Buffalo Trail

by Jeff Guinn

  “We should have won here.”

  “But we didn’t. Learn from this and win next time.”

  • • •

  MOST OF THE INDIANS gathered on the front edge of the bluff and looked down at the white camp. The stink of putrefying human bodies and animal carcasses wafted up. It galled the warriors to see their dead comrades bloating in the heat. The war party’s continued presence was for show now. There had been no formal declaration of this from the leaders, but everyone knew it. Some of the People gratified Quanah by telling him that they knew none of this was his fault, it was all because of fat, lying Isatai. Though the self-proclaimed Spirit Messenger had escaped death at the hands of the Kiowa, Quanah wondered if he might not end up dying at the hands of his own tribesmen. Some of the Quahadi muttered things about slitting his throat if he dared to show his face back in their village. Quanah didn’t care whether Isatai died or not. At least he himself had escaped blame. He would lead war parties again, just as soon as his arm was better. He felt compelled to kill more white people very soon, to wipe away the shame of failing to annihilate everyone in the hunting camp. There was no chance of any future tribal coalitions, he knew. It would be back to the old ways of individual camps and smaller raiding parties. Because the spirits and magic had failed them, the People would return to tradition for some measure of comfort. But at least there would still be fighting.

  The sun was midway through the sky and Quanah was sprawled on a blanket, looking up at the clouds, when Spotted Feather called him over to the precipice facing the white camp. “Something strange is happening,” he said. “You’ll want to see this.” Quanah wondered what could possibly be so unusual but obligingly got up, cradling his right arm as he did.

  Down in the white camp, one of the men stood behind a wagon and aimed his rifle up at the bluff. He was so far away that he was really just a tiny dot. The Indians laughed and hooted at him. Spotted Feather, standing at Quanah’s side, could scarcely control his mirth.

  “He’d have a better chance throwing his bullet at us,” he said. Then some smoke puffed from the end of the white man’s rifle. It took time for the sound of the shot to reach the war party, and at that same moment there was a meaty thunk and Spotted Feather yowled and staggered back. Quanah thought at first he had fainted and wondered why, and then he looked at Spotted Feather where he lay and saw a bloody hole in his abdomen. His friend had been shot right through the black dog fur scalp that he so proudly wore on his belt.

  All around, warriors cried out in surprise and horror, and down in the camp the rest of the white men started firing furiously. No one else atop the bluff was hit but that didn’t matter, because they knew now that they were vulnerable. The white men could kill them even up there. Some of the Indians clambered down the back of the bluff to where their horses were tethered and rode away fast, going north and west back to villages or agencies. These desertions came steadily. Before Spotted Feather’s blood was dry in the dirt, more than half of the war party was gone.

  Medicine Water had some of the dog soldiers wrap Spotted Feather’s body in blankets and tie it to a horse. “We’ll take him back to his family in our village,” he told Gray Beard. “Are you coming?”

  “I am,” the Cheyenne chief said. “Quanah, you need to take your people home too. This is over.”

  Quanah saw Mochi standing by her husband. Her right eye was still puffy but a small slit had opened between the lids and he thought she could probably see a little out of it. “Are you going home too?” he asked.

  “For a little while. Then I’ll go out and kill more white people.” She meant it, he knew. For Mochi, the fight would end only with her own death.

  When the Cheyenne were gone, only men of the People remained, obviously waiting for Quanah. For all the disappointments of the past few days, he was still the leader until they returned home.

  Quanah walked back to the edge of the bluff to take a last, lingering look at the white camp. He knew it was dangerous—that they might shoot him—but he didn’t care: maybe dying that way would be best. He wondered how he’d be treated when he got back to his village. Would they honor him there for what he had tried to do? Down below, the whites stared back at him. Quanah thought about making some grand final gesture, screaming in defiance, perhaps, but his dangling arm hurt and he simply sighed and turned away. At the bottom of the bluff someone helped him mount his pony, and he rode off without looking back.

  FORTY

  It was mid-afternoon before everyone felt sure that the Indians were gone—“At least for the present,” Billy Dixon cautioned. “We must remain alert.” But there was no more immediate danger, and that was liberating. People laughed for no reason. Some couldn’t seem to stop smiling. McLendon’s mood was thoughtful. He had trouble believing he’d survived such a pitched battle. He hadn’t been a hero, but he’d done his best. Now he wanted to get far away from Adobe Walls. Billy and some of the others seemed to think it might be at least a few more days. There were no horses and they didn’t want to risk walking out, so they’d have to wait until help arrived, probably from other white hunting parties.

  The smell was the big problem. They had to get rid of all the dead animals, and the Indians too. They stitched together some buffalo hides, inserted ropes through holes cut along the edges, and rolled individual horses or oxen on top of the hides. It was messy work. If they didn’t roll them just right, their hands ripped through the skins and into the putrefying, jellied insides. Then, using the ropes, they dragged the hides away from the camp and out into the meadow. They dumped the dead beast there and went back for the next. This took nearly until dark, because there were almost sixty dead animals. Everyone pitched in except Mrs. Olds. When she saw that her pet foal was among the slaughtered horses, she cried anew. Bat asked McLendon, “How much water can that woman have in her?” But she was the only nonparticipant. Even her husband tugged on a rope.

  When the stock was disposed of, they turned to the Indians. First, many of the hunters and crewmen stripped the corpses of souvenirs—beaded belts, scalping knives, anything that caught their eyes. Even Billy Dixon took a fancy silver-medallioned bridle off a dead Indian pony. McLendon didn’t want such grisly mementos, and turned down a war club that Bat Masterson offered him.

  “You ought to come away with at least one keepsake, C.M.,” Bat argued, but McLendon said that the memories of the battle would be plenty for him.

  Dutch Henry Borne, Bermuda Carlyle, and Frenchy lingered by the body of the Indian who’d painted himself black. They pushed at the corpse with the toes of their boots and lamented that they couldn’t find the bugle. One of the Indians must have picked it up and carried it off during the fight. To McLendon’s dismay, Borne and Carlyle argued over which of them had killed “the buffalo soldier deserter.”

  “You shot him, Billy,” he said to Dixon. “And it’s obvious he’s not a black man, he’s an Indian covered in black paint. Anybody can see that. They’re standing right over him and lying.”

  Billy chuckled. “Ah, people see what they want to. It’s a rule in life. They want that dead’un to be a bugle-blowing buffalo soldier deserter, so he is. You wait until they get back to Dodge and hear the stories they’ll tell then.”

  “But they’re taking credit for something you did.”

  “So what? Those boys know what happened here will be the stuff of legend, and they want their prominent places in it. For the rest of their lives, they’ll speak of shooting down the black bugler, and there’ll always be somebody to buy them a beer for the privilege of listening. I don’t mind. I know what really happened, and that’s enough.”

  The state of the Scheidler brothers’ bodies evoked considerable comment. Jim McKinley said the mutilations proved that the Indians were nothing but animals—“Sick, crazy ones at that.”

  “Anyone who desecrates a man beyond killing him should burn in a special place in hell,” Bermuda Carlyle d
eclared. “I always hated Indians, but now I hate them more.”

  Before they allowed the dead Indians to be hauled off on the makeshift hide travois, Carlyle and McKinley took axes and hacked off the corpses’ heads. Then they stuck the heads on poles along the corral fence.

  As darkness fell and buzzards swooped in to pick at animal and Indian carcasses, everyone ate dinner, bacon and biscuits, plus all the coffee they could hold, and talked about the fight. Nobody was sure how many Indians had attacked. Estimates ranged into the several thousands, and never less than eight or nine hundred. When asked his opinion, McLendon said truthfully, “I don’t know, just more than I thought I could count,” and everybody laughed and clapped him on the back. He volunteered to stand guard that night, and didn’t see or hear anything suspicious. It really was over.

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, a party of a dozen hunters and crew members rode in from the north with a load of buffalo hides they intended to sell at one of the camp stores. They hadn’t seen any signs of Indians at all, and were astonished to hear about the battle. Two volunteered to ride to Dodge for help, and several others rode back out to find and warn other hunting parties in the area that hostiles were on the warpath. By nightfall, three dozen more white men had arrived and there was almost a party atmosphere in camp. Jim Hanrahan found some cases of unbroken beer bottles and reopened his saloon. The merchants cleaned up the two stores and found that some stock remained to sell. Prices doubled. Jim Langton said he no longer felt the need to return to Dodge immediately because it was apparently going to be business as usual, except with additional profit.

  “Aren’t you worried that the Indians might again return in force?” McLendon asked.

  “Ah, we whipped ’em once, and will again if they didn’t learn their lesson the first time.”

  “I don’t know that it was a whipping,” McLendon said, but Langton was busy selling canned tomatoes to one of the latest arrivals.

  Some of the battle survivors, Carlyle and Dutch Henry and Bat Masterson in particular, reveled in telling wide-eyed camp newcomers all about the fight. Even William Olds did a little bragging. He said he’d used his Sharps Big Fifty to “lethal effect.” The sickly man was so energized that, on the third night after the battle, he said he’d stand guard duty. He struggled up the ladder to the loft in the Rath store where he’d left his rifle, retrieved it, and then tumbled off the ladder on his way down. The stock of the rifle hit the floor and apparently he’d foolishly had the weapon cocked. The rifle fired and blew his head off. Hannah Olds proved that she hadn’t yet screamed herself out. It took a long time to sop up all the blood. The dead man’s wife cried less for him than her foal. After so many tears, Bat speculated, she was finally running dry. They buried Mr. Olds by the Scheidlers and Billy Tyler, and promised Mrs. Olds that they’d soon have her back in Dodge. From there she could make her way to family in the East.

  Five days after the fight, they organized a traveling party to Kansas. There were plenty of wagons in camp now, and the newly arrived hunting crews all had extra horses. None of the merchants wanted to go. They struck deals with some of the teamsters to return from Dodge with wagonloads of supplies for the stores and saloon. But all of the original hunters and their men were ready to go, some sick of Adobe Walls and its bloody memories, others anxious to return to civilization and enjoy the celebrity they felt certain they’d enjoy there. McLendon couldn’t wait to leave. All he wanted now was to get to the Dodge City train depot and begin the long, circuitous route from there to Arizona Territory—a train east to Kansas City, another west to Denver, and from there the stage to Tucson and Florence and finally Mountain View, where Gabrielle was waiting. He sat on a wagon bench beside a teamster who quizzed him about the battle. McLendon offered vague responses and wished the Dodge-bound procession would move faster.

  They were almost six hours out of Adobe Walls before McLendon realized that he’d left his few possessions behind in the camp—spare clothes and his copy of The Last of the Mohicans, that cherished gift from Gabrielle. For a moment he mourned, then shrugged. These were just things, even the book. He was escaping Adobe Walls with his life, and on his way to the woman he loved. He didn’t think much about St. Louis, his young wife who had died there, his vengeful father-in-law, or the hulking killer he’d set on McLendon’s trail. That was all in the past. He was moving on.

  The trip took six days. It should have only taken five, but on the afternoon of the second day they came upon a sickening scene. A small party of buffalo hunters had been caught out by some roving war party. Seven corpses, mutilated almost beyond imagination, attested to the fury of the Indians. The bodies were solemnly buried, and prayers were said. That took some time. McLendon remembered the horrific demise of Mirkle Jones, the amiable Creole, and had to wipe his eyes.

  • • •

  WORD OF THE ADOBE WALLS fight reached Dodge well before the caravan arrived. People lined the streets and greeted them with cheers. The fight survivors were practically pulled down from horses and wagons and hauled directly into Tom Sherman’s dance hall and saloon, where their admirers stood them to endless drinks. The worshipful throng wasn’t just made up of town working class—McLendon saw business leaders Herman Fringer and Fred Zimmermann at the forefront of the crowd. Some of the Adobe Walls survivors vied for attention. Bermuda Carlyle and Dutch Henry Borne both claimed to have killed a buffalo soldier bugler, and to McLendon’s dismay Bat Masterson also insisted it was his shot that brought the “black fella” down. Sherman, awed by the tales, offered “my whores—no, I mean, my dancers” to Carlyle and Henry and Bat “on the house in honor of your achievement, whichever one of you it was.” They trooped off with the women on their arms. The others sat and drank and talked some more. A lieutenant from Fort Dodge appeared and asked if the gentlemen from Adobe Walls might come talk to the commanding officer. They informed him that they were still too tuckered from the battle to go just then, but would as soon as they recovered, maybe in a day or two. The lieutenant said that the commander was excited. This attack was just what was needed to convince the brass back in Washington, D.C., that the Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne hostiles had to be exterminated once and for all.

  “Full war on them’s coming, wait and see,” the lieutenant predicted. Someone handed him a beer and he toasted the men of the hour before reporting back to the fort.

  Billy Dixon got caught up in all the worship and described his shot that took down the Indian high up on the bluff. The distance was a mile at least, Billy estimated, maybe a mile and a quarter or even a mile and a half. He’d aimed at an Indian who’d been especially active in the previous day’s fighting, and hit him square. That elicited gasps of wonder, and Dixon beamed. McLendon tried not to feel too disappointed. Billy was human, after all.

  McLendon himself lingered for about an hour of backslapping. He drank one beer and took some polite sips of a second, but then slipped away. He had a chit for two hundred dollars signed by Fred Leonard to be redeemed at the Pioneer Store. After that, he wanted a bath, a bed for the night, and a morning departure on the train. It would have been nice to say good-bye to Billy and Bat, but they were busy and he knew they wouldn’t notice that he was gone. Maybe he’d see them in the morning if they were up early enough, though he doubted it.

  McLendon remembered the boardinghouse run by the Burgesses, where he’d planned to live before he decided to go along on the Adobe Walls expedition. They were nice people. Surely they’d be able to give him a hot bath and a room for the night at a reasonable rate. He didn’t have all the money he’d wanted before making the journey to Mountain View. After cashing his chit and accepting praise from the Pioneer Store staff as well as the money, he had enough for train and stage fare to Arizona Territory with some money left over, but not sufficient to get himself and Gabrielle, plus her father if she wanted, the rest of the way to California. Well, they’d figure it out. That Gabrielle would choose
him over Joe Saint he had no doubt. He’d lived through the battle for a reason. McLendon stopped on his way to the boardinghouse to send a telegram to Gabrielle. It said simply, “I’M COMING ARRIVE MAYBE TWO WEEKS LOVE YOU CASH McLENDON.” He wanted to say more, but it was a dollar for ten words.

  He was almost to the boardinghouse when he remembered he still had on the same shirt that he’d worn during the fight. Rust-colored bloodstains remained on one sleeve, and there were numerous tears from bits of flying glass and other debris. It wouldn’t do to wear that shirt for a romantic reunion. In fact, he needed a complete new change of clothes. Well, there went another ten or twenty dollars.

  There was a dry goods store near the Burgess boardinghouse and he stopped in there. The clerk, a stout young man, lit up as McLendon entered.

  “You’re one of them!” he exclaimed. “I came out and saw y’all arrive on the wagons. I wanted to come to the saloon, but couldn’t leave the shop unattended. Sir, you’re a hero and it’s an honor to be in your presence.”

  McLendon reminded himself to be gracious. “You’re very kind. As you might have noticed, my clothes are worse for wear and I need to replace them.”

  “Look at that split lip on you—those hostiles busted you up some,” the clerk said. He added hopefully, “Hand-to-hand fighting?”

  McLendon’s lip was somewhat healed but still swollen. He saw no point in telling the truth: that punches from another white man did the damage. “There was a lot going on. All of us got marked a little. Now, about some clothes?”