Without Quarter: The Wichita Expedition and the Fight on Crooked Creek

``Lords of the South Plains,'' the Comanche Indians were accomplished warriors on horseback who fiercely resisted the expansion of white civilization west of the Mississippi in the 19th century. Their raids from the Santa Fe Trail to Texas settlements led to intervention by the U.S. military. Here Chalfant ( Cheyennes and Horse Soldiers ) examines the army's surprise attack in 1859 on a small Comanche village along Crooked Creek in western Kansas that, resulting in the deaths of 49 Comanches and only two soldiers, contributed to subsequent subjugation of the Comanches in 1875. Chalfant also follows the troops, led by Maj. Earl Van Dorn, on earlier, even more lopsided action on Rush Creek, in what is now Oklahoma. This brief report, emphasizing tactical and military aspects of the confrontations, leaves much of the story unexplained. (Nov.)