JULY 28:

1642 Montreal Quebec Priest baptizes a 4 year old Algonquin boy.

1633 Quebec Quebec Flotilla of 140 Huron canoes arrives at Quebec.

1615 French River Ontario Samuel de Champlain arrives at Lake Huron on his way to Huronia.

July 28, 1756:  Today, Delaware Chief Teedyuscung, and 14 other chiefs, meet with Pennsylvania Governor Robert Morris, and other Pennsylvania leaders at Easton, Pennsylvania to discuss the Delaware uprising. Teedyuscung agrees to visit the warring members of the tribe, and to try to end the fighting.

July 28, 1862: Fort Bowie is established in the Apache Pass, in southeastern Arizona, by members of Brigadier General James Charlatan's California volunteers.

July 28, 1872: Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie and twelve officers and 272 enlisted men begin an extended patrol of the area surrounding the Texas Panhandle. They include twenty Tonkawa scouts. They are looking for renegade Indians. One of their engagements is called the "Battle of the North Fork of the Red River." It happens on September 29, 1872
 

BACKGROUND:
 

Excerpt from
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/TT/bmt68.html
 

The Tonkawa Indians were actually a group of independent bands, the Tonkawas proper, the Mayeyes, and a number of smaller groups that may have included the Cava, Cantona, Emet, Sana, Toho, and Tohaha Indians. The remnants of these tribes united in the early eighteenth century in the region of Central Texas. The Yojaune Indians, who were actually a Wichita tribe, were absorbed by the Tonkawas in the second half of the eighteenth century. The name Tonkawa is a Waco term meaning "they all stay together." Traditionally, the Tonkawas have been regarded as an old Texas tribe, but new evidence suggests that the Tonkawas migrated from the high plains as late as the seventeenth century. In addition, the Tonkawas proper might have been only a small element of the fragmented tribes that migrated to Texas.

Although this might explain the apparent lack of connection between the Tonkawa language and any of the surrounding tribes, it also raises the question of classifying components traditionally regarded as Tonkawan. Little is known of the social or political organization of the Tonkawas prior to their consolidation. Each band apparently elected a chief to lead them, and it is probable that during wars additional war leaders were chosen. After consolidation, the Tonkawas chose a tribal head chief. Maternal clans were the basic unit in Tonkawa society. Children became members of their mothers' clans, and men lived with their spouses' clans. Because each clan saw itself as a family unit, marriage within the clan was discouraged.

Anthropologists term the Tonkawa kinship arrangement as a Crow system of nomenclature, which stemmed from the brotherhood within each clan. As in many other Indian tribes, the Tonkawas practiced levirate, whereby a brother would marry his deceased brother's wife. If the deceased had no brother, another male from his clan, usually the son of a sister, would perform the duty. As a result, any such male was designated a "brother," regardless of the generational difference. The children in that situation would logically call both their biological father and his "brothers" "father." The same kinship relation carried over to the female side of the family where sororate, the practice in which a sister married her dead sister's husband, was practiced. Following this same pattern, when a man died his property was distributed among his siblings' children, rather than to his own in order that the property might stay within his clan. Orphans became wards of the mother's clan. The system was designed to insure that widows and orphans would be cared for.
 

Jeffrey D. Carlisle
 

*****
 

>From http://users.ricc.net/ramrod/gazette_nov.htm
 

Ranald Slidell Mackenzie was born in New York City, July 27, 1840, to Alexander Slidell and Catherine (Robinson) Mackenzie. Ranald had two brothers-Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, Jr., a lieutenant commander in the Navy, and Rear Admiral Morris Robinson Slidell Mackenzie; and a sister, Harriet Slidell Mackenzie. He was educated at Williams College and at the United States Military Academy, where he graduated head of his class on June 12, 1862. Coincidentally, Mackenzie's West Point student number follows that of George Armstrong Custer's, who graduated last in his class the year before.

Commissioned a second lieutenant and assigned to the Army of the Potomac, Mackenzie fought in eight major battles in the subsequent two years a nd was promoted to the rank of colonel. The year after that, in the Shenandoah valley, he commanded troops in five battles. After the final campaign against Robert E. Lee he was commissioned without pay to the rank of major general. At Appomattox he took custody of surrendered Confederate property and then commanded the cavalry in the Department of Virginia. By the end of the Civil War he had garnered seven brevets (commissions without pay) and was wounded six times. Undoubtedly, among those wounds was the one that disfigured and took two of his fingers, from which he later earned the nickname, "Bad Hand", by the Comanche he pursued.

Ranald accepted an appointment as colonel of a newly formed black regiment, the Forty-first Infantry in 1867. It was reorganized two years later as part of the Twenty-fourth United States Infantry, later known as "Buffalo Soldiers", whose headquarters were at Fort Brown, Fort Clark Springs, and later at Fort McKavett.

On February 25, 1871, Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie was given command of the Fourth United States Cavalry at Fort Concho with orders to put a stop to Comanche and Kiowa raids throughout the Texas frontier. Within a month he had moved its headquarters to Fort Richardson and by that summer, began a series of expeditions into the uncharted Panhandle and Llano Estacado in an effort to drive the Comanche and Kiowa onto reservations or "agencies".

In August, he led an expedition into Oklahoma against Comanche and Kiowa who had left the agency but was later ordered to return to Texas. From Fort Concho, Col. Mackenzia took eight companies of the Fourth Cavalry and two companies of the Eleventh Infantry, about 600 men, in search of Quohada Comanche, who had refused to go to the reservation and, "were plundering the Texas frontier". The Quohada were led by Parraocoom (Bull Bear) and Quanah Parker, who proved to be very illusive to the Buffalo Soldiers and their assiduous commander.

Ranald was wounded by the Quohada warriors on October 15th, in the "Battle of Blanco Canyon". For the next three years he pursued the Comanche band and Quanah, and led operations against almost every other band of Indian occupying the Texas frontier, to include the Kickapoo, Apache, Kiowa and Cheyenne; as well as Mexican renegades and Camancheros.