Council House Fight - Background

Background

On January 9, 1840, a small group of influential Comanches visited Colonel Henry Wax Karnes in San Antonio, Texas and presented the possibilities of negotiating a peace treaty in exchange for the return of Texas settlers who were being held as captives.

Texas officials, with the exception of Sam Houston, did not understand that the Comanche were not a unified nation in the sense of a nation like Mexico or the United States. There were at least 12 divisions of the Comanche, with as many as 35 independent roaming bands, also known as rancherías or villages. Although bound together in various ways, both cultural and political, the bands were under no formalized unified authority.

The absence of a central authority meant that one band could not make another band return their captives. Chiefs Buffalo Hump and Peta Nocona never agreed to return any captives. Among the Comanches, captives were often incorporated into the society and adopted into families. The Comanche made little distinction between people born Comanche and those adopted. The Comanche practice of taking captives dated back to at least the early 18th century and raids into Spanish New Mexico. Women and children were preferred, and in a significant number of cases young captives grew up as Comanches and did not wish to leave.

In 1840, after several years of war and a major smallpox epidemic, the Comanche sued for peace and sent emissaries seeking peace talks. They returned a white boy as a show of sincerity. Texian officials pressured them to return all white captives and invited the principal chiefs to visit. In March, Muguara, a powerful eastern Comanche chief, led 65 Comanches, including women and children, to San Antonio for peace talks. They only brought one captive and Albert Sidney Johnston, the Texas Secretary of War, had ordered San Antonio officials to take the Comanche delegates as hostages if they failed to deliver all captives. Therefore the Comanches were taken to the local jail. Muguara refused to deliver more captives on the grounds that they were held in the rancherías of other chiefs over which he had no authority.

The delegation had hoped to negotiate a recognition of the Comancheria as the sovereign land of the Comanche. Other chiefs, such as Buffalo Hump, warned that the whites could not be trusted.

Settlers in Texas had suffered horrible depredations at the hands of these Indians including having their children's brains bashed out, their wives and daughters repeatedly raped and then tortured to death. They had reached the end of their patience.