The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 44, July 1940 - April, 1941 Page: 75
546 p. : ill., maps ; 24 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Nolan's "Lost Nigger" Expedition of 1877
returning to the Indian Territory. For all practical purposes,
therefore, the "Forlorn Hope" had accomplished its mission.
It was thought that much more stock must have been left in
the sand hills, and sixteen of the hunters turned, retraced their
trail, and arrived at Nigger Hill six days after their original
collapse. Pushing into the sand hills, they found the abandoned
Indian camp and gathered up 107 head of stock. One of the
scouts further tells how the Indian trail had at one time run
directly east of this camp and then angled back southwest away
from the water. "We could not but admire their strategy." 0
This note of admiration, however, ends an epoch. The Plains
Indians had resisted the Spanish approach--then came the
Anglo-American with Adobe Walls, Mackenzie, Shafter, Big
Thompson Canyon, and Casa Amarilla as chapters. The last
retreat was in the sand hills on the west of the Llano Estacado.
Only a few water holes remained of what had been an empire.
Now the broad arid barrier belt, protecting those last water
holes, was penetrated by troops, buffalo hunters, and "long-
range guns;" and the Indians had gone back to the Territory
and the "white man's road." They would return no more to
apply their acute strategy and ingenious intelligence in plains-
craft to the land-a way of life was finished-and it is fitting
that a buffalo hunter should close the story."
"The summer of 1877 is on record as being the last of the
Comanches in [Texas] . . .; and we hunters were justly enti-
tled to credit in winding up the Indian trouble in the great
State of Texas, so far as the Kiowas and Comanches were
concerned. Those Indians had been a standing menace to the
settlement of 90,000 square miles of territory in Texas and
New Mexico."32
North Texas Agricultural College.
3oCook, The Border and the Buffalo, pp. 287-290.
31It is not contended that after 1877 there were no Coinanches and
Kiowas in Texas in the role of raiders and scalpers. These raiders and
scalpers, however, were that per se-they were marauders; they were
not defending a homeland; after a successful raid they returned to the
"Territory." See Frank P. Hill, "Indian Raids on the South Plains," in
Panhandle-Plains Historical Review, VII, pp. 62-69. For a good state-
ment of the Plains Indians' point of view see Angie Debo, "History and
Customs of the Kiowa," in ibid., pp. 51f.
32Cook, The Border and the Buffalo, p. 290.75
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 44, July 1940 - April, 1941, periodical, 1941; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth146052/m1/83/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.