Black Seminoles made mark on history
COMSTOCK — When he’s in Marathon, my four-legged pal Buddy (Holley) looks forward to morning runs at Post Park south of town. (Ducks on the pond and gopher dens in the picnic area make for an exciting morning.) Driving down to the park one morning last week, I glanced, as usual, toward a nondescript hill off to the left, where a chain-link enclosure around a gravesite near the top looks out of place among the rocks and brush.
This time I gave in to impulse. Pulling off the road and leaving Buddy in the car, I slithered like a rattler under the bottom strand of barbed wire and trudged through thorny bushes and prickly pear to the top of the rockstrewn hill. Catching my breath — and hoping landowner Susan Combs didn’t have a remote camera pointed in my direction — I surveyed the timeless view a fellow named Blas Payne had so often appreciated during his long life: striated rocks in shades of
ochre angling upward like a ship’s prow, rugged hills fading into blue-gray mountains, miles and miles of empty, brush-covered ranching country. The enclosure where I stood protected two gravestones: CATARINA B. PAYNE, 19041996 and BLAS M. PAYNE, 1901-1990.
Information about Catarina Payne is hard to come by, but her husband is a Big Bend legend. A cowboy, a horse handler and for years a foreman on the Combs Ranch, Blas Payne was heir to a grand tradition in the Southwest, one that needs to be better known. He was a Black Seminole.
The Black Seminole story stretches back to the early 1700s, when the jungle wilderness and malariaridden swamps of Spanish Florida became a refuge for runaway slaves from rice plantations in southern Georgia and South Carolina. They found protection by settling near the Seminoles, a confederation of tribes driven south by inexorable European settlement. Intermingling with the Indians, they became known as Black Seminoles.
For more than a century they lived in independent communities with their own leaders. They owned property, carried arms for self-defense and were often military allies with their Seminole neighbors. All was well until Gen. Andrew Jackson invaded their semitropical fastness.
In 1818, the future president led an American army into Florida to claim it for the United States. The Seminoles, Indian and Black, fought fiercely, but eventually, the might of the American military prevailed. In 1842, the Army forced the Black Seminoles and their Indian allies on a punishing trek to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).
In Oklahoma, the federal government placed them under the authority of the slave-holding Creek tribe. They also were at the mercy of white slave traders. In 1850, a group of Black Seminoles and Seminole Indians fed up with their plight escaped south across dangerous slave-holding Texas and into Mexico, where slavery had been outlawed years earlier. The Mexican government gave them a land grant near Musquiz, a village southwest of Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras, in exchange for protecting the Coahuila-Texas border against Apache and Comanche raids.
As in Florida, their settlement became a haven for runaway American slaves. That irritated the Texas Rangers. In 1855, a heavily armed Ranger band splashed across the Rio Grande intent on routing the Seminoles. The blacks and Indians drove them back into Texas. Many of the Indian Seminoles eventually returned to Oklahoma, but the Black Seminoles remained in Mexico, often forced to fight to protect their community from Comanche and Apache raiders.
After the Civil War, the American military desperately needed experienced Indian scouts, translators and trackers. In 1870, the U.S. Cavalry enticed some of the Black Seminoles — Mexicans called them los Moscogos — to return and join the Army, promising them cavalry pay, rations, horses and land for farming. At least 150 of them showed up for duty at Fort Duncan, near Eagle Pass, where they were officially recognized as the “Seminole Negro Indian Scouts.”
Moving to Fort Clark near Brackettville, they engaged the Comanche in numerous skirmishes across West Texas and into northern Mexico. That’s how Isaac Payne, a Blas Payne forebear, found himself fighting for his life in the spring of 1875.
Payne, a trumpeter, and two other Black Seminole scouts, Sgt. John Ward and Private Pompey Factor, were under the command of a 32-year-old white lieutenant named John L. Bullis, a New York Quaker who had commanded U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War. The quartet had tracked down a band of 40 or so Comanches driving a herd of 75 stolen horses toward the Rio Grande. Engaging the band, Bullis ordered his men to spread out among the rocks, hoping to trick the heavily armed Comanches into thinking they were fighting a force larger than four men.
It worked for about 45 minutes, but when their 40-to-4 ruse was discovered, Bullis and his men made a run for it. The scouts leaped astride their horses and galloped away, but Bullis’ horse threw him. Ward happened to glance back, where he saw the lieutenant standing alone and apparently uninjured, firing his carbine at the fast-closing, Winchesterarmed Comanches. Alerting his comrades, Ward headed back to help Bullis. Payne and Factor joined him, providing cover fire while Ward locked arms with Bullis and swung him up behind.
“We were at last compelled to give way, as they were about to get around us, and cut us off from our horses,” Bullis wrote in his report. “I regret to say that I lost mine with saddle and bridle complete, and just saved my hair by jumping on my sergeant’s horse back of him.”
For their bravery, Payne, Ward and Factor received the Congressional Medal of Honor. (Another Black Seminole, Private Adam Payne, received the Medal of Honor for gallantry in the Red River War.)
The skirmish took place near the confluence of the Pecos River and the Rio Grande, in a deep defile known today as Seminole Canyon. The canyon is also home to Seminole Canyon State Park near the village of Comstock. The park’s primary mission is to protect spectacular pictographs drawn on canyon walls eons ago.
Fort Clark, home to the Black Seminoles, is 60 miles east of Seminole Canyon. When their unit disbanded in 1914, the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts were promised land at the fort, but the federal government reneged. The Black Seminoles faded into history, although the Seminole Indian Scout Cemetery Association, based in Brackettville, has worked tirelessly through the years to keep their story alive. The four Medal of Honor winners are interred in the Seminole Indian Scout Cemetery south of Brackettville.
Today their descendants live in Brackettville, Del Rio, Eagle Pass and other West Texas communities, as well as across the river in Musquiz and elsewhere. Blas Payne spent his whole life around Marathon, working for 70 years on the Combs family ranch. When I wrote about him a few years ago, I interviewed Susan Combs, then the state comptroller, who had known him since she was a little girl.
“He was super-good with horses, super-good with cattle,” she told me. She and her husband named their middle son after him.
The late Lonn Taylor, a former Smithsonian Museum historian who lived in Fort Davis, told me about an East Coast scholar who was convinced that Payne was buried on the hilltop near Post Park, because the local cemetery wouldn’t take a Black man. Taylor knew otherwise. He knew that Payne had asked permission from the Combs family years before he died. He wanted to be buried on the east side of the hill, he told them. He wanted to see the sun come up.