Dying Thunder
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Maps
Cast of Characters
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Epilogue
The Plainsmen Series by Terry C. Johnston
Critical Praise for Terry C. Johnston’s Plainsmen Series
About the Author
Copyright
this novel is dedicated to
Ed Benz,
Director of the Hutchinson County Museum, who time and again helped make sense of the greatest Indian War on the southern plains
Cast of Characters
Seamus Donegan
Civilians
Rebecca Grover*
Louis Abragon*
Henry Lease
Orlando A. “Brick” Bond
John Fairchild
John Miles—Cheyenne Agent at Darlington Agency
Charley Armitage
Jim Cator
Fred Singer
Prairie Dog Dave
Joe Plummer
Robert M. Wright
Cheyenne Jack
George Bellfield
Richard Coke—Governor of Texas
James Haworth—Kiowa/Comanche Agent
J. Connell—Acting Agent, Anadarko
William Shirley—government trader at Anadarko
Jacob Sandford—wagon-master, Lyman wagon train
James O’Neal—wagon-master, Mackenzie campaign
Dr. J. J. Sturm
Samantha Pike*
Frank Brown
A. C. “Charlie” Myers
Mike McCabe
Charley Rath
Bob Cator
Emanuel Dubbs
Dirty Face Ed Jones
Ned Sewell
Anderson Moore
Blue Billy
Henry Lease
Participants at Adobe Walls Fight
James Langton
Andy “Swede” Johnson
Tom O’Keefe
Hannah Olds
Billy Ogg
William Barclay “Bat” Masterson
Hiram Watson
James “Bermuda” Carlisle
Fred Leonard
Edward Trevor
Charley Armitage
Billy Tyler
Mike McCabe
“Frenchy”
Jacob (Shorty) Scheidler
George Eddy
Sam Smith
William Olds
Billy Dixon
Oscar Sheppard
Mike Welch
James McKinley
James Hanrahan
James Campbell
Seth Hathaway
“Dutch” Henry Born
Billy “Old Man” Keeler
Fred Myers
Issac (Ike) Scheidler
Juan
Texas Rangers at Lost Valley Fight
Major John B. Jones, Commanding, Texas Frontier Battalion
Captain G. W. Stephens
Ed Carnal
George Moore
Billy Glass
Walter Robertson
David Bailey
Lieutenant Hiram Wilson
Lee Corn
Richard Wheeler
William Lewis
Mel Porter
John Holmes
Army
General William T. Sherman
General C. C. Augur
Colonel John W. Davidson
Lieutenant Colonel Thomas H. Neill
Lieutenant Colonel George P. Buell
Major T. M. Anderson
Captain Eugene B. Beaumont
Captain Tullis Tupper
Captain Napoleon B. McLaughlin
Captain Wyllys Lyman
Captain Andrew Bennett
Captain S. T. Norvell
Lieutenant Frank West
Lieutenant Granville Lewis
Lieutenant William A. Thompson
Lieutenant R. H. Pratt
Sergeant Nicholas deArmond
Sergeant Reuben Waller
General Philip H. Sheridan
Colonel Nelson A. Miles
Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie
Major William R. Price
Captain Peter Boehm
Captain Louis H. Carpenter
Captain T. A. Baldwin
Captain Sebastian Gunther
Captain William A. Rafferty
Captain A. S. Keyes
Lieutenant Frank Baldwin
Lieutenant Henry Kingsbury
Lieutenant H. W. Lawton
Sergeant John B. Charlton
Lone Tree Valley Massacre Civilians
killed:
Captain Oliver Frances Short
Captain Abram Cutler
Daniel Short
James Shaw
Allen Shaw
Harry Jones
John Keuchler
survivors:
Captain Luther A. Thrasher
Harry Short
S. B. Crist
German Family Massacre
John German
Rebecca German
Catherine German
Joanna German
Julia German
Lydia German
Stephen German
Sophia German
Adelaide German
Soldiers at Buffalo Wallow Fight
Sergeant Z. T. Woodall
Private John Harrington
Private Peter Rath
Private George W. Smith
Scouts and Interpreters
Sharp Grover
Amos Chapman
Horace Jones
William Schmalsle
Henry W. Strong—Fort Richardson post guide
Johnson (Lipan)
Job (Tonkawa)
Ben Clark
Ira Wing
Lem Wilson
James Butler Hickok
Henry (Tonkawa)
Comanches
Quanah Parker
Tonarcy
Paracoom (Bull Bear)
Wild Horse
Tabananica (Hears the Sunrise)
He Bear
Esa-Que (Wolf Tongue)
Old Man Black Beard
Horse Chief
Sai-Yan (Rag Full of Holes)
Cobay (Wild Mustang)
Big Red Meat
Cheevers
Mow-way
Isatai
White Horse
Ten Bears
Timbo
Horseback
Quirts Quip
Kiowas
Lone Wolf
Tauankia
Mamay-day-te
Mamanti (Swan)
White Shield
Dangerous Eagle
Stumbling Bear
Napawat
Tsentonkee
Loud Talker
Yellow Wolf
Poor Buffalo
Red Otter
Guitain
Long Horn
Big Bow
Howling Wolf
Big Tree
Sun Boy
White Cowbird
Hunting Horse
Lone Young Man
Tehan—white captive
Botalye
Satanta
Cheyenne
Little Robe
Sitting Medicine
Whirlwind
Red Moon
Medicine Water
Stone Eagle
Old Man Otter Belt
White Shield
Hippy
Buffalo Calf Woman (Mochi)
Gray Eyes
Cedar
Long Back
Black Horse
Stone Calf
White Shield
Gray Beard
White Horse
Iron Shirt
White Wolf
Whirlwind
Spots on the Feathers
Elk Shoulder
Yellow Horse
Mad Wolf
Red Eagle
Wolf Robe
Minimic
Arapaho
Yellow Horse
Delaware
Black Beaver
* indicates a fictional character
Prologue
Moon of Deer Shedding Horns, 1873
“There are only six of them, Quanah.”
Quanah Parker nodded, still staring into the distance at the austere ocher and snow-covered ridges. The winter wind nuzzled his long, braided hair this way and that, gently clinking the silver conchos he had woven into that single, glossy queue that hung almost long enough to brush to the back of his war pony. The air was racy with the smell of late autumn’s decay.
“You waited long enough to be sure there were no more inside?” Quanah asked the scout who had ridden back across the snow from the valley scooped out of the landscape southeast of where his Kwahadi warriors waited anxiously this bright, cold winter mid-morning.
“Six.”
“How many of the white man’s log lodges?”
“Two. One in front, the other in back—beside it, a wood pen for his horses and two of the spotted buffalo.”
Quanah turned his nose up at that. Spotted buffalo. The white man’s cattle. Docile and spineless. With less courage than even a buffalo cow. Good only for milking. And he wondered what the white man saw in milk anyway. If the Grandfather Above gave the milk to the spotted buffalo, why then did the white man drink it?
If he was so fond of milk, why didn’t the white man suckle at the breasts of his wife?
It was not as if Quanah had never tasted human milk. He had. Many times. For a moment now, here in the cold of this open land, with the brutal wind moaning out of the west like a death song upon the Llano Estacado, it was good to remember. At times he had thought about taking a second wife, but his first filled his life with all that he needed.
Tonarcy satisfied him even more now than ever before. Mother to their three children, he recalled how her belly had grown swollen with that first child. Thought about how he still made love to her when she grew as big as an antelope doe. How she had never been shy about expressing her hunger for him … the warm softness of her fingers as they encircled his excited flesh, kneading him into a frenzy. How he would roll her over, bringing her up on her hands and knees, that ripe belly of hers and those swollen breasts suspended beneath her as he drove his hard flesh into the moistness of her own warm readiness.
Quanah always answered her rising whimpers with his own growl of enthusiasm in the coupling, for none had ever satisfied him like she.
And after he had exploded inside her, Quanah would suckle at first one, then the other of her warm breasts. It seemed Tonarcy was never without milk from the time of the birth of their first child. And it had always been a warm, sweet treat for Quanah—after making warm, sweet love to his wife. This drinking of her milk from her small, swollen breasts—something that often made him ready to mount her again. And her more than ready to receive him as well.
He had never fully understood her appetite growing when it was he who suckled … yet had never questioned it either.
Quanah shook his head, aware of the cold blast of winter air once more. Something that reminded him that he was not in his warm lodge, wrapped in the furry robes with her.
Perhaps he needed her badly.
He acknowledged that he had been away from their winter village for too long, perhaps. He was thinking on his wife and that sweet, warm and moist rutting he shared with Tonarcy when he should be thinking about those six white men down there in that valley less than two miles away.
Many suns ago he had led a large hunting party away from their village to hunt buffalo. The Comanche were running low on dried meat. With a disappointing fall hunt, Quanah’s Kwahadi band were forced to venture out on the hunt much earlier this winter than they normally would have. More than a moon before, he and the warriors had killed a few white hide hunters they found south of the “dead line,” that place where the government’s treaty-talkers said the white buffalo hunters were not to cross.
But more and more the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne were discovering sign that the white man was venturing farther and farther south of the Arkansas River, come to the hunting ground guaranteed to the Indian as his own. A meaningless waste of time, this talking treaty with the white man, Quanah thought.
Ever since the autumn when the old chiefs had signed that talking paper up on Medicine Lodge Creek six winters before, it seemed the white hunters were crossing south of the Arkansas in greater numbers, crossing south of the Cimarron too. And Quanah feared they would one day soon come to the Canadian River—what he rightly believed was the last stand for his people: that northern boundary of the great Staked Plain, the Llano Estacado of the ancient ones who had marched out of the land far away to the south with their gleaming metal heads, the ones who first brought the horse to the People of the plains.
Besides those few hide hunters they found and killed more than a moon gone now, his scouts had also returned with news of a small group of soldiers marching northwest onto the Staked Plain. Quanah knew that killing the soldiers boded no good for his people. The army would only send more next time. Yet the yellowlegs never found the roaming warriors—instead the army’s Tonkawa guides sought out the Kwahadi villages filled with women and children and the old ones.
Rarely were the young warriors punished by the white soldiers. It was their families who were made to suffer—losing lodges and blankets and robes, clothing and meat and weapons when they ran quickly to flee the white man and the Tonkawa trackers who led the soldiers to the valleys and canyons where the Kwahadi always camped to escape the cold winter winds or to find shade come the first days of the short-grass time.
No, he had told his warriors. We are not going to kill these soldiers. Which had made them howl in angry disappointment.
“But,” he had instructed them, “we will drive them out of Kwahadi land—by burning the prairie!”
For miles in either direction along a north-south line, the horsemen set their firebrands to the tall prairie grass sapped dry by the arid autumn winds. The winter wind did the rest: whipping the sparks into a fury that forced the yellowlegs to turn about and flee to the east for their lives.*
However, in the days that followed, his scouts solemnly reported finding no sign of the sold
ier party. No charred wagon nor burned carcasses.
From time to time this mystery had made Quanah shudder: to think that those white men had merely vanished into the cold air of the Staked Plain. But if they had, he argued with himself, where still would they find food for their animals?
And besides, that great storm that had thundered down upon the plains, riding in on the bone-numbing breath of Winter Man, leaving behind tall snowdrifts and many hungry bellies, would surely have killed the white men so unprepared for such a blizzard.
While he was certain that storm had killed the retreating soldiers, it had also driven the buffalo even farther south. The little ones in Quanah’s village cried with empty bellies. The women and old ones wailed as well. It was only the warriors who could not cry out in the pain of their gnawing hunger—for it remained up to them alone to go in search of meat to lift the specter of starvation from the Kwahadi.
After many days of endless riding to the south, Quanah and his hunters found themselves near the southernmost reaches of the Staked Plain, without having seen any buffalo or antelope. It was as if Winter Man had wiped all before him with his great cleansing, cold breath.
As the days of searching grew into many, they had come across a few old bulls partially buried in a coulee here, frozen in a snowdrift against a ridge there—no longer strong enough to march on with the rest. They were the few left to rot by the passing of the winter storm … like the white hide hunters left the thousands upon thousands to rot in the sun.
Where had the rest of the herds gone? Farther and farther south still—to the land of the summer winds?
If they had, they would likely not return until the short-grass time on the prairies, when the winds blew soft and the Grandfather Above once more told the great buffalo herds to nose around to the north in their great seasonal migrations.
“You wish to attack these white men today?” asked the young warrior sitting beside the Kwahadi chief.
He blinked, his reverie broken and brought back to the now. “Yes.” Quanah turned to his scout. “You tell me there is a hill looking down on the place where the white man built his log lodges?”
The scout dropped quickly to the ground, his buffalo-hide winter moccasins scraping snow aside from a small circle. In the middle he formed up two frozen snowballs. Circling the snowballs on three sides, he mounded up some of the snow he had scraped aside.
“Yes, Quanah,” he said, gazing up into the bright winter sun hung against a winter-pale sky behind his chief. “These are the white man’s two lodges. And these, are the hills.”
“Where are we?”
The scout pointed with the butt of his rifle.
“It is good,” Quanah declared. “We will have the wind in our faces and the sun at our backs as we ride to the top of the hills.”
After dividing his force of more than ten-times-ten warriors into four groups and instructing each in its role, Quanah led them away in silence, moving swiftly across the hard, frozen ground.