The Warren Wagon Train raid, also known as the Salt Creek massacre, occurred on May 18, 1871. Henry Warren was contracted to haul supplies to forts in the west of Texas, including Fort Richardson, Fort Griffin, and Fort Concho. Traveling down the Jacksboro-Belknap road heading towards Salt Creek Crossing, they encountered William Tecumseh Sherman. Less than an hour after encountering the famous General, they spotted a rather large group of riders ahead. They quickly realized that these were Native American warriors, probably Kiowa and/or Comanche.
The corn train quickly shifted into a ring formation, and all the mules were put into the center of the ring. The warriors destroyed the corn supplies, killing and mutilating seven of the wagoner's bodies. Five men managed to escape, one of which was Thomas Brazeale who reached Fort Richardson on foot, some 20 miles away. As soon as Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie learned of the incident, he informed Sherman. Sherman and Mackenzie searched for the warriors responsible for the raid. In the end, notwithstanding the intervention of Guipago (Lone Wolf), well equipped with loaded rifles and revolvers and ready to fight, three of the war leaders involved were arrested at Fort Sill: Satanta (White Bear), Satank (Sitting Bear), and Ado-ete (Big Tree). Satank attempted to escape and was killed while traveling to Fort Richardson for trial. The other two were tried and convicted of murder.
Many of the Native American warriors came from the Fort Sill Reservation in Indian Territory, confident that they could terrorize Texas and escape to safety across the Red River, which was another legal jurisdiction. The ambush had been planned by a large band of Kiowa warriors, approximately 180 warriors, under the leadership of Satanta, Satank, Mamanti, Big Tree, White Horse, Fast Bear, Yellow Wolf, and Eagle Heart. Hidden in a thicket of scrub in the Salt Creek Prairie, they observed the slow approach of General William Tecumseh Sherman's inspection retinue of approx 18 men. Although the Kiowa war party outnumbered the US Army troop by ten to one, they did not attack, maybe because the Army troopers would have inflicted too many casualties.
The Kiowa story is that the previous night, Mamanti ("He Walking-above"), the shaman, had prophesied that this small party would be followed by a larger one with more plunder for the taking. The braves were rewarded three hours later when 10 mule-drawn wagons filled with army corn and fodder trundled into view. The Kiowa attacked and quickly overwhelmed this convoy. Seven muleskinners were killed, while five managed to escape.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
This page covers Salt Creek Prairie Massacre — Warren Wagon Train (May 18, 1871). A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Wikipedia source.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.