HISTORY TELESCOPES

Think of looking at history as a collection of telescopes....many that have cracked, missing, or dirty lenses...and most have no taper ...so it's easy to look in the wrong end.....There's some with very sharp detail in them......We all have to be looking through the right telescopes to be on the same page of that giant textbook in the sky. The one that's got ALL the history in it. Right down to the last birthday and treaty. I love the subject...got that from my mother. So I decided to do a little writing about my home. That map is called The South Plains today, once it was called the Comancheria . { Even my spell checker doesn't like the word } It was the last great stronghold of " The Antelope Eaters ". And they were the last hold-outs in Texas . From the time that Chiristo Columbo saw his first Arawak until the Mexican Revolution of 1821...The Spanish in the New World met and defeated every Indian group they came in contact with ....except one. By what ever reasons ....they won those contests. That one group of Indians stopped them cold. That one group of Indians are the reason that St Louis was a French town & not a Spanish one. And from St Louis all the points west to California, should have been little Spanish towns at the important places, when the Northern Europeans came floating by. Souix Falls S.D. should have been Estacado de Gudalupe'. But the Spanish ran into this buzz saw on horse back around 1700 and those Indians kicked everybody's ass until the year 1847 exactly ! That year, Major Walker of the Texas Rangers received his first shipments of the Model 1847 Walker Colt revolver. That shipment shattered nearly 200 years of power on the Southern Plains. I owned a reproduction of one those Colts. They are the biggest, heaviest {5lbs.}, and most powerful guns made in the 19th cenutry...They will blow the doors off a Volkswagen.....they roared flame, smoke, and thunder. Now the Rangers, soon took to carrying as many as 3 of these things. That's 15 shots per ranger . " The Shootist " was right .....with these guns the hammer is always resting on the empty chamber. ...."so you won't shoot your leg off". Why did this happen ? Well those Indians had a tactic that simply over came everybody else. They rode straight at you and showered your position with arrows...Anyone from central Asia, at any time from history, sitting on a horse on a hill top watching this would have smiled...... But in 1847 the Rangers began showering them with lead. Last bands held out until 1874 up here in the Comancheria . But it was really over the day those Colts got to Texas. To learn more about these Indians I recommend "Comanche Moon " by T. R. Farenbock..He's one of the great Texas writers. The history he writes gives you a look through just one telescope of what it was like in Central Texas in the early spring of the 1830's and you knew the Comanches were coming down from the Comancheria with the full moon and there wasn't a damn thing you could do about.