background on what made the Stubblefields from
Sunset, Texas, decide to hitch their wagon due north to
Oklahoma Territory.
For a history on the Oklahoma Territory, click on the link.
In the second part, Dustin recreates their journey!
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Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Stubblefields on this 1895 map. The family crossed
the Red River north of Henrietta and followed roads
and creek beds over the Wichita Mountains to their
Washita County homestead.
There are very few facts to go on concerning the exact route they took, but
there are a few clues here and there. In both Herk’s and my tapes
Grandmother says it took them a week to get from Sunset to the Oak Creek
farm, which is a distance of approximately 155 miles. At that rate they would
have to average about 22 miles a day. That is a starting point for trying to
figure out where they may have stopped to camp along the way.
In Uncle Herk’s tape Grandmother says “we went off up through Montague,
then angled up through what’s called Henrietta.” That makes perfect sense
because Henrietta is northwest of Sunset, and to get there they would have to
“angle up” through Montague County.
Henrietta is the county seat of Clay County, and in the 1880’s was a major
shipping point for buffalo bones. White hunters had slaughtered the herds and
left them to rot on the plains.
Their bones were everywhere, lying on the prairie and bleaching in the sun.
Then some enterprising soul realized that money could be made by collecting
the bones and shipping them up east to be made into fertilizer. A new industry
was begun.
I read an account that said piles of buffalo bones stretched half a mile along
the railroad tracks, and were thirty feet wide and sixteen feet high. Hundreds
of pioneer families beat droughts, debts, and famine by picking and selling
buffalo bones. I find it ironic that the buffalo, who provided the Plains Indians
their livelihood while they were thriving, later provided a livelihood for the very
people who slaughtered them.
I would imagine that Henrietta was the biggest town Grandmother had ever
seen in all her ten years! I can imagine her wide eyes when she saw the 1890
courthouse and jail pictured below. There was nothing like that in Sunset,
which is all she had known.
I’m just guessing again, but J.P. probably would have stocked up on provisions
in Henrietta, then camped the first night on the creek just outside town. After a
full day’s travel, grandmother was undoubtedly a tired little girl that evening
and fell asleep quickly and happily her first night on the road.
Day 2 –To the Wichita River
If you look at the 1895 map on the next page (I marked their probable route in
red), you can see that Henrietta would be the last real town they would go
through on the entire journey. When I first started trying to figure out what
route J.P. had taken, I didn’t even consider him taking the route I marked
because it was through Indian land – no towns and no wagon roads that I
knew of. I couldn’t see J.P. just heading out across the prairie through
unsettled Indian land. Notice that on the left and right sides of the map there
are towns. If there are towns there are roads. So I figured he took a less
direct, but more populated route through the towns marked on either the left
or right sides of the map.
Then one day I came across something that changed my mind altogether. I
was at the Oklahoma Historical Society reading accounts of pioneers who
settled Oklahoma Territory, and I came across this, written by a Texan who
settled in Washita County in 1893: “When I got to Henrietta I found that there
was a daily stage line between that place and Fort Sill. This stage carried the
mail and such passengers as might be going that way, together with light
express. Midway between the Red River and Fort Sill was what was commonly
called the Snake Creek Station, it being located where a small stream of that
name—a tributary of East Cache Creek—was forded.”
Eureka! After reading that, I was pretty sure it was the route J.P. had taken out
of Henrietta. A stagecoach line would require a good wagon road, and there
would be some stage stations spaced out along the way. Also it would be a
more direct route to their destination, 40 or 50 miles shorter than the routes I
first considered. (And back then that would mean two fewer days travel.)
I did some more checking and found that the stage line was once an old
military road called the Ft. Sill/Jacksboro Road in the 1870’s. (Remember,
Jacksboro TX is where Satanta and Big Tree were taken to stand trial for the
Warren Wagon Train Massacre). Then I found an old 1894 map with the Ft.
Sill/Jacksboro Road clearly marked on it, along with the designation “Hill’s
Ferry” at the crossing of the Red River. Now I was not only fairly sure of the
route J.P. took, but also the point at which they ferried across the Red River.
And that is the route I marked in red on the map.
One thing we know for sure is that they camped on the Wichita River. In my
tape Grandmother says, “We camped one time on the Wichita River. Papa
thought it was so pretty we camped on the edge of the river. He had bought
my brother and I some pretty things to fish with, colored floats and things like
the kids used to use so much. We just had to fish that evening and he got
pretty close to the river, and that storm came up that night and Papa hobbled
his horse and put him out on the grass. I heard him tell Mama that maybe he’d
better go get the horses and pull the wagon out up on the bank. And when it
would lightning I could see down on the river and it was getting up. I was
scared, and I’ve been nervous about muddy water ever since. I was scared to
death. I thought we’d just tumble over there in that old swift river and that’d be
the last of us.”
grandfather', James Stubblefield, in Sunset.
important trading and stage-coach center on
the Texas prairie during the frontier years.
Photo by Dustin Ward.
California Trail and Butterfield Overland
Stage Coach Crossing.
raids. I’m going to digress here a little bit and provide some historical background of Indian/white relations just prior to the
arrival of the Stubblefields in Texas. And it does have a very clear connection to my Grandmother.
In the early 1870’s the only Indians who were not subdued or on reservations were the tribes of the Great Plains. All the
eastern Indians, the Mohawk, Pontiac, Delaware, etc. were subdued. As mentioned earlier, the Five Civilized Tribes were
living peacefully on reservations. The Pacific Coast tribes were no problem. But the Great Plains tribes, the Lakota (or Sioux
- Crazy Horse’s tribe), the Apache, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa were a different matter. They ruled the Great Plains.
They were master horsemen, courageous warriors, nomadic. They followed the great buffalo herds, from which they got
their sustenance, shelter, tools, and way of life.
They didn’t like what the white man had to offer – land on reservations. Land where they would have to stay in one place
and take up farming or raise cattle. So they fought for their way of life. To the U.S. Government it became the “Indian
Problem.”
The strategy of the U.S. was quite clear. Kill the buffalo and the Indians are defeated. It hurts me to say it, but that is exactly
what happened. We all know about the great buffalo kills and how it became commonplace for white buffalo hunters to
slaughter whole herds, strip them of hides and leave their carcasses to rot on the plains.
A secondary strategy was to kill the Indian’s beloved horses. Without horses they would be forced to stay in one place – on
the reservations. So whenever they could, the Cavalry would kill their horses - sometimes by the hundreds.
So the Kiowa and Comanche started to cross the Red River from Oklahoma Territory to steal horses from Texas settlers. A
great number of settlers were ambushed and killed, entire families wiped out in many cases. Sometimes white children
were stolen and raised among the Indians as slaves. It got so bad that in 1871 President Ulysses S. Grant sent none other
than General William Tecumseh Sherman, the General of the Army and great Civil War hero, to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma Territory, to
do something about the problem.
Shortly after Sherman arrived at Ft. Sill he took a column of 7th Cavalry down to Texas to see for himself the severity of the
problem. At the same time a band of Kiowa arrived, led by the ferocious Satanta (I read somewhere that Larry McMurtry
based his Lonesome Dove character Blue Duck on Satanta.) Among Satanta’s band were two equally ferocious Kiowa
warriors, Big Tree and Satank. Okay, here’s the connection to my Grandmother. When I was a kid I remember
Grandmother and my dad talking about a scary Indian named Big Tree who had lived not too far from the Oak Creek farm.
They are one and the same.
About 15 miles southwest of what would later become Grandmother’s birthplace (Sunset), the Kiowa warriors saw the dust
from Sherman’s column. They hid and watched the soldiers approach, debating whether to attack or not. The medicine
man with them said he had a vision that they should not attack the first target, but the second one that rode past. So
Sherman’s column rode on past, unaware and spared.
The second target was a wagon train. The Kiowa attacked and caught the teamsters completely by surprise. All were
killed but one, a man who had shot and killed one of the Kiowa. He was captured and tied to a wagon tongue. A fire was
built under him and he was burned to death. This depredation became known as the Warren Wagon Train Massacre, and it
became pivotal in the Government’s resolve to subdue the remaining hostile tribes (especially, I would imagine, when
Sherman learned that he narrowly escaped what could have been a disastrous encounter himself!)
About a week after Sherman got back to Ft. Sill, Satanta, Big Tree, and Satank showed up on the porch of Sherman’s
headquarters to complain about not receiving the rations the Government had promised them. In the argument that ensued,
Satanta lost his temper and bragged about having done the Warren massacre. The interpreter told Sherman, and of course
Sherman immediately called for guards to arrest them. There was a short scuffle and Big Tree tried to escape by jumping
through a window, but they were all captured and taken to the guardhouse.
It was decided that the three would be bound over to Texas to stand trial for murder. It would be the first time that Indians
were held accountable for their raids and tried for murder in a white man’s court. They were each handcuffed and put in
separate wagons for the long trip down to Jacksboro, Texas to stand trial. (Jacksboro is about 30 miles southwest of
Sunset.)
Satank was a member of the elite Kiowa warrior society known as Koitsenko, and was duty bound to fight to the death.
When he was put into his wagon, he turned his back to his guards and started singing the Kiowa death chant. As he did so
he was biting the skin from one of his hands so he could pull it out of the handcuffs. He finally got his hand free and spun
and wrenched a rifle out of one of the guard’s hands. But before he could get a shot off the other guard shot and killed him.
Satanta and Big Tree were taken on to Jacksboro where they were tried, found guilty, and sentenced to hang. Upon hearing
the sentence Satanta pronounced to the court, “You hang us, it be like spark in prairie grass. Cause heap big fire.” I guess
the Government saw some truth to his statement because their sentences were soon commuted to life imprisonment. And
after spending two years in Huntsville prison they were paroled by Texas Governor Edmund J. Davis.
A condition of parole was that they would stay put on the reservation and never take part in any hostilities again. But in 1874
Satanta joined in a raid against buffalo hunters at the Battle of Adobe Walls in Texas. He was later captured and sent back
to Huntsville prison for violating his parole. In 1878 he jumped from a second story window in the prison hospital to his
death.
The Kiowa and Comanche continued on the warpath and were among the last of the nation’s Indians to be placed on
reservations. They had ruled the Plains from Kansas to Texas for over 150 years because of two things – the buffalo and
the horse. By 1875 the buffalo were gone and after the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon their horses were gone (the U.S. Cavalry
captured and slaughtered over 1100 of their horses). So in June of 1875 they acknowledged defeat, were stripped of their
weapons, and were brought to Ft. Sill as prisoners of war.
In 1887 (the year my Grandmother was born) the U.S. Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act. It called for the dissolution
of Indian tribes as legal entities and divided tribal lands among the individual members, granting 160 acres to each family
head and 80 acres to each single adult. Big Tree was given 160 acres on the Washita River about 5 miles east of what
would become the Ward family farm.
I may have gotten a little carried away with the above history lesson, but I wanted to give some background about the times
that preceded the Stubblefield’s arrival in Texas. And, as you can tell, I’m fascinated with Indians, especially the Kiowa and
Comanche who were among the fiercest, proudest, and hardest to subdue. When I discovered that the Big Tree I’d heard
Grandmother and my dad talk about so many times was an actual historic figure - well it just really impressed me.
