IS TEXAS AMERICA’S HOPE FOR THE FUTURE?
[This Monday’s Archive was originally posted on January 22, 2013. It chronicles the unbelievable struggle of Texas to be free of unimaginable savagery in the 1800s. Now Texas is struggling to be free of the savagery wrought upon it by the Hate America Democrats with their creation of illegal alien invasion. Yet the lesson here goes far beyond our borders. It is the lesson of what it takes to defeat the savagery of Hamas in Israel, or the savagery of Putin in Ukraine. This history of Texas may astound you. See how it applies to our world right now.]
TTP, January 22, 2013
Papeete, Tahiti. Yesterday (1/21), at the very moment Zero was being sworn in to his stolen second term and delivering a speech so bad even WaPo’s premier liberal columnist panned it as “flat, partisan, and pedestrian,” I was on a shark dive off a remote French Polynesian island.
We were 70 feet down and surrounded by a half dozen ten-foot long lemon sharks sporting impressive arrays of knife-sharp teeth. But they were after the multitude of schools of brightly colored tropical reef fish all around us, searching for those whose abnormal swimming (sensed by electroreceptors in their head) meant easy prey.
I wanted no part of the irretrievably disgusting spectacle in Washington and was happy to be as far away and as oblivious to it as possible. When you’re diving, you are totally in the moment. You are in a completely different universe of incomparable beauty, and while you are in it, the world of dry land and all that is happening there, does not exist. Especially if very large sharks are swimming very close to you.
It was only when I got here today and learned of the spectacle in DC that it occurred to me Americans are surrounded by fascist sharks like Zero and his thugs. Many of them will be easy prey. How do we make sure we are not?
One clear way is to leave the country. All of our ancestors did it – left the country of their birth and moved to America in search of freedom. Now we may have to leave America to find our freedom. But there may be two ways to do this.
What we want to be free of is not our country, but our country’s fascist government in Washington. Is there a place in America where we could do so, a state that has the capacity and will to protect its citizens from Zero’s depredations – even to secession if necessary? If there is, it would be Texas.
One reason is Texas’ history. Texans had to fight off unending shark attacks in its early history, which can provide guidance for us now.
The greatest Western film of all time, as rated by the American Film Institute, is John Wayne’s The Searchers (1956). In the late 1860s, a pioneer family in West Texas is attacked by Comanches, who butcher the men, gang-rape and murder the women, and take a little girl captive. Wayne embarks on an indomitable quest to find the Comanches and the captive girl.
The Searchers is based on a true story – the Fort Parker Massacre. The captured 9 year-old girl Debbie (when grown played by Natalie Wood) was in reality Cynthia Ann Parker; Wayne’s character of Ethan Edwards was James W. Parker who spent his life and fortune searching for Cynthia Ann and other captured members of his family.
Yet the Fort Parker Massacre was in 1836 (in May, less than three months after The Alamo), and it was in East Texas, 100 miles south of Dallas on the way to Houston. Old Fort Parker has been reconstructed, and you can visit it just outside of Groesbeck TX. How did the Comanches get so far east?
They called themselves the “Nermernuh” (“People”). They were a despised Stone Age tribe living in central Wyoming unchanged for millennia – no agriculture, no woven baskets, no pottery, no social organization beyond small hunting bands.
Far, far to the south, the Spanish were busy expanding their giant colony of Mexico. In 1598, they moved into what they called New Mexico and enslaved the local Pueblo Indians. A wild nomadic tribe called Apaches began stealing the Spaniards’ horses to eat. When the Spaniards couldn’t protect the Pueblos from relentless Apache raids, the Pueblos rebelled in 1680. Many Spaniards fled back to Mexico, abandoning thousands of mustangs to run wild into the open West.
This “Great Horse Dispersal” resulted in horses being suddenly available to dozens of Plains Indian tribes – and none of them learned better or more quickly to hunt on horseback than the Nermernuh – even more transformationally, to fight and shoot (with bow & arrow) on horseback. They were geniuses at it.
They erupted out of Wyoming in the late 1600s and early 1700s, staging raids on other tribes to the south. Their target became “Apacheria” – the huge area encompassing much of New Mexico, eastern Colorado, western Kansas, western Oklahoma, and West Texas controlled by Apache bands. The Nermernuh wiped out so many entire Apache villages, killing all the men, women, children, and babies (including horrifically torturing any survivors to death), that by the 1720s, the Jicarilla Apaches were begging the Spaniards for protection.
Other tribes begged too – such as the Utes, who called the Nermernuh Koh-mats – “people who are against me all the time.” The Spaniards pronounced this Comanche.
By 1750, the Comanche conquest of Apacheria was complete. The Jicarilla, Mescalero, and Chiricahua (the band of Geronimo and Cochise over a century later) Apaches fled into Arizona, while many other bands such as the Carlanes and Palomas simply became extinct.
Any other tribe who dared contest them – the Pawnees in Kansas, the Osages in Oklahoma, the Tonkawas in Texas – were savagely forced to submit. The Comanches had created an empire in the southern plains by extreme violence. Their entire society became based on war and ruthless conquest. Their empire became known as Comancheria:
So much for the libtard argument that the evil white man stole the noble Comanche’s land.
They relentlessly continued to stage murder raids outside their empire to expand it. The Spanish colony of Tejas was becoming depopulated. After 1821 when Mexico gained independence from Spain, the situation was so desperate the new Mexican government invited a flood of American immigrants to settle in Texas to form a protective barrier between Mexico proper and the Comanches.
Quickly, the Texians (what the American settlers called themselves) wanted freedom from the clutches of Mexico – which they got after The Alamo and the subsequent Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. But that didn’t bring them freedom from Comanche depredations, as the Parker Massacre demonstrated in that same year.
The inhuman savagery of these raids – the mutilation, torture, gang-rape, the disembowelment of babies, and the Indians’ enjoyment of it – is hard to digest. One example is the butchery of the Linnville Raid in 1840 – so horrific that the bustling shipping center on Matagorda Bay (above Corpus Christi on the Gulf Coast) has been a ghost town ever since.
What brought Texas relief, albeit temporarily, was a man named John Coffee Hays (1817-1883), captain of the newly-formed Texas Rangers. He changed the rules in three ways. First, he ignored Sam Houston, 1st President of the Republic of Texas (1841-1844), who preached appeasement with the Comanches, thinking they were like peaceful Cherokees whom the white man had provoked. Yes, Sam Houston was a liberal wimp.
Second, Hays learned and taught his men how to ride and fight like Comanches – making the Texas Rangers the first American soldiers who could fight a battle on horseback (all others dismounted to fight). And he was the first to buy the new revolving pistol invented by Samuel Colt in New Jersey. (Hays’ lieutenant, Samuel Walker, collaborated with Colt to invent the famous Walker Colt.)
Three, he took the fight to the Comanches, tracking them down and killing them in their villages while they slept, fighting like they did – victory or death, no quarter given, no honorable surrender. Comanche murder raids were conducted so often at night during full moons that they were dreaded in Texas as a “Comanche Moon.” Now the Comanches lived in fear of a Hays Moon.
Yet when Hays departed Texas for Arizona in 1849, the Rangers deteriorated and forgot all they knew except drinking and carousing. Soon the Comanche Moon was back. All through the 1850s, the murder-scalping-rape raids continued, with dozens of settlements like those west of Dallas wiped out.
Neither the Rangers nor the US Army knew what to do. The Office of Indian Affairs in Washington wanted “peace” at any price. Its every attempt at peace and appeasement only encouraged to Comanches to attack more murderously. Finally, Texas got sick and tired of Federal incompetence and took matters into its own hands.
One of Hays’ lieutenants, John Salmon “Rip” Ford (1815-1897) was brought out of retirement in 1858, given command of the Rangers, and told to fight “the Hays way.” He did, taking the fight to the Comanches so ferociously the raids went away. But not for long, as then came the Civil War, when all the men left to fight for the Confederacy. By 1864, vast regions from Colorado to south Texas were depopulated, with the frontier rolling eastward some 200 miles.
The years after the Civil War, the late 1860s, were worse – especially for Texas, which disintegrated into anarchic chaos. The victorious Yankees were almost happy to see the Rebels of Texas punished with Comanche murder-rape raids. Further, the Washington intelligentsia blamed the white men for them.
The dean of Texas historians, T. R. Fehrenbach, considers the “rosewater dreamers” in Washington willfully ignorant of the Comanche’s very existence being based on war and conquest, and insisting that anyone who refused to believe the Comanches wanted peace if only white men would be nice to them, that any trouble with them was entirely the white man’s fault, were “butchers, sots determined to exterminate the noble redmen.”
Yes, America has suffered from stupid and destructive liberal appeasement for a very long time.
At last, in 1871, President Grant realized his “peace policy” was an abject failure that rewarded aggression. He had even placed pacifist Quakers in charge of Indian Affairs. Grant’s revelation came when his Quaker Indian Agent Lawrie Tatum told him the Comanche strategy.
In a Comanche chief’s words, it was: “Go on warpath, kill and scalp white people, steal many horses, then make treaty to get many presents and good things.”
In response, Grant approved giving command to the Fourth Cavalry in Texas to a Civil War hero to the greatest Indian fighter in American history – Col. Ranald Slidell Mackenzie (1840-1889). Overall command of the US Army’s effort to defeat the Comanches and other tribes of the southern plains was given to Gen. William Sherman and Lt. Gen. Philip Sheridan.
The result was the Red River War of 1874, the culminating battle of which was that of Palo Duro Canyon with Mackenzie’s decisive victory. More devastating than the 300 Indians killed was Mackenzie’s capture of their herd of 1,400 horses. After selecting the best for his men, he ordered the rest – over 1,000 – shot. The Comanches were now on foot – and thus helpless, they surrendered. Even the most famous Comanche war chief of all, Quanah Parker (Cynthia Ann Parker’s son by Chief Peta Nocona), surrendered in 1875.
After decades of suffering unimaginable savagery, Texas was free at last. This is what victory takes. Final victory over a foe that cannot be appeased, only defeated. The kind of persistence and determination Texans showed from the 1830s to the 1870s is what it may take us to defeat the fascism of the left.
Hopefully, it won’t take that long – and quite possibly, because of Texas. An example took place last Saturday (1/19), when Texas State Representative James White filed HB 568: The Texas Self Sufficiency Act.
Once again, Texas is preparing to defend itself as it did against the Comanche sharks, now against the sharks of Washington. White and his colleagues are fully aware that Zero’s government may go broke and default, that Texas must be prepared to function without it. This is preparation for sovereignty, folks. Texas may be where America’s future resides.
We are in politically horrific times. Texans once lived in fear of being terrorized and murdered by Comanches. The day seems not far off now when we all may live in fear of being terrorized by federal agents and murdered by a Swat Team out to seize our guns. The Texans fought and won. We have to fight the Comanches of Washington. If we fight like Texans, we will win.
Note: The source for much of the history here described is from: Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, The Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, by S. C. Gwynne.