In the spring of 1871 Gen. William T. Sherman came to Texas to check complaints of raids from the Fort Sill reservation. He left San Antonio on May 2 with the Army's inspector general, Randolph B. Marcy, two aides and an escort of seventeen Black troopers, and rode north by Forts Concho, Griffin and Belknap. He saw no Indians, and when he reached Fort Richardson at Jacksboro on May 17 he was convinced the Texans were exaggerating.
On the Salt Creek Prairie
On the reservation the Kiowa were short of rations and divided. Resentment over provisions ran high, and the tribe had split into factions under Lone Wolf and Kicking Bird. On May 15 more than a hundred Kiowa, Comanche, Kiowa-Apache, Arapaho and Cheyenne riders crossed the Red River into Texas, led by Satank (Sitting Bear), Satanta (White Bear), Ado-eete (Big Tree) and the medicine man Maman-ti (Skywalker). By May 16 they were waiting at Flint Creek on the Salt Creek Prairie in Young County, twenty miles west of Fort Richardson. The next day Sherman's small column passed within half a mile of them. Indian informants later testified that Maman-ti had foretold that an attack on the second party to come by would succeed.
On May 18 the second party came: the wagon train of Henry Warren, a freight contractor hauling supplies on the old Butterfield road. The warriors killed the wagon master and six teamsters, and three men got away. The attackers lost one dead and five wounded. A survivor, Thomas Brazeal, reached Fort Richardson that night and told Sherman.
A courtroom first
At Fort Sill days later, Satanta told the agent, Lawrie Tatum, that he had led the raid. Sherman ordered Satanta, Satank and Big Tree sent to Jacksboro for trial in a civil court on charges of murder. Satank was killed on the road. On July 5 and 6 Satanta and Big Tree were tried separately, convicted and sentenced to hang. It was the first time Native leaders had been tried in a civil court. Under pressure from supporters of the Quaker peace policy and federal officials who feared Kiowa retaliation, Governor Edmund J. Davis commuted both sentences to life. The two chiefs were held at Huntsville, in effect as hostages for the tribe's behavior, until their parole in 1873.
What came of it
The raid changed Sherman's mind. He ordered the Army to take the offensive against Indians found off the reservation, a road that led to the Red River War of 1874. Satanta, sent back to Huntsville in 1874, died there in 1878. Big Tree lived another half century, counseled peace, helped bring the first Baptist mission to the Kiowa reservation and served thirty years as a deacon at Rainy Mountain Baptist Church. His last stand as a leader was against the allotment of Kiowa lands in 1901. He died at his home in Anadarko in 1929.
The post where Sherman heard the news is Fort Richardson State Park, and Fort Belknap stands on his route north. The Kiowa Tribe tells its own history at the Kiowa Tribal Museum in Carnegie, Oklahoma.