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Next
time you fry a stack of pancakes, imagine what it would be like if
your life and the well-being of your children depended on it.
In the spring of 1874, Kate Polly and her husband Ephraim lived with
their young daughters, two-year-old Katie and four-year-old Annie,
in a dugout at the headwaters of Morgan Creek in what is now Hemphill
County. They had been among the first Anglo families to settle
on the High Plains.
Back then, the Panhandle
had yet to see a plow, its sweeping, treeless plains covered in luxuriant
native grasses and vast herds of buffalo
and antelope. A person could see for miles in any direction.
And one morning early that summer, bad trouble loomed on the horizon.
Home alone with the children, Kate busied herself with her daily chores.
Her husband, who had been a hospital steward in the Army, had left
to tend to a sick buffalo hunter and then gather forage to sell to
the military at Camp Supply in Oklahoma. At some point Kate happened
to look outside and saw something not everyone lived to describe:
Hundreds of horseback Indians, all armed with either bows or rifles,
quietly encircling their dugout.
With gestures underscored by bruising pinches, the Indian’s headman
communicated that he and the other Indians wanted food. Sizing up
their number, Kate decided the easiest meal would be pancakes. After
lighting a fire in her wood-burning stove, she donned her apron and
started mixing batter.
One by one, the warriors filed through the Polly home, grabbing handfuls
of steaming pancakes straight off the top of the hot stove and wolfing
them down with great delight. (The Indians apparently did not need
melted butter and maple syrup to enhance their enjoyment of Kate’s
hotcakes.)
Whenever Kate had to stop and mix more batter, the next Indian in
line would pinch her and motion for her to start cooking again. Finally,
near sundown, the family’s 192-pound flour barrel ran empty. Exhausted,
Kate picked up her youngest child and went outside, plopping down
on a cottonwood log. Oblivious to the watching Indians, she opened
her blouse and began nursing her daughter.
Seeing that their meal service had stopped, several of the Indians
came up and pinched her again, pointing toward their stomachs and
the dugout. They wanted more pancakes.
Dead tired, Kate shook her head and ran her finger across her throat
in a universally understood gesture. She had been standing over a
hot stove all day long, flipping hotcakes for hundreds of hostile
Indians. If they wanted to kill her now, fine. At least she wouldn’t
have to wash the dishes.
Impressed by her pluck as well as with her cooking, the Indians mounted
their horses, rounded up the Polly family’s milk cows and rode off
through a canyon to the northwest. The cows later wandered back, but
not the Indians. |
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From
Morgan Creek, the war party rode on to a buffalo hunter’s camp at
a place called Adobe
Walls in what is now Hutchinson
County. At dawn on June 27, they attacked. Aided by Billy
Dixon’s famous mile-long shot that toppled the Indian’s medicine
man from his horse, the buffalo hunters managed to hold off the
warriors and all but two of the defenders lived to tell about it.
The incident triggered the Red
River War, the last stand of the Plains Indians in the Panhandle.
When Ephraim returned from his trip, he found the dugout surrounded
by unshod pony tracks and estimated as many as 700 Indians had descended
on the place in his absence. He reckoned them to have been a mix
of Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne.
When the U.S. cavalry marched into the Panhandle
to deal with the hostile Indians, the Pollys moved back to Fort
Hays in Kansas, which is where they had come from. They returned
to Texas in at the end of the war in
1876 and operated a stagecoach stop on Commission Creek (in present
Lipscomb County
south of what would become Higgins)
along the road from Dodge City, Ks. to newly established
Fort Elliott near Mobeetie
in Wheeler County.
The Pollys stayed there until 1885, when they returned to Hemphill
County. When that county was organized two years later, Ephraim
got elected as the first county judge.
Hemphill County
is where the couple stayed for the rest of their lives. Kate died
at 57 on May 2, 1899 and was buried in Canadian.
Her husband joined her in the same cemetery after his death on April
21, 1905. He had made it to 63.
Fortunately, the story of Kate’s 1874 pancake dinner did not die
with the pioneer couple. Kate’s oldest daughter, by then Mrs. D.M.
Hargrave, had been just old enough to remember the incident and
passed the tale on to her daughter, the future Mrs. E.R. Cloyd.
Mrs. Cloyd, in turn, put the story on paper for inclusion in a history
of Lipscomb County
published in 1976.
Whether Kate Polly could ever stomach cooking pancakes again is
not recorded, but given her grit, she probably did. After all, flapjacks
saved her scalp and probably averted a life of captivity for her
children.
© Mike Cox
"Texas Tales" June
3, 2010 column
See Adobe
Walls
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