Horse raid at Rancho Trinidad

By Jim Warren

Rancho Trinidad , Texas
January 18, 1851

Dear Mom,

Well, we finally at Rancho Trinidad. It belongs to Santos Moreno and is situated at the juncture of two creeks called Las Anacuas and Tiburones. The Anacua is a local tree -- remember me telling you how pretty they were near San Antonio Viejo last year when we were on the Ft. Ringold trip? It is the tree with sandpaper leaves. The other creek translates as "sharks." I don't know how it got that name way out here. I hope there aren't any sharks when we have to cross it.

The ranch is located near a lake formed by the two creeks coming together. After the water leaves the lake it flows into Santa Gertrudis Creek and eventually into the salt bay called Laguna Madre. It is a very nice ranch with whitewashed jacales and neat gardens. They irrigate the gardens from the lake. Since the the soil is so sandy a ditch won't carry water, so they have built a series of log troughs to carry water water which is dipped out of the lake in buckets. They gave us a big mess of fresh turnips and we nearly made ourselves sick eating too much. It's the first fresh vegetables we've had in over two months. They also have an orchard of orange trees loaded down with fruit! I think I could live here forever! We haven't had any oranges since we left Ft. Brown last year. Come to think of it -- this is our anniversary. This time last year we had just left Ft. Brown , headed for the Nueces River to build Ft. Merrill . And now here we are, headed back in the other direction. Hopefully we won't have to go that far, though.

The people here told us that the hostiles slipped up on the ranch during the night after the men had penned up the horses and mules to keep them from being stolen during the night. Everybody was still indoors about daybreak when one old man went outside for something and saw the Indians trying to take down the corral gate. Well, he raised the alarm and everybody went up on the roof and started shooting, and the Indians ran into the brush. Their houses are built with flat roofs with a trapdoor to the inside. They can get up there and shoot while keeping the door barricaded. The roof has a short parapet around the edge so they are not exposed while they are up there.

Well, the hostiles would make a feint below the house so everybody would look that way, then some of them would sneak up to the gate and try to take it down. It didn't take but one episode of this for the ranchers to get wise, and they had a long stand-off. The defenders thought maybe the Indians had left after about two hours, but they noticed the animals in the pens were nervous, and in a minute the Indians started whooping and hollering and riding around the pens at full speed and suddenly the pens were empty! Well, the Trinidadians -- or whatever you might call them -- were left without even their using horses, so they couldn't even give chase. They waited a few minutes to be sure all the hostiles were gone and some of the men went out to the corrals to see what had happened. Were they surprised to see a big hole in the backside of the pens through which all the horses and mules and even the milk cows had left!

What it was -- there was a couple of big oak trees near one corner of the pens, and the ranchers had never realized that they could not see all of the pen from the roof because of these trees. Well, the hostiles had figured this out when they couldn't get to the front gate, so they made a back gate. They worked with their hands and knives until they got all the fastenings loose, and even dug around the fence posts to loosen them. Then they put ropes on the fence posts and jerked them out on horseback. When they started hollering and riding around the pens and some of the horses saw an opening in the fence, it was all over! They rushed the gap and the stampede finished off what the Indians had started. They lost 33 horses and eight mules. Luckily the milk cows were too slow too keep up so they abandoned them about a mile from the ranch. The savages shot one cow with an arrow for some reason, but she isn't hurt bad.

I've got to go now. The Sgt. is sending the Corporal and four men to take some of the ranchers over to a nearby ranch so they can bring back some using horses.

Write soon.

Your son,

Henry

(Jim Warren is an archaeologist living in George West.)