Comanche Bondage: Beales’s Settlement of Dolores and Sarah Ann Horn’s Narrative of Her Captivity

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Text originally published in 1955 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

COMANCHE BONDAGE: DR. JOHN CHARLES BEALES’S SETTLEMENT OF LA VILLA DE DOLORES ON LAS MORAS CREEK IN SOUTHERN TEXAS OF THE 1830’s

with an Annotated Reprint of

SARAH ANN HORN’S NARRATIVE

OF HER CAPTIVITY AMONG THE COMANCHES HER RANSOM BY TRADERS IN NEW MEXICO AND RETURN VIA THE SANTA FĒ TRAIL

BY

CARL COKE RISTER

TEXAS TECHNOLOGICAL COLLEGE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

DEDICATION 6

PREFACE 7

ILLUSTRATIONS 8

FOREWORD 9

INTRODUCTION — JOURNEYING TOWARD THE LAND OF PROMISE 11

AT LA VILLA DE DOLORES 21

FAILURE OF DR. BEALES’S COLONIAL ENTERPRISE 34

NARRATIVE OF SARAH ANN HORN 44

PREFACE 48

NARRATIVE, &C. 49

[54] A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE CAMANCHE INDIANS 83

BIBLIOGRAPHY 89

DR. JOHN CHARLES BEALES’S RIO GRANDE COLONY 89

THE COMANCHE INDIANS AND THEIR CAPTIVES 89

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 91

DEDICATION

To my long-time friend

RUPERT N. RICHARDSON

Texas Historian

PREFACE

On April 16, 1955, death claimed Carl Coke Rister and brought to an end the career of the most productive writer on Southwestern history. He had completed this book, except for reading the page proof and preparing the index. A host of friends will miss him, but will find satisfaction in the thought that it was given to him to be active and useful to the end. On the last day of his life he addressed two audiences on subjects pertaining to another study he had just completed.

R. N. RICHARDSON

Abilene, Texas

May 23, 1955

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. STOCK CERTIFICATE OF THE RIO GRANDE AND TEXAS LAND COMPANY

2. SITE OF LA VILLA DE DOLORES

3. CORNERSTONES OF A BUILDING AT DOLORES

4. WRAPPERS OF THE ORIGINAL EDITION OF MRS. HORN’S NARRATIVE Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California

5. FACSIMILE OF THE TITLE PAGE OF THE ORIGINAL EDITION Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California

6. MRS. HORN’S PICTURE AS IT APPEARED IN THE SECOND EDITION TITLE PAGE Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California (H.M. 97186)

7. WILLIAM WORKMAN

8. MAP OF BEALES’S RIVER GRANT Drawn by Arnold Matter, 1955

FOREWORD

Mrs. Sarah Ann Horn and a Mrs. Harris were among the first, if not the first, Anglo-American women to be captured and enslaved by the nomadic Comanche Indians. Mrs. Horn’s small sons, John and Joseph, and Mrs. Harris’s infant shared their mothers’ fate. For many weary and horror-packed months the Indians subjected the two women to every hardship and cruelty which their primitive minds could invent, but at last they were ransomed by kind-hearted New Mexican traders and sent to Missouri via the Santa Fé Trail. While captives, they had been forced to watch the warriors impose on their children inhuman treatment, from which the babe, and later little John, died. So it is small wonder that both women, when ransomed, were sadly broken in heart, body, and soul and lived but a short time to tell their tragic story.

In September, 1838, Mrs. Horn found a friendly asylum in the home of David Workman of New Franklin, Missouri. And a short time later, to obtain the means to enable her to return to the land of her nativity, England, and for a measure of comfortable support, a kind amanuensis and friend presented to the American public her graphic narrative in book form. By going to England, Mrs. Horn hoped to gain the support of her relatives and friends to recover from the Indians her remaining son, Joseph.

That Comanche life and ways were as primitive as described in Mrs. Horn’s narrative is proved by the accounts of other captives of this period. The narratives of Cynthia Ann Parker, James W. Parker, Mrs. Rachel Plummer, Herman Lehmann, and Edwin Eastman, which are listed in this book’s bibliography, corroborate much of the minutia found in the Horn account. Yet since the 1830’s, no ethnic group of the world has made a more profound advance in modern civilization within so short a period. Today these Indians conform amazingly well to the white man’s ways. Their children attend village and community schools, churches, and attire themselves in store-bought clothes. Some Comanche young men and women hold college and university degrees and are accomplished in the arts and sciences. In short, the old tribal days are gone, and the present-day youth of Comancheria view the future with optimism.

It is not known how many copies of this little book were published and sold in 1839. In 1853, at Cincinnati, a second edition was published with some changes and abbreviations, although copies of it are also scarce. At present, only a few copies of the original edition are known to be in the United States. Bibliophiles and collectors of Western Americana regard it as the rarest of captive accounts, not only because of its scarcity but also because of its narration of stark realism, of primitive Indian life, and of terrible cruelty and grim tragedy. It is hoped that this reprint will in part reveal to its readers the price which our pioneers paid for laying well the basis of our present Southwestern life.

In editing this book, I have left the narrative as it was originally, except I have modified the pagination by inclosing page numbers in brackets, e.g. [1], [2], etc. Although the narrative carries a sustaining interest, at points it is replete with redundance, misspelled and misused words, involved sentence structure, and long paragraphs. Even the typography is faulty. On one line a six-or eight-point type has been employed and on another a larger type-face. But all these irregularities were common in border publications and lend color to the account.

In the Introduction of Mrs. Horn’s narrative, I have found it necessary to present an epitomized history of Dr. John Charles Beales’s Dolores colony on Las Moras Creek in southern Texas. To do this, I have leaned heavily on Beales’s part-journal found in William Kennedy’s Texas... (London, 1841), his Memorial and supporting documents, and Thomas H. O’S. Addicks’s Deposition—all of which are cited more fully in the bibliography. I have also found indispensable six letters in Eduard Ludecus’s Reise durch die Mexikamschen Provinzen Tumahpas, Cohahuila und Texas im Jahre 1834 (Leipzig, 1837), which Mrs. B. Brandt of the Texas Archives has translated and has kindly permitted me to study and cite.

I am indebted to the staffs of the Library of Congress, the Texas State Library (Archives Division), the University of Oklahoma Library (Phillips Collection) for their helpful courtesies. E. House’s Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn and Her Two Children with Mrs. Harris by the Camache Indians (St. Louis, 1839) is reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, which also reproduced for my use Mrs. Horn’s portrait from the 1853 edition of this book. The New World Study Club, Brackettville, with the assistance of Mrs. H. H. Senne, Secretary of the Kinney County Chamber of Commerce, kindly made available photographs of the ruins on the site of the Dolores settlement. Arnold Maeker drew the map used in this book, and my faithful wife, Mattie May Rister, and my secretary, Mary Doak Wilson, were helpful in copying, proof-reading, and rechecking data.

INTRODUCTION — JOURNEYING TOWARD THE LAND OF PROMISE

On the morning of November 11, 1833, a two-masted ship, the Amos Wright, Captain Monroe, quietly slipped out of New York harbor bound for the south. On board were fifty-nine emigrants-men, women, and children. Some stood at the rail watching the receding shoreline, others were busily engaged in caring for their baggage or for the colony’s equipment such as farming utensils, machinery, saw mills, horse powers, wagons, etc. and still others stood in groups here and there talking or observing the sailors as they went about their duties.

Most of these voyagers were Americans, but a casual glance would have revealed that some were from England and from Germany. Yet all were bound on a common adventure—to plant a settlement in a virgin Texas wilderness. They were the vanguard of the Rio Grande and Texas Land Company’s proposed colony under the energetic leadership of an English empresario, Dr. John Charles Beales.

Impelled by a restless spirit Beales had come to the land of the Aztecs during the early days of Texas colonization.{1} In 1830 he had married Dona Maria Dolores Exeter, the widow of another Englishman, Richard Exeter, recently deceased. Exeter and Stephen Julian Wilson, an American, had acquired on September 23, 1828, a vast land grant of 45,000,000 acres from the Mexican state of Coahuila and Texas, upon which they proposed to settle one hundred families. This tract was generally unexplored. For the most part it embraced the Llano Estacado, a semi-arid, wind-swept, and treeless area in what is now southeastern Colorado, northeastern New Mexico, southwestern Kansas, a part of the panhandle of Oklahoma, and the panhandle of Texas. Or, more precisely, its southeast corner was where the thirty-second parallel is crossed by the one hundred and second degree of longitude. From thence the line proceeded along the thirty-second parallel as far as what was then the eastern boundary of New Mexico;{2} from thence, it extended north along the boundary line between the provinces of Coahuila and New Mexico, as far as twenty leagues south of the Arkansas River; from thence, eastward to the one hundred second meridian; and thence southward to the point of beginning.

As stated, when Exeter died shortly after the grant was made, Beales became Wilson’s partner. But since no effort had been made to meet the requirements of the contract, and since there was little time left to do so, Beales and José Manuel Royuela secured a new contract on March 14, 1832.{3} One of its terms required that, within a period of six years, in keeping with the colonization law of 1830, the empresarios were to settle on their grant two hundred foreign families. Then seven months after the grant was made, Royuela assigned his interests to Beales.

Beales was not frightened by his sole responsibility, for in June, 1833, he dispatched a surveying party from Santa Fé, New Mexico, under the leadership of Major A. Le Grand.{4} For three months they were busy in running the boundaries and in dividing the tract into twelve or more blocks. They worked under many handicaps. In parts of the area water was scarce, and they were forced to drink from green-scummed ponds; at one camp a horse died from a rattlesnake bite, and at another...one of the men was bitten...but fortunately relief was found instantly. And on September 17, About midnight, Le Grand wrote in his journal, we were attacked by a party of Snake Indians [perhaps Comanches]; we all prepared for battle and made a manful resistance. The action lasted but a few minutes, when the enemy fled, leaving on the ground nine of their party dead. We have to regret the loss of three men killed and one slightly wounded. The men killed—McCrummins, Weathers, and Jones; Thompson slightly wounded.{5} A Texas historian later wrote that Le Grand preceded Captain R. B. Marcy, U.S.A., twenty years in the exploration and survey of the upper waters of the Colorado, Brazos, Red, Canadian, and Washita rivers, a field in which Captain Marcy has worn the honors of first explorer from the dates of his two expeditions, respectively, in 1849 and 1853.{6}

Meanwhile, Anglo- and Spanish-American empresarios were also in the field—Austin, Burnet, Dewitt, De Leon, Vehlein, de Zavala, and others—the grants of whom, as shown on early maps, composed much the pattern of a crazy quilt. And some of these empresarios had been successful in fulfilling their contracts. Austin was the first and most successful of them all. His grant was the center of an industrious and thriving Anglo-American culture. Indeed, so many settlers from the United States had come to his and neighboring grants as to alarm seriously Mexican officials. Friction developed