"Bandera Pass"

Historic Battle at Bandera Pass

In 1841 President Houston appointed Captain John Coffee Hays commander of a special Texas Ranger company. Captain Hays was instructed to put together a company of special forces to contain the Comanche. He was known for improving discipline and morale with solders. He filled his Texas Ranger company with noted Indian fighters which included men such as: Bigfoot Wallace, Ben Highsmith, Creed Taylor, Sam Walker, Robert Addison Gillespie, P.H. Bell, Kit Ackland, Sam Luckey, James Dunn, Tom Galberth, George Neill, Frank Chevallier, and many others well known in Texas frontier history. The Paterson Colt Six-shooters had just been invented and Captain Hays and his men were fortunate to be armed with fifty or sixty of these weapons instead of single shotguns. The Comanche were unaware of these new weapons when they attacked Captain Hays and his company in “Bandera Pass in 1841”. The exact day of the Battle is not known, but the time it occurred is known. Captain Hays and his men, approximately 50 in number, arrived at the pass about eleven o’clock in the morning and were surprised and confronted by a large band of Comanche. Hays’ report indicated his men were alarmed by the large number of comanche warriors. Captain Hays was reported to have ordered his men to “dismount and tie those horses, we can whip them. No doubt about that”. Captain Hays reported that they were badly out numbered, but the new weapons enabled the rangers to hold their ground. The fierce battle began at eleven o’clock in the morning and according to records left by Hays, lasted all day. Both sides finally ended the conflict as night fell. Finally the Comanche retreated and the Rangers followed. Both sides buried their dead. The Rangers lost five men dead and many wounded. The Comanche loses were much greater. The fact that 50 Rangers had held their ground with Colt Six-shooters against hundreds of Comanche warriors marked a change in the way the frontier wars would be fought, and marked the turning of the tide in the war between Texas and the Comanche.

In the 1870’s. Comanche attached buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls in Texas. This attach brought a retaliatory U.S. Army campaign under Colonel Ranald S. Machenzie that defeated and broke the power of the Comanche. The Comanche were forced to surrender and the painful transition to reservation life began. Today, their tribal government operates near Lawton, Oklahoma.