Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873

by Terry C. Johnston

  Quanah Parker nodded, still staring into the distance at the austere ocher and white snow-covered ridges. The winter wind nuzzled his long, braided hair this way and that, gently clinking the silver conchos he had woven into that single, glossy queue almost long enough to brush to the back of his war pony.

  “You waited long enough to be sure there were no more inside?” Quanah asked the scout who had ridden back across the snow from the valley southeast of where the Kwahadi warriors waited anxiously this bright, cold winter mid-morning.

  “Six.”

  “How many of the white man’s log lodges?”

  “Two. One in front. The other in back, with the wood pen for his horses and two of the spotted buffalo.”

  Quanah turned his nose up at that. Spotted buffalo. The white man’s cattle. Docile and spineless. With less courage than even a buffalo cow. Good only for milking. And he wondered what the white man saw in milk anyway. If the Grandfather Above gave the milk to the cow, why then did the white man drink it?

  If he was so fond of milk, why didn’t the white man suckle at the breasts of his wives?

  It was not as if Quanah had never tasted human milk. He had. Many times. For a moment now, here in the cold of this open land, with the brutal wind moaning out of the west like a death song upon the Llano Estacado, it was good to remember. At times he had thought about taking a second wife, but his first filled his life with all that he needed.

  She satisfied him even more now than ever before. Mother to their three children, he recalled how her belly had grown swollen with that first child. Thought about how he still made love to her when she grew as big as a antelope doe. How she had never been shy about expressing her hunger for him … the warm softness of her fingers as they encircled his excited flesh, kneading him into readiness. How he would roll her over, bringing her up on her hands and knees, that ripe belly of hers and those swollen breasts suspended beneath her as he drove his hard flesh into the moistness of her own warm readiness.

  Quanah always answered her rising whimpers with his own growl of enthusiasm in the coupling, for none had ever satisfied him like she.

  And after he had exploded inside her, Quanah would suckle at first one, then the other of her warm breasts. It seemed she was never without milk from the birth of their first child. And it had always been a warm, sweet treat for Quanah—after making warm, sweet love to his wife. This drinking of her milk from her small, swollen breasts—something that often made him ready to mount her again.

  He had never understood that … yet had never questioned it either.

  Quanah shook his head, feeling the cold blast of winter air once more. Something that reminded him he was not in his warm lodge, wrapped in the furry robes with her.

  Perhaps he needed her badly.

  He acknowledged that he had been away from the winter village for too long perhaps. He was thinking on his wife and that sweet, warm and moist rutting he shared with her, when he should be thinking about those six white men down there in that valley less than two miles off.

  Many suns ago he had led a large hunting party away from their village to hunt buffalo. The Comanche were running low on dried meat. With a disappointing fall hunt, Quanah’s Kwahadi band were forced to hunt much earlier this winter than they normally would have to hunt. More than a moon before, he and the warriors had killed a few white hide hunters they found south of the dead line, that place where the white treaty-talkers said the white buffalo hunters were not to cross.

  But more and more the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne were discovering the white man south of the Arkansas River, on the hunting ground guaranteed to the Indian as his own. A worthless, heartless act, this talking treaty with the white man, Quanah thought.

  Ever since the time the old chiefs had signed that talking paper up on Medicine Lodge Creek six winters before, it seemed the white hunters were crossing south of the Arkansas in greater numbers, crossing south too of the Cimarron. And Quanah feared they would one day soon come to the Canadian River—what he rightly believed was the last stand for his people: that northern boundary of the great Staked Plain, the Llano Estacado of the ancient ones with metal heads who first brought the horses to The People of the plains.

  Besides those hide hunters they found and killed more than a moon gone now, his scouts had also returned with news of a small group of soldiers marching northwest onto the Staked Plain. Quanah knew that killing the soldiers boded no good for his people. The army would only send more next time. And the yellowlegs never found the roaming warriors—instead the army’s Tonkawa guides sought out the Kwahadi villages filled with women and children and the old ones.

  Rarely were the young warriors punished by the white soldiers. It was their families who were made to suffer—losing lodges and blankets and robes, clothing and meat and weapons, when they ran quickly to flee the white man and his Tonkawa trackers, who led the soldiers to the valleys and canyons where the Kwahadi always camped to escape the cold winter winds or to find shade come the first days of the short-grass time.

  No, he had told his warriors. We are not going to kill these soldiers. Which had made them howl in angry disappointment.

  “But we will drive them out of Kwahadi land,” he had instructed them, “by burning the prairie!”

  For miles in either direction along a north-south line, the horsemen set their firebrands to the tall prairie grass dried by the arid autumn winds. The winter wind did the rest: whipping the sparks into a fury that forced the yellowlegs to turn about and flee to the east for their lives.*

  However, in the days that followed, his scouts reported finding no sign of the soldier party. No charred wagon or burnt carcasses.

  From time to time the mystery had made Quanah shudder: to think that those white men had merely vanished into the cold air of the Staked Plain. But if they had, he argued with himself, where would they find food for their animals?

  And besides, that great storm that thundered down upon the plains, riding in on the bone-numbing breath of Winter Man, leaving behind tall snowdrifts and many hungry bellies, would surely have killed the white men so unprepared for such a blizzard.

  While he was certain that storm had killed the retreating soldiers, it had also driven the buffalo farther and farther south. The little ones in Quanah’s village cried with empty bellies. The women and old ones wailed as well. It was only the warriors who could not cry out in the pain of their gnawing hunger—for it remained up to them alone to go in search of meat to lift the specter of starvation from the Kwahadi.

  After many days of endless riding to the south, Quanah and his hunters found themselves near the southernmost reaches of the Staked Plain, without having seen any buffalo or antelope. It was as if Winter Man had wiped all before him with his great, cold breath.

  As the days of searching grew into many, they had come across a few old bulls partially buried in a coulee here, frozen in a snowdrift against a ridge there—no longer strong enough to go on with the rest. A few had been left to rot by the passing of winter storm … like the white hide hunters left the thousands upon thousands to rot in the sun.

  Where had the rest of the herds gone? Farther and farther south still—to the land of the summer winds?

  If they had, they would likely not return until the short-grass time on the prairies, when the winds blew soft and the Grandfather Above once more told the great buffalo herds to nose around to the north in their great seasonal migrations.

  “You wish to attack these white men?” asked the young warrior sitting beside the Kwahadi chief.

  He blinked, his reverie broken and brought back to the now. “Yes.” Quanah turned to his scouts. “You tell me there is a hill looking down on the place where the white man built his log lodges?”

  The scout dropped quickly to the ground, his buffalo-hide winter moccasins scraping snow aside from a small circle. In the middle he formed up two frozen snowballs. Circling the snowballs on three sides he mounded up some of the snow he had scraped as
ide.

  “Yes, Quanah,” he said, gazing up into the bright winter sun behind his chief. “These are the white man’s two lodges. And these are the hills.”

  “Where are we?”

  The scout pointed with the butt of his rifle.

  “It is good,” Quanah declared. “We will have the wind in our faces and the sun at our backs as we ride to the top of the hills.”

  After dividing his force of more than ten-times-ten warriors into four groups and instructing each in its role, Quanah led them away in silence, moving swiftly across the hard, frozen ground.

  Behind the low hills he halted them, ordering off three of the groups, then sending off the fourth to guard the all-important opening in the small valley. If the white man was to flee, he told his warriors, it would be through that saddle. They were not to attack. Instead, they were to wait for any of the white men to come their way once the settlers were flushed like a covey of quail.

  When all was in readiness, Quanah took the small quarter of a red trade blanket that he sat upon and nudged his pony to the top of the hill. There he waved it against the pale, winter blue of the sky, watching the two white men turn from their work on something in front of the first log lodge.

  Immediately the three groups burst into motion, yelling, screeching, riding at a gallop for the two wood buildings.

  The two men outside in the open, grassy yard threw down the tack they had been soaping and repairing, sprinting for the cabin.

  Puffs of smoke began to rise above the warrior groups.

  One of the white men skidded to a stop, reaching behind him to claw at his back before he fell face first into the dry grass dotted with wind-drifted snow. Some of the first warriors leaped their ponies over him, attempting to get to the second man before he reached the cabin. He grabbed his arm, crying out as he stumbled—yet he disappeared through the doorway and slammed it shut as the red horsemen galloped by, their bullets thudding dully into the heavy planks.

  As that first wave passed the cabin, puffs of smoke appeared from the windows. From where Quanah sat, there were three windows used by the white riflemen. With one of the settlers already killed—his warriors had only to flush the other five.

  Quickly Quanah brought the red blanket over his head and held it there in the steady breeze. Two warriors obediently broke off their attack and sent their horsemen to a safe distance from the cabin while they rode to talk things over with the war-chief atop the hill.

  “Burn them out,” Quanah told them. “If we attempt to ride past their windows and kill them—the chances are very small we will kill them. This would be a bad thing, for the chances are very good the five who are left will kill many, many more of us with their big buffalo-killing guns. Burn them out!”

  The two returned to their bands, calling forth the Fire Carrier—the one who kept his hot coals smoldering in a protective gourd when they marched from camp to camp, fire to fire. A dozen of the warriors quickly made firebrands using the dried, belly-high prairie grass.

  The torches glowed and smoked smudgy trails against the blue sky as the warriors raced in. This was the most dangerous work of all, Quanah admitted. His men were riding in defenseless, not shooting arrow or bullet while their hands carried the firebrand. And the horsemen had to ride close—very close—to drop the torches through the windows—right where the white man squatted like a badger in his hole … with those big-barreled buffalo guns of his.

  Rider after rider rode by the windows. Some of the torches fell short. One horseman was knocked off his animal and dragged across the ground to safety by the rawhide rope lashing him with his pony. Most of the firebrands fell against the sides of the log lodges. Only two of the torches made it into the cabin.

  They were enough.

  It did not take long for the smoke to begin wafting from the chimney, pouring thick and greasy from the three windows Quanah could watch. Then as the smoke darkened and grew thicker, he instructed his warriors with his blanket to await the bolting of their prey from its den.

  A few minutes more and two of the white men burst out of the cabin, coughing, their rifles still held up at the ready.

  Warriors hammered their ponies into action, intending on running the white men over. But first one, then a second horseman fell to rifle fire. And from the looks of it, those guns were being fired from the second of the white man’s log lodges.

  A pair of white men had been in the second log lodge all the time, and his scouts had missed them. Quanah grew furious inside, his hatred seething for these settlers come to Kwahadi ground.

  The two who had fled from the cabin sprinted across the wide, grassy yard and found safety in the barn. Three more white men appeared at the door of the cabin, driven out by the thick columns of dark smoke issuing from every window.

  As the Kwahadis galloped in to make the kill—the three white men bolted headlong for the barn, while the four already there laid down a covering fire.

  His anger grown to a rage, the war-chief became a warrior once more. Without waiting for any of the rest to take the initiative, Quanah put heels to his pony and raced off the hillside for the cabin. At a full gallop he reined his pony toward the front window, leaning off the side of the animal to sweep up one of the burning firebrands that had not made it inside the first log lodge. Bringing his pony around in a broad circle, Quanah rode for the barn with the torch smoking and hissing, sputtering sparks on the cold winter breeze.

  Bullets whined angrily overhead like noisy black wasps on a spring day. He felt the sting of one of those bullets at the moment he pitched the firebrand through the narrow opening at the back of the barn where the white man had pitched his tall pile of grass.

  Sawing the rawhide reins hard to the left, Quanah urged his pony away from the white man’s guns—but not quickly enough.

  He sensed the flutter in the pony’s heart … a misstep, then the animal pitched forward suddenly, throwing its rider clear.

  Quanah rolled and rolled across the dry, smothering grass and frozen, crusty patches of snow, coming to a stop at last far from the white men who had killed his favorite war pony.

  On all four sides of the small valley, his warriors set up a great cry of rejoicing, for the firebrand had gone in and quickly ignited some of that dried grass the white man foolishly stored for his stock.

  With smoke billowing from doors on both sides of the barn, the seven white men darted into the open in a tight group, hurrying for the skimpy timber along the little nearby creek.

  With their quarry flushed into the tall grass, the young warriors had great sport with the settlers who no longer had any place to hide.

  It was over quickly.

  Quanah watched as the noisy young men laughed and joked over the eight bodies, counting coup and scalping, stripping them of their clothing to try it on, then cutting off hands and feet, and finally the manhood parts. Each of the eight were left facing the sky—for they had fought hard to the end and were worthy enemies.

  “Do you claim any of the white man’s horses, Quanah?” asked one of the older warriors.

  “I should look over the animals in the log corral. If I don’t find one that will let me ride it on this hunt—I will have a long walk home!”

  “That gray one looks strong,” suggested the warrior.

  “Quanah!” yelled a young scout riding in off the nearby hill. “Soldiers—they come!”

  “Where?” he asked. “How many!”

  The scout pointed to the east, his face grave. “Ten times ten. More,” he replied, striking his left forearm twice.

  “Tonkawa trackers lead them?”

  The scout nodded, his eyes filling with great concern.

  Sweeping his red blanket from the ground, Quanah turned to some of the others. “Open that horse pen and bring the big gray horse. Drive the others away when you leave.” He brought the blanket over his head, waving it swiftly from side to side. “Ride, my brothers—soldiers come! Ride now!”

  Two mounted warriors broug
ht the prancing gray horse up, its eyes wide with fear at the smell of the Kwahadis, its nostrils flaring as it tested the cold wind.

  “You do not like the smell of Comanche, do you, my new friend?”

  Quanah tore the concho slide from the bandanna at his neck and looped the bright yellow cloth over the horse’s eyes, tying a knot securely behind the animal’s jaws. As the two warriors held the big stallion, the Comanche war-chief leaped on its bare back.

  When it attempted to rear, Quanah instead drove his heels into its rear flanks. The horse bolted off, followed by the last of the raiding party to leave the scene of the attack.

  “You will do, my new friend,” Quanah whispered into the horse’s ear as they raced up the snowy slope. “We will learn much from one another.”

  “Between now and the short-grass time when the Kwahadi will join the Cheyenne and Kiowa in one great fight against the buffalo hunters … you and I will hunt many buffalo together and learn much about each other.”

  The cold breath of Winter Man whipped tears from his eyes as the great gray horse surged ahead of the other ponies, its hooves tearing up clods of frozen ground and crusted snow.

  “Then, I will proudly ride you when I lead a thousand warriors down to drive the white hide hunters from the Staked Plain—for all time!”

  THE PLAINSMEN SERIES BY TERRY C. JOHNSTON

  Book I: Sioux Dawn

  Book II: Red Cloud’s Revenge

  Book III: The Stalkers

  Book IV: Black Sun

  Book V: Devil’s Backbone

  Book VI: Shadow Riders

  Book VII: Dying Thunder

  Book VIII: Blood Song

  Book IX: Reap the Whirlwind

  Book X: Trumpet on the Land

  Book XI: A Cold Day in Hell

  Book XII: Wolf Mountain Moon

  Book XIII: Ashes of Heaven

  Book XIV: Cries from the Earth

  Book XV: Lay the Mountains Low

  Book XVI: Turn the Stars Upside Down

  CRITICAL PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF TERRY C. JOHNSTON

  “RICH AND FASCINATING … There is a genuine flavor of the period and of the men who made it what it was.”