Comanche, Penetekah Marker Tree Candidates

Parker County Witness Tree...location undisclosed

Pre-Settlement Comanches

Pre-Settlement Comanches

The Tabernacle

            When folks say “Indian” in Eastland County, they typically mean “Comanche”. Alameda became a territory of the Comanche Nation at 2:17 p.m., November 11, 1740 (I made the date and time up, but the year is thought to be close).

            The recorded history of the Comanche epoch in Texas, written from an Anglo point of view, is surprisingly robust. This account limits itself to events that occurred near or directly impacted the Alameda – Cheaney Box.

Modern coffee shop opinion supports the Comanches’ right to live along the Leon River Valley (I agree). They acknowledge that Anglo settlers invaded these Indians’ buffalo hunting grounds, destroying their mode of survival (I agree). They believe that Spaniards and later Anglos brought fatal diseases that wiped out Comanche Nation populations, much like germ warfare (I agree, though this part was accidental). The Comanches’ forcible exile to desolate “throw away” land reservations on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, then later to Oklahoma killed their chance to continue on a proud path of triumph stretching back thousands of years. This is all incontrovertible, based upon the evidence.

The comprehensive truth of what happened around Alameda from 1740 – 1874 confirms all of this. Taking both sides into consideration, the full truth is more

complicated, however Settlers eventually took the valley away from the Comanches “the people”, using the strategies both (intentional and accidental) outlined above.

Ironically, the Comanche’s spirit theology of The Land reflects more accurately what actually happened. The People belonged to the land, not the land to the People. Anglo settlers saw that world in reverse – this land is mine..NOT  yours.

The Comanche exercised military/political control over the Leon River Valley during from around 1740 until 1874. They took control of this territory away from Wacos and/or Caddos (who also probably invaded the land of whatever civilization predated them). Even Alameda’s Clovis Man was an immigrant, coming across the Bering Strait, walking from northwestern North America to this place. No people were truly “from here”. No people were truly native. Only The Land endures.

There were (and are) thousands of well-meaning Comanches – men, women and children. Good people – people you’d enjoy talking to, learning more about, being friends with. There also were (and are) thousands of well-meaning folks of European ancestry. Most of these people, you’d enjoy spending time with.

Both peoples expanded into the Leon River Valley trying to make their lives better. They were only viewed as an invasion force by whoever was there first. Displacement of whoever came before is a central theme to both civilizations’ arrival on the shores of Mansker Lake, at the epicenter of this valley.

Both group’s motivations are colored by racial and ethno-historical prejudices written into each account. I found many stories specific to the Mansker Lake area,

written from Anglo settler points of view. Sadly, I found no Comanche accounts, specific to the same area, though their stories from other locales exist.

There are instances of Comanches and German settlers getting along near Fredricksberg to the south, and sporadically in other settings. The western-moving American Frontier and the-southern-moving, borderless nomadic culture of the Comanche Nation, made eventual conflict inevitable. Unspeakable atrocities were committed by both sides. Treaties were made and broken (usually by Texians and Americans). Leaders from both sides could not always keep their brothers in line.

Peace had a chance while Old Owl and Sam Houston were alive. That flicker of opportunity came briefly back to life when Robert Simpson Neighbors was Indian agent. Two of these three men fell in the line of duty, one assassinated by enemy disease, the other by a bullet in the back.

Old Owl is the key to understanding the Comanche in Alameda – Cheaney prior to the 1859 arrival of its first white settlers. Old Owl was the Penatuhkah’s civil peace chief, a co-chief to the Comanches’ powerful War Chieftain Santa Anna. Old Owl’s camp was the Comanche headquarters on the Leon River until at least 1849.

Rip Ford describes Old Owl:

The Comanches arrived under their principal chief, Mopochocupee – the Owl. Prince Owl was quite a respectable looking savage. He had none of the swagger so ostentatiously displayed by bastard Rangers, and self-styled frontier celebrities, who throw crowds into spasms of

astonishment and admiration by reciting the daring deeds they never performed. His Highness was ready to accept anything in the shape of a present from an old tooth-brush to a cloth coat.

When I visited the Comanche Nation in Lawton, I was told that the “real decision maker” was often hidden behind the scenes, protected in case of treachery from assassination or capture. The “chiefs” that were in contact with military authorities, were sometimes only the mouthpiece of these “shadow” leaders. It’s impossible to know if Old Owl was the true Comanche decision maker, but his recorded actions and words indicate wisdom and a true leader’s heart for his people. He was respected by Rip Ford, Sam Houston and Robert Simpson Neighbors.

Old Owl visited Washington D.C. with Santa Anna and Neighbors in 1847 on horseback. The Owl was received by Sam Houston in the marble halls of the Senate. He saw American government buildings, thousands of American citizens in towns and cities along the way. He saw American armies, cannons, the vast nation that was hungry to move west in his direction. Old Owl recognized the future. He had to know that his practice role as peace chief was the Comanche’s best hope for survival.

Old Owl’s realization had to be hard on him. The Comanches had single-handedly forced the mighty Spaniards from Texas. They had ousted or enslaved every other Indian tribe they encountered. If the Comanche was ever defeated in a war prior to the Texian/American era, this defeat is not recorded.

From 1859 until 1872, the Comanche guerillas won most of the battles along the Leon River Valley. Mansker Lake’s settlers retreated to Blair’s Fort for a time. Besieged settlers at Blair’s Fort retreated to Fort Shirley or Stephenville as well. Wagon loads of anxious Anglo pioneers fled to the towns of Stephenville, Weatherford and Fort Worth fearing for their lives. Many went back east, never to return.

            The band of Comanches then operating in Central Texas were the Penatuhkahs, the Honey-Eaters. There were instances of peace between the Comanche Nation and white settlers. The Council House Battle of 1840 effectively ended Comanche trust in Texians forever, however (their mistrust was reconfirmed repeatedly).

            Thirteen Comanche chiefs were killed when fighting broke out at the Council House peace council in San Antonio. Republic of Texas President Mirabeau Lamar ordered the surviving Comanches arrested, hoping to use them as hostages until all white captives held by the tribe were returned.

            Most of the thirteen slain chiefs were Penatuhkah. Buffalo Hump assumed Penatuhkah leadership, mounting several retaliatory strikes, but his forces were defeated at Plum Creek. Santa Anna rose to fill the role of Warrior Chief. The rise of Peace Chief Old Owl may have been contemporaneous to this time period. The Penatuhkahs became bitter enemies of Texians.

            Arrowheads thought to be Comanche are scattered all over the Leon River Valley. The only known concentration of Comanche artifacts seems to be at the epoch-crossing Fulcrum Camp. This valley camp is watched over by an east facing cliff. It is

timbered along its winding waters, though a wide, grassy area for teepees, grazing and community was available. A nearby peak could connect its smoke signals to Caddo Peak and the Santa Anna Peaks to the southwest; to Ranger Station Peak to the north (then north to Gunsight Mountain or east to South Gordon Peak); and also to Desdemona’s Jameson Peak, then south to Comyn Peak and then Round Mountain in Brown County.

Smoke signals from this Fulcrum Camp site would have gotten reception from all four directions of the compass, and yet the campsite sits low topographically, protected from the weather, and enemy surprise.

            I feel a certain kinship with some of the narrators of this story – I call them storytellers. Some are alive, most are not – at least in the conventional sense. And yet, along the trail, they were with me, speaking stories through their actions, or in some cases only leaving clues. I can offer no other explanation.

            I have from time to time felt led by Old Owl, his Indian name Mopochocupee. In 1849, RIP Ford documents his camp “on the headwaters of the Leon.” A much later book by Kenneth Neighbours suggests that this ‘headwaters’ location might have been where Armstrong Creek hits the Leon River. I have reviewed Rip Ford’s original memoirs from that visit. There are no better clues hidden in its pages. Hopefully someday, a comprehensive history of the Comanche reign in the Alameda – Cheaney Box will be written. As of this writing, the clues still hold their breathy, waiting patiently in the woods.

The first Anglo traveler through our parts that I can positively identify was Big Foot Wallace. He passed slightly to our east, then may have turned west, coming up Bear Canyon east of Ranger. He writes on October 20, 1837:

We took our course again, which was about due north and, crossing a range of mountains at a place called “Walkers Pass”, we traveled over a rough broken country to the South Leon Creek, a distance, I suppose of 15 or 16 miles, where we “nooned.” We saw some fresh buffalo signs on the way and our old hunters began to whet their bills for fat steaks, marrow-bones, and “humps,” but as yet we have seen none of the animals.

We found the grass very fine on the bottoms of this creek, and have concluded to lay over until tomorrow, and give our horses a chance to recover, as they have had but poor grazing for the last 48 hours.

We had been in camp but a little while, when one of the boys found a “bee tree” which we cut down, and took from it at least five gallons of honey. In the evening I went out hunting, but saw no game to shoot at. On my way back to camp I stopped to rest for a few minutes in a little canon that lay between two rocky hills covered with thick chaparral. After a while, my attention was attracted by a noise in the bushes and looking around I saw a large bear coming directly towards me. I sat perfectly still, and he did not notice me, but came slowly along, now and then stopping to turn over a stick or rock, in search, I suppose, of insects.

When within twenty feet of me I took sight of his fore-shoulders and fired, and he fell dead in his tracks. This was my first bear. He was very fat and would have weighed, I suppose, three hundred pounds. I went back to camp, which was not more than half a mile off, and returning with two of the men to assist me, we butchered him and packing the meat on a horse, we soon had some of it roasting before our fires. What a feast we had that night on “bear-meat and Honey!” If the mess of pottage that Esau sold his birthright for was as good as bear meat and honey, and he had a good appetite, I believe the poor fellow was excusable.

In the night we saw a long line of light to the westward of us, and supposed the Indians had fired the prairie. The night was pleasant and warm.

October 21, 1837. We left camp after breakfast, taking what was left of our bear-meat along with us, and steered our usual course due north, and about 12 o’clock we struck the Leon River, opposite the mouth of Armstrong’s Creek. The country passed over today was very broken, and but little land on our route is fit for cultivation. We saw a small drove of buffalo, but our hunters did not get a shot at them, and the country where we found them was so broken we could not chase them on horseback. One of our men who had stopped behind awhile for some purpose, when he came up and reported that he had seen an Indian

following on our trail, but he was a “scary” sort of fellow and we thought his story doubtful.

We passed a singular chain of high bald hills today. Looking at them from a distance we almost fancied we were approaching a considerable city, so much did they resemble houses, steeples, etc. They were entirely destitute of timber.

The Leon River where we struck it is a small rapid stream [this was October], shut in on both sides by high rocky hills. We crossed over to the northern side and “nooned” in a grove of pecans. These trees are full of the finest nuts we had ever seen – very large and their hulls so thin we could easily crack them with our fingers. Before we left, we gathered a pallet-full of them and strapped it on one of our pack mules.

In the evening we continued our route up Armstrong’s Creek, and struck camp a little after sundown near one of its headsprings. The valley along the creek is very beautiful and the soil rich. Our hunter today killed a fat buffalo cow on the way, and we butchered her and packed the meat into the camp. That was the first buffalo meat I ever tasted, and I thought it better even than bear meat. The flesh of an old bull however, I have found out since is coarse, tough, and stringy, but the hump is always good, and so are the “marrow-bones” and tongue.

Just after we had camped, one of our men named Thompson, while staking out his horse was bitten on the hand by a rattlesnake. It was a small one,

however, and he suffered but little from the effects of the bite. We scarified the wound with a penknife and applied some sod to it and next morning he was well enough to travel. I do not think the bite of the rattlesnake is as often fatal as people generally suppose...

Night clear and cool – cool enough to make it very pleasant to sleep by our fires.  Toward midnight we had an alarm that aroused all hands very suddenly. The sentry on post fired his gun off accidentally, and we supposed, of course that the Indians were upon us. We were all up and ready with our guns by the time the sentinel came in and told us it was a false alarm. I was so completely roused up by the excitement and bustle that I did not get to sleep for more than an hour afterward. The little breeze that rustled among the leaves and dead grass the early part of the night had died away, and a dead silence had settled over all. Not a sound could be heard, except the howling of a solitary “cayote” far off among the hills, and the nipping of our animals as they cropped the rank grass that grew around us. The silence was oppressive, and when one of the men muttered in his sleep or one of the animals coughed or snorted, it was an actual relief....

            October 22, 1837. After an early breakfast we saddled up and traveled as fast as the broken and rock state of the ground would permit....By noon we had only made 15 miles....

           

            From an Alameda point of view, this memoir tells us that in 1837 there were buffalo close by, and that there were no Indians then encamped where Armstrong Creek hits the Leon River to our south. In April 1844 and June 1845, Old Owl was contacted along the Colorado and San Saba Rivers. In 1848, Neighbors, John McLennan, Jim Shaw, and Old Owl arrived at the Tenawish and Nocona Indian camp on Lewis Creek, locally called Plants Creek, which empties into the Brazos near the modern town of Seymour. “Neighbors found in the camp about two hundred and fifty Comanche lodges, fifty Tonkawa lodges, and ten Wichita lodges. The great chief Pah-ah-yuca, head chief of the Tenawish and Noconas, arrived in the evening, bringing with him the hostile Tenawish, Nocona, and Kotsoteka chiefs, in order to put an end to the hostilities.”

It is not known if this Seymour camp later moved to the Leon River headwaters the next year, or if this camp was a large, second camp existing at the same time as the one recorded by Ford on the Leon. In any case, in 1849 Robert Simpson Neighbors wanted to lay out a trail to the upper Rio Grande through El Paso. Neighbors left San Antonio, and passed through Austin. Dr. John S. Ford (“Rip” Ford) joined his expedition. They went to a Torrey Trading House near Waco and spent several days getting ready. Neighbors hired Penatuhkah Buffalo Hump as his guide. They left the North Bosque Settlement, March 23, 1849:

Preliminaries were arranged without trouble. The expedition set out before the middle of March. It was a motley crowd. The Americans were Major Neighbors, Doc Sullivan, A. D. Neal, and the writer [Rip Ford]. Captain Jim Shaw, a

Deleware, was interpreter. The other Indians were: Joe Ellis and Tom Coshattee, Shawnees; Patrick Goin, a Choctow, and John Harry, a Delaware. A band of Comanches traveled with us too.

            One morning Buffalo Hump awoke the camp with a medicine song. Ford said, “It stirred up recollections of boyhood – the calling of higs – the plaintive notes of a solitary bull frog – the bellowing of a small bull, and all that sort of noises. Anon the awful melody of the sonorous gong was reproduced; the next moment the mournful howl of the hungry wolf saluted the ear, which gradually softened into something like the gobble of a turkey.  It might have been a choice asortment [sic] of Comanche airs gotten up to amuse and do honor to the Supervising Agent, but it failed to solace his white companions.  The performance commenced about an hour before daylight and did little to soothe the slumbers of the morning”.

            Old Owl led the expedition into his camp “on the headwaters of the Leon” on the fourth day:

             About forty or fifty children who were in the creek bathing ran for the wigwams crying “pav-o-ti-vo, pav-o-ti-vo”, white man, white man, as loud as they could…We encamped near the Indians; numerous delegations of children came to look at us and our trappings. The squaws also evinced curiosity; many of them had never seen an American. We had time to examine the wigwams and to learn something of every day life among the Comanches…A deaf and dumb

woman attracted our attention. She was the only person we saw laboring under these defects among several thousands [author italics] of Indians. A very old woman was frequently in our camp. The Comanches said she had seen more than a hundred summers. She appeared to have things her own way: found fault, lectured, and scolded like other old feminines. She had the appearance of a skeleton moving around with skin on it…It was decided that Buffalo Hump should be our guide. He managed to get most of his pay in advance. Mopochocupee separated from us. Buffalo Hump’s band was traveling south of west and rather down the country old Owl stayed behind.

            I’m not convinced that the “Upper Leon Headwaters near an intersecting creek” site that Rip Ford speaks of is in fact where Armstrong Creek hits the Leon. I’ve been to this site. The intersection looks little different than most of the Leon in Eastland County, farther north there were archeological findings of a large camp on the west side of the Armstrong Creek site found, but little on the east side, as Ford reports.

            A campsite farther north, inside the Alameda – Cheaney Box makes more sense. Based upon the cited “several thousands” population of Old Owl’s Leon River camp, our topography better fits the descriptions and repeated archeological findings at this location make the Alameda – Cheaney site a much stronger suspect.

            If the expedition’s turn “south of west” back toward the Colorado River had been from this alternate Alameda – Cheaney site, the expedition could’ve followed the

anecdotal Spanish Trail, said to lead away from within four miles of this site (if this Spanish Trail truly existed, it was probably originally an Indian trail).

            Tragedy engulfed this Comanche “township” after the Neighbors expedition departed the Leon River Camp, from which the camp never probably recovered:

            Shortly after Major Neighbors left them in 1849 a scourge of cholera carried away three hundred souls within a few weeks’ time. The faithful Old Owl and the intelligent Santa Anna were numbered with the dead. These losses demoralized the southern branch of the tribe, and henceforth disintegration worked rapidly…As soon as they recovered from the cholera scourge, the Penatekas held a general council and tried to select a head-chief to succeed Old Owl. One account says a chief named Sanaco was chosen, but Buffalo Hump and Katumse, another chief, visited Fredericksburg to report that the honor had gone to Buffalo Hump. The title was an empty one, from this time on the Penetekas themselves agreed that they had no common leader. There was no one among them who could take the place of Santa Anna and Old Owl.

            I guess now would be the time to relate the story of Comanche County’s Indian Mountain, just southwest of Gorman. This site is about 15 miles from Alameda. The story goes that one day in the 1920’s a farmer was plowing his field, below Indian Mountain. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw an Indian, in full feathered regalia, standing outside the fence. The farmer walked over. The Comanche had come to pay his last respects to fallen comrades (the last battle at this site was said to be in the 1870s). Later visits by Comanche warriors to this site reoccured several times through the years, it’s said.

            Though anecdotal, given the high honor and clear-eyed theology behind Comanche beliefs about death, I have to believe Comanche oral tradition kept up with the locations of many of their warriors’ final resting places. That geographic information, if it truly exists, is still hidden far across a ripped apart cultural divide, not yet fully healed. One hopes that in the future Old Owl’s final resting place may be located, safeguarded and honored as an early leader and patron of Alameda and Cheaney’s history, in addition to being one of the Penatuhkah’s wisest leaders.

            The Owl uniquely understood what was happening to his world, and tried to ease his people peacefully from one epoch to the next. One wonders what might have happened if The Owl and Santa Anna had survived until 1859, when Alameda’s settlers began to arrive.

            The exact location of Old Owl’s camp is unknown. It is clear that at most it was

 a short ride away from the Alameda – Cheaney Box. Neighbors’ description matches a

location inside this box. Even if the site is at the Armstrong Creek location, supporting a

 population of at least 3,000 Comanche citizens would have made the rich Mansker

Lake area a prime theater of operations for Old Owl’s hunters. Whether The Owl

camped here, or merely hunted here, this wise, unassuming sage walked this place. Old

Owl’s peaceful spirit sleeps inside the Leon River Valley.

The Whisper of Old Owl

The Whisper of Old Owl

Through The Windshield

            I left Weatherford this morning, in search of Old Owl’s camp. It was last seen in 1849, best I can tell. If the stories are true, it lies just south of my Alameda-centric box. A full moonlit night would carry a warrior’s steed to the Mansker Lake Community in an hour.

            I turn south on Hwy 16 from I-20, the morning sun still coming in my east truck window. I figure a trip across the foot of Cook Canyon is a good way to time travel back into today’s nineteenth century search. 

            I’ve tried to develop the skill of seeing the land without its roads and fences. My John Wayne-colored glasses warn me that Indians might lurk along the cedar-covered rim of the canyon to my right, awaiting their chance to swoop down and surround me, fill me with piercing arrows. This canyon still whispers its tragedies, from not so long ago.

            I pass across Palo Pinto Creek, the Indians’ highway through this country, creating stories we’ve all heard, and a few never repeated, I’m sure. The project’s

newest contributor, the one translating darkly from outside our log cabin’s walls, says it’s important to get a sense of a place. That the Comanche were attuned to their world in a way that’s difficult for moderns to understand. I sense as I cross this creek that I’m entering their world, hoping for a sign I can follow into Old Owl Mopochocupee’s flourishing camp, one of the largest Comanche camps in Texas.

            What do you ask of a Comanche who died over 150 years ago? Will he ride around with me and point out all the old sites, my newest Shorty Fox? Will he have photos of the significant people and places from his nomadic world? “This is me and my friend Running Cloud the day before we attacked that wagon train up north – good times.” Will he be able to tell me what he, and later Buffalo Hump felt when these cursed settlers kept pouring over the hill from three directions, killing all that the Comanche held dear?

To be clear, I have little idea what I’m looking for. I feel pretty confident when I’m tracking Anglo sites now, when looking for abandoned cemeteries, homesteads or schools. Crooks in the road, cisterns in a field, fence lines that make no sense – I can pursue these footprints with some assurance. With the Comanches, I find myself again at the bottom of a new learning curve. Hopefully they will share some guideposts I will need to track them, to make contact.

            I ascend up the southern rim of Cook Canyon, up into the gently rolling country between Salem and Hogtown. This flatter plain would’ve been an easier path for our new friends to follow, moving northwest toward Mansker Lake. Before the log cabins

started showing up, the Comanches could have continued, on toward their camp near Sweetwater. Later, they could have stalked silently back to their reservation undetected, late at night. Our new friend counsels, “look for paths of least resistance.” Our old roads often follow theirs.

            I near Hogtown. Nearby Blair’s Fort is the last stop on the Stephenville – Fort Griffin Road that I’m sure of. Some writings suggest it headed to Dallas Scott’s place on the hill east of Mansker Lake, before following the Sanches Trail north to Merriman. Some suggests it continued north. Blair’s Fort became Hogtown, became Desdemona.

Desdemona has almost completed its metal volunteer fire house. The community still hold dances and plays, though as of this writing the community has split into two camps. Urbanization has not stolen this hamlet’s ability to fight for what it believes in, even when neighbors become the enemy. There are still pickups clustered around Desdemona’s combo gas station/café for coffee. This town still has a heartbeat, maybe two.

The long-ago story that I’m relying on this morning was written by R.I.P. Ford. “Rip” for all the death notices he signed – Rest in Peace. Robert Simpson Neighbors talked Rip into an expedition beginning at a trading post near Waco, heading for El Paso.  Buffalo Hump and the great peace chief Old Owl led the men to the wise second elder’s camp “near the headwaters of the Leon” after a four day ride. Ford’s description is vague, at least the version I have. The camp was said to be where a creek meets the Leon. It was supposed to be one of the larger encampments in Comancheria, a fully-functioning prehistoric society with many children and one lady said to be over 100 years old. Rip tells us there were two to three thousand Indians encamped here. 

One much later interpretation identifies a spot in northern Comanche County.  I’ve highlighted that stretch of the Leon on my map for today. Another 1936 journal (not necessarily related to Old Owl) tells of finding eleven fireplace hearths, evidence of an Indian “work camp,” the man says. Blow sand originally concealed the clay pits, three feet across and two feet high. Rocks protruded from the top in a circle. This sounds similar to the fire circles, or middens near Ranger. It’s unknown if this camp and Old Owl’s are related. There are fairly specific directions to this 1936 location.  I highlight it on the map as well. The two sites are half a mile apart. Could they be the same?

            The country south of Desdemona is gently rolling, mostly coastal now. Was this land cleared to farm cotton, or later peanuts? What did it look like back then, when mounted warriors attacked Blair’s Fort, Mansker Lake, the Duffer Ranch? Looking down I’m still on striped, winding asphalt. I’m not hot on their trail.

            Uncle Ben Freeman wrote that Jake Hamon’s locomotives couldn’t climb more than a two percent grade. Though they sought to tie certain towns together, the railroad searched hard in 1919 to find the easiest route. They too veered northwest, avoiding Cook Canyon and eventually skirting eastern Cheaney.

            I’ve looked at a lot of maps from as far back as the mid-1500s over the last couple of weeks. Our stretch of the Leon Valley, indeed most of the Leon Region is omitted on all but a few. History appears to be happening elsewhere. Today I am not so sure. 

As I near the little town of DeLeon I wonder…Alameda’s Leon river is straighter, is much easier to cross than the twisting Brazos. Before the tanks, lakes and wells, its water volume flowed much greater. Many in the project remember the richly flowing lion of a river before Lake Leon was built, during all but the driest years. And though we’re focused as moderns on the Comanches’ impact on us, it’s good to remember that they too had enemies before our creaking wagons arrived…Apaches, Kiowas, for example. The rich Leon River hideaway would have offered protection.

Archeological evidence shows that Comanches and Kiowas lived up and down our stretch of valley. The buffalo were less than a day’s ride to the west and northwest (McGough Springs had a few…seven miles from Mansker Lake, as did Victor, ten miles to the southeast). Other than the arrowheads and metates we’ve found on the sandy ground, how could the Indian’s presence have been recorded before the first Anglo families got here to see it?

            I pull into DeLeon about ten. The dusty little town will be my base of operations today, a first. A green highway sign tells me to turn left if I want Dublin or Comanche.  Why be greedy?  One Comanche will do. I turn left.

            DeLeon is still in business. The Highway 6 Café parking lot is packed with pickups at ten in the morning…I make a note for lunch time. The main drag boasts cars and hard-working farm trucks parked along its streets – over half the storefronts open, back in the mercantile game. 

I head south out of town, seeking the Leon River just above Lake Proctor. I’ll turn back north there and follow its waters to the base of Alameda Cemetery. Hopefully I will catch a Comanche scent, some sign, some clue. One can’t help one’s paranoia.

I speed past a wizened old man picking up pecans from the highway’s right of way, his old truck with a busted left taillight dangling by two wires, next to the opened tailgate pulled up near the barbed wire fence. A lady sits in a cream-colored Buick just past the man, waiting at her gate for the mailman – a card from a grandkid, a catalog, the Stephenville news paper.

            I slow within minutes, turn east onto a washboard caliche road, making a note to thank Commissioner Christian for the smoother trails we enjoy one county northwest of here. I come quickly up on the Ebenezer Cemetery and stop.  I’ll check graveyards along today’s unfolding path, looking to see if they share Alameda and Cook’s signs of Indian conflict.  “Killed by Indians” a tombstone clue that I might be close. 

If you ever get a chance to visit this cemetery, it’s worth a stop. Not quite as old as Alameda, it appears more like our Cook Cemetery, showing episodes of great care some years and busy descendants others. These headstones will pull at your heart. 

This lonely place is made better by many concrete markers with the stark word “UNKNOWN” stamped across each face. This sort of message used to make me sad, that some life had been “lost” like that – forever. Whoever crafted these markers saw the larger truth – each soul has been remembered now, though their names and life

details still swim tantalizingly out of reach. These slabs are breadcrumbs that will fall across the path of someone, someday – the circle will be completed.

            I’m walking back to the truck and realize that I’m still thinking like a modern. I look around for bent “Comanche Marker Trees” and spy none. Then far in the distance, on the eastern rim of the Leon River Valley, I see them – two linked peaks higher than anything in the area, connected like the twin mountains above Coleman County’s Santa Anna, Chief Santa Anna’s known headquarters (down which a runaway team injured Joe Cheaney later in life). The peaks I see have a distinctive shape, would make a good landmark. They’ve got to be five miles away at least. I crank up the truck and head for the river bottom, watching my new goal as I drive.

            I stop to look at my old map, nearing the Leon, hoping the old bridge on this map still exists. I start wondering how much my truck weighs. 

The river bed looks different here – more like a swamp with lonely willows and cottonwood, ghostly with flood debris leaves and limbs clawing their trunks, like they tried to escape this place and couldn’t.  I’m not comfortable here, want to leave. There is water standing beside the road – menacing. I can’t imagine the Indians wanting to live here.

            There’s a dented old Dodge pickup pulled off the road…no one in sight. A fisherman, hopefully, on an honorable enterprise. I cross the rickety bridge, bracing for my descent through its rotting floorboards, make it, pushing up the other side, rising quickly onto a giant plateau, old oaks with many-fingered crowns, like heads of broccoli. Circling down again near the river, I come to a place that has the feel of a campsite, near the mouth of Armstrong Creek. This concealed hideout has a rise above the flood plain that suggests a lookout, but it’s too low to see far away. It doesn’t fit Rip Ford’s description. I keep moving.

I end up at Comyn, settled in the late 1870s after the Indian risk had passed, according to their historical marker. Alameda pre-1870 founding makes me proud – not going to let a few blood-thirsty Comanches slow it down. Comyn was a railroad town, then home to a Humble Pipeline tank farm. I pass through, my two peaks in sight, just southeast of the almost evaporated settlement.

            The road rises, the peaks grow taller on my left. The ground falls away to my right, to the east and south. I have a clear view miles and miles southwest to the twin peaks of Round Mountain and the Long Mountain complex (1,800 feet above sea level), almost in Brown County. While I’m two miles from the Leon River now, I remember reading that the Comanches had lower subsidiary sites to relay smoke signals from higher altitudes. These peaks behind me (the higher of the two is 1,388 feet) were one of their “tall towers”. They could have seen trouble coming from miles away. I savor a yes moment. They were here. I feel the sense of place I’d been told about. Comanche Peak in Hood County is about 1,224 feet by comparison, also having a distinctive shape.

A big ranch is at the top of this peak. I am a hundred feet below and still have a great view. At the base of the mountain two decaying homesteads meet me, one maybe both built before 1900. A dense clump of mesquite and oak and a darkened draw off the mountain betray a spring….look for water, for a view, for game, for the path of least resistance. Story after story pour from Alameda about settlers invading the Indian’s front yards with their cabins. We had to have made the Comanches scratch their heads. “What are these light-skinned fools thinking?”

            I don’t think this is the Comanche’s main camp, though. It doesn’t fit Rip’s Old Owl story, either. This could be its lookout. The smaller lookout earlier, below Armstrong Creek, had an unobstructed view of this high place. I look to the north and can see Eastland County’s Jameson Peak, to the east of the invisible Howard Community (1,682 feet high, a distinctive shape, many arrowheads and mano/metates found near a spring at its base).  I remember last week, seeing this same peak from the Comanche smoke camp near Ranger. I have that “fill in the blank” feeling, feel like tumblers are locking into place, three rich, red cherries in a row. I might be observing the smoke signal promontory sites north, east and south of Alameda. Today, I see no smoke.

            I pass back through Comyn heading north. They now store peanuts in the giant coffee can-looking oil tanks, sisters to the round ones that waved Magnolia’s, then Mobil’s flying Pegasus back at me entering Desdemona when I was a kid going to see Cora Lee and Elbert. Path, of least resistance.

It’s impossible to drive close to the Leon River, because of private property. I’m able to turn south and again get close to where Armstrong Creek hits the sleeping larger river. Big Foot Wallace supposedly met the Leon here, then explored north around 1837. I’m still south on the map from where Old Owl is supposed to be waiting on me. How could Wallace have missed thousands of Comanches? Did the band not arrive until after he passed, or is the site further north than other historians have concluded?

            I get to the Leon bottom’s flats. They look just like the land between Alameda Cemetery and Mansker Lake…large pecans surrounded by wheat-colored winter grass…easy to ride through on a horse, easy to pass through on a wagon or a teepee pull-behind.

            I turn north, head up a road that would end up at Round Grove Cemetery if I kept going, but loop back to the west, following more Leon River Valley from a distance. The road is narrow and I’m passing dairy trucks and eighteen wheelers leaving with freshly cut sod, others with shiny-tanks full of milk and hard-working men in pickups. “You lost, boy?” a question I don’t like to be asked. What am I going to tell them? “Eh, yes sir. Could you direct me to Old Owl’s 1849 campsite?” I accelerate on past.

            It’s funny how much one’s head moves to the left and the right when you’re driving fifteen miles an hour looking for bent Indian trees or rises that could be lookouts or teepees or marks on trees. I’ve got to get into Fort Worth more.

I cross over into the stretch of meandering water I’ve highlighted on my map, based on the three reports. Trees get dense on my left, between me and the Leon. I see a stand of deer. I don’t see homesteads…I don’t see warriors riding horses through this dense brush. But I can’t get close enough to our river…there could be a clear path nearer the water. 

I approach another bridge and stop to take a photo, noting that the Leon’s flow mirrors that below Alameda’s cemetery. If conditions here and there were also identical in 1849, it would be hard to name the place where I stand “the headwaters”, at Alameda’s expense farther north. I turn north to loop around for another river crossing farther to the west. I see something on a hillside, about a quarter mile away. Low to the ground, gray short columns, built into a far hillside. My camera lens isn’t powerful enough to tell me what it is. It doesn’t belong, though. I pull the camera down, and finally see in front of me, bold and fully in focus, a sign-No Trespassing.

            I take off again, more than a little frustrated, now approaching the Leon from the north, pass a high dollar place on a knoll above the river. I head down into the peaceful, well-tended bottoms, littered with pecan trees as tall as Eastland’s courthouse. It’s flat across this stretch, with tributaries needing bridges twice. A shape catches my eye to the left and I slow. It’s a grandfather pecan tree, a serpentine giant bent toward the ground, the main trunk pointing east-southeast. Down the river, toward the shapes on the hillside I couldn’t identify without jumping a fence, without getting shot. My head whips to the left involuntarily, then sweeps rapidly to the right – though I hear nothing.  I’m ten feet away from a Native guidepost, a Comanche Marker Tree.  Could a Comanche hunting party be far away? I pause, smiling at my delusion, at my connection.

I don’t know if archeology supports this tree as a true People’s landmark. But the “pointing” tree is facing in a way that the river’s current doesn’t flow - flood waters would’ve pushed it another direction…it bends down, away from the sun, before being sawed off. There’s no other explanation, given the old age of the stunted tree. Could these branches have noted a river crossing…or does it point to the hazy site I couldn’t see earlier, not a quarter mile downriver? 

I take off, my enthusiasm renewed. The far southern rim of this river bottom rises with the road, has an Alameda feel to it, more like the western cliff where the McGahas stayed. I drive up the ridge and sure enough, there are several old homesteads…perhaps this river bottom was their Mansker Lake. The river below this point still flows, but in truth looks like it does on the stretch behind our cemetery, up through Cheaney, up under the Lake Leon Dam. I’m not convinced that this is the country where Neighbors and Ford crossed west at Old Owl’s camp.

            I head north out of DeLeon. It takes three tries to find the little road that will return me to the river. One of those attempts is marked by a county road sign, but takes me dead end to some people named Green’s front door. I swing the wheel around quickly before the shooting can commence.

            There are two cemeteries on my map through here, not far apart. I again want to check for evidence of inter-cultural conflict. I get to one crook in the road but don’t find

headstones, as the map tells me I will. Farther around I do find the Oliver Springs Cemetery…not started until 1885, according to the sign, too new to be of help (the Comanches cleared out in 1874).

I loop back around to the first site, crossing a spring-fed stream (car washes the only item I’m under budget on). I study the map and reconfirm the first location…the cemetery is gone. Bulldozed or plowed or whatever. There is no name for the cemetery on my map. This pasture was made bigger, maybe for peanuts now coastal. I wouldn’t think a cemetery out here would have been very large…half an acre more in peanuts? I am saddened by this latest tragedy on the path.

            After Neighbors and Ford’s expedition left Old Owl’s camp in 1849, over three hundred Native souls fell to cholera, within a few weeks, it’s said. Before the year was up, even wise Old Owl and Santa Anna would be claimed, their final resting place as hazy as these souls resting under the grass pasture, somewhere out there, in front of my bug-addled front windshield.

            I turn north to catch up to the Leon. I’m less than eight miles from Mansker Lake by horseback, though I’m still probably in Comanche County. This road is barely a road…I’ll be surprised if my grandchildren can follow this soon-to-be-forgotten route someday. Up ahead a small herd of cattle wanders the road-strays I think. Then I see a Ford pickup following behind in the ditch. These cattle are being herded to another pasture. The climate-controlled F-150 saddle mount seems to work great, until the cattle need to make a left turn off the almost-gone road, through a gate into a pasture. A

modern cowboy opens the door to his modern Henry Ford horse, gets out waving his arms and a white rag tied to the end of a lunge whip, convincing the herd of his wisdom. Buddy Rogers tells me he finds Dodge trucks superior for herding and cutting cattle.

            I come to the point that I can’t follow the Leon any farther north. I’m miles from where I can rejoin it, just below Mansker Lake. More fence, more private property – I channel the Comanche’s anger.

I cross over Highway 16 again, and head through the country toward Victor. Though not part of my plan today, Comanches were reported in this area as well and the sun is still too high to start serious photography. I’m driving slow…I find myself thinking “where would the Comanches have liked” and occasionally, as I near streams or hollows or quiet bends in the road, hear the thought “they would have liked it here.”

I keep coming back to the smoke signals. To life’s raw ingredients that these guys would’ve looked for before making camp. I put my map away. 

            I bend into another county road. I suspect that I’m in Erath County. No fences or bar ditches along the ten foot wide trail, crossing cattle guards as I enter and leave each fenced around place. This terrain has rolling hills that have lookout potential, but nothing as high as what I saw earlier.

            I come up on a farm place…this little road makes me feel like I’m intruding, like I’m driving through their front yard. There’s a mailbox. There are old pickups and tractors and junk scattered wildly around the place. Some diesel tanks have leaked and poisoned a giant hulk of a live oak, standing dead on its feet. The present owner is

living in a large storage building like you’d buy beside the freeway in Fort Worth, to store your lawnmower. Across the yard sits a once bright yellow house, a Sears and Roebuck Craftsman, I’d guess. Its window glass is gone. Black rings above the window frames betray a fire long ago. Another sprawling live oak pokes at the roof – wanting to go inside.

            I’m not sure which would be sadder to the folks that built this place, coming back to see what I see, or to see bare ground, all evidence of their lives erased.

            I turn back up the trail. It’s getting late. I catch myself wondering if there will be a full moon tonight, if their braves will ride through these hills looking for trouble. The sense of place and the sense of time finally becomes a conversation.

            I stop at the Bethel Cemetery, with a quaint wooden plank one room building that could have been a school or church. I take pictures, the light finally beginning to cooperate. I gently push open the door and get a pleasant surprise. There are pews. The wood planked floors are in great shape. An old piano leans against the far wall. All we need is the lost Bethel Community to show up, and we could have church. Could share one final prayer before darkness comes.

            I’m tired and I want to be home. I turn north, grab hold of some interstate pavement, and return to the world of speed limits and cell phones. I hope the next time I come out here, there is a feathered someone to greet me.

I’m thinking about smoke signals. I wonder who the switchboard operator was in Cheaney.  I’m sure it was a party line, but I don’t remember anyone talking about it. I’m not making a lot of sense. 

            I’m thinking that a sense of place goes on forever. Mr. Cheaney’s father Leander was a scout to Kit Carson, who faced Comanches many times. Is it a coincidence that his son would move from his dad’s place near Rustler, settle near Cheaney’s Comanche-muddied banks of the Leon, then move first to near Chief Spirit Talker’s camp at Mukewater, then to the mountain base of the mightiest warrior chief in Texas at Santa Anna? Did Leander get infected with the People’s sense of place, then pass it genetically along to his son?

            It’s easy to feel frustrated. I don’t have photos of me and Old Owl drinking coffee this afternoon, sitting around swapping stories. Of Buffalo Hump in his feathered warrior array wanting to go liberate some horses from wily Old Henry Mansker. I used to feel this same frustration about the Cheaney Community when all this started. I persuade myself that I have collected golden nuggets today as Kenworths roll past my window, puzzle pieces that will form a fuller picture someday, after I’ve put in more miles. Cheaney’s fragments finally started coming together that way.

I’ve walked right past more historic places on this journey than I’ll ever admit, the treasures remaining hidden until they chose to present themselves. Sometimes you try too hard to put lost tidbits back together. Today I’m not so sure. Did my ‘it could have happened here’ really amplify a quiet chieftain’s whisper – “it did happen here.”

Did that lonely stretch of road, that narrow winter’s thread of water share its rippling memory with me today?

I’m supposed to meet Linda Pelon at a confirmed Comanche camp in Dallas County in a couple of weeks. “It has all of the signs,” she tells me. Everything the People looked for in choosing a home, if you know what to look for. Those puzzle pieces have already been put back together, will form a good example. I’ll have the lay of this country firmly planted in my mind then. And its whispers to lead me.

Frank Sanchez and Calvin Vernor

Frank Sanches Comes Home

Then Leaves Again

            When I finally reached the Nueces River Valley, the man I was seeking was already dead. This valley is deeper than the Leon, up north. But the mysterious waters of the Nueces, carving shallow bends and then deep water holes strikes me as sister to the sometimes ferocious lion river snaking beneath Alameda Cemetery’s shadows.

Frank’s trail had gone cold, many months before, far to the north in that Eastland County echo. Blind luck even called me to this place…connected me with another mythic Alameda-like community.

Frank left behind a wife and five children.

My found friend’s humble earthen grave has been desecrated, on purpose – malice and aforethought. Like the Wicked Witch of the West, a sturdy house has landed atop my hero’s final resting place. He’s underneath that structure’s weight. Frank’s painstakingly-carved brown rock tombstone’s been stolen, used to prop open a door like some trash rock from the field, then taken into Travis County exile as some stranger’s trite souvenir.

Texas history isn’t supposed to end like this.

This Cheaney Community pioneer’s grave is unmarked.

If you don’t count the house.

Another man along my trail south told me, not even a week ago: “There are only two types of people in this world, those who build and those who destroy. It has always been like that. It will always BE like that.”

That man was right.

I talk to my deceased friend today, to the man buried beneath the house. Frank was and is the thick bottom trunk to a sprawling family tree stretching across America. “People that care are working on your behalf, Frank. Folks-up-in-Years can extract justice from the Destroyers.”

Graves never answer, in my experience.

I keep talking. “I need to know what happened here.”

Stories from within those graves can speak, however, if you listen long enough.

Frank Sanches somehow makes my seventy-two cent black writing pen begin to talk. What you’ll read below is a true story, told by a circle of people who have mostly never met. All Texans of good will, and all the folks with ties to the Leon River Valley connect to this Frank’s story.

If you stand under the late-1800’s wooden Tabernacle at Alameda Cemetery long enough, I believe that any man or woman who’s ever walked or galloped past, living or dead, will again ride up and start talking. Start telling stories. Crazy talk, I know.

But it keeps happening.

            I’m sitting at my desk working, checking emails. I receive a note from a lady who claims to be a long-lost descendent of Frank Sanches. He’s the man that folks in Eastland County hold out as the first permanent Anglo settler. Believe it or not, Frank Sanches/Sanchez was a fairly common name back in the mid-1800s. So this lady and I go back and forth with identifying questions.

I come to know it is our Frank Sanches.

            The one whose two lost log cabins sat alone and unguarded on the east side of Jim Neal Creek in northern Cheaney.

            Only a few hearthstone rocks remain today.

            Frank’s tangled story scattered like dust, thrown into a cold autumn wind, as the Tabernacle book left my hand. I knew he’d been there. I knew he’d left. I could walk to where the man’s log cabin once stood. Like so many calling to me from that distant fog, I surmised why he’d taken his family and abandoned ship (angry Comanches, lots and lots of angry Comanches sweeping down their inherited raiding trail along the Old Alameda Road. Not far outside Frank’s oaken front door).

As the book went to press, what happened next was a mystery.

            This is what I wrote about Frank in The Tabernacle:     

“Frank Sanches and Jim Neal are the first Anglo men known to have settled in Eastland County. Several explorers passed through first, but Frank and his step-son-in-law Jim Neal were the first that constructed cabins, settled in to earn a living and tried to make a go of it. They arrived in 1856. Their two log cabins and at least one large corral, were about a mile and a half up Jim Neal Creek from the Leon River.

The Sanches and Neal log cabins stood empty when the census taker rode by in 1860. After the Indians left that country in the 1870s, the Cheaney Community would spring to life just southeast of Frank Sanches’ first brave toehold.

Francisco (“Frank”) Sanches was a Creole from New Orleans, born between 1802-1808 in Louisiana, probably of Canary Islander/Spanish descent (he probably had coal black hair, a good thing in the Leon River Valley). His wife was named Jerusha Tidwell. He landed in Texas in 1835, the year before the Alamo fell, (entrance certificate No. 472), and lived in Nacogdoches County for a few years. Frank began to follow the ever-moving frontier west shortly thereafter.

By the late 1840’s, Frank Sanches was living in Navarro County. About 1849, Walker County’s John Stubblefield {related to the later Coffer/Stubblefields of the Leon River Valley?} employed Sanches to run cattle on the open range off Pecan Creek, near present Bynum in Hill County. Frank then moved to Parker County, pre-empting 160 acres on a creek above the Brazos, now known as Sanchez Creek. From this base, he ran cattle in Parker, Palo Pinto and Erath Counties, as was the practice back then.

            As the frontier pushed westward, Sanches saw an opportunity to relocate his cattle operation farther west into less crowded territory. He chose a site in the Leon River Valley, in present day Eastland County. His homeplace along the Jim Neal Creek was many miles from the next family of settlers, far to the east.

            Sanches scouted a cattle trail that came to be known as the Sanches Cattle Trail across Erath County, passing Davidson Springs at the Davidson Ranch near Tanner, then Rattlesnake Mountain, in present Eastland County. The Sanches Cattle Trail ran south to below Jameson Peak, northwest to Mansker Lake, north to Merriman, then west to McGough Springs. In Eastland County, it passed the old settlement of Central (northwest of modern-day Cisco), then headed to the end of the trail in Abilene, Texas. At this point, it connected to the much higher traffic Western Trail going north.

            The Stephenville - Fort Griffin Road largely followed this trail much later. The Sanches Trail was later used by immigrants and government freighting contractors who supplied the troops at Fort Griffin and other West Texas military posts. This trail is

believed to follow one of the original Indian Trails (based upon archeological findings along its path), and eventually became the Old Alameda Road.

 The Sanches cattle grazed far up and down the Colony Creek Valley, the Leon River Valley and out into the grasslands extending far beyond both. It is hard to imagine that Sanches didn’t have Indian trouble, being so isolated within their historic hunting grounds, and near one of their major transits. A brother of Frank is said to have spoken an Indian dialect, but if Frank shared that skill, that life-saving detail is lost to history.

By 1860, Frank Sanches and James Neal uprooted again to McLennan County. Not long after that, the family moved to Edwards County, settling near a spring (now known as Sanches Spring) near the Nueces River, in the area of modern Barksdale. In 1867, a man named Hill who was traveling in that country found Frank Sanches dead, an arrow still lodged through his lifeless body.

            Frank Sanches’ story while he lived in Eastland County is largely conjecture. Based upon circumstantial evidence, Sanches grazed his cattle in the wild over thousands of acres, much as Fuller Milsap did to the east in Palo Pinto County. The only recorded corroborating story of Sanches’ Eastland County exploits, by Kenny in “A Comprehensive History of Texas”, reports that in 1858 the Comanches came across a man named Peter Johnson and his eight-year-old son Ike, driving a wagon loaded with flour and meal in Bosque County.

The Indians killed the father and took the little boy captive. They left the settlements with a lot of stolen horses and cattle. When the Indians were fifty miles

away, they took the boy’s clothes and turned him loose in the wilderness, thinking he’d die of exposure/frostbite or be eaten by wolves. The account says that little Ike found some cows, staying with them for heat and sustenance until he was discovered.

            Mrs. Langston, in her History of Eastland County tells us:

Frank Sanches was out hunting stock and stood and watched numerous droves passing down to the Leon River for water, hoping to find some of his stray two-year-olds. Imagine his surprise as the last yearling was nearing him, and he was about to turn and retrace his steps homeward, to see a small boy’s head bobbing up just behind the calf. On the child’s approach, he found that it was a white boy who had been captured by the Indians. He had escaped and was following the stock, hoping to reach the settlements. Mr. Sanches cared for the little boy and returned him to his people.”

Other sources list parties other than Sanches as responsible for finding and repatriating Ike Johnson.

            Sanches and Neal left Eastland County no more than three years after their arrival. Given their homestead’s location near an ancient Indian highway, their isolation, and their large inventory of cattle, one has to believe that something bad happened out there in those woods, once, maybe several times, that made them want to leave. Whether or not lives were lost, whether children died of disease or worse, remains a mystery. Perhaps a silent dread that such tragedy was imminent drove them away.

Whether Sanches was still living along Jim Neal Creek in 1859 to meet Henry Mansker (settling to his south at Mansker Lake) or John Flanagan (to his north near present day Merriman in 1858), we will never know. If he did, his advice would have been interesting to hear. Frank Sanches and Jim Neal voted with their feet, and left this country, never to return.”

This is what Frank Sanches wanted us to know, after that book’s journey was finally closed. Frank was long gone when Uncle Henry Mansker and Mr. John Flanagan made it to our Leon River Valley. It’s unclear to me how so much of his Eastland County story survives, as only two empty log cabins and a broken down corral testified to his having ever been there.

The nice woman from the email puts me in touch with her daddy, Calvin Vernor of Camp Wood, Texas. Camp Wood is almost 250 miles to the south, near Leakey, not too far from Uvalde. Vernor is the great grandson of Frank. Calvin is thankfully also a historian. Living so far away, we’ve had to shake hands, and drink coffee over cell phones and thick envelopes through the mail.

Calvin Vernor is 79-years-old, and works hard every day. In addition to his normal projects, he’s on the “restore the old Spanish mission committee”. He knows the history of the Nueces River Canyon. Kind of a local historian storyteller. He’s a nice man. I enjoyed our visit.

Frank was the first Anglo settler living in the Upper Nueces country. The man had a knack for being first to a place, seems like. He arrived before the army got there to protect local settlers. He ended up living there about ten years before being murdered in cold blood. Their first homestead was above the Sanches Springs, in what is now Barksdale. Again, pulling out a map, you’ll be struck by the echo of his place, just above a major river/creek intersection, like say Jim Neal Creek two miles before hitting the Leon River.

The army got there in 1857 (this is a well-documented date), so Frank probably arrived in the Nueces country about 1856. The army reports his being there when they rode up. There were several beautiful springs there then, that he carved his initials into. There was a cave at Wallace Mountain, a cave near the top, where Frank created a beautiful carving into the hard stone containing his name, and a large, ornate Masonic emblem.

Another man explored out that way around 1921 and chiseled Frank’s work out of the wall to bring back to town. When he got the old carving free of the wall, it was too heavy to carry. He went back a couple of weeks later, he said, and Frank’s artistic mark on the earth was gone.

I think about all the carvings into the moss-covered stone up on Button Top, a prominent rock mountain pug nose above the Leon, where stray Alameda kids skipped school. The place is littered with old initials, carved into the stone. I remember something else and smile. One of Frank’s sons, living not a mile to the north of Button Top was nicknamed “Button”.

There are no photographs or drawings remaining of Frank or his wife Jerusha that Calvin knows of. Frank was a good man, a hard working man, Calvin tells me. He used his Bible often. There were no churches down there, back then.

If you look at photographs of the Nueces River Valley where Frank moved to after Cheaney, you’re quickly hit by its resemblance to the Leon River, over against the tall cliffs and hills rising from its seasonal waters, just to the west of Mansker Lake.

            You also find out in a hurry that their valley was also a favorite stomping ground for Native Americans of many Nations – Lipan Apaches, Comanches, et al. Flint points, shell beads, pottery and many other artifacts testify that Native peoples used the Water-Game-Protected Valley trifecta of the Nueces Valley as their Eden, just as our Leon River Valley Natives did around Mansker Lake and tributaries leading past it.

Franciscan friars built an unsuccessful Spanish Mission, San Lorenzo de la Santa Cruz in 1762 at Camp Wood. It was abandoned. Later in 1857, the U.S. Army carved an army post near the old mission’s fallen ruins, using the friar’s original spring for drinking water. Today the small town of Camp Wood in Real County boasts about 800 folks, a five store strip mall, a drug store with a soda foundation (“serving great floats”, their website says) and a movie theater (with three movies a week).

The Camp Wood army post was tasked to protect the vital San Antonio – El Paso Road from Indian attacks. Camp Wood was abandoned by the army for a time in 1857, then brought back to life until 1860 by John Bell Hood, of Hood’s Texas Brigade fame. Union troops later fled the place en masse trying to make a break back to the North in the spring of 1861. Confederate forces moved into their abandoned digs and set up shop.

After the War of Northern Aggression (Civil War) concluded, army soldiers and Texas Rangers periodically used the camp, it was said.

            Bill Badger, writing for the American Military University about Camp Wood (“Camp Wood, Texas – A Military History, 1857 – 1861”) tells us that Frank and Jerusha moved up the Nueces River Canyon to be closer to the army.

The army reports that the Frank Sanches Family were the first permanent settlers in the Upper Nueces Canyon…being there when the army arrived. Frank raised maybe 200-300 head of cattle. Their original place was three miles upstream from the army camp.

Calvin knows of no visible remains of their first homestead.

Frank built his family a cedar picket house (straight cedars, sharp arrow-like points in the air, driven vertically into the ground). I wonder if his Cheaney home was a picket house too, much like the oak picket Blair’s Fort, built a few years later to his southeast in Desdemona. Calvin tells me that Sanches Springs in Barksdale, Texas still runs, but not full-out like it used to. There’s a swale under the farm-to-market road, running east to west from Hamilton Hollar toward Frank’s homestead that always made me believe a non-vanished spring fed its erosion, before the time of wells, runaway mesquite trees and stock tanks.

Frank originally moved to Nacogdoches from a village outside New Orleans. His parents got off ship at New Orleans after arriving from the Canary Islands about 1790. Frank was born in a settlement near New Orleans about 1814. On July 22, 1835, he entered the Republic of Texas with his friend Andrew Rojas. His entry certificate says he was a citizen, a man of very good moral habits, industrious, a lover of the constitution and the laws of that country (Texas), a Christian, and unmarried without a family.

Frank married Jerusha Tidwell on Feb 13, 1844 (a widow with two children). Jerusha is a Hebrew name, meaning “wife”. Their marriage license was also issued by the Republic of Texas (I have copy) in Nacogdoches.

The 1850 census shows Frank and his wife Jerusha having two children together, and that they lived next to Frank’s friend Andrew Rojas in Navarro County. Son Joel Mack (nicknamed “Button”) was born in 1851. Also in 1851, Frank had a cattle ranch on Pecan Creek in Hill County, north of the present town of Bynum. A daughter they named Winnie was born there. Winnie later married W. R. Webb. That’s how Calvin ties to Frank and Jerusha.

Frank then ran cattle on the open range farther north and was taxed for a 160 acre place in Parker County (southwest of Weatherford) on a creek named Sanchez (spelled with a “z”). I pass a green TxDot sign taunting “Sanchez Creek Estates” every time I go west down Weatherford’s Ranger Highway toward Alameda, Cheaney and beauty.

Calvin tells me that Frank’s bride Jerusha (pronounced Ja-roo-sa) was a doctor for the army. A soldier’s diary from the camp backs him up. Calvin doesn’t know how she got her medical training, but she was definitely considered a healing frontier doctor for that country. Perhaps her Cherokee mother or her French father taught her the medical skills she possessed. She is known to have used native plants in her practice, giving credence to Native training by her Cherokee Nation mom. The Army hired her officially as their doctor at the camp. Calvin told me that she removed lots of arrowheads from local settlers during their time down there.

I copied this from the “1491 Days in the Confederate Army”, by W.W. Heartsill:
”June 10^th (1861): At 4 o’clk this morning F. M. Marshall was violently attacked with an Apoletic (sic) Fit, and in thirty minutes in spite of medical aid he expired. This last unexpected death of one of our number, in addition to the one we heard of yesterday and the victim to day is (unreadable)…messengers of the other’s death, has cast a gloom over our Camp such as was never witnessed before; so soon, in less than two months, two of our number are ushered into Eternity. At 6 o’clk Marshall is buried with Military honors, beneath the wide spread boughs of a large live oak, not far distant from Camp.”

Remember that oak tree.

Calvin tells me, “When the North and South got to fighting, the army left and suggested that the Sanches’s leave too. But they didn’t. The Army left in 1861. Calvin is said to have told his departing Army neighbors, ‘I’m staying, y’all come back soon’.

Calvin shares that Frank and Jerusha got along great with the Lipan Apaches coming up the canyons from Mexico, though the Indians stole horses and cattle from other area settlers. Perhaps Jerusha provided medical help to the Lipan, he wonders. Perhaps the family’s black hair kept them safe, I wonder, remembering blond-haired savagery closer to home. The Lipan Apaches and the Comanche Nation were then sworn Plains enemies.

The Comanches frequently attacked Frank while he was out working his stock. He always managed to get away into the trees where arrows are less effective, and escape to home and safety. Frank lived six more years after the Army left before the law of averages caught up with him.

Calvin speaks to me through a static-filled cell phone, more quietly this time, that when Frank didn’t come in from working cattle that night, Mrs. Sanches got some men and went looking for him. They found him fallen over dead with several arrows in him, just above where the town of Vance is now, twelve miles above Camp Wood. That was September 1867.

“At the time Frank was killed by the Indians, there was hardly anybody here at all except him, his wife and five kids and maybe a few other settlers,” Vernor said.

I think about the long now-secret trails Frank and Jerusha traveled during their love together, sad that their longing to live together until old age reward never came to pass.

They took Frank’s body home, traveling in fear of another sweeping Comanche attack, I’m sure. They rode down the lonely Upper Nueces Valley, passing beneath the shadows of Bullhead Mountain, Hog Pen Mountain, Turkey Peak and Meridian Mountain to their home.

Frank was buried under that same sprawling oak tree in the Camp Wood Army Post Cemetery with a good stone marker Frank had carved himself, with a beautiful chiseled border. He was real good with a hammer. Mrs. Sanchez had his name cut into the stone after he died. Frank was a 32^nd level Mason, another echo back to the Mansker Lake Community. The Masonic emblem is said to be visible yet on Frank’s tombstone-in-exile, in some house in Austin, Texas.

There came a time much later when the area around the town of Camp Wood started developing: about half the new folks were good people, about half were said to be outlaws.

Another echo.

Some guy wanted to build his new house in 1927 on the Camp Wood Army Post Cemetery spot where Frank and Army soldiers and I’m sure other pioneers are buried, so he did. That construction desecrated between 12 and 25 graves, it is thought. The house is still standing, lived in I am told by a Church of Christ minister.

Unlike the heroes and heroines of Alameda, Cook, Gregg and so many other Leon River Valley cemeteries, Frank was not able to rest in peace. The headstone that marked Frank’s grave in the Camp Wood Army Post Cemetery for over 140 years vanished.

Frank left blank a space for the specifics of his demise, to be inserted later. I have a photo of the stone. It would take your breath away, as it is a moss-covered brother to the brown rocks that litter Alameda’s lonely hillside. It shows that Masonic emblem, carved by Frank’s industrious hand.

            Frank’s tombstone was used as a back door stop from 1927 to when the property was sold in 1945, when it was moved to the front of the house until 2005, then ended up in Austin as a souvenir.

The F. M. Marshall I told you about was the first burial at that cemetery. The cemetery has been there since 1861 (a twin to Alameda, as there could be unmarked Alameda graves dating back as early as 1859, based upon our settlement timeline, or Natives likely before that.)

The Camp Wood Army Post Cemetery graves were interred farther apart than cemeteries of modern times, he told me. A Captain Cunningham was one of those buried there. “I know the location of the Captain’s grave as was told to myself when I was young and an old timer was old,” Calvin told a reported once.

The house sitting astride those fallen Texans was recently remodeled and added on to. This is some long-ago heresy against our past.

In October 1867, Frank’s widowed wife Jerusha filed to have his estate administered (I have a copy). The Letters of Administration list 16 cattle brands as his (like the multiple cattle brands of Schmick and Mansker stock at Alameda).

Frank was Jerusha’s third husband. Jerusha means wife. All three of her men had been killed by Indians.

I ask Calvin about Jim Neal, Frank’s step-son-in-law for whom one of our creeks is named. He recognized the Neal surname. Thought Jim Neal was a prior son to Jerusha, before she married Frank. The Neals grew up in that Upper Nueces Canyon, also, he told me. Jim Neal’s son was murdered, but I didn’t get the details. The Neals have descendants in Arizona today.

Frank left behind a loving wife and family – three boys and two girls who were industrious like their parents. Jerusha was still a medical doctor who walked for miles to deliver a baby or treat the sick. She passed away in 1884 from “cancer of the face”, at 75 years of age, buried with a marked tombstone in the Vance Cemetery as its earliest resident. Her cancer is thought to have been brought on by all those years in the sun, walking to cure her neighbors’ ills.

The State of Texas has erected a historical marker to her at Barksdale.

The three Sanches sons continued to ranch and did some irrigated farming (Frank never farmed). After a time, the only remaining child in the canyon was the youngest daughter, Winnie, who married W.R. Webb.

There are thought to be more than 1,000 descendents of Frank Sanches walking in this world. The majority are in West Texas and Arizona. “The children changed their name from Sanches to Little before 1900,” Vernor said. “Other descendents are Webb, Hicks, Handley, Vernor and some others.” Little means the same as Sanches in Spanish, I was told, but it also seems to come from the Latin “santus”…holy.

I wish you could see Mr. Vernor’s notes to me, scrawled on photocopies from newspapers and books, on index cards, on stray pieces of paper – not pretty, but the message was passed and received…a treasure chest about a great man named Frank Sanches, who in my mind, is today at last closer to home.

His hand-carved tombstone still needs to come home, however.

And the house atop his hallowed remains needs to be carefully removed.

This afternoon it will soar to near 100 degrees, at the lonely Alameda Cemetery Tabernacle. This part of one man’s tale is over, for now. Frank Sanches rides away…

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This story was roughed out to get the facts down, not for publication (at least until Frank’s final resting place plot line has been completed, and until proper citation can be undertaken). Based upon the Army records, it will now be possible to more accurately reconcile the dates of Frank’s life, which are currently all over the map. Many thanks to Trisha Mayes; Mr. Calvin Vernor; the Uvalde Leader News; “The Images”, a book by Wanda Handley; the Real County historical website; www.campwood.com/history.htm; the County of Nacgodoches, Texas; Bill Badger, writing for the American Military University about Camp Wood (“Camp Wood, Texas – A Military History, 1857 – 1861”); “1491 Days in the Confederate Army,” by W.W. Heartsill; Allen Stovall, “Headwaters of Neuces River”, a book; and the City of Camp Wood.