The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 58, July 1954 - April, 1955 Page: 46
650 p. : ill., maps (some col.), ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
While in the Comanche camps, a warrior looked intently at
the two six-shooters in Ford's belt. Finally he exclaimed, "No
bueno." He had received "a five shooter ball in the arm, as others
said, while in Hays's fight"42 on Walker's Creek, a tributary of
Sister's Creek, two miles above the Guadalupe, on June 8, 1844.
This seems to have been the first time revolver pistols (five
shooters) were used against Indians in battle, and they were
impressed by the havoc wrought in their ranks by the new
weapons.4"
At Sanaco's camp the wrath of Rip Ford44 was kindled by the
sight of a mutilated captive white woman. She had sandy, red hair
and blue eyes, and her cheeks were marred by long scars put there
by the slash of a knife-as a sign of bereavement. "Her face seemed
the personification of despair. It filled the beholder with the idea
of unutterable woe." Jim Shaw warned Ford not to speak to the
captive as it might cost him his life. Ford felt enraged that the
white woman had been captured and forced to become the wife
of a savage.
Not only his wife, his menial, his slave. To be the humble servitor
of his whims and caprices; to be punished for a seeming disposition
to disobey his behests-to be beaten, lassoed, and pulled through
prickly pears, with a rope around the middle, and filled full of
thorns to gratify the vengeance of one possessing less pity than
a brute.45
Ford shut out the harrowing thoughts for the moment, but in
his Memoirs said that:
The writer has since that period done some rather rough Indian
fighting. When leading a charge against the red men, the woman
with auburn hair, slashed cheeks, and countenance of extreme sor-
row, has appeared to lead him. She was before his mind's eye, and
he struck for her and for vengeance.4"
42John Salmon Ford, John C. Hays in Texas (transcript, Archives, University of
Texas Library), 23.
4Hays to Secretary of War and Marine, June 16, 1844, Texas National Register
kWashington-on-the-Brazos), December 14, 1844.
44In signing death certificates as adjutant during the Mexican War, Ford ap-
pended to the bottom, "Rest In Peace." As the casualties mounted this was short-
ened to R. I. P., which became his sobriquet. Walter Prescott Webb, The Texas
Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (New York, 1935), 124.
45Ford, Memoirs (MS.), III, 527.
"4lbid.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 58, July 1954 - April, 1955, periodical, 1955; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101158/m1/66/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.