Bill Dugan_War Chiefs 04

by Quanah Parker

  Chapter 24

  QUANAH SPENT A SLEEPLESS NIGHT. He had listened to all the things the commissioners had said, and he was not impressed. It was not just the distrust of the Anglos that he had learned at Nocona’s knee, although that was a major part of his concern. It was that what the white men were proposing seemed designed to make the Indians into white men. And yet, no matter how many white ways they adopted, Quanah knew the Indians would always be Indians. He had been near some of the white man’s forts. He saw how the Anglos looked at the Indians, their eyes full of contempt, even hatred. This was something that no piece of paper could change, no matter how many names were on it. Not even if the Great Father himself came and sat in the lodge and put his own name on the paper in front of all the chiefs would that look go away.

  And as he sifted through the details of the previous day’s discussion, he found one reason after another not to sign the treaty. The white men wanted the Indians to learn to farm. And when he saw how the white man farmers lived, tied to the earth, breaking their backs in the hot sun, knowing that too little rain, or too much rain, or a cloud of grasshoppers or a prairie fire could wipe out a year’s work in a matter of hours, it didn’t seem any way to live. Why scratch the ground and make yourself a slave to it. The Indian could go anywhere for his food. He carried his house around with him. Everything he needed to live was already out there on the plains, and there was enough for everyone. Or there had been, until the white man started killing the buffalo for no reason, taking thousands for as simple a thing as the tongue, leaving the rest of the meat to the buzzards. The killing was indiscriminate and, worse than that, it was utterly wasteful.

  Quanah knew things weren’t that simple. He knew the Indian sometimes had hard times. Sometimes the buffalo were difficult to find. Sometimes the water holes dried up and left nothing but bitter mud behind. Sometimes a bolt of lightning set the grass on fire, and left miles and miles of ashes and scorched earth behind. But when that happened, the Indian had the option to move, to go where there was enough buffalo, where the grass was green, where the water was cool and clear and good to drink. If the white man had to do that, he would have to leave his house behind, and maybe everything that was in it. Why, he kept asking himself, was that way to live better than the one the Comanche already had?

  And he didn’t have to look too hard to find the answer. The simple truth was, it wasn’t better at all. It was different. Maybe it was even good—for white men. But Comanche weren’t white men. Neither were Kiowa or Arapaho or Cheyenne.

  And Quanah knew all the stories about the Indians who had agreed to give up their right to roam where they pleased, to settle down on the white man’s reservations. Always it was the same. The goods the treaty promised were late, if they came at all. And more often than not, when they did come, they were worthless. The grain had worms, the cattle were skin and bones and only half of them even reached the Indians at all. The agents were mostly thieves and liars, lining their own pockets with stolen profit, selling the goods and keeping the money. And always someone came to the reservation and found something the white man wanted, gold or timber, sometimes even something as simple as good land for farming. And always the Indian had to sign another paper that made the reservation smaller, and he got nothing in exchange. Signing a treaty was jumping off a cliff. There was no place to go but all the way to the bottom once you jumped.

  No, there was no reason that made any sense at all for any Indian to touch the pen to the white man’s treaty paper. And by the time the sun came up, he knew that he would not sign and that he would do everything he could to convince the others not to sign. He hoped that the Comanche would listen to him, and that others opposed to the treaty, like Satanta, could convince their own peoples not to sign. Once the pen touched the paper, the Indian way of life would be doomed.

  He knew all the arguments about the treaties, especially how they would keep the Indians from fighting among themselves. But it was not much more than two years since the white men had been fighting among themselves, and he had heard stories about battles in which more white men died than there were Comanche and Kiowa put together. If the treaty would keep the Indians from killing each other, why couldn’t the men who wrote the treaties keep from killing one another?

  He went outside the lodge as the sun rose, and saw that the soldiers were already up and about. A line of them was heading into a tent, and another line was coming out, holding tin plates of food. Many of the Indians were already gathering in small groups, and he looked for Satanta, but there were so many Kiowa lodges that it took him nearly twenty minutes to find his friend.

  Satanta was already hard at work, haranguing the Kiowa and some Arapaho against the treaty. But opinion seemed to be divided. The hardliners, like Satanta, were contemptuous of those disposed to sign, and Quanah wondered if maybe they were being too inflexible.

  When Satanta saw him, he waved him over. “We will have trouble sending the commissioners home without a treaty,” he said. “There are many Indians, even Kiowa, who have lost their hearts. They are tired of worrying about the white man and want to sign his paper so he will leave them alone.”

  Quanah nodded. “I know. I have been thinking all night about it.”

  “You won’t sign, will you?”

  “No. But I understand why some will, no matter what we tell them. I’m afraid that one day we will all be forced to live on reservations. My father was afraid of that, too, and I think he was right, even though I disagreed with him when he would talk that way.”

  “Peta Nocona thought so?” Satanta seemed surprised. “I would have thought he would be opposed to the treaty. I know how he felt about the Anglos.”

  “No, he wouldn’t have signed, but he knew there were many who would. Every year more and more.”

  “Ah,” Satanta said. “I think he was right. Did you see Little Belly?”

  “Not yet. After the meeting today, I will look for him.”

  Satanta spat into the dust. “The meeting,” he said, his voice dripping acid, “will be much wind and little sense. Talk, talk, talk. I know people think I talk all the time, that I like to hear the sound of my own voice. But it isn’t so. I talk all the time to keep bad words out of the air. If I keep the wind filled with my words, there is no room for foolishness.” He grinned, and Quanah laughed.

  “They say you are the Orator of the Plains.”

  Satanta shrugged. “Somebody has to be. If you have ever spent much time around the council fire in a lodge full of Kiowa, you know where I learned it. I have to spend more time trying to convince these fools not to sign,” he said. “I will see you at the meeting.”

  Quanah drifted around, hanging on the perimeter of one conversation or another for the better part of an hour. And everything he heard convinced him that there would be some kind of treaty to come out of the great council. He was depressed and angry, and tried not to let his ill temper show, but he was having a hard time of it.

  By the time the meeting got underway, the commissioners were sitting at their long table, papers in front of them. It was nearly nine o’clock. The ceremonial passing of the pipe took nearly another hour.

  And finally, at a little after ten o’clock, Kicking Bird stood. Commissioner Taylor recognized him, and the Kiowa chief spoke at length about the treaty, and what he thought it would mean for his people. There were murmurs of approval, and a few shouts of contempt every time he paused, and Kicking Bird seemed aware that he was speaking for a majority, if not of the most influential, at least in terms of the overall attendance.

  The Kiowa chief had had a meeting six months before, with General Hancock, and he spoke once more as he had spoken then. And it was obvious to Quanah that Kicking Bird had become the leader of the peace faction, determined to have the treaty signed at all cost. He wondered whether Kicking Bird understood just how high that cost would be, and what he would have to say when the white man acted as if the paper had never been signed, when the soldiers came, and the buf
falo hunters and the settlers.

  By the end of the day, though, the commissioners were pushing for a signing the next morning.

  Quanah watched as the meeting broke up, and drifted off looking for Little Belly. Finally finding his lodge, he called to his old friend, whom he hadn’t seen in more than three years, and Little Belly came rushing out.

  He threw his arms around Quanah and dragged him into the lodge. “There is someone I want you to meet,” he said.

  Quanah, once his eyes adjusted to the dim light, was surprised to find himself staring at a white man, whose red hair looked like fire, and whose face was hidden behind a full, dark red beard.

  Quanah recognized him immediately. It was the interpreter, Philip McCusker.

  Little Belly introduced the two men, then chattered excitedly. “Mac has come to the council as an interpreter. He has news for you. I have been looking for you ever since I heard you were here.”

  Quanah shook hands with the white man, who got to his feet.

  And Little Belly broke in even before the hands had separated. “Mac has news of your mother!”

  Quanah looked stunned.

  McCusker measured him with his gaze. “You’re Cynthia Parker’s son?” he asked.

  “You know what happened to my mother?” Quanah asked, ignoring the question put to him. “Where is she? What happened to her?”

  McCusker raised a hand. “Hold on, one at a time,” he said. Dropping back to the buffalo robe on the floor of the lodge, he patted the ground beside him. “Sit down,” he said.

  When Quanah was seated, McCusker took time to roll a cigarette. Quanah wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake the information out of him, but he forced himself to be polite. When the cigarette was finished, McCusker asked if he wanted one, but the impatient Quanah just shook his head.

  Taking a deep breath, McCusker paused, looked at Quanah with a mixture of sadness and pity. “I can only tell you what I heard,” he began. “I wasn’t there, and I didn’t see any of this with my own eyes, but I believe it to be true.”

  He waited for that preamble to sink in, then nodded. “Naudah, I think she was known as among your people. At least, that’s what I’ve heard.”

  “Naudah, yes,” Quanah said, leaning forward.

  “Well, there was a Ranger attack on a camp at Pease River … your camp … and Naudah was captured, along with a baby girl.”

  “Prairie Flower,” Quanah said, trying to keep his voice from cracking.

  “Right. Anyway, the wives of the army officers at Camp Cooper took good care of her. They cleaned her up and gave her something to eat. She hadn’t been hurt. Neither had the baby. And Captain Ross, he was the Ranger who was in charge of the raid, he sent for Isaac Parker. That was her uncle. Your great-uncle, I guess, I’m not too sure of how that works. Anyway, Isaac Parker came to the camp. Whenever a white woman was recaptured from the Indians, even if they weren’t Comanche, Isaac would always go, hoping to find Cynth … Naudah. When he got there, she was sittin’ in a rocker, holding the baby. He didn’t recognize her right off, and the longer he looked at her, the less sure he was. Finally, he was about to leave, and said it wasn’t Cynthia Ann, and she ups and says she was. She was afraid of him at first, but I guess when he said her name, it reminded her of something.”

  “Then what happened?” Quanah asked, his voice barely a whisper. “Where is she?”

  “Isaac Parker took her and the baby home with him. She had a little sister, just a baby when she was taken away, and she lived with the sister. She was all the time worried about you and your brother and your father, though. At first, she tried to escape, to come back to the Comanche, but they always caught her. Finally, she figured she’d never find you anyhow, so she tried to fit in. But it didn’t work out so good. She couldn’t get used to the white man’s ways, and she was pining away for her family. The baby got sick and died. It seemed to take everything out of your mother. Not long after, she passed away herself.”

  McCusker had made the entire narration without looking at Quanah. Now, his own voice barely audible, he looked at the Comanche for the first time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I thought you’d want to know.”

  Quanah nodded.

  “She was well taken care of,” McCusker said. “She had people around her who loved her, but I guess …” His voice trailed off.

  “Thank you,” Quanah said. Then without another word, he got to his feet and walked out of the lodge, leaving McCusker and Little Belly to stare after him.

  By the time the Kiowa could get himself into motion, Quanah was already lost in the crowd.

  That night, he rode away from the council, not knowing and not caring whether the treaty was to be signed.

  Chapter 25

  Spring 1868

  ON THE LONG, LONELY RIDE from Medicine Lodge, Quanah had plenty of time to think. He was barely twenty-two years old, and he was as alone in the world as he had ever been. Peta Nocona was dead. Naudah was dead. Pecos and Prairie Flower were dead. And his way of life was slowly dying. He had Weakeah, but somehow it seemed not to be enough, because she was as trapped in the downward spiral as he was.

  What he had seen at the great council had done nothing to reassure him. He knew that Satanta, and the others like him, would fight until they could fight no longer. But they were already great chiefs, and they had substantial reputations as warriors. It was easy for such men to get others to follow them. But who was Quanah? A Comanche orphan. Worse, a Comanche orphan with blue eyes.

  He had no sense of where he belonged in the world, if, indeed, he belonged anywhere at all. All he could be sure of was that the Anglos had to be resisted at all cost, and it was into that resistance that he resolved to pour every bit of his strength and intelligence. The Staked Plains were Comanche land, always had been and, if he could do anything about it, they always would be.

  By the time he reached his camp, he had made up his mind. The white men sent soldiers to talk about peace. What they really meant was give us peace on our terms or we will give you war. If war is what they want, Quanah thought, then war is what they will have.

  Weakeah was pleased to see him. She worried about him every time he left the small village, and when, as increasingly happened, those absences were solitary, she worried still more. She was haunted by the possibility that something would happen to him and not only would she never see him again, she would never know what had happened to him.

  The thought of Quanah lying somewhere in the vast emptiness, his body food for wolves and crows, was almost more than she could stand, and her dreams were haunted by one ghastly scenario after another. She was not naive. She was, after all, the daughter of Yellow Bear, a great chief, and she knew that the life of a Comanche warrior ended more often than not in sudden violence. But this was no ordinary man who slept beside her, this was Quanah, a man who had it in him to lead his people, not just the small band of refugees, but all the Comanche. He could make war against the white man, or he could find a way to lead his people along the path of peace. But she feared that the choice would not be hers to make. And that it would not be Quanah’s.

  It was near sundown when he rode in, and she couldn’t help but notice the grim set of his jaw.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  He shook off the question. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “Not now.”

  “But … “

  He shook his head once more. “I have much to tell you, but I don’t want to talk yet. I want to think. There is so much that I have to try to understand, and I don’t know where to begin.”

  “At least tell me if the treaty was signed. Is there going to be peace? Will we have to go to a reservation like the Caddo and the Wichita?”

  With a labored sigh, he moved to the fire and lay down, folding his arms behind his head and staring at the smoke hole at the top of the lodge.

  Weakeah walked over to sit beside him. He reached out one hand and turned onto a hip to look up at her. She
took the hand in both of her own and held it in her lap.

  “You want to know everything, don’t you?” he asked. There was no anger in the statement, but his voice seemed to come from a great distance, as if he were barely aware of her, perhaps even talking to himself.

  She smiled. “Of course I do. I didn’t run away from my father’s lodge to have you keep secrets from me. I did it because I want to share everything with you. Good and bad. Is that so hard to understand?”

  He shook his head. “Yes, in some ways it is. I don’t have very much to share. The life I have is not one that many people would even want to share.”

  “I don’t … “

  He reached up to hold a finger to her lips. “Wait,” he said. “Just give me a little time to …” He stopped, sat up, and looked at her intently. “I don’t know if the treaty was signed,” he said.

  “But, I thought you went to the council to see what happened.”

  “I did. But there was so much going on. There were thousands of Indians—Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho, Kiowa-Apache, Cheyenne—it seemed there were as many Indians as there are blades of grass. But then I thought about how many Anglos there are, and it seemed suddenly that there were so few Indians that we could never hope to …”

  “Did they sign the treaty then, because they were afraid of the numbers, is that what happened?”

  Weakeah was trying to understand, but his mind seemed only to skip from one stone to another, when she was asking him about all the water between them.

  Sensing that he was not making himself understood, he sighed, lay back, and stared again at the top of the lodge. He saw where the lodge-poles were lashed together, and he thought that is what he and Weakeah were like. They were lashed together, with something stronger than rawhide, and if he were to be fair, he would have to try to tell her what he was going through. If she didn’t understand, at least he would have done his part.

  “I don’t know if the treaty was signed because I left before the council was over.”