Montague County Texas Archives News.....Tulsan Saw His Mother Slain by Indians January 25, 1931 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/tx/txfiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Kathleen Forshey-Burns kbswanie95@yahoo.com June 2, 2016, 2:47 pm Tulsa Daily Worls January 25, 1931 SUNDAY January 25, 1931 TULSA N SAW HIS MOTHER SLAIN IN INDIAN RAID Joined Texas Rangers During Civil War Says Savages Less to Blame Than Whites Frontiersman Still Limps from Arrow Wound in Leg Learned Woods and Plains Craft Playing With Comanche Boy By LaVere Shoenfelt Anderson The heroism of the Texas Ranger, back in those days, of the Lone Star State’s history when Indian raiding, horse thieving, and cattle rustling made the border country unsafe for even the hardiest of pioneering men, has been sung so much in song and story, that today we are prone to think of the old time Ranger as a glamorous and somewhat a mythical figure. We picture him in his big Hat and leather Jacket astride a fleet little pony of the plains, patrolling the Borderline, standing the sentinel alone on the covered wagon trails that led to California. Following dim Indian trails to the war camps of the Red Men. We see him in action, his guns spitting fire and his steel-point eyes that look of unflinching courage that made possible the winning of the West. We behold him at last falling to the Mesquite covered ground. Mortally wounded but still undaunted dying with his boots on and shrouded in a winding sheet of the smoke from his own six shooter. They make a thrilling subject for the writer’s pen, those Grand Old Fellows who fought Apache, Comanche, and Kiowa. They offer boundless opportunity for the authors eulogizing those Frontiersmen of the Old West who hung Horse Thieves and executed Cattle Rustlers. And because of the very fact of the things they did, took so much of iron nerves and quick thinking as well as straight shooting. The Texas Rangers of half a century ago have been glorified into legendary figures. We forget that they were real men with real courage and that they cleaned up the State of Texas and made it one of the outstanding commonwealths of the Union. They were courageous storybook heroes. They were tobacco chewing, unshaven, and generally not bathed and they had no official uniform. They never stayed in one place long enough. Most of the old time Rangers of the border country have followed the last trail into the setting sun and whatever history may do to them to beyond. A few of the Old Timers still remain today. However those who fought Indians and guarded the droves of cover wagon trains, they are the ones who can truly tell the story of one of the bravest groups of men this world has ever known. Such a man is David Presley Anderson of 324 South Kenosha, a Tulsan for fifteen years and a Texas Ranger for longer than that. Anderson, who was born in Illinois but at an early age emigrated to southern Texas with his family, grew up among the Indians of that region. The white boy and his red friends hunted and fished together. They taught him all the secrets of their lore, how to read the signs of the sky, how to speak their language, how to follow their conceal Indian tracks. They little dreamed, these boys at play, that the knowledge of the white boy was gaining day after day as they told him their secrets, that one day would be used against their people and with deadly results. The white boy didn’t know that either but while they were playing along the banks of the Red River and practicing riding and shooting on the Texas Prairies their elders were setting the stage for a bloody struggle between the two races. When Anderson was in his teens, the Civil War broke out and during those four years of fighting the very Indian lads with whom he had grown up with and whose families had not yet gone on the war path in pursuit of the white man’s scalp, painted their faces and collected their poison arrows and sharpened their tomahawks and set out on the trail of the white man. Young Anderson joined up with the main border protection unit as it was called and during the war patrolled the tall grass country. “I didn’t feel hard towards the Indians at all, “ he says now. “We had grown up together. I thought it was all the fault of the bad white men that had come down from the North and under cover of the war were instigating the Indians against the whites,” he said. “Those men would rouse up the Indians, telling them to exterminate the white men and too get their stocks and goods. When the Indians made a raid they brought back a lot of cattle and horses. The bad white men would trade them out of it for almost nothing at all. Then they would get their stock up north where it brought big prices.” “That was the way I had it figured and still do. A thing happened the summer of 1862 to make me join the Texas Rangers. I belonged to the Border Protection and was not scouting. One day in the middle of June, I think it was, I rounded a little piece of land. I saw my Aunt’s cabin, where I was heading, it was surrounded by a bunch of Indians. My Aunt’s dog came running up then and I saw he had an arrow stuck in his side and I knew the Red Men were after my Aunt and her three children. I spurred up my pony and rode as fast as I could toward the cabin shooting all the time and the Indians scattered and left. But by the time I got there my Aunt was dead and those three poor kids were scared half out of their wits. That is what decided me. I joined the Texas Rangers. My Mother and Father and all moved into Illinois Bend, at fort on the Red River, for they thought they would be safer than there out on the prairie alone.” “But it turned out they weren’t. The Indians were getting hostile sure enough and in December 1863 they made a big raid. The big raid is still spoken of almost with an awe by the Texas Rangers who can remember it today, almost as it remembers Sherman’s March in the south. The Indians swept over Texas crossing into Montague County where The Anderson family was located. They were killing, burning and looting and they pushed on as far as Gainesville. “It was just about Sunset,” narrates Anderson. “On the twenty second day of December in 1863 when the Indians made a raid on Illinois Bend, A confederate Fort where my family was living. We heard them first a half a mile away, forming into a line. Then with a whooping and yelling that made our blood chill in our veins. They attacked the fort. We didn’t have a chance. They murdered my family all, except for my four-year-old brother (Rufus Anderson) and myself. They burned the fort and they drove off the stock and they cleaned us out whole. From that time on Anderson spoke hatred towards the Red Men with a vengeance. “I still thought it wasn’t all their fault. I still knew they were still urged by those dirty white men and that they were trying to protect the buffalo herd for themselves from the white men who were killing off the prairie herds. But I couldn’t stop hunting them after they had killed my Mother and family. I stayed with the Texas Rangers a good many years.” It was then that all those things he had learned along the riverbanks as a boy stood Anderson in good stead. He could speak the Indians tongue. He could follow the wariest of Indian trails. He understood the woodcraft of the red man almost as well as the red man himself. Because of the invaluable knowledge Anderson then enlisted in his Uncle George Campbell’s company of Rangers and was sent out as a scout. It was his business to ride over the country, detecting any out break ferreting out Indian camps and learning of intended raids. “One strange thing about the Indians,” Anderson says, “They would never attack in the dark of the moon. People would tell you. You were safe enough when the moon was dark but no other dare to go any place in the light of the moon. That was when the Indians made their raids. That was when they went on the warpath. That was when white men had to be in a lockdown and it was every man for him self.” Anderson has crowded a good many harrowing experiences in his life. Escapes from death were matters of common occurrences during the Ranger days. Once he was shot in the leg with a poisoned arrow and today he walks with a cane because of it. Once he out rode fifteen Indians for 16 miles. “They were following me and shooting at me and I rode hard and shot back,” He relates. “I shot at their hips and dismounted them on after another as good as I could. Finally what was left of the bunch turned back and I was safe.” “You must have had a grand horse,” the writer suggested. “Horse Nothing!” Anderson snorted. “I had a mule. Hatfield was his name, and a fancy name and he was a fancy mule. I loved that mule.” Another time Anderson was captured by the Indians and together with four companions stood up to be shot. After the Old Squaws had their fun at slapping and pinching him. “They were mean to me,” he laughs now. “Old Hags.” But fate intervened just at the crucial moment. As Anderson stood up to what he thought was his death, a young warrior recognized him and after making talk with the others, took Anderson up on his horse behind him and rode away towards another camp. “He remembered me as being a good scout,” Anderson explaining. “And it was the way of the Indians to take any man who could shoot and fight pretty good and make Indians of them. They would tattoo up a man’s face until his own Mother couldn’t recognize him. Then they would set him up as leader of one of their bands and make him fight the white man.” “Well I would just as soon have been killed as made a member of a tribe and decided to escape or die trying. So on the third night out when I was sleeping on the ground on a blanket beside this young Indian who had me. I rolled off into the deep canyon on my side. I didn’t have any clothes on to amount to anything and I sure got mussed up in all those rocks. But, I hid and the young buck couldn’t find me and later I made my way to the headquarters. I was bloody as a beef when I got there, but I was alive.” And as go the list of adventures Anderson can tell. So many has he experienced that his words sometime run away from him and he begins on one story and tells three before he finishes. After his Ranger experiences (in the late 1870’s he quit the service “because a man gets worn out, living like that year after year.) he went into the cattle business and worked on various Oklahoma and Texas ranches. “I am not much good today,” he says. “I can’t walk much and I’m still plenty bowlegged from riding a horse so long. When I first left the service my legs were the perfect shape of a horse’s back and they have never straightened out to any tolerable extent. But I had a great experience down there and I never regretted one risk I ran or anything. I did fighting like we did is all over now and I guess most folks have forgotten it, but to those of us who are left the recollections of those Indian raids and border fights, and horse thief and cattle rustling gangs will always be pretty clear.” “We cleaned up Texas and we think we made a good job of it.” File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/tx/montague/newspapers/tulsansa22nnw.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.net/txfiles/ File size: 11.6 Kb