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Updated: April 30, 2025
Originally a powerful tribe occupying both banks of the lower Rio Grando to the south of the Comanches, in their wars with Texans and Mexicans the Lipans had dwindled until only this handful remained. Three years earlier the entire band had been captured after a desperate fight, and removed by the Mexican authorities to a small reservation five hundred miles southwest of Musquiz.
The most effective work against them was done by a band of about a hundred Seminole-negro half-breeds, to whom the Government had made a grant of four square leagues twenty-five miles west of Musquiz, on the Nacimiento.
Curiously, seven months later, in August, 1883, while on another ranch-hunting trip in Mexico, this time along the eastern slope of the Sierra Madre in northern Chihuahua at least five hundred miles distant from Musquiz, I learned the solution of our puzzle as to whether our last fight in Coahuila was with Lipans or Mexicans.
The manager of the Corralitos Ranch, which I was then engaged in examining, was Adolph Munzenberger. The previous Winter he had lived in Musquiz, as Superintendent of the Cedral Coal Mines. While there, however, I had not met him or his family. One evening at dinner, Mrs. Munzenberger asked me, "Have you ever, perchance, been in Coahuila?"
Just above these narrows, the gorge widened into seven or eight acres of level, park-like, well-grassed benchland, and into this little park we turned our horses loose for the night, for they were too worn to stray. Having made eight or ten miles up the cañon during the afternoon march, we were now within a mile of the summit, and no more than seven miles from Musquiz.
As leading merchant of the town, he soon supplied us with provisions and various articles, and with four saddle and three pack horses for our journey. The next day, while my men were busy arranging our camp outfit, I took train for Monterey to get a letter from General Treviño, commanding the Department of Coahuila, to the comandante of the garrison at Musquiz.
Upon our return we found Manuel gloating over three trophies a hat shot through the side by a ball that had evidently "creased" the wearer's head, an old Spanish spur and a gun scabbard which he seemed to find salve for the burning wound in his side. Beneath us to the north lay Musquiz, in plain sight, a scant six miles distance.
Well recommended to General Treviño from kinsmen of his wife, who was a daughter of General Ord of our army, he gave me a letter to Captain Abran de la Garza, commanding at Musquiz, directing him to furnish me any cavalry escort or supplies I might ask for, and the following day we started north from Lampasos on our one-hundred-mile march to Musquiz.
Even in this town of fifteen hundred people guarded by a troop of cavalry, no one ventured out at night except from the most pressing necessity; and of the seventy killed by them since their return, nearly a third were macheted in the streets of Musquiz during Juan Galan's night raids on the town.
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