In January 1840 Penateka Comanche (Nʉmʉnʉʉ) emissaries came to San Antonio to ask for peace. The Handbook of Texas says the Penateka were frightened of Cheyenne and Arapaho attacks on their northern edge, thinned by smallpox, and pressed by the Texas Rangers. The commissioners of the Republic answered with demands: return every captive, leave Central Texas, and keep away from white settlements.
The delegation
On March 19, 1840, thirty-three Penateka chiefs and warriors rode in with thirty-two other Comanches, women and children among them, led by the peace chief Muguara. They brought a few Mexican children and one Anglo captive, sixteen-year-old Matilda Lockhart, who had been taken in 1838. She told the commissioners she had been abused, and burn scars and a mutilated nose bore her out. Matilda also said fifteen more captives remained, to be ransomed one at a time.
In the Council House
The talks met in the Council House on the east side of Main Plaza, across from San Fernando Cathedral. Muguara told the commissioners that the other captives were held by bands beyond his authority. The Handbook says the commissioners, failing to grasp how widely Comanche authority was spread, rejected his explanation. Soldiers entered, and the chiefs were told they were hostages until the rest came home. They tried to escape and called to their people outside.
When it was over, the San Antonio Report counts thirty chiefs and warriors, three women and two children dead, twenty-nine people taken prisoner, and seven Texans killed. The Handbook says the Comanche were outraged, because they held ambassadors immune from acts of war. Texas officials freed one woman to carry an offer to the camps: the captives held there in exchange for twenty-seven Comanches in custody. The Penateka leaders did not answer, and most of the Comanche prisoners escaped. The San Antonio Report adds that the Comanche killed the captives they held, Matilda's sister among them.
Buffalo Hump
Buffalo Hump, a Penateka war chief, first became prominent after the fight. Outraged, he carried out a revenge raid, and in August 1840 he led nearly 400 warriors and an equal number of women and children against Victoria and Linnville. Militia caught the column at Plum Creek on August 12, but most of the Comanches escaped to their camps.
In 1844 he asked Sam Houston to keep white settlers east of the Edwards Plateau, and in May 1846 he led the delegation that signed a treaty with the United States. In 1856 he took his people to the Comanche reservation on the Brazos, and in 1858 he left it after threats from horse thieves and squatters. In the Wichita Mountains his camp was attacked by United States troops under Maj. Earl Van Dorn, who killed eighty Comanches, unaware, the Handbook says, that Buffalo Hump had just signed a peace at Fort Arbuckle. In 1859 he settled near Fort Cobb in Indian Territory, asked for a house and farmland to set an example, and died in 1870.
The city abandoned the Council House in 1850 and later razed it, and a state marker stands near the site. Main Plaza still fronts San Fernando Cathedral, and the Spanish Governor's Palace is a short walk west.