Howdy and welcome to Wise About Texas, the Texas History Podcast. I'm your host Ken Wise. Thank you so much for

tuning in today and thank you for loving Texas. Today we're going to

continue with part two of the story of the Wagon Warren Wagon Train raid and the subsequent criminal

trial of some Kiowa Indian chiefs. So let's go right back to the Texas

frontier in 1871 and get wise about Texas.

All right, we need to start with a brief recap of Part 1, but I encourage you if you haven't listened to Part 1, go back and listen to it. It's called People, Places and Policy and in part one I talked about the

conditions on the Texas frontier west of Fort Worth. In short they were very dangerous.

The Civil War had provided the Plains Indians tribes and the ones

we're concerned with are mainly the Kiowa tribe, also the Comanches, and they provided those tribes

with a great opportunity to push the frontier of settlement in Texas back

toward the east, which they did.

And during reconstruction, the United States government was again responsible for security on the frontier.

And Ulysses Grant had instituted what we call the peace policy or the Quaker peace policy

where he had placed Indian agents, most of them Quakers, but all of them,

religious people, with various tribes.

And they were supposed to model peacefulness, civilization, etc.

They were also in charge of administering a massive government welfare program

where the U.S. government would provide rations and annuity goods, farming tools, food blankets, that kind of thing to the Indian tribes.

And in exchange, the Indians promise to stay on the reservations and not raid.

Of course, as you might guess, that wasn't working very well. I introduce you to

Laurie Tatum, who was the Quaker Indian agent for the Kiowa and Comanche. He was based at Fort Sill or near Fort Sill and the problem

Laurie Tatum was having was the Kiowa's and the Comanches were very actively raiding

...