Isa-tai

This drawing of a buffalo bull is my second attempt at doing a pencil drawing. This buffalo bull lives on a wildlife park near Grapevine, Texas. While doing this drawing, I couldn’t help but think about how at one time millions upon millions of these bison roamed the plains of the central part of the North American continent.

To the Indians that lived on these great treeless plains, the buffalo were the source of their very existence. After the Indians got the horse and learned how to ride the horse and shoot arrows from their bows while on the back of a running horse, they could successful hunt the buffalo. Everything they needed for food and making their shelter, their clothing, their bedding was available in the huge herds of buffalo that surrounded them everyday of their lives.

The principal tribe of Indians that lived on the plains was named Comanche, which in their language meant “The People”. The skills they learned to hunt the buffalo while riding a horse, also made them the deadliest killers of other humans in their time. They were feared by all the other Indian tribes. The were the rulers of the open plains of present day Kansas, western Oklahoma, eastern Colorado and New Mexico and the north half of Texas.

The Comanche on his horse with his fast shooting bow and arrow was much better armed than the white immigrant standing on the ground with his single shot muzzle loading rifle. The Comanche would generally dominate the conflicts with the white immigrants until the whites got the six-shooter pistol that could be shot from the back of a horse. This war between the Comanche and the white immigrants would last forty years.

In the 1830’s, white immigrants from the eastern half of the North American continent began moving westward and approaching the land of the Comanche. The first major conflict between the two cultures occurred on May 19, 1836. On this day, a large band of Comanche horsemen attacked Parker’s Fort on the headwaters of the Navasota River. They killed a number of the people there and captured five women and children. One of the captured children was a little girl named Cynthia Ann Parker. This little girl would grow up to be a Comanche woman and would marry a chief named Peta Nocona. One of their children was named Quanah. He would grow up to be the most famous of all of the Comanche war chiefs. He would be the last Comanche chief to surrender in 1876, forty years after his mother had been captured.

Other than the invention of the six-shooter pistol, the other major thing that caused the defeat of the Comanche was that it became a fad in the eastern part of the United States to own a buffalo robe. Since there were millions of buffalo on the plains and the price for a buffalo robe was about $3.50 on the east coast (about three times a days wages then) , it was inevitable that some men would risk getting killed by the Comanche Indians and go into their territory to kill buffalo to get their hides. This became a big business. The Comanche Indians seeing the plains covered with rotting dead buffalo were furious.

General Sheridan, head of the US army, was delighted because for the first time in nearly forty years, he knew he could win the war with the Comanche Indians if there were no more buffalo.

In 1874, a young Comanche Indian named Isa-tai had reached manhood. He was short, fat and with a big broad head. He was not a good warrior, but he was a great politician, magician and con man. He soon became famous for his magical tricks and the Indians believed that he had divine powers. He concocted the story that he had had a vision that gave him extraordinary divine power. He told The People, that the gods had told him that if he painted himself and his horse yellow that the white man’s bullets could not penetrate the scared yellow paint. Furthermore, the gods had told him that the yellow paint would also protect the other warriors. This message spread like wildfire through the Indian tribes. A messiah had come to save them.

He talked Quanah into being his war chief. Together they developed the plan to unite all the tribes on the plains and kill all the white buffalo hunters. Next they would invade Texas and kill all the white settlers there. They would restore the Comanche tribe to its former glory and rule the plains once again.

Together they went to the visit the Kiowa, Arapaho, Cheyenne tribes. They did something that had never been done before. They united a number of the warriors in these tribes to fight with the Comanche warriors against the whites. They now had an army of about seven hundred mounted warriors, to be painted in yellow and therefore invincible to the white man’s bullets.

They chose as their first target a trading post and saloon, called Adobe Walls, where a large group of the buffalo hunters were living. It was located on the Canadian River in the Texas Panhandle. The buffalo hunters there were using the powerful .50 caliber Sharpe rifle that could down a 2,000 pound buffalo at 1,000 yards. It was probably the most accurate and powerful rifle in the world at that time. In the supply post there were 11,000 rounds of ammunition and cases of new rifles. There were twenty six men and one woman there.

It was June and hot. The Indians knew the buffalo hunters were sleeping outside due to the heat. The plan was to surprise the hunters just before daylight while they were still outside asleep. Isa-tai said that it should be as easy to kill them as it is to kill old women. It was a great plan and should have worked, but the element of surprise had been compromised.

Somehow the saloon keeper there knew that the attack was coming and when. Fearing that he would lose business if he warned the hunters, he withheld the news. Worried the night before the attack, he shot his gun after midnight to wake everybody up. He said the sound was the main beam beginning to break and they worked the rest of the night replacing the beam. They were wide awake at daylight.

On June 27, 1874, Isa-tai, his naked body and horse painted yellow, with his war chief, Quanah, and seven hundred mounted warriors, most painted with the invincible yellow, thundered in to slaughter the sleeping hunters.

The hunters, with their big .50 caliber Sharpe rifles, all excellent marksmen, shooting from behind the thick adobe walls, found the Indian warriors and their horses painted in yellow were easy targets. It was a disastrous defeat for the Indians. After Quanah, the war chief, was shot and wounded, the Indians retreated.

After the battle, Isa-tai, was confronted by the furious Indians that had survived the battle but had lost relatives because the yellow paint did not stop the white man’s bullets. Always the con man with the answer, he said that one of them must have killed a skunk the night before the attack thereby comprising his divine vision.

This story is from the new book, Empire of the Summer Moon, by S. C. Gwynne. I highly recommend this book on the story of the Comanche Indians..