Thirty years after the Comanches surrendered, twenty years after Geronimo turned himself in, and decades after their oft-proclaimed “extinction,” Lipan Apaches are still roaming free in South Texas and Northern Coahuila. Despite centuries of conflict with Spanish, Mexican, Texan, United States, and other native tribes, the Lipanes have managed to do what perhaps no other North American native community has been able to: carve for themselves a place in their ancestral homeland without surrendering it. Join us this season on “Lipan Apocalypse” as we pull back the veil on the Lipanes in our midst and their outsized legacy on modern Texas.

On June 28, 2022 the Uvalde Consolidated Independent Schol District voted to raze Robb Elementary to the ground. Uvalde’s isn’t the kind of school district that can afford to just go tearing down perfectly good buildings though. And Robb elementary held some historic significance as well for its role in desegregating Uvalde’s school system a generation prior.

The month before the school board decision, however, Robb Elementary had been the site of one of the most horrific massacres in modern Texas history. I refuse to replay the details here: most of us remember them all too clearly. And for those of us who do, the decision to tear down the school makes perfect sense, at some deep, intuitive level, even as it’s not rational in strictly economic terms.

For some reason, when I heard about the school board’s decision, it reminded me of something that I had read about the Lipan Apaches years ago. According to some sources, Lipanes would raze their villages, uproot their communities, and move to an entirely new location after particularly traumatic deaths. It’s obviously a highly inefficient practice, and sometimes is offered as proof of Native American superstitiousness or of how indecipherable the native American mind must have been.

And yet here we were, in 2022, doing the same thing. And I got it. It made perfect sense.

I wonder too if I thought about this particular Lipan custom in the context of Uvalde because Uvalde was, according to Episode 5 of Season 1 of my podcast, the location of the “final” defeat of the Lipan Apache nation in January of 1790. I’ve since come to appreciate that I was as wrong about that claim as the Spanish chroniclers I was relying on, a fact brought to both my attention and the Spanish chroniclers by the devastating string of Lipan attacks up and down the Rio Grande just a few months after that 1790 battle, attacks that actually resulted in the death of Antonio Zapata’s grandfather in Episode 1 of Season 4 of this podcast!

In fact, it would be 114 years after the Battle of Soledad Creek near Uvalde when the “last Lipanes” turned themselves into a reservation in 19-0-4!….thirty years after the Comanches surrendered and twenty years after the great Chiracahua Apache Geronimo turned himself in! The last Apache attack on US soil actually occurred twenty years after that, in 1924 and the last documented battle with the Apaches was in the Mexican mountains in 1935, fought with the assistance of the Mexican air force! The “broken” Apaches, it turns out, made it into the aviation age.

But here’s the truly amazing thing: the Lipan story doesn’t end even in 1935! There are still reports of “free” or “bronco” Apaches into the 1950’s! In 2008 – 2008! – a researcher reported a remnant community of Lipanes in the Santa Rosa Mountains of Coahuila!

But precisely because they were so effective in resisting the European and Native American empires pressing down on them, the Lipan Apaches have won themselves few fans in the historical record. Most of their history has been written by their enemies, who almost universally saw them as arrogant, untrustworthy, and a little too sure of the superiority of their own culture – descriptions that sound suspiciously like the kind of criticism people level at those who remind them of themselves. And yet they weren’t wrong: for most of the last 400 years, those who encountered the Lipanes were encountering the undisputed power players of the Texas plains. Their power initially arose from their control of the lucrative Mesoamerican – New Mexican–and Mississippian trade and from their skill as alliance-makers, at first through marriage and cultural absorption, later from the dissemination of a religious practice which they would spread throughout Native North America with enduring effect. But most of all, their power came from the horse. They were the first and finest Native American horsemen. Not to take anything away from the more famous Comanches, but most contemporaries agreed that the Lipanes were the superior horseman. The respect that the Comanches had for the Lipanes as horseman and as warriors was reflected in the violence that they directed toward them. And yet even the Comanches would ultimately could pulled into the Lipanes’ cultural orbit.

The Lipan Apaches are among the few native american tribes who never surrendered, a fact, which, perversely, means that they aren’t formally “recognized” by the US or Mexican governments. Indeed, no people has been declared extinct more wrongly, more often, and by more governments than the Lipanes, most recently in 1946 by the US Indians Claims Commission.

And yet, the Texas-Mexico border itself may be the most tangible Lipan legacy in the modern-day. Along the Texas-Mexico border, the Lipanes may have accomplished something that almost no other native American group in North America was able to: preserve for themselves a place in their ancestral homeland without surrendering it. In recent decades, increasing numbers of individuals throughout the border region have started to come forward with proof of their Lipan identities.

The Lipan legacy is frustratingly subtle though, and as often as not, the evidence for it is indirect. It’s like the dark matter in the fabric of the Texas history universe. But also like dark matter, even when you can’t directly observe the Lipan legacy, I’ve come to realize that nothing else in early Texas history makes sense without it. And so it’s not good enough anymore to just assume they were this unintelligible, malicious, or superstitious force shaping the geographic, demographic, and cultural parameters of our state. I think it’s time to allow ourselves to assume that things we indirectly see them doing, were being done for reasons that we might actually have understood… which really isn’t too much of an assumption to make, but it’s a grace that has typically been denied them by their chroniclers writing from the viewpoints of their enemies. We’ll be a little wrong if we do this, but probably not any more wrong than if we just accepted the Lipan enemies’ accounts as gospel. And I think you’ll be surprised by the results.

Uvalde’s not a bad place to start then: if we modern Texans in our hyperrational, budget-obsessed present, can all agree that tearing down an otherwise perfectly good school building – just like the Lipanes would have done – just because it was the site of an unspeakable tragedy is the right thing to do – and I think most of us do – we may already be one step closer to starting to understand these old Lipan Texans.

And I actually want to try to take it one step further this season: maybe our decision to raze Robb Elementary is hinting at something even more profound…maybe the Lipan legacy is actually operating inside our own heads and all around us without our even realizing it! They didn’t tear down Columbine! If we here in Texas have, perhaps, internalized Lipan rituals of grieving, what else might we have absorbed from their culture? What if, instead of having gone extinct, the Lipan Apaches represent the oldest unbroken thread of Texas identity that we can find?

To answer that question, of course, we’ll need to find the Lipanes, both in the historical record and in the present. Join us this season on “Lipan Apocalypse” as we pull back the veil on the most maligned Texans in history…and the greatest survivors of them all.

The Whirlwind (Killer-of-Enemies)

Welcome to Lipan Apocalypse. Episode 1: Tierra Blanca. I’m Brandon Seale.

Killer-of-Enemies teaches his people, the “Nde,” how to treat with the peoples they meet as they descend into the Texas panhandle: the Puebloans to the west, the Jumanos to the South, and the Caddoan-speakers to the east. Yet the arrival of yet another newcomer – this one from across the ocean – challenges the diplomatic skills of even the most effective Nde alliance-makers.

Down in the lower world, in the beginning, there was no light, only darkness. The people held a council down there. They discussed whether there was another world. They decided to send out Wind to find out. Wind went up to the surface. He was a whirlwind, and he cleared all before him, exposing the land.

From the Guadalupe Mountains they emerged, we emerged, the Apaches or [Nde] as we call ourselves, and we began walking, to the four directions. To the north went the Navajo…to the West, the Chiracahua…to the South, the Mescaleros. And to the east, the last to drop off, were the Lipanes. And the first of these Lipanes, was Killer-of-Enemies, a great one.¹

Note something interesting about the Lipan Apache origin story, paraphrased here. Most peoples’ origin stories – at least the ones I’m familiar with – imagine their ancestors as the first human beings. But the Lipanes, in their own telling at least, appear as the LAST humans. The LAST of the last humans, in fact, because in some tellings, the Apache exodus from the lower world had also been preceded by the animal people, the bird people, the tree people, and THEN the “Spotted Wood” people, a sort of not-quite fully formed human race that perhaps represented all non-Apache peoples.²

And indeed, true to legend, the Apaches’ ancestors – who called themselves collectively, the “Nde” in their Athabaskan tongue - may have been the last to cross the Bering Strait into the Americas. There is actually a language isolate in central Russia today that has been linked to these Apache ancestors. Other Athabaskan-speakers still live in Alaska and Canada, but some sub-group of these Nde broke off around 700 AD, and began making their way south, propelled forward by a particular technological innovation: the bow and arrow. These bow-wielding Nde hunters descended down the Canadian great plains like a whirlwind in pursuit of the Caribou until the caribou herds became buffalo herds, and then they began to follow the buffalo. And of course, true to their origin story, in all the new lands they entered, they found other peoples already living there. “Killer of Enemies,” despite his violent name, actually taught his people that they should expect to have to treat with others, to trade with them, to negotiate with them, and to occasionally ask them for help. According to legend “Nothing was impossible to Killer of Enemies. But even he asked for a little help now and then…that was to show that no matter how strong we are we must ask for a little help.” Killer-of-Enemies taught that it was a moral obligation to make alliances with other people, even those they found dishonest or distasteful…according to a later chronicler, “they attach great importance to entering into agreement and union with even some evilly deceitful Indians, upon whom they judge their prosperity and adversity to depend....”³

Yet for all of their willingness to treat with other peoples, the Nde didn’t doubt that they were exceptional, and their prosperity and success only confirmed this. The word “arrogant” shows up to describe the later Apaches about as often as does these days when foreigners write about modern inhabitants of the United States. An early Spanish commentator would describe Apaches as “astute, suspicious, bold, haughty, and zealous of their freedom and independence,” which has always reminded me for some reason of Thomas Jefferson’s description of New Englanders as: “cool, sober, laborious, persevering, independent, and jealous of their own liberties.”⁴

Generalizing about the Nde can get you into trouble real quick, however. They ate fish, they didn’t eat fish; they made pottery, they didn’t make pottery; they moved after burying their dead; they buried their dead under their homes. All of which is to say that by the time the Nde whirlwind had swept down the length of the Great Plains, were diverse, open-minded, and experimental conglomerate people. One Spanish viceroy would later say that “Under the name of Apache are an infinity of nations.” The Nde were a cultural as much as an ethnic group, defined by their shared Athabaskan language, buffalo-hunting, and a moral obligation to everywhere and always seek alliances with the people they came across.⁵

Around 1300 AD, however, the buffalo began to drift even further South. The so-called “Little Ice Age” cooled the southern plains and began to water them with more regular rains. Here, however, on the flanks of the Southern plains, the Nde migratory whirlwind smashed into another great people, secure in their Rocky Mountain strongholds behind great adobe houses and irrigated fields. The Nde had never encountered peoples like this, peoples that the later Spanish would honor with the label of “Pueblos:” true “peoples” in the Spanish estimation, because of their settled, agricultural society. There were so many of them, 40 maybe 80,000 in two dozen or more city-states along the New Mexican Rio Grande. And they were wealthy beyond anything the Nde had ever seen, a wealth generated by trading the caloric surplus of their fields for the exotic goods of Mesoamerica: cotton, copper, and colorful plumage.

The Nde gift for alliance-making failed with the Pueblos. At first anyway. What could a bunch of poor buffalo hunters have to offer a wealthy, diversified, trading empire? It may have been a violent rejection, the proof being that the name “Apache” seems to come from a neighboring language and means “enemy.” The Pueblo mountain strongholds along the Upper Rio Grande scattered the Nde whirlwind all around them. True to their myths, some Nde spun off to the northwest to become the Navajo; some like the Chiracahua Apaches, broke west; others, like the Mescalero Apaches pushed South, down the spine of the Rockies; yet some, struck out on the Texas high plains: Plains Apaches we might call them, the ancestors of the Lipan Apaches.⁶

The onset of the same Little Ice Age which had drawn the buffalo south challenged the Pueblos, however, in ways that Nde bows and arrows couldn’t. While rainfall increased on the great plains, it disappeared from the Pueblos’ fields, leaving their crops to wither and waste away. The little ice age also brought about the collapse of the great Mesoamerican trading outposts in Chihuahua on which the Pueblos had depended for their trade. It caused the Pueblos to look east for new trading partners, to the Texas Panhandle, where they found the Antelope Creek peoples living near the headwaters of the Red River. The Antelope Creek people were perhaps the westernmost outpost of a larger, mound-building cultural group that extended all the way to the Mississippi River and spoke principally Caddoan languages, including the Pawnee and Wichita on the plains and the Tejas who would give East Texas its name.⁷

The slab-rock buildings and finely-crafted ceramics of the Antelope Creek peoples spoke to their prosperity, which derived from their control of the Alibates flint quarries. The Alibates flint quarries produced the highest quality and indeed most beautiful flint anywhere in the region. It was prized as far north as Montana, as far east as the Mississippi, and traded deep into Mexico as well. Flint was also, of course, a critical input for bison-hunters like the proto-Plains Apaches, not only for the hunting, but also for the working of the hides, perhaps the most valuable, non-perishable product of the buffalo. For these Plains Apaches coming upon the Antelope Creek peoples around 1400, control of the flint quarries offered a means of vertically integrating their economy. But more than that, controlling the flint quarries meant controlling the trade of the Texas Panhandle. Buffalo hides and flint were just the currency of the great Mesoamerican, Pueblo, Caddoan-Mississippian trade. The trade itself was the prize…

For all that Killer-of-Enemies had taught his people about alliance-making, it does not appear that the Plains Apache absorption of the Antelope Creek peoples was a peaceful one. Trophy skulls and dismembered remains and a layer of burnt dwellings suggests a rather apocalyptic end to the Antelope Creek culture, more in line with a literal interpretation of Killer-of-Enemies’ name. By 1450, the Antelope Creek culture had been replaced by the Tierra Blanca culture – a buffalo-hunting, agriculture-eschewing, decidedly proto-Apache cultural center of power by which they were able to insert themselves into the middle of the Rio Grande Pueblo and Caddo-Mississippian trade.⁸

The people of Killer-of-enemies hadn’t cornered the market on the the Texas plains trade, however. There were other Texas plains traders to the south, even more prosperous than the old Antelope Creek people, the so-called “Jumanos,” who occupied the better part of modern Texas from El Paso to the Colorado River, and from the Brazos down to the Rio Grande and beyond. The opulence of their communities around modern day Presidio, TX (as documented by our friend Cabeza de Vaca) spoke to the profitability of the Jumanos’ trade routes: multi-story adobe houses, fields planted in corn, beans, and squash; their peoples dressed in fine cotton and bedazzled with copper and turquoise jewelry.

Before the Plains Apache could even begin to treat with these new Jumano rivals, however, they noticed something. In the early 1500’s, the Jumanos’ trade goods changed radically. They weren’t just bringing back bolts of Mexican cotton or colored plumage or worked copper anymore. Now, they had a different kind of linen, higher quality flints than the Alibates, and entirely new tools made from iron: Knives, axes, and scissors. It gave the Jumanos an insurmountable competitive advantage…briefly. Because not long after these mysterious new goods showed up in Jumano towns, so too did a wave of devastating epidemics. Estimates vary, but as much as 95% of the native population of the Americas might have died from disease in the first century after contact, and there was a DIRECT correlation between the death rate and proximity to the line of European advance. And unfortunately for the Jumanos, they were the first north American tribes to really feel the advance of European disease, precisely because of their wide-ranging trading networks into Mesoamerica.

Even in their weakened state, however, the Jumanos mounted a fierce resistance against their new Plains Apache rivals. Such was the force-multiplying effect of Spanish steel that the decimated Jumanos had access to now, to say nothing of the turbo-charging effects of a trading economy with access to such force-multiplying goods.⁹

And fortunately for the Jumanos, they weren’t really a target for Spanish conquest in the 1500’s. They were too dispersed to govern, their trading economy much harder to tax than an agricultural one. The true object of Spanish interest was the Rio Grande Pueblos. As we’ve repeated many times in this podcast, the ideal targets for Spanish conquest were large, agricultural civilizations upon which the Spanish could impose themselves as tribute-collecting overlords. And the Pueblos – with their concentrated populations, irrigated fields, and established cities checked all these boxes.

The newcomers did not tread lightly, and stories of their arrival would have spread like a prairie fire. Literally. On their first visit to the Rio Grande pueblos in 1640, the Spanish under Francisco Vazquez de Coronado torched at least 17 communities and burned perhaps 150 natives at the stake, to say nothing of those they killed in combat. But something about the Plains Apaches - whom they met the next year, in 1541 - impressed the Spanish. Intimidated them even, in a way that settled Pueblo cities with their neat fields and adobe buildings didn’t, which says something. Coronado would describe the first Plains Apache settlement he encountered in the Texas panhandle as consisting of dozens if not hundreds of houses. The houses were framed with stalks “bent over like barrel staves” or stacked like more classic “tipis” with three structural tentpoles lashed together at the top with rawhide, sometimes with a quasi-permanent stone foundation. And yet what stood out about all of these houses was the quality of the buffalo hides that enclosed them. They were “made as neatly as those from Italy,” a later Spaniard would claim.¹⁰

The Plains Apaches themselves were no less impressive than their craftsmanship. Coronado’s chronicler admired their “neatness and martial bearing that differentiates them markedly from the other nations…” Coronado said they had the “the best physique of any I have seen in the Indies,” and indeed the archaeological record backs this up. The men were tall, averaging close to six feet tall at a time when the average Spanish man was half a foot shorter than that. Apache women and men were routinely described as good-looking by friend and foe alike, even as their grooming customs always shocked European observers a bit. Particularly their habit of plucking all their facial hair, including their eyebrows. Europeans always found their dress, well, stylish I guess you’d say, particularly their everpresent buckskin fringe which remains a fixture of “Western” wear today.¹¹

For all that they had heard about these newcomers, the Apaches weren’t intimidated by them. Their history taught them how to deal with all kinds of peoples. And these great alliance-makers immediately appreciated the potential benefits of friendship with the newcomers. Aside from the obvious benefit of access to Spanish goods, the Plains Apaches were particularly good at reading their world like a geopolitical checkerboard, by which I mean they were always quick to realize that the rivals of their rivals – one checkerboard square removed – often had a common interest in circumventing or teaming up against the rival in-between: in this case, perhaps against the Jumanos or the Pueblos. And so unsurprisingly, Coronado’s chronicler found the Plains Apaches to be “a kind people and not cruel” and “faithful friends.” The Plains Apache captains came forward to parlay with the new arrivals, using the near universal plains sign language that they would help spread throughout North America, and “made themselves understood so well that there was no need of an interpreter.”¹²

Coronado’s diary records these people as “Querechos,” but one of the tell-tale clues by which we know they were proto-Apaches was their distinctive use of dogs as beasts of burden to drag their belongings on tent poles. This form of transport had given the mobile and migratory Plains Apaches just enough of a logistical edge to dominate the Plains. And which suggests to me that they must have noticed and intuited the potential of the animals that Coronado, and his expedition, and future Spanish expeditionaries came riding in on. Indeed, the Apache word for this new animal would be “Big Dog.” The horse, however, really was more than that. It wasn’t just a better beast of burden. It made of its rider a veritable eagle, flying across the plains at unimaginable speed and with an unrivaled vantage. How, the Plains Apaches wondered as soon as they saw it, how could they get ahold of those amazing, four-legged force multipliers?¹³

Trade was the obvious answer. It’s what the Plains Apache were best at, what they were committed to more than ever since their conquest of the Antelope Creek People. Rumors had probably reached the Plains Apache as to the pieces of commerce that these Spaniards most desired. Actually, “pieces” is what the Spanish euphemistically called their favorite trade good. It was a psychological means of dehumanizing the commerce in Indian slaves which – almost as soon as the conquest of Mexico was complete – became the most profitable trade in Spanish North America. Particularly with the discovery of silver in Zacatecas and Durango and later Parral, Chihuahua, in the middle of the 16th century the mines of New Spain began to swallow the Native population of Mexico. Life became cheap: a horse in Mexico city in 1525 was worth 300 pesos…an Indian slave was worth 6 pesos. But even the Plains Apaches understood the reason why: there were a lot more potential Indian slaves out there than there were horses.¹⁴

On the next episode of Lipan Apocalypse.

Thank you for listening. Editing for this episode was performed by Susana Canseco. The intro and outro music is from the White Mountain Apache Crown dancers, you can find them on Youtube. A special thanks this season to my Lipan friends Bernard Barcena, Lucille Contreras, Richard Gonzales, Margot Moreno, and Gary Perez. I hope I’m doing your story justice. Make sure to check out Lucille’s Texas Tribal Buffalo Project online and fill out her Texas Indigenous Data Sovereignty Study. For more information about the Lipan Apaches, check out the books by Thomas Britten, Jose Medina Gonzalez Davila, Nancy McGown Minor, and Sherry Robinson; the doctoral thesis of Enrique Maestas; and the Texas observer article by Dylan Badour. Also, check out Gorka Alonso’s website, apacheria.es.

For more information on my other projects, check out www.brandonseale.com.

Alliance and Advantage

Welcome to Lipan Apocalypse, Episode 2: Alliance and Advantage. I’m Brandon Seale.

Nde buffalo hunters, Jumanos, and Puebloans vie for control of the Texas plains trade amidst waves of Spanish entradas, epidemics, and slaving expeditions. As they Nde take on a distinctly “Apache” identity, we see them begin to deploy their most effective historical tools of cultural absorption: intermarriage, religious exchange, and alliance-making. And we see them acquire their most devastating weapon of future absorption: the horse.

The Plains Apaches of the Texas panhandle wouldn’t see the Spanish for almost forty years after their first meeting with Coronado in 1541. Which didn’t mean that they didn’t feel the Spanish presence in other ways.

All throughout the middle of the sixteenth century, the Spanish pushed up through the central Mexican highlands, fueled by the spectacular wealth of the mines they found there. The silver supply of Europe would septuple over the next hundred years, fueled in large part by these Mexican mines. And despite royal prohibitions to the contrary, almost every ounce of that silver was pulled out of the ground by Indian slaves, who died at horrific rates in the process. Using a loophole in Spanish law which technically forbade Indian slavery, as long as slavers could claim that they had captured the Indians warring “unlawfully” against the Spanish throne, then they could keep them. Which created a terrible but terribly profitable incentive for maintaining a state of continuous war against the natives of northern Mexico. The profitability of the Indian slave trade became perhaps the primary enticement to Spanish north American frontier service and settlement.¹⁵

The Jumano strongholds along the Rio Grande and the southern Texas plains shielded the Plains Apaches somewhat from these earliest slaving expeditions. But not entirely. When Spanish expeditionaries returned to the Texas panhandle in 1581, they were received much more coldly than Coronado had been in 1541. Four hundred Apache bowmen met this Spanish expedition and made it clear in no uncertain terms that the Spanish weren’t welcome. Something had changed, and most likely, it had been rumors of or direct encounters with Spanish slavers.

But this 1581 expedition was led by a Fransciscan friar. Even at their far remove from Spanish power, these Plains Apaches had learned to distinguish between different types of Spaniards. They had learned that the men in robes – while not the saints they believed themselves to be – were different than the slavers. Despite the Apaches’ hostility, the Franciscan expedition leader came forward and tried something: he made the sign of the cross. The Friar didn’t realize this, but there were things about the symbol of the four-pointed cross that actually aligned pretty well Apache cosmology. Four was a sacred number to the Apaches: it represented the four sacred directions, the four sacred colors (black, yellow, white, and blue-grey), and it shows up throughout their legends.¹⁶

An Apache came forward and made the symbol of the cross back to the Friar. What had Killer-of-Enemies taught them about alliance-making? It was a moral obligation, even sometimes with deceitful people you had good reason to distrust? You never knew what good could come out of it, especially in a world turned upside down by epidemic, war, and climate change. The 400 Apache bowmen stood down, the two sides approached each other and greeted, awkwardly, skeptically. The Apache obligation to deal with the strangers would not go so far as to require them to let the Friar and his expedition enter their town that night, however. They forced the Friar and his expeditionaries to set up their camp at a distance.¹⁷

Which proved to have been smart. Because when the Apaches woke up the next morning, one of their Apache brothers was gone. And so too were the Spaniards. The stories the Apaches had heard must have been true! The Spanish just couldn’t help their slaving! And yet, some Apaches must have weighed in that it made no sense to send an expedition all this way to take one slave. And frankly, the friar’s expedition was so small and awkward on the plains that the Apache could probably track them down and overwhelm them in just a few days on the open plains, even on foot. Apaches, noted by nearly every contemporary for their “hardiness,” “[rivalled] horses for endurance.” Richard Gonzales, a modern-day Lipan Apache told me a family motto: If you can go a mile, you can go 100 miles. And so in this instance, they decided to be patient.¹⁸

Sure enough, a few days later, the Spanish expedition returned. They had just gone on a buffalo hunt. The Apache brother was returned unharmed and frankly may have sort of volunteered for the assignment out of a very Killer-of-Enemies’ type of fearlessness. By so doing, he had seen the future, he reported back to his brethren, describing how the Spanish had killed 40 buffalo with unimaginable speed, using their horses to run down the giant beasts and their muskets, or arquebuses still at this point I suppose, to dispatch them from a safe distance. The Friar then made gifts of buffalo meat to his Apache hosts – lots of it – showing that he understood reciprocal exchange, that he understood perhaps how to make alliances. When the friar and his expedition left, the Apache community reconsidered their hostility toward these newcomers. Perhaps their initial impression in 1541 had been right. Perhaps the Spanish could be treated with. They certainly couldn’t be ignored.

In 1598, Juan de Oñate formally “took possession” (“toma de posesión”) of what would become the Spanish province of New Mexico, and all the peoples within it – mostly notably, the Pueblos. In an extended listing of the tribes over whom he claimed sovereignty, he conspicuously left out the Plains Apache, however. On the contrary, he sent an expedition to them over in the Texas panhandle in order to, from the Apache’s perspective, pay them tribute. The Plains Apaches greeted Onate’s emissaries warmly, without fear or reservation this time. They lifted their palms up to the sun, offering their symbol of friendship to the emissary, and brought them wild plums and pomegranates. The emissary too made the appropriate gifts and some of the Plains Apaches perhaps began to fantasize about the possibilities of a grand Spanish-Apache alliance.¹⁹

The Jumanos watched all this from the Edwards Plateau with great concern. Inasmuch as they were bearing the brunt of Spanish slaving and Spanish disease, they couldn’t afford to lose their control of trade with the Spanish, or with the Pueblos. Certain Pueblo towns – those in the north, had already drifted into the Plains Apache orbit as well. Increasingly, the Jumanos were realizing that the Plains Apaches weren’t just an economic and military force. From the Red River, their cultural and spiritual influence had begun to infiltrate Jumano society as well. Apaches just had an aura about them, a direct line to the transcendental, and a keen sense for the power of religious expression and the soft power of cultural exchange. The Apaches had certainly figured out that religion was a big deal to these Spanish newcomers. They made the sign of the cross before and after everything they did; in new towns they typically built a church before they even built their own houses; and they were always hanging depictions of a teenage mother on the walls of their churches, and weaving her into their stories they tried to explain to the Plains apaches and other north american natives, without much success.

Sometime around 1627, several Plains Apache captains came into a Spanish-controlled pueblo and entered a church. There, they claimed, they were moved by a candle-lit sculpture of the Virgin Mary. The told the friars that they wanted to be brothers in the religion of the Spanish, that they would splash the water on their heads, and accept baptism in the name of their Spanish friends. Maybe they were driven by a genuine religious impulse, or maybe it was a political calculation, but what is undeniable is that the friars had long fantasized about converting the Plains Apaches to Christianity. Their perceived “arrogance” and independence made them the ultimate proselytory prize. For the fifty or previous years of contact, however, not a single Apache had ever agreed to be baptized, so this offer in 1627 was a big deal. The friars rushed to baptize the two captains, who promised to carry the message back to their communities. A wave of hope washed over Spanish administrators and Plains Apache captains all, energized by the possibility of a great Spanish-Apache alliance in Christ!

The Jumanos, sitting one checkersquare to the south, realized they’d been outmaneuvered. They felt the Spanish-Pueblo trade drawing away from them; they saw a Spanish-Apache alliance aligning against them. But then, a miracle happened. Conveniently for the Jumanos, in 1629, they were visited by a mysterious “lady in blue,” like the one in the paintings in the Spanish churches, who had started teaching them about the Spanish religion. 50 Jumanos made their way to the nearest Spanish-controlled pueblo and told the administrators what had happened, how this lady in blue had told them to travel west and find Spanish holy men. The Friars took the excited Jumanos into a church, and showed them a painting of the Virgin Mary. Yes, yes, they responded, confirming that the lady in blue “looked like her, but younger.” That was a good enough for the priests. They splashed the water on the enthusiastic Jumanos, and embraced them as brothers in Christ. Their preferred brothers in Christ.

Immediately after, the Spanish governor sent a war party to attack the specific Plains Apache town in which the Apache captains baptized in 1627 lived. Was this some secret condition of the Jumanos’ conversion? Had the Spanish decided they could only have one Texas plains ally, and that the Jumanos were it? The timing was so suspicious, and the attack so deliberately targeted. In fact, one of the Apache captains was killed with the rosary gifted to him at his baptism in his hand! The rest of the town – the survivors anyway – were enslaved!²⁰

This attack must have left the Plains Apaches’ heads spinning. If accepting a people’s religion wasn’t enough to win their friendship, what in the world would be? It was almost enough to make you believe that the Spanish were too dense or too irrational to deal with in any way other than with the universal language of violence. To their credit, the Spanish friars protested the enslavement of these newest members of their flock, leading to the emancipation of the captured Apache…but then the friars went and did something almost just as stupid. That same year, 1629, they sent some of their own deep into Texas, somewhere on the Concho River near the site of modern Paint Rock, Texas - whose name makes direct reference to the pictographic proof of a large and prosperous native presence in the area - and declared their intention to found a “mission” there…a mission for the Jumanos. The Plains Apaches knew what this meant. The Spanish were full-on allies of the Jumanos now, to the extent that they were willing to turbo-charge the Jumanos economy with a permanent trading stations (which is how Texas natives mostly viewed these missions) and frankly an arms depot for Jumano warriors.

Thus began a long history of Spanish missionaries in Texas naively believing that they could be friends with peoples on both sides of centuries’ old Indian rivalries. Actually, it goes beyond naivete, it came from arrogance - why wouldn’t everyone want to be friends with Spain, the most powerful empire on earth? Even the word the Friars used for bringing native allies into missions – “to reduce” them – hints at their true views on the power dynamic. And this was a relationship and a power dynamic that Apaches would never accept. Ever.

Which might explain why Spanish civil authorities were biased almost from the start against them. The Apaches were just too powerful, too independent. It may have been that the Spanish straight-up feared being the little brother in a Spanish-Apache alliance. The same Spanish friar who had converted the Plains Apache captains in 1627 and given one of them his rosary believed that the Apaches could field 30,000 warriors. That number was probably high, even if it was counting all the related Apaches tribes and Navajo, but it’s suggestive of how afraid the Spanish were of Apache power.²¹

Secure in their alliance with the Jumanos, by 1630 the Spanish were on the offensive and attacking every Plains Apache town in striking distance of the Rio Grande Pueblos. Uncounted numbers of Apaches were killed and enslaved. Indian slaves soon outnumbered Spaniards 3 to 1 in Spanish New Mexico. Even Apache merchants were being captured and enslaved, a major breach of every basic human protocol, and economically short-sighted as well. Except that increasingly, the Spanish didn’t much need the Apache trade anymore. Having shored up relationships with the Jumanos, they had access to all the hides and tallow and salt they could need…and unlike the Pueblos, there wasn’t much that the Spanish needed from the Caddoan-speakers on the other side of the Texas plains.²²

In the mid-1630’s, however, the Apaches began to strike back. Surgically and strategically. They increased their attacks on the Jumanos first, pushing south into central Texas and causing the Spanish to quickly abandon plans for that first Jumano mission. Then in 1639, the Apaches struck the Spanish in the Pueblos, attacking various towns and burning the meager corn surplus that Spanish administrators had collected that year.²³

And the Apaches went to work alliance-making right underneath Spaniards’ noses. Plains Apaches had never given up on the idea of an alliance directly with the Pueblo people, who, by 1640, were suffocating under the weight of a generation of Spanish occupation. Unlike the Spanish, the Pueblos were suffering from the loss of the Plains trade. And they were starving from the loss of the crop surpluses that had been the basis of their great trading wealth – and that the Spanish now taxed at nearly 100%. Most of all, they were fed-up with having been “reduced” to second-class citizens in their own towns.²⁴

Given that background, it wasn’t hard for the Apaches to bring the Pueblos at last into their orbit. From 1640 or so on, the Apaches and the Pueblos became allies resisting Spanish rule, which is an interesting glimpse into the persistence and effectiveness of Apache alliance-making on a generational timespan. Together, the Plains Apaches and Pueblos established a great trading center up on the plains in modern-day Kansas, just out of reach of Spanish patrols. El Cuartelejo, the Spanish called it, the “barracks,” was a Plains Apache-controlled but Pueblo-built trading fort that prospered for the next century from its control of an illicit Northern plains trade route and from the influx of Puebloans escaping from Spanish rule. And from something else. Around that same time, the horse had escaped onto the plains. And the Plains Apache were about to make him their own. On the next episode of Lipan Apocalypse.

Apache Empire (Juan Sabeata)

Welcome to Lipan Apocalypse, Episode 2: Alliance and Advantage. I’m Brandon Seale.

Welcome to Lipan Apocalypse, Episode 3: Apache Empire. I’m Brandon Seale.

Newly mounted Plains Apaches expand their influence over an increasingly broad swath of the Great Plains and Northern Mexico. In the course of one remarkable generation, they will drive the Spanish out of New Mexico and absorb their old Jumano rivals, despite an epic last-ditch effort by Jumano Captain Juan Sabeata to frustrate them. Before they recede from the record, however, the Jumanos would introduce the Plains Apache to “the medicine.”

Jose Medina Gonzalez Davila, a scholar of the Lipan Apaches, interviewed an old time caporal on a South Texas ranch in 2010. The caporal remembered working with Lipanes back in his younger days in the 1950’s, mind you, again, a reminder of their non-extinction - and remembered how remarkable they were to watch on horseback. When they rode, he said: “parece que andaban flotando” – they seemed to just be floating. They even walked different. Most cowhands, the old caporal said, walked kind of bowlegged, and kind of dragged their heels. But Lipanes “walk on their tiptoes almost,” “ni ruido hacen los cabrones” “they don’t even make a sound.” And even when they sat, they sat almost coiled like rattlesnakes, like “cascabeles enroscadas,” ready to bite. “Son cabrones estos indios, son bien agresivos…no si te digo, si son bien distintos.” They’re aggressive, he said…they’re just different.

Lipanes always had an aura about them. Maybe it’s what made them such naturally good horseman. If you’ll recall from the opening of Season 5, they believed that the horse was made for them. I’ve learned from my wife that the best horsemen – and women – are possessed of a special combination of self-confidence and adaptability…two traits that we’ve seen in abundance in the proto- Lipan Plains Apaches for sure. Old Tejanos would always hire Lipanes when they could to do their horsebreaking. The great cattleman Ed Lasater – creator of the Beefmaster breed and stock-raiser across northern Coahuila and South Texas – went out of his way to find Lipanes to work his ranches. José Francisco Ruíz, who I hope most of you know from my previous season here, lived amongst the Comanches for 8 years declared unequivocally that the Lipanes were the superior horsemen.²⁵

The Plains Apache – we still can’t quite call them Lipanes, but that’s coming - must have enjoyed surprising the Spanish with that first mounted raid in 1650. They struck the Spanish again on horseback in 1652, raiding a New Mexico village, vandalizing the church, and riding off with 27 captives of their own. For pretty much the previous 130 years, it had always been the Spanish rampaging around and terrorizing native populations from horseback. Yet the Lipanes didn’t just adopt the horse, they modified him, in the ways the plains steppe people around the world have consistently modified horse warfare to suit their needs. Except that they did so pretty much on their own and over course of a single generation. The Spanish – at first at least – fought heavy, armoring their mounts, preferring large animals, and deliberate, concentrated charges. The Plains Apache fought light, realizing that speed and mobility was the great advantage of the horse, particularly on the great American plains. The Spanish retaliated to the new mounted Plains Apache threat with more slave raids, peaking around 1659 and 1660 when the New Mexico governor issued no less than 90 decrees justifying specific slave-taking expeditions. He supposedly owned no less than 90 slaves himself.²⁶

The conflict between the now-mounted Plains Apaches and the Spanish quickly proved too costly for either side to sustain, however. And there was quite an obvious way that they could be of benefit to one another now, without either having to submit. The price of Spanish friendship, the Apaches soon learned, was to become slavers for them. In some ways the fast-moving, newly-mounted Apaches were even more effective against Native peoples than slower-moving Spanish expeditions ever could be. And it was an incredible thing, in a way, to not only be able to defeat your enemies – be they Jumano or Caddoan or whatever – but to be able to get paid for capturing them and selling them far far away.²⁷

A robust slaving economy took off on the Texas plains and the Plains Apaches were right in the middle of it. Buffalo hides and salt were now secondary commodities. Annual trade fairs in New Mexico were organized for Spanish and Apache traders, though the name they gave these fairs revealed their true purpose. They called them “rescates” or “rescues,” the idea being that the Spanish weren’t making slaves out of Indians – that would violate royal edict! – but that they were “rescuing” them from Apache slavery…by buying them as slaves themselves.²⁸

The Spanish-Apache slave trade was not, however, an alliance. The Plains Apaches understood this. It was an extremely profitable arrangement that bought peace between the two powers so long as each side could live up to its side of the bargain. But the 1660’s brought another cycle of drought to the Pueblos. In 1661, the peoples of the New Mexico Pueblos were reduced to eating their seed corn. In 1664, conditions in Taos got so bad that almost the entire population fled to the relatively new Apache trading center at El Cuartelejo, in Kansas, that we mentioned in the previous episode. In 1667-9 – no crops were even harvested in most of the Pueblos! Both Spanish and native in the Pueblos were reduced to eating cow hides, toasting them to make them more edible. 450 natives starved to death in one town alone.²⁹

In short, by 1669, the Spanish had become poor trading partners. They could barely feed themselves, much less continue to buy slaves from the Apaches. Of what use was peace with the Spanish, though, if they couldn’t afford the Apaches’ goods? Of what use were the Spanish? The Pueblos peoples made known to the Apaches their resentment toward their Spanish overlords. And that they were going to do something about it.

In 1669, the Plains Apache collaborated with the Pueblos in an abortive uprising against Spanish rule. Two Pueblo towns in northern New Mexico – closest to the Plains Apache power center of El Cuartelejo - rose up, but were quashed, and the rest discovered before they could revolt. But the next year, 1670, the Plains Apaches rekindled the revolutionary fires, attacking the same Pueblo that had lost 450 to starvation, killing 11 Spaniards, and carrying off 30 captives. The Apaches attacked again in 1672, when the corn harvest had once again failed, liberated six towns from Spanish rule. It was a chink in the Spanish colonial armor and a taste of freedom for the 1200 Pueblo families living in those six, newly liberated towns. Spanish authorities responded with a brutal round of repression. They outlawed Pueblo religious ceremonies entirely, arrested 47 medicine men, hanged three, publicly whipped the others and condemned them to slavery.³⁰

In retaliation and in apparent coordination with the Pueblos, Plains Apaches now openly attacked the Spanish military outposts throughout New Mexico. After each attack, more and more Puebloans followed these Apaches back out onto the plains and up to El Cuartelejo. According to some reports, even some of the old Spanish Tlaxcaltecan allies and even several mestizos joined in with the insurrectionists. Other Puebloans stayed behind and fomented revolt within the Pueblos, demanding specifically the release of their imprisoned medicine men. The Spanish governor realized that he had no choice but to relent. The surviving 44 Puebloan religious leaders were released. ³¹

Among these 44 Puebloan holy men was a man named Popé. Popé retired to Taos for a few years, the northernmost of the pueblos geographically and culturally closest to the Plains Apache stronghold at El Cuartelejo. And for the next several years, Popé and the Plains Apaches would plan the most successful Native uprising in North American history.

Sometime somewhere in July 1680, Popé handed out a series of knotted cords to a trusted group of co-conspirators from throughout the Pueblos. Each day, as they traveled back to their respective Pueblos, the conspirators undid one knot. On August 13, 1680, the last knot on everyone’s cord was undone, and the Pueblo towns of Spanish New Mexico rose up in spectacular unison. 400 Spaniards were killed in a matter of days, if not hours, including 21 of the 33 priests in the province. Churches in particular were targeted. “The God of the Christians is dead,” Pope proclaimed. “He was made of rotten wood.” The surviving Spanish retreated to Santa Fe, where they holed up for a week, before negotiate to abandon the province for modern-day El Paso. As he staggered south, the defeated Spanish Governor blamed the Plains Apache specifically for his defeat.³²

Indeed, the great benefactors of the whole affair were the Plains Apaches. The Pueblos would struggle over the next decade to reassemble their society after fifty years of Spanish occupation. But the Apache had all but eliminated the Spanish square from their checkerboard and in the process left a radically weakened nominal ally, the Pueblos in their place. And they had won something else: 1,000 or more fine Spanish horses.

Killer-of-Enemies would have been proud. It was a masterstroke of alliance-making really, and native peoples all over the region took notice. Before the Pueblo Revolt, there had been only the irresistible thrust of Spanish conquest, the ravages of their disease, and the dislocations of their slavers. But now, the Plains Apache offered Native America hope. And they offered them horses! The Plains Apache now controlled the most desirable currency on the continent. They would husband it carefully, but they would share it. With their allies, anyway. To their toolbox of alliance-making through trade and intermarriage, they added the carefully controlled sale of horses. Apache alliance-making became more effective than ever.

The easiest recruits were the natives of the El Paso, Texas region, which now hosted the Spanish remnants of New Mexico. Just two years after their arrival, Spanish were already reporting Apache-led attacks on them there. But even further south, the peoples of Coahuila and Chihuahua began to drift into the Plains Apache orbit. One scholar has suggested that the Apache “expansion” during these years might principally have been Apache absorption of these fragmented peoples. The names of peoples like the Janos, the Jocomes, the Mansos, the Sumas, the Chisos, the Tobosos, the Julimeñes would recede around this time, just as the mounted Plains Apaches are arriving. Plains Apache mythology and their Nde ancestors had taught them the advantages of absorption over extermination. We’ll get later glimpses in the historic period to the Plains Apaches’ uncanny ability to “infiltrate” other native peoples – like the Kiowas, the Tonkawas, and eventually even the Comanches – through peaceful means, but their success from this point forward was clearly fueled by their mastery of the horse.³³

Mounted now for a generation and reprovisioned by the 1,000 or more horses that they had come into possession of when the Spanish abandoned New Mexico, the Plains Apaches began to overwhelm their Jumano rivals. From the High Plains to the Hill Country, from the Big Bend to the Lower Rio grande, the mounted Apaches pressed down on the Jumanos, threatening the Jumanos’ core trade routes to the East Texas Caddoan-speaking peoples and cutting them off almost entirely from their old Pueblo and Mesoamerican trading partners.

The Jumanos refused to roll over, however, and 1684 saw the rise of a great alliance-making Jumano captain equal to the threat. This Jumano captain had accepted the Spanish religion, and went by his baptismal name of Juan Sabeata. And now, Juan Sabeata invited the Spanish into an even closer alliance against their shared Apache enemy, by establishing missions in Jumano territory. It was no small thing to accept a Spanish mission: it brought disease, slavers, and a lot of insufferable priests; but it also brought immense trade and served as a sort of trip-wire against Apache aggression. The Plains Apaches would think twice about attacking a joint Jumano-Spanish settlement because of the coordinated repercussions it might bring, whereas an isolated settlement of horseless-Jumanos could be overrun almost overnight. The Spanish and Jumanos had tried to establish a mission back in in 1629 following the mystical message of the Lady in Blue, but had scuttled the idea in the face of Apache attacks. But the abandonment of New Mexico gave new impetus to Spanish efforts to secure their North American frontier. Immediately after withdrawing from New Mexico in 1680, they established their first missions in the El Paso/Juarez area, to be followed in 1684 by the founding of two missions near Presidio-TX, an old Jumano hub, and also – most boldly of all – on the Conchos River near San Angelo – right on the borderline between Apache and Jumano territory.³⁴

And Juan Sabeata brought another player onto the Texas checkerboard. In 1673, rumors began to spread from the direction of the Mississippi River of the arrival of “other Spaniards” – Spaniards without rosaries. Through their old Caddoan-speaking trading partners in East Texas, the Jumanos now learned in 1685 that these Other Spaniards – the French, it turns out – had landed along the Texas Gulf Coast. And they brought with them an innovation that might – just might – balance the playing field against Apache horses. Whereas the Spanish strictly forbade the sale of firearms to native americans, the French were eager and willing arms traders. The Caddoan-speaking East Texans as well as their Caddoan-speaking plains cousins, the Pawnee and the Wichita were the first to acquire them up on the Kansas plains, and there were stories of how they had checked Plains Apaches’ advance with them. Jumano Captain Juan Sabeata shot across Texas to secure his own access.³⁵

And yet Juan Sabeata’s third and final step may have been his most ambitious. After meeting with the French – and realizing that they were not in fact Other Spaniards, but rivals of them – he shot BACK across Texas again - something he apparently did at least eight times in the historical record of these years - to make sure that the Spanish knew that their French rivals were on the checkerboard. Nothing served as greater impetus for Spanish action in North America than their old world rivalry with the French. And Juan Sabeata somehow intuited this. Don’t worry, though, he told his Spanish friends. I can put in a good word for you with the East Texas Caddoan-speakers, they’re old friends of mine. In fact, why don’t you consider setting up a mission with them in East Texas as well, they’d love it. Just help me out a little with these pesky Apache, you know how violent and untrustworthy they are!³⁶

The first two Spanish missions established in East Texas in 1690 spoke to the success of Juan Sabeata’s alliance-making. And indeed, he ultimately drew thousands of people to his great capital on the San Saba river in the Hill Country, which he always kept at a slight remove from the Spanish. He had outmaneuvered the Plains Apache, helped the Spanish establish a footprint in Texas, and laid the foundations for an “anyone-but-the-Apaches” Spanish diplomatic bias that would never really go away. But by 1693, Juan Sabeata disappears from the colonial record. And around this time Jumano identity increasingly merges into Apache identity.³⁷

Juan Sabeata shows that Apaches weren’t the only alliance-makers in Native Texas. What I think it shows, however, is that the Plains Apaches were just better than anyone else at it, especially after the arrival of the horse. It all just enhanced their aura, and to other native tribes, these proto-Lipan Plains Apaches became a shining beacon of anti-imperial resistance. In the words of one scholar: “the success of the Lipan Apaches after their acquisition of the horse drew other shattered groups toward them and their way of life.” The proof of this mass migration into Apache Texas was the linguistic diversity documented there by the first Spanish entradas in the 1680’s. The sheer number of languages in Native Texas was way out of proportion to the size and to the carrying capacity of the region, it only makes sense if South Texas had become a common destination for native peoples fleeing Spanish disease, missionaries, and slavers from all over, where the Apache whirlwind swept them up into its vortex.³⁸

But here’s the punchline I’ve been keeping from you: this massive sphere of influence – ranging from Kansas to Coahuila, from the Rio Grande to about modern-day I-35 was being sustained by a shocking small number of Plains Apache. Plains Apaches may have numbered as few as 5,000 men, women, and children in 1680 as compared to 35,000 or so Caddoan Hasinai in East Texas, 20,000 or so scattered Jumanos and/or Coahuiltecans to their South, and similar numbers or more of Caddoan Wichitas in Oklahoma. This was the power of the Apache aura, to be sure. But it was also the power of the horse.³⁹

In 1692, however, the Spanish recaptured the New Mexican pueblos. It was not a peaceful affair, with many Pueblos captured and enslaved, and some fleeing to live with the Apaches. But there’s some reason to believe that the Apaches let the Spanish reconquest happen. Increasingly, the Apaches missed the Spanish as trading partners in the Pueblos, particularly once their Caddoan-speaking rivals to the east started arming themselves with French guns. Trade with Europeans was a terrible drug: once you were hooked, you couldn’t live without it, especially if your rivals got access to it. And the whole point of controlling the old Jumano trade routes was to profit from this trade with now-Spanish-controlled markets in Mesoamerica and New Mexico. Increasingly, the Plains Apaches realized, they needed the Spanish.⁴⁰

It didn’t mean that they would let them return for free, however. Apache captains in New Mexico and in and around El Paso extracted lucrative concessions. As a condition of “allowing” the Spanish to return, the Apaches received lavish amounts of cloth (one of the most valuable commodities at the time), access to the trade of the Pueblos, and gold and silver batons for the Plains Apache captains who begin to enter the record here as individuals. These gifts – it seems – were understood to be recurring – rent, we would call them if were weren’t Spanish bureaucrats trying to cover up the fact that they were now having to pay tribute to the native tribes they pretended to govern. As further proof, under the terms of their agreements with the Apaches, the Spanish were only allowed to enter Apache lands on designated roads. The irony of these caminos reales as they show up in our textbooks, is that they were less proof of the extent of Spanish power but rather evidence of the very limited presence that the Spanish had in these lands that we ought to more properly think of during these period as constituting an Apache empire.⁴¹

It was an empire as large and dominant as anything on the continent at that time, the scale of which often gets lost in English-language histories because at least half of it extended deep into modern-day Mexico. Complemented by their related Mescalero, Chiracahua, Navajo, and other Apache nations to the West, “Apacheria” at this point ran from the Pacific to the Atlantic. It’s probably not a coincidence that this is the period when you start to pick up on a common theme in Spanish accounts of the Apaches. Apaches in the historical record are “untrustworthy.” Specifically, they demonstrate an irrepressible “tendency to steal.” “Their lack of trustworthiness and ignorance of all laws that govern the waging of war have no other source than the natural propensity of the Apaches to steal and to inflict damage on their enemies.” It’s a charge that is almost exclusively levelled by settlers against Apaches, however, within the recognized borders of the Apache empire…but can you really steal from a trespasser? It’s also a little hard to square with the other consistent description of them, a description that will continue well into the Anglo period. The Plains Apaches didn’t really need to steal anything…they were rich! At a time when a horse could fetch $50 or $100 or $300 in New Spain or New England for that matter, each individual Plains Apache owned dozens! Not to mention their finely-worked hides, control of the best flint quarries and salt mines, and their other weapons and personal effects.⁴²

By the end of the seventeenth century, the Plains Apaches had brought to a screeching halt the Spanish imperial machine that had conquered the Aztecs, the Incans, and many many others. And yet it was precisely on the borderline of the Spanish-Apache worlds that a new settlement would arise, a mixed society of the Spanish and native traditions which would come to define the identity of each. It was San Antonio…it was Texas. On the next episode of Lipan Apocalypse.

Thank you for listening. Editing for this episode was performed by Susana Canseco. The intro and outro music is from the White Mountain Apache Crown dancers, you can find them on Youtube. A special thanks this season to my Lipan friends Bernard Barcena, Lucille Contreras, Richard Gonzales, Margot Moreno, and Gary Perez. I hope I’m doing your story justice. Make sure to check out Lucille’s Texas Tribal Buffalo Project online and fill out her Texas Indigenous Data Sovereignty Study. For more information about the Lipan Apaches, check out the books by Thomas Britton, Jose Medina Gonzalez Davila, Nancy McGown Minor, and Sherry Robinson; the doctoral thesis of Enrique Maestas; and the Texas observer article by Dylan Badour. Also, check out Gorka Alonso’s website, apacheria.es.

For more information on my other projects, check out www.brandonseale.com.

Changing Woman (Changing Woman)

Welcome to Lipan Apocalypse: Episode 4, Changing Woman. I’m Brandon Seale.

A new Spanish trading post on the San Antonio River represents an opportunity and a threat to Plains Apache control of historic pan-Texas trading corridors. Amidst cycles of Spanish tribute-paying and then Spanish-slaving, the mythical figure of Changing Woman guides her people to respond with equal turns friendship and violence in order to articulate their demands of the new settlement. But before they can be resolved, a new rival will appear on the northern Plains: the Comanches.

There’s something that bothers me about Killer-of-Enemies, that legendary first Apache.

Think for a second about what we’ve learned about these plains Apaches. They are alliance-makers, not warmakers, at least not as a first option. They seem to live by and respect the cycles of life, meaning both the ups and downs of human relationships, but also even the literal cyclical migrations they would make each year through their enormous domain, from Kansas to Coahuila, from the Rockies to Rio Grande. They are absorbers of peoples, not annihilators of them. In short, they aren’t just killers-of-enemies.

There’s another, very different mythical figure in Apache stories that appears much more rarely and yet who seems to have been a sort of counterpoint to Killer-of-Enemies. Appropriately for a figure referred to as “Changing Woman,” she appears in multiple forms, much like the moon with which she was associated. Most often, however, she is either Killer-of-Enemies’ companion, or, even more often, his mother. Doesn’t alliance-making, a reverence for the cycles of life, and a preference for cultural absorption over annihilation sound much more appropriate to a Changing Woman rather than a Killer-of-Enemies? What if Changing Woman is the real avatar of her people, not Killer-of-Enemies?

There’s other reason to suspect a more prominent role for Changing Woman in the pre-historical period. The Plains Apaches – and particularly the later Lipan Apaches – were matrilineal and matrilocal. Meaning not only did they define their families by their mothers (matrilineal), but new husbands would leave their families and move in with the families of their wives (matrilocal). This may be a part of the reason why Apache political structures were so hard for Europeans to make sense of. The kinship-based networks that sat at the core of Apache identity were built off of relationships between Apache women, where Europeans never thought to look and, unfortunately, never bothered to write down. In the words of a modern-day Lipan friend, “We had a leadership tradition that the Spaniards’ minds could not understand and do not yet understand today.” Which unfortunately makes Lipan women nearly invisible in the historical record, even when they seem to be at the center of events.⁴³

The story of Early San Antonio, however, offers some of the most tantalizing evidence of the central role of these figurative daughters of Changing Woman in Apache life. Located just off the southeast corner of the Edwards Plateau at a collection of springs that the natives called, “Yanaguana,” in 1718 the San Antonio river basin hosted a sizeable community of as many as 500 natives that would later get labelled “Coahuiltecans”, tending “gardens” that they may have already been irrigating. The Plains Apache had watched the Spanish naively – or was it insolently? – plop a village down at this spot in 1718 – right in the middle of an established Apache trading route and adjacent to a favored Apache campsite at the convergence of Alazan and Apache creeks. This clearly violated the agreements of previous decades which permitted Spanish movement along established corridors, but said nothing about settlement. Still, the Plains Apaches remained open-minded. Maybe San Antonio could be used to strengthen trade – and thus, political bonds between the Spanish and the Plains Apache. They had missed the Spanish trade of New Mexico for the dozen years it was gone. And they had seen how the arrival of the French turbo-charged the militaries and economies of their East Texas Caddoan-speaking rivals.⁴⁴

But from the Plains Apache perspective, this was also the confusing thing about the establishment of San Antonio. It coincided with the founding of a handful of missions in East Texas…amongst the Apache’s Caddoan-speaking Tejas rivals. The Spanish had tried this before in East Texas in the 1690’s, at the convincing of Juan Sabeata in the previous episode…and had converted exactly zero natives to Christianity before they were run out of the state. What the Plains Apache could see – and the Spanish never really could – was that the Caddoan-speakers already had their preferred European partner. The French always seemed to be just a little better-wired to understanding the kinship-based nature of native American societies. Instead of focusing on “reducing” them into missions or removing them, the French intermarried with them and created lasting trade networks - which is to say, they used much the same tactics that the Plains Apaches and their ancestors had. Within a generation at least two enormous French-supplied Caddoan-Pawnee villages numbering in the tens of thousands had sprouted up on the northern plains, rivaling and soon challenging the Apaches’ hub at El Cuartelejo. Prior to this, the Apaches had exploited their temporary monopoly on the horse to raid the Caddoan-speaking peoples with impunity and sell their captives to a hungry Spanish slave-market. But the French alliance soon neutralized the Apaches’ mounted advantage, very specifically, in the form of access to French guns. The Apaches would struggle for the next 100 years to get access to firearms. And so to see these Caddoan-speakers get a Spanish trading presence in East Texas now in addition to their French one was more than the Plains Apache could tolerate.⁴⁵

The Plains Apaches expressed their opposition to the East Texas missions through the universal language of violence, albeit in a measured, almost performative way. In 1718, they hit two supply trains coming up from Monclova to provision the first San Antonio mission, though once again, they were more warnings than serious attacks. In 1721 the Apaches hit another supply party but when that didn’t work, they hit harder. In 1722, a four-man party went and rounded-up the presidial horse herd at San Antonio, escaping into the hill country with as many as they could. It was a way of showing the San Antonio residents whose land they were on.⁴⁶

Violence might be the most universal language…but it’s also the most imprecise. The captain of the San Antonio presidial company believed the round-up to be plain old horse theft, and elected to respond in a pretty disproportionate fashion. He sent out men in pursuit of the four-man Apache party, captured them, and decapitated them! The Plains Apaches were appalled. It was like a squatter shooting the landlord for trying to collect the rent. And then decapitating him! And then, to rub salt in the wound, they learned that the presidial captain had been promoted precisely because of his savage attack on their brothers.⁴⁷

The Plains Apaches rode into San Antonio and shot two arrows into the ground right in front of the presidial captain’s quarters. Red cloth dangled from each of the arrows…it was a declaration of war. Up on the Brazos River, they caught a Spanish priest out alone, and killed him. They attacked a pair of presidial soldiers who came too close to their corn fields in Helotes, TX, killing and scalping one of them. And in August 17, 1723, they rounded-up the presidial horse herd once again and made off with 80 horses.⁴⁸

Once again, the presidial commander came after them. But he didn’t bother to try to find the Apaches who had rounded-up his horse herd. Instead, he set his troop upon the first Apache community he found, near Brownwood. And on September 24, 1723, he attacked them in their sleep.

The San Antonio commander killed 34 apache men (including their captain), 120 horses (40 more than he had lost), and took 20 women and children back with him as captives. ⁴⁹

A bold Apache woman – a figurative daughter of Changing Woman, I like to imagine her - was among the captives. She came forward to the presidial commander and began to speak, through an interpreter. She explained her people’s insult at seeing the Spanish settle a new community right on the Apache San Antonio road. She explained the restraint her community had displayed during their discussions as to how to handle the Spanish interlopers. And she tried to explain the injustice at watching the Spanish supply the Apaches’ Caddo rivals in the east without even trying to treat with the Apaches who controlled this land.

The Apaches like the Spanish as partners, she continued. It was a tragedy in their eyes that they couldn’t have Spanish friendship without violence, and without slaving, which still continued and which, frankly, these 20 captive women and children were probably now headed for. The Spanish had shown their strength, she acknowledged to the commander, but their disproportionate response to Apache horse round-ups also suggested that he knew how fragile his position was. Might not Spanish and Apache be better served by a peace?

This Apache woman – whose name we don’t know – shows up in the historical record simply as a really chatty captive. But there’s clearly more to her than that. First, to have the boldness and presence to confront her kidnappers immediately after the murder of 34 of her relatives. But second…she was apparently persuasive. A Franciscan priest picked up her reasoning and complemented it an anecdote of his own, from the El Paso region, where he had seen how cycles of violence against natives only perpetuated more violence. Outnumbered now by the Priest and this figurative daughter of Changing Woman, the presidial commander agreed to for peace. He told the woman he would release the 20 captives if she could convince any nearby Apache captains to come into San Antonio for a peace council – once again, the Spanish commander was insisting on interpreting Apache politics through the lens of male authority, but, still, it was a chance at peace. The presidial commander gave her a horse and on October 7, she rode off into the hill country.

When she rode into her village a few days later, she found 500 Apache men preparing to assault San Antonio. Which is unsurprising. And which undoubtedly would have ended poorly for Spanish San Antonio. But this woman (!) apparently convinced them to halt their plans. She explained the negotiation she had opened with the presidial commander. Which actually would NOT have been unusual for an Apache woman to have done. Throughout this period and pretty much throughout Native Texas, it is women who carry out the peace negotiations. It’s women who conduct the alliance-making. Take that to its logical conclusion: a people defined by their alliance-making prowess conducting that alliance-making principally through their women leaders, and you see why I think Changing Woman plays at least as large a role in Plains Apache thinking as Killer-of-Enemies!

A five-day war council ensued as the men and women of five plains Apache nations debated the best course of action. There was no doubt that they could wipe San Antonio off the map if they so desired, and drive the Spanish back below the Rio Grande. They had done exactly that in New Mexico, just forty years prior. But they considered how disadvantaged they would be against their French-supplied rivals if they lost all access to Spanish goods. And maybe they remembered what their mythology had taught them, about their moral obligation to treat even with people who had wronged them badly. A lesson that makes a lot more sense coming from the mouth of a Changing Woman than from a Killer-of-Enemies.

The 1723 Plains Apaches war council chose peace. They chose to accept the Spanish trading post at San Antonio and to go see the presidial commander. On October 29th, the Apache woman returned to San Antonio, and she carried with her a gold-tipped baton… the same gold-tipped baton, it seems, that a different Spanish commander had given to a Plains Apache Capitan Grande near El Cuartelejo in Kansas 17 years prior and 700 miles away! Tease out for a second the implications of this gesture. The first is what it confirmed about the extent of the Apache Empire, which stretched from Kansas to Coahuila, from the Rockies to the Rio Grande. The second was what it said about their unity. Throughout this season I’m supposed to describe the Plains Apaches as fickle and loosely organized in bands, that formed and reformed on a whim and for only so long as a particular captain could command obedience. The alternative interpretation is that the Plains Apache were a highly unified people, simply that they weren’t unified by the oppressive bureaucracy of a nation-state, but rather by familial and kinship bonds that European chroniclers didn’t know how to record.⁵⁰

And third, that sometimes, the collective authority of the Plains Apaches could be handed to a woman, like the Apache woman carrying the gold-tipped baton into her conference with the San Antonio presidial commander now. But all of this subtext was lost on the Presidial commander. Or maybe he just refused to see it. In any case, he refused to honor his initial offer to release the captives, even as the Apache woman had in fact brought a male captain with her. The presidial commander demanded that more Apache captains come in to negotiated with him, and continued to hold the twenty Apache women and children captive as security against the second peace conference that he demanded in December.

The Apache woman and the captain in her company reluctantly agreed, and dutifully returned in December with more male captains, as requested. But once again, there was a problem. Instead of a peace ceremony, the Apaches rode into the middle of a heated argument between the Presidial commander and the Franciscan priest that had been so persuaded by the Apache woman. The presidial commander had decided now that he wanted an unconditional promise of peace from all the captains or from the capitan grande and then he would consider returning the 20 captives, and the priest was calling him out for changing the terms of his demand…right in front of the Plains Apache woman and the captains! The Apache emissaries picked upon the nature of the argument, and – ever the alliance-makers – even offered the presidial commander an alternative: the male captains themselves offered to switch places with the captives as security while they sent once again for more captains to continue the negotiations, But even this seemed to not satisfy the presidial commander.

The Plains Apache stormed out, infuriated and confused. They had tried to take the Spanish commander at his word, and it appeared now they’d just been strung along. Was this like a good cop bad cop thing? Even as they were leaving the priest was telling them not to give up, and was offering them – for the first but not the last time – a mission in Apache territory, something, however, that was decidedly less attractive if it would bring with it Spanish soldiers like the San Antonio presidial captain.

The Plains Apaches made the heart-wrenching gamble to negotiate no further with the presidial commander. And it worked. About a year later, he gave in and released the twenty captives. Which was, in its own way, a validation of the strategy advocated by our nameless Apache woman, inspired by the example of Changing Woman and her lesson of patience through the cycles of human affairs. To be sure, it was an acknowledgement of Apache power, a desperate bid for continued peace while fledgling San Antonio tried to find its footing. In that sense, it worked…but only because the Plains Apaches had been drawn to the other side of their empire to deal with a different threat.⁵¹

Sometime around 1720, a demographic wave swept down onto the Plains Apaches from the northwest. A 40,000-man strong wave with their own horseherd. These newcomers from the north – Comanches, they came to be called - were the only other Natives “equal in manliness to the Apacha with whom they war,” according to a contemporary Spanish chronicler. Comanches broke the Plains Apache monopoly on the horse and, around 1723, broke through to the Caddoans and French on the eastern plains. Following the checkerboard geopolitics of the great plains, these Comanches and Plains Caddoans and French formed an epic alliance: Comanches’ horses and French Caddoans’ firearms were a lethal, as yet-unseen-combination in Native America. Together, this alliance of French-armedmounted plains Indians descending into Apache Texas from the North would come to be known as the Nortenos.⁵²

The Plains Apache fought them back for decades: two large battles in 1706 near their trading center at el Cuartelejo in Kansas ended in draws and an Apache retaliatory raid drove the Caddoans and French as far back as Nebraska. It was increasingly clear, however, that without guns – and outnumbered perhaps 10:1 by these Nortenos – that they were isolated on the checkerboard. The Spanish seemed incapable of true friendship, much less alliance. The French were unwilling, because of their alliance with the Nortenos and their own highly-profitable trade in captured Apache slaves.⁵³

The Plains Apache realized it was too late to frustrate the Comanche, Caddoan, French alliance. So they went on the offensive. Sometime in early 1724, they raided almost 1,000 miles into Comanche territory! The Comanche – with their Norteno allies – retaliated in turn, and somewhere near modern-day Wichita Falls at a spot known as “El Gran Sierra del Fierro,” the great peoples clashed. This is hard for a Battle of Medina fanboy like myself to admit, but from the scant details we have, the battle of Gran Sierra del Fierro may have in fact been the largest, bloodiest battle in Texas history. Thousands of nortenos and perhaps every available Plains Apache of fighting age arrayed against each other, in what legend would record was a nine-day running battle. No mercy was given, to combatants and non-combatants alike, and hundreds were massacred during and after the battle. According to the Spanish account, “the enmity remained so great after the battle, if the Indians of these … Nations rose up on Judgment Day, their bones would fight one another.” Eventually, the Apaches though ““more courageous and more warlike than the Comanches, [were] forced to yield to numbers.”⁵⁴

By the time the battle was over, the Plains Apaches had lost the northern plains, including the wealthy trading center of El Cuartelejo and the rich buffalo ranges of the Texas panhandle. The French were provisioning their old Caddoan-speaking rivals in the east, and the Spanish had shored up their settlements in New Mexico, along the Rio Grande, and in San Antonio. Opposite-colored checker squares surrounded the Plains Apache now on all sides.

Is there a sense in which this marks the passing from the age of Changing Woman to the age of Killer-of-enemies? The chroniclers of the Plains Apaches – mostly their enemies, we should remember - suggests this was the case, but the historical record always prefers the high drama and precise dates of battles to the messy work of alliance-making and relationship building. And rather than a renewed commitment to violence, I think what we are about to see next is an intensified effort precisely at alliance-making. I don’t think that the example of Changing Woman ever stopped reminding her people that history moves in cycles, like the buffalo from summer to winter pasture, like the first Apaches cycling out of the Guadalupe mountains, like the whirlwind itself which occasionally dies down before finding the energy to re-form where it’s least expected.

On the next episode of Lipan Apocalypse.

Lipanes at Last (Boca Comida)

Welcome to Lipan Apocalypse. Episode 5: Lipanes at Last. I’m Brandon Seale.

Cabellos Colorado, La Capitana, and Boca Comida lead the Plains Apaches through their greatest cycle of alliance-making to. In the great peace of 1749, two great cultures agreed to be defined by each other. Spanish Texas would become the great outlet for native North American trade and for the mediation of Native Texas culture into Spanish society. And in particular, with that Apache culture which would hereafter adopt a symbiotic existence with the settler communities around them, and come to take on a distinct identity as “Lipan” Apaches – the people of the in-between.

Whether apocryphal or not, the Norteno defeat of the Plains Apache in 1724 at the Battle of Gran Sierra del Fierro coincided with a major change in the geography of the Apache Empire. Plains Apaches would no longer control the Texas Panhandle. The headwaters of the Colorado and the Brazos would mark the line between Apache and Comanche spheres of influence for most of the next century, during which time the Plains Apaches would double down on protecting their Hill Country homeland and the ranges in and around San Antonio.

Because the truth is that the Plains Apaches’ economic model was still sound. Indeed, the reason that the Nortenos continued to so relentlessly attack the Plains Apache for the next century was that the Apache still filled a very profitable economic niche. Even if they couldn’t broker an outright alliance with the Spanish in the same way that the Nortenos had done with the French, Apaches still controlled the geography of Spanish trade. Even as Spanish administrators in San Antonio remained standoffish and hostile to the Apaches, San Antonians developed increasingly close relationships with them. And here we see the subtlety of the Plains Apache absorption strategy at work. Apaches began to trickle into the San Antonio community: “In the registers of baptism, marriage, and burial for San Antonio de Valero from 1721 through the 1780s, 129 Apaches can be counted.”⁵⁵

Spanish slaving remained a major impediment to a closer alliance, however. When times got tight, presidial commanders and even less scrupulous types would head out of town and just enslave the first Indians they found…which, increasingly, were the same Apaches on whom they had come to depend for their economic subsistence. A second favorite activity of Spanish settlers – rounding-up wild horses – just as often consisted of “rounding them up” from the neighboring Apaches’ horseherds…something Spaniards would have been quick to label horse-“theft” if it had been the other way around.

These hill country Apaches were relatively judicious in pushing back against the slaving and horse-stealing raids. Which doesn’t mean they were non-violent. In the years leading up to 1731, 22% of all recorded Spanish deaths in San Antonio were attributed to Apaches, though again, those numbers might be self-serving for Spanish officials looking for an excuse to launch “retaliatory” slaving raids. But in 1731, the Spanish-Apache conflict intensified. On September 18, 1731, an Apache party rounded up 60 horses that the presidial commander claimed belonged to the presidial company. The presidial commander sent out 6 scouts in pursuit, who were soon met by six times as many Apaches on horseback. The Spanish scouts sent back for reinforcements, but as soon as the 30 additional presidials showed up, 500 more Apaches did as well. The Apaches surrounded them and began advancing in the shape of a crescent moon. And then, “the enemy, for no apparent reason, took off at top speed and disappeared.”⁵⁶

From the comfort of the present, these kinds of Apache tactics look like conspicuous displays of mercy…deliberate decisions not to annihilate the forces of a society that they were increasingly accepting as a part of their economy. And yet, once again, instead of interpreting Apache mercy as such, the traumatized Spanish survivors committed to retaliating against the people who had chosen not to massacre them.⁵⁷

In October 1732, the San Antonio presidial company surprised an Apache town of some 400 houses spread out over several miles, home to maybe 700 people. The Spanish party – led personally by the Texas Governor – slaughtered 200 men women and children including a captain with a silver tipped cane! It was another betrayed promise of peace, capped off by the theft of 700 horses and 100 mule loads of hides and plunder and the marching off of 30 women and children into slavery. The wild disproportionality of this response to an Apache round-up of 60 horses the year prior suggests that the raid was less about vengeance, and more about profit. The San Antonio mission priests certainly thought so, who complained about it to their superiors. And so did the Apaches, who mustered up as many warriors as they could and attacked the Spanish presidial party all the way back to San Antonio, which they barely reached alive. Even the most experienced presidial soldiers “expressed amazement at what they saw, for they had been in many engagements with various Indian nations, but never in their lives had they seen anything to equal the valor and daring of these warriors.”⁵⁸

Realizing his vulnerability, the Spanish Governor decided against selling the 30 new women and children captives into slavery. Instead, he would use them as leverage to demand peace talks, in much the same way that his predecessors had in the previous decade. The strategy met with similarly mixed success. The Apache response was to kill and mutilate the first two Spanish soldiers they caught outside the city. And the hardball negotiating tactics also led to the ascendance of a fiery young Apache captain known as Cabellos Colorados – redhead in English. Though we should be precise: referred to just as often in the records of Cabellos Colorados was his wife as well. Though she isn’t called his wife. She’s called, “la capitana.” Cabellos Colorado and la Capitana seemed to promote a policy of tit-for-tat. Which is to say, given the indecipherability to Spanish motives, they would simply mirror Spanish actions every step of the way. If the Spanish wanted trade, they would trade, and indeed, trade in buffalo hides and salt resumed even during these years. Cabellos Colorados himself would sometimes come to town to trade. But every time the Spanish overstepped, they would be retaliated against. Two years later, in 1734, Cabellos Colorados would kill two more Spanish soldiers that had wandered too far from town, and by so doing reminding the Spanish of the limits of their power.⁵⁹

And yet Cabellos Colorado, la Capitana, and the Plains Apaches’ generally would not compromise on one thing: the horseherd of Texas was theirs! Recall the Apache origin story of the horse, and how the horse had been made specifically for them! Spanish squatters would be allowed to raise horses, to use them, and to pasture them on Apache ranges. But the Apaches would preserve the right to round them up whenever they needed them and put them to their own uses. And this was a right that they asserted consistently and, after 1732 they believed, with Spanish consent. In 1736 they rounded-up 40 horses from Mission Espada, and there was no retaliation. In September 1737, la Capitana led the round-up of 100 horses from a ranch southeast of town. Again, nothing. In December of 1737, they returned and collected 300 horses. Once again, without apparent objection from the Spanish.

But after that December 1737 round-up, the presidial commander struck back. On December 11, he surprised Cabellos Colorado, la Capitana, and the fourteen other Apaches, capturing them all without a fight. Which also shows how confident Cabellos Colorado and la Capitana and the rest were in their position. Sure, if the presidial commander wanted to go back to San Antonio and talk, they would go with him. For an Apache, every talk was a chance to make an alliance.

But this presidial commander was different, and at some level, even Cabellos Colorado and la Capitana should have known this. Because they had known of this presidial commander their whole lives. Left behind in 1693 when the Spanish had abandoned east Texas, this presidial commander named Jose de Urrutia had “gone native”. He had integrated himself amongst the Caddoan-speaking Tejas and risen up to lead entire campaigns against the Apache. Even after he returned to Spanish society in the late 1690’s, he had spent the entirety of his career posted to the Texas frontier, and found himself opposite the Apache Empire at every turn. Urrutia and his Menchaca descendants would develop be the Apaches counterparts with Spanish Texas – sometimes friend and sometimes foe - for the next two hundred years!

Which didn’t mean that communication between Urrutia and the Texas Apaches was clear or even consistent. It was, more often than not, reduced to the universal language of violence, as imprecise as it is. When an Apache peace emissary came to visit Urrutia to request the release of Cabellos Colorados and la Capitana and the other fourteen prisoners in exchange for an equal number of horses, Urrutia turned her away with an offensive counteroffer: he would release Cabellos Colorados, la capitana, and the others IF the Apaches returned ALL of their stolen animals. Setting aside the rather offensive implication that the Apaches animals had been “stolen,” it was the kind of impossible condition that someone places on a negotiation when they want it to fail.

That seems to be how the Apaches took it anyway. Because they broke off negotiations and responded again with a show of force. The next week, still in December 1737, 1,000 Apache warriors surrounded San Antonio. Commander Urrutia had maybe three dozen men total under his command, 150 if he mustered in the militia! The Apache whirlwind could have swallowed him whole in single afternoon, but Urrutia stared them down. The Apaches dissolved back into the hill country, and tried a different strategy. They resumed normal trade and ceased any further round-ups of livestock. Perversely, Urrutia interpreted this as proof of Cabellos Colorados and la Capitana’s guilt, and as proof that he could never give them slack.⁶⁰

But Apache patience ran out in October of 1738, and they resumed their round-ups and attacks. Urrutia took the extreme step of sending Cabellos Colorado, la Capitana, their two-year old daughter, and the other captives in chains to Mexico City. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say he “sold” them; we don’t really know. In either case, they were never heard from again. Then, he began recruiting volunteers to join his presidials for a retaliatory raid on the Apaches’ hill country heartland in the lean winter months of 1739. His recruiting pitch was transparent: the wealth of the Apaches would be theirs…the proceeds of the sale of captives too. It was successful, both the recruiting drive and the campaign. He got lucky and hit the Apaches as many of them were off fighting (and, ultimately, wiping out) a Comanche force. But once the Apache men returned from the victory over the Comanches, they caught up with Urrutia’s force on October 4, 1739 southwest of San Antonio, and resoundingly defeated him, taking “all the horses and provisions and clothes that we had bought [in addition to] some gunpowder and musket balls…”⁶¹

The whole cycle of Spanish-Apache violence continued even after Jose de Urrutia died and his son, Toribio, took over. In some ways, the Apache response in these years continued to be the same mirroring strategy that Cabellos Colorados and La Capitana had followed, responding tit-for-tat to Spanish aggression, and then trying to let tensions calm. Unfortunately, they never calmed for long. Every raid and round-up created the justification for the next. And as we alluded to in a previous episode, a state of constant war was certainly advantageous to Spanish officials: it helped justify larger budgets and it legitimized the capture of Indian slaves. And I think it’s a fair question as to whether there was something uniquely hard to deal with about the Plains Apaches or whether they were just unfortunate enough to live next to the Spanish frontier at this time. But I think a third possibility is just as likely: that they simply refused to accommodate themselves to a Spanish imperial model that only understood native subjugation, not true native alliance. In any case, every attempt by either side to establish trust was betrayed before it could yield any benefits. For example, in 1741, an Apache band informed presidial commander Toribio de Urrutia of their plans to establish a settlement on the Guadalupe River. As in, hey, this is how much I trust you that I’m gonna tell you straight up where all my people and property are gonna be. Urrutia repaid the trust by attacking the new settlement within the year and selling the captives into slavery. These Apaches went on a rampage throughout northern Coahuila, eventually defeating a force of 200 Spanish soldiers in the field, killing half of them, wounding the Spanish governor, and taking most of their horses and equipment. The next year, they attacked Santa Rosa, known in modern times as Muzquiz, Coahuila, and a year later they were campaigning as far south as Saltillo and Monterrey.⁶²

Father Benito Fernandez de Santa Ana had been watching this for a decade from his post as President of the Texas missions at San Antonio Mission Concepción. He was genuinely sympathetic to the Apaches, and perhaps had developed channels of communication with them through the numerous Apaches who lived inside the San Antonio mission communities of San Antonio. But also, at a practical level, he saw how mistrust begat mistrust and how violence created its own justification. And what was particularly obvious to him was the role that slaving continued to play in undermining relations with the proud and powerful Apaches. He noted the precedent of El Paso, where slaving by military commanders had eventually been eliminated, and, sure enough, attacks by the Apaches stopped.⁶³

In April 1745, presidial commander Toribio de Urrutia launched a particularly devastating slave raid deep into the Apache homeland up on the San Sabá. Amongst the captives that Urrutia brought back to San Antonio, Father Fernandez recognized the seven-year old daughter of the Apaches’ most powerful captain, the man who had risen up in the turmoil of Cabellos Colorados and La Capitana’s kidnapping, a man more inclined to peace than his predecessors, but also quite capable as a leader in war as well. This captain may have been a man named Boca Comida or might have been another. In any event, Father Fernandez hoped that through this seven-year old girl, he might be able to pass a message to the great captain.⁶⁴

The Apaches, however, weren’t in a mood to hear peace proposals. They sent commissioners, four women this time, to tell presidial commander Toribio de Urrutia and the people of San Antonio that a state of war now existed between the two peoples. Weeks of attacks followed through the early summer of 1745, killing nine San Antonians in separate incidents. Then, on June 30, 1745, a local shepherd boy stumbled upon a force of 350 Apache rangers gathering for an attack on the north side of town, led, presumably, by Boca Comida himself or whoever this great captain was who was, intent on rescuing his kidnapped daughter at any cost. (BTW, this might sound familiar from Episode 5 of Season 1 of this podcast.) The shepherd boy rushed back to town and sounded the alarm, just as the first waves of Apache warriors hit the city. 100 mission Indians from Valero (the Alamo) plus the presidials and the local militia scrambled to defend the city.

In the heat of battle, however, an Apache living in the missions made his way to the great Apache Captain and delivered a message from Father Fernandez. He told the captain that his daughter was still alive. More over, that the other captives from the spring raid were also alive and well and, thanks to the intervention of Father Fernandez, had been treated exceptionally well. In fact, the Father wanted to offer the Apaches true peace, to be secured by a mission in their own territory, and a promise to stop the slave raids.⁶⁵

The Mission Apache’s message “moved the captain to shed tears, to give up the campaign, and to order all his men to fall back.” Spanish officials were shocked. European settlers – projecting their own subconscious desires, perhaps – often assumed that objective of Native attacks was extermination. It rarely was. The settlers were immensely valuable as trade partners. And as quickly as it started, the Apache attack on San Antonio was called off. The Apaches kept their booty that they had captured from the attack…all except for the property belonging to Mission Concepción, Father Fernandez’s mission, which had been left untouched – a directed response from the great Apache Captain to Father Fernandez’s message in the highly-nuanced language of restraint that once against shows the sophistication of Apache diplomacy.⁶⁶

True to his word, Father Fernandez saw to it that the Apache captain’s daughter was released. A truce was declared, and honored. Eight times over the next six months, Apaches would meet with Father Fernandez to negotiated for the establishment of a Spanish mission to the Apaches. While the proposal for an Apache mission and as the terms for a permanent peace with the Apaches labored its way through Spanish colonial bureaucracy, Father Fernandez even prevailed up on the presidial commander, Toribio de Urrutia, to continue showing restraint. When he felt obliged to respond to a small Apache attack in early 1749, Urrutia made a point to treat the 8 women and children he captured conspicuously well, and to find ways to let the Apaches know he was doing so. A larger raid in April resulted in the capture of a 170 or so Apache captives; this time, Urrutia released most of the women and children immediately. Once again, Father Fernandez was able to ensure the good treatment of the remaining captives and to ensure that all of the Apaches back in their hill country heartland knew about it: “All of this was done to the great wonder of the Apaches, for they had never seen such humanity among the Spaniards.”⁶⁷

San Antonio Mission Indians confirmed to Father Fernandez – and, presumably, commander Urrutia – that the strategy was working, that the Apaches were starting to trust Spanish motives and truly pushing now within their councils for peace. Even mission Indians from rival tribes told Fernandez “We always thought that the Apaches would never be our friends nor come to be Christians, but today we know that their friendship with us comes from the heart. They speak the truth, that they desire a mission, and the priests can believe them.”

In April of 1749, Urrutia and Fernandez released two Apache women and one man to “present to their chiefs an offer to return all the prisoners that had been taken…combined with a peace offer to live together and move forward as brothers.” To tell them that this time, as a show of good faith, the Spanish would release the prisoners before negotiating the terms of the final peace, trusting that the great peoples could figure out the details. All throughout May and August, Apaches – skeptically at first - began to trickle in from the North to collect their loved ones, who were released to them unconditionally. In the meantime, the peoples’ began to built trust by sharing intelligence with each other: the local Apaches let on to the Spanish that their Mescalero cousins were preparing a raid out in west Texas; the Spanish let on to the Apaches that the East Texas Caddoans were planning a raid into the Hill Country.⁶⁸

On August 15, 1749, smoke signals in the hills northwest of San Antonio announced the arrival of the leading Plains Apache captains and all their people to a great and final celebration of peace. This time, Spanish soldiers, settlers, and missionaries welcomed them in. Three days of carneadas ensued – barbeques we’d call them – and religious ceremonies – both masses and mitotes. On the fourth day – recall again how sacred “four” was to the Apaches – the Apaches lined up on one side of the plaza and the Spaniards on the other, on either side of a large hole. According to a later account, in the hole were buried a lance, six arrows, a live horse, and – most famously – a hatchet. Four Apache captains and Urrutia – whom the Apaches had come to “Fear and love at the same time,” – all of them danced around the hole three times, shouted three “Viva el reys”, and echoed them with an uncounted – I’d bet four – Apache shouts. Was one of these dancing captains Boca Comida? Or, as perhaps the Capitan Grande of the period, was he just off-screen as so many other capitan grandes always seemed to be, with the Capitanas? Mass marriages between Apaches and mission Indians followed as well, a small glimpse in the historical record of one of the Apaches most effective alliance-making strategies at work. The Apaches were, in effect, “adopting” San Antonio, marrying the town into their kinship networks, something which even Spanish administrators now understood. After the 1749 peace treaty, San Antonio became the “center of the Apache,” according to a Texas governor. They had made it ““their establishment.”⁶⁹

Three clauses of the great 1749 Spanish-Apache peace demonstrate the extent to which it was, however, really an Apache victory. First, the Spanish began paying annual rent to these Apaches – Over 2600 fanegas of corn, 133 cattle and more over the next 7 years, in addition to annual payments of textiles, hats, horses, bits, tobacco, knives, and other metal implements. “Gifts” the Spanish bureaucrats called them to assuage their egos, but we typically call large recurring payments to a landlord “rent” so I’ll call it that. It was an enormous windfall for the Apaches and showed the extent to which the Spanish acknowledged Apache dominance in Texas.⁷⁰

Second, the Apaches agreed to peace with their Caddoan-speaking Tejas rivals in East Texas…who for the first time gave them access to a small number of French firearms. Nothing could have been more valuable to the Plains Apache. It was an astute and important concession on the part of the Spanish administrators in San Antonio, who were forbidden by official policy from selling them guns, but by finding found this backdoor they helped the Plains Apache feel truly secure in their homeland.

And third, after four years of negotiations, the Apaches would finally – really this time, Father Fernandez swore – get a mission. It was the kind of thing that, in theory, would protect them against slavers, turbo-charge their economy with Spanish trade goods, and ensure a line of mutual defense against the encroaching Norteno hoards.

Because even the Spanish were growing unsettled by the Comanches by this point in time. In 1747, French traders had crossed the plains from Missouri to Taos under Comanche escort! This in itself was proof of the Apache loss of control of the northern plains, but also cause for alarm for Spanish administrators always nervous to close off their domains to cheaper foreign trade goods. And yet most alarming to the Spanish was how well armed the Comanche escorts were. These peoples who a generation before had never fired a gun were now better armed than the Spanish presidials that intercepted them. Fearful of this growing Comanche power, the Spanish formally cutoff trade with the Comanches, which of course only pushed them into a closer alliance with the French-supplied Caddoans. The fate of Spanish Texas would, for the next generation, be tied to Texas Apaches.⁷¹

And so too would the fate of these Apaches be tied to Spanish Texas. It’s always important to remember that the Apaches were not a nation-state nor were they even a “people” in the way that western ethnologists like to classify folks. They were just free people, descendants of Nde buffalo hunters who had been carried by the whirlwind down the Great Plains until it deposited them on the backs of the horse and granted them dominion over the trade of the Texas plains. And now, a subset of these people would define themselves even more specifically by their decision to live in the Texas Hill Country and West Texas and South Texas and northern Coahuila – and to live there symbiotically with the Spanish pushing up from the South.

These Apaches would come to be known – by the Spanish, if not also in their own language – as Lipanes. The word appears for the first time in Spanish records around this time. There are a few theories as to its origins, but the most widely accepted suggests that lépai-ndé meant the “light gray people.” There’s some references in the historical record to Hill Country Lipanes coating themselves or at least their hair with the white caliche dust of the Edwards plateau, an adaptation from an earlier practice of coating their hair with red ochre – this may have been the source of Cabellos Colorado or Captain Redhead’s name. So it would be fitting perhaps that the captains after Cabellos – entrenched now in their Hill Country homeland, should have adopted their own, locally-sourced, autochthonous form of body art. But I also like the idea that the “gray people” refers to the color between white and black, representing the north and east respectively where the Lipanes’ origin story said they had landed on the first Apache migratory cycle. Gray is the color between night and dark, representing the tension between the Changing Woman moon and the Killer-of-Enemies sun. And so gray is the perfect color for the ultimate alliance-makers, absorbers, and adapters: the “people of the in-between”, as Bernard Barcena, chairman of the modern Lipan Tribe of Texas calls his people. In the way that their ancestors had absorbed and merged their way down the plains for the last 1,000 years, these Lipan Apaches would absorb and marry and merge their way into the Spanish settler societies that were coming in to populate Texas and Coahuila.⁷²

But Captain Boca Comida wouldn’t be there to lead them. He – and several others – contracted smallpox soon after the peace celebration in San Antonio, perhaps from some of the clothing that the Spanish had “gifted” to them. There’s no indication of any ill intent on the part of the Spanish in this instance…but it was symbolic somehow of how circumstances always seemed to conspire against a lasting Spanish-Lipan alliance. Indeed, it was the alliance’s greatest victory ever that would soon tear it apart. On the next episode of Lipan Apocalypse.⁷³

San Sabá (Bigotes)

Welcome to Lipan Apocalypse. Episode 7: San Sabá. I’m Brandon Seale.

In the course of a single generation, Spanish policy toward Texas Apaches shifts from an alliance to extermination. A generation of alliance-making with other Apache groups by Captain Bigotes and others makes the Lipan Apaches more powerful than ever before. The Comanches are beat back to the Red River, and the Spanish retreat behind a line of presidios that still cuts across the North American continent like a scar: the US-Mexico border.

In 1755, Spanish friars picked a particularly beautiful and defensible spot in northern Coahuila for the site of the mission that had been promised to their Lipan allies. Actually, more likely, the Lipanes “allowed” the friars to establish a mission at a spot where Apaches had already been living for some time. The site sat in an arroyo along the San Rodrigo river, where water swirls up from the rocky bottom and flows with striking clarity through limestone canyons and then disappears back into the rocks in tiny vortexes, little whirlwinds like the great whirlwind which had carried the Lipanes’ Apache ancestors down through the plains. That’s my theory anyway for why this site came to be known as El Remolino – whirlwind in Spanish, sometimes translated as “[Circle house]” from the Lipanes’ language. Over the next few months, some 2,000 Lipanes came in to settle around this new mission, digging irrigation ditches, planting crops, and even erecting a chapel. Then, six months later, the Lipanes burned it all down.⁷⁴

The Spanish friars were confused and not a little pissed off, but no more confused and pissed off than the Lipanes had been by two previous attempts by the Spanish to repurpose existing missions - to other native peoples! – in satisfaction of their promise to establish a Lipan mission. First, the Spanish offered them a failing mission in east Texas near modern-day Rockdale - on the wrong side of the Colorado River, an informal borderline between Lipan and Caddoan-speaking Tejas worlds. Then, in 1754, the Spanish tried to convince the Lipanes that the missions around San Juan Bautista on the Rio Grande would do. But those missions were already occupied and dedicated to other peoples, Jumano, Coahuiltecan, and Carrizo refugees – again, old enemies and victims of Lipan expansion. The Lipanes tried it out…for exactly one night, and then rode off.⁷⁵

At least the Lipanes had given the mission at El Remolino a few months. But it wasn’t long before they realized the disadvantages of making that the center of the Lipan-Spanish world. For one, it was tantamount to yielding their Hill Country homeland to the advancing Comanche hordes. Two, it would have placed them even further away from the retreating buffalo herds, which each year retreated a little further north. And three, having a bunch of Spanish friars right in the middle of the most prolific peyote gardens – the lomerío de peyotes – just felt sacreligious.⁷⁶

In the process of “overrunning” the Jumanos over the previous centuries, the Apaches had been exposed to a particularly powerful medicine. The Jumanos as residents of the Coahuilan canyonlands were heirs to 5,000 year old – or older! – religious tradition documented in the Rock Art of the Lower pecos and centered around the ceremonial use of peyote. The Lipanes seem to have learned the peyote ceremony specifically from a group of Jumano refugees that we will later meet as the “Carrizos” – you might recall them from our season 4 on Antonio Zapata. Some later Lipanes would sometimes even call peyote “carrizal” from this memory. In their own language, they called it “hosh-chezhál” or “hoosh” for short. The Spanish document the consumption of Peyote throughout central and northern Mexico pretty much from the moment of their arrival, amongst the Aztecs in 1569, Chichimecas in Southern Coahuila in 1620, and by 1673 Spanish missionaries in northern Coahuila named a mission after the sacred cactus – Mision Santo Nombre de Jesus Peyotes - right in the middle of the Jumano-Carrizo homeland that the Lipanes – by the 1750’s - now dominated.⁷⁷

Until the Lipanes adopted it, peyote consumption had not really broken through north of the Rio Grande. That would all change going forward. It would become a fourth tool of Lipan Apache alliance-making, and perhaps their most effective, supplementing intermarriage, trade, and the horse. And the leader of the band that controlled these peyote gardens was a man named Captain Bigotes – or Captain Mustaches in English. Bigotes and the 2,000 or so people he led felt a particular affinity for northern Coahuila and the Rio Grande more generally, from which they would take their name…or, perhaps, give it its name. They were, in their own language, the “Big Water” band, a name that came into English first as Rio Grande in the Spanish that most native Texans had acquired by the time Anglos started arriving. Bigotes and the Big Water Band were the first adopters of the peyote ceremony it seems. It is around the time that Captain Bigotes and his people burn down the El Remolino mission in the middle of the peyote gardens, in fact, that we see Captain Bigotes embark on a highly-effective and multi-generational campaign of strategic intermarriage with Mescalero and other Plains Apaches, united together now by the medicine. In so doing, the Big Water Lipanes weren’t casting off the Spanish entirely…but they were deciding to keep them at a distance.⁷⁸

Out on the Texas plains, another sizeable group of “Upper Lipanes” were deciding to follow more directly in the footsteps of Captain Boca Comida in the previous episode by committing themselves to a symbiotic co-existence with the Spanish in Texas. Captain Casablanca’s 3,000 or so people called the Pecos and Devils river region home, but were also pushing south now into the wild horse desert between the Nueces and the Rio Grande in South Texas. San Antonio became a center of gravity for them. In fact, Casablanca’s name – White House, in English – was also, coincidentally or not, the name that the Lipanes had started calling San Antonio, in reference perhaps to San Antonio’s plastered buildings. One subset of these Upper Lipanes was led by a youngish captain particularly committed to making the Spanish-Lipan alliance work. Captain Tacú - known as “Chico” or “boy”, maybe because he was young - commanded the loyalties of 300 or so Lipanes. After the failed mission at El Remolino in Coahuila, he swept into the diplomatic void and began working with Spanish friars to locate the mission right smack in the middle of the Lipanes’ hill country heartland. Aside from being his people’s core range, a Hill Country location had the added advantage of serving as a bit of a forward base against increasing aggression from the French-armed Comanche-Norteno alliance. There’s also a hint in the historical record that the Lipanes may have already installed some kind of irrigation along the Guadalupe and San Saba rivers, which was the kind of thing that Spanish colonizers always looked for. That and silver. What finally got the Lipanes their mission on the San Saba river were rumors of silver mines in the barren granite outcroppings of central Texas, the famed, nonexistent mines of El Almagre.⁷⁹

On April 17, 1757, Spanish friars established the Mission Santa Cruz de San Sabá on the San Sabá River . They performed the prescribed ceremonies of “toma de posesión” of taking possession of the mission in the name of the Lipanes, and even brought the customary tribute payments which the Lipanes had required to seal the deal. But neither Captain Chico nor Captain Casablanca nor any Lipanes at all were there to meet them.

This was the kind of Lipan behavior that always really infuriated the Spanish friars and set their mind to concocting conspiracy theories. In defense of the Lipanes, April was a strange time of year to expect the Lipanes to dismount and plant corn…it was their last chance to hunt buffalo before the animals retreated north for the Summer. And sure enough, that’s what Captain Chico told the friars when he did show up in June. But, we’re seeing here the roots of a deeper Spanish-Lipan misunderstanding. Lipanes viewed missions as trading, reprovisioning posts; the Spanish viewed them as tools for “reducing” wild mounted natives into docile corn farmers. Those were not mutually compatible visions, in any sense, and one or both parties were bound to be disappointed. The Spanish friars’ hopes were lifted, however, when in the fall of 1757, Captain Chico finally came around with not only his 300 people, but also Casablanca’s 3,000! Half of the Lipan nation was now settled in the San Sabá river valley around this new Spanish mission. Granted, only a handful seemed willing to actually enter the mission and convert, much less plant corn for the Spanish. Most were content to just visit and trade…and to prepare themselves for the retaliation that they knew was coming from the north.⁸⁰

Because the Spanish mission at San Sabá was a brazen advertisement of the new Spanish-Lipan alliance to the French-armed, Comanche-Caddoan Norteno alliance that was determined to frustrate it. At the same time that the Spanish friars were founding the Mission San Sabá – and wondering where their Lipan allies were – Caddoan-speaking Tejas had been viciously attacking an eastern Lipan towns while the Comanches raided across the Lipanes’ Central Texas ranges. What Captain Chico hadn’t told the Spanish friars was that he had missed the April inauguration ceremony because he had been on a retaliatory mission with Captain Casablanca against a Comanche war party that had killed Casablanca’s brother. It was this experience, in fact, that might have helped convinced Casablanca to come in with Chico to the Spanish mission to consolidate forces.⁸¹

On February 25, 1758, Nortenos – Caddoan-speaking Wichitas, really - raided the new San Saba presidio and rode off with its horse herd. Smoke signals on the horizon in the first days of March confirmed that a larger attack would soon follow. Many of Chico and Casablanca’s Upper Lipanes sent their families down to Coahuila to live with Captain Bigotes and the Big Water Lipanes, and pulled their fighting men out onto the Texas plains, just days before some 2,000 Wichitas appeared outside the Mission San Sabá’s feeble walls on March 16, 1757. Armed with French guns, accompanied by a force of Tonkawa and Comanche auxiliaries, and with at least one officer in a French uniform, the Nortenos announced to the terrified Spanish friars they were looking for “Apaches.” The priests insisted that there were no Apaches in the mission, and tried to appease the Nortenos with gifts. Eventually, the priests let the Nortenos into the mission to show them that they had nothing to hide. The “search” turned into a ransacking…and then, into a rampage. The Nortenos killed the head priest and seven others, fired their muskets at the church, set fire to the buildings, and then rode off toward the presidio three miles west. Wildly outnumbered, the presidial commander kept his men inside the walls of the presidio and wisely kept his gates shut. When morning broke, the Nortenos were gone, but they had delivered their message loud and clear: a Spanish-Lipan allowance would not be tolerated.⁸²

Captain Chico and his Lipanes returned to San Sabá a few days after the massacre. They helped the Spanish scour the countryside for survivors, and found a few. For months Lipanes conducted regular patrols of the countryside, which was still full of signs of a Norteno-Comanche presence. In December, Captain Chico patrol party was ambushed by Comanches…only Chico and twelve others of his 34 man party escaped. Captain Chico swore revenge.⁸³

At a Jan 3, 1759 war council convened by the Spanish military commander of the province in San Antonio, Captain Chico offered to lead a retaliatory campaign with 600 Lipan warriors, which was most of the men of fighting age in his and Casablanca’s bands. Spanish officials, however, bore a grudge toward the Lipanes for having abandoned the Mission San Saba just prior to its destruction, and some even wanted to believe that they had been complicit in it. Still, the Spanish Commander decided to accept the offer of Lipan aid, in part. The Spanish Commander retained command, but enlisted 134 Lipanes to assist his 500 or so presidials, militia, and San Antonio mission Indians. In a remarkable campaign unrivaled in the annals of Spanish Texas history and about which you can hear in more detail back in Episode 6 of Season 1, this allied Spanish-native force launched a 400 mile retaliatory raid deep into Comanche-Norteno territory. In October, they surprised a Norteno village, killing 45 and capturing 149. A few days later, they assaulted a major Norteno population center located near the modern town of Spanish Fort on the Red River. Thousands of Wichita, Tonkawa, and Comanche buzzed around inside a well-fortified town, guarded by French cannon and, according to one account, a dozen or so French soldiers. The Lipanes – presumably led by Captain Chico – played a vital role in the Spanish assault, scouting the crossings, stampeding the Norteno horseherd, and eventually fighting as the rear-guard when the Spanish commander decided to return to San Antonio.⁸⁴

Various chroniclers and historians have written up this so-called Battle of the Twin Villages as a Spanish-Lipan defeat. But that doesn’t quite fit the evidence. The combined Spanish-Lipan force inflicted major losses on the Nortenos, including the killing of a major Wichita captain that seemed to cause the Nortenos great distress. The Lipanes certainly celebrated the campaign as a victory, with songs and dances, both the night after the battle and on their return to San Antonio. Even the skeptical Spanish commander of the expedition admitted that the Lipanes had served “loyally and affectionately,” a service he rewarded by giving them the majority of the Norteno captives as prizes of war.⁸⁵

The campaign sowed the seeds of the dissolution of the Norteno alliance. In 1771, four Caddoan-speaking Wichita nations made a separate peace with Spanish authorities in San Antonio, without their Comanche allies. Geopolitical convenience would still occasionally align them with the Comanches, but they would be far less of a unitary force going forward. And the Tonkawas would begin a century-long drift into the Lipan orbit, aided, it seems, by the peyote ceremony, yet another instance of Lipan soft-power and cultural absorption complementing their fearsome reputation on the battlefield.⁸⁶

So here’s the really strange part. Despite what was for all tactical purposes a Spanish-Lipan victory, their alliance would almost immediately thereafter begin to crumble. Spanish military and civil administrators seemed to just come hardwired with a deep and abiding mistrust of the Lipanes. They would never quite forgive the Lipan disappearance just before the attack on Mission San Sabá, even as the Spanish friars seemed much more willing to forgive. Almost immediately after the Battle of Twin Villages, they boldly reopened two new Hill Country missions for the Lipanes. These missions were located on the headwaters of the Nueces River near Camp Wood, Texas. This time, after the friars performed their “toma de possession” ceremony, the Lipan captains reciprocated with their own ritual, pulling grass up by its roots, and pouring water on the stones underneath, and symbolizing their buy-in more fully this time. Spanish military and civilian authorities still thought the friars painfully naïve, even as 400 Lipanes soon gathered around each of the missions. And this time, in fact, these missions drew-in Lipanes not just from Captain Chico’s and Casablanca’s Texas Lipanes, but also from Captain Bigotes’s more standoffish Big Water Lipanes down in Coahuila. In fact, representatives of as many as 7 of the 10 known divisions of the Lipanes were present in these new missions, a demonstration of the Lipanes’ continued commitment to the Spanish-Lipan alliance.⁸⁷

If Captain Chico represented the extreme accommodationist position advocating for closer Lipan-Spanish relations, and Captain Bigotes represented a sort of peace-first but keep your distance strategy, there was a third, much more overly skeptical if not outright hostile faction amongst the Lipanes as well. The most vocal leaders of this faction became a man named El Lumen, sometimes identified as a captain, sometimes as a medicine man. In the fall of 1762, El Lumen and many of the other men left the new missions to hunt buffalo for the upcoming winter. The mission priests had been most insistent – most insistent that the men leave their wives and children behind. For their protection, the priests claimed, though the Lipanes remembered how well the Spanish had protected the inhabitants of Mission San Sabá. In the end, the missionaries all but required that the Lipan hunters leave their women and children behind or else the missionaries might reconsider the missions altogether. The Lipan hunters relented. But as soon as they were out on the plains, El Lumen had a dream. In the dream, El Lumen saw the Spanish friars abandoning the new Hill Country missions, and taking the Lipanes women and children with them! El Lumen told his hunting party about his dream. And soon enough, he had the entire hunting party in a panic. They wouldn’t have had to reach to far back into the historical record to justify their fears: there were Lipanes still alive who remembered Spanish slaving expeditions and remembered how Spanish administrators had used Lipan women and children captives as bargaining chips in the 1720’s, 30’s, and 40’s.

El Lumen led the hunting party on a frantic ride back to the Nueces headwater missions. To their great relief, all of their people were still there when they got there. But El Lumen’s suspicions remained and he decided to bring the entire issue to a head. He devised a test to see what was more important to the Spanish friars: Lipan friendship or Spanish superiority! He confronted one of the friars, and made a demand of him. Give me the altar cloth from the chapel, he said. Why, the priest asked, confused? To use as underwear, el Lumen said.⁸⁸

Not surprisingly, the priest refused El Lumen’s request, validating the Lipan rabble-rousers fears. Then, as if in confirmation of the emptiness of Spanish promises, not long after this incident, a major Comanche attack on the new missions left fifty Lipanes dead. What good was Spanish friendship if they couldn’t – or wouldn’t- even defend their friends? Where were these mighty Spanish guns that were supposed to be defending them? What if, El Lumen asked out loud now, the Spanish had established these missions just to gather the Lipanes all in one place to make it easier for their enemies to kill them!⁸⁹

Once again, events conspired to prove El Lumen right. An epidemic began to sweep through the missions. 63 Lipanes died over the winter, which we know, because the missionaries recorded them all as baptisms, extracted in the throes of death, and also typically only after promising the sufferer plenty of “mitotes” in heaven if they converted. But from the viewpoint of El Lumen it seemed clear that the baptisms themselves were killing Lipanes!⁹⁰

Around this time, El Lumen had another dream! A vision rather, but this time others saw it as well. In this vision, an old man or sometimes an old woman appeared, and then vanished, and then would appear again. El Lumen might not have known it, but this vision coincided with the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. As a result of that war, Spain would, more or less, disappear from Texas for a while. Texas no longer sat on the Spanish Frontier with New France: French Louisiana became a part of the Spanish empire, and Spain inherited French Louisiana’s colonial administration. And French Louisiana’s colonial administrators were firmly aligned with the Caddoan-speaking Nortenos and Tejas, as well as the Comanches. It seems doubtful that El Lumen could have understood all of these geopolitical factors. And yet the figure in his vision spelled it out clearly for him and his compatriots, and seemed to even build upon his first dream: the Spanish were about to abandon their promises to the Lipan Texas allies and leave them to the mercy of their enemies. All the signs, El Lumen indicated, pointed to a future of “continuous war.”⁹¹

One January 21, 1766, 400 comanches and nortenos swept into the Nueces valley and overran one of the new Lipan missions, killing 6 Lipanes and taking 25. The Lipanes retaliated immediately, catching up to the retreating Nortenos on the 23rd on the Llano river and killing 200 of them! “They could hear the Nortenos weeping as they trudged northward to their homes.” But the Nortenos returned in October, overrunning both of the Nueces headwater missions and marking their end. The Spanish abandoned the Texas hill Country missions for good…just as El Lumen’s dreams had foretold. That same year, a Royal inspector – the Marquis de Rubí - started an inspection tour of the Spanish North American frontier – which is to say, the borderline between Spanish north America and Apacheria. He quickly absorbed his administrators’ mistrust of the Lipanes, and it didn’t help that they attacked his entourage first near El Paso and again near El Remolino in Coahuila. After that, he became convinced that the Lipanes were a particularly untrustworthy “mob of savages.”⁹²

The Marquis de Rubís report and recommendations would be codified in the so-called Reglamento of 1772. At the core of Rubís recommendations was the conviction that Spanish North America would never know peace until the Apaches were eliminated. It was a total abandonment of the Spanish-Lipan alliance and a complete abrogation of the Spanish-Lipan treaty of 1749. The Reglamento of 1772 took the extreme step of actually authorizing outright offensive war against the Apaches, for the first time really since the initial Conquest of Mexico. The Apaches were, going forward, indios barbaros, outside the protection of the law. Military commanders were, in fact, forbidden from even offering peace to the Apaches going forward. Apache war captives would be shipped down into the interior of Mexico, or even as far as Cuba to try to depopulate the region. The entire northern frontier would, in fact, be militarized, grouped into a new “Commandancy of the Interior Provinces.” The Marquis de Rubí also ordered the pull-back of Spanish forces – with the exception of Santa Fe – behind the shortest possible line of presidios, running in a more or less straight line from the Gulf of Cortez to El Paso to San Antonio and down to the Gulf of Mexico…a line that represented the border between Spanish North America and Apacheria, a line passed down today, essentially, as the US-Mexico border.⁹³

The Marquis de Rubi’s final conclusion spelled it out in stark terms: “The only method of terrorizing, subjecting, or even annihilating these [Apaches]…is a continuous offensive in their own territory. By this means they would be exterminated in a short time…” The Viceroy adopted the Marquis de Rubís recommendations and ordered the new Commandant of the interior provinces to seek out the Apaches and “maintain a continuous war against them, without observing the solemnities of the law.” Here was the “continuous war” – in the exact same words even - that El Lumen’s visions had foretold.⁹⁴

And yet precisely because they had been warned by El Lumen’s visions in 1762 and 3, the Lipanes had been preparing. They had always struggled to find a reliable sources of guns, but around this time, they had made contact with a new square on the Texas checkerboard. Crammed into the Southeast corner of Texas lived a people called the Bidai, neighbors of the old East Texas Caddoans, but not entirely aligned with them. They were, however, aligned with French traders and they had access to French guns. And thanks in part to efforts of that famous old East Texas Tejano, Gil Ybarbo, the Lipanes were able to negotiate with the Bidai to purchase several hundred muskets. Spanish soldiers were now writing of the Lipanes – always a wealthy people to begin with, but previously without firearms - “rare is the Indian among them who does not have two muskets with sufficient powder and bullets.”⁹⁵

Newly armed, the Lipanes unleashed an old-school Apache whirlwind before the Spanish could launch their “continuous war.” They hit the Comanches first, and hard, driving them out of the Hill Country and all the way back to the Red River. Then, in 1771, they poured across the Marques de Rubí’s defensive line and raided all the way to Durango, deep into New Spain! They attacked the ranches around Monclova, killing 23, capturing 22, and running off 1000 head of livestock. Here’s where Captain Bigotes’ lifetime of alliance-making and intermarriage paid off. A Spanish chronicler at the time would call Bigotes the “Adam of all the Apaches,” in recognition of his role at the top of nearly all the Apache kinship networks in the region. It allowed him now to orchestrate attacks across 200 mile stretches on the same day and the same time and with devastating effect. Describing Coahuila during those years, a Spanish chronicler wrote that “No stone, bush, or plant could be found that was not tinged with blood.”⁹⁶

The Lipanes and their Apache cousins were at all places all at once across a 1,000 mile frontier. And it got the attention of other Texas natives. Their Caddoan-speaking Tejas rivals in East Texas – now without their French allies! – read the changing winds and decided to negotiate for peace with the resurgent Lipanes. The Spanish Governor of Texas got wind of this and hired assassins to murder the three Lipan peace commissioners who had gone to negotiate the terms of this budding alliance. It was a mark of Spanish desperation, and the Lipanes made them pay for it. They “surged across the land like a storm wind stirring dust devils,” a Spanish official wrote, either consciously or unconsciously invoking Apache imagery in the process.⁹⁷

But now unencumbered by the niceties of the law of “civilized warfare,” the Spanish retaliated. On December 22, 1775, an enormous Spanish force of 2,228 soldiers and militia finally caught up to a Lipan army on the Devils River. Over the course of the next month, the two forces would engage in at least fifteen separate battles, leaving 194 Lipanes dead and 168 captured. And that was before a final attack on the Lipanes’ rear by Comanches working in secret coordination with Spanish forces! A slaughter ensued. 300 Lipanes were left dead after the battle, men, women, and children. For the first – but not nearly the last! – time, colonial officials would declare the Lipan nation to be in ruins. Spoiler alert: they weren’t. in the decade following the Reglamento of 1772, Lipanes and Mescaleros – working together now, thanks to a lifetime of alliance-making by Captain Bigotes in particular- would kill 1,674 Spaniards, capture 154 of them, ransack 116 haciendas, and run off 68,256 head of livestock! They almost killed the Commandant General of the Provincias internas himself (!) in a battle near Santa Elena Canyon south of Big Bend. Because of this surge in Apache hostilities the mines in Chihuahua suspended operations and beef became scarce all the way in Mexico City.⁹⁸

Not only had the Apaches halted the advance of Spanish empire. By the 1780’s, they were on the verge of sending it into retreat. On the next episode of Lipan Apocalypse.

Indios Bárbaros (Picax-Andé)

Welcome to Lipan Apocalypse. Episode 7: Indios Bárbaros. I’m Brandon Seale

A series of Lipan victories and alliances with old rival Texas tribes force the Spanish to seek peace. Spanish army officers prove reluctant to change their mindset, however, even as a Lipan alliance under the great Captain Picax-Andé brings to a definitive halt the advance of Spanish conquest.

The Lipan Great Captain Picax-andé crossed the Pecos River to meet with the Spanish Commandant General awaiting him on the other side. Commandant General Juan de Ugalde admired Picax Andé’s “face and bearing of a soldier” as he approached. The fifty-year captain’s name meant “Strong-Arm” in his native language, a reference to his legendary acts of valor on the battlefield during the previous decades’ of violence. Technically a Lipiyan rather than Lipan, Picax-Andé’s rise to prominence represented an alliance of 15 or so of the roughly “thirty-seven” Apache tribes that were claimed to populate the Texas plains between San Antonio and Santa Fe: Natagés, Pelones, Ypandi, Yxandi, and of course Mescaleros and Lipanes. In some ways, Picax was the heir to a network of alliances that the Captain Bigotes had begun structuring in the previous episode through the classically Apache alliance-making toolkit of marriage, trade, horses, and, now the peyote ceremony. Picax-Andé had married into this kinship network himself by taking a Mescalero wife and strengthened those networks even further. By the time of his meeting with Spanish Commandant General Juan de Ugalde on July 10, 1787, Captain Picax-Andé was said to be “the idol of all of them, and the one whom they all obey and many accept him as their chief.”⁹⁹

In some ways, the nature of Lipan leadership confounded European observers, though in other ways it was quite simple. In the words of a latter-day Lipan observer: “To be a chief, a warrior has to be able to draw and hold men. He has to lead those men, not drive them.” Generally speaking, captains were judged as often as not by how much and how fairly they managed to distribute resources amongst their followers. “A great chief is one who supplies the needs of his people, not one who robs them of what they have.” There’s some reference to “elections” for Lipan captains, but the historical record suggests a strong hereditary component to it. The idea of plains Indian polities being unstructured and free-wheeling, often gets oversold by European observers for whom ANY type of stateless society was mind-boggling. One of them would write of the Lipanes that “all of them are free; they go from one rancheria to another whenever their chief does not have the strength to oppose.” But that doesn’t square with other Lipan observers who claimed that “this is the nation most obedient to its chieftan,” and we’ve certainly seen evidence of an impressive coordination of action.¹⁰⁰

That coordination of action had been seen most convincingly in the years following the promulgation of the Reglamento of 1772. The Spanish launched a “continuous war” against the Apaches. The policy was disastrous for the Spanish North American frontier, resulting in the killing of 1,674 Spaniards, the capture of 154, the sacking of 116 haciendas, and the loss of 68,256 head of livestock! In the minds of desperate Spanish administrators, such a naked display of coordinated Apache power sanctioned all manner of duplicity in dealing with them going forward. They began working to form alliances with all of the Lipanes’ enemies, from the Caddoan-speaking Wichitas with whom they had signed a peace in 1771 to the Comanches with whom they had begun to coordinate campaigns against the Lipanes. But the new Spanish policy went beyond alliance-building. It was outright underhanded. The Spanish began to allow for the sale of firearms to Lipanes….but only guns that were too long to be useful on horseback and with deliberately faulty parts, so that they would fail after only mild use. All attempts by the Lipanes to offer peace – including a delegation of 5 of the most prominent Lipan Captains in January of 1778 – were rebuffed. Indeed, under the 1772 Reglamento, peace with the Apaches was legally forbidden.¹⁰¹

In 1779, a particularly unscrupulous governor took office in Coahuila: Juan de Ugalde, the man who was now in 1787 the Commandant General of the Interior Provinces and meeting with Picax-Andé on the Pecos river. In 1779, Ugalde launched an ambitious but ill-conceived campaign to try to turn the Mescaleros and Lipanes against each other. He would spend much of the next four years in the saddle, ranging all over Coahuila and the Big Bend and up into the Edwards plateau, chasing Lipanes and Mescaleros. In 1783, however, they got into his rear and they violently sacked Coahuila – Juan de Ugalde’s province – which he had left unguarded. Embarrassed, Ugalde was removed from command.¹⁰²

Even though Ugalde had returned to favor with his appointment as Commandant General in 1787, Captain Picax-Andé made sure to remind Juan de Ugalde of this history when they met on the Pecos River. He framed it in hopeful terms, however, that things might go better for him in his new job, an attempt to give his opponent a reputation to live up to, as Dale Carnegie might have put it. And then Picax-Andé deployed the Spaniards own religious imagery against him: “There are three great captains here today: God above, you, and I. The first is looking down upon us and listening to what we say so that we shall see who is lacking in truth.” It was hard not to hear in Picax-Andé’s invocation an accusation. Ugalde had already won for himself a well-deserved reputation – even amongsthis fellow Spanish – as untrustworthy. He was gifted at the art of bureaucratic obfuscation and justifying his own actions through invented acts of Apache treachery.¹⁰³

But by this point in the history of Spanish-Apache relations, it wasn’t just Ugalde. Double-dealing seemed to have become official Spanish policy. Four Lipan captains – including, Captain Chiquito, son of Captain Chico from last episode – had come to San Antonio in 1779 to try to negotiate an end to hostilities with the Spanish governor. The governor agreed to an initial truce and allowed the Lipanes to settle nearby. Within days, a Comanche raiding party hit them. And then a few days later, a Tonkawa force did the same. Suspecting that the governor had tipped off the Comanches and Tonkawas, the Lipanes went to San Antonio to complain and were surprised to find a party of Caddoan-speaking Tejas in town also conspiring with the Governor. When they confronted the governor, the governor allowed them to understand that the alliance was the Tejas’ idea, not his! But don’t worry, the Texas Governor told them, I’d rather be allies with you again. But here’s what I need you to do: I need you to travel to Chihuahua to meet with my boss, the Commandant of the Interior Provinces and convince that that you are sincere about peace. Ok?¹⁰⁴

It was a classic exercise in Spanish bureaucracy, disguising an impossible condition as an innocuous request. The entire region between San Antonio and Chihuahua was filled with the Lipanes’ enemies, not least of which all the soldiers of Coahuila they had been warring against for the last five years. But, surprisingly, the Lipan captains accepted the Spanish governor’s condition. He wasn’t ready for this. So he came up with another impossible condition for them. Ok, but you have to choose a single capitan grande – a “baton captain” recalling the old Spanish practice of acknowledging with a gold or silver tipped cane - to speak for your entire nation. We can’t be having to negotiate with a bunch of different captains. Once again, the Lipanes accepted. Actually, they went one step further: they told the governor he could pick which captain he wanted to speak for the nation, and they would accept it.¹⁰⁵

I find it interesting that at no time during these negotiations did the Spanish stop paying rent to the Lipanes. Which made the Governor’s demands all the more curious, like a tenant demanding fealty from a landlord. If they seem particularly unreasonable, however, we should remember that – violence notwithstanding - it was highly advantageous for frontier governors’ to maintain a state of war with the neighboring Apaches nations, at least in budgetary terms. Each year the Spanish delivered thousands of pesos worth of cigars, candles, salt, corn, cattle, dried meat, sugar, copper pots to the Lipanes. There was some questions, however, as to how much of those reported gifts actually made it into Lipan hands. And having large numbers of men under arms created the opportunity for large and non-transparent military supply contracts, controlled patronage-style by the governor.¹⁰⁶

The Spanish governor in 1779 certainly seems to have gone out of his way to avoid agreeing to peace terms with the Lipanes. Every time they accepted his demands, he’d come up with a new one. In this case, he refused to pick the Lipanes baton-captain and told them that they must pick someone and then have him ratified by all Lipanes everywhere, not just by you five and not just by the Lipanes that are camped outside of San Antonio. All the Lipanes. The Lipanes left, but surprised the governor again when they returned a few months later with the news that the entire Lipan nation had consented to follow whichever captain the Governor might select. It was an exercise in absurdity, but the Lipanes were playing along well.

The Lipanes weren’t so foolish as to place all their hopes on a Spanish peace though. Indeed, the most intriguing peace negotiations of the period weren’t going on in San Antonio…they were going on up on the Guadalupe River. Sometime in December 1782, perhaps the greatest pan-Indian conference in Texas colonial history took place. Nearly 4,000 Tonkawa, Karankawa, Bidai, Caddo Tejas, Mescalero, and Lipan and others met to attempt to lay the groundwork for a 1680 style New Mexican Pueblo Revolt and for a new trans-Texas Indian identity! During the two month trade fair and great council, 4,000 beeves were slaughtered to feed the enormous gathering! Half of the attendees were Lipan and the fact that it occurred in their homeland shows the central role they had in organizing it Captain Chiquito’s name is listed prominently amongst the organizers, but so too were two younger captains of the South Texas Lipanes: Pocaropa and Flacco. We’ll see more of them later. Indeed, the complicated lineages at play here show the extent to which native Texas was reshuffling itself, particularly since a wave of epidemics starting in 1780 had once again ripped through native communities. The Tonkawas, for example, consolidated from four bands into one, and were now led by a Lipan!¹⁰⁷

But the Spanish governor caught wind of it. Summing up his response to the threat of coordinated native action, the governor wrote his deputies that “It behooves us to cultivate their old enmity.” Conspiring with some disaffected Tonkawas, he had their charismatic Lipan leader assassinated, a message to all those who would conspire against Spanish hegemony. And he doubled down on his efforts to cement the long elusive alliance with the Comanches, who, notably, had not been present at the Guadalupe River conference. In October 1785, the Texas governor signed a peace treaty with three of the most powerful captains of the Eastern Comanches. It’s main objective was clear. The treaty confirmed that going forward the Comanches and Spanish “would be the declared enemies of all the Apaches and Lipanes and attempt as much as previously to make war on the latter in such a way that they may be totally exterminated.”¹⁰⁸

The Lipanes registered their displeasure with the new alliance by targeting the three Comanche captains for assassination. Within a year, the Lipanes had killed one of the captains, and would’ve killed another if the Spanish hadn’t accidentally killed him first. Picax-Andé, it seems, may have killed the third in a battle in which he killed four Comanches personally with a lance, including a captain wearing a Spanish uniform.¹⁰⁹

This was the background of Captain Picax-Andé’s meeting with the Commandant General Juan de Ugalde in 1787 on the Pecos River. It was a supreme act of faith on the part of Picax-Andé to even show up to the conference, given Ugalde’s history. The Apaches were alliance-makers, however, and their mythology had taught them of the necessity of treating with even the most distasteful people. The meeting transpired with little more than proforma declarations of friendship and only the vaguest promises of peace. Ugalde recognized Picax as Capitan Grande of the Apache nation. Picax accepted Ugalde as his godfather, of sorts, Picax Andé now symbolically adding “de Ugalde” to his name. Yet each seemed to realize that they were setting each other up for a contest rather than a collaboration.¹¹⁰

The next year, in February of 1788, Juan de Ugalde sent a message to Captain Picax-Andé. He told him that he was about to go on the warpath against the Mescaleros. In order to make sure that Picax-Andé’s people didn’t get caught up in it, he needed the Lipan Captain to relocate all 2,000 of his people down to Santa Rosa, Coahuila, modern-day Muzquiz. And one other thing: Ugalde requested the support of his godson Picax-Andé on this campaign against the Mescaleros.

In much the same pattern of the Spanish governor of San Antonio a decade prior, Ugalde was imposing an impossible loyalty test on Picax-Andé. The two were engaged now in a high-stakes game of politics and diplomacy, and Picax-Andé matched Ugalde move for move. He accepted Ugalde’s invitation and within a month, his entire community marched into Santa Rosa. Ugalde fired his cannons in salute, and the Lipan captain’s warriors performed a mock battle upon their arrival, each side flexing for the benefit of the other. But instead of accepting or rejecting Ugalde’s demands to join him against the Mescaleros, Picax-Andé used his audience with the Spanish general to articulate his Mescalero allies’ grievances. He focused on one in particular: the ongoing sale of Spanish firearms and other goods to the Comanches. The young South Texas Lipan captain Pocaropa chimed in here as to the injustice of Lipanes’ repeated and rejected peace overtures to the Spanish versus the open Spanish embrace of the perfidious Comanches. December 1787 had seen the Comanches attack Lipan camps three times, and the Wichitas as well, with a force of over 400 men and which 480 Lipanes barely fought off. This was still raw for the Apache alliance. Then, Picax-Andé came over the top. Forget the Mescalero campaign, he said to Ugalde. Let’s march out together against the Comanches!¹¹¹

Picax-Andé was, essentially, mirroring the Spanish General’s strategy, putting him to his own form of loyalty test. Ugalde promised to consider it. And with that, the second peace conference of the great Capitanes Grandes ended.

A young Spanish Lieutenant accompanied Picax-Andé back to his camp, which the Lipanes had made near their old sacred site of the old El Remolino mission. This wasn’t just any lieutenant, he was José Menchaca, a great grandson of the old San Antonio presidial commander José de Urrutia and grandson of Toribio de Urrutia, who had been the Lipanes’ greatest opponents but eventually came to be both “feared and loved by them.” Menchaca’s father – also a commander of the San Antonio presidio during the Spanish-Lipan alliance years – was an outright “bosom-friend” of the Lipanes. Young Lieutenant Menchaca – like many San Antonians – had thus grown up with Lipan friends, and presumably spoke the language a bit. And almost as soon as he rode into the Picax’Andé’s camp, he ran into a childhood Lipan friend who served as his tour guide for the next few remarkable days.¹¹²

Lieutenant Menchaca gives us an incredible window into Lipan politics and culture. Menchaca got to witness Picax-Andé call his people into assembly and download them on his latest conference with Commandant General Ugalde. Then, he got to see Picax-Ande’s wife, la capitana grande, stand and given an even longer speech, holding the audience spellbound. Then, that night, in order to consider the issue properly and deliberate on it with due solemnity, the entire camp participated in an elaborate, all- night peyote ceremony, a piece of archival evidence for its power as an alliance-making tool.

All of it, however, was just pre-lude for an even more elaborate ceremony set for the next day. Just before mid-day, Lieutenant Menchaca watched as everyone stripped down to the waist and gathered outside Picax-Andé’s tent. Then, at almost exactly noon, Changing Woman came face-to-face with Killer-of-Enemies! Which is to say, the moon began to block out the sun! A bell rang from the Captain’s tent, and for the next hour, the people entered four at a time, offered gifts to Picax-Andé, and exited with blue paint on their faces. Menchaca was stunned by the elaborateness of it all. I’m stunned by how a largely nomadic people were able to predict with scientific precision the time and place of a solar eclipse! And by the way, there’s another reference in the historical record to the Lipan Apaches correctly predicted a lunar eclipse I guess if ever there was a people whose cosmology situated them well to understand the orbits of the celestial bodies, it was the migratory Lipanes, whose own migrations imitated the orbits of the moon throughout the Texas plains.. But this level of knowledge really suggests both an incredibly ancient but also an incredibly far-reaching cultural tradition. It takes hundreds of years for solar eclipses to re-occur! (Coincidentally, El Remolino in the San Rodrigo Canyon will once again be brought to darkness this year, on April 8, 2024.) ¹¹³

Commandant General Ugalde was unimpressed when Lieutenant Menchaca reported back to him. He had only two questions for the Lieutenant: Did you see any Spanish brands in their horseherd? Menchaca thought back. He supposed he had. It wouldn’t have been surprising in a land where horses were currency. The Commandant continued: did you see any Mescaleros in their camp? Well, of course he had. Picax-Andés own wife was Mescalero.¹¹⁴

Ugalde had his pretext. Picax-Andé was consorting with known horse-thiefs and with the enemy Mescaleros. Ugalde sent Picax-Andé a message, an accusation really, calling out the presence of Mescalero captains in his camp, and ordering them all to come to Santa Rosa. Under a banner of truce, of course, but they must report immediately. Picax-Andé and his captains complied, but on March 24, 1789, as soon as they rode into Santa Rosa, Ugalde threw the Mescalero Captains into chains and declared war on their people. No sooner had the sun re-emerged from behind the moon than Juan de Ugalde had once again set the Spanish Apache frontier on fire. On the next episode of Lipan Apocalypse.¹¹⁵

The Unbroken (Chiquito)

Welcome to Lipan Apocalypse. Episode 8: The Unbroken. I’m Brandon Seale.

Pressed on all sides by European and native rivals, the Lipanes never should have survived into the nineteenth century. Yet not only had they survived, they had done so with their numbers and their range undiminished. They were wealthier than ever, and more powerful too. The arrival of a new trading empire on their eastern flank promised access to even more desirable trade goods prompts Captain Chiquito to reach out to these Anglo-American newcomers in Louisiana, who were about to turn the Texas plains trade on its head…just as Spanish Texas was about to turn itself upside down.

For as much as the Commandant General Juan de Ugalde was cynical, the new governor of Texas in 1787 was sincere. Governor Rafael Martinez Pacheco had personal experience with the Lipanes. He had been a young officer in 1757 stationed at the presidio of San Sabá, and all of the drama that followed. None of which, it seems, had led him to view the Lipanes uncharitably. If anything, he thought it helped him understand these mysterious but undeniably powerful people. The first thing he did when he took office as Texas governor in 1787 was to increase the amount of the annual Lipan rent payment. He came out of his own pocket to do this, to the tune of an additional 6,000 pesos! He even went ahead and entered into a peace treaty with local Lipanes, ignoring official Spanish policy that prohibited peace with the Apaches.¹¹⁶

Within two years, the Governor would be murdering five Lipan captains in his own house and justify it “because the Lipanes themselves have created the excuse, the time is right to accomplish their extermination, since they have squandered such a good opportunity to settle in towns or missions in order to preserve their lives.”

How could things go so wrong so quickly for someone who seemed to be so favorably disposed toward the Lipanes? The previous Texas governor had written at one point about the Lipanes that “the Indian was an incomprehensible being,” and by the end of his term this Governor Martinez Pacheco probably would have said the same thing. And yet, the Lipanes surely felt the same about their Spanish counterparts. The story of Lipan Texas is a repeated and tragic cycle of Spanish and Lipanes taking tentative steps toward trusting each other, and then having that trust badly repaid. In large part, this seems to be because Lipanes refused to play the role that even sympathetic governors, like Martinez Pacheco, had in mind for them. True, the Spanish aspired to the incorporation of all native peoples into their empire, in contrast to the Anglo-American model that really had no place for them. But the Spanish empire was not an empire of equals, and the language they used toward their native subjects reveals as much. Indian populations were reducidos, sometidos, tributarios – reduced, subjugated, tribute-paying. And the Apaches obviously were none of these. Uncomfortably for Spanish administrators, they were the ones paying tribute to their Lipan Apache neighbors, though by calling the tribute “gifts” they assuaged their egos a bit. Yet by refusing to submit to these Spanish colonial categories, the Lipanes essentially left themselves outside the protection of the law: Indios bárbaros on a frontier “sin ley, sin fe, sin rey.”¹¹⁷

But you can see why a society that still commanded the great Texas plains trade and why a society with a cultural tradition rich enough to predict once-every-three-centuries eclipses would see little reason to yield before a lumbering European imperial power that seemed chronically incapable of keeping its promises to them. The failed councils between Commandant General Ugalde and the Great Captain Picax-Andé in the previous episode only confirmed this. Commandant General Ugalde, you might recall, had first been exposed to Lipanes in his stint as governor of Coahuila a decade prior…and they had made a fool of him, so much so that he’d been removed as governor. Well, he was back now on the Coahuil-Texan frontier, entirely unreformed in his views toward Apaches, and on a bit of a mission to restore his reputation. This time, he declared, he would make war on All Apaches, even those he found north of the Rio Grande, the line established in 1772 as the line between Spanish and Apache worlds. His meetings with Captain Picax-Andé under the auspices of securing the peace had given him the pretext he needed to launch his war: he had seen Spanish-branded horses and Mescalero captains in Picax’s camp, neither one of which should have been that surprising, but they served as his justification for imprisoning Mescalero captains that he had invited to council under a banner of truce in March of 1789. The violation of this banner of truce led Captain Picax-Andé to break off discussions with Ugalde and abandon the pretense of peace. The Lipan Captain and at least 2,000 followers pulled back up into Texas Hill Country to link up with other Lipanes there. Ugalde pursued…and began coordinating with Comanches and Caddoan-speaking Wichitas and Tejas to attempt to reassemble the old Norteno alliance and exterminate the Lipanes once and for all.¹¹⁸

This was the moment when five Lipan captains called upon the new Texas governor at the so-called Spanish governor’s palace in San Antonio to invoke the protections of the peace treaty he had negotiated with them in 1787. And yet, Texas Governor Martinez Pacheco had been thoroughly reprimanded by Ugalde for his peaceful overtures toward the Lipanes. And the five Lipan captains who came to San Antonio in December 1789 must have noted his comparative coldness toward them when they knocked on his door. He invited them in. Then he closed the doors. And stepped outside. And came back in with a troop of soldiers and opened fire. A melee ensued. The walls of the Spanish governor’s palace were “covered in blood as though five bulls had been slaughtered. The bed, the walls, chairs, and tables were bloody.” But in the end, the five Lipan emissaries of peace lay dead.¹¹⁹

That same month, coordinated attacks on the Lipanes in their Hill Country refuge began in earnest. The Wichitas hit them first, and although the Lipanes drove them off, rumors of more attacks to follow pushed them south, down the Sabinal River valley. Where Ugalde was waiting for them. On January 9, 1790, Ugalde with 200 Comanche auxiliaries surprised a Lipan army in the Battle of the Arroyo de la Soledad, just north of Uvalde, which actually takes its name from the anglicization of Ugalde’s name. It doesn’t seem that Picax-Andé was present, but it does seem as though the Lipanes involved were part of his alliance. It was a vicious fight that went on for hours, despite the Lipanes being outnumbered and caught offguard. Two Lipan captains fell in the fighting as well as 59 younger men. 800 horses and an uncounted number of women and children fell into their enemies’ hands as well.¹²⁰

And this is where I declared the Lipanes a broken nation in Season 1. The Lipanes must hold the distinction of being the native americans declared extinct most frequently and most falsely. It’s a testament to their resiliency, but also to their enemies’ wishful thinking. They would continue to disappoint their eulogists. As they had at every other instance, the Lipanes bounced back from their defeat at Uvalde and unleashed an Apache whirlwind on their enemies, raiding deep into Spanish territory. March 7, 1790 saw the beginning of a three-month series of attacks on the South Texas villas del Norte, from Laredo down to Revilla, that would result in 29 dead, including the maternal grandfather of Antonio Zapata from Season 4. September 1790 would witness at attack on the Presidio del Rio Grande in Guerrero, Coahuila and that killed 22 soldiers and led to the loss of 1,490 head of livestock. They took this loot over to their gun-running Bidai allies in southeast Texas and traded for 300 good French muskets. The “broken” Lipanes ended 1790 better armed and perhaps even more in command of the Texas checkerboard than they had started the year.¹²¹

Neither Commandant Ugalde nor Governor Martinez Pacheco could say as much. By the end of that same year, they had both been replaced, Ugalde once again for leaving the frontier exposed to the Lipan violence that followed the Battle of Soledad Creek and Martinez Pacheco because even the viceroy couldn’t ignore the apparent murder of Lipan peace emissaries at a peace conference in the Governor’s home. Their replacement didn’t represent a change in policy, however. On May 1, 1791, they invited a Lipan captain to a peace conference near El Remolino and arrested him. The Captain fought his way out, stabbing Ugalde’s replacement in the back in the process, and escaping. Then the Spanish tried the same thing again on May 12, this time to Captain Chiquito, who also escaped! The whole peace conference invitation-kidnapping thing had now become some kind of official tactic, cutting off peaceful means of discourse between the two peoples. Once again, all that was left was the universal language of violence: 300 Lipanes rampaged through Nuevo Leon, killing 37 settlers, taking 25 captives, 1,084 horses, and slaughtering 2,400 head of cattle!¹²²

Thanks to these victories and to the wealth they generated, Picax Andé’s esteem grew more than ever. Soon, he was recruiting as far north as Colorado for his Pan-Apache alliance, scaring the hell out of Spanish administrators in New Mexico! He might also be the same captain referred to as Pasquale in Spanish records in Zacatecas from the same period, which would make Picax-Andé’s domain larger than maybe any other native american in the colonial period, but also highlights how the extent of Lipan power often gets underappreciated in the English-language literature because at least half of their cultural life occurred south of the Rio Grande. Lipanes still constituted the largest constituency in Picax’s growing alliance even as Picax was now estimated to have some 5,000 men of fighting age at his command! The Spanish would never know for sure, as Picax-Andé was a master of keeping himself and his alliance off-stage as much as possible.¹²³

Finally, after two decades of the “continuous war” against the Lipanes, it had become obvious to Spanish administrators that “the kind of Indian who infests these regions cannot be exterminated or reduced with a decisive blow…” One observer in the early 1790’s wrote: “It has been and continues to be our absurd and foolish belief that [Lipanes] are impossible to force into peace and the customs of a rational life, but this is a most patent fallacy. They love peace and hate to lose it. Since the year 1786 when we began to fight them with greater expertise and tactics, we have seen many rancherias from different tribes come in to seek peace. It is true that some rancherias have struck their encampments and gone to seek refuge in their mountains, but if we examine their reasons in honest truth, we will find that they are justifiable.” And even more damning, ““If the Indians had a defender who could represent their rights on the basis of natural law, an impartial judge could soon see that every charge we might make against them would be offset by as many crimes committed by our side.”¹²⁴

This same observer also tried to put to bed any delusions about reducing Lipanes to farmers, presaging a century of failed later US policy: “One would never accomplish anything by forcing them to engage in agriculture.” I should think not, they were wealthy traders, rich people today don’t generally elect to go into farming either. It didn’t help that the Comanches had not proven to be particularly effective or faithful allies against the Lipanes: “The Comanches found it difficult to pursue Apaches in their own country, even with tracks. The resourceful Apaches dug for water with sticks and used gourds to scoop it out for their horses. The Comanches refused to enter those places because they would lose horses with little certainty of gain.” Also, the Comanches had finally been hit by several waves of European diseases, reducing their earlier demographic advantage, though they probably still outnumbered Lipanes 3:1. Better armed now and more united by Picax-Andé’s alliance-making, there are stories of Apache victories over 1,000 man Comanche armies in 1791, further reducing Comanche enthusiasm for an anti-Apache alliance with the Spanish! And now that the Spanish had developed deeper contacts with more native tribes, they began to suspect that the Comanches might be the more difficult of the two great plains peoples: [The Comanches], they realized “are at peace with no other nation but Spain, and carry on a ceaseless war with all their neighbors.”¹²⁵

Many of the Comanche superlatives fade a bit too once you appreciate that they never had to face the Spanish at full-strength. The Apaches – and the Lipan Apaches specifically – had done so for the last twenty years. Or for the last two centuries more like. And by the 1790’s…they had won. Spanish administrators changed course, explicitly adopting a new, if not desperate policy of peace with the Apaches: “A bad peace with all the Indian nations who may ask for it will be more beneficial to us than the efforts of a good war.” It was an admission that without a monopoly on horses and gunpowder: “the Indians have the advantage.” Going forward, the Spanish would buy peace from the Apaches at any price. The Spanish would start to pay Apaches for livestock they return, even branded – i.e., suspected stolen - livestock. “Certain trifling defects” of Lipan compliance with treaties would be ignored, removing the discretion sometimes used by colonial administrators to perpetuate cycles of frontier violence. Slaving and deportation of Apache captives to far-off locations would cease entirely; Cuban administrators had actually been begging royal authorities to stop sending them Apaches prisoners because they kept inciting uprisings there.¹²⁶

The New commandant of the interior provinces led the way by forgiving getting literally stabbed in the back by the Lipan captain he had been trying to unlawfully arrest and going forward “required his officers, to learn as much as possible of Apache customs, and expected all members of the presidial companies to learn the Apache language. He wanted Apache friendship fostered in every practicable way: through consistently courteous, patient, fair treatment at every level; through frequent conferences of Spanish officers with Apache leaders; through the officers' cultivation of personal friendship with Apache individuals; through extended visits to Apache camps by competent, trustworthy interpreters.”¹²⁷

This was a major change, and this is a reminder of the strength of the Spanish imperial system, that it could see the need for a radical change in policy and effect it in a fairly short time. In 1793, San Antonio signed an officially sanctioned peace treaty with the nearest Lipan captains, most notably, with Captain Chiquito, the son of the captain that had first arranged the San Sabá mission and who had all but committed his people to a symbiotic relationship with the Spanish trade colony on the San Antonio River, and who’d been trying to re-establish peace for the last decade despite Spanish attempts to arrest him. Under the terms of the 1793 treaty, annual payments to the Lipanes increased, though there were certain Lipan concession as well: they would start to brand their own cattle and they would release certain Spanish captives. Laredo also entered into a separate treaty with the Lipanes in 1799, again, with the increasingly influential Captain Chiquito in attendance. In 1798, the province of Nueva Vizcaya bought peace with the Lipanes and Nuevo Leon and Nuevo Santander did the same in 1799. The Spanish tended to refer to these treaties as “Articles of Capitulation” which actually works even better in English than in Spanish to captured the power-dynamic underpinning these treaties. Because in many ways, they were total capitulations to Lipan demands. Under their terms, Lipanes would have rights to trade at presidios and they would have unlimited to rights to the unbranded horses of the Texas plains – which they believed by right had been created for them, probably their two most important geopolitical objectives in Texas. Even more tellingly, these treaties all but confirmed the Apaches’ control of the lands lying between Presidio del Norte – El Paso- and the Gulf of Mexico, as far north as the Colorado river.¹²⁸

This string of peace-making would culminate in the first ever trip of six Lipan emissaries – four men, and two women – to Mexico City to mark this new era of Spanish-Lipan relations in a meeting with the viceroy himself in June of 1799.¹²⁹

How funny that I – and many other historians – seemed to want to interpret a one-off Spanish-Comanche victory over the Lipanes in 1790 as the start of a period of decline, when everything about the 1790’s suggests a period of peace, increased trade, and an orderly transition of power within the Lipan nation. By which I mean that the great Picax-Andé recedes from the historical record here. Which is a bit of an anti-climactic end to perhaps one of the most important native american leaders in Texas and Mexican history, but the most peaceful, prosperous moments in history often read pretty anticlimactic in the history books. One account claims that Picax-Andé died in 1801, another says 1806. But in any event, it seems that he died of old age. It’s an appealing idea in an epoch defined by so much violence that the greatest native captain of the period might have died quietly in his bed after passing the reins of power to the next generation of Captains like Chiquito and Pocaropa and Flacco and others. And that such a great captain should retire so-quietly off-stage reminds us how much of Lipan life we can’t actually see in the written record.¹³⁰

By the close of the eighteenth century, the Lipanes had fought the Comanches back north of the Colorado River, and reestablished their dominance over their South Texas, West Texas, Coahuilan ranges. More importantly, as the nineteenth century dawned, they found themselves on good terms with the people with their neighbors! The Spanish governor in 1800 wrote of the Lipanes as people of “good faith”, and they were Spain’s preferred partners in Texas once again, especially after Spanish presidials accidentally killed the son of a Comanche captain in 1801, rupturing for good the fragile Spanish-Comanche peace of 1785. Lipanes in fact rode with Spanish troops to beat back Comanche retaliatory raids in 1802 and 1803.¹³¹

San Antonio became, once again, a sort of neutral meeting point, the trading post that most everyone seemed to want it to be. A representative two month period in 1798 saw 183 Lipanes, 169 Comanches, 68 Caddoan speakers, 21 Bidais, 14 tonkawas come to the town to trade. More and more Lipanes entered the local population, not just in the missions, but on Tejano ranches where they were sought out for their famed skills as horse-breakers.¹³²

And the market for horses, incidentally, was more robust than ever, thanks to the arrival of yet a new square on the checkerboard. In 1803, the United States acquired Louisiana. And everyone knew that the Anglo-Americans were relentless traders with an unquenchable demand for horses and an unlimited supply of firearms to buy them with. In 1806, the US government established an official trading “factory” in Natchitoches, Louisiana whose only possible purpose was to sell goods into Texas, despite it being an officially “closed” economy. Spanish administrators were aware that the $4,000 or so of rent payments they distributed each year to Native Texans would soon be dwarfed by the volume of trade coming across the Sabine River, whether they allowed it or not.¹³³

And yet after so many generations of struggle and bloodshed, Texas Indians remained loyal to their hard-fought and hard-won co-existence with the Spanish. And frankly, the stories trickling in from Indians in the US Southeast gave Texas Indians good reason to be wary of the Anglo-American republic’s Indian policy. And so in 1806 – just as tensions with their new US neighbors were beginning to flare – Texas leaders organized a great conference in San Antonio, attended by 300 Lipan, Comanche, and Caddo-speaking Wichita Captains. All spoke with “energy with which they spoke against the evils of war.” Their speeches left the young Spanish scribe of the conference “impressed and aware of the injustice that is done to the Indians in considering them nothing but savages.” Together, they planned a response to Anglo-American threat. They defined spheres of influence: Lipanes in the West and south, Comanches to the northwest, Caddoans to the east. The Tonkawas weren’t present, but maybe because by this time that had almost fully entered the Lipan cultural orbit. And all the tribes swore each other to peace. The Comanches even sent troops to accompany a Spanish expedition sent to the Sabine as a show of force against the Anglo-Americans.¹³⁴

And yet, a dollar is a cynical thing. By 1820, that US trade factory in Natchitoches was selling $90,000/yr worth of goods into Texas, and buying God knows how much more than that from Texas indians! It was the first phase of a process that would re-orient the Texas economy to the east, and away from the great plains. For the time being, however, it was just an economic boon to everyone it touched, not least of which, for the Lipan Apaches. Because even as they were committing to help the Spanish preserve the political status quo in Texas, Captain Chiquito sent his son, Cuelgas de Castro, to open up channels of communication with these new Anglo-American neighbors. Alliance-making was an obligation. Alliance-making was an opportunity. On the next episode of Lipan Apocalypse.

Unshared Sovereignty (Cuelgas de Castro)

Welcome to Lipan Apocalypse. Episode 9: Unshared Sovereignty. I’m Brandon Seale.

In the turmoil of fight for Mexican independence, Captain Cuelgas de Castro emerges as a beacon of stability in Texas. Perhaps no one saw the Texas geopolitical checkerboard better at this moment. Captain Cuelgas de Castro wins for his people recognition by the new Emperor of Mexico, promises of title to their lands and to the Texas horseherd they claimed by right, a commission in the Mexican army, and relations with the new English-speakers in the eastern portion of the state. None of which will be enough to secure his people’s future in their homeland, however.

Lipan Apache Captain Chiquito knew why the rent was late. It didn’t make it any more excusable, however. The Spanish governors of Texas understood that their “principal responsibility” – in their own notes to themselves! - was the payment of the annual rents owed to Texas Indians, most notably, the Lipanes and Comanches. Especially since the new U.S. traders had showed up in Louisiana. Within a decade of the opening of an US trading “factory” in Natchitoches, official trade topped $90,000 a year, dwarfing the $4,000 in annual gifts that Spanish authorities distributed. Industrial trade goods were now, more than ever, plentiful and cheap in Native Texas, but they weren’t coming from the Spanish authorities. Which made it all the more inexcusable and risky for the Spanish to miss their rent payment.¹³⁵

In some ways though, Captain Chiquito might have known more about the forces conspiring to undermine Spanish rule in Texas than the Viceroy did. Because by 1810, the Lipanes had developed a multi-generational relationship with Tejanos in Texas and in particular with the Menchaca family, dating back to 1693. They had started as enemies, when a young Spanish soldier named Jose de Urrutia went native and helped organize the Tejas in East Texas to fight against the Apaches. His son succeeded him as presidial commander at San Antonio, and started off his career slaving and provoking the Lipanes into terrible acts of violence, but then played a critical role in burying the hatchet in 1749. His nephew-in-law, Luis Antonio Menchaca, would succeed him and become a “bosom-friend” of the Lipanes during the years of Spanish-Lipan alliance. It would then be Luis Antonio’s son who was allowed to witness the solar eclipse ceremony in Picax-Andé’s camp in 1788. By the time Luis Antonio’s nephew, Miguel Menchaca entered the scene, the Lipan-Menchaca bond ran deep. And that bond ran right through Captain Chiquito, who had in effect, bound his people’s future to San Antonio. Also known as the Nutria del Sol or Sun otter band, they were more colloquially known as the “San Antonio Lipanes.”¹³⁶

And Menchaca must have been the one to share with Captain Chiquito the terrible, wonderful things that were happening down in Mexico: A revolt by a holy man in Guanajuato. Dreams of independence from Spain. Of a Mexico for the Mexicans. Of America for the little-a americans! A first, abortive revolt in San Antonio in 1811! Followed by escalating cycles of violence. And then, a reversal of fortunes…the revolutionary priest ambushed in Coahuila on his way to San Antonio! The movement for an independent Mexico seemingly crushed! Chiquito’s friend, Miguel Menchaca fleeing the state.

Like the migrations of the buffalo, like the planets, like the moon, like Changing Woman, like the story of their own first great migration, Captain Chiquito knew that history moved in cycles. And despite the setbacks, he could tell that the Spanish were not what they had been. And that their grip on Texas was slipping. Menchaca assured him of that as fled to the United States to raise men and money for the cause. Actually, Chiquito might have even helped Menchaca make these connections with the Anglo-Americans in Louisiana, whom he had begun to develop relationships with as well. As early as 1806, Captain Chiquito had sent his son, Cuelgas de Castro, to find a direct line of trade with the Anglos. It was a great test of his then fourteen year old son, whose name “Cuelgas” in Apache essentially meant “of the plains.” Cuelga-nde, people of the plains, was a term by which Lipanes sometimes referred to themselves or their predecessors, plainsmen. The Castro part is less clear, it may have honored a special relationship in the past with a Spanish officer. But there was some idea that his son, Cuelgas, was carrying the legacy of his people in his name, a legacy he could trace to a grandfather who had helped settle the San Sabá mission and all the way to Boca Comida and Cabellos Colorados whose people the San Antonio Lipanes had absorbed. By opening a trade channel with the Anglo-Americans in 1806 – for guns, always that most sacred commodity on the plains and pre-industrial America’s first mass produced item – Cuelgas had proven his potential. It was his first alliance, that most sought-after object of Lipan energies, and as was becoming increasingly apparent, an alliance with the Anglo-Americans might soon prove to be a necessity.¹³⁷

It also fit the logic of the Texas geopolitical checkerboard nicely. Chiquito probably recognized that the Comanches and Caddoan-speaking Wichita and Tejas now sat in much the same position as the Lipanes had sat in one hundred years prior: they were directly in the line of march for an aggressive settler nation pushing into their territory. But the Anglo-Americans weren’t like the French, they would never settle for trade. Nor were they like the Spanish, they would never settle for co-existence. There simply was no room for the Indian in the Anglo-American world. But because the Lipanes were one checkersquare removed from the Anglos, they made for natural allies with the Anglos against the Comanches and Caddoans sitting in-between. Early Anglo accounts of dealings with the Lipanes confirmed this perception, describing them as uniquely “shrewd…remarkably honest…and warmly attached to the Americans.”

In fact, the interests of Tejanos, Anglos, and Lipanes, all seemed to align in 1812. Even the Comanches came around, however, thanks to the blunders of the Spanish Texas governor, who not only failed to make their required rent payments, but also arrested the Comanche captain who came to town to complain about it. It was a shocking breach of the peace that had held in Texas for the last half decade, and it sent the Comanches into the revolutionary camp of the Tejanos, Anglos, and Lipanes. So that when Miguel Menchaca crossed the Sabine River back into Texas in August 1812 at the head of the Tejano contingent of Jose Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara’s Republican Army of the North, he was able to count on not only Lipan support, but also Comanche and the increasingly Lipan-aligned Tonkawas as well.¹³⁸

Which creates this incredible scene in 1812-1813 when you have Tejano, Anglo, Lipan, Tonkawa, and Comanche forces all fighting on the same side during the first war of Texas independence! The Lipanes played a vital role in supplying Menchaca and Gutiérrez de Lara’s army with buckskin and moccasins and other provisions, and in carrying Gutiérrez de Lara’s highly-effective propaganda throughout the province. They were soon fighting and dying alongside the so-called Republican Army of the North. Three hundred Lipanes and Tonkawa under the command of the now twenty-year old Cuelgas de Castro and another rising Captain from the South Texas Lipanes named “Flacco” suffered disproportionately large losses in the Battle of Rosillo in March 1813. They had misunderstood an order and charged early, though with devastating effect. The Republicans carried the day and the Spanish Royalist Governor and his men were captured. Gutiérrez de Lara and Menchaca recognized the Lipanes’ contribution after the battle with gifts of guns, cash, loot, and copious praise. Lipanes then figured just as critically in June in routing the Spanish Royalists at the Battle of Alazan, where they fell upon the Spanish rear in a frenzy of killing, horse-capturing, and looting.¹³⁹

And they rode with Miguel Menchaca on the morning of August 18, 1813, into the final, tragic Battle of Medina. Cuelgas de Castro wasn’t with them that morning…perhaps he picked up on the friction in the Republican army’s upper ranks. Days before the battle, a series of political maneuvers had led to the dismissal of the Republican army’s as-yet-undefeated General, Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara. The Lipanes’ friend, Miguel Menchaca hung around, but was openly mistrustful of the new commander, a young Spanish nobleman, who just never seemed to understand the spirit of the Republican Army of the North. From the start, the Battle of Medina felt disorganized. And when Menchaca died on the field of battle, the Lipanes fled.

They retreated back into their Hill Country homeland, where Captain Chiquito and his son Cuelgas de Castro, and the rest of their people considered what to do next. They didn’t have long to consider. In October, just two months after the battle, the victorious Spanish Royalist General Arredondo made the Lipanes his next target. The Spanish military’s mistrust of the Lipanes ran deep, and Arredondo attacked a village of 300 Lipanes and took nearly all their property. In the interim, a few surviving Tejanos from Menchaca’s old command managed to make contact with them, most notably, José Francisco Ruíz, the highest-ranking Tejano to survive the Battle of Medina. In the year or two following the battle, Ruíz had established a particularly close relationship with the Comanches, procuring goods for them in American Lousiana and carrying them out to the plains. He had grown up with a Lipan Apache adopted brother in his house, and seems to have spoken their language some, and during these years developed a great deal of trust with them.¹⁴⁰

Through Ruíz perhaps, the Lipanes made a radical proposal to their old Comanche rivals: an alliance, against the Spanish in Texas. To work together to raid the weakened old conquistadors, with the support, Ruíz assured them, of the Tejano population of the state. They had nothing to lose and everything to gain, and so in 1816, Captain Chiquito’s band of San Antonio Lipanes entered into an alliance with the Comanches. Lipanes, Comanches, and Tejanos exiles would spend the next five years harassing the Spanish in Texas. By 1818, the Spanish governor would be writing that “not a single day passes without them making some depredation or attack.” He estimated that the Lipanes numbered 25,000 and Comanches 18,000 warriors. He was off by about 10X or more on the Lipanes and probably 4-5X on the Comanches, but it’s a testament to how overpowered he felt. Cueglas de Castro during these years rose to become a captain in his own right, alongside his aging father, and alongside Flacco of the plains Lipanes and Pocaropa of the South Texas Lipanes. And there’s a fascinating continuity here, as these three – Cuelgas, Flacco, and Pocaropa – were direct descendants of Captains Chico, Casablanca, and perhaps even El Lumen, the seer, from previous episodes. In 1818, this new generation of Lipan leadership joined with the Comanches in sacking Refugio. In 1819, they defeated the Spanish in a set piece battle outside Victoria. In 1819, they infiltrated San Antonio and rounded up part of the presidial horse herd, something they hadn’t done for almost a century by that point.¹⁴¹

In 1821, the news arrived that the war with Spain was over…and the Mexicans had triumphed! Nothing changed overnight in Texas, however. In fact, most of the old Spanish officers retained their posts (and their distrust of the Lipanes) in the independent Mexican government. It just heightened the Lipanes’ confusion when it came to figuring out who was really speaking for the Spanish or the Mexicans or whoever they claimed they were now. And yet when José Francisco Ruíz sent word to the Lipanes inviting them to meet him in Coahuila in April of 1822 to learn more, they were inclined to listen. They’d come to trust him, and Ruíz had suffered like they had from Spanish oppression. He’d been in exile in Louisiana for nine years by this point, and even now that Mexico had won the independence his pardon – his pardon for fighting on behalf of the side that had theoretically won the war of Mexican independence - was withheld by vengeful Spanish officers on the condition that he must negotiate a definitive peace with the Lipanes and the Comanches who he had arrayed against the Spanish for so many of the previous nine years.

Ruíz showed his appreciation for Lipan power and his knowledge of their lands by proposing to meet them near their sacred El Remolino in northern Coahuila, in the modern-Mexican town of Zaragoza, Coahuila. And when he finally sat down with Cuelgas de Castro – representing the Lower Lipanes from around San Antonio - and Pocaropa – representing the Upper Lipanes who now ranged all up and down the Rio Grande - on April 3, 1822, he assured them that it was a new day in North America.¹⁴²

Instead of the old Spanish model which recognized only “reduced” Indians and “barbarous” Indians, all were equal in this new nation. They were equal and yet, their sovereignty and their identity would remain undiminished. The new Mexican nation – particularly under the still-to-come constitution of 1824 – was committed to testing the limits of shared sovereignty, “Federalism” as they would call it in their European languages, yet really it was just a European version of the old Native American ideal that sovereignty doesn’t have to be unitary and it doesn’t have to be hierarchical. It can be overlapping, recognizing the other types of bonds – like kinship, compadrazgo, etc – that tie people together rather than just master and subject. Everything about Ruiz’s description of this new Mexican nation seemed relatable to Cuelgas and Pocaropa and the other Lipanes, intuitive even. It was cute, in a way, that these settlers thought they were inventing this notion out of thin air, but regardless where they were adopting it from, it promised a more peaceful, prosperous future for everyone involved.

And so Cuelgas and Pocaropa accepted Ruíz’s invitation to Mexico City to formalize the new peace. Ruíz’s Comanche allies did too. Go listen to my episode in the previous season on the “Impossible Peace” if you want to learn more. By the end of 1822, the chief captains of both the Lipanes and Comanches were in the great imperial Capital, signing treaties with and in the case of the Comanches anyway, meeting with the new Mexican emperor Agustin Iturbide. The Lipanes may even have arrived in time to have seen his coronation.

And yet the great Lipan alliance-makers in particular extracted terms from the new Mexican government that reflected the power they held over the region. It’s an unparalleled thing, really, that even after nearly two hundred years of facing down colonial and native powers, the Lipanes’ heartland ranging from South Texas to Northern Coahuila to the Trans-Pecos and north to the Colorado remained undiminished, and geographically well out of proportion to their small numbers. In exchange for returning Spanish captives, the new Mexican nation would formally recognize the Lipanes’ rights to the water and pasture-lands. The Lipanes wanted it even clearer than that, however, and so the Mexican government promised they would “let the Lipan tribes have whatever they need for their families and for war to defend themselves against their enemies…” The Mexican government also promised to serve as guarantor of the almost decade-long Lipan-Comanche peace and to resume making the old Spanish rent payments. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, the Lipanes were given rights to round-up any and all wild horses in Texas. It was the formalization of the long-asserted Lipan right to all the horses of the Texas plains, who were, after all, created in the beginning just for them and over whom no other people – native or settler – could claim the same level of mastery.¹⁴³

Other Native Americans got wind of the generous terms being offered by this new Mexican nation. In contrast to the United States of Eastern North America which wouldn’t recognize native americans as citizens until 1924, the Mexican government was promising actual citizenship and formal – if slow-moving – recognition of their rights to land. Under increasing pressure from the United States’ Indian Removal policies, peoples from East of the Mississippi began migrating into Mexican Texas. From Michigan, from Ohio, from Georgia and Tennessee almost 10,000 of these “immigrant Indians” entered Texas over the next decade. The arrival of these immigrant Indians into East Texas set them at odds with the resident Caddoan-speakers of the region, the Tejas, the Wichitas, and the Lipanes’ other old East Texas rivals. And the truth was that Mexican officials seemed to favor these new immigrants over the settled East Texas native communities, presumably because they could extract more concessions for them in exchange for giving them land in East Texas. Some of these immigrant Indians, like the Shawnee, for example, took a dislike to the Comanches as well, and began to fight with them on occasion. It all played to the Lipanes’ advantage, distracting their old rivals and allowing Lipan alliance-makers to play the newcomers off the old-timers, politically and commercially.¹⁴⁴

As they had many times before in the past, this moment of Lipan power drew other native peoples to them. Indeed, despite having endured at least four major epidemics in 1750, 1764, 1780, and 1798, there is reason to believed that the Lipan population might have increased slightly during this period, in stark contrast to the demographic trends elsewhere in Native America. We’ve already mentioned the Lipanes’ strong bonds with the Tonkawas by this point, who often lived side-by-side with the Lipanes by the 1820’s. The badly depleted Karankawas even came into their orbit: as early as 1816 they are documented as making pilgrimages to the Lipan-controlled peyote gardens. The Lipanes also directed their alliance-making efforts toward the recovering Tejano urban centers. Captain Pocaropa became particularly close to the leadership of Laredo. And after the death of his father Captain Chiquito in 1821, Cuelgas de Castro became a regular presence in San Antonio. Like many Lipanes by this point in time, Cuelgas spoke “quite good Spanish” and also “was the easiest chief for the military commanders of the eastern interior provinces to communicate with, both for lodging complaints against crimes and for seeing that the criminals are punished for their misdeeds.” Cuelgas made sure to live up to his end of the 1822 treaty, punishing wrongdoers under his control and making sure to lodge his complaints through the correct, Mexican legal channels.¹⁴⁵

And there was, of course, yet another new entrant on the scene. Starting in 1823 and 1824, the first Anglo-Americans started arriving in East Texas with Stephen F. Austin. Captains Cuelgas de Castro and Flacco had actively sought out Stephen F. Austin as early as 1821 and quickly realized a natural alignment of interests. Picturing it again like a checkerboard, the Lipanes were one square removed from the East Texas Indians who surrounded Austin’s new colony, and Austin’s colonists brought with them deep-seated Anglo-discomfort about any Indians living in their immediate proximity. As early as 1826, Cuelgas and Flacco were riding with Austin’s colonists against Caddoan-speaking Wacos and Wichitas, and again in an even larger campaign in 1829. By 1831, their East Texas Caddoan-speaking rivals with whom they had warred for almost three centuries were badly beat down by the demographic pressures converging on them from all sides.¹⁴⁶

Which didn’t mean that all of their old rivalries had been put to bed. Despite a decade of collaboration, in 1824, a bout of violence broke out between the Lipanes and Comanches. The Lipanes would call on – and receive! – Mexican aid against the Comanche violence of the 1820’s. In 1826, Cuelgas was commissioned a lieutenant colonel in the Mexican army for his effectiveness against the Comanches, and Pocarropa as well was given an officer’s commission. And in July 1827, a joint Mexican-Lipan force defeated a large force of Comanches who then sued for peace, negotiated with the help of José Francisco Ruiz. And in some ways, the Lipan-Comanche rivalry starts to take on a different flavor from this point forward. Generations of contact, of shared geography, and of converging lifestyles – and perhaps some early-stage peyote-diplomacy – had started to weave kinship bonds into the tapestry of old Lipan-Comanche enmity. By 1828, the Lipanes and Comanches were regularly being written about as at peace, with each other, and with Mexican officials.¹⁴⁷

There was still something uncomfortable though for Cuelgas and Pocaropa and Flacco and all Lipanes in their dealings with the Mexican government. In part, it was the presence of so many former Spanish Royalists in the army’s officer corps, with all of their centuries’ old resentments of Apache power. There was also too the tension between the idea of shared sovereignty in a nation-state.

Lipan Captains Cuelgas de Castro, Pocaropa, Flacco, and others were beginning to feel like this supposed federal republic still seemed to believe deep down that even in a system of shared sovereignty, the sovereignty of the Europeans in the center of the nation-state should be just a little more supreme. Even the supposed “rule of law” promised Lipanes under the constitution of 1824 began to seem like something that was only ever wielded against them. Cuelgas couldn’t help but notice how rarely Mexicans were actually punished for the same crimes that he was obligated to turn his people over for. As early as 1824, Mexican officers took Cuelgas to task for supposed Lipan horse raids in Coahuila, even as Mexicans had been rounding up his wild horses in Texas for the previous three years, in defiance of the treaty of 1822 that said those Texas horses were the property of the Lipanes. It sure didn’t seem like Lipanes were really and truly full “citizens” under the law, or that sovereignty was being shared at all. It seemed like the perpetuance and survival of that central sovereign was more sacrosanct than the people who had invested it with that sovereignty. And that all manner of injustice, violence, and even genocide could be justified, if done in the name of its survival. On the next episode, of Lipan Apocalypse.¹⁴⁸

Fidelity to the Texian (Flacco the Younger)

Welcome to Lipan Apocalypse. Episode 10: Fidelity to the Texian. I’m Brandon Seale

No Native Texan captured Texians’ hearts like Lipan Captain Flacco the Younger. His exploits as a Texas Ranger and his people’s defense of Texas’ borders against Mexican reinvasion and other native peoples make him the darling of Texas newspapers. Texas newspapers fail to distinguish, however, between hostile native Texans and Lipanes living in their midst. Lipan wealth becomes an irresistible target of Texian raiding and retaliation.

A southeast wind carried the sounds of cannonfire up into the Hill Country and into the ears of the Lipanes living there. They hadn’t expected to hear the cannons of San Antonio firing again so soon after the December 1835 defeat of the Mexican centralist army there by rebel “Texians” as we typically refer to Texans from this upcoming Republic of Texas era. The Mexican army had been defeated, parolled, and promised to never return. The Lipanes had been the ones to make sure of it, actually, sending Flacco the Younger – son of Captain Flacco the Elder – to trail them all the way across the Rio Grande.¹⁴⁹

But in Saltillo, the defeated Mexican army stopped and turned around. They were joined by an even larger army led by General Santa Anna, fresh off the sack of Zacatecas. Flacco the Younger heard the gruesome details: hundreds killed, thousands imprisoned, the town looted. He rode back as fast as he could to report it to his people and to their Tejano friends. Could the cannonfire they were hearing from San Antonio here in February 1836 be Santa Anna’s army already? Could 6,000 men really have covered the 300 miles from Saltillo through a foot of snow during one of the coldest winters in memory – in just 6 weeks?

Captain Cuelgas de Castro took a handful of trusted men and rode into San Antonio to check it out and try to link up with the hundreds of Lipanes and Lipan descendants living there. But as they approached town, they were cut off by Mexican scouts, officered by skeptical old Spanish royalist officers on the lookout for untrustworthy Lipan-types to come to the aid of the rebel Texians. Cuelgas de Castro and his men hung around the outskirts of San Antonio for the next thirteen days, helpless. One descendant of Cuelgas de Castro recalled what they eventually witnessed on March 6: “We witnessed how the Mexican soldiers tossed and burned the bodies of the dead Texans into large fires. We lost family at the Alamo, we buried our dead.”¹⁵⁰

Seeing their Tejano friends – like José Francisco Ruíz and the young José Antonio Menchaca – taking up arms against Santa Anna’s army, the Lipanes threw in their lot with them. They spent the next few months raiding the unguarded Mexican frontier in Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas, assisting the Texian war effort immeasurably. Listeners to this podcast will recall their effectiveness in the form of the suffering they inflicted of the inhabitants of the Rio Grande Villas after the Battle of San Jacinto, which would become one of the principal incitements to the revolt of the Republic of the Rio Grande two years later.¹⁵¹

Because of the fervor with which the Lipanes harassed the Mexicans during the campaigns of 1836, they became immediate favorites of the Anglo-Texians. Lipanes just had that aura about them, and Texians could tell. Texas newspapers praised Cuelgas de Castro as “a man of great courage, wonderful sagacity, and uncommon physical powers; and is also distinguished for his fidelity to the Texian.” He was President Sam Houston’s guest of honor at a ball in Houston in 1838, where Cuelgas played to the crowd by crying “Muerte a los mexicanos!” a phrase that even the English-speakers in attendance could understand. And Flacco the Younger painted a particularly gallant figure in the Texas mind. Twenty-five years old or so at the time of Texas independence, he had already taken the scalps of eight enemies. A Texas newspaper described him as “the pride and the flower of his tribe, and as fierce and as brave as a lion.” Like many Lipanes, he was tall, walked exceedingly upright, “gave an impression of bounding elasticity,” he also possessed “a fierce alertness coupled with strength and agility,” and on a horse was a “most splendid and graceful” thing.¹⁵²

And yet Lipanes like Cuelgas and Flacco must have picked up on some very troubling differences between the Anglo-American view of native americans and the Spanish-Mexican one they had grown up under.

The first clue was that upon adoption of the Constitution of the Republic of Texas, Lipanes were no longer officially citizens of any nation. Whereas the Mexican constitution of 1824 had extended citizenship to all peoples within its borders, including Indians, the Constitution of the Republic of Texas specifically excluded them. There was, actually, a somewhat interesting theoretical basis for this, namely, that – if you’re gonna be a stickler for the social contract and the principle of self-determination - you can’t really force citizenship on people who aren’t a part of your polity. In the early years of the United States, the idea was that the government of the United States was the government of the white people of the United States…and of 3/5ths of their slaves of course, who couldn’t vote, but that’s another issue. But Indians were theoretically excluded from US sovereignty because they had their own governments and their own, well. sovereignty.

Very quickly, however, the Anglo-American republic’s concept of political sovereignty expanded into a concept of geographic sovereignty. In the 1831 Supreme Court Case of the Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Indian tribes were reclassed from sovereign nations with whom the US was required to treat as any other sovereign, foreign nation, to “domestic dependent nations” that were fundamentally inferior to the overriding sovereignty of the US government. This of course enabled the various United States Indian Removal Acts that followed over the next half century.

These nuances were largely obscured, from Cuelgas and other Lipan chiefs in the first years of the Republic of Texas, however, because the first Texas President held anything but conventional views on native Americans. Sam Houston had lived amongst the Cherokees for many years and in theory had first come to Texas as an Indian agent for the United States. His favorable view of Native Americans would long be his greatest political liability in Texas in fact. Saying things outloud such as that he “had never yet known a treaty made with an Indian tribe first infracted or violated by them” did not win him any votes. And yet, the hero of San Jacinto rode to a landslide victory in the Republic of Texas’ first presidential election, allowing him to articulate in his first inaugural address a strategy toward Texas Indians of “pacification and protection.” In short, he would avoid war, promote trade, and seek co-existence with them, in ways not terribly dissimilar to the previous Spanish-Mexican strategies.¹⁵³

Even Houston wouldn’t go so far as to invest Lipanes and other tribes with titles to their lands, however. In a perverse way, the fiction of Native sovereignty – as “domestic dependent nations” or otherwise – helped justify this inaction. How can one sovereign issue title to another sovereign? And there was a practical if not cynical reason why Anglo-americans resisted issuing native americans titles to their lands: titles to land tend to survive changes in sovereignty, whereas if you can just push a sovereign out of their untitled lands, you get to issue new, clean titles to whoever you want. This was probably what was behind the Texas Senate’s effort in 1837 to officially classify Lipan Apaches as part of the Mexican nation, so they could avail themselves of a clause in the Texas constitution that stripped title to land from anyone who supported “Mexicans” in the fight of 1836. Houston was able to ignore the Senate’s measure, however, and in general attempted to treat with the Lipanes as true sovereigns…and as allies.¹⁵⁴

Because Houston was first and foremost a pragmatist. He had resisted the cries of newspapers and demogogues to execute Santa Anna after San Jacinto, realizing that the Mexican General was worth much more to Texas alive than dead. Similarly, he knew that the fragile Republic of Texas needed Indian allies, particularly Indian allies with shared grievances against the Mexican army’s ex-Royalist officer class and against the Comanches. And in general, Texians perceived the Lipanes to be the toughest Indians on the block: “[Lipanes] are more enterprising and warlike than the Comanche, who regard them with a respect, in which fear is a chief ingredient.”¹⁵⁵

And so Houston actively recruited Lipanes into the service of the Republic. On January 8, 1838, Houston’s commissioners met with Cuelgas de Castro and signed the Treaty of Live Oak Point, a treaty of “peace and perpetual friendship” between Texas and the Lipanes. Notably, the Texian government would continue the old Spanish-Mexican rent payments. But Texian negotiators couldn’t resist dropping in a few one-sided clauses. For example: the Lipanes promised and solemnly pledged to be and remain the perpetual friends of the Republic of Texas; the Republic of Texas promised and guaranteed peace, friendship, and protection for so long as the Lipanes remained peaceable and in good faith. Lipanes that broke the law would turned over to the courts of the Republic of Texas; Texians who broke the law would also and only be dealt with in Texas courts.¹⁵⁶

But there were also some very meaningful gestures included. Most notably, the Lipanes were recruited en masse into the Texas Rangers. Cuelgas de Castro and both Flacco the elder and Flacco the Younger were given officer’s commissions and Cuelgas was actually given a commission as either a Colonel or a General of the Texas rangers, I can’t quite tell, he gets referred to by both ranks at different times.¹⁵⁷

Mirabeau Lamar succeeded Sam Houston as president in December 1838, and effectively declared war on the native population of Texas. Wisely, he excepted the Lipanes and their Tonkawa allies, considering them “friendly” Indians and continuing Houston’s cultivation of them. He needed their help, particularly against the Comanches, who were his primary targets.¹⁵⁸

On Feb 12, 1839, a force of fifty-four Texians, forty Lipanes, and a dozen allied Tonkawa snuck up on a Comanche camp in modern-day Williamson County. Cuelgas de Castro with his Lipanes and Tonkawas managed to sneak all the way around the Comanche camp and stampede most of the Comanches horse herd. The Anglo commander, John H. Moore, however, had decided to dismount his men and try to attack the Comanche camp on foot, demonstrating how Anglo-Texians were still learning the hard way how to fight on the Texas plains. The Comanches waited for the Texians to fired their first round, then attacked, just as the Cuelgas and his men were riding back around to the front. The Lipanes fought back the Comanche charge, but Colonel Moore ordered his men to retreat, just when Cuelgas thought that the Comanches had lost the momentum. In the confusion, the Comanches then managed to stampede the Texians’ horseherd, leaving them to walk home from this so-called Battle of Brushy Creek on foot. “Old Castro was so disgusted when Colonel Moore ordered his retreat that he withdrew his command and left…old Castro told Colonel Moore at the time that such a thing as ordering a retreat when the enemy was routed and flying had never been heard of before.” Cuelgas and the Lipanes managed to snag 90 Comanche horses, however, which softened the blow of the lost opportunity.¹⁵⁹

Things only got worse for the Texians after the March 19, 1840 Council House massacre in San Antonio. Texian commissioners invited Comanche captains into San Antonio – that old neutral trading town. The meeting quickly went off the rails, however, and ended with the deaths of 35 Comanches including 12 captains. Comanches would never forget that day and would adopt a more or less permanent war footing toward the Texians forever after. Which only improved the Lipanes’ situation, of course, because it made the Texians that much more dependent on them and aligned them near-permanently against their old plains rivals.. When the Comanches retaliated for the Council House debacle with their Great Raid of 1840 all the way to Linnville on the Gulf of Mexico, Lipanes but especially their Tonkawa allies would lead the Texian counterattack. The August 1840 Battle of Plum Creek is often painted as a final Texian victory against the Comanche raiders. To Lipan eyes it looked indecisive at best, and necessitated a follow-up raid. On October 23, 1840, Cuelgas once again rode up the Colorado River alongside Colonel John H. Moore, the two having worked out their differences after the Battle of Brushy Creek. Somewhere around modern Colorado City, right on the Lipan-Comanche border that the two had been fighting over now for a century, the Texian-Lipan force surprised several hundred Comanche families in camp, and killed 128 of them – men, women, and children. Cuelgas and the Lipanes also rode off with 500 Comanche horses. It was a brutal massacre of innocents. And yet, it was an undeniable Lipan-Texian victory. “Great credit is due the Lipan chief Castro and his men,” Colonel Moore wrote afterward.¹⁶⁰

Another Lipan-Texian attack the next summer would drive the Comanches entirely out of the Lipanes’ old ranges. On July 14, 1841, Captain Jack Hays led a force of 43 rangers and 7 Lipanes as they approached the Frio River headwaters in the Lipanes Hill Country heartland in search of Comanches. They found them without meaning to, stumbling into a camp of about fifty Comanche men. A running fight ensued, and at one point, Jack Hays’ horse ran away with him, charging straight toward the middle of the Comanche line. Flacco the Younger had become quite close with Hays through a half decade of service together now and seeing his friend Hays plunging into the Comanche lines, Flacco spurred his horse and charged in after him, his buckskin-fringed leggings flapping in the wind, silver arm bands glistening in the sun, an eagle feather flopping in his hair. As Hays pulled up even with the Comanche line, he fired a shot to each side to buy himself some space and Flacco came right through the same breach, firing and covering as Jack Hays began to make a giant loop back toward the ranger lines. Flacco finally caught up to Hays, they killed one more Comanche together who got in their way, and rode back to safety.¹⁶¹

After the battle, Flacco famously said of Hays that he was “bravo too much,” which is cute, but it bears noting that even Hays admitted that his “charge” had been involuntary; Flacco had chosen to come in after him. ¹⁶²

Mirabeau Lamar’s Indian wars had nearly bankrupted the Republic, however, and so increasingly Texas Ranger expeditions were self-financed now by whatever plunder they could lay their hands on. At a time when a man might be lucky to make $150 for a year’s worth of work back in town, clipping three $50/horses from a Comanche camp made for a pretty successful venture. And of course it wasn’t just horses. Comanches were wealthy in guns, powder, hides, and even more recognizable tools, implements, and jewelry. ¹⁶³

But so too were the Lipanes. And by 1842 or so, the “line of Anglo settlement” had reached the traditional Lipan lands. Which meant that when an Anglo settlement got hit by an unidentified Indian raid, the first Indians that Anglo-Texians typically saw when they looked around, were Lipanes. Rich, well-provisioned Lipanes. There was also a bias, then as now, against the idea that migratory people could be rich. Western minds were schooled in the progression of societies from hunter-gatherer, to agricultural, to industrial, migratory hunter-gatherers were on the bottom rung of the prosperity ladder. Nevermind that yet every wealthy person I know today who can afford it, chooses a nomadic existence, following almost the exact same rhythms as the mountains-to-plains proto-Apaches that the Lipanes still imitated. But to a nation of sod-punching farmers, a bunch of wealthy wandering Indians on their border seemed suspicious.

In 1841, Cuelgas and Flacco the Elder were arrested while visiting Austin on business. Someone had accused the Lipanes of killing an Anglo settler. It had been a Comanche raid, in fact, but as we’ll see with increasing frequency going forward, a favorite Comanche tactic was to retreat right through a Lipan camp after going on a raid. Cuelgas and Flacco were released and forgave the mix-up. Houston’s return to the presidency later that year helped calm tensions too, especially when he declared Lamar’s Indian wars a failure and noted that they had cost the republic $2.5 MM dollars. Houston would spend only $139,000 over the next three years on Indian affairs, mainly on gifts. The gifts were needed reassurance by 1842 to allies like Cuelgas and the Flaccos, and came at a time when Texians needed allies. A foolish and failed Texian attempt to capture Santa Fe the previous year had demanded a response from Mexico. On March 5, 1842, a Mexican army surprised and occupied San Antonio. The bankrupt Republic of Texas had no realistic plan to fight back. But that same day, a separate column of the Mexican army picked a fight with someone who could. This other Mexican column occupied Refugio, and when a Lipan party rode into town to figure out what was going on, the Mexican column attacked them. Viciously. They killed every Lipan they could reach, including two others who they claimed tried to escape after they were “captured,” and including Cuelgas de Castro’s son-in-law and nephew.¹⁶⁴

It was a really strange move considering that the Mexican government had actually been quite skillfully negotiating secret alliances with East Texas Indians against the Anglo-Texians at the same time. But the old Spanish bias against the Apaches still dominated the Mexican army officer corps, and that Spanish thinking couldn’t see Lipan Apaches as anything but enemies in need of extermination. Within two days of their massacre of the Refugio Lipanes, 300 Lipan, Tonkawa, and even Mescalero from far west Texas surrounded the Mexican column’s camp. They set fire to the prairie surrounding the Mexican column, and then charged in, killing fifteen, stampeding the Mexican horseherd, and forcing them to leave behind the dead and wounded to burn. The other Mexican column abandoned San Antonio the next day. Cuelgas de Castro soon joined by 52 Lipan rangers under the command of Flacco the Younger - now carrying a Colonel’s commission – harassed the Mexican invaders all the way to the Rio Grande, inflicting fifteen casualties on the way.¹⁶⁵

Despite their heroics in defense of the Republic, Texian hostilities against the Lipanes began to increase. Most other Texas natives had removed themselves from beyond the reach of the Anglo-Texians. But Lipanes had long defined themselves by their symbiotic co-existence with European settler societies. They were still fixtures of life around places like San Antonio and Laredo, and even Refugio, whose bacon they had just saved precisely because they were still around! And yet, by the summer of 1842, President Sam Houston was having to issue Cuelgas de Castro – the Lipan captain who had been feted at charity balls in Houston just four years prior! – a passport for safe passage between Austin and Houston. After two attacks by vigilante parties against Lipan communities in 1842, President Houston had to send orders to army officers to stop any further civilian attacks on Lipanes from occurring.¹⁶⁶

Then, on September 11, 1842, a Mexican army once again captured San Antonio. And once again, a second Mexican column tried to push up along the Texas Gulf coast. And once again, now-Colonel Flacco the Younger attacked this Mexican column and turned them back. As before, this weakened the Mexican army’s position in San Antonio, and this time, a hastily assembled Texian force came down and defeated the Mexican army at the Battle of Salado Creek. For like the third time in his young life, it fell to Flacco the Younger to trail a defeated Mexican force back to the Rio Grande. This time, however, Flacco the Younger was joined by several hundred Texians intent on revenge. They disorganized pursuit turned into an army of conquest, with the Texians occupying Laredo – which like New Mexico had never actually been under Texian control - and capturing several pockets of the escaping Mexican army’s horse herd.¹⁶⁷

The Texians were feeling confident, however, and wanted to press on further south. On December 19, 1842, they captured Guerrero, formerly known as Revilla, hometown to Jose Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, Antonio Zapata, and don’t you just love how small of a world Texas history was in the 1840’s. And yet, Colonel Flacco the Younger wasn’t with this force as it pressed its luck on down to Mier and into the famous black bean episode. At $50/horse the captured Mexican horse herd represented a not insignificant source of financing for the entire expedition. Flacco being a Lipan and the Lipanes being known far and wide as the best horsemen in the state, the Texian general ordered Flacco to take the captured Mexican horses back north to Texas where they could be sold. On January 1st, Young Colonel Flacco left the Texas expeditionary army near Laredo and began to ride back to San Antonio.

He never made it. On the next episode of Lipan Apocalypse.

Grass Will Not Grow on the Path Between Us (Ramon and Juan Castro)

Welcome to Lipan Apocalypse. Episode 11: Grass will not grow on the path between us. I’m Brandon Seale.

Texian wealth, numbers, and policies prove particularly effective at isolating their Lipan allies by denying them access to the markets upon which they had come to depend. Lipanes adapt by becoming proxies for a Texian guerilla war against northern Mexico. Mexican officials resurrect an old Spanish policy of “pan o palo,” “bread or the stick,” offering sanctuary to some Lipanes while brutally massacring others. The Texas-Mexico border itself – and the freedom it offers – becomes an artifact of enduring Lipan resistance during these years. Captains like Juan and Ramon Castro and others…

“Tears rained down the old man’s face while sobs fairly shook his frame,” Noah Smithwick wrote in describing Lipan Captain Flacco the Elder’s reaction to the news of his son’s death. Flacco the Younger had “burned down” in the Lipan idiom, though that makes it sound like he had died of old age or natural causes. He most definitely had not. He had been sent on January 1, 1843, to drive the Texian army’s captured horseherd from Laredo back to San Antonio. His body was found along the Medina River a week later, around the same time the horses showed up in Seguin, along with his saddle blankets and personal remuda. Worried about the Lipan reaction to the murder of the “flower of their tribe,” Texas officials went into spin mode. They publicly blamed Mexican bandits for Flacco’s murder. And/or other Indians, they never quite got the story straight. But in private, Texas officials knew he had been murdered by a pair of Anglo-Texians. They even knew their names. Tom Thernon and James B. Reavis. No charges were ever brought, however. It was, in Smithwick’s words, “one of the most pathetic incidents in the history of Texas.” Describing his visit to Flacco the elder afterwards, Smithwick could only note “I felt how useless words were in such a crisis. I could only express my sympathy by the tears that welled up to my own eyes.”¹⁶⁸

All Noah Smithwick could offer the elder Flacco was a poem. It was no substitute for the justice that Flacco would never receive, but it had been written by Sam Houston himself, and, well, frankly, its poignant. It’s long, but here’s a slightly abridged form:

“My heart is sad

A dark cloud rests upon your nation.

Grief has sounded in your camp;

The voice of Flacco is silent.

His words are not heard in Council;

The Chief is no more.

His life has fled to the Great Spirit;

His eyes are closed;

His heart no longer leaps

At the sight of the buffalo.

The voices of your camp

Are no longer heard to cry

“Flacco has returned from the chase.”

…

Flacco was a friend to his white brothers.

They will not forget him;

They will remember the red warrior.

His father will not be forgotten.

We will be Kind to the Lipans.

Grass will not grow

On the path between us…

Thy brother, Sam Houston.”

Here’s where I’m supposed to talk about the Lipanes’ beliefs in the afterlife, that Flacco was now in the ““Happy Place,” down in the southern world with streams and shady cottonwoods and with all of his dead ancestors. But that for me would make this scene less human, less real, and fall in a long tradition of trying to accentuate how different native americans were as a subconscious way of distancing ourselves from the terrible violence perpetrated against them.¹⁶⁹

Flacco the Elder had a much more relatable response. He accepted Houston’s poem, graciously, through his sobs. Then told Smithwick that he no longer wanted to be called Flacco. Even hearing his own name was too painful, because of the memory it brough him of his son. A most relatable response if ever there was one and pretty definitive proof here that – despite the Lipanes’ aura, despite their “otherness” in their enemies’ accounts of them - we’re dealing with people NOT all that together different from us.¹⁷⁰

And then, he threw it all back in Smithwick’s face: “It has always been our custom to destroy everything belonging to the dead, but my son was the white man’s friend and I want to do with his things as white men do.” He gifted Smithwick one of his son’s finest horses. He sent two horses to the commander of the Texian army, General Burleson. And he sent President Houston a mustang that Flacco had broken and trained himself. It was a gift in the Lipan idiom more poignant than a poem. And it was an accusation. It would be a living reminder to Houston, Smithwick, and Burleson of the emptiness of their promises, of the hollowness of their “friendship.” Then, like the Uvalde School district deciding to raze Robb Elementary, the Lipan captain formerly known as Flacco and his people then destroyed the rest of the younger Flacco’s belongings, struck their camp, and abandoned the site forever.¹⁷¹

Lipanes had been a fixture of settler life in Texas for as long as European settlers had been writing about Texas life. As the great alliance-makers of the plains and as a people who had more than a century before defined themselves by a decision to live in symbiosis with and among settler societies. We see them singing in the streets of Laredo in 1828, living close enough to Refugio to save its ass in the Mexican invasion of 1842, and entangled in and around San Antonio for centuries before AND after: at a community on Cibolo Creek where they were attending elementary schools with German immigrants, their fields of “elote” or corn giving the name to Helotes on San Antonio’s northwest side, in the old mission communities that still governed themselves a bit apart from the city of San Antonio proper, even in the old “Indian Town” at the junction of Apache and Alazan creek on San Antonio’s near west side.¹⁷²

But 1843 was a turning point. First, obviously there was the murder of Flacco the Younger. But also, the great captain Cuelgas de Castro had died the previous summer, apparently of natural causes, but it marked a passing of the baton to his sons, Juan and Ramon Castro. And then, as if to pile on their misfortunes, a particularly devastating bout of smallpox that swept through Lipan communities, killing perhaps 1/5 of Lipan men.¹⁷³

Amidst all of this loss, Flacco the Elder and Juan and Ramon Castro could feel Anglo-Texians’ attitudes changing all around them as well. The vast majority of the 70,000 non-Indians living in Texas by 1843 were newcomers, with no context for the decades-long Anglo-Lipan alliance and with a strong discomfort at seeing Indians in their midst. In the words of Sam Houston, settlers became “victims to their own indiscretion and temerity.” You may be surprised to learn that the social media of the day - Newspapers - never hesitated to circulate to the wildest and most unsubstantiated rumors of Apache violence. A contemporary Texas ranger – and certainly no lover of Indians – reviewed the records from 1823 to 1875 to count the number of deaths actually attributable to Indian violence. His final tally was approximately 400 Anglo-Texians and enslaved people killed over the course of the entire fifty-two year period, two-thirds by Comanches. In 1849 alone, however, Texas newspapers reported 150-200 civilians having been scalped along the frontier that year…all of them entirely false. It didn’t hurt that the Lipanes were wealthy and they were closer by than any other Indians. In fact, an entire industry had sprung up of Anglo Bandits dressing up as Indians, going on raids, and then loudly proclaiming their Indian identities in suspiciously good English. All of it to justify the retaliatory raids against the real Indians that would follow. The Lipanes actually tried for many years to protest the these attacks and accompanying theft of their property using the Texian court system, but by 1843 they had given up.¹⁷⁴

A Comprehensive Indian bill in 1843 also enshrined into Texas statute the policy that Flacco and Juan and Ramon Castro had been sensing for some time. First, there was no longer any special designation for the Lipanes as “friendly” Indians. Second, it prohibited all Texas Indians from crossing an ill-defined line of white settlement, effectively displacing the Lipanes from land where they had co-existed with European settlers for centuries. It was enough to make an old Lipan long for the days of Spanish rule. Behind the Spanish forked-tongue diplomacy was at least a recognition that the Lipanes were the de facto owners of the state. This is why Spanish and Mexican governments had only ever patented out 15% or so of the lands that they claimed in Texas…because the other 85% were clearly owned and occupied by natives like the Lipanes! Behind Texian policies, however, was some unquestioned idea that even that 85% now belonged to as-yet-to-come Anglo settlers…and that the Lipanes would be begrudgingly allowed to occupy it for only so long as it took for these new settlers to get here.¹⁷⁵

But most painfully of all, the 1843 Texas Indian bill prohibited any trade in horses between white settlers and Lipanes. Whether deliberate or not, it almost immediately drove the Lipanes into poverty. The Lipan economy and the Lipan lifeway had been built around the horse for two centuries by this point! To deny them the right to participate in horse-trading was like denying them their identity! The horse had been made for them. The horse in Texas was theirs by right! If you think that’s a presumptuous claim, as some Texians did, I’ll point out to you that it’s really not any more presumptuous than the so-called “doctrine of discovery” under which these newcomers to Texas were claiming title to clearly Native lands! Arbitrarily, the doctrine of discovery held, only Europeans could hold title to land. Native Americans living there only could only ever have a limited “right to occupancy.” To their own lands.¹⁷⁶

But as the Lipanes had discovered, most settlers they encountered weren’t quoting legal doctrines. They weren’t even actually following any chain of title back to some first European discovery. Most settlers’ claim to their land came, perversely, from the obligations they owed on it to other people. Land speculation was and perhaps still is the great American path to riches. Large grants of Texas land – be they under Mexican colonization laws or Republic of Texas headright grants – were often surveyed, patented, and then quickly subdivided to secondary buyers. These buyers then borrowed as much as they could to buy this land from the government, from banks, from railroads, or from the sellers themselves. And more than anything, it was this obligation to “pay the note” that seemed to authorize all manner of violence in defense of that manufactured claim to the land.

The irony of this situation, from the Lipanes point of view, was that the entire system exculpated nearly everyone along the chain from moral guilt…except for the Indian who had been using the land first, and whose ongoing attempts to access the land were suddenly considered trespassing. It was an odd thing, from the Lipan perspective, that they couldn’t even figure out who to turn to complain about the situation. No Texian seemed to have the authority to halt the taking of land or the cutting off of the horse trade or the negotiation of any kind of peace, and yet each settler was authorized it seemed to enforce it with violence.¹⁷⁷

The San Antonio Lipanes began spending more and more time down along the Mexican-controlled Rio Grande or in Northern Coahuila. Mexico was not an entirely comfortable place at this time either, however. The Mexican army officer class retained the prejudices of the old Spanish royalist administrators toward the Apaches, and even Mexican federalists didn’t look particularly fondly on “indios barbaros” like the Lipanes. They were an embarrassment to Mexican official focused on modernizing their country’s image. And Lipanes’ migratory patterns didn’t work in any country built around privately-owned land which granted the owner a near total right of exclusion to keep any and all others out.¹⁷⁸

The Lipanes’ political troubles were only compounded by the collapse of buffalo populations along the Texas plains. This was due primarily to increased hunting pressure, but it was also attributable to the ending of the Little Ice age that had brought the buffalo – and the Apaches – down into the Texas plains. Perversely, the same warmer temperatures that were driving away the buffalo were improving the conditions for the cultivation of Anglo-Texians’ cotton. Which by contrast, was making Texans wealthy, and increasingly covetous of the river valleys and well-watered lands throughout the state for the expansion of King Cotton…the same lands most prized by Lipanes and Comanches for their horseherds. President Houston decided to make one last push for peace with the natives of the state, all of them, including the now-starving Lipanes. In October 1844, 10 Texas tribes came into to a great conference on Tehuacana Creek, just south of modern-day Waco, TX: Comanches, Waco, Tawakoni, Caddoan, and even immigrant Indians like the Cherokee, Delaware, and Shawnee. The Lipan were represented at the council by Captain Ramon Castro, son of the late Cuelgas, and a few other male captains – there are no more “capitanas” or women peace commissioners in the records going forward. “The tomahawk shall be buried…” the resulting treaty of “peace, Friendship, and Commerce” opened, recalling the Spanish Lipan peace of almost exactly 100 years before. Like the 1749 ceremony, this one too featured an enormous barbeque, though the differences in how the beef was prepared hinted at the cultural differences that had occurred in the interim: instead of slow-cooked cuts over a fire with chiles and tortillas, this one featured 200 pounds of boiled beef and cornbread.¹⁷⁹

The cultural differences were also apparent in the terms of the 1844 Tehuacana Creek Treaty as well. Whereas the 1749 Spanish treaty had “incorporation” as its goal, via weddings and shared religious ceremonies, the Texian treaty of Tehuacana Creek focused on defining the sacrosanct line of white settlement dividing native and anglo worlds. Under the terms of the treaty, natives would technically be allowed to cross the line of white settlement to return to their old lands…but only for so long as those old lands were unoccupied, an increasingly rare case. In exchange, the Texian commissioners committed to making sure that no “bad men” crossed the line into Indian territory…but not really, because even if such bad men did cross, the Indians had to promise not to harm them.¹⁸⁰

The Lipanes accepted the terms of the treaty, representing themselves as “perfectly willing to be governed by the instructions of the government in every respect.” It was a posture that had often adopted toward these kinds of treaties, even when they were dictated toward them, trusting in their ability as alliance-makers to smooth over some of the harsher provisions of the document. And there was still, in 1844, at least some memory amongst Texas officials of Lipan friendship, and so they were given “special privileges as useful allies and were allowed to remain in their southern homeland.” It was a measure of grace made easier by the fact that the Republic of Texas government never really had control of those “southern homelands.” And by the fact that the ever-resourceful, ever alliance-making Lipanes once again found a way to be of use to their settler neighbors, even when their settler neighbors didn’t much seem to want to like them.¹⁸¹

The Republic of Texas was still acutely vulnerable to attacks from Mexico, as 1842 had shown. Texians also couldn’t really attack Mexican towns without risking retaliation, and frankly they hadn’t proven to be very good at it even when they tried. From the failed Matamoros expedition at the start of the Texas revolution to the Mier Expedition to the disastrous Santa Fe campaign, Mexico remained pretty secure in its ability to holdoff Texian incursions and even launch the occasional raid into it.

But the Lipanes knew the terrain of the south side of the Rio Grande as well as they knew the terrain on the north side. And even though Anglo-Texians coveted Lipan lands in Texas, Lipanes knew that Texians would shelter them from Mexican authorities. And so, the Lipanes become proxies for a Texian campaign to destabilize the Northern Mexican border. In 1844 alone, 400 Lipanes hit four of the Rio Grande Villas, killing 83, taking 50 captives, and plenty of livestock. From 1840 to 1850, Lipanes stole something like 3,300 head of cattle from Mexican ranchers and sold them to Texians at steep discounts and without Texians having to risk retaliation. Even as Mexican officials suspected Texian support for the Lipan raids, it gave Texians plausible deniability. The raids had the further advantage of aggravating northern Mexicans’ grievances against the Mexican government and promoting separatist movements such as that of the Republic of the Rio Grande, which also further reduced the threat of reconquest from Mexico.¹⁸²

But a confusing piece of news reached the Lipanes in March of 1846. Texas was now, apparently, a part of the United States. You can imagine the Lipanes’ confusion throughout this period. For all that settler societies complained about their inability to make a permanent peace with the Lipanes because of the dispersed nature of Lipan political authority, Lipanes could level a similar complaint against the frequent changes in sovereignty that they had been subjected to over the previous generation, from Spanish, to Mexican, to Texian, to United States. Who were they supposed to be negotiating with? Who’s promises were they supposed to be believing in when the Spanish Governor of Texas had no authority over the Spanish governor of New Mexico who had nothing to do with the independent Mexican government and then the Anglo-Texian government and there were german-speaking immigrants around too but now it was with the United States Government located a continent away?¹⁸³

The situation was actually worse for the Lipanes than Flacco or Juan Castro or Ramon Castro could have appreciated. Because of the unique terms of Texas’s annexation, however, the Federal Government didn’t actually own any land in Texas. The state of Texas retained control of all of its public lands. Which created a very peculiar situation. Since Texas controlled all the land in the state and since Texas recognized no title to be held by the Indian tribes of the state, according to the Texas legislature, “we recognize no right in the government of the United States to make any treaty of limits within the said Indian Tribes without the consent of the government of this state.”¹⁸⁴

And the US Commissioner of Indian Affairs would more or less agree with the Texas legislature’s interpretation: “Texas, on coming into the Union, retained control and jurisdiction over all her public domain, so that none of the laws or regulations of our Indian system are in force in her limits.” So the Lipanes were now required to deal with the United States government which had no authority to deal with them, by its own admission. And more troublingly, the fact that Lipanes were on Texas rather than Federal lands meant that the Federal Nonintercourse Laws didn’t apply to Texans. These were the laws that prohibited US citizens from entering federal lands occupied by Indians without a passport and which, however imperfect, promoted some form of peace on the rest of the American frontier by criminalizing trespass onto Indian lands.¹⁸⁵

With Texas’s annexation to the United States, the line of white settlement had just become a bright red line. Even the Lipanes – long settled in areas behind the line of settlement - would now be prevented from crossing that line by the might of the US army …a line that that Anglo-Texans would be allowed to cross with impunity, comforted by the knowledge the line moved with them and that they couldn’t be followed back across it. On the next episode of Lipan Apocalypse.

El día de los gritos

Welcome to Lipan Apocalypse. Episode 12: El día de los gritos. I’m Brandon Seale.

All pretense of accommodation with Native American tribes disappears in the 1870’s. Lipanes are pursued equally and openly by American and Mexican forces on both sides of the border. One-by-one, they see their old native rivals picked off and carted off to reservations. Lipanes refuse to play the “doomed savage,” and declare “war with the whole world.” Juan and Ramon Castro

On October 1, 1855, rumors reached Captains Juan and Ramon Castro at the old Lipan refuge of El Remolino in Northern Coahuila that 100 or so armed Texans had crossed the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass and were headed their way.

Ramon and Juan Castro and their bands of Lipanes hadn’t wanted to be living in Mexico in 1855, but they were lucky to have it as an option. Lucky compared to other Texas natives, who had nowhere else to flee from Texas’s increasingly aggressive campaigns against Texas enemies, supported now by the US army. It was doubly disappointing for the Lipanes, who had been critical allies for the short-lived Republic of Texas, but also had been inclined to assist the recent US invasion of Mexico in 1846. Just prior to the invasion, Mexican officials had tried to forcibly conscript Mexican Lipanes into their army, once again alienating these potential allies against Anglo-American expansion. Instead, Lipanes became a thorn in the side of northern Mexico for the next two violent years, raiding Mexican ranches and selling the booty to delighted Texas buyers. Which didn’t suddenly turn the Texans into allies. There was an odd scene in the middle of the Mexican-American war on May 13, 1847 where US, Texan, and Mexican forces set aside their differences to go out after a 65-man Lipan ranging party deep in Chihuahua. The joint force defeated the Lipanes, severed the Lipan medicine man’s head, boiled the skull, and carried it back to the U.S. as a trophy. The Mexican and American soldiers celebrated with a great banquet that night. If there was one thing that Mexicans and Americans could agree on apparently, it was that Lipanes couldn’t be tolerated in either country.¹⁸⁶

Yet the final peace between the US and Mexico revealed the power that greater Apacheria still held over North America. Mexico, in effect, ended the war by selling the United States Apache lands, from the Nueces strip to Arizona. The two countries essentially adopted the Marquis de Rubi’s 1772 presidial line as the U.S-Mexico border, which was for all intents and purposes the limit of effective Mexican government control at the time. The condition that Mexico placed on the cession – at the insistence of the Mexican border states - was that the US must prevent and punish raids by Indians (i.e., Apaches) in those ceded territories into Mexico. This Article XI of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo also stipulated that Americans (i.e., Texans) were prohibited from acquiring property, including livestock, taken by the Indians in those raids. To oversell it a little but also to drive it home, in a very real sense Mexico gave up California, Arizona, New Mexico, and its claims to Texas in order to be protected from the Apaches.¹⁸⁷

The U.S. government didn’t really have any control over Texas Indians however, since those Indians all lived on Texan rather than Federal lands. Which hadn’t prevented the US government from trying to exert some form of control over them. The 1846 Treaty of Council Springs saw most major Texas Indian nations were invited to a peace conference that somehow acquired the flavor of a surrender. It must have grated on the Lipanes to be lumped in with the Comanches, Caddos, Wacos, Wichitas, and Tawakonis, their traditional enemies, especially because as one old Anglo-Texan reminded people “The tribe of Lipans, that had befriended Texas in all her struggles, this tribe had no sins to attone for.” Ramon and Juan Castro were both there in representation of the Lipanes. They sat through the proceedings as the US commissioners more or less dictated terms: the US government would have an unlimited right to establish forts in Texas Indians’ land, Indians would be allowed to trade only through trading houses and designated agents (i.e. not to enter the white settlements), and Indians would submit all their members to the jurisdiction of US courts. Texas Indians received no such reciprocal promise. And horse stealing, according to the treaty would be dealt with “with the utmost severity.”¹⁸⁸

All of the Texas Indians nations signed. Except for the Lipanes. While the negotiations were finalizing, word reached the Lipan negotiators of the murders of several Lipanes on the streets of Austin, causing “the most heartrending national mourning by the Lipan women encamped here, loud with their shrieks which lost their sound in the distant heaven.” Why would Ramon and Juan Castro agree to anything with these forked tongue negotiators, who offered peace with one hand while they murdered their brothers with the other? And in fairness to Ramon and Juan and the other Lipan commissioners, the US negotiating posture didn’t respect the Lipanes’ strength. Did US commissioners really not recognize that the new US-Mexico border was a map of Apacheria! Anyone who tried to convince the Lipan captains that they were a broken people in 1846 – or in 1850 when the government tried again to get the Lipanes to sign on, successfully, though the US Senate would never ratify this version - wouldn’t have got much of an audience, amongst either the Lipanes or their Anglo, Mexican, or Comanche enemies. The real proof of Apache power in 1850 was that the US Army sent something like half of its entire fighting strength to Apache Texas at different points over the next decade to try to root them out. And the U.S. army would prove to be so embarrassingly unable to enforce Article XI of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo – the one committing the US to preventing Apache attacks against Mexico - that the US would feel the need to just buy their way out of it as part of a second treaty with Mexico in 1854.¹⁸⁹

Despite two centuries of warfare with Caddoans, Spanish, Mexicans, epidemic diseases, Comanches, and Texians, Lipan numbers in 1850 remained largely undiminished, around 5,000! Even the Comanches had been reduced by half from their pre-contact numbers by this point. Yet the fight had just been made more unequal than it had ever been. The US army now made it their point to keep Lipanes on their side of the sacred line of white settlement in Texas, while Texan forces were allowed to cross back and forth with impunity. In 1847, a Texas ranger unit massacred several members of a Lipan community out on the upper Colorado. In January 1848, seven Lipanes were executed by a different Texas Ranger captain for a Comanche horse theft. Famed ranger Bigfoot Wallace retaliated for the theft of one mule by raising a ranger force and killing a dozen Lipanes…and then making off with several kegs of gunpowder, lead, blankets, robes, and 170 horses, a $10,000 or more payday to offset the loss of one mule. Bigfoot Wallace would affirm that the Lipanes “never recovered from the fatal blow we gave them on this occasion,” making him yet another in a long line of enemies to have declared them a broken nation. And yet the Lipanes were apparently still enough of a threat that in October of the same year, a different ranger captain felt obliged to raze yet another Lipan village, killing 30 this time, and making off with 200 horses of his own as retaliation for yet another Comanche attack.¹⁹⁰

In 1848, the Lipanes finally snapped and went on a rampage, killing twenty Anglo-Texans over the next month between the San Antonio and Guadalupe rivers and rounding up at least forty horses and mules They whipped a Ranger force sent out to attack them and killed the Ranger captain himself in the contest. And yet every Lipan victory only justified further violence against them. In 1849, a Lipan camp near Castroville was massacred, without even the pretense of it being in retaliation for any particular theft, “These bloodthirsty men, who have neither faith nor moral feeling, massacred a whole division of the Lipan tribe, who were quietly encamped near Castroville: they slew all, neither woman nor child was spared,” the local Alsatian priest recorded.¹⁹¹

The violence brought the parties back to the peace table. Nine Lipan Captains – including Ramon and Juan Castro – and 4 Mescalero captains and 8 Comanches met with 11 US and Texan peace commissioners in October 1851 at the Lipanes’s San Saba river stronghold. It was a rehashing of the 1846 and 1850 treaties which had never really been properly ratified by either party. It had one other important clause, however: in exchange for accepting US sovereignty, the tribes were to be allotted land where they might live in safety…that latter clause never made it into the final draft of the agreement, however. The problem was that the Lipanes and other Native Texans were now dealing with settler counterparties that wanted nothing from them, except for them to go away! They had no negotiating power with them anymore! The Spanish at least had feared Lipan numbers and needed Lipan commerce. The 30,000 new Anglos/yr flooding into Texas were almost entirely decoupled from the Texas plains trade which had made the Lipanes rich. Anglos sold their cotton east for American dollars which they used to buy American manufactured goods. Buffalo hides and salt were nice, but they were rounding errors on the state’s economic output. And other state and federal measures prohibiting commerce with tribes like the Lipanes – measures in some cases sincerely meant to try to protect them – had the effect of starving Lipanes of their livelihood, which had been defined for a least a century now by commerce with the settler societies.¹⁹²

The ink on the Treaty of San Saba had barely dried when its terms began to literally starve the Lipanes. Prior to the treaty of San Saba in 1851, US officers were still writing of the “wealthy Lipanes.” Forbidden from trading horses, hides, or anything with Anglo settlers after 1851 however, Lipanes’ income dried up. And so did their accumulated savings. They were reduced to selling their hides and jewelry and other personal effects at blackmarket discounts just to buy corn just to survive the winter of 1852-53. “There is no exaggerating the starving condition of these Indians and with every disposition on their part to be friendly, they are forced into predatory excursions to sustain life.” Some neighboring Germans took pity on them in the Spring and gave them seed corn to plant to survive. But then the US Indian agent got complaints from settlers nearby who were uncomfortable with the Lipanes’ presence and told them they had to move. The same thing happened the next Spring in the Nueces valley further west. The Indian agent that year confessed that he couldn’t in good faith advise the Lipanes to plant corn at all the next year: “It would be folly to advise them to make fields where they would be dispossessed in less than a year.”¹⁹³

Complaints by Lipan captains through official channels fell on deaf ears. A Lipan Captain went to San Antonio to complain, following the procedures established by the treaties. He was arrested, for a raid the Lipanes had nothing to do with. While imprisoned, one of his guards threatened to kill him. The Captain escaped, which only confirmed his responsibility for the raid in the eyes of his jailers, even though their superiors knew that it had not even been Lipanes behind the raid. The Captain didn’t stop trying to protest through official channels or to beg the US government to follow through on its promises, albeit now from a safe distance: “I request and desire that our great chief the president of the United States would procure a home for me and my people and protect us from further prosecution…We wish to raise corn and know how to do it. We feel like Americans and are willing to abide and be governed by their laws. We are poor and denied the privilege of catching mustangs to sell and eat.”¹⁹⁴

Eventually, the normally unsympathetic Texas legislature realized that it was not in their interest to have a bunch of starving, homeless Indians on their periphery. Since the federal government had not followed through on their promises of land for the Indians, in 1854, the Texas legislature established three Indian reservations on the Upper Brazos river: 37,152 acres for the various Caddoan-speaking East Texas tribes, 18,516 acrs for the Comanches, and 18,576 acres for the Lipanes. Some 2,000 Caddoans and Comanches quickly relocated to the reserved lands. But the Lipanes refused. It was an insult to their history…18,000 acres of the millions of acres that they had never surrendered or been paid for? Plus, they understood the implication: By setting aside some land for the Lipanes, the Texas legislature had effectively made Lipanes outlaws anywhere other than the reservations.¹⁹⁵

It was just as well that the Lipanes never relocated there. The Comanche and Caddoan presence was so unpopular with Texans nearby that the US Indian Agent felt obliged to sneak his Indian wards into Oklahoma under cover of darkness a few years later. And when that agent got back to Texas after the exodus, he was murdered by locals for helping them escape.

1854 would also mark the last time that Ramon Castro’s Lipanes would run buffalo off the banks of Cibolo creek (Cibolo is buffalo in Spanish) outside San Antonio. A few Lipanes would return to Helotes in 1856 to plant corn for the last time there. Juan Castros Lipanes held out near Laredo, until in 1855 they were falsely accused of murdering the Forrester family (it was the Comanches), of raiding ranches near Laredo (it was Wichita), and of attacking a wagon train south of San Antonio (straight-up white bandits). Some newspapers claimed that Juan’s band had killed 100 men the previous month. The actual number was 0. Threatened with jail or worse, in 1855, both Ramon and Juan Castro’s people fled. The very US Mexico border that Lipanes had carved now offered them the only sanctuary they could find. The heart of this sanctuary was a spot along the San Rodrigo river known as El Remolino – “the whirlwind” in Spanish, the name an echo of the Apache whirlwind which had carried the Lipanes to this spot centuries before. Remarkably, there were still some small pockets of buffalo in the region. The last herd of about 40 or so would survive in the mountains nearby until 1900. It was also very possibly the site where Lipanes had first learned the peyote ceremony.¹⁹⁶

In 1853, the local Lipan captain had negotiated with the leaders of nearby Zaragoza, Coahuila to, essentially, adopt the town. The town would serve as safe harbor and as a market for stolen Texan goods, flipping the script on their strategy from a decade before, when Texians had happily served as market and safe haven for Lipan raids into Mexico. It was, frankly, Lipanes’ only real way to support themselves at this point. Unfortunately, it gave the pretext to the 100 or so Texans bearing down on them now in retaliation for these “predatory excursions.” ¹⁹⁷

Returning to where we started this episode, the Texans riding for El Remolino were under the command of a Ranger Captain that Lipanes in general – and Juan Castro in particular – had served alongside during the 1842 Mexican invasions, a man name James Hughes Callahan. And inasmuch as the Lipanes’ predatory excursions were the pretext, the economic rationale for the Callahan raid was much more unsavory. The Callahan Raid had been underwritten by “men of means, influence and character” (read, slaveowners and slavecatchers) to recapture some of the 4,000 or so fugitive slaves who had escaped into that part of Mexico in the first half of 1850’s. Native communities – like the Lipanes – had often became destinations for these fleeing freedom-seekers, most notably the entire Black Seminole tribe which was also granted land not terribly far away from the Lipanes’ peyote hills heartland where Ramon and Juan Castro had sought refuge themselves the same year.¹⁹⁸

Callahan’s force rode three days straight for El Remolino, when suddenly, on October 3, 1855, 3 particularly well-dressed Lipanes appeared in the road in front of them. Callahan and the Texans froze. The Castro brothers and the Lipanes then revealed themselves in strength, 120 Lipanes, joined by a unit of black Seminoles as well, squared off now and evenly matched against the slavecatching expedition. The Texans prepared to charge. And then 200 Mexican infantry materialized on the Texans flank.

They had set the trap perfectly. A melee ensued, but Callahan’s force was defeated, and the Texans fled back toward Piedras Negras with the combined Lipan, Black Seminole, Mexican party on their rear. Callahan and his men torched the town to cover their retreat across the river, casting aside their army-issued revolvers in their panic and leaving behind pretty incontrovertible proof of US and Texas sanction for the raid.¹⁹⁹

It was an international embarrassment for the United States, and for the State of Texas, which eventually accepted responsibility for the raid and paid Piedras Negras $50,000 for the damage caused by it. It was really a highpoint of Mexican and Indian collaboration in defending the integrity of Mexico’s borders and yet Mexican officials drew different conclusions. Reeling from yet another Santa Anna presidency that had – blessedly – just ended, 1855 saw the rise in neighboring Nuevo Leon of a new caudillo, Santiago Vidaurri. He had come of age as a federalist, but by the time of Santa Anna’s last removal, he had recolored himself – as had many federalists by this point – as a “liberal.” A liberal with expansionist dreams. After becoming governor of Nuevo Leon in 1855, he “invited” Coahuila and Tamaulipas to join Nuevo Leon in a sort of super-state, resurrecting the old Northeastern Interior province from Spanish Colonial days. When they demurred, he sort of just annexed Coahuila.²⁰⁰

For Vidaurri, the 1855 Callahan raid demonstrated how vulnerable northern Mexico was to another American invasion. And if the presence of fugitive slaves and predatory Indians was the excuse that Americans would use, he would do everything he could to eliminate that excuse. It was also a fact that Mexican federalists retained their own frontiersmen’s memory of indios barbaros, and indeed the continued reign of migratory Indians on their peripheries made a mockery of their pretensions to being a modern, industrializing nation-state.²⁰¹

Vidaurri immediately opened lines of communication with US army commanders in Eagle Pass and Laredo. He sent a message to the Lipanes that they would be blamed for any further Texan incursions into Mexican territory and that “the least complaint for damages caused on either side of the Rio Grande would be the signal for their extermination without discrimination of any kind…” which must have landed as a gesture of supreme ingratitude amongst the Lipanes to whom it was directed. It was also the kind of impossible to comply with directive than an old Spanish colonial administrator would have been proud of.²⁰²

Then, on March 19, 1856, without any particular provocation and just months after Lipanes and Mexican forces had fought side-by-side to repel the Callahan raid, Vidaurri’s forces descended on a Lipan town just outside the old Mission Santo Nombre de Jesus de Peyotes. Caught off-guard along the banks of a creek with the ironic name of Gracias a Dios, the 63 Lipan men women and children didn’t put up much of a fight. They surrendered, and the Mexican forces executed 30 of the men immediately. The Lipan women, realizing what awaited them, took an extreme step, unparalleled in the history of the Lipanes. They began slitting their own children’s throats. There is no account anywhere else in the historical record that I’ve seen of Lipan suicides or mercy killings, even in the midst of extreme odds and profound suffering. Had they reached their breaking point? Were Lipan women so displaced in particularly from their roles in a traditionally matrilineal, matrilocal society that they snapped? ²⁰³

The Mexican commander used the women’s actions at Gracias a Dios as justification to execute another 11 of the Lipanes, including some of the women. A week later, a desperate collection of Lipanes tried to retaliate on a different Vidaurri force on March 22, but were defeated and inadvertently led the Mexican forces to another Lipan settlement of 74. Once again, the women, supposedly, starting murdering their own children, which again served as the Mexican commander’s excuse to execute countless dozens on the spot, though the fact that we haven’t seen this kind of behavior anywhere else in the Lipan experience makes you wonder if it wasn’t just a pretext for the Mexican officers to thin the ranks of their captives. The rest were carried off into anonymous captivity, sold most likely to ranchers who prized the Lipanes’ famed skill as horse-breakers. “The history of the Lipan is brought to an end,” Vidaurri’s government proclaimed, joining the long and distinguished line of administrators to declare the end of the Lipanes.²⁰⁴

It wasn’t the end. It was clear, however, to Juan and Ramon Castro and the rest of the Lipanes that there was, apparently, no more security in a Mexican homeland than a Texas one. And that the only security they might find would be to remain in a constant back and forth across a border that both Americans and Mexicans agreed was neither American nor Mexican.²⁰⁵

Following the Mexican massacres of Lipanes in Northern Coahuila and using the Devil’s River as their base, Juan and Ramon Castro and the old San Antonio Lipanes returned to Texas in July of 1856. They tried the Hill Country one last time. In 1858 Ramon Castro’s people would try to plant corn near Camp Verde in Bandera County, but a US cavalry patrol found them and destroyed their crop. And yet, the US army was still pretty outmatched by the Lipanes in terrain like the Devil’s River. Old Texans like Rip Ford snickered at the US Army’s struggles to learn mounted warfare against “the best horsemen in the world,” as he and many others referred to the Lipanes. These years against the Lipanes in West Texas would lead to the formation of the first US Cavalry units, which, unlike earlier “dragoons” which just rode to the fight on horses, were units which did their fighting on horseback. And these units were led by an array of men whose names would become famous on battlefields of the American Civil War. And Ramon Castro’s Lipanes would beat back every one of them. The John Bell Hoods, the George Buells, the Earl Van Dorns, commanded from back in San Antonio by the Robert E. Lee’s and many others.²⁰⁶

We’ve seen how Lipanes and Comanches had collaborated during the final years of Spanish rule a generation prior, and around 1849, we start to get hints of Lipan Comanche collaboration once again. In 1857, they jointly attacked Laredo, embarrassing US army forces who thought they had them pinned down on the Devils. They began to sit together with the medicine. And they were starting to marry each other. Several Lipan stories from around this time tell of conflict being averted amongst Lipan and Comanche bands because someone recognized a relative on the other side²⁰⁷

In a sign of the population pressures they were facing, however, the joint raids began to focus as much on captives as on stuff. Unfortunately, the taking of white captives only played to Anglo-Texans worst, most prurient fears. Texas will never know peace, RIP Ford wrote, channeling the sentiments of most Anglo-Texans of the period, “as long as we have a horse left or as long as there is an Indian left to steal him.” In 1859, the US army launched a coordinated campaign against the Lipanes, their old Tonkawa allies, and the Comanches. The Tonkawas yielded, and in 1859 they agreed to move onto a reservation in modern-day Oklahoma. Juan and Ramon Castros Lipanes decided to break off into smaller bands to more easily evade US forces, particularly after an 1860 smallpox epidemic hurt their numbers.²⁰⁸

And then, in 1861, it all stopped. The blue coats disappeared. The Rangers disappeared. The frontier fell silent. And a remarkable thing happened. The level of violence dropped dramatically! Neither the Confederate government nor the Texas state government had the resources or bandwidth to launch major campaigns against them. There’s a popular perception (that this podcaster has definitely perpetuated it) that the line of white settlement in Texas retreated significantly during the Civil War. And yet the statistics don’t quite back that up. Or if the line retreated, it wasn’t because of increasing violence, but rather more likely because of economic and population declines caused by the war itself. There were indeed some raids on settler’s livestock by unknown perpetrators during the war…but far less than in the pre-War years. And many of these might just as likely have been Anglo bandits, its unclear. It seems that what mostly happened during the American Civil war was that the Lipanes at least returned to their old lifeways. In fact, they developed a major trading hub up on the upper Concho River serving Comanche, Mescalero, and Mexican traders.²⁰⁹

But when the Civil War ended in 1865, the great American war machine – now more powerful than ever – directed its energies toward Native America. The US Army returned to West Texas in 1867 at Fort Lancaster on the Pecos River…right in the middle of the Lipanes’ new heartland!. The Lipanes coordinated a 900-man Lipan, Kickapoo, and Mexican force that even boasted a few ex-confederates and gave the blue coats a little welcome party, reminding the Army that they would have to fight differently out here. And indeed, the US army came up with a more effective strategy in their fight against the Lipanes: According to one scholar, “recruiting the Black Seminoles was the military’s most effective single move against the hostile tribes.” The Black Seminoles weren’t Seminole Indians, per se; they were escaped American slaves who had allied and intermarried with the Seminoles back in Florida during their years of fending off the US army there. After the Seminoles were shipped to Oklahoma in the 1830’s, the Black Seminoles went with them. They were, however, made to feel unwelcome as neighbors by their old Seminole allies, and soon heard about the offer from Coahuila of free land for Indians that would come live in the state and help defend it against…Lipanes and Comanches.²¹⁰

The Black Seminoles accepted and performed their part admirably for most of the 1850’s, proving to be the most effective foils to the Lipanes in Coahuila, even as they rode together to fend off the Callahan raid of 1855. But by the 1860’s, the Coahuilan government’s grand promises of land grants had yet to fully materialize and the Black Seminoles were increasingly viewed with the same suspicion that Mexican liberals viewed other Indians. The US Army stationed in Fort Clark near modern-day Brackettville picked up on the Black Seminoles’ dissatisfaction and recruited them as scouts to ride against the Lipanes and other natives holding out in West Texas.

While the US was preparing the fight the Lipanes, they were also trying to negotiate with them. By declaring that they wouldn’t negotiated with them anymore. In 1871, the US Congress declared that the US would no longer recognize Indian tribes as even being capable of making treaties with the US. It meant that Native Americans were no longer “domestic dependent nations”…they were squatters on their own land. Their choice was the Reservation or extermination. The US government sent commissioners to Northern Coahuila in the Spring of 1873 to seek out the Lipanes and lay out their options for them. The Lipanes told them to pound sand, and refused to “entertain any proposition to limit their place of residence.”²¹¹

The Lipan commissioners returned from this council to their people camped in the canyons of El Remolino. As they had been in 1855, Ramon and Juan Castro were both there with their people, along with other captains from the resident Big Water Band and even some Kickapoo and Mescalero allies. There were some 180 houses strung out over several miles in the canyons of El Remolino, translating into something like 1,500 people. Unlike in 1855, however, this time they had no idea that 377 US cavalry troopers and 24 Black Seminoles under the command of Colonel Ranald MacKenzie were bearing down on them. Why would they? It would have had to be a particularly sinister thing were the U.S. army to cross an international border and attack a peaceful camp of Lipanes at the same time US peace commissioners were in the town next door offering terms. And they were being led through secret, unguarded passes by a young Mexican military officer named Antonio Menchaca…I can’t confirm his genealogy, but it definitely calls my attention that he had the same last name as 6-7 generations of Mexican and Spanish officers before him in the region, all of whom counted on a famously close relationship with the Lipanes. It would explain how he knew exactly where the Lipanes were camped, and how he was able to sneak up on them.²¹²

The first indications that the Lipanes had of the attack that morning of May 17, 1873, were the sounds of screams from the Kickapoo camp 400 yards away. A U.S. lieutenant remembered later ““the fierce crackling of the flames mingled strangely with the carbines, rifles, cheers, and yells.” “El dia de los gritos,” the day of screams, Lipanes would remember it. The Lipanes scattered, seeking out foxholes they had dug for precisely this purpose and covering themselves with sage brush. Yet the soldiers came on, shooting indiscriminately and once they learned about the brush-covered foxholes, they started bayoneting and firing into those as well. Many escaped, but many didn’t. When the smoke cleared, 42 Lipanes had been captured. 19 were dead, including old Captain Ramon Castro. His two children, Jack and Kesetta, were captured and sent off to the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial school in Pennsylvania, never to see their people again. Juan Castro’s wife, Francisca, was also dead, but Juan was only wounded. Juan’s children, Juanita, Manuel, and Calixto carried him to safety. The made their way over the next several months to friends in and around Reynosa and tried to lay low. They changed their last name. But they didn’t just “disappear.”²¹³

The dia de los gritos was a traumatic day for the Lipan people, a day that they would never forget. And yet, it was 41 dead out of a population who still numbered at least 1,500! Maybe more. The Lipanes now very likely outnumbered Comanches, whose final defeat Lipan and allied Tonkawa scouts played a prominent role in the next year! A Lipan Sergeant known to history as “Johnson” located the Comanche’s Palo Duro canyon hideout and led the US cavalry to them. After the Comanches’ final surrender to reservation life in 1875, Johnson was rewarded with 40 horses for his role.²¹⁴

The Lipanes were more resolved than ever not to give in, however. They sent a message to US Indian agents after the Remolino massacre that “They will never make peace again and from this time forward they will war with the whole world.” The years between 1873 to 1881 would see three Mexican army campaigns and 11 US Army cross-border incursions intent on exterminating the remaining Lipanes. And they would fail.²¹⁵

For all their skill as traders, as horsemen, and as warriors, the Lipanes’ greatest strength was their alliance-making. The Lipan aura still preceded them everywhere they went in Native America, and it would make possible for them a survival strategy into the next century that frankly wasn’t available to any other native group in the United States. On the next episode of Lipan Apocalypse.

Bronco Apaches (Chevato and Magoosh)

Welcome to Lipan Apocalypse. Episode 13: Bronco Apaches. I’m Brandon Seale.

The United States dispenses with the idea of Native American sovereignty and adopts a policy of forced assimilation. Mexico waxes poetic about the “cosmic race” while sending airplanes to track down “bronco Apaches” living free in the mountains. The Lipanes adapt and continue their alliance-making ways. They disperse to the native communities of Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Chihuahua, and Coahuila, and carry with them a religious ceremony that only enhances their aura. Chevato and Magoosh.

The young Lipan woke up with a sharp pain in his gut. Chevato, as his Mexican and Comanche friends called him, looked down at a blood-caked compress of herbs packed into a wound in his stomach.. He was laying face up, in a ravine, the sun overhead.²¹⁶

He started to cry out for his little brother, Dinero. But he stopped. His brother was Ok, he remembered. They’d accidentally left him behind after a fight with a band of Kickapoos who had ambushed them near Musquiz, Coahuila, but Chevato had come back for him. It was, in his later memory, “almost suicide,” and its why he had the bullet hole in him now. He had returned alone to the site where the Kickapoos ambushed Chevato’s little Lipan band. He dismounted, and began slinking through the brush in search of his brother. Through sheer luck or perhaps some subconscious brotherly bond, he found Dinero hiding in an improvised foxhole loosely covered with brush. But the Kickapoos were still nearby, and they must have heard the sounds of Chevato and Dinero’s emotional reunion. They turned toward the brush and started firing. Chevato told Dinero to make a run for his horse. Dinero made it, and rode away, just as Chevato caught a round in his stomach. But Chevato knew how to heal. He’d seen it all before in a dream. He’d always known what he would do in this moment. He stuffed the wound with healing herbs from a leather pouch and said a prayer. Then the darkness came to him.²¹⁷

But now he was awake again and he saw the Kickapoo that shot him nearby, standing over him almost, but turned away, facing the sun, praying. The Kickapoo was about to finish him off, Chevato realized! The Lipan felt around for a weapon, but found nothing, not even the knife that Lipanes always carried on their hips. But then he remembered the derringer, concealed by rawhide against his forearm. He popped it forward, cocked the hammer, and crept to within pointblank range of the praying Kickapoo’s head. He pulled the trigger, and the Kickapoo was dead before he hit the ground.²¹⁸

Chevato had been born around 1852 to the Mexican Lipanes, the Big Water Band who lived along the Southern bank of the Rio Grande to which they may have helped give its name. Chevato and his people had lived in this region around Zaragoza Coahuila and El Remolino here in the Peyote hills now for more than a century, but recently, it had become quite crowded with native american refugees: Cherokee, Pottowatomi, Kickapoo, Seminole, and Black Seminoles. And of course, Mescalero and Lipan Apaches, like those of Ramon and Juan Castro and of a younger Captain of the San Antonio Lipanes named Magoosh.²¹⁹

Chevato and his brother had been orphaned a few years prior by Mexican soldiers, maybe at the Gracias a Dios massacre in 1856, though the suggestion is that they were a bit older when it occurred. Just as the ending of the American Civil war in 1865 had brought the full brunt of the US military to bear on the American plains Indians, the ending of the French intervention in Mexico in 1867 had left a highly-trained Mexican army with the bandwidth and firepower to eliminate any holdout indios barbaros. Smoke signals across the Serrania del Burro in northern Coahuila warned of the Mexican military patrols scouring even the deepest, driest arroyos ravines now. Mexican friends began warning the Lipanes of pressure from above to cut them off, and soon even the typically friendly storekeepers of Zaragoza stopped selling them ammunition.²²⁰

There were rumors of an American reservation in New Mexico, a reservation for the Mescalero Apaches, but at which the Lipanes would be welcome. Starting in 1873, just after the El Remolino massacre, I believe, the Young Captain Magoosh began coming and going to the Mescalero reservation near Ruidoso, along with many of his 350 followers. When Chevato first saw Magoosh, he thought he had been scalped. But he was just bald, though this made him a genetic anomaly amongst Native americans, who don’t tend to suffer from male pattern baldness. It’s hard not to want to attribute Magoosh’s hair loss to the stress that he had endured as the leader of the most persecuted people in Texas. In the grand Apache tradition, however, Magoosh was the consummate alliance-maker, and he had encouraged his Lipanes to accept at least a partial accommodation with US reservation life. Yes, it would restrain their movement some. They would have to get a “pass” from the nearest base commander to even go off and hunt buffalo on the lands they had hunted for centuries. But to be honest, even the buffalo weren’t what they used to be. Between 1872-74 the US Army had virtually eliminated them from the Southern plains. But accepting the Mescalero reservation as a base would at least give them an outlet on the US side of the Rio Grande when things got too hot in Mexico, Magoosh argued. And frankly it would let them coordinate with their Mescalero cousins: marriages, religious ceremonies…and yes, the occasional raid. The Mescalero reservation gave them a sanctuary on the western rim of their traditional range, and the years following the Remolino massacre indeed saw a “perfect reign of terror for hundreds of miles” of the reservation as Lipanes and Mescaleros and even some reservation-hopping Comanches collaborated to defend the old Apache homelands.²²¹

The US Army deployed 4,000 soldiers to West Texas to deal with the estimated 225 free Lipanes of fighting age there. Led by hardened Buffalo Soldiers and guided by bilingual Black Seminoles, these specialized Army units pursued the Lipanes relentlessly back and forth across the US-Mexico border, which no longer served as a guarantee of Lipan safety, Magoosh and his people soon discovered. In 1876, 20 Black Seminoles and 20 Buffalo soldiers crossed the Rio Grande and attacked a Lipan community near Zaragoza, killing 14. In June of 1877 another combined Black Seminole and Buffalo soldier force tracked a Lipan party 200 miles just to recover 23 horses. And then a few weeks later, a mixed US force surprised the Lipanes in a mountain camp outside of Zaragoza, killing 19 men, capturing large numbers of women, and making off with 125 horses. The victorious American officer, predictably, declared that it “nearly wipes out the Lipans.”²²²

In spite of these assaults, the Lipan whirldwind kept touching down behind the line of white settlement in Texas! Ten Lipan men and one woman were found camping in Menard County in 1875. They were caught and killed – all of them – but other raids were more successful. In April 1878, a Lipan party crossed their first railroad tracks to raid 360 miles worth of ranches above Laredo – well behind the line of US army forts as well I should add - leaving 18 people dead. In April of 1881, they hit a settlement seven miles above Leakey, Texas, killing four! Nearly fifty settlers were killed and 1000 livestock stolen in the region of Fort Davis over a two-year period, all or nearly all attributable to Apaches! And Mexican army columns in Coahuila were still being ambushed by sizeable Lipan troops in the Serrania del Burro. The Black Seminoles trailed the Lipanes with particular doggedness, but the Lipanes knew every watering hole between the Red River and the Rio Grande. They remained one step ahead, spending as much time covering their tracks as making them, filling watering holes with brush or dead animals to slow down their pursuers.²²³

The US Army began to suspect – correctly – that the Mescalero reservation was serving as a safe-haven for many of these Lipan renegades, and so in 1880 they announced a policy to disarm and dismount all of the men on the Mescalero reservation. 700 US troops slipped onto the reservation on April 16, 1880, and corralled 250 Mescalero and Lipan men in a pen with manure “three to five inches deep” for five days! 199 horses and at least as many guns were taken from the Apaches’ diminished herds, never to be replaced or reimbursed. Magoosh and his Lipanes were amongst the men rounded up. But they broke out, and made a run for the mountains. The soldiers opened fire on them, killing 10, but 25 – including Magoosh – escaped.²²⁴

Which brings us back to Chevato. Around this time, call it 1875, Chevato started showing up on the Mescalero reservation too. And so do the first reports of the peyote ceremony, that is, at the exactly same time that Lipanes like Chevato started traveling there. Chevato’s grandfather was probably Pedro Chevato, an old Lipan captain who some legends held was among the first Lipan to have learned the peyote ceremony from the earlier inhabitants of the region and brought it into the Lipan world. Over the years, the Lipanes had adapted the ceremony and made it their own. They dispensed with the wilder mitotes that earlier Spanish chroniclers had observed, in favor of drumming and singing and more subdued deer dances and offerings to grandfather fire on a “Grandfather plate,” rituals that we can actually trace back 5,000 years through the rock art of the Lower Pecos river region. The ceremony remained an all-night affair, but performed now inside a lodge instead of out in the open, built around the sacred Apaches fours: four structural cross-members to the lodge, four petitioners at a time, entering and cycling just like the first Apaches who had emerged from the Guadalupe Mountains out onto the plains to the four cardinal directions.²²⁵

The experience of the previous centuries had caused them to move away from the belief in a sun god or some of the other deities older accounts record them worshipping. A Lipan captain told Sam Houston in 1853: “I believe that the white man’s God is a very rich God, and he gives the white man everything he wants; but the Indian’s God is a very poor God and he has nothing to give us, and the Indians have got nothing. That is the difference between the white man and the Indian.” Two Lipanes in 1891 were asked if they had gods. They said No. When asked where they go when they die, they responded “To nowhere; we go to the soil. Death and nothing are the same word: tasá.” And yet the peyote ceremony allowed them to sit with the transcendent, to take them back to a time when God and mind and spirit and body were one. Here’s a quote from a different Apache: “There is only one God, and we worship Him under the name in our tongue. He speaks to the Apache. But he speaks to any who have faith and ask. You White Eyes no longer have sufficient faith to hear Him. Long ago He talked to some of you; your Book says that he did. If you really believe in Him, he would do so now.”²²⁶

The focus, now, of their religious practice became inducing the state necessary to access the transcendent. The psychedelic aspect of Peyote was there simply to facilitate this, it was the ceremony itself that gave the participant access to the supernatural. The drumming, the singing, the community, all of it! There was no other ceremony so powerful as the Lipan peyote ceremony. It erases the presence of the participant, allowing him or her to disappear in plain sight, to use my friend Gary Pérez’s phrase. There was a nothing else like it, and even as I talk about it now, you can see how it might appeal to a modern audience, right?, part of what again makes me feel that in studying the Lipanes we might not be looking at the past so much as looking into the future.²²⁷

Observers – be they Spanish, Anglo, or other native americans – often used the word “arrogant” to describe the Lipanes, and Lipanes themselves frankly believed that “supernatural power [was] naturally bestowed upon Lipanes.” When Chevato was a boy, he had gone on a four-day vision quest into the mountains and been given a gift by a mountain lion. It was the gift of premonition: he could predict the outcomes of battles. It was quite a useful skill, as you might imagine, and it won him some renown in Lipan, Mescalero, and Comanche circles. Including with the most famous Comanche of his day. And of ours, I suppose.²²⁸

Not long after he had helped lead the Comanches onto their reservation in 1875, Comanche captain Quanah Parker visited the Mescalero Reservation and witnessed the peyote ceremony for the first time. And he was converted. Here, was a new power for a new moment. He had to have more of it, to bring it back to his people in Oklahoma, and he invited Chevato and a few other Lipan “peyote singers” as they were called then, to return to Oklahoma with him. Quanah had an ulterior motive as well: Quanah needed bodyguards. His accommodationist policies had brought on the ire of many other more traditional Comanches. Chevato and the other Lipan “road men” as we’d call them today brought both the Lipanes’ fearsome reputation and their sacred ceremony with them when they moved to the Comanche reservation around 1880.²²⁹

The peyote ceremony became the most powerful tool of Lipan diplomacy, and Lipan “peyote signers” scattered like apostles in the last years of the 19th century to various Native American reservations. And the most powerful evidence of the Lipanes’ skill at alliance-making and cultural absorption. Instead of surrendering their sovereignty and entering a reservation of their own, they would project their power through and across the reservation system itself! In addition to the Mescalero reservation, some Lipanes ended up with Kiowa Apache next door to the Comanches in Oklahoma around 1874. Others came into the reservation of their Tonkawa allies in 1885, including the Lipan army Scout Johnson who had tracked the Comanches to their final defeat. Some were even able to call on old trading relationships with Choctaws who had sat on the other side of the checkersquare from their East Texas Caddoan rivals, and settled as far east as the so-called Choctaw-Apache reservation in Louisiana. And many, like Chevato, settled with their old Comanche rivals on the Comanche reservation. Chevato and his peyote signers would become the first roadmen of the new Native American Church, relocating permanently to the Comanche reservation in 1887 to spread the Medicine amongst the north american Indians throughout the Indian territory. Today, more than fifty known North American tribes all the way up into Canada sit with the medicine as a part of their religious practice. The ceremony itself has become a unifying part of the modern Native American experience on this continent.²³⁰

Of course, these Lipan roadmen had their detractors. I’ve definitely toned down in this series the extent to which the Lipanes neighbors – even their native american neighbors – found them hard to deal with, frustratingly inscrutable at times. Even their Mescalero cousins held them at a distance, this line is from an interview with a Mescalero in 2010: “Look, the Lipans are witches man, they have their ceremonies, and they always cause us problems. Since they arrived more than a century ago there have been problems.” And yet the Lipanes were also a shining beacon of continued anti-colonial resistance to all native americans struggling to survive. During the Mexican revolution of the 1910’s, Chevato would find himself on a train being robbed by revolutionary bandidos. When the revolutionaries found out the Chevato was a Lipan, they gave back his meager belongings. He was the original revolutionary, they said.²³¹

Into the 1880’s Magoosh and his people were still fighting. After their escape from the roundup on the Mescalero reservation in 1880, they hid out for five years in the Guadalupe Mountains, that mythical birthplace of the Apache peoples. The US army eventually offered them a pardon and to feed their families if Magoosh would help them track down Geronimo. Magoosh recruited several other Lipanes, including Chevato, who accompanied the 1886 army expedition that brought Geronimo in, just before relocating to the Comanche reservation. In that sense, the US Army gave Geronimo both barrels: Magoosh – the warrior alliance-maker – and Chevato – the apostle of the peyote ceremony. It worked.²³²

But after Geronimo’s surrender, Magoosh didn’t just settle down. He resumed his old Lipan migratory cycles: summers in the mountains of New Mexico, winters in their old Coahuila heartland – where hundreds of Lipanes still lived free. In 1891, two Lipan captains – buckskin fringe and all – managed to make their way to Mexico City to meet with Mexican president Porfirio Diaz and negotiate for the protection of their lands in and around Zaragoza, Coahuila. President Diaz offered some vague promises of friendship, but In 1896 US and Mexico were still signing agreements allowing their troops to cross the border to track down the remaining free apaches, “apaches broncos” as they called them in Spanish. Mexican forces were still in fact capturing and selling Apaches to area ranchers in an uncomfortable echo of old Spanish slaving practices, and indeed, there are ranches in Coahuila today still staffed by the descendants of these Apache captives and who are still prized for that uncanny abilities with horses.²³³

In 1903, Mexican forces evicted 37 Lipanes from a canyon near Zaragoza, Coahuila. Fearing the worst, when Magoosh heard about it, he quickly arranged for them to be transported to the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico, though this would be yearlong ordeal that would see them transported in cattle cars, detained in shadeless corrals and fed raw, unshucked corn for months at a time.²³⁴

And yet we know there were still other Lipanes out there, harried and harassed, but still living free! A larger Lipan settlement (or settlements!) in the Santa Rosa Mountains was written about around this time, but was considered too large to round-up. Many Lipanes cycled back to Texas during these years, this time to stay. Unsurprisingly if you know the history of the Lipanes as who defined themselves by their symbiotic relationship with the surrounding settler societies, these Texas Lipanes principally settled in enclave communities within the urban centers in their old ranges: in McAllen and just outside Laredo and in Ojinaga-Presidio (where a Lipan cemetery still stands) and even in the middle of San Antonio. San Antonio’s Alazán-Apache Courts Public housing project in the 1930’s was built over a neighborhood known previously as “Indian town,” because of the concentration of Native Americans and the “jacales” on this old Lipan camp site still living there as late as 1937!²³⁵

The last confirmed killing of an Apache on US soil was in 1907. But the last confirmed killing of free bronco apaches in Mexico (2 men and 8 women) wasn’t until 1935! They had to use the Mexican air force to track them down! Just for context, this was 60 years after the Comanches surrendered, fifty years after Geronimo’s last ride, 45 years after Wounded knee, twenty years after Magoosh – who had witnessed the battle of the Alamo! – died at 94, four years after Chevato died on the Comanche reservation amongst the 100 or so Lipanes he had invited to come live with him on the land grant he had secured by enrolling as a Comanche… It’s wild to me that Bronco apaches were still fighting into the aviation age! I’ll also point out that this killing also came ten years after Jose Vasconcelos was publishing the virtues of the “raza cosmica” and Diego Rivera was finishing his History of Mexico Mural in the halls of Chapultepec…even in a post-revolutionary Mexico that celebrated the nations’ indigenous roots, Apaches were a special and an especially intolerable case.²³⁶

We’ll never know when the last, uncounted, free apache died. Because they probably still haven’t. There are communities today in the mountains of northern Coahuila that identify – cautiously, and quietly – as Lipan Apaches, as reported by researcher Jose Medina Gonzalez-Davila! They’re not wearing buckskin fringe or plucking their eyebrows or coating their bodies with Caliche dust. But there aren’t too many folks walking around in conquistador helmets or powdered wigs either. Lipan disappearance is in fact Lipan diaspora. And yet diaspora was an option uniquely available to the Lipanes. Other tribes, particularly in the United States, had only extermination or the reservation to choose from. But in the end, the Apaches carved out their own space on the checkerboard and held it. I’m talking about the US-Mexico border – a direct artifact of Apache power - and the Texas-Mexico border in particular. It’s still the place where most Americans and most Mexicans too feel least comfortable and there are today Lipanes and other Apaches living free all throughout it. On the next and final episode of Lipan Apocalypse.²³⁷

Emergence

Welcome to Lipan Apocalypse. Episode 14: Emergence. I’m Brandon Seale.

Contrary to popular usage, “Apocalypse” doesn’t actually mean an end. In Greek it means an “unveiling,” an uncovering…a “revelation.” But what have we revealed about the most powerful, most unconquerable, most exceptional people in Texas history?

Contrary to popular usage, “Apocalypse” doesn’t actually mean the end. In Greek it means an “unveiling”… an uncovering…a “revelation.”

And yet have we unveiled, uncovered, or revealed the Lipanes at all this season? Where are they?

We’ve seen how self-serving most claims of Lipan extinction have been, and how inaccurate they turned out to be. To repeat that false claim today would be to give in to a particularly pernicious aspect of US policy toward Native Americans. To be enrolled as a Native American in this country, you need a “Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood,” which requires you to prove your direct descent from an indigenous ancestor as determined by their appearance on a US government roll, typically taken on a reservation in the first decade of the 20th century. Well, what if your people never came into the reservation? What if your people aren’t federally recognized? Basically, in this country, if you can’t prove that you are descended form a ”reduced” or “subjugated” Indian – to misapply the old Spanish terms – then you’re not an Indian. Which is absurd on its face, but even more so when you compare how hard it is to get native American lineage acknowledged versus how easily the descendants of enslaved persons were classified as “black” under the infamous “one-drop rule.” In many states – including Texas - a single drop of black blood was enough to classify a person as black; almost the polar opposite of the standard for Native Americans who apparently carry the burden of proving that their blood comes from the people that it comes from. Ironically, both the “one drop” and the “blood quantum” policies were adopted in order to deny equal treatment to the two groups under US law, but in the case of Native Americans it was to reduce their numbers and hence reduce the number of people to whom compensation and access to government programs were owed.

All of which makes it especially difficult to pull back the veil on the Lipanes. Two main groups represent the Lipan Apaches today: the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas and the Lipan Apache Band of Texas. Two other smaller groups also advocate on behalf of Lipanes, the Lipan Apache Nation of Texas and the Apache Council of Texas. A facebook group helps convene descendants of the Big Water band of Lipanes and Lucille Contreras’ Texas Tribal Buffalo Project is doing really important work collecting data on Lipan and indigenous identity throughout the state, check out her website and her survey. The different groups debate among themselves the pros and cons of seeking Federal recognition. Collectively they represent 5,000 or so people of Lipan descent. The only formally enrolled Lipan Apaches today are the few whose ancestors happened to be on the Mescalero reservation when the rolls were taken, though if I understand it correctly they technically carry a Mescalero ID card. Estimates vary, but this seems to total only 100 people.²³⁸

Which is laughably low, demonstrably wrong, and wildly out of proportion to the 5,000 or so Lipanes who lived in their native ranges for centuries and even the 1,500 or so who were documented as living free in 1873. It’s also in obvious defiance of the fact of hundreds of years of Lipan co-habitation with Tejanos. From its founding in 1718 until 1781, there were 129 Lipanes living in and around Mission Valero alone; dozens more were married to other mission Indians at the 1749 bury-the-hatchet peace conference. In the words of UT Professor Richard Flores, “In San Antonio, the Indians aren’t on reservations, they’re on the streets and are called ‘Mexicans’...”²³⁹

This was the simply the latest alliance-making strategy that the Lipanes had up their buckskin-fringed sleeves. They swore their Lipan identity to secrecy, and “sought refuge…in a Mexican identity.” Because you definitely didn’t want to be Indian at that time. Native Americans wouldn’t be granted US citizenship until 1924, sixty years after enslaved peoples were made citizens and four years after women’s suffrage! Federal policy then changed from segregating Indians onto reservations to “assimilating” them. Aggressively. The policy of Assimilation would result in the forcible relocation of 750,000 native families typically into urban areas to which they had no previous connection, the sterilization of something like 25% of all native women between 1970 and 1976, and the shipping off of 60,000 native children to the notorious Indian boarding schools as late as 1973. And in this the land of religious freedom, the practice of the perhaps the oldest continuously practiced religion in the world – the peyote ceremonies of northern Mexico, brought to North America by the Lipanes – were prohibited by federal law until the American Indian Religious Freedom act and associated amendments passed in 1994 – 1994! And even today, after federal raids against Lipan ceremonies in the 2000’s – because, recall, they aren’t officially Indians - its practice has had to continue in the shadows.²⁴⁰

In order to survive, then, Lipanes had to become “Mexicans.” Not Mexican citizens; South Texas “Mexicans” in the ways that term has been used here for the last century. They took Hispanic surnames: Castro, de Leon, Flores, Solis, Gonzales, Villareal, Hernandez, Telles, Garcia, Pompa, Borroso, Leal, Romero, Venego, to name a few. And yet, by so doing, they were able to continue their lifeways, their migratory rhythms, their trips to the peyote gardens, and even, remarkably, their service alongside Texas rangers! In 1895, Calixtro Castro, a child survivor of the massacre of El Remolino and the son of the old Lipan captain Juan Castro, was serving in the Texas rangers, just like his father had, just like his Grandfather Cuelgas de Castro had! As a teamster, but serving nonetheless.²⁴¹

Indeed, the descendants of Cuelgas de Castro played this strategy to perfection. After the massacre at El Remolino in 1873 by US troops, the Castro Lipanes made what seemed like an odd choice: they returned to the US. They settled near modern-day McAllen, then Beeville, by the 1880’s they were attending trade fairs in New Braunfels, in 1884 a Texas historian was noting their presence once again in San Antonio, and as late as 1937 they were living in “Indian Town” in the middle of San Antonio’s westside along the aptly named Apache Creek which had carried their name since colonial times!²⁴²

Which brings up a funny point: one of the criticisms you’ll hear of some Native American groups today is that they are just “Mexicans playing Indians.” The irony is that just the opposite may be true: Texas today is full of a lot of Indians playing Mexicans. Though even the original criticism, is pretty meaningless to me. Sunday morning finds a lot of Anglo-Texans playing Romans and Hebrews, without any plausible genetic connection.

But let’s actually take it there and do some genetic math. According to an article published in 2014 in the magazine Science, the average genome for Hispanics in the US is about 18% Native American. Which is way low for Texans of Hispanic descent, but let’s stay with it. If 18% of the DNA of the 39% of Texans who are classified as “Hispanics” is Native American, that translates into something like 7% of the total Texan gene pool being native American. Which doesn’t even include the almost 1% that openly identify as Native American!²⁴³

Incidentally, that’s right in line with the percentages of Texans that claim to be of Irish descent (7%) and German descent (9%) and barely less than the 12% of Texans that claim to be English! And yet, no one claims the Irish, Germans, or English are extinct in Texas?²⁴⁴

Except that, in truth, they are, or at least they are not any less “extinct” than Native Americans in Texas anyway. Because I don’t see a lot of folks on the streets these days wearing kilts or liederhosen or powdered wigs, but I do so a lot of people eating tamales, tortillas, pozole, and chiles. We also eat a lot more barbecue than boiled beef these days, thank god, and there’s a direct line of descent from paleo-Texan earth ovens and a good barbacoa del pozo. The rituals of South Texas womanhood – from the Quinceanera to the lazos used to symbolically bind newlyweds- descend directly from native rituals. Even American sign language traces its roots to Indian Plains Sign language, invented by Texas natives and disseminated – like the peyote ceremony – by the Apaches’ extended trade networks across the continent. My favorite modern connection to native tradition are the tents that pop up in parks in Texas on holiday weekends. When Brackenridge Park in San Antonio fills up with families barbecuing, listening to music, and enriching their kinship-based networks, you’re seeing a modern mitote. A mitote being celebrated, in many cases, by the descendants of the very people that were celebrating them here thousands of years ago. To say nothing of the other, less obvious vestiges of native thought that had to hide themselves in order to survive, such as perhaps razing a perfectly good elementary school because it was the site of an unspeakable tragedy.²⁴⁵

I think the most powerful indirect proof of the indigenous legacy on the modern United States is Americans’ unique political ideals. It’s a little comical the extent to which historical ideologues – past and present – bend over backwards to trace the Americans’ anti-authoritarian, liberty-loving ideals to a European continent that is still mostly appalled by them. There is a much more obvious source for Americans’ prized individualism and reflexive resistance to authority. American-style political ideals probably owes more to European settlers’ centuries’ long experience with the “absolute liberty of the savage” (as early settlers called it with horror) than those settlers’ were willing to admit. It would explain why those ideals don’t appear in the same way back in Europe, and would also explain why these classically American political sentiments are much more deeply held – if not always authentically implemented - in the old American frontier states. Those frontier states that were the first states to give women the franchise, to demand the direct election of Senators and most other offices, and to give birth to the various American “Populist” movements that you just don’t see in other countries. And nowhere in North America was the experience with Native America more intense and more prolonged than in Texas. Texas exceptionalism, in this sense, may itself be a legacy of the exceptional Lipanes.²⁴⁶

Yet there is a much more tangible Lipan legacy: pretty much all of Texas west of I-35 and south of the Brazos. The Texas Attorney General has argued that the Lipan Apaches relinquished their land and sovereignty claims under the 1846 Treaty of Council Springs. Only problem there is that the Lipan captains didn’t sign that treaty. And even if they had, the 1846 treaty (and the subsequent 1850, 51, and other treaties) simply acknowledge US sovereignty, they don’t transfer title to the land. More on point would be the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the Mexican-American war and which secured all Mexican citizens – which would have included Lipanes, at least as it regarded their lands along the Mexican-controlled Rio Grande - in all of their “property,” personal and real.²⁴⁷

In 1976, the US Indian Claims Commission dispensed with Lipanes’ already-reduced claims to the 60 MM acres of between San Antonio, the Hill Country, Del Rio, and Laredo by claiming that “For all intents and purposes, the Lipans had ceased to exist as a tribe sometime after 1854…”a claim which really didn’t hold up then and certainly doesn’t hold up now. Perhaps recognizing the weakness of their argument, the Indian Claims Commission continued with an alternative justification: that the Lipanes hadn’t made a “serious effort to defend or regain lost tribal lands in Texas” after 1854. Texas newspapers – who were still claiming hundreds of murders per year by the Apaches in those years - certainly didn’t feel like the Lipanes had ceased to try to “defend and regain” their lands. And it’s a little hard to explain the transfer of something like half of the fighting men of the US Army during those years to Apache Texas, if not for the fact that the Lipanes were pretty clearly continuing to claim a right to exist on those same lands.²⁴⁸

By 1976, however, the Indian Claims Commission was thirty years into its existence and about to be disbanded. It was the take-it-or-leave phase of the game. In the end, the Claims Commission reduced the Lipanes’ claim to an undefined 10 MM acre swath south of San Antonio and paid them an arbitrary $1.00 an acre on it. They found 61 Lipanes to accept the settlement, and all of them were actually residents of the Mescalero reservation and carrying Mescalero ID cards. And consistent with the muddled logic of the ICC”s ruling – but inconsistent with anything approaching logic - half of those funds actually went assigned to the Mescalero tribe itself.²⁴⁹

Concluding a podcast with the fact that Native Americans got screwed is neither novel nor even interesting these days. And I’m tired of watching people use their moral indignation at the past to hide from the really uncomfortable challenges that the story of the Lipanes actually ought to pose to us in our comfortable present. Like, for example, that you too might sanction some pretty terrible things against people like the Lipanes if you had to wonder whether every bird call or coyote yip you heard on your backpacking trip was actually coming from a bird or a coyote…or whether it was actually coming from the pissed off band of Lipanes sneaking up on you and entirely unsympathetic to how sympathetic you were to the fact that you were on their land. Or that some of the most appalling policies toward Native Americans – for example, reducing Indian populations into Missions or kidnapping native children and shipping them off to boarding schools – were actually perpetrated by the bleeding-heart, land-acknowledging, do-gooders of their day, who genuinely thought they were helping Native Americans by erasing their identity. Or that statistically speaking, most of us probably would’ve done the same things that even the most unrelatable historical villains in this story did if we’d been cast back into their shoes at their moment in time.²⁵⁰

When it comes to studying Native American histories like the Lipanes, I’m inclined to say that the better conclusion is to abandon any delusion that the “arc of the moral universe…bends toward justice.” It’s a sweet American ideal but it’s objectively false when it comes to the Native American experience, especially the Lipan Apache one. And in a perverse way, the idea of history as progress actually makes it easier to reconcile ourselves to the removal and extermination of native peoples…as in, it must have all been part of the moral universe’s arc toward justice, after all. There must have been something about Native America that was just a little incompatible with justice.

Lipanes tell us how naïve that is. Justice doesn’t move the world. There’s only the whirlwind. A whirlwind that everywhere and always expands upon itself, fueled by the chaos it creates, indifferent to the people it obliterates, and justifying its every act by the certainty that if it stops, it will perish.

History is what we make of the wreckage the whirlwind leaves behind. Most of what we see of Native American life even in the historic period is a window into a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by disease and conquest and slaving. And so much of what we see in the Texas historical record are Native American identities in flux, refugee remnants of Mesoamerican traditions merging with refugee remnants of Mississippian traditions, mashed together by the great mounted plains cultures sweeping into the state and then jumbled by the whirlwind of European conquest and the African slave trade and everything else. What we see in Texas is ethnogenesis, the birth of new peoples into a world of old peoples, just like the emergence of the first Apaches from the Guadalupe mountains into a world already populated but by no means complete. John Graves in Goodbye to a River articulates this beautifully: “Neither a land nor a people ever starts over clean. Country is compact of all its past disasters and strokes of luck- of food and drouth, of the caprices of glaciers and sea winds, of misuse and disuse and greed and ignorance and wisdom - and though you may doze away the cedar and coax back bluestem and mesquite grass and side-oats grama, you're not going to manhandle it into anything entirely new. It's limited by what it has been, by what's happened to it. And a people, until that time when it's uprooted and scattered and so mixed with other peoples that it has in fact perished, is much the same in this as land. It inherits. Its progenitors stand behind its elbow, and not only the sober gentle ones.”²⁵¹

The whole thing just pisses you off though. It pisses you off because you know that every progenitor behind every elbow has a story that they’re trying to tell. But the stories are so varied, so inconsistent, that you don’t know what to do with them. And yet stories themselves are evidence! Even if we can’t prove the content of the stories, their existence – and their quantity! – are proof of something. And once you start looking for them, the quantity of Lipan Apache stories that Texans today are still carrying around is absolutely overwhelming. And there’s enough of them coming out of the shadows now that they are beginning to coalesce into something approaching a coherent whole. Particularly when they remember things that they weren’t supposed to know: like the story of Captain Ramon Castro’s children disappearing after the El Remolino massacre, only to have a researcher recently find them in the records of the Carlisle Boarding School in Pennsylvania; the stories of a so-called “deer dance” passed down through family gatherings that echoes the story of the antlered deer god bringing peyote in the Rock art of the Lower Pecos; and the uncanny way that certain highly-sought after families of ranch hands in Coahuila seem to be able to talk to horses, the hands themselves however as standoffish and impenetrable as the horses they were hired to break.

A Lipan friend told me one of these stories over lunch at Garcia’s in San Antonio. Visting his grandmother one day back in the 60’s, she came out of the back room wearing a funny-looking, obviously handmade dress. He couldn’t figure out why she was dressed like that. Then they walked out of the house together. And she took off the dress and burned it. “Promise me you will never tell anyone you’ve ever seen a dress like this,” she said. He was confused. And his grandmother could tell. And so she told him a story. About her eight-year old grandmother. At a camp in a beautiful, well-watered canyon in northern Mexico. El Remolino, she called it. But there were screams everywhere. And gunshots and shouts. And flames. And now her grandmother’s hiding in a shallow hole, trying to keep her 18 month old little brother from crying. She pulls some dead sage brush over the hole. But her brother doesn’t understand. He’s scared. He screams out. A soldier comes over and starts thrusting his saber into the hole. Her little brother is impaled. He cries once more and then never again. The soldier walks away. The 8 year old girl tries not to even breathe. But the soldier comes back. He stabs twice more, slicing her hand open. But she doesn’t scream. And the soldier leaves.

“What does that make you feel?” his grandmother asked him, getting up into his face, making him feel naked and afraid.

“Angry!” he says to her, “Angry at the soldier!” he says.

“No!” she says to him. “This story isn’t about the soldier. It’s about your great-great-grandmother!”²⁵²

Thank you for listening to this season of A New History of Old Texas.

One last comment: My friend Gary Perez – whose parents were Lipanes - has spent years interpreting events in Native Texans’ history through the movements of the heavens and the alignment of the planets. He marks the history of both the Comances and the Lipanes by a 280 year cycle tied to the orbit of Venus. And he notes that 1745 was when the Lipanes emerged from the larger Plains Apache culture and tied their identity – and their future – to the settler societies around them. It was a momentous decision, that led to the great peace of 1749 four sacred years later and everything else we’ve spoken about.

2025 marks the end of that 280 year cycle. Will 2025 bring about some great new Lipan “Apocalypse”? “Ta-á kuho shekaú nete” – as the Lipanes would have said. That’s all I’ll tell.²⁵³

Selected Bibliography

Alonso, Gorka. “Apachería.” Accessed January 1, 2026. https://apacheria.es/author/gorkaap/

Anderson, Gary C. The Conquest of Texas. University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Kindle.

-----. The Indian Southwest, 1580-1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention. University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.

Baddour, Dylan. “Labeled ‘Hispanic.’” Texas Observer (May/June 2022). https://www.texasobserver.org/labeled-hispanic/.

Ball, Eve. Indeh: An Apache Odyssey. University of Oklahoma Press, 2013.

Berlandier, Jean-Louis and Rafael Chovel. La Comisión de Límites: diario de viaje. Archivo General del Estado de Nuevo León, 1850.

Britten, Thomas A. The Lipan Apaches: People of Wind and Lightning. University of New Mexico Press, 2011.

Carlisle, Jeffrey. Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande. PhD diss., University of North Texas, 2001.

Chebahtah, William, and Nancy M Minor. Chevato: The Story of the Apache Warrior who Captured Herman Lehmann. University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Cortes y de Olarte, Jose. Views from the Apache Frontier: Report on the Northern Provinces of New Spain. University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.

Foster, William C. Historic Native Peoples of Texas. University of Texas Press, 2009.

Garduño, E. (2004). Cuatro Ciclos de Resistencia Indígena en la Frontera México-estados Unidos [Four Cycles of Indigenous Resistance on the Mexico-United States Border]. Studies Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y Del Caribe [European Review of Latin American and Caribbean] 77 (October 2004): 41-60.

González Dávila, José Medina. ¿Qué significa ser apache en el siglo XXI?: Continuidad y cambio de los lipanes en Texas [What does it mean to be Apache in the 21st century? ]. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2018. Kindle.

Hampton, Neal M. “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation: Lipan Apache Sovereignty and Relations with Mexico, the United States, and the Republic of Texas.” Master’s thesis, University of Central Oklahoma, 2015.

La Vere, David. “Between Kinship and Capitalism: French-Spanish Rivalry in Colonial Louisiana-Texas Trade.;” Journal of Southern History 64 (May 1998): 197-218.

------. The Texas Indians. Texas A&M University Press, 2004.

Maestas, Enrique G. M. Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas. PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2003.

Minor, Nancy M. The Light Gray People: An Ethno-History of the Lipan Apaches of Texas and Northern Mexico. University Press of America, 2009.

Minor, Nancy M. Turning Adversity to Advantage: A History of the Lipan Apaches of Texas and Northern Mexico, 1700-1900. University Press of America, 2009. Kindle.

Moorhead, Max L. The Apache Frontier: Jacobo Ugarte and Spanish-Indian Relations in Northern New Spain, 1769-1791. University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.

Mulroy, Kevin. Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas. Texas Tech University Press, 1993.

Opler, Morris E. Myths and Legends of the Lipan Apache Indians. Borodino Books, 1940.

Robinson, Sherry. I Fought a Good Fight: A History of the Lipan Apaches. University of North Texas Press, 2013.

Rodriguez, Oscar, and Deni J Seymour. (2019). “Those who stayed behind: Lipan Apache enclaved communities.” In Communities and Households in the Greater American Southwest. University Press of Colorado, 2019.

Smith, F. Todd. From Dominance to Disappearance: The Indians of Texas and the Near Southwest, 1786-1859. University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Valdés, C. M. (1995). La Gente del mezquite: Los Nómadas del Noreste en la Colonia. Ciesas [The Mesquite People: The Nomads of the Northeast in the Colony]. Biblioteca Coahuila de Derechos Humanos, 1995.

Weber, D. J. (2008). Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment. Yale University Press. Kindle.

Footnotes

Morris E. Opler, Myths and Legends of the Lipan Apache Indians (Borodino Books, 1940), 23-28. ↩
William Chebahtah and Nancy M. Minor, Chevato: The Story of the Apache Warrior who Captured Herman Lehmann (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 6, 63. ↩
Thomas A. Britten, The Lipan Apaches: People of Wind and Lightning (University of New Mexico Press, 2011), 65; Enrique G. M. Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” PhD diss., (University of Texas at Austin, 2003), 47; Opler, Myths and Legends of the Lipan Apache Indians, 28; John Cortes y de Olarte, Views from the Apache Frontier: Report on the Northern Provinces of New Spain (University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 54. ↩
Cortes, Views from the Apache Frontier, 56. ↩
David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 2008), Chapter ##, Kindle. (Loc. 1101). ↩
Jeffrey Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande” (PhD diss., University of North Texas, 200) 6. ↩
“What is Protohistoric,” Texas Beyond History, Accessed January 1, 2026, https://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/landis/images/proto-spanish-textbox.html. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 74, 76. ↩
Neal M. Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation: Lipan Apache Sovereignty and Relations with Mexico, the United States, and the Republic of Texas” (master’s thesis, University of Central Oklahoma, 2015), 28. ↩
“Trans-Pecos Mountains & Basins,” Texas Beyond History, Accessed January 1, 2026, https://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/trans-p/peoples/jumano.html; W. W. Newcomb, Jr., The Indians of Texas: From Prehistoric to Modern Times (University of Texas, 1961), 143; Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 74, 264, 95. ↩
Cortes, Views from the Apache Frontier, 59; Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 14; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 19; Sherry Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight: A History of the Lipan Apaches (University of North Texas Press, 2013), 12; Nancy M. Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage: A History of the Lipan Apaches of Texas and Northern Mexico, 1700-1900 (University Press of America, 2009), Chapter XXX, Kindle. (loc 175); Nancy M. Minor, The Light Gray People: An Ethno-History of the Lipan Apaches of Texas and Northern Mexico (University Press of America, 2009), 43. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 55. ↩
Newcomb, The Indians of Texas, 274. ↩
Carlos Manuel Valdés, La Gente Del Mezquite: Los Nómadas de Noreste en La Colonia (Biblioteca Coahuila de Derechos Humanos, 1995), 147-149. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 96. ↩
José Medina González Dávila, ¿Qué significa ser apache en el siglo XXI?: Continuidad y cambio de los lipanes en Texas [What does it mean to be Apache in the 21st century? ] (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2018), Kindle Loc. 5675. ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 83. ↩
Cortes, Views from the Apache Frontier 54, 57. ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 92; Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 276. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 92. ↩
Ibid., 93. ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 118, 120, 123; Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 94. ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” NEED PAGE. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 94; Weber, Bárbaros, Chapter ##, Kindle. (loc. 1139) ↩
Minor, Light Gray People, 70; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 378; Art Martínez de Vara, Tejano Patriot: The Revolutionary Life of José Francisco Ruiz (Texas State Historical Association, 2020), 94. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 23, 96. ↩
Ibid., 99. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 116. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 101. ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 127; Carlisle 102 ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 126, 127. ↩
“Po’pay,” Wikipedia, Accessed January 1, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop%C3%A9; Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 107. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 110; Weber, Bárbaros, Chapter ##, Kindle. (Loc 1097) ↩
Newcomb, The Indians of Texas, 243. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 114, 215. ↩
Newcomb, Jr., The Indians of Texas, 239. ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 155. ↩
F. Todd Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance: The Indians of Texas and the Near Southwest, 1786-1859 (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 8. ↩
Britten seems to agree with this number. Britten, Lipan Apaches, 87; Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 3-8. ↩
“Pueblo Revolt, Wikipedia, Accessed January 1, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo_Revolt; “Po’pay;” Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 120; Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 31. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 132. ↩
Cortes, Views from the Apache Frontier, 75; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 40. ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 11; Richard Gonzalez, “Lipan Apache History” (unpublished manuscript, 2023). ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 178, 380; Newcomb, The Indians of Texas, 88. 1690, Masanet on the de Leon expedition notes two Indian trade routes, one hugging the coast, but harder to cross, but protectd by the this post oak belt ↩
Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 15; Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 181. See also David La Vere, “Between Kinship and Capitalism: French-Spanish Rivalry in Colonial Louisiana-Texas Trade,” Journal of Southern History 64 (May 1998): 197-218. ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 190, 193. ↩
Ibid., 190. ↩
Ibid., 191. ↩
Ibid., 193. ↩
Ibid., 194. ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 371). ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 186; Carlisle 117. ↩
So instead, these master Apache alliance-makers tried to break-up the Norteno alliance. They decided to go right to the source of their power, to their French trading partners. If past precedent was any example, they sent women to open these negotiations. In 1724, the French accepted. Barely a year after we see a concentration of Plains Apaches gathered outside San Antonio Texas, we see a similar number of Plains Apaches – also united behind some kind of Capitan Grande and a council of other captains – 800 miles away in Kansas! It’s unclear if it’s the same Apaches or the same captains, but the Plains Apaches disappear from San Antonio at precisely the same time. In any event, in 1724, near their stronghold of El Cuartelejo, a 2,000 person-strong received a French emissary. The French were duly impressed, if not a little bit intimidated, and they made lavish gifts to try to keep this continental power on their good side. But the French could never seriously consider allying with the Apaches. It would alienate their Caddoan-speaking trading partners, with whom they had begun to intermarry and, with whom, they were now carrying on a quite profitable trade in Apache slaves. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 66, 180; Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 191; Minor, Light Gray People, 22. ↩
“Fernández de Santa Ana’s Petition for an Apache Mission, 1750,” University of Arizona, Accessed January 1, 2026, https://open.uapress.arizona.edu/read/the-presidio-and-militia-volume2-part2/section/b9224721-e75f-43e6-9154-4dcb8f3b1ac8. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 225; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 410); Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 209; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 58. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande” 227. ↩
Ibid., 230-231; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 117; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 59. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 63. ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 217. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 126; Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 218; “Fernández de Santa Ana’s Petition for an Apache Mission, 1750;” Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 676); Diana Hadley, Thomas H. Naylor and Mardith K. Schuetz-Miller, eds., The Presidio and Militia on the Norther Frontier of Spain: A Documentary History (University of Arizona Press, 1997), Accessed January 1, 2026, https://open.uapress.arizona.edu/read/the-presidio-and-militia-volume2-part2/section/b9224721-e75f-43e6-9154-4dcb8f3b1ac8l;. In 1740 Captain Urrutia’s 1739 winter campaign against them, at which time a large number of captives were taken. ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,”218-219; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 708). ↩
“Fernández de Santa Ana’s Petition for an Apache Mission, 1750.” ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 220. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 242. ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 223. ↩
Diana Hadley et al., The Presidio and Militia on the Norther Frontier of Spain; Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 247; “Fernández de Santa Ana’s Petition for an Apache Mission, 1750.” ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 807-9). ↩
“Fernández de Santa Ana’s Petition for an Apache Mission, 1750;” Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 238; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 67; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 940.) ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 268, 237; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 854). ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 263, 265; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 130, 148 ↩
Minor, Light Gray People, 7, 139; Bernard Barcena conversation with the author, October 25, 2023; Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 1, “this indigenous nation linked itself to the settler state.” ↩
Minor, Light Gray People, 46. ↩
Minor, Light Gray People, 25-26; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 141; Chebahtah and Minor, Chevato, 10. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 141. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 270, Chebahtah and Minor, Chevato, 10, 13; Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 377. ↩
One of the words for peyote was “carrizalejo.” Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 402. Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 2497); Chebahtah and Minor, Chevato, 210; Newcomb, The Indians of Texas, 423; C 77. ↩
Minor, Light Gray People, 108; John R. Swaton, “Linguistic Material from the Tribes of Southern Texas and Northeastern Mexico,” Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, Accessed January 1, 2026 https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/15429/bulletin1271940smit.pdf. See also Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 160, which mentions the Lipan term in Spanish for the Presidio del Rio Grande as “Aguagrande.” Interesting that the Presidio del Rio Grande in the middle of the Lipan Peyote gardens was the only place I can find where the Spanish were calling it the “Rio Grande;” Bernard Barcena in conversation with the author, October 10, 2025. I guess I’m inferring this from the ceremonies we’ll see Picax-Andé leading with Mescaleros and Lipanes a generation later, building on bonds formed by Bigotes’ campaign of intermarriage. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 365; Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 274; Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 267, 261. ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 270-272. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 275. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 149, 152; Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 18; Chebahtah and Minor, Chevato, 10; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 90. Increasingly, it appears that this was a much more Wichita (Taovaya) driven assault, rather than a Comanche one as traditionally depicted. ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 272; Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 278. ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 1474). ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 160-161; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, 1494; Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 280 ↩
Berlandier references Lipanes and Tonkawas together in the context of “the intoxicating plants” used in their carneadas. Jean-Louis Berlandier and Rafael Chovel. La Comisión de Límites: diario de viaje. (Archivo General del Estado de Nuevo León, 1850), NEED PAGE NUMBER. Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 404, 297. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 166; Carlisle 288; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, 1595, 1639. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 169 ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 281, 289. ↩
Ibid., 292; Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” NEED PAGE; Minor, Light Gray People, 156. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 171; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, 1722. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 173, 176, 179; Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 307. ↩
Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 21; Weber, Bárbaros, Chapter ##, Kindle. (loc 2250-2251, 2277); Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 308; Britton 193 ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 179; Weber, Bárbaros, Chapter ##, Kindle. (loc 2440). ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 317; Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 278; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 373, 126. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 312; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, 2020, 1776. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 188. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 318; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 110; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 2292); Weber, Bárbaros, Chapter ##, Kindle. ( loc. 2426). ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 2101, 515); Minor, Light Gray People, 36; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 133, 138; ↩
Eve Ball, Indeh: An Apache Odyssey (University of Oklahoma Press 2013) 45, 11; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 44; Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 168; Minor, Light Gray People, 103; Chebahtah and Minor, Chevato, 16. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 334; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 1963). ↩
Gary B. Starnes, “Juan de Ugalde,” Handbook of Texas Online, Accessed January 1, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/ugalde-juan-de. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 134; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 2829, 2855. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 200. ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 2422). ↩
González Dávila, Qué significa ser apache en el siglo XXI, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc. 2717.) ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 124; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, 2623, 2616; Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 306; Britton 204 ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 208. ↩
Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 35; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 2561). ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 220. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 140, 129; ‘Short Biographies of Some Notable Lipan Chiefs,” Official Website of the Lipan Apache Tribe, Accessed January 1, 2026, https://www.lipanapache.org/LAT/e-chiefs.html; Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 42. ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 2346). ↩
Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 42; Frank Buckelew ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 144 ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 2609). ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 338. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 214; Weber, Bárbaros, Chapter ##, Kindle. (loc 3922). ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 131. ↩
Ibid., 149. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande.” 341. ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 79; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 150; Smith 44 ↩
Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 45; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 153; Minor, Light Gray People, 73. ↩
“Short Biographies of Some Notable Lipan Chiefs;” Bernard Barcena conversation with author, December 21, 2023; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 155. ↩
Weber, Bárbaros, Chapter ##, Kindle. (loc 2408); Cortes Views from the Apache Frontier, 30. ↩
Cortes Views from the Apache Frontier, 31; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 155; Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 31; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 2961). ↩
Weber, Bárbaros, Chapter ##, Kindle. (loc 2541, 2423, 2538); Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 158, 131. ↩
Cortes Views from the Apache Frontier, 7. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 226; Minor, Light Gray People, 48; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 164; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 3073). ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 3096). ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 166; “Short Biographies of Some Notable Lipan Chiefs.” ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 346; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 226, 232; Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 34, 45, 79. ↩
Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 34; Minor, Light Gray People, 70. ↩
Cortes Views from the Apache Frontier, 70, 88; Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 84. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 233, 245; Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 88; Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), Chapter 3, Kindle; Weber, Bárbaros, Chapter ##, Kindle. (loc. 4036) ↩
Cortes, Views from the Apache Frontier, NEED PAGE # ↩
Minor, Light Gray People, 93. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 175; “Articles published by Gorka Alonso,” Apacheria, Accessed January 1, 2026, https://apacheria.es/author/gorkaap/; Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 322; Minor, Light Gray People, 108. ↩
Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 97. ↩
Carlisle, “Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande,” 347; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 169; Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 99. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 170; Martínez de Vara, Tejano Patriot, 21. ↩
Martínez de Vara, Tejano Patriot, 47, 71; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 171-172; Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 324; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 237; “Ndé: Lipan Apache Band of Texas Claim as a Sovereign Nation,” January 16, 2016, 36; Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 109. ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 3211); Martínez de Vara. Tejano Patriot, 78. ↩
Martínez de Vara. Tejano Patriot, 79; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 3201). ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 237; Chebahtah and Minor, Chevato, 178; Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 143. ↩
Minor, Light Gray People, 90; George R. Morgan and Omer C. Stewart, “Peyote Trade in South Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 87 (July 1983): 284; “Articles published by Gorka Alonso;” Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 325. ↩
Minor, Light Gray People, 26; “Articles published by Gorka Alonso;” Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 133, 142. ↩
Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 124, 137; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 246; “Ndé: Lipan Apache Band of Texas Claim as a Sovereign Nation,” January 16, 2016, 31. ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 324. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 185, 191. ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 325. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 250. ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 3382). ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 58; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 251. ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 50, 52. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 221. ↩
Ibid., 186; “Ndé: Lipan Apache Band of Texas Claim as a Sovereign Nation,” January 16, 2016, 55; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 3342); Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 55. ↩
“Ndé: Lipan Apache Band of Texas Claim as a Sovereign Nation,” January 16, 2016, 34. ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 71. ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 3353). ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 65; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 196; Britton 260 ↩
Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 176. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 197. ↩
Anderson, The Conquest of Texas, Chapter 13, Kindle. ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 212, 74. ↩
Ibid., 74, 203-204; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 261. ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 74, 76. ↩
‘Short Biographies of Some Notable Lipan Chiefs.” ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 79; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 262; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 209-210. ↩
Ball, Indeh, 9; Minor, Light Gray People, 83. ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 79. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 209. ↩
Omer Stewart, Peyote Religion : A History (University of Oklahoma), 215. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 205; Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 189. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 189, 213; Anderson, The Conquest of Texas, Chapter 2, 17, 13, Kindle; ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 80-1. ↩
Ibid., 52. ↩
Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 164-165. ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 95. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 265; Hampton 13, 54 ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 211. ↩
Hampton 84; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 3461). ↩
Minor, Light Gray People, 132; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 3530); Smith 187; Hampton 91, 95 ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 137. ↩
Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 193; Nde 47 ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 149; Anderson, The Conquest of Texas, Chapter 15, Kindle. ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 105, 107. ↩
Ibid., 113. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 217; "Treaty with the Comanche, Aionai, Anadarko, Caddo, etc., 1846,” Tribal Treaties Database, accessed January 1, 2026, https://treaties.okstate.edu/treaties/treaty-with-the-comanche-aionai-anadarko-caddo-etc-1846-0554. ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 138; Richard Gonzalez, “Lipan Apache History.” I have a similar stat somewhere in the first season of this podcast. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 220, 226, 230; Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 145; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 280. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 223, 227; Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 147. ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 3758); Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 1, 54. ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 162; Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 206-207; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 287; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 231. ↩
Smith, From Dominance to Disappearance, 215-216; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 231. ↩
Carrie J. Crouch, “Brazos Indian Reservation,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed January 1, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/brazos-indian-reservation; Anderson, The Conquest of Texas, Chapter 19, Kindle. ↩
Minor, Light Gray People, 60; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 290; Anderson, The Conquest of Texas, Chapter 19, Kindle. ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 121. ↩
Ron Tyler, “Callahan Expedition,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed January 1, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/callahan-expedition. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 250; Anderson, The Conquest of Texas, Chapter 19, Kindle. ↩
Tyler, “Callahan Expedition.” ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 254. ↩
Hampton 129 ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 252; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 292; Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 130, 13, 54. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 292; Hampton 130; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 4059); Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 253-254. ↩
Weber, Bárbaros, Chapter ##, Kindle. (loc 4197) ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 254; Anderson, The Conquest of Texas, Chapter 20-21, Kindle. ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 3664); Chebahtah and Minor, Chevato, 200. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 256. ↩
Chebahtah and Minor, Chevato, 28, 87; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 261. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 288. ↩
Hampton, “A Dark Cloud Rests Upon Your Nation,” 157; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 295. ↩
Britten, Lipan Apaches, 304. ↩
Ibid., 302; Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 333, 335; https://www.uea.ac.uk/research/explore/finding-the-lost-ones; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 291. ↩
Who numbered about 1,500 when they trickled into the reservation after their final defeat in the Texas panhandle two years later. Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 295, 297. ↩
Minor, Light Gray People, 132, 100. ↩
Chebahtah and Minor, Chevato, 5. ↩
Ibid., 31. ↩
Ibid., 22. ↩
Ibid., NEED PAGE #; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 299. ↩
Ibid., 33, 38. ↩
Ibid., 37; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 282, 308; Ball, Indeh, 19. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 312, 315, Britten, Lipan Apaches, 307-308. ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 4350, 4490); Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 308, 316-317; Britten, Lipan Apaches, 309. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 325-326. ↩
Chebahtah and Minor, Chevato, 23, 61, 213-214; Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 340. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 239; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 4552); Britten, Lipan Apaches, 35; Ball, Indeh, 13. ↩
Minor, Light Gray People, 142; Gary Perez conversation with the author, October 18, 2023. ↩
Chebahtah and Minor, Chevato, 186. ↩
His role as a chief in the free Comanche period has been consistently overstated, it was on the reservation that his status grew and the fact that his mother was an Anglo made him a sort of preferred counterparty for the white man’s government. Chebahtah and Minor, Chevato, 161; Gary Perez, 10/18/23. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 300, 367, 373; Chebahtah and Minor, Chevato, 121, 150; Morgan and Stewart, “Peyote Trade in South Texas,” 269. ↩
González Dávila, Qué significa ser apache en el siglo XXI, Chapter XX, Kindle. (Loc. 1804). ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 344, 346; Chebahtah and Minor, Chevato, 136. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 344; Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 4541); “1935. Cacería humana de apaches en el México revolucionario [Human hunt of Apaches in revolutionary Mexico],” Desperta Ferro Ediciones, accessed Jaunary 2026, https://www.despertaferro-ediciones.com/2021/mexico-1935-caceria-humana-apaches-broncos/; Daniel Sada conversation with the author, January 2, 2024.; ↩
Minor, Light Gray People, 78; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 361. ↩
Oscar Rodriguez and Deni J. Seymour, “Those who stayed behind: Lipan Apache enclaved communities,” In Communities and Households in the Greater American Southwest (University Press of Colorado, 2019): 152-180; Bernard Barcena conversation with the author, October 25, 2023. ↩
“Las Colonias-the Mormon Colonies in Mexico, accessed January 1, 2026, http://www.lascolonias.org/tag/indio-juan/; Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 364; Chebahtah and Minor, Chevato, 218. ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 4579) ↩
González Dávila, Qué significa ser apache en el siglo XXI, Chapter XX. Kindle. (Loc. 1911). ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 418. ↩
Rodriguez and Seymour, “Those who stayed behind,” NEED Page Number; Brianna Theobald, “A 1970 Law Led to Mass Sterilization of Native American Women. That History Still Matters,” Tine Magazine (November 28, 2019), accessed January 1, 2026, https://time.com/5737080/native-american-sterilization-history/. ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 4394); Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 335. ↩
Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage, Chapter XXX, Kindle. (Loc 3569); Minor, Light Gray People, 99. ↩
Katarzyna Bryc et al., “The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans Across the United States, Journal of Human Genetics 96 (January 8, 2015), accessed January 1, 2026, https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(14)00476-5; Dylan Baddour, “Labeled ‘Hispanic,’” Texas Observer (May/June 2022), accessed April 9 2025, https://www.texasobserver.org/labeled-hispanic/. ↩
2020 Census Data ↩
Maestas, “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas,” 359, 391; Cortes, Views from the Apache Frontier, 66; Baddour, “Labeled ‘Hispanic;” Richard Gonzalez (Chairman of the Lipan Apache Band of Texas ) conversation with the author, August 1, 2023; “La Quinceañera,” Encyclopedia.com, accessed January 1, 2026, https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/legal-and-political-magazines/quinceanera-la. Cortes purportedly quoted Apaches, who I suppose had picked up the Spanish word. ↩
Weber, Bárbaros, Chapter ##, Kindle. (loc 481, 2397) ↩
Governor Gregg Abbott to Senator Frank Madla, July 18, 2025, accessed January 1, 2026, https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/opinion-files/opinion/2005/ga0339.pdf ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 381. ↩
Gonzalez conversation with the author, August 1, 2023. ↩
Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight, 22. Also see John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Press, 2002). ↩
Graves, Goodbye to a River, 237. ↩
Gonzalez conversation with the author, July 28, 2023. ↩
Chebahtah and Minor, Chevato, 7. ↩

The preceding bibliography contains the principal primary and secondary sources used in the research and writing of the Texas history podcast series. These works include archival travel diaries, ethnographic studies, colonial reports, and modern historical scholarship relating particularly to the Lipan Apache, Spanish Texas, the Rio Grande frontier, and early Tejano political history. Citations appearing in episode transcripts refer to works listed here.

Brandon writes and records stories about Texas and México.

Lipan Apocalypse

Brandon Seale

Selected Bibliography

Footnotes

Podcast Archive

Transcripts

Books