Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (14 page)

Chapter 9

May–September 1873

The sun hung halfway into the western sky, off the left shoulder of Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie this late September day.

He hated this waiting. Almost anything would be better than waiting.

For a proven, blooded warrior experienced in fighting Confederates, the past twenty months had been something altogether different. Since December of 1870 he and his Fourth Cavalry had never been given anything to really sink their teeth into here on the plains of west Texas. Instead, they had only suffered through two long-ranging expeditions stalking after the warrior bands who repeatedly struck east from the long-held security of the Staked Plain.

That's the way it had been when Mackenzie went stalking after the bunch who had jumped Henry Warren's supply train out of Weatherford, Texas, in May of '71. Then just this past May of '73, the commander of the Department of Texas, General C. C. Augur, had ordered the Fourth back into the field to make an attempt at breaking up the Indian-Mexican trade long ago established but of late making new inroads into relieving Texas settlers of both horse and cattle herds.

For some time the Mexicans west of the forbidding and austere Staked Plain supplied powder, bullets, guns and whiskey to the Indians, in exchange for those horses and cattle stolen from the white man's ranches.

Just the past spring, the army had stumbled onto a small group of the Mexican traders before they could recross the Staked Plain, their Llano Estacado, with their ill-won booty. In a running battle, one of the wounded Mexicans had been captured. Upon reaching Fort Richardson, the prisoner had decided to talk not only about his wealthy employer, but the various trading stations along the lengthy route home, and the trading operation as a whole.

Mackenzie, as well as the rest of those who interrogated the Mexican, was astounded to learn there was not only a trail across what the army believed was a trackless region, but there was in fact a well-established wagon road, with good grass and water for every night's stop made with the stock stolen from Texans' ranches. What a scheme it had been, Mackenzie brooded: bringing in huge profits for the wealthy Mexicans who hired their own private armies to bribe the warrior bands into stealing the cattle and horses. Yet it was something the Kiowa and Comanche themselves did gladly. Besides the whiskey and weapons, there was always the added lure of lifting white scalps during the raids.

For too long now the army had turned what amounted to be a deaf ear to the complaints of the Texas stockmen. Up until now, post commanders had believed the reports were exaggerated. No one could take that many animals across that hostile a piece of country and survive, season after season.

But suddenly, with the admissions of the Mexican thief, the army had decided it would do what it could to strike back at the raiders. After all, the soldiers had been stationed here to protect the Texas frontier. It was time, General Augur had decided, to do some protecting.

Yet what had started as an auspicious undertaking last May turned out to be another frustrating goose chase for the Fourth Cavalry. Out of rations, adrift on the trackless tableland of the Staked Plain, Mackenzie found himself forced to turn back. While he did not locate the Comanches and Kiowas adrift in that great sea of grass, Mackenzie nonetheless did go a long way to dispelling the belief that the Llano Estacado was completely uninhabitable. The colonel and his campaigners had in fact laid eyes on the headwaters of the three important water sources of those prairie raiders: the Brazos, the Pease and the Wichita.

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 most 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.