Essays

Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado

Spotted Jack
February 11, 2004

Spotted Jack pulled back on the reins. His horse wanted to stop -- something on the prairie had caught its attention. The stallion knew it was back on its home territory, where it had spent the first four years of its life running free, before being caught when Sanaco's band of Comanches mired 20 wild horses in the goopy mud of Casas Amarillas on the way to the only-ever intertribal sundance among southern Great Plains Indians. The horse had been given to Spotted Jack as a gift of gratitude, two years before, after the surrender of Isatai and Quanah Parker at Bull Creek. He had helped to reunite a Quahadi-Kotsoeteka family that had been terribly splintered apart during Mackenzie's relentless war on the Comanches.

The scout was leading 40 buffalo hunters from the headwaters of the Brazos out on to the plains, following the tracks of Cuatro Plumas and Black Horse's band of Comanches. The Indians had left the reservation the fall before, and now in the spring of 1877 the Indians had killed a buffalo hunter, burned wagons, destroyed hides, and otherwise were fighting a last ditch battle against the unrelenting economic force of Anglo resource extraction and depletion. Thousands of men, hoping to get rich, had swarmed to the headwaters of the Brazos, Red, and Colorado Rivers, to hunt the southern buffalo herd.

Spotted Jack 's paternal grandparents and his parents had moved to Mexico from Oklahoma, some of 500 hundred people following Wildcat and John Horse's dreams of egalitarian freedom. His mother's parents were a Seminole woman and a white rapist. Both had been long dead. His father's parents were a black man who escaped slavery and joined the Seminoles, and a Seminole woman.

Spotted Jack, a young teen-ager at the time of the move to Mexico, had been captured by Comanches as he hunted for the travelers. After a couple of years he fell in love with a Comanche girl. For the next decade he proved himself a valiant warrior, but when his wife and infant died in childbirth, he had left the Comanches and returned to Oklahoma, hoping to hear news of his parents. When he learned that all had died of cholera, he went to work for one of the missionaries ministering to the Seminoles, learning to speak English.

After several years in Oklahoma he longed for the wide-open landscape of west Texas, and became a contract scout for the Army at Fort Griffin. Because of the years riding with the Comanches, his knowledge of the landscape surpassed the Seminole-Negro, the Lipan Apache, and Tonkawa scouts who also served the army. After the final Comanche surrender at Bull Creek, Spotted Jack became a sought-after guide for buffalo hunters.

Spotted Jack dismounted and hunkered down, waiting for the thirty minutes it took for the buffalo hunters to reach his position. Half of them were drunk, full of boasts about the numbers of Indians they would soon kill. The sober hunters, including the young Englishman Frank Collinson, had given up trying to stop the drinking. They rode up first, a hundred yards in front of the others.

"The Indians are camped where the draw divides, up ahead of us about a 2 hour ride away," Spotted Jack stated. When questioned how he knew, he replied, "My horse told me." That made the other men laugh, but Collinson asked what the horse had said. "He stopped because he could smell other horses." Despite more laughter, Collinson further queried Spotted Jack. "How can he tell the difference between wild horses and the horses of the Indians?"

Spotted Jack pointed at the ground. "Four horses walking abreast crossed this gyppy slope -- wild horses travel trailing each other. The tracks are deeper than those of unsaddled horses."

The leader of the hunters, Smoky Thompson, glanced at the drunken men behind. "It is late in the afternoon, and they are in no condition to fight. We will camp there." He told John Cook to tell the other men to stop, and pointed at the mouth of a side draw where a grove of hackberries grew.

"These four were the wolves -- sent to make sure of their backtrail," Spotted Jack commented.

Smoky understood the unspoken -- the Indians believed that pursuit had ended.

At the campfire, the drinking men celebrated the coming fight, bragging about how many scalps they would have tomorrow. Smoky carried a scalp and was often asked the story of how he got it, and as the night wore on, he had to tell the story several times, as the men became more and more raucous. Jim Campbell, the leader of the drinkers, kept "egging the men on." Spotted Jack left the camp early, moving upstream, a mile past the furthest point the camp could be seen or the smoke smelled. He dozed, relying on his horse to warn him of any returning Indians.

In the morning, with many of the men still "half-shot," Spotted Jack led them to the camp. Luckily the whiskey wagon was a mile behind, otherwise the drinking men would have bolstered their courage. The buffalo hunters charged the camp, where it appeared that all the Indians were still asleep. When they got within a hundred yards, they were met with a withering barrage of bullets. Spotted Jack fell dead, and within seconds the rest of the buffalo hunters retreated. One hung on to his horse, badly wounded, and several others held their hands over wounds where bullets had grazed them.

When the buffalo hunters joined the whiskey wagon, Campbell officiously instructed Thompson, "Take half the men and charge the camp again, I will keep the balance and protect the wagons and hold it at all hazards!" Smoky, in the passion of the moment, did as instructed. They again charged the camp, and this time found it deserted, with only the dust from the horses of two dozen Indians visible far in the distance. Spotted Jack had been wrong -- the "wolves" had seen the buffalo hunters, and the women and children had gone on ahead while the men waited in ambush. Smoky burned the tipis and returned to the wagon, bringing along the body of Spotted Jack. With the most severely wounded man gutshot and in horrible pain, the fight went out of the buffalo hunters, and they retreated eastward. Spotted Jack's horse watched them go, free again, on his home range.

Frank Collinson's version of the fight (in "Life in the Saddle") is the source material from which I built the story. John Cook's version in "The Border and the Buffalo" tells of an all day battle with hundreds of Indians including Apaches, and Zane Grey later used that version in "The Thundering Herd." Hermann Lehmann, a captive turned Comanche warrior, wrote a book that included the story from Comanche perspective, and it backs up Collinson's accounting.

I have run across several references to Spotted Jack in other accounts of that time period in west Texas history, and became fascinated with his character. My accounting of his personal history is pure conjecture, other than the fact of his time spent with Comanches, his racially mixed background, and the manner of his death. The above fight took place in Yellowhouse Draw in present day Lubbock.