Comanche village represented “a victory
more decisive and complete than any
recorded in the history of our Indian war-
fare.” It was a claim as grandiose as
Twiggs’ shelving of Thomas was petty.
Van Dorn recovered quickly from his
wounds, but his famous victory was soon
overshadowed by a report that the same
Comanche he had attacked had recently
engaged in a parley with an Indian Affairs
representative and mistakenly believed that
they had reached a peace agreement with
the white men. “One of us has made a seri-
ous blunder,” a chagrined Twiggs
lamented, “he in making the treaty, or I in
sending out a party after them.” The sec-
ond guessing did nothing to help the dead
Comanche or their furious chief, Buffalo
Hump, who told Indian agents with some
justification that henceforth his “heart was
black” toward all American soldiers.
After five weeks recuperating at his Mis-
sissippi home, Van Dorn returned to the
2nd Cavalry at Camp Radziminski. The
next spring he again took the field in search
of the star-crossed Buffalo Hump and his
band. The soldiers tracked the Indians to a
camp on the Cimarron River in north-
western Oklahoma. Dismounting to attack
in a misty rain, the troopers swept the
Comanche toward a deep, steep-sidedravine. Kirby Smith, his glasses fogged by
the rain, walked right past a concealed
Comanche, who then shot him in the thigh.
Fitzhugh Lee, Robert E. Lee’s nephew, was
also wounded in the fighting, taking an
arrow through the chest before shooting
his assailant between the eyes. Not a single
Indian escaped—49 were killed, five
wounded, and 37 taken prisoner. “The
Comanches,” reported Van Dorn, “fought
without giving or asking quarter until there
was not one left to bend a bow.”
Van Dorn’s twin victories helped crush
Comanche resistance in northern Texas, at
least for a time. Meanwhile, the 1st Cav-
alry’s contemporaneous victory at
Solomon’s Fork ended major Cheyenne
hostilities in Kansas and Nebraska for sev-
eral years. “Colonel Sumner has worked a
wondrous change in their dispositions
toward the whites,” remarked one Indian
agent. “They said they had learned a lesson
in their fight with Colonel Sumner, that it
was useless to contend against the white
man.” In the end, it was a lesson that would
not last as intermittent hostilities between
soldiers and Indians would continue for
another two decades on the western plains,
interrupted by much more urgent hostilities
among the white men back east.
Two years after Van Dorn’s victory onthe banks of the Cimarron, the elite fight-
ing force put together by Jefferson Davis
would find itself breaking apart in the wake
of mass resignations by Southern officers
heading home to fight for the Confederacy
under now-President Jefferson Davis and
General Robert E. Lee. The new war would
pit officers of the 1st and 2nd Cavalry
against one another on fields of battle from
Pennsylvania to Missouri, and the frus-
trating, frequently inconclusive warfare
they had conducted against hostile
Cheyenne and Comanche warriors would
be forgotten in the much larger war they
fought against each other.
In all, 29 officers from the 1st and 2nd
Cavalry would become generals in the
Civil War. Robert E. Lee, of course, was
the most prominent, leading the Confed-
erate Army of Northern Virginia into mil-
itary immortality. His commanding
colonel on the frontier, Albert Sidney
Johnston, would also become a full gen-
eral in the Confederacy before dying early
in the war at the Battle of Shiloh, his great
promise largely unfulfilled.
Three other members of the two cavalry
regiments would achieve the rank of
full general in the Confederacy: Joseph E.
Johnston, John Bell Hood, and EdmundUnion and Confederate cavalry charge each other at the 1864 Battle of Westport, Missouri, in this 1921 painting by famed illustrator N.C. Wyeth.
Opponents of “Jeff Davis’s Pets” feared the creation of two new Southern-dominated regiments.Continued on page 98Q-Spr16 1 and 2 Cavalry_Layout 1 1/14/16 12:18 PM Page 41