A little long, but an interesting read if you like American or Texican history.
On June 1, 1844, Captain Jack Hays led fourteen Texas Rangers from their camp on the Medina River twelve miles west of San Antonio. They rode north through broken hills and winding streams in search of American Indians. What happened one week later, on a small creek about fifty miles away, would dramatically change the nature of frontier combat and the history of Texas and the American West. For most of the previous year, the western half of the young Republic of Texas—where most Indian attacks occurred—had been relatively quiet. When President Sam Houston had been elected for a second time, in 1841, he’d sought to solve the nation’s conflicts diplomatically. The main reason was money. Between the Indians incensed at white settlers encroaching on their land, and Mexico, which had never acknowledged the independence of its former territory, the cash-strapped Republic faced hostility on multiple fronts, and it was incapable of properly defending against incursions. Mexico had its own problems to deal with—lack of money and troops, as well as internal strife—that kept it from causing too much trouble for the new republic. But Indian attacks were taking their toll. Houston’s efforts to treat with the Indians had achieved some success: during meetings in March and September of 1843, Texas had signed agreements with several of the smaller tribes. They discussed a boundary line beyond which the Indians would remain, but because the largest and most powerful tribe in Texas, the Comanches, had attended neither meeting, the line and its exact location would have to wait until the third, which convened in April 1844 and was still in session as Hays’s Rangers broke camp. Texas’s cost-cutting measures had included disbanding the 560-man regular army and auctioning off the navy’s four vessels, which left Hays’s 40-man Ranger company as the country’s only defense force. Lately, they had spent more time chasing Texan outlaws, Mexican spies, and bandits along the Rio Grande than fighting Indians. - See more at:
http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/two-sams-and-their-six-shooter/?utm_campaign=5%3A1+Mother%27s+Day+%28mvw5tK%29&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Newsletter+Current+%28Eastern+Time+Zone%29#sthash.IHF72zDw.dpuf
