Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (5 page)

Then the white man began to arrive in such numbers, no longer just content to push down from the land of the Lakota and Osage and Pawnee, crossing the Arkansas, the Cimarron and the Canadian on his way only to trade with the Mexicans in Santa Fe. Now the white man came out of the east, his walking soldiers in blue uniforms and his rolling wagon guns rumbling along behind, marching to fight the Mexicans, to take land away from them.

Just like the white man had later begun taking this grand, grass kingdom of rolling hills from the Comanche and the Kiowa who had ruled it from atop their fleet ponies.

In those years following the white man's war with Mexico, the number of Tehannas multiplied like puffballs on the prairie after a spring thunderstorm. Not that they were there to kill the buffalo, no—instead these built their lodges beside the creeks and scratched at the earth and raised their animals and kept to themselves while the Kiowa most loved to be in the company of one another. This was something hard for Satank to comprehend—that the Tehannas would want to set themselves off from others of their own kind.

Twenty winters after the white man's war on the Mexicans, in the summer after Yellow Chief was killed, word came to the Kiowa that the treaty-talkers wanted again to speak to the warrior bands. Two years before, they had met with the white man and received his presents and signed his talking paper at the mouth of the Little Arkansas. Now again, there was to be more talk far to the north, on Medicine Lodge Creek.

That was four winters ago by Satank's count—when the bands gathered for the great peace council not far from Fort Larned in the white man's Kansas Territory. Many miles to the south on the Cimarron River, and refusing to yet come in to talk, were camped the might of the Southern Cheyenne, more than 250 lodges in all. Skeptical, they waited far from the reach of the white man's soldiers should this treaty-talk prove to be a ruse and a trap.

On the other hand, Black Kettle's twenty-five lodges of Southern Cheyenne marched right to the banks of Medicine Lodge Creek itself to camp. Below them stood more than a hundred lodges of Comanches. And downstream from them were raised the camp circles of some 150 lodges of Kiowa, along with eighty-five lodges of Kiowa-Apache—warrior bands under Satank, Satanta, Big Tree, Big Bow, Lone Wolf and Kicking Bird. Camped closest to Fort Larned were some 170 lodges of Southern Arapaho.

All told, an impressive gathering of more than eight hundred lodges, each camp in a joyful mood, for the hunting had been good in recent days. What was more, word had it the soldiers at the nearby post had just received shipments of the goods soon to be brought out to the great encampment in wagons: coffee, sugar, flour and dried fruits; in addition to blankets and bolts of colorful cloth, there were to be surplus uniforms from the white man's recent war among himself, uniforms the War Department had in the last few months turned over to the Interior Department. And on its way as well was a sizable herd of the white man's cattle to feed the gathering bands.

When the white commissioners arrived at the scene on the fifteenth of October, they and their military escort of the Seventh Cavalry camped across the creek on the north side of the Medicine Lodge. Row upon neat row of soldier tents were erected across the grassy prairie for time beyond memory dotted with dried buffalo chips. Nearby stood a long train of the freight wagons bulging with the very presents for those who would sign the talking paper with the Great Father back east. Closest to the creek were the tents erected for the commissioners themselves.

In that flat meadow between their tents and the stream bank, the great council got its informal sessions under way on the seventeenth of October. Two days later the visiting chiefs began making their formal speeches.

Behind the commissioners seated at their table hung a large canopy beneath which the many stenographers sat over their paper and pens, recording the proceedings word for word. There too gathered the many newsmen here to record for their curious readers back east this momentous gathering with the warrior bands of the Great Plains.

On each subsequent morning the council assembled, the Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs seated themselves on the right hand of the white men, or on the west. To the left sat Satank along with the other Kiowa and Comanche leaders. In a sweeping crescent behind these chiefs sat the old men, councilors and leaders among their people. Behind them, beside the stream itself, the young warriors strutted in all their martial glory—feathers and bells, paint and totems, in no way shy in showing off their weapons.

That first day Senator John B. Henderson had proposed to the assembled chiefs that the Cheyenne and Arapaho bands be moved south to the Arkansas River while the Kiowas could settle on land farther south along the Red River for their permanent reservation. As soon as the head men would agree to this proposal and formally touch the pen, Henderson told them, the army would distribute the promised goods. Woman's Heart and Kicking Bird were the first of the Kiowa to step to the tables and again make peace with the white man as they had so often done in the past.

Satank and the rest of the chiefs did not.

When it came time for the old chief to speak, he told the white commissioners, “The white man grows jealous of his red brother. The white man once came to trade. Now he comes as a soldier. He once put his trust in our friendship and wanted no shield but our fidelity. But now he builds forts and plants big guns on their walls. He once gave us arms and bade us hunt the game. We loved him then for his confidence. He now covers his face with the cloud of jealousy and anger and tells us to be gone, as an offended master speaks to his dog!”

Then came a few of the Comanche, followed by the Arapaho, and finally—after many days of debate—the Cheyenne agreed to the white man's terms.

Their job done, the commissioners informed the chiefs they were ordering the distribution of the promised presents. High-walled army freight wagons groaned into the meadow, emptying their contents into three huge piles: on the west, a pile for the Apache and Arapaho; in the center, a pile for the great Cheyenne of the central plains. And, on the east, a pile for the Kiowa and Comanche of the southern plains.

There was so much there and the celebrating so great—Satank remembered now how the warrior societies were ordered forward to see that a fair distribution was made among the people. One by one the women were handed a kettle and an axe, blankets and the white man's clothing, coffee and sugar and flour and much more.

Sitting Bear recalled that day—remembering it as the first time he had ever thought that the white man just might number like the stars in the sky. What sadness it had caused him too—while there was such celebration in the camps.

No man, no woman nor child, was able to ride from that meadow back to their villages. Every pony and pack animal the Kiowa put to use hauling their new riches, stacked high and cumbersome and wobbly on animal backs or swaybacked on groaning travois. No woman muttered complaints of having too much.

With the days growing shorter and the nights colder, Satank had watched as the other bands wandered off onto the mapless prairie, slowly marching into the four winds. Along the bank of Medicine Lodge Creek that last morning before the Kiowa themselves marched away, the old warrior had found the stream slicked with a thin, fragile layer of ice scum. Winter was due on the high plains. Winter would not be denied.

Satank felt it in his heart again, even now, that coldness of winter as he stroked his scraggly mustache.

It hurt too, remembering that happy time for his people before they were ordered onto their reservation, recalling how the great cloud of dust rose into the clear, autumn-cold sky above the rear marchers of Arapaho and Southern Cheyenne and Comanche, each taking a different trail to find their own winter camps.

He gazed now at this small campsite, remembering that great, empty campsite along the Medicine Lodge four winters gone, strung as the campsites were up and down the banks of the little stream, the tall grass trampled and pocked with hundreds of lodge circles and blackened by hundreds of fire pits, pony droppings and bones and the remains of willow bowers used by the young warriors too old to live any longer with their families but too young yet to have a wife and lodge and children too.

His eyes stung him for a moment as Satank swallowed down the pain of loss, remembering the old days—knowing his grandchildren would never know such joy as he had known in days gone, and never to hold again in his hands. A pain like a deep wound within him refusing to heal, seeping a poison with such a stench that it made his nose wrinkle.

Little more than a year after Medicine Lodge, the Yellow Hair Custer had marched into Indian Territory and massacred Black Kettle's sleeping village camped but a few miles down the Washita from the Kiowa. Then a moon later the Yellow Hair had marched once more, this time after the Kiowa themselves. Custer and Soldier-Chief Sheridan had caught Satanta and Lone Wolf on Rainy Mountain Creek and held the pair hostage until the rest of the bands came in. Although the chiefs were prepared to die and had told their people to flee to the faraway Staked Plain, Big Tree and Satank and Woman's Heart decided to do as the soldiers demanded. In desperation, the Kiowa were made to promise they would stay on their reservation in the shadows of the newly constructed Fort Sill.

Yet it made his heart swell to think back that the next spring the young men were riding off again, to raid into the land of the Tehanna for cattle and horses, even riding north to steal mules from the soldiers at Camp Supply.

From time to time a visitor came from the Cheyenne or the Arapaho, telling of the slaughter of the buffalo north of the Arkansas River. The visitors spoke of how the air stunk with the rotting meat left behind for the fattened buzzards and the four-leggeds who lived on stinking carrion. The white hunters took only the hides, perhaps a few tongues, and left the rest to rot and bleach and foul the clean prairie air.

“It does not matter,” Satank had assured them, as only an old warrior could. “The treaty-talkers told us—this is our land down here. These are our buffalo and we can hunt them as long as there are buffalo. The white man will never cross south of the Arkansas to kill the buffalo—for our children's children will have the rich, juicy meat for their bellies many winters yet to come.”

“What becomes of us if the white man kills all the buffalo north of the Arkansas and he wants our buffalo?” asked young Mamanti, a brave war-chief preparing to lead a party of 150 warriors south into Tehas, where they would raid farms and settlements and perhaps a wagon train or two.

Satank laughed easily, showing some of the gaps in his teeth. What teeth he had nowdays were sore, and he remembered how he used to chew on buffalo hump-meat barely seared over a flame.

“Do not worry, Mamanti,” he said, reassuring the war-chief. “The treaty-talkers promised us the soldiers would keep the white man north of the river. You would be foolish to think that the white hide hunters would ever dare cross south of the Arkansas.”

Chapter 2

May 18, 1871

“We don't start making better time, we won't see Salt Creek tonight,” said the young teamster to the older man on the bench beside him.

Thomas Brazeale had been working for civilian Henry Warren for two years now, back and forth, up and down this road, in and out of the Indian Territories, on contract to haul supplies for the forts of west Texas: Richardson, Griffin and Concho.

The old man wiped a sweaty hand along the butt of his Spencer repeating rifle and flung a long brown curd toward the tail of the leeside mule. He connected, center.

“Don't know what you're fretting about, son. It don't matter much to me where I sleep tonight. One piece of ground just like the next.”

They had just entered the Salt Creek prairie, and weren't making the kind of time they should be on this part of the haul. At least Thomas knew that. “I figure we got ten more miles till we reach Salt Creek. It's the next water we'll see.”

“And if we don't, Warren's see'd to it we've got water in them barrels lashed to every wagon. Now shut-up and drive, boy—what you paid to do,” the old man snapped.

Brazeale didn't like this old rifleman assigned to his lead wagon for this trip west from the rail depot at Weatherford, Texas, burdened under a load of corn for the army. Ten wagons, forty mules, and a dozen employees. And Thomas had to ride with this old, snarling bastard through luck of the draw—just because Brazeale always drove lead wagon. Knowing, as he did, the road, and landmarks, and places to noon and where to water the stock, along with where the good grass could be found come time to make camp for the night.

Two days back they had been late leaving Fort Richardson farther down on the Brazos River. And that had made Warren late ever since. Now they were a good twenty miles west of Richardson, Brazeale spotting some horsemen far ahead, across the grassy plain.

“Riders.”

“I see 'em, boy. You just tend to your driving.”

The horsemen turned out to be the advance of a military escort for no less than William Tecumseh Sherman himself. The general stopped for but a few minutes to shake hands all around with the teamsters, veterans of the Confederate Army to a man, thanking each one of them for the job he was doing, declaring that his escort was lagging behind him a few minutes on this leg of his journey to Fort Richardson.

“All's well down at Griffin,” Sherman reported, turning his back on the old rifleman who refused to budge from the wagon seat. “Believe me, I know about long and delicate supply lines … what with that goddamned Georgia campaign. Bloody plain you men are the backbone to keeping this frontier open. My congratulations to you.”

Sherman saluted the civilians, then remounted and promptly rode off with his dozen soldiers, having caught up, continuing east.

Thomas Brazeale climbed back aboard the high-walled freighter, glanced over his shoulder, eased off the brake and slapped leather against mule hide. The wagons rumbled into motion once more.