The command at Fort Concho, as at the other forts, rotated in a perpetual manner. After service elsewhere, Mackenzie returned to Concho to organize five companies of the 4th Cavalry and a headquarters company for service at Fort Richardson, nearer the Indian Territory. His column moved out March 27, 1871, cavalry, pack mules and wagons. The bachelor commander even allowed wives of the men to accompany the expedition as far as the new headquarters at Fort Richardson.
The weather was crisp and cold as they forded the North Concho and soon passed Mt. Margaret, named after “the most accomplished, loving and devoted wife of one of our favorite captains, E. B. Beaumont”—(Beaumont-Beautiful Mountain), so wrote Captain Robert G. Carter, historian and winner of The Congressional Medal of Honor in the Indian Wars, who was a member of the expedition. (Mt. Margaret is the outstanding hill at Tennison.) They pitched camp the first night at old Fort Chadbourne, from where they followed the military trail passing en route huge herds of buffalo, as they went on by old Forts Phantom Hill, Belknap and on into Richardson.
Two months later, in May, Colonel Mackenzie roused his 4th Cavalry at Fort Richardson and set out to obey General Sherman’s orders issued after the killing of the teamsters at Salt Creek. But it began to rain. After a futile chase Colonel Mackenzie headed for Fort Sill, commanded by Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson. There he learned that Sherman had left but not before the Chiefs Satank (Sitting Bear), Big Tree and Satanta (White Bear) had returned to the reservation at Sill and boasted of murdering the teamsters. Mackenzie arrested and escorted the three Indians to Jacksboro for trial in the Texas court. Satank purposely got himself killed by a guard on the march, but Satanta and Big Tree were later sentenced to prison in the state penitentiary at Huntsville. The duplicity of these reservation Indians should now have been apparent to even Grierson and the Indian lovers in Washington and Austin, but it was not.
A good insight into the Indian problem of the times, and of which we have a written record, appeared at the trial of the two Indian chiefs during July of 1871 in the little log courthouse on the public square of Jacksboro. Charles Soward was the presiding judge. Samuel W. T. Lanham, later to be a two term Governor of Texas, was the district attorney. The court appointed Thomas Fall and Joe Woolfork of the Weatherford Bar to represent the defendants.
Thomas Williams, the foreman of the Jury, was a frontier citizen and a brother of the Governor of Indiana.
The principal witnesses against the defendants were Colonel Mackenzie, Lawrie (or Lowerie) Tatum, the Indian Agent who had heard their statements at Fort Sill and Thomas Brazeal, the teamster who had escaped from the Salt Creek massacre.
Our Captain Carter wrote:
“Under a strong guard accompanied by his counsel and an interpreter, the Chief, clanking his chain, walked to the little log courthouse on the public square. The jury had been impaneled and the District Attorney bustled and flourished around. The whole country armed to the teeth crowded the courthouse and stood outside listening through the open windows. The Chief’s attorneys made a plea for him, and referred to the wrongs the red man had suffered. How he had been cheated and dispoiled of his lands and driven westward until it seemed there was no limit to the greed of the white man. They excused his crime as just retaliation for centuries of wrong. The jurors sat on long benches, each in his shirt sleeves and with shooting irons strapped to his hip.”
Satanta got up to defend himself before his accusers. Over six feet tall, the perfect figure of an athlete and well known as the orator of the plains who could sway councils of both whites and Indians, he could well have influenced the jury by mute silence, but instead he lied and dissembled to save his life. He never mentioned the wrongs done his people by the whites. Instead, speaking through the interpreter, he proceeded as follows:
... “I have never been so near the Tehannas (Texans) before. I look around me and see your braves, squaws and papooses, and I have said in my heart, if I ever get back to my people, I will never make war upon you. I have always been the friend of the white man, ever since I was so high (indicating by sign the height of a boy). My tribe have taunted me and called me a squaw because I have been the friend of the Tehannas. I am suffering now for the crimes of bad Indians—of Satank and Lone Wolf and Kicking Bird and Big Bow and Fast Bear and Eagle Heart, and if you will let me go, I will kill the three latter with my own hand....”