Governor Outrages Texans By Patroling War Chiefs

Gov. Edmund J. Davis paroled a pair of Kiowa war chiefs on Oct. 8, 1873, a grandstand gesture the Reconstruction Republican knew would be unpopular with his constituents but which he hoped would guarantee the federal guns to keep him in office.

The uproar over the surprise release of Santanta and Big Tree was not limited to outraged Texans. Gen. William T. Sherman, who helped to put the renegades behind bars, quickly jotted off an angry letter to the governor. Predicting a bloody rampage by the Kiowas, he prayed Davis would be the first to lose his scalp.

By the end of the Civil War, the vast majority of Lone Star Indians had been exterminated or expelled. The ferocious exceptions were the Comanches and Kiowas, masters of the western half of the state who succeeded in stemming the tide of white expansion.

Taking advantage of the chaos that followed the collapse of the Confederacy, the elusive warriors launched an unprecedented offensive which actually depopulated previously settled sections. By 1870 the Texas frontier was being rapidly rolled back as terrified pioneers sought safety in the east.

Three years earlier, Washington had promised the Plains Indians the impossible. The Treaty of Medicine Lodge granted the nomads an enormous sanctuary south of the Arkansas River, including the Texas Panhandle, where the buffalo would be a federally protected species.

It was, however, up to the army to enforce the treaty, and neither Sherman nor his superior, Gen. Phillip Sheridan, wanted to serve as game wardens for the buffalo preserve. Sherman, in fact, advocated the wholesale slaughter of the bison herds, which he called “the Indians