THE PATH I FOLLOW
Submitted by Ray Hernandez-Chief Broken Eagle for the Menard County Historical Commision
This story started in a history class in a little school in Texas. Our teacher asked us to pick a Texas Native American tribe and talk about it for an assignment about the tribes of the state. I picked a small tribe named the Tonkawa, mostly peaceful hunter-gatherers that at times practiced ritual cannibalism for strength against their enemies that roamed all over Texas and originated in this area. I got an A+ for my story! It was a story about my family.
Most of my family lived in Menard, but we all started in Ft. McKavett. When I was a boy, in summers and fall my dad and I often visited my grandparents who lived there. One day after about a year since I had visited them, my grandfather placed my grandmother in the Menard Nursing Home for care after she became ill, and he could no longer look after her. I started visiting her more often at the home.
Although she was very old, she was still sharp minded. We both enjoyed my brushing her long salt and pepper hair. Whenever I visited, she began telling me about her tribe that lived around Ft. McKavett, the Tonkawas. OH MY!
She told me about her travels as a little Indian girl and the things she had encountered and the people she had seen. She told me how she learned to survive by watching others older than herself. When she told me these things my Spirit lifted me. I could see a big campfire burning, Indians dancing, eating, chanting, waving their spears, playing their tom-toms.
After a few years, her illness got worse, but before her passing she told me many stories about her life on the frontier. My friends in history class also visited to listen to her stories. She told of how their tribe, under the leadership of Chief Castile, the big chief of the Tonkawas, sought the protection of the soldiers at Ft. McKavett from other aggressive tribes. They scouted and hunted for the soldiers at the fort.
They once helped find and rescue a Lipan woman captured by Comanches, who killed her mother and father. She was taken back to the fort. Chief Castillo took her in. They named her Nis-ass, also giving her the English name Frances.
When the frontier ended and the Comanches were conquered, Ft. McKavett eventually closed. The Tonkawas were re-located to a Reservation along the Chisholm Trail in Oklahoma. My grandmother, however, slipped away from the tribe because she did not want to leave the area, and in hiding, stayed around the closed fort. Here she eventually met my grandpa, who was of Lipan Apache descent. Together they homesteaded the fort. They had seven children born in Barrack #3, all this time not knowing they were planting the seed for me to carry on my heritage for all to know and learn of the Tonkawa family and its part in the history of Menard.
The trail I follow will be long, and the hunting great. I will not know the end until the mountain’s edge. My horse will return, but I won’t. What will return is the history and stories about Menard making its mark in Texas!
“Next Month: Faces From the Past”