Red Treachery Black Slavery: Dark Histories of the Texas Frontier

By James Kaye

Red Treachery Black Slavery is a history of the confrontations in Texas between Native Americans and Anglo-American settlers, and of plantation slave life of which both subjects were dark histories of the Texas frontier between the 1820's and 1870's.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781984587060

James Kaye

James Kaye is a retired research biologist from the National Park Service working first in Carlsbad Caverns, then Padre Island, Joshua Tree, Death Valley, Channel Islands and lastly Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, during which Kaye wrote thirty papers in science journals on plant and animal subjects. Other interests were (are) in the art of British artist John William Waterhouse with three papers on his life and works in art journals; two being in The British Art Journal. Kaye also wrote five articles on the 1800s pioneer era of Texas, his home State, appearing in history journals and four novels based on Texas history; one being A British Butterfly Collector on the Texas Frontier. When a teenager, Kaye collected butterflies in Texas and of the obstacles encountered as written in the Dedication to all collectors of them. In 1948 on a summer vacation trip in Green Mountain Falls and when Midland trains were still running through the town, and when on hikes up along the Crystal Creek waterfalls, Kaye collected specimens of the so-called Rocky Mountain Apollos commonly known as The Snow Butterfly of the Mountains (Fig. 33). His interest in them and in the history of Green Mountain Falls as well as that of Ute Pass inspired much of the storylines in The Falls of Green Mountain Novella, sometimes known as a “long short story.”

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Copyright © 2020 by James Kaye.

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Rev. date: 07/14/2020

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Contents

Dedication

Preface

Chapter One Red Treachery

Chapter Two Black Slavery

Afterword

Appendix A The Indians of Texas

Appendix B An Unknown Limb on the ‘Ole’ Foley Tree

Appendix C The After Deaths of Pioneer Era Settlers

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

The Republic of Texas

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Dedication

To anyone interested in the pioneer history of the Texas

frontier from the 1820s to the1870s of controversial

relationships between pioneer settlers and Native Americans,

and between plantation owners and slave laborers.

James Kaye

Preface

The fifty-year history of the Texas frontier between the 1820s and 1870s in the settlement of Texas by Anglo-American and European settlers resulted in bloody confrontations with Native Americans being essentially turf disputes, and the cultural differences between them being civilization versus barbarism. Moreover, there occurred during the four-decade era between the 1820’s and 1860s the enslavement and harsh treatments of indentured Blacks on plantations.

It is however difficult for this Author and others of similar thinking to conform to the current feeling of the need in one’s writing for Political Correctness, that one should be careful in the use of any language considered offensive to a particular group of people. Such herein is omitted as there can be no erasing and forgetting the already for decades, the many well-documented histories of either subject in this book, which is history and not to be glossed over in these times of sentimentalism and romanticism all too common now in one’s writing of historical works.

This book is not to discuss how things could have been, or should have been, but as they were. This book is not of as the radical leftist extremists of this decade trying for whatever reason to erase the past by tearing down or paint spraying statues. History is always in need of remembering, both the good and the bad to learn from the past of what is not to be repeated.

The Bibliography at the end of this book lists the many references cited, being primarily the writings of Academics who are (were) scholarly in their respective fields of interest relating to the subjects herein discussed, and of today’s intellectuals who may concur with or express contrary opinions. The sources too are of some of those historians who actually lived during the hardships and dangers of the 1800s settlement of Texas and who fought hostile Indians and with both sides suffering the consequences. Likewise, there occurred the conflicts between slave owners and those enslaved.

Too, back then, there was a no-felt need for Political Correctness in one’s writing true-to-life history of a subject although now too much of it, back then, was written during the 1800s Victorian era of decency, decorum and propriety to not give details of sex crimes in newspapers. People back then could only read between the lines of what little was written and to suspect what may have happened. However, to give balance here to both subjects of the title, much is discussed that did occur gleamed from books and Journals of the travesties of Indian treachery and Black slavery. The Bibliography at the end of the book is a long list of them.

What’s written may be brutal in the reading, and in the knowing that early-on in their pre-Columbian histories that none of the more than five hundred indigenous tribes in North America knew anything of Christianity and of such teachings as to Love thy neighbor as thyself and To do unto others the good things that weren’t practiced or did aboriginal peoples have any conceptions of them, not even between those of their own color and/or those who lived as close to one another as from one mountain range to another. Intratribal wars did occur and were ongoing throughout the whole era of their evolution over thousands of years. Then came Europeans to America in the 1600s and to Texas in the 1820s.

It’s important for readers to know and to understand the why of American Indian brutality of which accounts of them especially in Texas are discussed at length throughout the first part of this book on Red Treachery. Such speaks succinctly of the why of all that happened by writers Allee et. al. (1949).

[Assemblages of individuals in the animal world including humans of whatever rank and connection fill niches with others of their kind by adaptation and competition. Such is a universal characteristic of all living organisms both physiological as well as sociological. Humans fill niches with others of their kinds, and in so doing get caught up in that ‘inexorable law of survival,’ or in other words ‘survival of the fittest.’ In still other words, ‘survival by the laws of competitive elimination.’]

W.W. Newcomb, Jr. (1961) was of the opinion that Every human is born into one culture or another and quite literally it embraces and envelops him from the moment of his birth. Such was similarly believed by General George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876) that nature intended an Indian to be a savage and by J. W. Wilbarger (1889) of Indians unable to advance beyond where nature placed them. General Randolph B. Marcy (1812-1887) wrote They have yet to be taught the first rudiments of civilization." It was generally believed by those who fought them that Native Americans were brute savages unworthy of being in the Brotherhood of Man.

As evidence of it being commonly considered as such among early-day Indians, Fanny Kelly (1900), a Sioux captive, wrote that the pleasure to the adult when torturing prisoners was unquestionable, and that cruelty was manifested by the children who tortured birds, turtles, or any other small animal that fall into their hands and who delighted in it. Brain Moore (1985) wrote similarly that Woodland Indian children took pleasure in torturing and taunting prisoners as much as the adults, being cases of like fathers like sons but not to exclude mothers like daughters."

Evolutionary psychologists in general believe that violence among all peoples is the legacy of human evolvement as groups fiercely loyal to one another in closely related tribes, clans and families, and on grander scales as races and nations. Good examples worldwide were the hostile Comanches in America and the Zulus in Africa. As believed by Wilbarger, American Indians will always be savages.

In his novel The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) wrote of an instance when Hawkeye, the primary protagonist, proclaimed contemptuously and vehemently of savage, treacherous, warring Mingos [Iroquois]. And I will tell you that he who is a Mingo will die a Mingo. A Mingo is a Mingo…and God having made him so can never be altered.

Present-day sentimentalists often so-inclined to the romanticism of such Indian related stories are advised to not go overboard in extolling (haloing) any of the aborigines as proud, lofty and noble, even mythical and romantic. One contemporary author opined that The spirit of Native people lies in the rocks and the forests, the rivers and the mountains. It murmurs in the brooks and whispers in the trees. A nineteenth century author expressed a similar opinion that the nature of the red man, noble of soul, is enshrined in poetic beauty. Another of the time romanticized lofty Indians as being extraordinary people who saw God in clouds and heard Him in the winds. They obviously didn’t know the history of them.

Such haloing then and now is poetic and romantic although overboard in the writings of philosophical sentimentalists who want to gloss over or shy away from the otherwise harsh and matter-of-fact realities of the times, especially discussed herein of the well-documented truths of aboriginal treachery and barbarity, and not only inherent in the Americas but in nations and peoples worldwide.

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Much of the information throughout this book researched for authenticity is quoted verbatim or paraphrased and so stated, and when parenthesized or bracketed as below, for example, are remarks that may reflect this Author’s own points of view but should not be charged to authors and/or editors quoted from other works. This Author however may well be guilty of that suggested by James Axtell that the language used in presenting accounts of social conflict inevitably reveals the moral judgements of the writer.

[Parenthesized remarks are little touches of reality that are as necessary in historical narration as are salt and pepper to a roast, soup or vegetable. J. Frank Dobie (in Jenkins, 1995).]

The references to Chapter One concerning the facts of Amerindians in Texas and to conflicts with frontier settlers, and even between tribes of their own color, are primarily ten. (1) Comanches – The Destruction of a People by T.R. Fehrenbach (1974) who wrote of them as Terrors of the Plains, also Lords of the South Plains by Ernest Wallace and E.A. Hoebel (1952). (2) The Comanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement by Rupert N. Richardson (1929). (3) Texas in 1820, Report on the Barbarous Indians of the Province of Texas by Juan Antonio Padilla. (4) The Indians of Texas in 1830 by French/Swiss anthropologist Jean Louis (Jon-Louie) Berlandier. (5) Observations of the Indian Tribes in Texas by Englishman William Bollaert (1850). (6) The Indians of Texas by W.W. Newcomb (1961). (7) Indian Depredations in Texas by pioneer J.W. Wilbarger (1889) who recounted conflicts between settlers and Indians across the whole of the Texas frontier. (8) Twenty Years Among Our Hostile Indians by J. (Jacob) Lee Humfreville (1903). (9) Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border by General Randolph B. Marcy (1866), and (10) Plains Indians History and Culture by John C. Ewers (1997).

The latter is an excellent collection of essays on Native Americans written by an ethnologist for the Smithsonian Institution who over more than fifty years studied them including the Plains Indians in general, being the Arapaho, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Kiowa and Sioux; horse tribes that hunted buffalos and who lived in tipis covered in buffalo skins and with trophy scalps hanging on poles (Fig. 1. Cheyenne tipis).

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