The sun had barely cleared the horizon over the Red River when the first screams tore through the quiet of the Texas frontier, signaling the start of a reign of terror that would leave a trail of blood, ash, and stolen children across Montague County in 1867 and 1868. The Comanche and Kiowa were not merely raiding; they were systematically dismantling the fragile outposts of civilization, and the settlers of North Texas were caught in a vice of violence that spared neither the young nor the brave. From the brutal slaughter of two teenage boys hunting a stray pony to the capture of little girls who would vanish into the western plains for years, the accounts preserved in Fanny Potter’s 1913 history paint a harrowing picture of a land where death rode bareback and unannounced.

The first tragedy unfolded on a Sunday morning in the fall of 1867, a day meant for rest, not mourning. Bright Green and Billy Bailey, both just eighteen, set out from their homes near Sandy Creek to find a pony that had wandered off. Their conversation likely drifted to fishing holes and wild grapes, but their eyes were fixed on the tree line, knowing full well that the Comancheria lay just across the river.

They never made it back. A band of eleven Indians materialized from the brush without warning, and the boys ran for their lives. Green was driven into the creek bed, struck by three arrows—two in the breast, one in the back—and left face-down in the water with his pockets turned inside out.

Bailey was not so fortunate. He stumbled fifty yards, wounded and bleeding, before the warriors caught him. The lance thrust through his arm was only the beginning; he was shot nineteen times, scalped, and tortured in a manner that the men who found him could barely describe.

The bodies were too heavy to carry back in the fading light, and the threat of ambush was too real, so the boys lay in the open overnight until kind hands bore them home the next morning. They were buried together in the same grave, the first souls laid to rest in the Selma graveyard.

The raids did not stop with the fall of the leaves. On January 5, 1868, a day the settlers called Old Christmas, a massive Kiowa war party led by Chief Big Tree crossed into the county with a single purpose: destruction. The first victim was John Leatherwood, cut down on his way home at Clear Creek, scalped and left where he fell.

The warriors then moved like a storm, burning Charles McCracken’s house to the ground—a fire fueled by rage after they discovered an Indian scalp hanging inside. They swept through the Williams home, stealing what they pleased, and then descended on the Carlton family. Miss Perily Carlton was captured and thrown onto a horse, but fate intervened during a skirmish with white settlers that night.

In the chaos, she slipped from her mount and buried herself in the tall grass, lying motionless until the warriors rode on, believing she was still with them. She walked a mile in the dark to the home of Dr. Davidson, saved by her own nerve.

But the same raid brought unspeakable horror to the Shagog family. Mrs. Shagog was home alone with her baby, two Manasco children, and a little Black boy when the warriors attacked without warning.

They killed the infant in front of its mother, a brutal act designed to break her spirit, and then took her and the children captive. Her father, Mr. Manasco, was racing to protect them when he too was cut down by the same band.

The captives were driven north toward Gainesville as the weather turned vicious. A blue norther swept across the prairie, bringing snow and biting cold that froze the blood of the raiders themselves. Believing Mrs.

Shagog had succumbed to the elements, the Indians threw her body to the ground and rode on, leaving her for dead. She wrapped herself in a buffalo robe that fell with her and lay on the frozen earth until dawn, when the sound of roosters led her to the home of Sam Doss. The children were not so lucky; their small bodies were discovered the following spring by cowboys, frozen solid on the open prairie.

The same relentless band struck again the next morning near Forestburg, where Tom Fitzpatrick and his wife Alice were fleeing to the home of Arthur Parkhill for protection. They never made it. The warriors surprised the small party, killing and scalping both men on the spot.

Alice, clutching her three children on horseback, spurred the animal toward the Parkhill enclosure, her heart pounding as the gate came into view. She was within feet of safety when the warriors closed in. They killed her, murdered the baby, and carried off the two little girls.

For a long time, nothing was known of their fate. Eventually, they were found living among the Indians of Western Kansas, and Congress appropriated $10,000 for their education and maintenance. The raid ended only when the warriors crossed the Red River back into Indian Territory, leaving behind a county in mourning and a legacy of fear that would last generations.

The summer of 1868 brought no respite. Levi Perryman, a former sheriff, was returning from an eight-day cow hunt when his wife Josie met him with terror in her eyes. The Indians were attacking the McKelroy family.

Perryman rode out alone, a magnificent horse beneath him, and reached the McKelroy home to find the parents screaming that their children, Nat and Dora Ellen, had been stolen. He gave chase, catching sight of the warriors in the distance, but took the wrong trail and lost them. The children had been out gathering dewberries with a young man named John Lackey, who was killed in the attack.

The McKelroy children were held captive for months before their parents, through the government, finally secured their return. Perryman spent the rest of the day riding down the Willowwala Valley, warning every family he could find that the Indians were in the country.

The attacks were not always successful, and the settlers learned to fight back with desperate courage. In the fall of 1868, the Jackson and Willingham families were living together for protection when a band of Indians approached their well at four in the afternoon. The men sent the little Jackson boy racing toward the house on horseback, and he was thrown over the fence into the yard by the sudden stop, saved by a miracle.

The men barricaded the houses, hiding the women and children under the puncheon floor, and prepared for a siege. The Indians, for reasons unknown, chose not to attack the house. Instead, they stole every horse, killed the hogs, shot the cattle, and burned the wheat and oat stacks before riding off with their loot.

It was a hollow victory for the settlers, who watched their livelihood go up in smoke but kept their lives.

One of the most gallant stands came at Forestburg, where a company of rangers had just returned from church services. A band of Indians had stolen the company’s horses, and Alec Frasier, a remarkably handsome young man, jumped on his horse without a saddle and charged the warriors, recovering all but two of the finest animals. Lieutenant Van Roberts ordered his men to pursue, and they caught up with the Indians in a grove of live oaks where the town now stands.

When Roberts and Frasier dismounted to fight, the rest of the rangers fled, leaving the two men to face the warriors alone. They fought until their ammunition was gone. Roberts tried to mount his high-spirited blue roan, but an Indian waved a blanket in the horse’s face, spooking it, while another shot him with arrows.

The horse bolted, leaving Roberts on the ground. He drew his Bowie knife and charged the Indian who tried to jump on him, running him down three times before he collapsed from loss of blood. The Indian scalped him alive, taking only a small patch from the top of his head—a mark of respect for a brave man.

Frasier escaped to a vacant store, where eighteen arrows were later found embedded in the walls, none having found their mark. The lieutenant’s brothers, sent to fetch water from a spring, narrowly escaped the same warriors, and their father shot one of the Indians before the band fled.

The winter of March 1867 had been one of the coldest ever recorded, with snow on the ground for more than twenty days and thousands of cattle perishing. Even in that brutal cold, the Indians came on foot. They pulled the stoppers from barrels of sorghum molasses at Jimmy Waller’s mill, letting the sweet syrup run into Dye Creek, and stole horses from John Carter’s stable.

Dan Brunson and John Short were on their way to mill with oxen when they were overtaken by a band of warriors. Brunson rode for weapons, but when he returned, he found the Indians had surrounded the wagon, poured out the corn and wheat, and taken everything of value. A party of men from Clear Creek joined the chase, following the Indians to the breaks of the Red River.

The warriors sat down to eat, thinking they were safe, but the white men surprised them. A gun went off accidentally, giving the alarm, and a running fight ensued that lasted until after dark. Not a white man was wounded, though five horses were hit, and the Indians withdrew into the night.

These raids, spanning Montague, Cooke, Grayson, Wise, and Denton counties, were not random acts of violence but a coordinated campaign to push the settlers back across the river. The Comanche and Kiowa, driven from their ancestral lands, fought with a ferocity born of desperation. The settlers, for their part, built no forts and waited for no cavalry; they defended their homes with rifles, Bowie knives, and sheer will.

The stories recorded by Fanny Potter in 1913 are a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming odds. The graves at Selma and Elm Creek hold the bodies of boys and men who died too young, and the prairie winds still whisper the names of the children who were taken and never returned. The frontier was a brutal place, and the price of settlement was paid in blood.