The Battle of the Wichita Village, also known as the Wichita Village Massacre, was a massacre conducted by the United States military on October 1, 1858, along Rush Creek near present-day Rush Springs, Oklahoma.
Four companies of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry under Brevet Major Earl Van Dorn and a force of Native American scouts under Lawrence Sullivan Ross launched a dawn attack on a Comanche village of Kotsoteka and Penateka men, women, and children led by Chiefs Buffalo Hump (Potsanaquahip), Hair-Bobbed-on-One-Side, and Over-the-Buttes.
The Comanches had recently concluded a peace treaty with the U.S. Army commander at Fort Arbuckle and, despite receiving scout reports of Van Dorn's approach, had gone to sleep beside a Wichita village without posting sentinels, believing the Army would not violate the new truce. Van Dorn denied knowing that a treaty had been made.
Background From 1849 to 1858, U.S. military policy on the Texas frontier was strictly defensive and prohibited soldiers from attacking Native Americans without proof of a specific crime. In 1855, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis established two reservations on the Brazos River in northern Texas: the Brazos Indian Reserve for roughly 1,000 Wichita, Caddo, Anadarko, Tonkawa, and Delaware people, and a 20,000-acre reserve on the Clear Fork of the Brazos for the Penateka Comanches. Chief Sanaco led about 400 Penatekas onto the Clear Fork reserve under Indian agent Robert Neighbors, while the remaining 800 Penatekas fled north of the Red River under Chief Buffalo Hump. After Comanche raids increased across Erath, Brown, and Comanche counties in late 1857, Texas Governor Hardin Runnels funded 100 Texas Rangers under Senior Captain John S. "Rip" Ford to wage an offensive campaign north of the Red River. Joined by 113 Brazos Reserve scouts under Tonkawa chief Placido and Caddo leader Jim Pockmark, Ford crossed into Indian Territory and defeated a Kotsoteka Comanche village on May 12, 1858, at the Battle of Little Robe Creek during the Antelope Hills expedition, killing Chief Iron Jacket and fighting off a second force reputedly led by Peta Nocona.
Ford's victory prompted U.S. Senator Sam Houston to demand that regular troops in Texas be replaced by Rangers. Under pressure to match the Rangers, Brigadier General David E. Twiggs, commander of the Department of Texas, secured War Department approval to abandon the passive defense policy and launch a federal offensive into Indian Territory. Twiggs ordered Captain and Brevet Major Earl Van Dorn at Fort Belknap to lead the "Wichita Expedition" into northern Comancheria with the 2nd U.S. Cavalry. Because Brazos Reserve agent Shapley Ross was too ill to take the field, the reserve warriors chose his twenty-year-old son, Lawrence Sullivan "Sul" Ross to lead 100 to 135 Tawakoni, Waco, Wichita, Caddo, Tonkawa, and Delaware scouts. Ross marched north ahead of the main column and selected a base site on Otter Creek near present-day Tipton, Oklahoma. Van Dorn left Fort Belknap on September 15, 1858, with 225 regulars from four companies (A, F, H, and K) of the 2nd Cavalry and one company of the 5th Infantry, establishing Camp Radziminski on Otter Creek.
At the same time, Captain William E. Prince, the commanding officer at Fort Arbuckle to the east, negotiated a peace treaty with Comanche chiefs Buffalo Hump, Hair-Bobbed-on-One-Side, and Over-the-Buttes. Following the talks, about 500 Comanches (mainly Kotsotekas along with a band of Buffalo Hump's Penatekas) pitched a village of 120 tipis on Rush Creek next to a Wichita village of grass houses to feast, trade, and gamble while en route to a further peace council with federal agents. Comanche scouts tracked Van Dorn's column and reported the soldiers' strength and location to Hair-Bobbed-on-One-Side, who concluded that the U.S. Army would not attack them immediately after concluding a peace agreement. Feeling secure deep in Indian Territory, the Comanches posted no sentinels and left their horse herd unguarded. On the afternoon of September 29, two Wichita scouts sent by Van Dorn visited their kinsmen at the Wichita village and returned to Camp Radziminski with the location of the Comanche camp. Within an hour, Van Dorn left his infantry to guard the supply train and led his four cavalry companies and Ross's scouts east on a 90-mile, 36-hour forced march.
Massacre
At dawn on October 1, 1858, Van Dorn's command reached the Comanche village on Rush Creek and deployed for an immediate cavalry charge. At the start of the attack, Ross and his Brazos Reserve scouts swept around the camp and stampeded the unguarded Comanche horse herd, capturing roughly 300 horses and forcing most of the Comanche people to fight on foot. Awoken to gunshots, the villagers were caught by surprise as 200 troopers charged into the camp and fired directly into the tipis with repeating six-shooter revolvers, breech-loading carbines, and muzzle-loading .58-caliber carbines and Model 1855 pistol-carbines. The dismounted Comanches (armed mainly with sinew-backed bows, iron-tipped arrows, 14-foot lances, and single-shot trade muskets) took cover in the thickets, ravines, and creek bed to hold off the cavalry while the women, children, and elderly fled.
Close-quarters fighting across the village and brush lasted between two and five hours. Early in the battle, Ross, one of his scouts, Second Lieutenant Cornelius Van Camp (an 1855 West Point graduate serving as the expedition's topographical officer), and a 2nd Cavalry private rode out to intercept a group of fleeing noncombatants after spotting a young white captive girl among them. At Ross's order, his scout grabbed the child. As the four men turned to rejoin the main force, 25 Comanche warriors cut them off.Comanche arrows killed the cavalry private and struck Van Camp through the heart, killing him in the saddle. An arrow hit Ross in the shoulder before a Comanche warrior identified by Ross's biographers as Mohee (who Ross reportedly recognized from visits to his father's frontier post) picked up the dead trooper's .58-caliber carbine and fired a bullet through Ross's chest. Temporarily paralyzed by the shot, Ross lay on the ground as Mohee approached him with a scalping knife. Lieutenant James P. Major of the 2nd Cavalry intervened and killed Mohee with a blast of buckshot. Major was credited with killing three Comanche warriors during the battle. One of Ross's Caddo scouts remained with him and dressed his wound.
Late in the battle, Van Dorn charged two Comanches who were trying to escape by riding double on a single horse. After Van Dorn shot and killed their mount, the two knelt on the ground and fired arrows at him at close range. One arrow pierced Van Dorn's left arm above the wrist, and a second entered his right side above the ninth rib, passing through his upper stomach and cutting his left lung before exiting his left side. Army surgeons treated Van Dorn on the field after his men carried him to the rear.
Buffalo Hump and the surviving Comanches eventually withdrew. Van Dorn reported that his troops killed 56 men and two women on the battlefield, with total Comanche losses estimated at 70 killed or mortally wounded and an unknown number wounded. U.S. forces lost one officer and three enlisted men killed, one soldier missing and presumed dead, and twelve wounded.
Aftermath Destruction of the villages Following the battle, U.S. troops burned all 120 Comanche tipis along with the village's ammunition, cooking utensils, clothing, dressed skins, corn, and winter food stores, leaving the unhorsed survivors with only the clothing they wore. The adjacent Wichita village also suffered heavily in the spillover from the attack: several Wichitas were killed, their horses were lost, and U.S. troops burned their lodges and agricultural fields, destroying their winter food crop. Because two Wichita scouts from the Brazos Reserve had visited their kinsmen at the Rush Creek village to locate Buffalo Hump's camp prior to the battle, the surviving Comanches believed the local Wichitas had betrayed them and retaliated by raiding their remaining horses. Stripped of their homes and crops and fearing Comanche reprisals, the Wichitas abandoned the Rush Creek village and fled to Fort Arbuckle for government rations and military protection.
Van Dorn denied having any prior knowledge of the Fort Arbuckle peace negotiations. Too badly injured to travel, Van Dorn and Ross remained on the battlefield for five days. When Ross's wounds became infected, he begged his men to kill him before finally being evacuated on a mule-drawn litter and carried on the shoulders of his scouts back to Camp Radziminski, which was later relocated twice before settling at the southern entrance of the "Narrows" four miles northwest of present-day Mountain Park, Oklahoma. Van Dorn praised Ross in his official report, printed in the Dallas Herald on October 10, 1858, and General Winfield Scott offered Ross a direct commission in the regular Army, which Ross declined in order to finish college. Unable to locate the family of the white girl captured during the fight, Ross adopted her and named her Lizzie Ross after his fiancée, Elizabeth Dorothy Tinsley. The Army established Camp Van Camp near Newcastle, Texas, in April 1859 in memory of Lieutenant Van Camp.
Retaliatory raids, expulsion of the Brazos Reserve, and Comanche retreat Although the Army hailed the attack as a decisive victory, the assault on a village operating under a peace agreement provoked retaliatory raids across the Texas frontier. By November 5, 1858, Ross noted that Comanches had stolen more than 100 horses in northern Texas, and raiders soon destroyed a settlement 25 miles from Fredericksburg, Texas.
White settlers near the Brazos and Clear Fork reservations blamed the reservation tribes for the raids. Former Indian agent John R. Baylor organized armed settlers to attack both reservations, even though Brazos Reserve warriors had served as the scouts for both Ford's and Van Dorn's campaigns. On December 27, 1858, white vigilantes killed four men and three women in a sleeping camp of 17 Caddos and Anadarkos from the reserve; the six killers were identified but never prosecuted. After Baylor's followers clashed with reservation Indians again in May 1859, agent Robert Neighbors secured federal approval to close both Texas reservations. On July 31, 1859, Neighbors and three companies of federal soldiers escorted 384 Penateka Comanches and 1,112 Wichita, Caddo, Anadarko, and Tonkawa people out of Texas to a new reservation on the Washita River near Fort Cobb in Indian Territory, arriving on August 16. After Neighbors returned to Texas to file his report, Edward Cornett, a settler opposed to his defense of the reservation tribes, shot him in the back at Belknap on September 14, 1859.
Meanwhile, after recovering from his wounds, Van Dorn led the 2nd Cavalry on a second offensive against Buffalo Hump's camp near the Arkansas River in Kansas on May 13, 1859, at the Battle of Crooked Creek, killing 49 Comanches and capturing 37. Demoralized by repeated surprise defeats deep within their home territory at Antelope Hills, the Wichita Village, and Crooked Creek, the Comanches withdrew from the open plains of Indian Territory by late 1859 and retreated northwest into the high plains and canyonlands of southwestern Kansas and the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles.
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