The Death Song

This little peaceful painting of a Black Swallowtail Butterfly munching on a Texas Thistle wildflower is the third in my series of doing some small watercolor paintings. Most of my drawing, painting and writing is done, as was this painting and story, in the early morning hours between four and seven o’clock. This is when I can live, undisturbed, within my soul and thoughts. Here lately, I have again been thinking a lot about the conflict and violent clash of two cultures that occurred between 1836 and 1876. This conflict, which lasted forty years, occurred when people of European heritage from the wooded eastern part of the North American continent and also directly from Europe began to invade the homeland of the nomadic Comanche Indians who lived and dominated the southern Great Plains of the North American continent.

This was a conflict between a culture of advanced industrial people and a group of people still living in the stone-age. The first group, generally of the Christian religion, that accepted the concept of personal ownership of land, written laws and a government that managed their affairs. The stone-age people did not have an organized religion, or written laws, or a government. They were superstitious and could not discern the difference between mystical beliefs and fact. Since individuals in this culture did not have the protection of laws and government, they admired only the courage, bravery and strength of an individual. At the time of the conflict, neither side ever understood the way the other side thought. This led to an escalating downward spiral of the conflict to the ancient “an eye for an eye”.

At first the stone-age people, the Comanche Indians, dominated the conflict because they had developed better weapons for fighting from horseback. As more and more Europeans invaded the Great Plains and became better armed with the invention of the “six shooter” pistol, then they slowly began to dominate.

Of all of the books that I have read on this conflict, there is one paragraph written by a young Texas Ranger, named A. J. Sowell, that best states this eventual dominance by the invading Europeans and the nature of the Comanche individual. At the time of the incident, he was about eighteen years old, and was with a group of about thirty Texas Rangers led by Captain Samson. They were on a scouting mission out of Fort Griffen on the plains of the Texas Panhandle in the early 1970’s. They had encountered two Comanche warriors and immediately killed one and started chasing the other one. After a long chase, they had killed his horse and had him cornered. He shot at the Rangers with a pistol in each hand until both pistols were empty. Then he stood there surrounded by thirty rangers on the loudly snorting and panting horses. Bleeding from about a dozen gunshot wounds, he stood proudly and folded his arms across his chest and awaited his fate.

         A. J., who was there on one of the horses circling the Indian, would later write the following paragraph.

“There was such a look of proud defiance in his features, and something so noble in the attitude in which he placed himself, that the rangers ceased to fire. He was bleeding from a dozen wounds…but still he stood erect and gazed far off across the prairie, not deigning to look at his enemies… Presently the Indian began to sing, still looking far off… It was, indeed, a touching scene, and one which is seldom witnessed on the frontier… This lone Indian, standing on the prairie with his arms crossed majestically on his breast…singing his death song, with about thirty Texas rangers in a circle around him on their panting steeds. When his song was finished, he stood a few moments and then commenced swaying to and from, and finally sank to the earth, dead.”

This quote is from the book, Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821 – 1900, The Texas Rangers, by Mike Cox, page 230.