Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (3 page)

Kwahadi Comanche Indians

Quanah Parker

Wanderer/Peta Nocona

Comanche Indians

Cheevers—chief

Black Horse

Prologue

Moon of Plums Ripening 1866

“We have seen the wagons, White Bear!”

The stocky, muscular Kiowa chief watched that young, grinning rider bring his snorting pony to a halt before him. On all sides milled anxious warriors, warmed by the sun of this late summer day.

“The others you left behind will not be seen by the white men with those wagons?” asked the chief.

The young messenger shook his head, smiling in the brilliant, late-morning light. “It is a long snake of wagons … crawling slow as a sand tortoise. The white men will not know we are even in the country, White Bear—until we are on top of them!”

At that, the rest of the ten-times-ten hooted, shaking their bows, a few old muzzle-loaders held aloft in the hot August air among the warriors waiting down in the cottonwood and alder of the Llano River.

“They will stop soon, perhaps at the river crossing not far from here,” White Bear told the warriors he hushed with a single wave of his hand. “The white man always stops to eat.”

“We will strike them before their mouths are empty—and give them a bellyful of death!” shouted Big Tree, a young, proven warrior who had become one of White Bear's trusted lieutenants.

The chief turned once more to the young scout who had galloped in with the good news. “Take us to the others now. So that we may see for ourselves this long snake of wagons you have found for us.”

“Our ride will not be long, White Bear,” the young one replied, pointing overhead. “From where the sun now hangs, it will not yet be at mid-sky when we reach the river crossing where the white men wait.”

Without another word, the Kiowa war-chief turned and by stabbing the hot, still air with his long medicine lance ordered the hundred to follow. No squeak of leather saddles. No noisy strike of iron horseshoe on pebble. No rattle of bit-chains. Instead, these were proven warriors raised from birth in the hunt and chase of buffalo and enemy alike, at this moment nestled bareback atop war ponies, a single rawhide or buffalo-hair halter lashed securely to the animal's lower jaw. Silently they moved out: a fighting force on the move across the heart of the southern plains.

It was home to White Bear, better known to the hated white man by his Kiowa name—
Satanta.

Born on the fringes of northern Mexico in the early winter of the year those white men designated as 1807, Satanta was the son of a Kiowa warrior and a Mexican woman. As a young child she had been captured on a raid made deep into the Saltillo country of Mexico in the late 1700s. Like so many others, she was raised as a Kiowa so that their wombs eventually bore the seed for many warriors.

She bore one son—White Bear.

It was his eyes that would see the greatest of days for the Kiowa people. Generations before, the Kiowa had been the first to see the white men marching north out of the hot lands far to the south, dressed in their heavy, sun-gleaming clothing, riding their tall elk-dogs.

And the Kiowa would be one of the last to give up to the white man. More pale-skinned enemies would fall to Kiowa bullets and arrows, lances and clubs, than to any other tribe on the southern plains.

Yet little did White Bear know as he rode down to the Llano Crossing this day, that his eyes would see the sunset of that greatness.

Long, long before any man's memory, the ancient Kiowa had lived in a land of cold, never-ending winters near the headwaters of the Missouri River, between the Flathead to the west and the Crow to the east. On the north roamed the far-ranging, war-loving Blackfoot confederation. It was in that country, during an autumn antelope hunt, that two rival Kiowa chiefs argued over possession of a young doe, her sides still warm as she lay among the sage. Arrows from both bows bristled from her side. Both chiefs claimed the doe, along with the prized udder, filled with the warm, rich milk considered a delicacy among their people.

Instead of bloodshed, the chiefs and their followers went their separate ways. One band wandered northwest, never to be heard from again. The other migrated south and east some, toward the headwaters of the Yellowstone River, eventually moving on to live in the shadow of the Black Hills, where they traded in peace with the Crow—until the white man far to the east began pushing the Dakota Sioux onto the northern plains, four generations before Satanta's mother was captured in Mexico.

A small tribe compared to the mighty Lakota bands, the Kiowa were once more pushed out of the way, this time farther south. Into the land of the Apache and the fierce, war-hungry Comanche. For many summers the Kiowa battled the Comanche, until both tribes made what was at first an uneasy truce, then eventually forged a strong and lasting alliance that would see them into these final days of their greatness as warrior societies on the southern plains.

From the Comanche the Kiowa first acquired Mexican mules. It wasn't long before the Kiowa became eager customers for Mexican prisoners—children and women only. A child might be worth at least ten dollars in blankets and beads, vermillion and tobacco … while a Mexican woman would be worth much, much more in trade goods. As was their custom, the Kiowa tattooed many of those captured Mexican women. Because of that disfiguring ornamentation and their new families created among a primitive people—few of these women chose to return to Mexico if rescue presented the opportunity.

“They are on their way to the new fort the soldiers are building,” Satanta told the warriors—speaking of Fort Concho, being built here in the tough reconstruction months following the end of the Civil War.

He had reined them up some distance from the Llano Crossing, then sent two scouts ahead to find out what the wagon men were doing. “The white man used to fight among himself. Now they come to settle and raise their spotted cattle on our hunting land. We must show them this land will never be theirs—the price we will demand in blood for this ground must be too high for the white man to pay!”

Just prior to the early 1820s, the Kiowa saw their first Americans, traveling in long mule trains back and forth along the Santa Fe Trail, crossing the Cimarron and the Arkansas. A decade later the tribes of the southern plains were told some white traders had built a mud fort far up on the Arkansas, in sight of the tall, blue mountains. But few Kiowa and Comanche journeyed that far to trade: it would mean riding into Arapaho and Cheyenne country.

For many of those early years, the Kiowa and Comanche preferred instead to raid into Mexico.

Then in 1834, the “Summer of the Girl Returning” in Kiowa winter counts, the tribe was first visited by the Americans' warriors. General Henry Leavenworth led a sizable force of Mounted Dragoons to the southwest, land of the Kiowa and buffalo. Even more telling, Leavenworth had brought his riflemen to accompany the return of a Kiowa child to her people, a girl who had years before been captured by the Osages. The old chief, Dohauson, was much impressed with the effort taken by the white man and his warrior society to return this one small child to her people. The Kiowa pledged their undying friendship to the Great Father far to the east where the sun was born each day.

A decade later, in 1844, a white man came among them, sent by “Hook Nose Man” Bent, the trader in the mud house far up on the Arkansas. This old man who now built the log and mud trading house a few miles above the old Adobe Walls, west of Indian Territory, was named “Wrinkled Neck” by the Kiowa. Here the tribe traded for looking glasses and brass tacks, powder and lead for their old muzzle-loaders, iron barrel hoops for their arrow points. Still, Bent's trader lacked one thing most desired by the Kiowas: Mexican captives.

For nearly twenty years Wrinkled Neck's trading house flourished, until cholera spread its deadly scourge across the southern plains in the winter of 1861–62. The disease that no man feared in the morning while taking his breakfast, yet left that same man dead by supper, had been carried north by the Kiowa gone south to raid into Mexico. On their winter count robes the tribe called this time of despair, dying and stinking bodies in the camps … the “Spotted Winter.” Cholera finally died out, but not until it had killed nearly a fourth of the tribe and scattered the rest to the four winds in fear and superstition.

It was a time too that the white man had made his presence known in Colorado Territory, coming for the tiny yellow rocks. So many white men marched greedily west that the buffalo were being pushed farther east along the Arkansas.

Satanta recalled the following winter, when the warrior bands were camped on upper Walnut Creek, which flows into the Arkansas at the great bend the river makes in Kansas Territory. The snow came so early that season, drifted so deep and stayed so long, that the Kiowa remembered the year as the “Winter When Horses Ate Ashes.”

As soon as the white man stopped fighting himself far to the east, the many tribes on the plains were instructed that they would now be compelled to make peace with the Great Father in Washington City. Soldiers were coming to enforce that peace.

By this time there were few Indians who had not learned of the massacre of Black Kettle's Southern Cheyenne on the Little Dried River—what the white man called Sand Creek.

Yet in the autumn of 1865 five warrior bands warily met with white peace-talkers at the mouth of the Little Arkansas. Only Kicking Bird, a courageous chief who throughout his life counseled for peace, favored holding talks with the Great Father's representatives. Lone Wolf and Satanta sneered at any suggestion that the Kiowa must fear the white man and his soldiers.

At that council Satanta told the white man, “There are three chiefs in the land of the Kiowa: the Spanish Chief, the White Chief, and now me. The Spanish Chief and me are men. We do bad toward each other, sometimes steal horses and take scalps from men, but we do not get mad and act the fool. The White Chief is a child and gets mad quick when my young men, to keep their women and children from starving, take from a white man something so simple as a cup of sugar or coffee or flour. The White Chief is angry and threatens to send his soldiers. He is a coward. Tell your White Chief what I have said.”

That's why now, in Satanta's fifty-ninth summer, he was leading this raid on the white man's wagon train. This was, after all, what his people had done for as long as any man now alive could remember. To make war—as a man.

“White Bear—the wagons have stopped!”

“How far?”

The young scout pointed downstream. “My pony is hardly winded from the ride.”

“It is time I had a look myself.”

Minutes later Satanta inched on his belly to the crest of a hill and peered over. Below him stretched the timbered valley of the Llano, like a cool, beckoning ribbon here at midday in the late summer's heat come to roast the southern plains. The tall grass in the meadows, waving as far as the eye could see, had already been touched by the scorching heat come to stay this late in the season. He saw, smiled, then turned and retreated down the gentle slope to his expectant warriors.

“The white man is eating his noon meal,” Satanta explained. “The animals are no longer tied to the wagons and are inside the ring made for their safety.”

“Those wagons will not be enough to save them this day!” shouted Big Tree eagerly.

“Now is the time to finish making your medicine and painting your ponies. Very soon we must ride through that gap in the hills and come up behind the white men,” he said, gesturing toward the saddle in the low hills.

It was through that gap that Satanta led the hundred, for the most part concealed behind the skimpy timber offered along the river's course. By the time he stopped the warriors and called his two hot-blooded lieutenants to his side, the moment of attack had arrived.

“They have seen us, my brothers,” Satanta explained, his eyes not straying from the ring of wagons where the white men had suddenly exploded into action upon spotting the Kiowa, yelling, darting about, frantic like a prairie dog town under siege.

“It does not matter,” said Yellow Chief with a smile.

“You are eager, aren't you?”

“I smell blood on the wind, White Bear,” the young warrior answered.

“It is good. You will take half the warriors. Big Tree will lead the rest today.”

Big Tree nudged his pony closer, an eager darkness crossing his face. “You are not leading the attack?”

Satanta shook his head. “I have lived many winters and taken many scalps. I will direct the attack from here.” Reaching behind his shoulder, the Kiowa chief pulled up a shiny bugle he slung over the shoulder on a rawhide loop. “Each time I blow, I want the attack cut off and you both to ride to me. Is this understood?”

They nodded.

“It is good. Go now—see what the white men have for us in their wagons!”

With a whoop, both young war leaders leapt away, quickly dividing the hundred warriors. Big Tree sent a wild cry aloft as he led his band to sweep around the left side of the wagon circle. Yellow Chief led his warriors to the right.

All the white men had abandoned their tiny mealtime fires and now lay on their bellies in the shade beneath their wagons, their long guns ready.

For those first minutes, Satanta watched the young warriors hurl themselves down on the wagons, circling the white men, whirling past one another in two blurred rings of noise and terror as they pushed their ponies to great speed in that arc of spraying sand and brilliant summer sunshine. Closer and closer to the wagons they rode with each circuit, firing their arrows from short, Osage-orange bows, then quickly dropping to the off-side so that the white man had no more target than a heel hooked over a pony's backbone or a brown hand tangled in the pony's mane.

For a long time the white man did not fire, seemingly content to watch the brown-skinned riders and their lunging, sweating ponies, content to listen to the arrows hiss overhead and clatter into the branches of the trees where they had circled up for the noon meal. More arrows tore through wagon canvas. Iron-tipped wasps stung the mules kept at the center of the ring, making the animals noisy in their braying, thrashing, crazy dance of confusion and fear while the white man waited safely beneath his wagons.