'The average Indian could ride rings around the average mounted
white. Worse yet, the American weapons were not designed for horse
combat. The Kentucky rifle and the tomahawk were woodland weapons. The
long flintlocks (percussion caps began to come into use about 1820)
were awkward tools in the saddle; they lost their accuracy, and could
not be recharged easily. In the time it took a frontiersman to reload,
a Comanche could charge three hundred yards and shoot twenty
arrows. In a country without trees to hide behind, the whites were
outclassed.
'When whites engaged Comanches, they had to dismount and make a
stand, firing some of their pieces to hold the Indians off, but
always keeping some loaded rifles in reserve against a charge by
what was the best light cavalry in the 19th-century world. Many
Americans were saved, not by the stubbornness of their defense but
by the fact that it was against Indian sensibilities and tactics to
push an attack home. The best the Americans could achieve with their
single-shot rifles was a standoff. If they ran, however, they were
doomed, unless they quickly found timber or rock. Frontier manuals
and books were emphatic, in detail, against trying to outrun
Comanches; when the enemy fled, it brought out the hunting and
killing instinct, and the Comanche was splendidly armed, with the
bow, to kill fleeing horsemen during pursuit.'