*PREVIEW* The Great Comanche Raid of 1840

Old Paint happened to be the only Texan not carrying a gun that day. So he confronted a Comanche warrior, picked up rocks, and started throwing them at him.

The Comanche warrior then literally shot him in the knee with an arrow, turning him into a character from Skyrim.

This is insane. This is absolutely insane.
Also, I'm just laughing at the idea of like you getting rude tween firing squad with bows and arrows.

I'm going to straight kill you, no cat, son. No, they are experiencing what it's like to play Fortnite as a 30-year-old.
It's like,

I am getting absolutely zeroed by a guy in a Goku skin who is probably nine years old. And saying the most horrific things into your ears instead of a literal Nazi rally.

Maybe that was just my experience in online gaming and early Xbox live shit.

Yeah. Lots of slurs, lots of

just the worst shit imaginable. A lot of I fucked your mom.

Oh, yeah. A lot of dudes playing Skrillex into their mic in order to piss you off.
Oh, that's worse than a slur.

Did the Comanche kids have Turtle Beach headsets on? Oh, God.

Scooting through town in Gabriel chairs.

God damn it. They brought movement back into this update.
Fuck's sake. Your tactical sliding everywhere.
I hate the Gabriel chair cavalry.

Now, all this took about a half hour, and the Texans gave the hiding Comanche an ultimatum. Surrender or they'd all be killed.

Some took the deal and others didn't, but in the end, at least 30 warriors, women, and children were killed, and the Texans lost seven.

One of the Comanche women was released, given a message, a horse, and sent back to the other Comanche to tell them what happened.

And to warn them, release all of your white captives, thought to be about a dozen people, or Everyone the Texans just captured would be killed.

The Comanche didn't even entertain this shit for a second when news of the ambush got back to them.

Instead, they conducted a series of grief rituals, like cutting off all of their hair or sacrificing the extra horses of the men who were killed in the ambush.

Some warriors cut themselves, while others chopped off one of their fingers as a promise of revenge. So we also have Comanche Yakuza, I guess.

All of this over a disagreement in ethics and Texas governance.

Still better than how it's worked out nowadays. Uh-huh.
Then, as an extra bit of fuck you to the Texans, they lined up all their white captives and executed them in just about the worst ways possible.

Some were lit on fire while still alive. Others were worked over with knives for a real long time.
It was all ugly. But like I said, the Comanche did not have a kind of centralized authority.

But given the circumstances, One chief named Buffalo Hump eventually rose to be the loudest voice in the room.

He told people, after all of this happened, he had a dream, a prophetic vision, of the Comanches storming into Texas and destroying the Republic entirely.

This would not be a raid like the Comanches would have done prior to this, but a proper invasion. Soon, he sent men to the other bands around Texas, trying to recruit them to his cause.

And the bands furthest away from the whites didn't really bite, really. They didn't see the point of the whole thing.
They didn't live anywhere near the Texans.

They had other non-white problems to deal with. They're like, this this really sounds like a Shelbyville problem.
But other bands who had dealings with the Texans were quick to join up.

This included several different bands of the Penateca, including one, ironically, led by a chief named Santa Ana.

And knowing the Mexican Santa Ana, I would not be surprised if this was just Santa Ana who had once again switched sides.

Actual Santa Ana moonlighting, shaved off his mustache and was wearing a funny hat. Yeah, I'm a native now.
I can't go back to Mexico. I have done so many things wrong.

I mean, look, I appreciate Santa Ana's like dedication to just being like, nah, fuck government's fun. I always want to go to war.
I want to fight. You know, know what you're good at.

He doesn't like government as much as he enjoys having the title of president and then not governing. So he's like, I'm a chief now.
I'm going to be the worst chief ever. That's my promise to you.

And then I'm going to try to be white in like two weeks. I talked to some Dutch people.
They gave me ideas.

Now, it's often said that Buffalo Hump managed to gather a thousand Comanches, like this massive Comanche army of a thousand warriors invading the Republic of Texas, which I guess is technically true, but there's more to it than that.

The Comanche went to war as a community, as a society. They brought their civilians with them.
This had several practical reasons behind it.

The women and children acted as a kind of built-in logistics system. The older boys would drive livestock with them.
Obviously, they need that livestock while they're on the march to eat.

And the younger children and women would ferry supplies, mend equipment, take care of the wounded, you name it.

There's also the fact that if they brought their civilian population with them, they wouldn't have to leave any warriors behind as a garrison, so to speak.

So when the Comanche went to war, they did bring a thousand Comanche with them, but only about maybe half were warriors. So the story of the thousand-man raid isn't entirely accurate.

Then again, if you give a 12-year-old a bow, we already could see what kind of damage they could do. Yeah, no kidding.

And on August 4th, they got moving into Texas, traveling only by night in order to hide their movements from the Republic forces.

Though they did eventually get discovered by a single mailman who happened to stumble upon their camp in the morning, that mailman then ran into the town of Gonzalez, where a local captain of the Texas Rangers, Ben McCulloch, was stationed.

McCulloch is kind of a perfect encapsulation of a Texan of the time. He was a veteran of the Revolution.
He manned the cannons known as the Twin Sisters during the Battle of San Jacinto.

He's also a guy who owned several slaves and had one of his arms disabled due to being shot in a duel a few months before.

As one does. As one does.
Yes, it's just dueling, owning slaves. It's like ticking all the boxes for a guy of this era from this, you know, region of the world.

And it's important to remember where and how the Texas Rangers, infamous slash legendary law enforcement agency that still exists today, how they got their start which was little more than a frontier death squad against native people he did that too he was as texan as any man ever has been from there they rode out to try to find the comanche army who was busy doing some pretty horrific shit to any people they came across without going into all the details i'll only include one they captured a guy cut off the soles of his feet and then forced him to go for a walk until they got bored and just finished him off.

Fucking hell. Yeah.
I mean, I assume that's what happens at the Nike Performance Center, but, you know, it's a bit much in the Texas countryside. That's what happens if you piss off Phil Knight.

Yeah, probably.

From there, the Comanche conducted a half-hearted raid into the town of Victoria, deciding to instead call it off and raid a nearby horse farm because horses were worth more than a lot of material goods to the Comanche.

While doing so, several women and children were captured. And again, I'm not really going to go into details here because this is not that kind of episode I'm going for.

but just know that the Comanche warriors killed literal babies the same way the Khmer Rouge did.

Yeah.

It was a tree. They smashed them against a tree.
There. Is everybody happy they know those facts now? Moving on.
I'm not. Fuck that.
I'm not happy.

Nobody's better for knowing that in the context of the attitude of this episode. Then they turned and raided into the town of Linville.

Hundreds of warriors stormed the town, surprising the townspeople, who, rather than try to stand and fight, ran to the coast and got on some boats.

The Comanche don't exactly have much of a seafaring tradition among them.

So the people on the boats paddled only far enough out into the water where you couldn't walk to them and just watch the Comanche plunder the town.

One Linville merchant complained in a letter that he watched the Comanche loot his warehouse that was full of top hats and umbrellas.

Oh my god.

They're all just running out wearing three top hats with a parasol. The guy's just like jumping up and down, shaking his fist.

The Comanche got dressed in frock coats, top hats, and breeches, and were like twirling umbrellas at the streets and laughing at the watching townspeople as they burnt down the town.

Raging against the bacchanalia of it all. It's insane.
Comanche Bacchadalia.

One guy in the boat was a local judge named John Hayes. He got really, really sick of watching the Comanche Bacchadalia, we have named it.

He grabbed a gun, jumped overboard, swam/slash walked to shore, and the Comanche thought he was insane, so they just left him alone as he wandered through town muttering to himself and holding a pistol.

Then he went to dry his gun off, because obviously, you know, these are black powder weapons. You can't fire them if they're wet.

And Judge Hayes discovered he brought an unloaded firearm and just kind of sat down crisscross applesauce as the Comanche continued to loot the town.

All right. All right.
At this point, Buffalo Hump and the other chiefs pretty much considered their mission a success.

The Republic was hardly destroyed, but they had gotten absolutely loaded down with loot. They had stolen thousands of horses, which were very, very valuable.
They secured that fat horse stack.

Just imagine a Comanche warrior holding up a horse like it's a telephone. It's pretty hard to do a muddy spread with a horse.
Getting all the horses to lay down is really hard.

But like lay down in a way they're like kind of layered on top of each other, but not completely, so you can get an accurate count.

It's that scene from Breaking Bad where they lay out the pile of money, but you're just rolling out incredibly angry horses.

It's incredible.