This drubbing had a salutary effect on the Indians. The captives were sent to Fort Concho for prisoner exchange, and many warriors sought safety on the reservations. Their Chief Satank was dead and Chiefs Satanta and Big Tree were in the penitentiary at Huntsville. The next spring the remaining one hundred captive women and children at Fort Concho were delivered back to the reservation at Fort Sill amid great rejoicing by the braves. They began to feel that the pale face was not such a bad hombre after all. Evetts Haley says that some of the braves so seriously considered settling down that they even sent their women into the fields to see what work was like.
Things now looked better and the Indian lovers persuaded Governor Edmund J. Davis to issue pardons to Satanta and Big Tree. This infuriated General Sherman. That was in April of 1873. Trouble immediately started again.
But meanwhile Mackenzie had returned to Fort Concho, where he arrived in January of that year, and set up the headquarters of the 4th Cavalry Regiment. Then in March, the 4th itself left Fort Richardson for Concho, and the 7th Cavalry took over at Richardson.[8] The 4th headed for Fort Concho, the same column, soldiers, wagons, wives and their household plunder that had moved north to Richardson two years before. General Sherman had decided to do something about that other Texas frontier, the Rio Grande, and he wanted Mackenzie with his 4th Cavalry to handle the job.
Things were not, and never had been, peaceful along the Rio Grande. It was another frontier with two parts. From Ringgold Barracks, opposite the Mexican city of Camargo, on down to the mouth of the Rio Grande, a man by the name of Juan Cortina, once a general in the Mexican Army that had opposed General Zachary Taylor’s invasion of Mexico, sought to make a living in the grand style. He was very successful as a bandit and became the “Robin Hood” of his side of the border. During the Civil War his banditry ceased. He became a trader and did well because the Rio Grande became the only outlet of the Southern Confederacy. But with the close of the war, he resumed his favorite role as a bandit and declared that the Nueces River and not the Rio Grande, was the border between his country and the United States.
The result was that he and other lesser bandits overran the entire country from the Rio Grande to the Nueces, killed for the pleasure of killing and drove into Mexico tens of thousands of Texas cattle. In 1875, one of his raids came within seven miles of Corpus Christi. Truly, his activities were as fearsome and as costly as were those of the Indians on the other frontiers of the state. But the United States Army did little about it, being unable to catch raiders in Texas, and unwilling to attack them in Mexico. The Texas Rangers, recreated in 1874, began to effectually take care of the matter. Thirty-one of these men, under their able commander Captain Leander H. McNelly, began to take a bite out of these raiders in 1875, killing them not only in Texas but pursuing and attacking them in Mexico itself.
General Porfirio Diaz came to power in Mexico about this time and ended the Cortina troubles by arresting and confining that gentleman to the environs of Mexico City. The Rangers took care of the rest of the gangs.
Along the upper Rio Grande, the raids into Texas were made by Indians: the Kickapoos, Lipans and Apaches. These tribes had settled in that great arid and sparsely inhabited area that extends south of the Rio Grande from Laredo to El Paso. That part of Mexico was a no-man’s land. The small Mexican and Indian villages were a law unto themselves. The Mexicans often joined the Indians on their raids, and the cattle and horses brought back found a ready market in the Mexican villages.
G. Catlin
U. STATES’ INDIAN FRONTIER IN 1840.
Shewing the positions of the Tribes that have been removed west of the Mississippi. By George Catlin.