The best remembered and most gruesome instigator of the chaos that stained the history of the 1850s in the Erath area, was John R. Baylor. He directed the likes of Peter Garland to harass the reservations until they were moved to Oklahoma. Earlier, Baylor had been appointed Indian agent to the Comanches on the Clear Fork Reserve in 1855. He was soon dismissed for feuding with his supervisor, the conscientious Robert Neighbors. (Neighbors was later murdered by a Baylor follower). Baylor claimed that Indian agents and Comanches were operating a horse-thieving scheme, delivering Texas frontier horses to Kansas. Ranger Captain “Rip” Ford investigated the charges and found that the hoof prints of the “relentless, merciless, and treacherous foe,” as Baylor called them, were shod with iron shoes and the arrows strewn along the way were not even Comanche. Edward Burleson, Jr. reported that Baylor had asked him to help steal a neighbor’s horses and then fabricate a trail to the Comanche Reservation. Others reported that Indian trails were usually hard to follow but after some of these murderous raids, the trails were so distinct that “an Easterner could follow . . . blazed from mutilated bodies to the Clear Fork Reserve.” Baylor’s charges were a supreme act of projection, he was found guilty of the very scheme that he had worked so hard to spread during mass meetings and through his “newspaper,” The Whiteman.