Comanches

The Comanches had another incentive for their attacks: a $50 bounty for the return of Black Seminoles, offered by the Texas Indian agent, John Rollins, with tacit approval from Texas Governor Peter H. Bell. In one of the ironies of frontier race-relations, white Texans paid their most feared Indian enemies to capture black fugitives.

As individual runaways, Black Seminoles were principally the concern of those who claimed them as property. This group included Creek and Seminole slavers and the Seminole subagent Marcellus Duval, who posted reward offers for the fugitives in Texas newspapers. Collectively, the Black Seminoles threatened all of the frontier slaveholders. Slaveholders “shuddered,” in the words of historian Ronnie Tyler, “as exaggerated newspaper accounts aroused fears that every Negro in the state would try to join the Seminole.”

Duval, who had helped create the hysteria, tried to use it to his advantage. He wrote Governor Bell and various military officials requesting aid in capturing the fugitives. By November 12, Army officials ordered the commander at Fort Duncan to arrest any blacks attempting to cross south of the Rio Grande.