Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (2 page)

And in this case, we're talking about two tribes who had been driven and harried and pushed to their limit for at least two centuries before the era of the great buffalo wars. Here was the place. And both the Kiowa and the Kwahadi Comanche understood this to be their clarion call to a final, desperate last stand—to defend at all costs their dying way of life.

This, even though by the time the buffalo hunters were done slashing their way through the great herds, both the Kiowa and the Kwahadi were no more than mere shadows of their previous greatness: hence our title,
Shadow Riders.

Perhaps I should remind those who have been diligent in reading the previous five volumes in the Plainsmen Series, along with informing those readers for the first time joining up with Seamus Donegan in what will be his twenty-four-year odyssey across the length and breadth of the American West, that above all, this is the story of a time and characters largely forgotten what with the pace of our supremely comfortable, relatively untroubled lives. I do so hope I have been able to convey with my story what must have been the very real pathos, the genuine human drama and conflict and passions of men colliding at destiny's siren call.

But I do want the newcomer to this iron-assed trail ride Seamus Donegan takes us on to know of my keen desire to go beyond the mere
retelling
of history. As a historical novelist, it is up to me to add something that history and historians alone cannot convey to the reader: that imminently warm, throbbing pulse that not only makes the reader a spectator to the drama, but for once and all time allows the reader to truly
relive
a moment in history.

The fevered romance of that quarter century is what I believe I have recaptured for you here in the Plainsmen Series—a fever that made the Indian Wars a time unequaled in the annals of man, when a vast frontier was wrenched from its inhabitants, in a struggle as rich in drama and pathos as any the world has known.

There is no richer story than to peer like voyeurs into the lives of people under the stress of life and death. Wondering, as only a reader in the safety of your easy chair can, if you would have measured up.

Important too is that the reader realize he's
reliving
the story of real people. In the cast of characters that accompanies the front material for this novel, a few of the names appear with an asterisk. They, and only they, are fictional characters, brought in by me for the use of a subplot that flows along elbow to elbow and stirrup to stirrup with the main storyline—the buffalo war of the great southern plains. Remember that all the rest were real, breathing human beings—on this stage at the time of this story. It is really the actual, documented events of their lives that form the backbone of this story. Not the dalliance of this historical novelist.

Into the midst of this tragic drama of the
Shadow Riders,
I once more send my fictional character, Seamus Donegan, late of the Union Army of the Shenandoah, cavalry sergeant turned soldier-of-fortune. (At this point the reader should be reminded that Seamus—Gaelic for James—is pronounced
Shamus
 … just as you would pronounce Sean as
Shawn.
) Over the twenty-two volumes that will encompass this era of the Indian Wars, you will follow Seamus Donegan as he marches through some of history's bloodiest hours. Not always doing the right thing, but trying nonetheless. As those of you who have read the first five volumes in the series know already, Donegan was no “plaster saint,” nor was he a “larger-than-life” dime-novel icon that Hollywood seems so dead set on portraying for us in our western themes.

History has plenty of heroes—every one of them dead. Seamus Donegan represents the rest of us. Ordinary in every way, except that at some point we are each called upon by circumstances to do something extra-ordinary … what most might call heroic.

Over the past year and a half since the publication of Volume 1,
Sioux Dawn,
I have been deeply gratified at the rousing success of this singular character, who, by the way, ended up being far different than I had first envisioned him. Seamus is, above all, his own man—and won't even let this author tell him what to do. Let me heartfully thank those of you who I've met at book signings from Canada to Texas, from California to the Atlantic Coast states, and from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf Coast—thank you for your fond acceptance of Seamus as not only a character you've come to identify with … but a man so many of you have come to regard as real and as a friend.

I find that reaffirming—because Seamus Donegan is very much a friend of mine.

We've all spent enough time in the saddle together, around winter campfires and hunkered down in little patches of what shade the great plains had to offer us, haven't we?

So what you will follow here in the
Shadow Riders
is, after all, a compelling story of something inevitable. Something of destiny's impelling course sweeping us up in its headlong rush into the future. But that has always been the story of man at war—of culture against culture, race against race. And remember this: that in this story, we stand but three short years from celebrating our nation's centennial, a time of scientific marvels, the beginning of our great Industrial Revolution.

Think of that: our Grand Republic speeding ever onward toward her Centennial birthday!

While out west, the unsung, lonely soldiers of the army of the frontier were called upon to wage a costly, inefficient, and thankless war against a stone-age people. A stone-age people who time and again confused, outmaneuvered, and downright defeated the cream of our military machine.

This time rather than going into detail on the books I drew upon for the factual history, the background, the color of that era, I'll just be content to list those titles I recommend, should you wish to learn more of the conquering of the southern plains.

The Conquest of the Southwest
by Cyrus T. Brady

Conquest of the Southern Plains
by Charles J. Brill

Fighting Indian Warriors—True Tales of the Wild Frontiers
by E. A. Brininstool

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
by Dee Brown

Crimson Desert—Indian Wars of the American Southwest
by Odie B. Faulk

Soldiers West—Biographies from the Military Frontier
edited by Paul Andrew Hutton

Carbine and Lance: the Story of Old Fort Sill
by Colonel Wilbur S. Nye

Death Song—The Last of the Indian Wars
by John Edward Weems

The Indian Wars of the West
by Paul I. Wellman (currently reprinted in two volumes:
Death on the Prairie
and
Death in the Desert
)

Satanta—The Great Chief of the Kiowas and His People
by Clarence Wharton

Even more so, the twelve volumes I returned to again and again in the late hours of each night when this story would not be denied, those same books I returned to again and again early each morning when I had no trouble getting up before dawn to write once more, ready to ride again that day with Seamus Donegan or the Tenth Negro Cavalry or Ranald Slidell Mackenzie's Fourth Cavalry—those twelve volumes I treasured most during the writing of this story:

The Life and Adventures of a Quaker Among the Indians
by Thomas C. Battey

On the Border with Mackenzie—Or Winning West Texas from the Comanches
by Robert G. Carter

The Buffalo War—the History of the Red River Indian Uprising of 1874
by James L. Haley

The Comanches—Lords of the South Plains
by Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel

The Buffalo Soldiers—A Narrative of The Negro Cavalry in the West
by William H. Leckie

The Military Conquest of the Southern Plains
by William H. Leckie

Five Years a Cavalryman
by H. H. McConnell

The Kiowas
by Mildred P. Mayhall

Plains Indian Raiders—the Final Phases of Warfare from the Arkansas to the Red River
by Wilbur Sturtevant Nye

The Buffalo Hunters—the Story of the Hide Men
by Mari Sandoz

Quanah, Eagle of the Comanches
by Zoe A. Tilghman

Ranald S. Mackenzie on the Texas Frontier
by Ernest Wallace

And if you have time to read but one book on this period beside Mari Sandoz's monumental work, to get a sentimental look at the hide-men and their era, you must read:

Life of “Billy” Dixon—Plainsman, Scout and Pioneer
by Olive K. Dixon

With these sources at my fingertips, what remained was for the novelist in me to again do my best to flesh out the story with muscle and sinew, giving these faceless ghosts from our past voice once more. And distinctive voices is what I tried to give each of them, voices that would ring in your mind's ear long after you have finished the last page of
Shadow Riders,
voices that will express better than I ever could the mood and flavor of both that time and that place.

If I make you feel the bone-numbing cold so much that you know you'll never be warm again … then you will begin to understand what it must have meant to a plainsman, despairing of ever again warming his frozen fingers over a fire. If I can make you feel the sheer panic and gut-wrenching fear it must have been to find yourself in the path of a raging prairie fire hurtling itself across the plains with a mindless destructive abandon … then you might begin to understand just how frightened these frontier-hardened men could become of something they could not understand, much less control.

For many of us, at those crucial turning points in our lives, fear is our most intimate companion. An enemy who will either break us … or a friend who will see that we survive, in the end a little stronger the next time we watch the sun rising pink and orange across the endless plains.

So go ahead as you turn the pages … sniff the air—you'll likely smell the stinging, pungent fragrance of gunpowder so hot it burns going down. Or you might smell the earthy perfume of a buffalo chip fire—if you've been savvy enough to lay in some against the coming blizzard. Those buffalo chips just might be the only thing between you and becoming a pile of bones come next spring when the wolves find what's left of your carcass at the first thaw. When your hands are cold enough, when your tongue is too numb to talk—you'll likely not care what it is that keeps you warm, and thank the great herds of buffalo that passed this way.

If one thing is constant and to be counted on out here in this country, it's that the wind will blow. The wind is like a constant companion, always at your ear, so constant you don't listen to it anymore. But that wind becomes a terror when it drives before it a frightening prairie fire … or with fury swirls the arctic winds into a plains blizzard.

So, you best saddle up, my friend. Seamus is waiting to ride out and there's no time to waste. You'll be knee to knee as he gallops for his life before that prairie fire and rides face-on into the jaws of the winter blizzard. If you look over at him now, you'll see how the wind and the sun, the wind and the cold, the wind and the caking dust mark a man living out his days on the plains. Tossing his long, curly hair, filling his nostrils with the wildness of this land.

And just like there's more than enough land to go around, there's enough wildness here as well.

Saddle up … we're riding to Texas.

—Terry C. Johnston

The Staked Plain

Panhandle of Texas

June 20, 1991

Characters

Seamus Donegan

Civilians

Thomas Brazeale

Nathan S. Long

Henry Warren

Sharp/Abner Grover

Lawrie Tatum—agent to the Kiowa-Comanche (resigned: 3/73)

S. W. T. Lanham—District Attorney, Jacksboro, Texas

Judge Soward

James Haworth—succeeded Tatum as agent to the Kiowa-Comanche

John D. Miles—agent to the Southern Cheyenne

Billy Dixon

Mike McCabe

*Rebecca (Pike) Grover—Sharp Grover's wife

*Samantha Pike—Rebecca Grover's sister

Governor Edmund J. Davis—Governor of Texas

E. P. Smith—U.S. Indian Commissioner

Enoch Hoag—Superintendent of Central Superintendency, U.S. Indian Bureau

*Simon Pierce

*William Graves

Army

General William Tecumseh Sherman

Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie—Fourth Cavalry

Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson—Tenth U.S. Negro Cavalry (Companies: B, D, E, L, M)

Captain Louis H. Carpenter—H Company, Tenth Cavalry

Lieutenant L. H. Orleman—H Company, Tenth Cavalry

Lieutenant R. H. Pratt—D Company, Tenth Cavalry

Lieutenant Robert G. Carter—Fourth Cavalry

Lieutenant Peter M. Boehm—Fourth Cavalry

Captain E. M. Heyl—Fourth Cavalry

Lieutenant Colonel John W. Davidson—Tenth U.S. Negro Cavalry

*Lieutenant Ben Marston—commanding first Stillwell escort

Sergeant Reuben Waller—Company H, Tenth U.S. Negro Cavalry

*Lieutenant Harry Stanton—commanding second Stillwell escort

General Philip H. Sheridan

Scouts and Interpreters

Horace Jones—Grierson's interpreter at Fort Sill

Philip McCusker—interpreter at Medicine Lodge Treaty ceremonies

Jack Stillwell

Kiowa Indians

Satanta/White Bear

Kicking Bird (chief)

Satank (chief)

Big Tree (chief)

Mamanti

Lone Wolf

Yellow Chief

Eagle Heart (chief)

Big Bow (chief)

Red Otter

White Horse—well-known horse thief

Tau-ankia—son of Lone Wolf

Gui-tain—nephew of Lone Wolf