Battle of Little Robe Creek - Aftermath

Aftermath

The Tonkawa warriors with the Rangers celebrated the victory by decorating their horses with the bloody hands and feet of their Comanche victims as trophies. They also had containers with various other body parts which they cut off and ate in a "dreadful feast." “The Rangers noted most of their dead foes were missing various body parts, and the Tonkawa had bloody containers, portending a dreadful victory feast that evening.”.” The coat of mail worn by old Iron Jacket covered his dead body "like shingles on a roof." The Rangers cut up the mail and divided the pieces as trophies.

Ford triumphantly returned to Texas claiming he had killed 76 Indians, and captured 16. Ford requested that the Governor immediately empower him to raise additional levies of Rangers, and return north at once to continue the campaign in the heart of the Comancheria. However, Runnels had exhausted the entire budget for defense for the year, and disbanded the Rangers. The long-term impact of this battle, and campaign, however, was dramatic. For the first time, Texan or American forces had penetrated to the heart of the Comancheria, attacked Comanche villages, with impunity, and successfully made it home. The U.S. Army would adopt many of Ford’s tactics – including his attacking women and children as well as warriors, and destroying their food supply, the Buffalo. in their campaigns against the plains tribes after the Civil War.

In the immediate future, this battle would represent the shape of things to come in the Civil War: it marked the first time that a state openly defied the federal government, raised its own military, and marched into federal territory in specific and open defiance of federal law and treaties.