Comanches

Comanches continued to attack scattered groups of Black Seminole refugees over the ensuing months. A group of 50 to 100 Black Seminoles who had started with Jim Bowlegs eventually made it to Mexico. The rest were either killed, or captured and sold into slavery. In a report from 1852, Captain Randolph B. Marcy described meeting two mutilated Black Seminole girls who were the only survivors of a maroon party that Comanches had put to death. A Delaware trader ransomed the girls from the Comanches. He told Marcy that the Indians had scraped the girls’ skins to see how deep the color went and “burned them with live coals to ascertain whether fire produced the same sensations of pain as with their own people.”

As Capt. Marcy noted in his report, the Comanches had strategic reasons for attacking the black refugees. By the fall of 1850, Comanche bands had skirmished with the Seminole allies stationed in Mexico. It was clear that the blacks and Indians with Coacoochee were going to be enemies of the Comanches, not allies in a pan-Indian confederation.