mid-1870s. The Comanche were the Native American inhabitants of a large area known as Comancheria, which stretched across much of the southern Great Plains from Colorado and Kansas in the north through Oklahoma, Texas, and eastern New Mexico and into the Mexican state of Chihuahua in the south. For more than 150 years, the Comanche were the dominant native tribe in the region, known as “the Lords of the Southern Plains”, though they also shared parts of Comancheria with the Wichita, Kiowa, and Kiowa Apache and, after 1840, the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho.
The Red River War was a military campaign launched by the United States Army in 1874 to displace the Comanche, Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes from the Southern Plains, and forcibly relocate the tribes to reservations in Indian Territory. The war had several army columns crisscross the Texas Panhandle in an effort to locate, harass, and capture nomadic Native American bands. Most of the engagements were small skirmishes with few casualties on either side. The war wound down over the last few months of 1874, as fewer and fewer Indian bands had the strength and supplies to remain in the field. Though the last significantly sized group did not surrender until mid-1875, the war marked the end of free-roaming Indian populations on the southern Great Plains.
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The Council House Fight, often referred to as the Council House Massacre, was a fight between soldiers and officials of the Republic of Texas and a delegation of Comanche chiefs during a peace conference in San Antonio on March 19, 1840. About 35 Comanche men and women under chief, Mukwooru represented just fraction of the Penateka band of the southern portion of the Comanche tribe. He knew he had no authority to speak for the Southern tribes as a whole and thus, any discussions of peace would be simply a farce. However, if Mukwooru could re-establish a lucrative trade with the San Antonian's perhaps a peace, by proxy, could be established. Just as the Comanche had done had been done for centuries in San Antonio, Santa Fe and along the Rio Grande. They would rob one settlement and sell to the other.
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The Texas–Indian wars were a series of conflicts between settlers in Texas and the Southern Plains Indians during the 19th-century. Conflict between the Plains Indians and the Spanish began before other European and Anglo-American settlers were encouraged—first by Spain and then by the newly Independent Mexican government—to colonize Texas in order to provide a protective-settlement buffer in Texas between the Plains Indians and the rest of Mexico. As a consequence, conflict between Anglo-American settlers and Plains Indians occurred during the Texas colonial period as part of Mexico. The conflicts continued after Texas secured its independence from Mexico in 1836 and did not end until 30 years after Texas became a state of the United States, when in 1875 the last free band of Plains Indians, the Comanches led by Quahadi warrior Quanah Parker, surrendered and moved to the Fort Sill reservation in Oklahoma.
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The Battle of North Fork or the Battle of the North Fork of the Red River occurred on September 28, 1872, near McClellan Creek in Gray County, Texas, United States. A monument on that spot marks the site of the battle between the Comanche Indians under Kai-Wotche and Mow-way and a detachment of cavalry and scouts under U.S. Army Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie. There was an accusation that the battle was really an attempt "to make a massacre," as during the height of battle some noncombatants were wounded while mixed in with warriors.
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