Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  “If the government contractors cannot supply us with what we need to feed your families,” a disgruntled Miles had told Stone Calf and the others, “I will have no other choice but to free your people to move west, to hunt the buffalo.”

  The sting in his old eyes also burned in his chest. Stone Calf knew it was what his people would want most to hear. But, that meant the Cheyenne would have to go west to locate that last great herd of buffalo, the same southern herd the white hide men from Kansas were very likely already hunting.

  * * *

  The catfish and perch had been a most welcome change for Seamus from the steady diet of venison and antelope and turkey. The nearby creeks throbbed with the fish. And there was a morning or two when the Irishman decided he would take the day off and sit beneath the shade of the willow and cottonwood and doze, listening to the drone of the horseflies and dragonflies and yellowjackets while the rest of the men finished the last details of their settlement here in the meadow beside Adobe Walls Creek.

  That is, those few men who had remained behind when the rest pulled out to find the great herd.

  “This damned weather is likely keeping them south longer than normal,” Charlie Myers said one evening as a group of them had stood outside, staring to the south as rose-colored twilight came down easy on the land.

  “All they’ve brought in so far are a few bull and a some cow hides,” added James Langton, Myers’s young partner.

  Donegan often eyed the growing ricks of dried “flint” hides outside the Myers and Leonard compound or across the way near the low walls of the Rath & Company stockade. Each stack stood some forty to fifty hides tall, giving the appearance of clusters of small buildings dotting the outskirts of the stockades.

  Nearly every day now saw the arrival of a new outfit, hunter and skinners having followed what had become a well-worn trail south from Dodge City. In either store, the hide men bought powder and primers, lead and cartridges, patch paper and gun oil. Food was next on the list for highest demand among the hunters: canned tomatoes, soup and peaches; crackers, pickles and dried apples. Others items moved more slowly—Castile soap, strychnine wolf poison, axle grease and stomach bitters.

  While Charlie Myers had promised the hunters he would hold the line on Dodge City prices, most items did cost more when they crossed the counter at Adobe Walls. In Dodge City bacon had cost fifteen cents per pound; twenty cents in Indian country. Coffee that was thirty-six cents a pound in Kansas was selling in Texas for at least forty-five cents. And tobacco cost a man at least twenty-five cents more by the time it made it to buffalo country.

  Upon arrival at the trading post, or during their infrequent visits to purchase supplies, most of the hunters took their two hot meals a day in one mess hall or the other for the enviable price of fifty cents per meal. Most of the time Seamus would avoid the closed-in buildings when the hide men came in off the range, preferring to eat or do his drinking when he could do it alone. Although soap was available to the skinners, most did not take advantage of mixing it with water. Theirs was a life requiring that they work up past their elbows in the great carcasses, some of which were becoming putrefied. Blood, body fat and the parasites that infested the buffalo all were the lot of the skinner—lowest in the hunting echelon.

  Dried sweat on a frontiersman was one thing, Donegan brooded. The telltale stench that clung to a buffalo skinner was something else altogether.

  It was on the long late-spring nights like this that the men of Adobe Walls congregated to drink, play cards, tell stories and dance, besides regaling one another with their lies and windies. And because of some of the company a man was required to keep in either of the two stores, Seamus ofttimes preferred his own company. The solitude of the night beneath the stars and the sliver of that gold moon as he dug and drank, letting long draughts of the whiskey tumble down his throat before he set the bottle back atop the crumbling adobe wall above the new hole he was currently excavating. Still hoping. Talking to himself and God and any of the saints who might be listening—telling them that he needed their help as night after night he had been coming down here, slipping away in the darkness lest anyone become suspicious of the Irishman’s need to be digging up the old ruins.

  And tonight he just did not have the grit to work long at his obsession. Whether it was the nagging warning of something unknown by the great white scar across his back, or only the bone-weary fatigue settling into his muscles after these weeks of labor during the day, digging at night. He was no longer a young man able to work and drink as long as he required of himself.

  Ah, though the spirit were willing—his flesh no longer was.

  Secreting the shovel back in a copse of willow and hack-berry, Seamus strode back to his tent, pitched close by the stakes and twine that marked what would soon become the walls of Jim Hanrahan’s saloon. With the completion of the Rath & Company compound, Swede Johnson had only recently begun raising the newest of the settlement buildings.

  Tracing an icy finger along the scar down his back, the wind made him shudder. Donegan glanced at the clouds scudding across the thumbnail sliver of a moon as he hunched over to enter his tent. And instantly froze.

  Everything lay scattered.

  He dropped to his knees, digging through the jumble of what few possessions he owned. The Henry was here, he could feel it with his hands without any light. The extra pistols as well. They hadn’t wanted his weapons.

  Hurriedly he dragged a lucifer down the tent pole and lit the crude lamp he used—a wick standing in buffalo tallow in a tip cup.

  They were after something else.

  Pulling the painted rawhide pouch into his lap, he knew before he even lay back the flap. It was untied. He never left it untied. But even then he knew they had not come to steal his money. It had been just a plus to going through his things.

  Whoever it was had wanted something else. Something more valuable than that last hundred dollars Seamus Donegan had in the world. Back at the walls earlier that evening the warning at his back had told him, and he hadn’t paid attention to the ghostly whisper.

  Now, like a cold wind come to frighten a man on a hot mid-summer day, the questions and fear eddied and rustled through his weary, troubled mind. His heart thundering in his ears, furious and wanting more than anything at this moment to put his big hands on whoever had violated him, Donegan nonetheless knew that there was someone among these men he could not trust. And, in all likelihood, it had to be someone newly come to the meadow. One of the new arrivals—hunter, skinner or company employee.

  Eyes gone dark with instant suspicion, his temper flaring hotter than a rope burn, Donegan knew he would have to watch his back now. Never giving any man among them a chance to even suspect where he had buried the map.

  Worse still, now he would no longer be free to wander off at night. No more could he feel certain of his own safety, alone beneath the stars and moonlight. Whoever had violated the unspoken trust and bond between these frontiersmen might very well be the sort of predator who would stop at nothing short of killing him to get what he wanted.

  Someone sent by Louis Abragon to do everything he could to get his hands on the Irishman’s map.

  9

  Moon of Fat Horses, 1874

  The first day of the new moon. And when that first moon of the summer had grown full and fat, they would attack the white hide hunters while they slept in their earth lodges.

  As decided by the chiefs, the bands had come together a few days ago at the mouth of Elk Creek on the North Fork of the Red River. It was there, within the bounds of the Kiowa-Comanche Reservation itself, that Isatai had directed the construction of the sun-dance lodge. Even Quanah was impressed by the size of the gathering. A wildly independent people, often led by extremely jealous chiefs, the Comanche had never before joined in such numbers for any purpose. Even the avowed peace chiefs like Horseback and Elk Chewing had journeyed south to the great sun-praying with their bands.

  Perhaps even more telling, man
y of the Kiowa and Cheyenne warrior bands rode in to take part in the great Comanche celebration, afterward to hold a council of war with the Kwahadi war chiefs. To that camp on Elk Creek came the Kiowa under Satanta and Lone Wolf, along with the Cheyenne under Medicine Water, Iron Shirt and Gray Beard, each chief carrying the war pipes sent them by Isatai. Little Robe, on the other hand, had immediately taken his people to the agency, fearing most what everyone knew was coming, while Stone Eagle sat arguing with himself on what path to take.

  For most the path was clear.

  As much as he had initially doubted this magician and his sleight of hand, Quanah found himself reluctantly beginning to believe in Isatai: perhaps this shaman was truly more than a magician. Perhaps through the prophet Isatai, the Comanche truly could drive the white man from their ancient hunting ground, for all time to come.

  If for no other reason, Quanah thought, Isatai was extremely smart—in the way a wolf is smart. By assembling the various bands, the shaman was consolidating his power in a way few others among the Comanche could ever think of doing. But something about that, something right down in the pit of him still nagged the young Kwahadi war chief—worrying over any man who wanted so much power. Still, Quanah had to admit as he argued with himself night after night as the lengthening days turned warm, then hot, Isatai was accomplishing exactly what Quanah himself wanted: gathering a large force of proven warriors with one concerted end in sight.

  So it seemed fitting that the Comanche had chosen to immerse themselves in more of the symbolism of the sun dancing, forgoing many of the “formalities” practiced by the Kiowa and Cheyenne. And that symbolism of the sun dance had for many generations been unequivocally tied to the buffalo. Now more than ever, the threat posed by the white buffalo hunters had become most real.

  The extermination of the buffalo clearly meant the extermination of the Comanche.

  Across four days the bands had gathered the poles and branches for the great sun-dance arbor. At the center they raised a tall, forked ridgepole which had been selected for cutting by a virtuous captive woman who had been faithful to her Kwahadi husband. Ringing the outer circle stood twelve shorter poles, connected to the center with long streamers decorated with scalps and scraps of fluttering calico and trade cloth. All but one of the openings between these twelve poles were filled in with brush—the easternmost remained open to admit the dancers. A newly killed buffalo calf, its body cavity emptied then stuffed with willow branches, was raised to the top of the huge center pole. There it would symbolically look down upon the dancers, granting its blessing upon them.

  At the same time as warriors were raising the sun-dance arbor, masked clowns who had smeared themselves with mud and tied small branches of willow about their bodies cavorted and swirled among the villages, throwing mud balls at the unsuspecting and generally giving a carnival atmosphere to the predance activities. These were the Comanche “Mud Men,” the sekwitsit puhitsit—a purely Comanche addition to the sun-dance practice, in all likelihood something picked up from the koshare dancers of the Pueblo Indians near Taos.

  To Quanah’s way of thinking, the Mud Men were a comical diversion to an otherwise deadly serious act: invoking the power of the supernatural to bring about the salvation of a dying way of life.

  On the final day of preparation a group of warriors constructed a fortress and stockade of brush that simulated the earth buildings inhabited by the white hide men to the northwest on the Staked Plain. Then the young warriors rode down on this mock fort, destroying the hated enemy to the last man. Only then did the dancing begin at the sacred arbor where the buffalo calf looked down upon those who prayed.

  While he did not himself join in the dancing, Quanah nonetheless fasted the four days of scorching sun and long, chilly nights, taking no water and sitting through the endless drumming and singing by the old men. While dancers among the northern tribes hung themselves from the rawhide tethers or dragged buffalo skulls from skewers driven beneath the muscles in their backs, the Comanche dancers did not believe it necessary to torture themselves to be heard by the Spirit Above. Still, like Quanah, the dancers took no food or water for the duration of the celebration of the sun. While these warriors danced, men and women both came forward and hung small offerings of food and tobacco and scalps from the center pole. Young boys hoping one day to become full-fledged warriors tied their gifts to their tiny arrows and shot them into the sun-dance tree, far above the dancers.

  Quanah prayed as he sucked on the bark of the slippery elm, something that softened the torture of his thirst—prayed that the coming war council would bring together as one the tribes and warrior bands.

  On the morning after the fourth day of dancing, there arose a great celebration that stirred Quanah’s heart to believing his prayers had been answered. He called for his warriors to dress as for battle and mount their finest war ponies. Then he led them on a mock charge on the Kiowa and Cheyenne camps—riding through the villages screeching their war cries, shaking their shields and scalps and lances, firing their weapons into the air before returning to their own camp.

  In no time did the Kiowa respond in kind, riding down in a mock attack on the Comanche villages. The warrior bands of Lone Wolf and Satanta and Big Bow were ready to take up the battle against the white man. All waited expectantly for the Cheyenne answer to this flamboyant call for war.

  And just as he was beginning to fear the Southern Cheyenne would not join the Kwahadi in driving the white man from the Staked Plain, Quanah heard the pounding of the hooves. In a swirl of dust and a deafening cacophony of screeching noise and trilling women, the Cheyenne warriors tore into the Kwahadi camp, shaking their scalps and firing their rifles.

  “We are ready to join you, Quanah!” shouted Medicine Water as he brought his snorting pony to a halt beside the lodge of the Kwahadi war chief in a spray of yellow dust.

  Quanah had rarely felt more proud, wishing that his own father stood beside him at this moment as he looked into the paint-streaked faces of those Cheyenne and Kiowa warriors, their voices raised exultantly to the heavens, the hot summer breeze toying with their feathers and braids and unbound hair. Were that his father could be here to see this great union of fighting men.

  “Tonight!” Quanah replied, his voice booming across the great gathering. “Tonight Isatai and I will host a grand council for all chiefs.”

  “We talk of strategy for the coming fight!” Isatai echoed.

  “Yes,” Quanah replied with the hunting yelp of the prairie coyote. “We talk of war!”

  And war was all they spoke of that evening as the early summer sun sank in the west, far beyond the great canyon called Palo Duro.

  Isatai began with his long harangue about the Caddos and Wichitas, bands that had accepted the white man’s reservation life and no longer lived as true Indians.

  “Are not their numbers diminishing?” asked the shaman of that great gathering beneath the summer stars. “Are they healthy? Eating the white man’s food instead of the meat of the buffalo?”

  Slowly, dramatically, he strode around the interior of the huge circle formed by the head men of each warrior band. “Is this what the Comanche want? What the Kiowa and Cheyenne want?”

  There arose a general muttering, until Isatai turned suddenly to look at the young Kwahadi war chief.

  “What say you, Quanah?”

  “We want to follow the buffalo herds as in days of old!” he replied, his voice booming. “We wish to stay a strong people, needing nothing from the white man!”

  Isatai quickly strode to Quanah. “I have been to talk to the Spirit Above. He has told me that the strong of heart will prevail in the coming war. He has told me that if we go on the warpath and wipe our land clear of the white man—only then will the buffalo return to blanket our hunting ground. Unless we drive the white man out now, the buffalo will disappear.”

  “The white man must go!” Quanah shouted.

  “No,” Isatai snarled. “The white man must die! All of
them. Man … woman … child!”

  Reluctantly, yet magnetically, Quanah felt himself drawn to the charisma of the shaman, unable to think of nothing else at that moment but killing all whites. But as much as he hated the white man, a small voice inside reminded him that had the Comanche killed all whites—man, woman and child—his mother would not have been Cynthia Ann Parker. And he would not be who he was this night, standing before this greatest gathering of war chiefs the southern plains had ever seen.

  “How do you answer, Quanah?” Isatai demanded. “Bull Bear, the old war chief of the Kwahadi, lies dying of the great lung sickness in his lodge. Will you take up the war banner of Bull Bear? Will you lead the Kwahadi back to greatness!”

  His eyes quickly went to Bull Bear’s second chief, an older warrior named Wild Horse. Quanah could see the jealousy in the warrior’s eyes, the threat there. Yet even Wild Horse refrained from protest.

  “I will lead the Kwahadi,” Quanah said boldly.

  “And I say we first wipe out the Tonkawas,” Isatai told the assembly, turning away from Quanah. “They lead the white man down on our villages. They are evil Indians, wearing the white man’s clothes, eating his food and leading his soldiers. And, the Spirit Above told me that this is true: the Tonkawas eat the flesh of their dead enemies!”

  Many of the warriors and chiefs quickly clamped their hands over their mouths. Quanah himself was surprised by this sudden declaration, although it had long been suspected that the Tonkawas did practice cannibalism.

  “No!” shouted White Wolf, a powerful Cheyenne war chief. “These Tonkawas are not our concern.”

  Isatai’s face glowered at the taller, powerfully built warrior. “I say we wipe out the Tonkawa first”

  “I too answer no,” added Old Man Otter Belt, a warrior of great distinction among the Cheyenne. He rose to stand beside White Wolf, then strode over to Quanah. “This medicine man is no warrior, Quanah Parker. But you—you are a pretty good fighter. Too bad you are still young and don’t know everything.”