ANTELOPE HILLS, Indian Territory — A combined force of Texas Rangers and Native American scouts shattered a Comanche encampment before dawn on May 12, 1858, killing as many as 76 warriors in a running battle across the rolling grasslands of what is now western Oklahoma, according to accounts reaching the Texas frontier this week.
The engagement, already being called the Battle of Antelope Hills, marks the deepest penetration yet by Texas forces into the heart of Comancheria and the first major test of Gov. Hardin R. Runnels’ pledge to carry the war against raiding parties into their own country.
The fight claimed the life of the feared Comanche chief known as Iron Jacket, a warrior who rode into battle wearing a Spanish conquistador’s steel breastplate and whom many in his band believed could not be killed by bullets. He fell early in the action, shot from his horse as he led a countercharge against the advancing Rangers and their allies.
Only one Ranger, a young private named Robert Nichols, and one Waco warrior were killed in the engagement, though several others were wounded. The disparity in casualties is being attributed by officers in the field to the overwhelming firepower carried by the Ranger column and, unexpectedly, by their Native allies as well.
The operation began in late April when Capt. John Salmon Ford, the veteran Ranger commander known throughout Texas as “Rip” Ford, led 102 men out of Fort Belknap northwest of Dallas. His force included two wagons, a field ambulance and 15 pack mules.
At Cottonwood Springs they were joined by Capt. Shapley P. Ross and 113 Native warriors, mostly Tonkawa, Waco, Shawnee, Delaware and Tawakoni, all of whom had suffered heavily in recent years from Comanche raids.
They crossed the Red River on April 29, leaving the official jurisdiction of Texas behind and entering the expanse of open prairie that the Comanche have long regarded as their inviolable homeland. For decades, the grasslands had swallowed pursuing parties whole, leaving them lost, starved or dead. This time, Ford’s men traveled light, carrying ammunition instead of rations and living off the game they killed along the way.
The break came on May 10, when scouts who had downed a buffalo discovered Comanche arrowheads lodged in its flesh. The animal had narrowly escaped becoming food for the raiders. The Comanche, the scouts concluded, were close.
Scouts fanned out across the countryside and returned with word of a hunting party and its camp on the Canadian River. Ford roused his men from a cold camp before dawn on May 12 and moved out in darkness. The Native warriors wrapped their heads in strips of white cloth to prevent being mistaken for the enemy by jumpy Texans in the coming fight.
The scout Kichi reported two villages: a smaller one of five lodges and a much larger one across the river containing roughly 350 warriors, not counting women and children. Ford left the wagons, the ambulance and the pack mules under a guard commanded by his 73-year-old father, Capt. William Ford, and rode six miles through the dark toward the smaller camp.
At 7 a. m. the killing began.
Rangers and their allies poured into the village, cutting down warriors as they stumbled from their lodges. Two Comanche escaped and rode hard for the larger village three miles away. Ford’s men gave chase, but many of the Tonkawa stopped to loot and burn the camp, their hatred for the Comanche running deeper than that of any other people in the column.
At the Canadian River, the pursuit bogged down. Men dismounted in the thick mud, and some lost their horses entirely, left afoot to chase their mounted comrades in a desperate race to reach the larger camp before it could mount a defense. The two fleeing Comanche reached it first.
Iron Jacket was likely warming himself beside his morning fire when the riders came screaming into camp. There was no time to waste. The chief gathered his weapons, ordered his children to help his wives break camp, and pulled on the Spanish armor that had made him a legend.
Then he and his warriors rode out at full speed, intent not merely on stopping the Ranger attack but on killing every man they could reach.
The Rangers’ Native allies had beaten them to the village by a few hundred yards and took the brunt of the Comanche counterattack. What the Comanche did not know was that the Waco, Shawnee, Delaware, Tawakoni and Tonkawa riders had been equipped with repeating rifles and six-shot revolvers. The shock of that firepower broke the charge.
Iron Jacket and his horse went down together. The Comanche line wavered. Most in the band had believed the chief invincible while clad in his famous armor.
Confused and momentarily beaten, the surviving warriors fell back toward the village, where Ford’s Rangers came smashing in at full force amid screams and gunfire.
The fight dissolved into dozens of small, savage combats scattered across roughly 18 square miles of prairie. After several hours, the Rangers regrouped at the captured village, where Ford found Ross marshaling the Native allies into a battle line. A Comanche counterattack, Ross insisted, was coming.
Two of Ford’s youngest Rangers were missing. Private Oliver Searcy came running into camp, breathless, to report that he and Nichols had been among the men whose horses were lost in the mud of the Canadian. Afoot and still spoiling for a fight, the two had missed the volley that killed Iron Jacket and chased the retreating Comanche to the northwest.
They were soon surrounded. Nichols was overrun and killed, cut down at the ends of Comanche lances. Searcy reached a ravine, hid within its labyrinth, and eventually made his way back to camp, badly shaken.
Almost as soon as Searcy’s warnings reached the camp, Ross spotted mounted Comanche warriors approaching. They were led by Peter Nocona, Iron Jacket’s son and a respected warrior in his own right. As Nocona’s men maneuvered along the brushy bank sloping toward the river, Ross worried they might seize the high ground behind the captured camp.
A Tonkawa scout told him not to fear. The scout mounted, took up only a spear and shield, and rode alone into the open ground between the two forces. What followed struck the Rangers present as a scene out of medieval antiquity.
The lone Tonkawa shouted taunts at the Comanche on the ridge, telling them they had nothing left to fight for, that their women and children were captives, their lodges, buffalo meat and horses taken. If the Comanche wanted a fight, he called, they should come down and fight for something.
For more than half an hour, Comanche and Native allies engaged in one-on-one taunting battles, charges and bouts of hand-to-hand combat on horseback. The clash gave Ford the opening he needed. He ordered a detachment under Lt.
Allison Nelson to flank the Comanche position and cut off any route of retreat, then recalled the Native forces to the village to marshal for a frontal assault.
The plan did not go as intended. A group of Tonkawa could not be held back, and their premature attack alerted Nocona to the Rangers’ intentions. With the Comanche aim of drawing attention to themselves so the remaining women and children could escape accomplished, Nocona saw no reason to stand and fight.
He led his forces in retreat over the rolling hills with the Tonkawa in hot pursuit.
A captured Comanche woman told Ford that an even larger camp lay miles away under the command of the famed and feared chief Buffalo Hump. That, Ford concluded, was likely where Nocona and the other survivors were headed, and a much larger and deadlier counterattack would likely follow. Seeing a tactical withdrawal to Texas territory as his most prudent option, Ford ordered the 16 prisoners shackled, the wounded placed in the ambulance, and waited as the Tonkawa pursuers straggled into camp one by one.
As they arrived, Ford noticed their horses laden with Comanche hands, feet and strips of flesh strapped to their mounts and flapping in the wind. Such was the depth of hatred that fueled warfare on the plains.
In all, 76 Comanche were killed. Ford lost only Nichols and a young Waco warrior who was lanced by his opponent in the one-on-one fighting.
On May 13, the column began its trek back to the Brazos agency with the wounded and prisoners in tow, arriving on May 20 to widespread acclaim as a successful manifestation of the governor’s new policy. But the war is far from over. Buffalo Hump and Peter Nocona are expected to ride roughshod over the entirety of the Southern Plains, and their retribution, when it comes, is expected to be swift, harsh and all-encompassing.
Nocona, for his part, is said to have married a kidnapped white woman named Cynthia Ann Parker. The couple are reported to have three children, one of whom, Quanah Parker, may one day figure prominently in the Comanche people’s story.
For now, the frontier is watching. The Rangers have proven they can reach the heart of Comancheria and strike. Whether they can hold what they have gained, or whether the Battle of Antelope Hills has merely opened a deeper and bloodier chapter, remains to be seen.