Satank (Set-angya or Set-ankeah, translated as Sitting Bear) was a prestigious Kiowa warrior and medicine man. He was born about 1800, probably in Kansas, and killed June 8, 1871. An able warrior, he became part of the Koitsenko (or Kaitsenko, Ko-eet-senko), the society of the bravest Kiowa warriors. He led many raids against the Cheyennes, the Sacs, and the Foxes. As the white settlers' importance increased, he raided settlements, wagon trains, and even army outposts.
In 1860, Satank was a frequent visitor at the Peacock Ranch near present-day Great Bend, Kansas. Satank asked Mr. George Peacock to write a letter of introduction (begging paper) saying that Satank was a good Indian. Peacock took advantage of Satank's illiteracy, and instead wrote that Satank was a bad Indian. When the Chief learned about the trick from Buffalo Bill Mathewson, Satank's tribe killed Peacock and several other people at Peacock Ranch. [1] [2]
After the death of the Kiowa supreme chief Dohäsan in 1866, Guipago was selected as the new head chief, Satanta took over the leadership as war chief, with Satank leading the Koitsenko; Tene-angopte (Kicking Eagle), together with Napawat (No Mocassins) was the leader of the white-friendly party. 1867 Satank signed the Medicine Lodge Treaty together with Satanta and other Kiowa chiefs (but not Guipago, who refused to sign).
In 1870, his son, also named Satank, was killed in a raid in Texas. Disconsolate, the old man carried some of his son's bones with him. He stepped up his raiding, in retribution for his son's death, including many conducted by Satanta and other discontented Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache tribes, including the Warren Wagon Train raid, on May 18, 1871 on Salt Creek Prairie in Texas.
The survivors of the Warren train had rushed on to Fort Richardson, where they encountered General William Tecumseh Sherman, who had passed by the raiding party as it lay hidden waiting for the wagon train. The general, realizing that he had escaped death by fate, ordered Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie and the 4th Cavalry to pursue the war party and bring back those responsible for the attack. [3]
The Army did not catch the war party, the war party caught themselves. Leaders Satank and Satanta had come back to the reservation, and had they kept quiet, no one would have ever found out officially who had committed the Warren Wagon Train raid. But Satanta could not bring himself to be quiet. He asked the Indian agent on the Kiowa-Comanche Reservation for ammunition and supplies, bragging that he, Satank, and young war leader Ado-ete (Big Tree) had led the war party which had recently killed the teamsters at Salt Creek, and that they could have killed General Sherman if they had wished. [3]
Sherman, already enraged over the acts of the war party, was further enraged to hear that he could have been killed. He ordered the arrest of Satank, Satanta, and Big Tree, and personally carried it out on the agent's porch, in spite of Guipago's intervention (the head chief came in well equipped with loaded rifle and guns, fit to fight for his friend's liberty, but had to surrender in front of the massive presence of military troops). Sherman then hit on the ingenious idea of sending the Indian chiefs to Jacksboro, Texas to be tried in state court for murder. He ordered them tried as common felons by the Court of the Thirteenth Judicial District of Texas. This would deny them any vestige of rights as a prisoner of war, which they might keep in a military court martial, and send a message that acts by a war party would be regarded as common crimes rather than legitimate resistance by representatives of a sovereign state. This would mark the first time Indian chiefs had ever stood trial in the white man’s court. [3]
General Sherman ordered the trial of Satanta and Big Tree, along with Satank, making them the first Native American leaders to be tried for raids in a US court. [4] Sherman ordered the three Kiowa sub-chiefs taken to Jacksboro, Texas, to stand trial for murder. Satank had no intention of allowing himself to be humiliated by being tried by the white man's court, and told the Tonkawa scouts before the three were to be transported to Fort Richardson that they should tell his family they would be able to find his body along the trail. Satank refused to get in the wagon, and after the soldiers threw him in, he hid his head under his red blanket, (worn as a sign of his membership in the Koitsenko). The soldiers apparently believed the old chief was hiding his face because of humiliation, but in reality, he was gnawing his wrists to the bone so that he could get out of the chains they had put on him. He began singing his death song, and when his hands were free, stabbed and wounded one of his guards - a corporal - [5] in the leg [6] with a knife he had secreted in his clothes, and managed to wrestle the man's rifle from him. Satank was shot to death before he could manage to fire. (A teamster, Antonio Barbello, was wounded by a random shot in the head.) [7] [8] Satank's body lay unburied in the road, with his people afraid to claim it for fear of the Army, though Col. Mackenzie assured the family they could safely claim the remains. Nonetheless, they were never claimed.
Eventually his corpse was buried by the army at Chief's Knoll, on the cemetery at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. [9] Satanta was also brought there after his suicide in prison at Huntsville, Texas, and buried nearby. Other prominent chiefs of the Kiowa, Comanche and Arapaho are also buried on or around the same knoll, such as Kicking Bird (Kiowa), Ten Bears (Comanche), Quanah Parker (Comanche), Yellow Bear (Arapaho) and Little Raven (Arapaho).
Young County is a county located in the U.S. state of Texas. As of the 2020 census, its population was 17,867. Its county seat is Graham. The county was created in 1856 and organized in 1874. It is named for William Cocke Young, an early Texas settler and soldier.
Kiowa or CáuigúIPA:[kɔ́j-gʷú]) people are a Native American tribe and an Indigenous people of the Great Plains of the United States. They migrated southward from western Montana into the Rocky Mountains in Colorado in the 17th and 18th centuries, and eventually into the Southern Plains by the early 19th century. In 1867, the Kiowa were moved to a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma.
The First Battle of Adobe Walls took place between the United States Army and American Indians. The Kiowa, Comanche and Plains Apache tribes drove from the battlefield a United States Expeditionary Force that was reacting to attacks on white settlers moving into the Southwest. The battle on November 25, 1864, resulted in light casualties on both sides but was one of the largest engagements fought on the Great Plains.
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.
Comanche history In the 18th and 19th centuries the Comanche became the dominant tribe on the southern Great Plains. The Comanche are often characterized as "Lords of the Plains." They presided over a large area called Comancheria which they shared with allied tribes, the Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache, Wichita, and after 1840 the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho. Comanche power and their substantial wealth depended on horses, trading, and raiding. Adroit diplomacy was also a factor in maintaining their dominance and fending off enemies for more than a century. They subsisted on the bison herds of the Plains which they hunted for food and skins.
Satanta was a Kiowa war chief. He was a member of the Kiowa tribe, born around 1815, during the height of the power of the Plains Tribes, probably along the Canadian River in the traditional winter camp grounds of his people.
Kicking Bird, also known as Tene-angop'te, "The Kicking Bird", "Eagle Who Strikes with his Talons", or "Striking Eagle" was a High Chief of the Kiowa in the 1870s. It is said that he was given his name for the way he fought his enemies. He was a Kiowa, though his grandfather had been a Crow captive who was adopted by the Kiowa. His mysterious death at Fort Sill on May 3, 1875, is the subject of much debate and speculation.
The Warren Wagon Train raid, also known as the Salt Creek massacre, occurred on May 18, 1871. Henry Warren was contracted to haul supplies to forts in the west of Texas, including Fort Richardson, Fort Griffin, and Fort Concho. Traveling down the Jacksboro-Belknap road heading towards Salt Creek Crossing, they encountered William Tecumseh Sherman. Less than an hour after encountering the famous General, they spotted a rather large group of riders ahead. They quickly realized that these were Native American warriors, probably Kiowa and/or Comanche.
Fort Richardson was a United States Army installation located in present-day Jacksboro, Texas. Named in honor of Union General Israel B. Richardson, who died in the Battle of Antietam during the American Civil War, it was active from 1867 to 1878. Today, the site, with a few surviving buildings, is called Fort Richardson State Park, Historic Site and Lost Creek Reservoir State Trailway. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1963 for its role in securing the state's northern frontier in the post-Civil War era.
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.
The Little Arkansas Treaty was a set of treaties signed between the United States of America and the Kiowa, Comanche, Plains Apache, Southern Cheyenne, and Southern Arapaho at Little Arkansas River, Kansas in October 1865. On October 14 and 18, 1865 the United States and all of the major Plains Indians Tribes signed a treaty on the Little Arkansas River, which became known as the Little Arkansas Treaty. It is notable in that it lasted less than two years, the reservations it created for the Plains Indians were never created at all, and were reduced by 90% eighteen months later in the Medicine Lodge Treaty.
Dohäsan, Dohosan, Tauhawsin, Tohausen, or Touhason was a prominent Native American. He was War Chief of the Kata or Arikara band of the Kiowa Indians, and then Principal Chief of the entire Kiowa Tribe, a position he held for an extraordinary 33 years. He is best remembered as the last undisputed Principal Chief of the Kiowa people before the Reservation Era, and the battlefield leader of the Plains Tribes in the largest battle ever fought between the Plains tribes and the United States.
The Koitsenko was a group of the ten greatest warriors of the Kiowa tribe as a whole, from all bands. One was Satank who died while being taken to trial for the Warren Wagon Train Raid. The Koitsenko were elected out of the various military societies of the Kiowa, the "Dog Soldiers." They were elected by all the members of all the warrior societies of the entire tribe.
The trial of Satanta and Big Tree occurred in May 1871 in the town of Jacksboro in Jack County, Texas, United States. This historic trial of Native American war chiefs of the Kiowa Indians Satanta and Big Tree for the murder of seven teamsters during a raid on Salt Creek Prairie near Jacksboro, Texas, marked the first time the United States had tried Native American chiefs in a state court. The trial attracted national and international attention. The two Kiowa leaders, with Satank, a legendary third War Chief, were formally indicted on July 1, 1871, and tried shortly thereafter, for acts arising out of the Warren Wagon Train Raid.
White Horse was a chief of the Kiowa. White Horse attended the council between southern plains tribes and the United States at Medicine Lodge in southern Kansas which resulted in the Medicine Lodge Treaty. Despite his attendance at the treaty signing he conducted frequent raids upon other tribes and white settlers. Follower of such elders as Guipago, Satanta and old Satank, he was often associated with Big Tree.
Guipago or Lone Wolf the Elder was the last Principal Chief of the Kiowa tribe. He was a member of the Koitsenko, the Kiowa warrior elite, and was a signer of the Little Arkansas Treaty in 1865.
Big Bow was a Kiowa war leader during the 19th century, an associate of Guipago and Satanta.
Mamante or Mamanti, also known as Swan was a Kiowa medicine man.
Big Red Meat was a Nokoni Comanche chief and a leader of Native American resistance against White invasion during the second half of the 19th century.
Big Tree, Kiowa: Ado-ete, was a noted Kiowa warrior and chief. He was a loyal follower of the fighting chiefs party, and conducted frequent raids upon other tribes and white settlers, often being associated with Tsen-tainte.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
