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

by Terry C. Johnston

  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.

  “Why didn’t you get down to shake hands with the general?” Thomas asked the old rifleman.

  He spit more brown juice into the spring wind. “Son of a bitch can die with a bullet between his goddamned eyes, for all I care.”

  “That was General—by God—Sherman!”

  “And during the goddamned war I done my best to make things hard on that poke-stealing bastard,” he snarled.

  “Didn’t know you was so hard again’ the Union.”

  The old man stared at Brazeale, incredulous. “I’m from Texas, boy. There ain’t no doubt of that, is there?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So there damned well better be no doubt where my heart laid when it come to that goddamned war.”

  “Sounds like the war ain’t over for you.”

  The old man finally glanced over and caught the grin on Brazeale’s face, then smiled with one of his own. “Shit—if I was still of a mind to fight the war … there’d be one less Yankee general right now … and one more dead body to lay a’bleaching in the middle of this Jacksboro road!”

  Thomas had to laugh at the old man, the way he said it, and the way he stroked the butt of that scuffed and worn but well-oiled Spencer repeater. Seven shots, and seven good Injuns, the old man had said days ago when they first loaded up at the rail siding in Weatherford, on the other side of the Brazos River, last stop on the line coming west from Dallas.

  “All seven red niggers got a real good chance of spending eternity in Hell, I got anything to say about it!” the old Texan had spouted.

  He was a sour one, Thomas thought, most of the time—but he could smile if he had to. And the old man would do to ride with all the way to Fort Griffin and back.

  “You think General Sherman got more soldiers riding his rear guard?” Brazeale asked less than an hour later as the wagons lumbered closer and closer toward the Salt Creek Crossing.

  He had to nudge an elbow into the old man’s side to roust him from his sleep.

  “What’s that?”

  “Look yonder,” Thomas said, pointing. “You figure that’s some of Sherman’s rear guard?”

  The old man didn’t reply at first, merely squinting and peering through the shimmering afternoon sunlight, studying the road far ahead.

  “First off, son—there’s too damned many of the sonsabitches to be soldiers.”

  Brazeale swallowed hard. “Not … not soldiers?”

  The old man was rising from the bench seat, turning to signal back to the other nine wagons and teamsters. “Find us a good, open spot to corral these wagons up, son. And you best make it fast. We don’t have time to be lollygagging.”

  Brazeale felt his heart rise in his throat as he read the look of something strange, foreign, in the old man’s eyes. Then he glanced on down the road at that dust cloud and the wavy horsemen beneath the sun and shadow and haze of the Jacksboro-Belknap Road. Not that he hadn’t seen Indians before, even Kiowa. Shit, he worked for Henry Warren of Weatherford—and if that didn’t mean hauling supplies north to the Nations where the government had the Indians on reservations, why … but this group of horsemen was something else. More warriors coming on at that easy pace, just coming and coming on—more than young Thomas Brazeale had ever seen.

  And these didn’t look like no reservation bucks neither.

  There was no time lost in rumbling those ten wagons into a crude circle, wagonmaster Nathan S. Long yelling orders and nobody really listening as they all scrambled to unhitch the mules from the trees, confining the forty-one animals inside the circle while the teamsters pulled rifles and ammunition from beneath the seats and made themselves small under the wagons just as a bugle blast split the air and more than a hundred Kiowas gave a war whoop, pounding heels into their war ponies.

  In the shadows of that wagonbed, Thomas felt he was choking on his own belly-bile. Cursing himself, he knew it was better than wetting himself.

  Those painted, screaming warriors were not content to merely circle the wagons this time out. Instead, they rushed headlong at the dozen white men as if they intended to overrun the ring of wagons in one swift and bloody charge.

  Just like a nighthawk, Thomas thought as the screeching brown horde thundered in. Like a nighthawk sweeping down on a moth or wren or tiny sparrow.

  As those dozen teamsters opened fire into the brown mass of that first wave, Nathan Long and four others were either killed or wounded.

  Thomas watched the screeching, red wave pass, the sting of burnt black powder making his eyes water, pungent on his tongue. Behind him some of the teamsters were yelling again, nonsense. Then someone was pulling on Thomas’s leg. He jerked around to find one of the older men motioning him out of the wagon shadows.

  “Let’s get!”

  “Where?”

  “We’re going to the trees, by God!”

  Brazeale glanced over the scene. Five men down: two staring at the sky, motionless. Another two facedown in the grass and dust, barely breathing. The old rifleman was the fifth, sitting slumped against a wagon wheel, his legs akimbo, his head slung low between his shoulders. On his chest glistened a
bright red rosette. As Brazeale crouched beside him and pulled the old man’s head back, the wrinkled eyelids fluttered.

  “I’m done, boy. Just don’t let them bastards get me alive. You … you gotta kill me ’fore you go.”

  “C’mon, Thomas!” rose the shout from others.

  He gazed back at the old man.

  “Gimme my gun, boy—you don’t got the stomach to kill me yourself, much as I’d beg you.”

  Brazeale found it in the nearby grass, slapped it in the old Texan’s hand. For the first time those wrinkled eyes softened.

  “I don’t want you to watch—now get and save your hide!”

  Brazeale was pulled onto his feet by two others anxious to escape. He found himself running, eyes stinging as he glanced one last time at the old man, watching the Texan jam the muzzle of his rifle under his chin, stretching down for the trigger guard. He squeezed off the tears and turned around as the three of them vaulted over the wagon tongue.

  The rifle exploded like spring thunder behind him. Brazeale did not look back.

  One teamster spilled a few yards ahead of him, whimpering in pain from the first arrow that fluttered between his shoulder blades.

  They would never make the trees ahead.

  He leaped over the wounded man, squirming still, his hands red as he struggled to grasp the arrows bristling high in his back. Crying out, like the gutted pigs back home—crimson streaming down his wrists.

  When Thomas reached the trees, he was gasping, sliding in among the late shadows with the rest. How many he did not know at that moment. Only that there were five back there at the wagon ring where the warriors closed in now. And two out there in the dry grass, having tried to make it to this stand of trees. His mind scratched at the calculations the way he would scratch at the damned chiggers troubling his sweating body this time of the year. That made five of them left out of the twelve …