Shadow Riders: The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (The Plainsmen Series)

by Terry C. Johnston

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Map

  Author’s Foreword

  Characters

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Teaser

  The Plainsmen Series by Terry C. Johnston

  Critical Praise for the Writing of Terry C. Johnston

  About the Author

  Copyright

  for

  Audie,

  because you helped me

  feel again and showed

  me just how much a miracle

  loving someone can be

  My people have never first drawn a bow or fired a gun against the whites. There has been trouble on the line between us, and my young men have danced the war dance … Two years ago I came upon this road, following the buffalo, that my wives and children might have their cheeks plump and their bodies warm. But the soldiers fired on us, and since that time there has been a noise like that of a thunderstorm … The blue-dressed soldiers … killed my braves … They made sorrow come in our camps, and we went out like buffalo bulls when their cows are attacked. When we found them we killed them, and their scalps hang in our lodges. The Comanches are not weak and blind, like the pups of a dog when seven sleeps old. They are strong and farsighted, like grown horses. We took their road and we went on it. The white women cried and our women laughed.

  —Ten Bears

  Yamparika Comanche

  I have heard that you intend to settle us on a reservation near the mountains. I don’t want to settle. I love to roam over the prairies. There I feel free and happy, but when we settle down we grow pale and die … A long time ago this land belonged to our fathers; but when I go up to the river, I see camps of soldiers on its banks. These soldiers cut down my timber; they kill my buffalo; and when I see that, my heart feels like bursting; I feel sorry … Has the white man become a child that he should recklessly kill and not eat?

  —Satanta

  Kiowa chief

  Map drawn by author, compiled from contemporary sources. Graphics completed by Sandra West-Prowell.

  Author’s Foreword

  A warfare in which the soldier of the United States had no hope of honors if victorious, no hope of mercy if he fell; slow death by hideous torture if taken alive; sheer abuse from press and pulpit, if, as was inevitable, Indian squaw or child was killed. A warfare that called us through the cliffs and canyons of the southwest, the lava beds and labyrinths of Modoc land, the windswept plains of Texas, the rigors of Montana winters, the blistering heat of midsummer suns, fighting oftentimes against a foe for whom we felt naught by sympathy, yet knew that the response could be but deathless hate … A more thankless task, a more perilous service, a more exacting test of leadership, morale, and discipline no army … has ever been called upon to undertake than that which for eighty years was the lot of the little fighting force of regulars who cleared the way across the continent for the emigrant and settler.

  So penned Lieutenant Robert G. Carter, serving in Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry stationed on the frontier of west Texas. A most dramatic statement I wanted to use in beginning this foreword. Carter served the Army of the West with honor for much of the entire era of the Indian Wars.

  As much as this time was one of supreme drama and romance—we must not forget that we are talking about real heroes, both red and white. Not the celluloid heroes Hollywood would have us believe peopled the West. Instead, I’m speaking of the faceless men and women who became heroic solely because they were called upon by circumstances to forge this nation’s destiny across the trackless frontier … or they were called upon to resist that westward migration of a foreign and incomprehensible race.

  Both races played lead roles in the most astounding drama played on any world stage at any time in our collective history—the American West.

  Indeed, the American frontier West was an experience both of extremes and of complexities. Not an easy story to tell simply, but one I hope will be worth your experience in reading—this whole-cloth tapestry of a dramatic and most romantic time. And perhaps nowhere else in the West did two of the greatest symbols of the American frontier confront one another but there on the southern plains, beginning in the early 1870s. Contrary to what most people believe, it would not be farther north in the land of Red Cloud and Sitting Bull and Man Afraid that we find this dramatic, last-ditch effort. Nowhere else but in that region of the southern prairie did those two great enemies stare one another in the eye so fatefully: the free-roaming Kiowa-Comanche and the buffalo hunter.

  Besides the singular icon represented by the frontier horse soldier, these are the two most potent symbols of the West in our collective imaginations: the naked warrior on his small, quick pony … and the hardy men who ventured onto the central and southern plains to begin the final chapter for the nomadic warrior tribes by hunting the buffalo for only the hides (and perhaps a few tongues).

  Ironic too that in the mind of the Indian the buffalo hunter came to symbolize everything he could hate in the white race.

  As this story will soon unfold, you will meet Billy Dixon, hide hunter. Nothing less than a real hero in my eyes, head and shoulders above so many—although most of the time, young Billy just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Through Dixon’s role in this story, I will begin to tell of the buffalo hunters’ era on the southern plains, a story that will continue right in the next book, Dying Thunder, Volume 7 of the Plainsmen Series. Billy Dixon will be back with Seamus Donegan at the Battle of Adobe Walls, where twenty-nine white buffalo hunters held off untold numbers of Comanche and Kiowa and Cheyenne for five days. But first you’ll read the background to the entire conflict, allowing me to set the stage for this novel, Shadow Riders.

  These hide-men were not that different from the “long-hunter” who haunted the Appalachian and canebrake country two centuries ago to hunt for game and new homes for their family. Nor were they that different from the Rocky Mountain fur trapper who came in search of beaver. Each of them, like the last to come—the buffalo hunter—were of a kind: a fiercely independent breed. A spearhead of the nation’s destiny.

  The only matter of any consequence that differed the hide hunter from those who had gone before him was that men like Billy Dixon were hunting buffalo, an animal irretrievably associated with the frontier, with the Myth of the West, and wi
th the rise and fall of fortunes for the nomadic red man of the West. In killing off the buffalo to advance their own personal gain in addition to the larger fortunes of eastern entrepreneurs, the buffalo hunter unwittingly accomplished much more than his fair share to bring about the settlement of the plains.

  This novel starts off at the beginning of that era of this ofttimes mythical creature—the buffalo hunter—who descended upon this fringe of the western frontier like the locusts of ancient Egypt descended upon the Pharaoh. From 1871 through the winter of 1873, the period encompassed by what you will be reading shortly, these hide-men killed those great, nearly blind, massive-headed beasts in such astonishing numbers that one fact is likely to be incomprehensible for you to understand: that a relatively small group of white men armed with extremely accurate and powerful weapons began killing buffalo at the rate of what works out to be some two hundred per hour, spread out over a twenty-four-hour period per day, until, by the spring of 1874 (when the next novel in this series will take up this dramatic story), there were complete sections of the central and southern plains where a man could no longer find any of the beasts which had once blanketed the prairie from Canada to northern Sonora.

  Dying Thunder, that next installment in this ongoing series that I envision encompassing some twenty-two novels, will tell the story of not only the waning days of the buffalo hunter on the central and southern plains, but the last days of the great horse-mounted cultures who once upon a time built their entire culture around the nomadic journeys of the buffalo—using the animals for food, shelter, weapons, tools, and not the least as an object of worship.

  When the buffalo were taken away from these horsemen, there was little culture left for the Indian to hold on to. The buffalo hunter—not the frontier army—ultimately drove the last of the southern tribes, those once-great warrior cultures, into the reservations to feed their families.

  In the end, as I have said before, both sides in this conflict underestimated the resolve of the other. The buffalo hunter cleared the plains for the settler who came in his wake. And the Indian understood neither of them—he was baffled by just how great a value the white man placed on the material ownership of the land. Yet, as I have mentioned before, the white man in turn failed to comprehend to what extremes the Indian would go to maintain the universal freedom of the land.

  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 Sou
thwest 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