On June 1, 1844, Captain Jack Hays led fourteen Texas Rangers from their camp on the Medina River twelve miles west of San Antonio. They rode north through broken hills and winding streams in search of American Indians. What happened one week later, on a small creek about fifty miles away, would dramatically change the nature of frontier combat and the history of Texas and the American West. For most of the previous year, the western half of the young Republic of Texas—where most Indian attacks occurred—had been relatively quiet. When President Sam Houston had been elected for a second time, in 1841, he’d sought to solve the nation’s conflicts diplomatically. The main reason was money. Between the Indians incensed at white settlers encroaching on their land, and Mexico, which had never acknowledged the independence of its former territory, the cash-strapped Republic faced hostility on multiple fronts, and it was incapable of properly defending against incursions. Mexico had its own problems to deal with—lack of money and troops, as well as internal strife—that kept it from causing too much trouble for the new republic. But Indian attacks were taking their toll. Houston’s efforts to treat with the Indians had achieved some success: during meetings in March and September of 1843, Texas had signed agreements with several of the smaller tribes. They discussed a boundary line beyond which the Indians would remain, but because the largest and most powerful tribe in Texas, the Comanches, had attended neither meeting, the line and its exact location would have to wait until the third, which convened in April 1844 and was still in session as Hays’s Rangers broke camp. Texas’s cost-cutting measures had included disbanding the 560-man regular army and auctioning off the navy’s four vessels, which left Hays’s 40-man Ranger company as the country’s only defense force. Lately, they had spent more time chasing Texan outlaws, Mexican spies, and bandits along the Rio Grande than fighting Indians. Because of the ongoing negotiations, Hays was under orders not to penetrate too far into Indian country. But a series of raids had recently been perpetrated on the San Antonio area, and the dutiful captain had gathered nearly half his company and headed north in search of the culprits. After several days with no success, they turned toward home. At midday on June 8, they took a break on a creek a few miles north of the Guadalupe River, near the Pinta Trace, an old north-south trail. Two men climbed a nearby cypress tree to collect honey from a large bee colony. They had just begun to cut into the tree when the Rangers’ rear guard galloped into camp. They had sighted ten warriors on the back trail, heading their way. The honey was forgotten, and Hays ordered his men to mount and prepare for a fight. The Indians came into view—warriors all, sporting full war paint and armed with lances, bows, and shields. A raiding party, Hays was sure. The fifteen Rangers tightened their horses’ cinches, mounted, checked their arms, and moved forward slowly. The Indians retreated, also slowly. As they fell back toward thicker brush and trees, the Indians pranced about, clearly hoping to lure the Rangers into attacking. Hays resisted this trap, and the Indians disappeared into the trees. Moments later they reappeared on a hill behind the brush. Now there were between sixty and seventy of them—Comanches, it looked like—dismounting and taunting the Rangers, yelling, “Charge! Charge!” and daring them to fire their rifles. The odds had shifted: the Rangers were outnumbered four to one by a Comanche war party. This gave Hays little pause. The Rangers with him were a hardened bunch, the best he’d ever had. Almost all had served with him before, and the new men were good, especially quiet Samuel Walker, recently escaped from Mexico. Walker didn’t resemble the other Rangers, most of whom were large, bearded, and rough. He was slightly built, and beardless, with sandy reddish hair and an easygoing demeanor. Born in 1815 into a large Maryland farming family, he had been apprenticed as a young man to a carpenter. It didn’t take—Sam later admitted to being “naturally fond of military glory,” with a “love of chivalric immortal fame”—so he had enlisted in the Army to fight in the Creek and Seminole Wars. Though promoted to corporal for bravery, he had found that the life of an enlisted man wasn’t for him. After some railroad work in Florida, he’d headed west and arrived in Texas early in 1842. Walker had signed up for ranging work in time for the Battle of Salado Creek in September, where he helped repel an attack by more than a thousand Mexican soldados. After the battle, seven hundred Texans, including Walker, had reorganized to march into Mexico in retaliation. They recaptured the towns of Laredo and Guerrero and then were ordered to disband and return home. Most did, but three hundred men marched on the Rio Grande town of Mier, unaware that three thousand Mexican soldiers were in the area. They were ultimately forced to surrender, and the survivors were marched to Mexico City. General Santa Anna ordered their execution but eventually mandated that only every tenth prisoner from the Mier expedition would be killed. Though Walker survived, he was imprisoned and brutally beaten. After six months, he escaped. In September 1843 he returned to Texas, and he joined Hays’s Ranger company in February 1844. Hays had worked his men in horsemanship and marksmanship, using Indian and vaquero riding tactics and equipment—like a heavier Mexican bit that provided more control to the rider, allowing him freedom to deal with his firearms—and drilling them constantly until they rivaled the Comanches themselves. And they were a disciplined group, or as disciplined as a group of Texans could get. As he faced the Comanche war party that day in June 1844, Hays knew what his men were capable of, and he knew he could count on them. A year earlier, Hays might have declined the Comanches’ invitation for a fight. But this time was different. This time the Texans had a new weapon.

Photograph by Dan Winters

The standard frontier gun at the time was the mountain or plains rifle, a more compact version of the Pennsylvania-Kentucky flintlock muzzle loader, accurate to about two hundred yards. Dependable and powerful, it had one drawback: it took time to properly load—a full minute or close to it, and even longer on a horse, in a fight. Indians knew this and adjusted their tactics accordingly. They would send a few warriors to draw fire; then the entire band would swoop down onto the furiously reloading Anglos. Carrying a pistol or two or three helped, but these single-shot flintlocks were inaccurate at anything but the closest range, and they often snapped, or refused to fire, because of wet powder. And since an Indian could shoot ten to twelve arrows in the time it took to reload, the Anglos were at a serious disadvantage. Until now. On this day, Hays and his men were armed with Samuel Colt’s patented revolvers, a newfangled invention they had only recently obtained. A Connecticut Yankee who had been raised in a family of some privilege—at least before his father lost the bulk of his fortune—Colt had been fascinated with explosives and firearms since childhood. He’d come up with the idea for his revolver while still in his teens, but he didn’t have the funds for such an undertaking, so he’d hit the road for a few years as the Celebrated Dr. Coult, putting on stage shows demonstrating the wonders of laughing gas. Besides being smart and mechanically curious, Colt was a born huckster, and these shows were popular and lucrative. Much later, Colt would write that he burned with a desire to do “what never before has been accomplished by man.” Toward that end, in 1836, at the age of 22, after he’d saved enough money and acquired several investors, and after years of experimenting, he patented a five-shot revolver. The new pistol took advantage of a recent innovation, the percussion cap, which had replaced the flintlock as a much more reliable way to ignite gunpowder. He began manufacturing the guns in a Paterson, New Jersey, factory. Firing five shots in less time than one man could reload a flintlock weapon should have guaranteed large orders from the government. But the Paterson, as Colt’s first revolver became known, was fragile and fired a small-caliber ball, and it had to be half-disassembled to reload, so military tests were unimpressive, as were sales. When his company went bankrupt in 1842, Colt had turned to other pursuits, such as underwater mines and waterproof cables. But before Colt went out of business, his best customer had been the Republic of Texas. Paterson revolvers had somehow found their way there, and the Texas army and navy placed orders for the expensive weapons. When the two military branches were eliminated, many of the five-shooters were given to the Rangers. They had used the Colts in fights before June 1844, but it was only recently that all men were armed with revolvers in addition to their flintlock guns. Hays had seen enough to know what the revolver could do. And as he looked up at the large force of belligerent Comanches before them that June day, he might have been itching to test its worth in combat against a formidable enemy. He ordered his small company forward. Reaching the base of the peak and realizing they were out of sight of the Comanches, Hays quickly led his men around the hill and up one side. As the surprised Indians leaped onto their mounts, the Rangers fired their rifles, pulled their five-shooters, and charged into them, shooting left and right. The Comanches gave way but regrouped and closed around the Rangers, who formed a tight circle, backs to one another, and for fifteen minutes the battle raged at close quarters in a blizzard of arrows, lances, and pistol rounds. Two Rangers were hit with arrows, and lances found two others, Sam Walker and Ad Gillespie. But at such a short distance, the Patersons found their marks, and Comanches fell to the ground steadily until they finally broke—shocked, surely, by the guns that never seemed to stop firing—and hurtled off the hill. The Rangers paused to change cylinders—another five rounds each—and pursued. The running fight continued for two or three miles, the Comanches wheeling and charging a few times, the Rangers meeting them and forcing them steadily back. A half hour later, about forty Comanches still resisted. The Rangers were down to their last shots. When Hays saw a chief exhorting his warriors to charge, he asked who had a loaded rifle. The wounded Gillespie did. “Dismount and shoot the chief,” Hays said. Gillespie dismounted, took careful aim over his saddle, and fired. The Comanche leader fell from his horse, dead, and the rest finally galloped away. The Rangers counted 23 dead warriors, among them a few Mexicans. Their own casualties were 1 man dead and 4 wounded, Walker the most seriously—some expected him to die, though he would eventually recover. Hays sent a rider to San Antonio for help and supplies. By the time Hays and his men returned home, news of the battle had already begun to circulate. Hays would name the stream where the battle started Walker’s Creek, and he told a few people about the epic fight there. Texas newspapers ran an account, but almost no one understood its significance: never again would Indians own the clear advantage, man to man, in an evenly matched fight.

Photograph by Dan Winters