The Tonkawa Massacre

The Tonkawa Massacre

On the night of Oct 23, 1862, Horace P. Jones, the famed scout and interpreter of Indian Territory, was awakened by the sound of approaching riders at his quarters at the Wichita Agency (later Anadarko, OK). The Civil War had been going on for over a year by now and most of the lines had been drawn as to which side the various Indian tribes would choose.

The Cherokee were having a civil war within a civil war. The Choctaw and Chickasaw sided with the Confederates as well as most of the Creeks and Shawnees. The Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, Apache and Arapaho didn't care one way or another as long as the white man just went away.

The Loyal Creeks, Osage and some of the Shawnee sided with the Federals. The Wichitas had thrown their lot with the Federals and moved from the Agency to Kansas near the future site of Wichita, Kansas. A handful of smaller tribes such as the Caddo, Tonkawa and Wacoes were still located at the Wichita Agency which was now under Confederate control and basically remained neutral.

This night would bring the greatest massacre that Indian Territory would ever witness. Horace slipped out the back door as the riders approached. From behind the house he asked who was there. In the cool stillness of the night he heard several rifle hammers cock and he immediately ran to a hobbled pony he kept for such emergencies behind the house. It was then he realized that it was the Osage and Shawnee who were Federal sympathizers on a raid of the Confederate post.

The Osage riddled the cabin with rifle shots and then set it on fire. The rest of the buildings at the agency were also burned and all the white people killed. The raiders then moved on to Ft. Cobb where they killed the occupants and set that post on fire.

Horace raced through the countryside spreading the alarm. Few of the whites believed him until he would take them outside and show them the glow of the burning Ft. Cobb five miles in the distance. The whites believed that the friendly tribes would have warned them if there was going to be a raid. They were wrong.

After the raiders had burned the Wichita Agency and Ft. Cobb, they turned south to the Tonkawa Village. This action against the Tonkawa had little to do with the Civil War. It was a longstanding hatred against the Tonkawa that was held by all of the southern plains tribes.

You see, the Tonkawas were cannibals. The word in the Comanche and Kiowa language used for Tonkawa meant the same thing "eaters of humans".

A few years earlier two Kiowa boys about twelve years old were out hunting alone. The Tonkawa tried to capture them but one boy escaped. The escapee hid in the bushes in a ravine and watched as the Tonkawas killed the captured boy and started cutting him up and began to cook the flesh on the campfire. The escapee ran for his very life.

He was soon overtaken by a band of Comanches who were allies of the Kiowa. When the boy related the story, the Comanche went to the Kiowa village and gathered reinforcements. The two tribes then rode to the Tonkawa camp and surrounded it. Carefully the Comanche and Kiowa approached the village hiding in the creeks and ravines until they were close enough to see if the boy's story was true.

Here they saw the dead Kiowa boy and the Tonkawa cooking his flesh on the fire. The Comanche and Kiowa were so repulsed by what they saw that they immediately attacked and killed every man, woman and child in that village.

Now the Osage had the entire tribe in one place and one camp. They attacked with rifles supplied by the Federals while the Tonkawa had mostly bows and arrows to defend themselves. It wasn't much of a battle, just a slaughter. The few who escaped were tracked down and killed as they were found scattered in the brush and ravines.

The massacre continued all through the night into the next day. By the end of the day, the Osage had killed over eight hundred Tonkawa men, women and children. The tribe which had numbered over one thousand members the day before now was less that one hundred forty.

The few Tonkawas that did survive straggled into Ft. Arbuckle, which was now under Confederate control being manned by the Chickasaw Battalion. It was illegal for any other tribe to be in the Chickasaw Nation, so the commander at Ft. Arbuckle sent an urgent message to the Chickasaw governor asking permission for the tribe to seek shelter from the Osages in the Nation. The governor granted this permission.

The commander of the post gave what aid and food he could spare to the Tonkawas. He then sent them to the springs on Rocky Creek eighteen miles east of Ft. Arbuckle to camp and recuperate. The rag-tag wounded survivors of the Osage raid moved into the safety of the springs on the first of November 1862 into the area that would someday become Platt National Park.