Come Sundown

by Mike Blakely

  I believe Sul Ross was an honest man and that he truly believed he had killed Peta Nocona. He was naïve to believe his Tonkawa scouts, but perhaps to assuage his own conscience, he could believe nothing else, even to his death. He had to tell himself and his people that he had met at least one warrior on the battlefield, for he and his men had slaughtered dozens of unarmed women and children. This atrocious act of war, however, met with little disapproval on the Texas frontier, where Peta Nocona’s warriors had so recently raided, burned houses, stolen horses, killed men, scalped and raped women, and carried away children.

  The Comanches believed that the spirits wanted them here on this good measure of Mother Earth. The whites believed God Himself had led them to the salvation of the selfsame country to wrest it from waste and make it good with fences, crops, and domesticated cattle.

  Violence begets violence. It was the Indian way from the time when animals spoke and walked about like two-leggeds. It was the way of common white-skinned people from before the days of barbarians and feudal marauders. The Comanches had taken this land by brutal force from the Tonkawas and Apaches, and now the whites were taking it from the Comanches with equal brutality and force, and superior weaponry and supplies.

  War breeds as much cowardice as courage. I had the ability to move among the civilizations of both red and white men. I saw cruelty among them both. I also saw mercy and honor. The variations rested not so much with the cultures as with individuals. Among these individuals were men like Charles Goodnight, the cowboy who had spared the life of Nadua—Cynthia Ann Parker—and had recaptured her from the Pease River camp. Later, Goodnight would become a cattleman renowned among cattle kings. He would feed starving Comanches with his own cattle and raise buffalo on his ranch for reservation Indians to hunt as in days of yore. Perhaps he did these things to make amends for his part in the Pease River massacre. Only Goodnight could say, and he did not speak as much about the incident as Sul Ross did.

  I would gather all this later. At the time, all I could do was ride westward with a wounded former wife and a rescued child. The captured horse did not possess the smooth trot of the slain Indian pony that had carried me to this awful place. He pounded our bones with every step. As we jolted onward, Hidden Water buried her face between my shoulder blades and, in her pain, wrapped her arms tightly around my waist and began to wail a soul-shattering song of mourning. It was cold, and we had no blankets. The child in front of me wept tears that spattered on the saddle horn, but even at his tender age, he knew a warrior did not cry aloud.

  Fifteen

  Seven bedraggled riders struggled toward Peta’s new camp on five horses. There were three women, two children, an adopted Mexican captive, and me. After riding almost all day, we stopped to tend wounds. Hidden Water’s was the worst. We packed the wound with grass and bound it with deerhide cut from the end of my loinskin. We had no lodge poles with which to make a travois, so Hidden Water had to ride behind me and suffer the jolting trot of the ranch horse I had captured. We journeyed on in mourning and misery. We took five days covering the ground that I had ridden in three on the bald-face pony.

  When we reached Peta’s new camp, Hidden Water’s leg was swollen to twice its normal size. Her husband, Bear Tooth, was summoned and came to carry her away to a medicine man. He did not thank me for rescuing her.

  Our arrival threw the big camp-together into turmoil. Peta came, and I had to tell him that his wife, Nadua, had been captured. “They saw her eyes, and did not kill her. She is yet alive.”

  “And my daughter?” Peta asked.

  “Nadua carried her at the time. Your daughter was captured, too, but she is unharmed.”

  “You are white!” said an old man. He had a tomahawk in his hand which he raised above his head as if he would strike me with it. “You led the tejanos there.”

  “No!” said a woman who had escaped on a horse with her child. “Plenty Man fought them. He was alone, but he rode into the middle of the bluecoats and tejanos. His battle cry scattered them, and gave some of us a chance to get away. They would have killed me and my son if Plenty Man had not been there. They might have killed us all.”

  “He took no scalps,” the old man said.

  “He counted one coup and captured a horse,” my defender replied.

  “My daughter was in that camp!” the old man shrieked.

  “Then you should pray she lives,” I said, my impatience certainly coming through in my tone of voice. “We must send riders back to help the others who are wandering here on foot. Some will be wounded, I am sure. Some may not be far from the place of all the killing.”

  “Plenty Man speaks wisely,” Peta said. His face drawn with grief over the news of his wife and daughter, he nevertheless set about the business of leading his people. “I will send a rescue party for the survivors, and a burial party for the dead. I will ride there myself. Perhaps I can overtake the tejanos and get my wife back. Plenty Man, you will stay in my lodge while I am gone. You must rest there. You look almost dead. No one will bother you in my lodge.”

  Peta turned away to organize his rescue party, and I went to his lodge where I would be safe. I had expected that some of the more excitable relatives might blame me for the raid. I was white, like the attackers. Those who were missing wives and daughters and sisters would want some white man to pay. As I entered Peta’s lodge, I saw Kills Something running toward me. He had brought the main village to the great camp-together the day before.

  “My brother,” he said. “I have heard the story.”

  “I am tired,” I said.

  “Go in the lodge and sleep. I will guard the door. No one will bother you. Sleep as long as you want.”

  I nodded my gratitude, and that is the last thing I remember clearly for a while. I must have collapsed onto one of Peta’s comfortable buffalo robe beds. I fell into a fitful sleep and dreamed some horrible dreams. Wave upon wave of angry Texas Rangers and blue-coated soldiers attacked me. Their bullets sang all around me. When I turned to run, I would find the old Comanche man with the tomahawk raised over his head. The attackers just kept coming and killing. I would run to protect some child or woman, but the white men would cut them down before I could get there.

  These dreams seemed to last a long time, then my sleep became a black void. In this blackness all I could hear was the wailing of women in Peta’s camp. Even in the dark recesses of my sleep, I reasoned that the survivors had told of those they knew were dead, and the relatives of the slain women and children were mourning, slashing themselves with knives, keening their songs of anguish. I slept with this song of misery in my head for a long, long time.

  WHEN I WOKE, my eyes opened, but my body would not move. I saw young Quanah sitting cross-legged on a robe, looking at me. This was, after all, his lodge, too. My ways of sleep, as I have mentioned, are so peculiar that I sometimes cannot move when I wake. My eyes will open, but my body will not move until I hear some sound. So I just lay there on my robe, staring at Quanah, who was staring at me, until I spooked him.

  “Are you dead?” he finally asked.

  These words, ironically, jolted life into my body. I blinked my eyes until my face would move, then my head and neck and shoulders, then the rest of my body. I rolled onto my back and looked up at the smoke hole. “No, I am not dead,” I responded.

  Quanah went to the door flap and pulled it aside. “He is awake,” the boy said.

  I saw Loud Shouter stick his head into the lodge. “You have slept through almost three suns,” he said, as if in reproach for my laziness.

  “That must be why I have to piss so badly,” I muttered.

  “Hurry,” Quanah said. “I want to hear how my mother was captured.” He said this in such a serious, stoic manner that I was compelled to follow the orders of a mere boy.

  “I will tell you if you will find me something to eat,” I said. “We had little to eat on the ride back from that terrible place, and now I have slept so long that I am about to starve.”
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  “I will bring you some food,” Quanah said, and he bolted outside.

  I took care of my business and found Quanah and Loud Shouter waiting with a bowl of stew that had been cooking a long time and was filled with tender morsels of hump meat and tongue, flavored with tallow, salt, and wild onions. It was delicious. I told young Quanah what I had witnessed concerning the capture of his mother, and he thanked me for the intelligence. In that boy, I saw a wisdom, and a toughness of character, and a leadership quality seldom found among humans of any society. His eyes, though sad to think of his lost mother, were bright and thoughtful. He was smart, and he knew already how to ask his own questions and gather firsthand intelligence. He sought the truth, and remained unmoved by rumor and unbridled emotion. Unlike some others in camp, he refused to blame me for the disaster of the massacre merely on account of my whiteness. He was, after all, half white himself, and must have experienced occasional social ostracism because of it, even though his father was a chief. All this, I believe, went toward building young Quanah’s fiber as a future leader of the Comanche Nation. And oh, how vigorously he would lead …

  FOR A WHILE, we feared Hidden Water would die. Her leg became seriously swollen with infection. She lapsed into delirium and mumbled strange things. Kills Something advised her husband, Bear Tooth, to take her to our medicine man, old Burnt Belly, who went out into the woods and prairies to listen to the plants talk. Then he made a poultice of something he would not reveal, and burned cedar, and made lengthy incantations over the patient. There were no amputations among the Comanches. The leg would either heal, or it would kill Hidden Water. But Burnt Belly’s treatment worked, and Hidden Water’s leg began to return to its normal size. When she woke, she asked if she would have a scar.

  “You will have a great one,” Burnt Belly said.

  Hidden Water wept for hours. She was very vain. After she recovered, she would go to great pains to conceal her scar. She would wear leggings long after the cold moons had passed, and tailor her summer dresses longer than she did in the days when she reveled in showing off her shapely legs. She never thanked me for getting her out of that camp. She did not like to speak of the incident at all.

  Bear Tooth, however, did thank me for saving his wife after she recovered from the wound. He was quite devoted to her. Though she was never the best Comanche wife when it came to cooking and housekeeping, she made up for her shortcomings between the buffalo robes at night. Bear Tooth loved her enough to give me seven horses as a reward for bringing her home. I always suspected, however, that he did this under pressure from Peta himself.

  After Peta returned from the rescue-and-burial detail, the great camp sank into howls and shrieks of mourning that lasted through the two coldest moons of the winter. When the mourning finally dwindled to a merciful end, the Comanches at the great camp-together began to speak of revenge on the Texans. The chiefs of the various bands held many a council of war in Peta’s lodge. This went on night after night for yet another moon. War chiefs and peace chiefs alike were unanimously in favor of attacking white settlements, but the questions of how, when, and where stirred much debate. Some wanted to attack in mass, as the Comanches had done in 1840, when over a thousand warriors rode all the way to the coast of Texas and sacked the town of Linnville, driving the citizens right into the very surf.

  “I remember that raid,” old Burnt Belly said to the younger chiefs when his time came to speak in council. “It was twenty winters ago. The glory of the raid was great in the beginning. We took scalps in three of the tejano towns and stole so many horses that they raised a great dust cloud in the sky. I had much fun taking things from the trading lodges near the beach while the frightened palefaces watched from wooden canoes in the big water. I got ribbons to tie in my horse’s tail, and a good black hat shaped like the kettle my wife cooks with. And I got a cloth coat that I wore through the winter, and a thing on a stick that would spread out in a circle and make a shade from the sun, but when I made it spread out, it frightened my horse, so I threw it down.”

  Burnt Belly pantomimed his reminiscences, making the chiefs and leading warriors in the council lodge laugh in appreciation. “But,” the shaman reminded them, “though that was a glorious raid at first, you must remember that all the medicine went bad. Someone must have killed a coyote or a skunk, or spoken to an owl, because as we were taking all our scalps and captive women and stolen horses back to our own country, the tejanos attacked us and ruined our raid. Our large war party was too easy to find. The tejanos killed many of our warriors. It is not the way of the True Humans to attack in great numbers, as the white people fight. The good way is to strike in small war parties, attack quickly, surprising our enemies, and ride hard to get away from the tejanos who will surely follow.”

  Burnt Belly’s warnings convinced the war chiefs, and they began to talk of ending the great camp-together so that the various bands could spread out along the frontier and attack isolated ranches and small communities of whites. Once the questions of how and where were settled, the only remaining decision involved when. Burnt Belly settled this issue, as well.

  One night in council, after all the war chiefs had given their opinions on when the attacks should begin, they finally turned to Burnt Belly and asked his advice.

  “The time to raid begins now,” he said. “Do not hurry about it, but prepare well, for you will have plenty of time to make your raids. Season upon season. Victory upon victory.”

  “How do you know this, old man?” asked Tasacowadi.

  “Last night, in my lodge, I had a vision. I saw a great battle in a strange place, far away, with big guns that shook the earth like thunder. I watched the battle as it was happening. It was at a place by the big water. There were no True Humans or other redmen in the battle. Only whites.”

  “What does it mean, kunoo?” asked Kills Something, using the respectful term meaning “grandfather.”

  “It means the war between the whites has begun. The tejanos and their allies are on one side. The bluecoat soldiers are on the other. Now, the bluecoats will leave our country and go away to fight, and no longer will they protect the houses of the tejanos where we will raid. Now, even the rangers will go away to this great war. Only a few of them will stay behind to guard against our attacks, and we will sweep over them like a great stampede of buffalo.”

  “Are you sure, old man?” Peta asked.

  “I have seen this vision, given to me by the spirits. I watched the first great battle between the whites. Now, they will fight and kill each other like crazy men. I hope they all kill each other to the last soldier, then we can have our country to ourselves again. I do not know if they will, but I know this: the more they fight each other, the more land we will take back from those whites who invade it and chop down trees and tear up the earth and block up streams and frighten away game with their noise. The great war has begun, my sons. Now the time to raid begins.”

  I had been in camp with Comanches for months by this time, and hadn’t heard any news from the outside world, so I could not appreciate the scope of Burnt Belly’s vision at the time. But I made a mental note of the date, employing the unerring calendar that forever worked clocklike in my head. The date of Burnt Belly’s vision was April 12, 1861.

  THE DAY AFTER Burnt Belly’s vision, the great camp-together began to break up. Women took lodges down and Burnt Belly came to me and told me that it was time for me to bring trade wagons to the Big Crossing on the Canadian River again, for Kills Something’s warriors wanted to resupply before taking the warpath against the whites, and they had plenty of horses and buffalo robes with which to barter. It had been decided that the Stag Moon, July, would signal the beginning of the Comanche raids on the Texas frontier. So I bid farewell to my Comanche friends and struck out with my own herd of horses to William Bent’s Stockade at the mouth of the Purgatory River.

  My trip was relatively uneventful, except that I was chased by a hunting party of Mescalero Apaches, my bitter enemies, and
had to leave a dozen horses behind for them to capture before I finally outdistanced them. I still got to William’s stockade with twenty horses, so the trip was not a total loss. Anyway, a trader who had well-nigh gone Indian did not have that much use for money in those days. I could live off the fat of the land. Hell, I could live off the gristle of the land if pressed hard enough.

  The farms and fields of William Bent and Tom Boggs were beginning to take shape. When I arrived, in early May, I found their fields dotted with sheep and cattle, and rowed with corn.

  I told William that the Comanches would be waiting to trade hundreds of horses to us at the Crossing by June. This is what he had sent me to arrange, and he was pleased that I had succeeded. He offered to buy the small herd of horses I had brought with me, but urged me to sit and talk with him for a while before we got down to business. We pulled two chairs out of his cabin so we could sit in the sunshine and smell the cool high plains breeze as we talked. Along with his chair, William carried a newspaper, folded and tucked under his arm.

  “Things must be going smoothly enough,” I mentioned. “I’ve been out of touch, but I haven’t heard of any Cheyenne troubles.”

  William frowned. “There’s trouble coming, I fear. I’ve resigned as Indian agent for the Cheyennes.”

  “Why?”

  “You know I’ve seen the need for some time now for a treaty. One that would secure a permanent homeland for the Cheyennes on paper, recognized by Congress. I knew the Cheyennes would have to give up some of their old haunts, but I wanted to get financial compensation for them when they did give it up.”