Come Sundown

by Mike Blakely

  “Burnt Belly,” I said.

  Major had caught his wind, and now plunged down off the bluff at my urging. I charged through the smoke ahead of the column of soldiers and rode hard across the prairie. As I overtook the old man on his pony, I slowed, so as not to excite his mount, and I heard his death song. Blood was streaming down his arm and onto the old fist that clenched the mane. I came around in front of him and saw the wound to his chest that gushed blood. A bullet had struck him right at the top of the old lightning scar that had burnt him so many winters ago.

  He felt my presence there, and shifted his eyes to me. His death song ceased, and he smiled and reached to me. I saw him slipping from the pony and I quickly darted up to him to catch him. His strength was almost gone and he fell onto me, his weight pulling me down. I threw a leg over Major and jumped down, easing the old medicine man to the ground as gently as I could. I laid him in the grass so he could look up at the sky, and my panic began to consume me as I watched the blood well up from the hole in his chest. I put my hand over the wound, feeling the hot slickness of the old man’s lifeblood as I tried in vain to stop the flow. Burnt Belly feebly pulled my hand away from his wound.

  “It is as I have seen it in my visions,” he said. “But even more beautiful.”

  “Grandfather,” I said. “I must tell you.”

  He silenced me by raising a finger. “Quiet. I am listening to music.” His eyes closed and he lay back and smiled.

  “I love you, old man,” I said in English. At least, I think it was English. My mind was quite cloudy.

  His eyes opened, as if he had understood, and he looked right into my face. “You must remember the things I have taught you, Plenty Man. There is much yet to learn, but now you have only the spirits to teach you.”

  A cannon shot and a whistle of shell sang behind me, exploding among unlucky warriors. Burnt Belly seemed not to even hear the sound. His bloody hand groped until he found mine, and he gripped me like an eagle. “Grandson …” His breath was ragged, his eyes fluttering. “Make a smudge of fir needles when the Thunderbird comes. Do not let the beast catch you in his gaze …” His eyes closed and his body made a lurch. “The burden is too great for you to …”

  The old man’s chest fell and his grip went loose in my hand. His eyes opened and he stared at the sky, but he was not there.

  I did not even feel like I was there anymore. My fatigue and my sorrow combined to sweep me into some peculiar state of half-consciousness. I remember seeing my tears fall into the blood on the old man’s chest. I remember the reports of the cannon, and the shaking of the ground when the shells exploded. I remember mounting Major and standing guard over the corpse as I watched the battle, useless and detached from it all now, as if it had chewed me to ruin and spat me aside.

  Lieutenant Pettis’s howitzers scattered the Comanches and cleared the Kiowa camp. Kit’s soldiers charged into the village to retake it. Come sundown, the lodges were afire, sending dots of orange embers aloft in the twilight. When darkness fell, the soldiers marched away up the valley, and the Indians let them go. I sat on my pony and stared stupidly. At some point, I lay forward across the withers of Major and went to sleep, my dreams intermingling with the events of the day.

  I awoke on the ground, wrapped in a blanket, daylight coloring the sky. Someone must have found me, taken me from my horse, and covered me. Opening my eyes, I saw Major grazing not far away, having freed himself somehow of the war bridle. I got my body moving and looked to my left, where Burnt Belly had lain. But someone had carried his body away. From the Comanche camp, over a mile away, I heard the eerie music of mourners across the otherwise quiet valley.

  Wearily, I pulled myself to my feet. The sun was about to rise over the eastern bluff. Major looked at me as he chewed his grass. I did not intend to catch him. I simply turned toward the camp and trudged that way. Major followed behind, pausing now and then to crop the tall grass, as if Burnt Belly had saved it just for him.

  Fifty-Two

  There. That is what you came to hear me tell. That is the way it happened. I was in the big, bloody middle of it. It happened on this very ground, sixty-three years ago. If you go snooping around these prairies and woods, you may still find rusty things dropped by dying men. It was among the most horrible and exhilarating days of my life. Yet, I admit that I would not have missed living it even now. I could do nothing to stop it. I could only suffer it along with everyone else.

  They called it the Battle of Adobe Walls. It happened on November 25, 1864. Years later, it would become known as the “First” Battle of Adobe Walls, for a “second” battle was yet to come. I was here for that one, too, but that is a tale for another time. The first battle was a victory for the Indians, but it came at such a cost of lost men that little celebration followed. The Indians had driven the invaders out of the valley, but had killed only a few bluecoats and had taken no scalps. The official reports of the officers vary, for some men died of wounds after the actual battle, but the toll amounted to only a few dead and perhaps twenty wounded among the soldiers and their Ute scouts.

  That Kit Carson got out of this valley with any men at all is a tribute to his leadership, coolness under fire, common sense, and almost total lack of desire for personal glory. Had he listened to his ambitious officers, and attacked the larger Comanche village, his command would have been slaughtered to the last man. He faced odds similar to those which, years later, General George Armstrong Custer would face at the Little Big Horn. Yet Carson kept his regiment together, refusing to divide his forces beyond the point of leaving his supply train behind under guard. He used his two pieces of artillery with brilliance, and it had been his own idea to trail the cannon along in the first place, cumbersome though they were. Kit knew he had been beaten at Adobe Walls, but he returned to Fort Bascom with light losses in the face of overwhelming opposition, and lived to tell the tale. Soon, he would be breveted general.

  The Comanches and Kiowas lost almost one hundred killed, and twice that many wounded. Their victory was costly, and it fed their fear of and hatred for white men. Soldiers had now pierced the very heart of their country, delivered a telling blow, and gotten out. And the thunder guns. Oh, the dread of the gun that shoots twice. Those mountain howitzers so shook the warriors that forever after, when soldiers were sighted, the first question was always about the cannon: “The big guns? Did you see them? The guns on wheels? The guns that shoot twice?”

  So it was that the victors of the First Battle of Adobe Walls suffered more than the vanquished invaders. For Little Bluff, Kills Something, and the other Indian leaders, it was a point of little pride. For Kit, who admitted that he had been whipped, it was nonetheless his greatest battle and one that he even boasted about in his reports to his superiors.

  It was also Kit’s last fight. After returning to Fort Bascom, most of his regiment was disbanded, his men mustered out. Kit was assigned to various duties on the plains and in the mountains. I would not see him during these years after Adobe Walls, for I suspected that his sense of duty might persuade him to have me arrested as a traitor.

  Indeed, I had let events manipulate me into a precarious position. Once Kit’s personal spy, I was now considered an enemy to the government. At least, I assumed that I was considered a turncoat. In reality, I would find out years later, few people thought about me as much as I thought about myself. It would appear that Kit himself was the only white man who knew that I had been with the Indians at Adobe Walls, and he would take that knowledge with him to the grave.

  Yes, I would see Kit once more, but there were other matters to suffer first. Telling this grieves me to this day. I do not like to speak of it. I will not dwell upon it. But you should know what I have suffered, so that you may appreciate the strength of the human spirit, and the will of man to rise above the heaviest of all sorrows.

  Fifty-Three

  On the tenth day after the battle, a small, battered party of Arapahos dropped into the valley and shambled into camp.
They ignored the wailing of the mourners and went straight to the biggest lodge in camp—that of Kills Something. I was summoned as a translator. There were four men and two women. One man had a bullet hole through his arm, and one woman had been shot through the thigh. The tale they told chilled my heart.

  Up in Colorado, all Arapahos and Cheyennes who wanted to be considered friendly had been ordered to camp at the reservation on Sand Creek, so that the army would know that they desired peace. There, they would be protected. That was the promise of the soldier-chiefs.

  Instead, the friendly Indians had been attacked. The slaughter had come at dawn. Soldiers charged the lodges and massacred men, women, and children, even mutilating bodies. It was said that Black Kettle, a Cheyenne chief, had raised an American flag, and waved a white banner of truce. White Antelope had run afoot to meet the soldiers, unarmed, begging them not to attack. He had been ridden down by the soldiers and shot, still wearing his peace medal given to him by President Lincoln in Washington, D.C. A bitter fight had lasted all day as a few survivors dug in to the creek bank and held off the soldiers. They had slipped away after dark, many of them wounded, all of them freezing and hungry.

  The leader of the cowardly massacre had been the same man who had been ordering Indians to Sand Creek in the first place. Colonel John M. Chivington. The name made me shudder as I remembered how Chivington had tried to order Westerly and her sister, and William Bent’s wife, Yellow Woman, to the camp at Sand Creek. What if he had come back for them? What if John Prowers and William Bent had been unable to keep their wives, and mine, from being sent to Sand Creek? My panic began to mount, and I wondered suddenly if Westerly was dead or alive; well or wounded and dying. A sickly dread fell upon me like an avalanche.

  “Listen, my brothers,” I asked the Arapahos after they had told their tale to the Comanche leaders. “Do you know Chief Lone Bear of the Cheyennes?”

  “Yes,” said the leader of the party, his visage locked in a stare of fatigue.

  “Lone Bear has two daughters. One of them is my wife, Nomeme-ehne. Do you know her?”

  The visiting Arapahos looked at one another, and then one spoke:

  “I saw the daughters years ago. Beautiful girls.”

  “Yes. One daughter, Amache, is married to a white man—a good white man named John Prowers who lives at the town near the stockade of Owl Man. My wife lives there, also. I want to know that she is safe. My heart is heavy to think of this bad thing that has happened to you, but understand that I am worried about my wife. Was she at Sand Creek? Once before, the big bluecoat, Chivington, tried to send her there but Owl Man would not let it be.”

  The Arapahos stared at each other for a while, then the leader spoke. “This is a bad thing to talk about. I do not know what is true and what is not. There was much confusion, and no one knows all of those who were killed, for the people were scattered after the attack.”

  “Tell me what you know,” I begged.

  He sighed and looked at the floor of the lodge. “I know that the wife of Lone Bear was in the camp at Sand Creek. I know that a daughter came to visit her before the attack. But I do not know which daughter. I did not see her. I only heard about it. Also …”

  “What?”

  “I heard that Lone Bear’s wife was killed. I do not know about the daughter. She may have left the camp before the attack. She may have escaped. I do not know. I should stop talking about it, because there is no truth in what I say, only guessing.”

  “Where have the survivors gone?”

  “They are scattered, but we heard that the biggest camp is on the Smoky Hill River.”

  Overwhelmed with worry now, I got up and burst out of the lodge into the cold afternoon. For ten days I had been considering what I should do now that I had gone Indian and turned against the U.S. Army. I feared returning to Boggsville to collect my wife. I feared I would be arrested and tried for treason should I show my face in a white man’s settlement. I had planned to have a secret letter delivered to Westerly, telling her where to meet me, so that we could stay among the Indians. Now, I did not even know if Westerly was still in Boggsville. I did not know if she was alive or dead.

  I turned and ran to my lodge. By the time I got my herbs and medicines and other things together, the criers were spreading the distressing news about Sand Creek through the camp. I grabbed a bridle and some rope and went to catch horses.

  “Plenty Man!”

  I turned and saw young Quanah running toward me. “I have no time to talk, nephew.”

  “I heard about Sand Creek. I know you worry about your wife. I want to ride with you, uncle.”

  I simply nodded. “Hurry. I will not wait for you, and I will ride hard.”

  He smiled briefly and turned to sprint away.

  By the time I caught two of my ponies with good bottom and a lot of wind, Quanah was also astride a horse and loping to catch up to me. We took the trail the Arapahos had ridden in on, and we went fast. I decided to go straight to the Sand Creek refugees. Boggsville was closer, but I reasoned that if Westerly was there she was safe. If, however, she had been at Sand Creek during the massacre, she might need my help right away. An agonizing thought nagged me. If she was slowly dying of some mortal wound, I might have just a few days to see her alive. I hated thinking of these things, but my mind would not stop considering every possibility. At the very best, assuming my wife was safe, she was nonetheless mourning the loss of her mother, who the Arapahos said had been killed in the massacre.

  The ride was punishing. Not the riding itself, for a Comanche embraces physical hardship, especially astride a good mount. It was the not knowing; the constant hoping, fretting helplessness of it all. Quanah did not speak to me much on the trail, for he knew I was worried. He communicated with me only to discuss the trail and our progress. Thus we rode northwest without stopping or eating much for four days. We crossed the Arkansas thirty miles downstream of Boggsville and Bent’s Stockade and angled due north, toward the headwaters of the Smoky Hill River, where we had heard most of the survivors of Sand Creek had fled. We scarcely saw a tree after leaving the Arkansas Valley. Here, the plains rolled away, hill after hill. The days were brisk; the nights bone-achingly cold.

  Another day and a half of riding brought our fagged ponies to a bloodstained trail that led us to a wretched refugee camp of wailing mourners who shrieked their anguish as they slashed their own flesh with knives. A line of burial scaffolds stood on a hill overlooking the camp. My dread sank into my empty stomach like a hot coal. I spoke to the first woman I came to who was not mourning.

  “I am looking for my wife.”

  She stared at me and Quanah for a few seconds. Then she began to laugh and I saw the sanity go right out of her eyes. Just as suddenly, she cut her own laughter off in her throat, and attacked Quanah’s horse, pummeling the animal across the head before Quanah could rein away. Then the woman ran off, screaming through the camp.

  “A crazy woman,” Quanah said, obviously nervous about our greeting.

  I nodded. “I hope not everyone in this camp has gone crazy.”

  “Look. Someone comes.”

  I followed Quanah’s eyes and saw a middle-aged man limping toward me, using a stick as a crutch. His leg was badly swollen from a wound. “What do you want?” he said, a suspicious glare in his eyes.

  “I am looking for my wife.”

  “Where have you come from?”

  “Comanche land. I am Plenty Man. This is Quanah.”

  He looked south. “Did you see any soldiers?”

  “No.”

  “Buffalo?”

  “No. There is nothing out there. The plains are dead.”

  “Everything is dead,” he replied. “Everything. Even the sky. The sun is not even warm anymore.”

  “I am looking for my wife. She may have been at Sand Creek. She is the daughter of Chief Lone Bear. Her name is Appears-with-the-West-Wind.”

  His mind seemed to roll back into the horror of that day on S
and Creek, and he looked afraid. “The wife of Lone Bear was at the camp on Sand Creek. She was killed.”

  “I have heard that. But her daughter?”

  “A daughter was there, but I never heard her name.”

  “What happened to her?” I demanded.

  “She came to this camp with the others.” He spoke so quietly, I could barely hear.

  “So, she is here?”

  “She was here until … Until yesterday.”

  “Yesterday? Where has she gone?” My mind felt like a corkscrew, all twisted and cold.

  “She has gone …” He shifted on his good leg, and winced at the pain of the wounded one. “She has gone …”

  “Where? Tell me!”

  His eyes began to creep laboriously across the camp, and his head turned so slowly that it seemed his neck must be in great pain. He twisted his whole body around to the right, his feet locked into place by the pain of his wounded leg. His eyes grew so sad and his face looked as if he would weep, but no tears came, and no sound escaped his mouth. His gaze crawled, as if he had to drag it like a dead thing. And I watched, a prisoner of my own terrors, as I saw where he would look, finally, when he willed his tortured eyes to show me where Westerly had gone. Now, before I even knew it, he was looking at the hill over the camp.

  “She went there,” he said. “The one farthest away.”

  The scaffolds stood like skeletal stalkers of life lurking over the camp, and I heard the winds of black death moaning among their poles. I screamed and kicked my pony, leaving Quanah and the wounded Arapaho man behind.

  “I will join her soon!” he shouted at me as I ran my mount toward the burial scaffold.

  Which daughter? Which one? Amache? Westerly? No, no, please, not Westerly. Please, oh, please … I felt the horrible guilt of wishing my sister-in-law dead.