DISASTER AT DOVE CREEK - Cover Page: February 1997 Civil War Times Feature

DISASTERAT DOVECREEK

BY PHILLIP RUTHERFORD

Captain N.W. Gillitine and twenty-three militiamen of the Texas 2d Military District stared into the grave they had just opened. On the bottom lay a two-year-old Indian girl, dead not 48 hours. To Gillitine, she was less a dead child than the final proof he needed for an alarming report he was sending Confederate Colonel James Barry at Fort Belknap. As the soldiers kicked loose sand back into the hole, Gillitine began the communiqué that would soon lead to his own death in a battle unlike any other fought in Texas during the Civil War.

After pushing through bone-chilling cold and marching thirty miles beyond the ruined chimneys of old Fort Phantom Hill, an abandoned west Texas cavalry outpost, Gillitine’s routine scout had struck heavy Indian signs on December 9, 1864. They first discovered a fresh trail nearly 100 yards wide, then found a deserted campsite containing the remnants of 102 dwellings and the debris of a tribe on the move. Gillitine, a veteran Indian fighters, estimated the Indians to number about 500. His men were nervous. They did not like the odds, and they suspected they had been spotted. The commander hurried through his report and gave it and one of the dead child’s moccasins to a courier for delivery to Colonel Barry, asking him to bring a force of Confederate regulars to meet them some miles east of the Indian trail on Paint Creek.

Under a weak winter sun, Gillitine rapidly withdrew toward the Paint, becoming ever more apprehensive: Large, recently-abandoned Indian camps seemed to be everywhere. Now he was scared himself. He decided not to wait for Barry at the creek, but to warn the frontier settlements and make his report directly to Major George Erath, commander of the state militia’s 2d District at Meridian.

At first glance, Gillitine’s alarm seems justified. A concentration of Indians anywhere in west Texas during the Civil War was a cause for real concern. Although the frontier had been progressing steadily westward since the 1830s, it had not only ceased advancing but had actually regressed after U.S. troops surrendered to the Texas militia in 1861. The Kiowas and Commanches took advantage of the military vacuum and raided with impunity, stealing horses, burning the isolated ranches, and killing settlers. In their first communication with the new Confederate government, Texas authorities had pleaded for troops to protect the western settlements. Indeed, hostile Indians were a serious threat.

But in this particular case, Gillitine failed to ask the obvious question: Were the Indians hostile? He was a scout; he could read sign. The Indians could not be a war party, even a large one. The dead baby, the campsite littered with scraped hair, scraps of calico, broken tableware, and pieces of trimmed skin showed that there were women present. Dog droppings were everywhere. The shelters were of a semi-permanent sort used to house entire families and were of an eastern woodland variety rather than that of the plains tribes. Even the trail was fifty to sixty miles west of the most western settlements and led in a west-south-westerly direction, away from the settlements and toward Mexico. That this was a peaceful tribal migration was evident by even the most cursory examination. Gillitine ignored the obvious and set the stage for needless confrontation.

When Gillitine reached Meridian and found Major Erath absent, he made his report to Captain S.S. Totton, a former Confederate officer who had resigned his commission in the East because of wounds. Totton’s militiamen did not like him. He enjoyed hunting deserters just a little too much to suit them. Also, he had tried to teach the independent Texas frontiersmen a bit of discipline, which they did not care for. Texas troops in the regular army paid little attention to military details and orders they did not like; home guard units did strictly as they pleased. In an emergency, Totton could not necessarily count on his men obeying him.