In the 1890s, these unnamed men from Montague County, Texas posed for a photograph after filing claims against the U.S. government for suffering Indian depredations. (University of Texas at Arlington Special Collections).
Since the southern Plains Indians were supposed to be under government supervision inside the post-Civil War reservations, any Indian activity (war, ambush, horse taking, hunting) was viewed as criminal, even if an ambush or attack was instigated by the settlers. American settlers thus could file claims against the reservations via the Bureau of Indian Affairs to recoup their losses. The monies were deducted from tribal annuities.
Check out the man in the middle (I don’t know his name). He must have suffered incredibly… though I’m not sure if the injury was from a depredation or from an attack or even from an unrelated calamity (Civil War, maybe).
In doing my master’s thesis research, I encountered Charles Goodnight’s depredations claims. His Palo Duro Canyon ranch was part of the Kiowa and Comanche lands that he received from Texas after his Ranger activity along the Texas/ Comancheria frontier during the Civil War. He used the money from the claims against the tribes to build up his livestock, which he then sold to the Fort Sill (Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache) and Fort Supply (Cheyenne) reservations.
As I tell my students, form your own conclusions about this.
Charles Goodnight (center, seated) with others at the JA Ranch, Palo Duro, TX, 11/29/1921; standing, from left, M.K. Brown (Pampa), Whitfield Carhart (Palo Duro), T.D. Hobart (Pampa), H.W. Taylor (Clarendon), J.W. Kent (Palo Duro), H.W. Patrick (Clarendon), S.W. Dunn (Mobeetie); seated, from left, Vass Stickley (Canadian), T.S. Bugbee (Clarendon), Goodnight, G.W. Arrington (Canadian), Judge O.H. Nelson (Amarillo). (UT Arlington Special Collections)
Montague, Parker, Clay, Palo Pinto, Jack, and Young counties reveal incredible amounts of history about the clash between Texas and the Comancheria. It’s only been pretty recent that historians have taken a serious look at this very important part of history. It’s one of the reasons the U.S. won against Mexico in 1846, and one of the reasons Texas seceded from the United States in 1861.
The white men fighting along the frontier before the Civil War were cattlemen. Their wealth was on the hoof, and they used slave labor, along with paid hands, to work their capital. The Indians’s use of the land was always suspect to them – by 1859, the tribes in the Brazos Indian Reservation in Young County had been forced out of Texas. By 1876, a mere year after the end of the Red River Wars, the state of Texas refused to allow Indians to enter into Texas at all, and Indians who still lived in Texas were forbidden from owning guns.
There’s a lot of history to be uncovered in group portraits.
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