Shadow Riders: The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (The Plainsmen Series) Page 11

  It was now clear to Ranald S. Mackenzie that these horsemen and their families had never simply vanished into the clean, thin air of the Llano Estacado. Instead, the colonel had discovered that the raiders could indeed push into the hostile stretches of the Staked Plain and there find enough water, grass and game on which to survive until such time they chose to venture east, once more to raid the cattlemen and settlers of Texas when it suited them best.

  Now it was late September, and Mackenzie was back in the field with his Fourth Cavalry. Sitting here, waiting in the autumn sun for—

  “Trackers coming in, Colonel.”

  Mackenzie snapped to, watching the two Tonkawa scouts loping in at a good clip, all eight hooves kicking up spurts of dust as the animals carried their riders across the rolling tableland blanketed with waving grass. He tried to wait patiently while the two Indians jabbered with the white civilian scout, speaking with their moving hands.

  “They say they’ve found you something, Colonel,” said the white scout who was past his middle-age and nudging into his fifties.

  “For God’s sake, Grover—spit it out. I didn’t hire you to—”

  “I made it clear from the start, Mackenzie: I didn’t wanna come along on this little soldier parade of yours. Not last May when we ran ourselves out of water and one time had to open our own veins up for something wet to drink. And now … here you are, dragging me back into another goddamned war.”

  Mackenzie sympathized, yet glared at the civilian all the same. “I had no one else and you damn well know that, Grover. No one, that is, who could use enough sign to understand these Tonkawas.”

  Sharp Grover shuddered, glancing at the two trackers. “Bloody cannibals is what them Tonkawas are. Only Injuns I ever knowed what would eat human flesh.”

  Mackenzie squinted into the sun, then put his eyes squarely on the civilian. “We have a problem with time today, Mr. Grover.” Then he sighed, sensing the scout bristle. “Yes, I agree about the Tonkawas. But they are our trackers—and there is no love lost between them and the Comanche or the Kiowa. What have they found?”

  “A big village.”

  “What are they?”

  “From the looks of things, the Tonkawas say they’re Kwahadi.”

  “Comanches,” Mackenzie whispered, his eyes smarting as he once more looked at the sun dipping out of mid-heaven. “Do we have time?”

  “Ain’t that far ahead, Colonel,” Grover replied. “Up on McClellan’s Creek. Just … one thing.”

  “What’s that?” he asked, watching the scout gaze back along Mackenzie’s dusty columns, only four companies strong.

  “It’s a damned big village.”

  “How big?”

  “We counted at least two hundred fifty lodges. There’re more’n that though.”

  “How many warriors that make it?”

  “At least five hundred of fighting age.”

  “I see.” Mackenzie leaned back on the cantle of his saddle and stretched as he considered it: taking some 280 weary men into battle against twice their number. “All right,” he said, turning to his adjutant, “pass the word back that we’re closing on a hostile village. Put out flankers, left and right. I plan on engaging the enemy well before sunset.”

  “We best be getting on, Colonel,” the civilian said.

  “Lead on, Mr. Grover. Lead on.”

  * * *

  He didn’t look like the rest of the Kwahadi Comanche who were his people. A little taller than most, his skin a shade lighter.

  His mother, captured from a stockade of white Tehannas when she was a child, had grown into a fair-skinned, blond-haired young woman who became the wife of a fearless Comanche warrior named Wanderer. Cynthia Ann Parker grew to be every inch a Kwahadi—as was her son, Quanah.

  Almost ten years ago now she had died. Quanah had not been with her. Cynthia Ann Parker had been recaptured by the white man and returned to her people.

  That had always made him laugh, this half-breed son of Wanderer’s. From the lips of a white man Quanah had heard that his mother had refused to become white again, refused to talk, to eat, to do nothing but stare west into the distance of her mind, squeezing shut on the memories.

  Until she died of a broken heart, ten years ago.

  Now Cynthia Ann Parker’s son was a war leader in Mowi’s band camped here in the sheltering timber along a creek east of the Staked Plain. The hunting this fall promised to be as good as ever. Few white hide hunters had ventured south of the Arkansas River, fewer still had ventured near the Llano Estacado where the great herds were retreating from the pressure of the hunters’ big guns to the north.

  It was here that few white men ventured anyway. Here the Comanche was a feudal lord, with no tribe strong enough to challenge them for over 150 years. Almost two hundred years before, the Shoshonean ancestors of the Comanche bands had migrated out of the land now called Wyoming Territory. In sign language the tribe’s symbol for themselves is a gesture made by putting the right arm in front of the body, palm downward, wriggling it back and forth—in the sign of the snake. Another clear indication that the tribe was an offshoot of Shoshonean stock.

  Pressure from the great warrior bands of the Blackfoot confederation and the westward encroaching Lakota warrior societies pushed the Comanche into what became eastern Colorado and western Kansas territories in the 1700s. By the turn of the century the five bands were roaming far and wide, in command of the country from the Arkansas on the north to the Brazos on the south. In fact, in time the Comanche tongue became the language of trade among the various bands that traded horses and robes across the central and southern plains.

  To win this land the newcomers had to drive off not only the Osage, Tonkawa, Apache and Navajo, but the Mexican and white Tehannas as well. All were lesser men to the Comanche, for the tribe called themselves “The People,” and more often referred to themselves as “The Human Beings.”

  Yet it was not the sign language, or the Comanches’ own name for themselves, that proved most notable in their contact with the white man. Instead, it proved the Ute tribe’s name for their fearsome enemies to the south that came into general usage. Simply put, Comanche meant “enemy.” More specifically, the Ute word komantcia meant “enemy who fights me all the time.”

  The war-loving lords of the southern plains: these Comanche.

  By the time the Tehannas won independence from Mexico, the tribes ruled west Texas and beyond, from the Arkansas on the north to the northern provinces of Mexico across the Rio Grande. For more than a century the bands absorbed countless Mexican captives into their bloodline. Make no mistake: this was their land, shared at will with the Kiowas, and God bless the white man who dared enter this wild domain of the intractable spear hunters.

  Some thirty years later, at the end of the white man’s Civil War far to the east, the dozen Comanche bands had confederated themselves into five warrior bands: the Penatekas or “honey eaters”; the Yapparikas or “root eaters”; the Kotsotekas or “buffalo eaters”; the Nokoni or “wanderers”; and the Kwahadi or “antelope eaters.”

  These Kwahadi had never been party to any treaty with the white man, anywhere, at any time. They seldom went near the white man except to steal what was there for the taking, and they most assuredly never ventured onto a reservation and never did take the white man’s handouts and annuities. Most of the time, in fact, the Kwahadi had little to do with the other four bands, preferring instead to stay in their ancient haunts on this grassy prairie of the Staked Plain. They were a people of honor and dignity, preferring to care for themselves as they always had—with gallantry in war, and honor when peace was made with an old enemy.

  In 1865 the old chief Ten Bears and a few others had journeyed east to the city of the Great White Father. And two years later ten of the Comanche chiefs touched the pen to the white man’s peace treaty at Medicine Lodge Creek. Nonetheless, the Kotsotekas and Kwahadi refused to sign and left Kansas without their presents.

  While mo
st of the Comanche did move onto the new reservation carved out of lands ceded from the Choctaws and Chickasaws near Fort Sill in 1867, the Kwahadi remained free on the Staked Plain. But even those who had chosen to live on the reservation by the rules laid down by the white man found they were not safe from the yellowlegs. On Christmas Day 1868, a large band of Comanche waiting for the distribution of the first annuities following the Medicine Lodge Treaty was attacked by Evans’s column of soldiers campaigning out of Fort Union in New Mexico.

  Very little of the annuities were distributed to the reservation Comanche in 1869, in part to recoup losses due to depredations by the free-roaming bands. The policy went a long way to convincing the reservation Indians that it was far better to raid and steal. Only then would the white man be eager to make a new treaty with the warrior bands, and a new treaty meant many new presents. And besides, the white man’s practice of giving a one hundred dollar reward for the return of any white captive only encouraged the Comanche raiders to steal more victims.

  So those who waited on the reservation for help would do just that—wait.

  Quanah Parker would remain here where he continued to live the old life his father had lived, and his father before him.

  All but the Kwahadi came in for rations at Fort Sill Agency in the brutal winter of 1871–72. As soon as the grass turned green on the rolling prairie, the young men and families of the reservation bands slipped away anyway, joining Mowi’s Kwahadi. In fact, some of the young warriors struck the government corral at Fort Sill in a parting gesture, relieving the army of every one of its fifty-four horses and mules.

  The newcomers to the nomadic villages told the Kwahadis of a council the Indian agent had just held at Fort Sill, led by representatives of the five civilized tribes in Indian Territory. They urged the Comanche and free-roaming Kiowa to take up the white man’s road before they would starve, unable to survive on the dwindling buffalo herds.

  Quanah laughed, scornful of such foolishness.

  The buffalo disappear?

  Never. Surely, he had to admit, there were fewer buffalo this summer than before, but nothing to show that the buffalo were disappearing. Besides, the Kwahadi had decided on their own already to take fewer of the shaggy animals this year and next, allowing the buffalo to repopulate in its great numbers. The Comanche, Quanah Parker told the disbelievers, would continue to live in harmony with their brother buffalo, into generations as yet unborn.

  So it was that the war-chief was securing iron arrow points to the rosewood shafts with long, thin strips of sinew Quanah held in his mouth to soften. Each shaft he had deeply and painstakingly grooved so that it would bleed its intended victim—buffalo bull, Tehan settler, or yellowleg soldier.

  At the same time, he watched his young son play on the buffalo hide outside the lodge this warm autumn day when the first stirrings of alarm shot through camp.

  “Soldiers!”

  Quanah bolted to his feet, scattering the arrow shafts and iron tips and sinew and owl feathers he used as fletching because owl feathers kept their shape even dipped in blood. He pushed his infant son into his wife’s hands, ordering her to flee. In one easy movement he lifted them both to the back of the war pony he always kept tethered at the side of their lodge, grazing close at hand. In an instant he was into the lodge, then back again, handing his woman a small rawhide satchel filled with dried meat for their trip.

  She looked down at him, tears coming to her eyes. He did not want her to speak.

  Quanah tried to smile. To make her brave. She must be brave, for she was the wife of a war-chief and the mother of his son.

  “I will see you both again, very soon. It may be with the coming of the new sun. Maybe two suns. But we will be together again. You must believe … and now you must ride!”

  He slapped the spotted pony’s rump, causing it to jump to the side as the woman pulled hard on the buffalo-hair rein.

  After seeing her disappear into the tangle of women and children fleeing from the far side of the village in a noisy cacophony of keening, crying, pony-neighing clamor, Quanah wheeled and snatched up his bow and quiver of arrows, then found a place in his hand for the brass-studded Winchester repeater he had stolen from a white man he scalped along the Pease River.

  The distant gunfire was growing in volume now. And he could see that the white soldiers were led by the Tonkawas. Quanah Parker cursed them—these savages who ate the flesh of other people. Surely these Tonkawas were not human beings.

  Were the white men who followed the Tonkawas not human beings as well?

  Levering the first cartridge into the breech, Quanah squeezed the recurring thought out of his mind—much too painful, for he was half white himself.

  Chapter 10

  September 28, 1872

  Sharp Grover felt too old for all this.

  He waited as his heartbeat slowed, now that the gunfire had died off and the excitement passed in the prairie darkness, like the leave-taking of a prairie thunderstorm here seven miles from the north fork of the Red River. There hadn’t been much fighting to speak of there beneath the starshine. Only a lot of shouting and noise and confusion when the Comanche came screeching in to reclaim their pony herd from the soldiers who had attacked the Kwahadi village.

  His chest had burned with some mysterious fire, hurting him from the moment the Tonkawa trackers had returned with the news that they had located the village on McClellan Creek, near the mouth of Blanco Canyon, that autumn afternoon. Now there were stars twinkling brightly overhead and the sound of hoofbeats and gunfire fading into the distance.

  Sweeping in out of the blackness, the Kwahadi Comanche had come back for their ponies.

  During the short, furious battle earlier that afternoon, Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie ordered three of his companies to bear the brunt of the attack. Grover knew the colonel was planning on holding his fourth company in reserve at the point of attack, but when the charge began and Sharp saw that the young Comanche herders were hurrying the ponies toward the village so the warriors could fight off the assault mounted, Grover advised Mackenzie to send that last company out to cut off the herd. They and the Tonkawas were directed to capture the enemy’s greatest wealth—those ponies.

  “Left front—oblique!” Mackenzie shouted into the arid, crackling prairie air astir with dust.

  Up and down the line of rattling bit-chains and squeaking leather, clattering carbines and nervous, snorting horses, the order was echoed above the remaining three companies. Most of those troopers had only glanced at the company of soldiers riding after the pony herd, for their attention was captured by the screeching, enraged warriors preparing to cover the retreat of their families.

  “We’ve gone and stuck a big stick in this hornets’ nest, Colonel,” Grover had whispered.

  “Now that they’re stirred up, I’ve got no other choice but to swat them!” Mackenzie had replied grimly, then turned to his staff. “Order the charge!”

  His adjutant twisted in the saddle, finding the color bearer and the bugler waiting expectantly. “Bugler—sound the advance … charge!”

  On the dry, autumn wind their red, white and blue guidons snapped furiously as the entire line bolted into motion like a surging ocean tide racing headlong for the shore. And by the time the troopers reached the outskirts of the village, the warriors were pulling back. Mackenzie ordered one of his companies sharply to the right flank to cut off any escape through a narrow cut in the grass-covered hills, the maneuver coming quickly enough to entrap 124 women and children. For the rest of the Kwahadis, the back door had slammed shut after the quarry had flown.

  Their women and children either captured or already racing into the hills, the Comanche fought only long enough to cover the retreat of the rest, then dissipated onto the prairie like ground fog warmed by a spring sun.

  In thirty minutes of furious action, twenty-three Comanche were dead, most of them warriors who had turned back to fight. As the first of the regiment’s supper fires began to glo
w at twilight, the colonel had his report: three troopers killed, another seven wounded, two seriously enough that in all likelihood the surgeon figured they would not make it through till morning.

  And just before moonrise, in the blackest part of night, the Comanche warriors swept down upon the weary, overconfident bivouac, driving off the regiment’s horses and those of the Tonkawas.

  “I’d always been told Indians didn’t attack at night,” the handsome Mackenzie said grumpily, looming out of the darkness toward Grover’s cook-fire. He settled on a cottonwood stump.

  “I never told you that, Colonel. Better you never gamble on what Injuns will do. Soon as you think you got a Injun figured out, he’ll prove you wrong.”

  The soldier regarded his chief of scouts for this expedition. “No, you didn’t, Grover.”

  After several minutes of silence between them, Mackenzie asked, “You really didn’t want to come on this campaign, did you?”

  “Not from the start. I’ve had enough of scouting to fill my craw.”

  “You’re the best I’ve got for now, Grover. The others are just buffalo hunters—nothing like the experience you have. And besides, the money is good, isn’t it?”

  “I’m just a settler now.”

  Mackenzie smiled. “What, you? Raising some corn, maybe a few cows? Waiting for the Comanche to ride down on your place? C’mon, Grover—save your breath and try to convince someone else.”

  “I’m serious. That’s why I came down here, to get away from the army and Injuns up in Kansas. All I figured to do was make a place for myself just across the Red River from I.T.”