As soon as weather permitted, Johnston
sent the entire regiment into the field to
conduct daily scouting patrols of the area.
Texans had long pleaded for help from the
federal government against the ferocious
depredations of the flint-hard and ever-
aggressive Comanche. The new regiment
was intended to answer those pleas. Vet-
eran plainsmen, however, scoffed at the
untried troopers’ chances of controlling the
Indians. “Keeping a bulldog to chase mos-
quitoes would be no greater nonsense than
the stationing of six-pounders, bayonets,
and dragoons for the pursuit of these red
wolves,” scoffed one old-timer. Wolves, as
everyone knew, were elusive.
Despite the old-timers’ doubts, John-
ston’s policy of “rigorous hostility” to all
nonreservation Indians soon paid divi-
dends. “The troops ought to act offensively,
to carry the war to the homes of the
enemy,” he urged the War Department,
noting that it was not enough to wait for
the Comanche to strike and then try to run
them down. Vigorous action, said John-
ston, was needed to keep the Indians in
check and on the defensive. He intended to
do just that.
Meanwhile, Robert E. Lee, who had not
made the march into Texas with the regi-
ment, arrived a few weeks later and took
command at Camp Cooper. He dutifully
met with Chief Catumseh of the reserva-
tion Comanche but was less than impressed
by the chief or his charges. “These people
give a world of trouble to man and horse,”
said Lee, using his favorite—if mild—pejo-
rative, “and, poor creatures, they are not
worth it.” Any attempts to humanize the
Comanche, Lee warned, “will be uphill
work, I fear. Force is the only corrective
they understand.”
Heeding his own advice, Lee took the
field in the summer of 1856 with four com-
panies of the 2nd Cavalry. Fellow South-
erner Earl Van Dorn of Mississippi served
as his second in command on the expedi-
tion, and the celebrated scout Jim Shaw
and his Delaware Indians rode along with
the column as guides. The force headed
west from Fort Chadbourne, scanning the
horizon for telltale smoke signals. The sol-diers found several abandoned campsites,
but no live Indians. At the headwaters of
the Brazos and Colorado Rivers, Lee
divided his command into three groups to
cover a greater area.
Van Dorn’s force, accompanied by Shaw,
broke camp on June 29. That evening the
soldiers finally spotted smoke signals. The
next morning they swooped down on an
unsuspecting Indian camp in a nearby
ravine. Expecting to find large numbers of
hostile Comanche sheltering there, they
were quickly disappointed. Only three war-
riors and a woman were in camp, and one
of the men quickly leaped onto his horse
and escaped. The other two, gallantly
defending the woman, were chopped down
by the troopers’ gunfire.The brief, one-sided skirmish at the
ravine was the only action in Lee’s entire
40-day, 1,600-mile expedition. The cavalry
averaged sighting one Indian every 10
days—hardly a worthwhile return on the
Army’s investment of men, money, and
time. Said a disgusted Kirby Smith, one of
Lee’s party on the raid, “We traveled
through the country, broke down our men,
killed our horses and returned as ignorant
of the whereabouts of Mr. Sanico [a
Comanche chief] as when we started.”Despite the lack of major battles, how-
ever, the incessant cavalry patrols put the
always wary Comanche on guard, so much
so that by the autumn of 1856 veteran
Indian agent Robert S. Neighbors could
write approvingly, “Our frontier has, for
the last three months enjoyed a quiet never
heretofore known. This state of things is
mainly attributable to the energetic actions
of the 2nd Cavalry, under the command of
Colonel A.S. Johnston.”
Johnston’s popular reign as head of the
2nd Cavalry came to an abrupt end in May
1857 when he was ordered by his superi-
ors in Washington to lead a punitive expe-
dition—this time against white men, Mor-
mon extremists who were attempting to
secede from the Union. His replacement,Brig. Gen. David Emanuel Twiggs, contin-
ued Johnston’s aggressive policies. “Old
Davey, the Bengal Tiger” was 67 years old,
but he was still as active and disputatious
as he had been as a young captain in the
Black Hawk War several decades earlier. A
tall, beet-faced man with a towering tem-
per and an eye for the ladies, the Georgia-
born Twiggs recommended keeping the
pressure on the Comanche. “For the last
ten years we have been on the defensive,”
he wrote to his old Mexican War com-ABOVE: The crumbling remains of Fort Belknap, Texas, were photographed in 1934. The fort, located
on the Brazos River, served as the home base for the 2nd U.S. Cavalry Regiment, commanded by
then Colonel Robert E. Lee. OPPOSITE: Cheyenne Indians attack outnumbered railroad workers on
the western plains. Two new cavalry regiments were added in 1855 to combat the growing threat
posed by 40,000 implacable warriors to white expansion.Q-Spr16 1 and 2 Cavalry_Layout 1 1/14/16 12:17 PM Page 39