The Texan rangers were ordered out by Governor Wood to protect the frontier. The Comanches, the fiercest of the western tribes, were finally defeated by the rangers under Colonel John S. Ford. Their chief, Iron Jacket, was killed in a desperate hand-to-hand combat with Captain S. P. Ross. The chief’s tall form was found, after death, to be encased in a fine coat of scale armor, supposed to have belonged to some Spaniard in the days of the conquest of Mexico. Hence his name, Iron Jacket, and the belief that he could not be killed by the bullet of the white man. Iron Jacket’s little son Noh-po was carried to Waco, where he was raised by the Ross family. During the administration of Governor Pease, the legislature gave the Indians twelve leagues of land and built for them several new trading-posts along the frontier. Later they were all removed to the Indian Territory. Two million dollars were set aside by the state for a permanent school fund; and a quantity of land was voted for the support of the deaf and dumb, the blind, the orphan, and the insane. A new state capitol, a Land Office, and other public buildings were erected at Austin. In 1857 there was an uprising of Texan wagoners against the Mexican cartmen, who were engaged in hauling goods from the coast towns to San Antonio. Mexican labor was much cheaper than any other, and a large number of these teamsters, who were honest and reliable, were employed by merchants and planters. The Texan wagoners, failing to drive out Mexican cartmen by threats, raided them on the roads, drove off their oxen, broke up their carts, and in some instances killed the drivers. Governor Pease, by ordering out a company of rangers to protect the Mexican teamsters, finally put a stop to the “Cart War,” as it was called. No other trouble marred this bright period. “Our inhabitants,” said Governor Pease, in his message to the legislature in 1855, “are prosperous and happy to a degree unexampled in our former history.” 3. DYING RACES. The Indian tribes who possessed the fair land of Texas when the white man first set foot on its soil were rapidly dying out. Some were already extinct, having left hardly a trace to show where their villages and wigwams had once stood. The Cenis, that noble nation which welcomed La Salle and nursed him tenderly when he lay for months “sick of a fever” in their midst, and who sheltered the fleeing fugitives from Fort St. Louis,—these had entirely passed away. So had the kindly Coushattis, the friends of Lallemand’s colonists; and the Orquisacas, the Nacogdoches, and all those gentler tribes by whose help the Franciscan friars had built the earliest missions. Gone were the music-loving Wacoes from the banks of the Brazos; and from the Trinity the corn-growing Tehas.