The agricultural Anadarko Indians had been forced from their ancestral home in Southeast Texas by land hungry Anglo immigrants, they tried to settle in a number of places but were forced to move each time before they could harvest a corn crop. They were in the Erath area before the Stephen immigrants arrived in 1854, and as skilled mounted fighters, kept the Comanches away from Stephenville in the first years after it was established. The friendship was ruptured, opening the way for Comanche raids after the Red Jack incident in November of 1857. The Anadarko were described as clean-living people who never touched alcohol, [and never lost a battle with the Anglos] but Red Jack, who might have been depressed about something, broke tradition when he visited Stephenville. He left his bow and musket at a tree near the present Tarleton dinning hall and rode to the square (Stephenville was mostly concentrated on the square then) and bought a bottle of whiskey. Red Jack became drunk and rowdy, so the constable was asked to force him to leave, but he was also drunk. Finally Red Jack headed back to where he left his equipment, along the way he passed near the McNeill cabin, (about where Vanderbilt crosses the railroad tracks) and decides to ride his horse into the log cabin. W.W. McNeill, later involved in the massacre of friendly Indians, was not home, but his wife was sick in bed and 16-year old Arch McNeill was terrified. He blocked Red Jack’s entrance to the cabin by holding a percussion revolver at him, but to little effect. So McNeill pulled the trigger on an empty cylinder, popping the cap, in an effort to turn Red Jack away. Red Jack became alarmed and pulled a knife. McNeill then shot him. Red Jack continued to ride toward the post oak where his gear was left, then fell from his horse and died. The residents of Stephenville didn’t know what to do, so they laid the body in state in a store on the square for a few days, before burying him about where Highway 377 crosses the Bosque River. [fifty years later boys dug up the grave and made a quirt handle of the thigh bone, but an old-timer made them put it back]. When the leader of Anadarko, Caddo, and other horticultural Indians, Jose Maria rode into town, looking for Red Jack, the residents gave him his horse and explained what happened. The outnumbered residents fed the warriors a meal {Erath’s Thanksgiving] while trying to mend relations. The Indians said they understood and left, ending their protection of Stephenville from the Comanches. It was two years before the musket and bow were discovered leaning on a post oak. Comanche raids were intense in the area until the early 1870s.