WRITINGS OF 5AM HOUSTON, 1858
174
pays more in a single year in my opinion, than would keep a Texas regiment in the field, who would give us protection and . defend us against an enemy. Give us a regiment of rangers, place this agency where I have desired, and I pledge you my honor, I will lay down my life, if within five years we have not entire peace, if I should live that long. If you will only do it, it is all I ask. I ask for no increased expenditure. We have saved you $60,000 through the integrity of a capable man, and I want him to extend his protecting mantle and his sagacious policy over those Indians that are our enemies, and will remain so until they be- come identified with us as friends, and receive their annuities through our country, and know that we are identical with the other portions of the Union. I may mention a circumstance that once occurred in Texas, some sixty or eighty miles, perhaps, from the Colorado, at the point of the Brazos. The people on the Colorado had war with the Comanches and other tribes in the interior. They were conduct- ing it with great violence, with continual inroads, interchanges of invasions of Indians by the whites and invasions of whites by the Indans. The Indians living on the Brazos had intercourse with the Brazos people and were perfectly friendly. The people from Brazos could go up amongst the Indians and could trade. They were on terms of perfect amity. There was a remarkable man living on the Brazos, a man fond of excitement. The Colo- rado people said, we have to suffer this war and the Brazos people will not help us because the Indians will not attack them; the Indians are their friends. Now, we will go and we will bring war upon the people on the Brazos. So they made up a campaign, caught a party of peaceful Indians and massacred them. [Mr. Johnson of Arkansas warned Houston that time for ad- journment was approaching.] Mr. Houston. I am hoarse, and I can hardly talk. I was observing that they determined on the Colorado to involve the people on the Brazos. They came over. They got a white man who had a remarkable appearance on the Brazos associated with Coloradians. In the conflict or skirmish they had with the Indians, this man was killed. The whites, as I recollect, left him unburied. The Indians discovered that he was the man with whom they had been on terms of amity on the Brazos; and, find- ing him associated with the others, they thought they had been deluded by the people on the Brazos, and instantly made war on
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