It was a relief when Seamus had finally laid eyes on that dirt-colored Red River at last, knowing he was come to Texas. The river meant Fort Richardson and the thriving settlement of Jacksboro weren’t far—a little less than 150 miles left to ride. His ass had been scrubbing leather since the early days of the Civil War, and a few more days and a few more miles meant little when she was waiting at the end of the line for him.
Gone since last winter, that first night after Seamus rode into Sharp Grover’s yard was one the Irishman was not likely to soon forget. The way Rebecca and Samantha fried up a plump chicken, with white gravy and biscuits as big as his fist, along with some of Rebecca’s garden onions mixed in the greens she served on the side, not to mention Grover’s special fruit brandy brought out for only the most special of occasions.
The way Samantha had kept turning to look at him that evening as she moved from stove to fireplace, table and back again, rarely taking her eyes off him, reaching out to touch him from time to time—why, Seamus knew that surely was a most special occasion. And when it came time that Rebecca shuffled a drunk and grumpy Sharp off to bed, with a wink to a clearly blushing Samantha that neither of the women suspected Donegan had seen—Seamus was as ready for her as she was hungry for him.
Now he stood at Fort Concho with Sharp Grover, hired on as a civilian scout for Mackenzie’s push against the nomadic red raiders of the Staked Plain. Word around the post was that there would be columns marching against the hostiles from five directions. Those bands they did not drive back to the reservation were to be destroyed. To Seamus it sounded every bit like his old commanders, “Uncle Billy” Sherman and “Little Phil” Sheridan, had at last taken all they were going to take of bloodshed on the southern plains. They had conceived of a plan that would get about this business of ending once and for all the Indian problem from the Arkansas clear down to the Rio Grande.
“If need be,” one old Fourth Cavalry sergeant said that evening as Seamus was drawing extra shoes and nails for his mount in the stables, “we’ll just have to rub the red bastards off the face of the earth.”
It was work, he told himself. Something he could readily do: this hunt and track and stalk and fight. And there was little doubt Seamus needed the money. With what he owed Billy Dixon for the horse and other plunder to stake him back south to Texas, with what he owed Sharp Grover to get him from Jacksboro to Fort Concho—he needed the work.
And when this bloody little war was done, he’d likely ride back to that shady horse ranch outside of Jacksboro, Texas, with his friend, Abner Grover, sure of finding someone waiting there for him. It was like that in the army, or just working for a campaign outfit: all some men wanted was a woman who wouldn’t cry when it came time for him to ride off leaving her behind while he marched away, following a man called Mackenzie.
Samantha was that sort. He had seen it in her red-rimmed eyes that morning he and Grover left. She had been crying but had washed and splashed cold water on her face and done her best to make it seem it didn’t cut her deep that he was leaving her again. But she bit her lip every time it threatened to betray her, and he was certain she had held him tight enough that he wouldn’t feel her trembling in his arms.
She was the sort of woman a man could leave behind and go marching off to war. Yet, to him now, Samantha Pike was the sort of woman he wanted to come home to. A woman who had filled a few of his nights with such splendid memories. Memories enough to last him many a cold night to come sleeping on the hard ground of the Staked Plain.
Still, it was not merely the intangible vision of her and the remembrance of the fevered coupling they had shared. He had something more now, something he could touch in the dark of prairie night that would make their separation that much more difficult to bear.
Seamus would carry a small, lace, ladies’ handkerchief scented with the lilac smell of her. Carry it into the coming war with the red lords of the Staked Plain.
26
August 22–23, 1874
Reuben Waller had no idea what they would find when Captain Louis Carpenter’s H Company got north to the Wichita Agency at Anadarko.
Following the electrifying news that a massive war party had attacked buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls then followed up that siege with other sporadic attacks on settlers and settlements from Kansas down to Texas, the War Department and the Indian Bureau finally agreed on a common policy to get tough. And part of that new posture was to separate the peaceful Indians from those who were inclined to take to the warpath.
On 21 July, General William Tecumseh Sherman telegraphed General Philip H. Sheridan that henceforth reservation boundaries were to be disregarded by the army, that hostile war parties were to be pursued and chastised wherever those warriors were to be found. In an effort to separate the wheat from chaff among the many bands of Cheyenne, Kiowa and Comanche, an immediate enrollment was decided upon. Those on the reservation by a specified closing date, answering the enrollment and submitting to a daily roll call, were to be considered peaceful. The rest were hostile and would be subject to annihilation.
Meanwhile, in Indian Territory itself, the warrior bands were doing their worst: they struck Signal Hill a few miles east of Fort Sill, killing one civilian; the next day some of Satanta’s own warriors brazenly rode out of their camp, marching downriver, where they captured and killed two more civilians; the next afternoon, only eight miles south of Fort Sill, a war party shot and butchered two cowboys riding north from their Texas ranch.
And as each week passed, it became more and more clear to both Agent James Haworth and Colonel “Black Jack” Davidson that neither of them was getting the response from the tribes that both had hoped they would. By the end of the first week in August, only 173 of the Kiowas had come in to be enrolled; only 108 Apaches and 83 Comanches under Horseback, Cheevers and Quirts Quip. The bulk of the Kiowas, in fact, had abandoned Kicking Bird’s band and gone north with some of their old war chiefs to the Wichita Agency at Anadarko.
The pressure on the agents to supply the needs of these bands increased tenfold when some sixty lodges of Nocona Comanches under chief Big Red Meat came in to enroll and receive their allotments. They and a Kiowa band under Lone Wolf had long been belligerent and refused the agent’s request to give up their ponies and weapons. In addition, these warrior bands had been plundering the field crops of the agency’s “civilized” Indians, Wichitas and Caddos. On top of it all, strong rumors had it that both Big Red Meat and Lone Wolf had taken part in the attack on Adobe Walls and were to be considered very dangerous.
On 21 August, Haworth’s man on the scene, acting agent J. Connell, sent a frightened messenger to Colonel Davidson with word that things had grown ugly there at Anadarko and that he expected trouble any day. Besides the surly mood the warriors were in, there simply wasn’t enough rations to go around—and now the white man was demanding that each warrior give his name up so the agent could write it down on a page in his book. His name, the names of his wives and children. To the Indian mind, this giving away of his name was surely not a good thing.
Besides Carpenter’s H Company, Davidson would also lead companies C, E and L on that march north the thirty-seven miles from Fort Sill to the scene at Anadarko. Upon his arrival at noon on Saturday, the twenty-second, ration day for the Wichitas, Caddos, Pawnees and Penateka Comanche, the colonel immediately demanded his first audience with chief Big Red Meat, whose warriors were clearly on hand, making a nuisance of themselves with the beef allotment being rationed to the peaceful bands. Evidently the Comanche and Kiowa men were expecting trouble and had grown agitated, sending their women and children over the hills as soon as they received word Davidson’s soldiers were drawing near. Big Red Meat and Lone Wolf were clearly anticipating a fight.
“You and your people must surrender,” Davidson reminded Big Red Meat through interpreter Horace Jones in the heart of the Comanche camp. “Since you did not register with the agent soon enough, I have no choice but to consider you as hostile. Bes
ides, I am told you and your warriors took part in the fight at Adobe Walls. Now you must give up your weapons, hand them over to my soldiers and return to your own agency at Fort Sill as prisoners of war. Then your people will be given something to eat.”
It was a tense scene, with Big Red Meat sternly disagreeing until two of his head men convinced the chief that it would be all right to hand over their weapons. But then Davidson had Horace Jones tell the chief that they expected not just the rifles and pistols, but all weapons—including bows and arrows.
To Reuben Waller it seemed that this demand for total surrender of all weapons had suddenly become a sticky point of pride with the Comanche chief. Never before had any of the bands been required to give up their bows. It was at that crucial moment when a large number of Lone Wolf’s Kiowas showed up on the outskirts of the Comanche village and began taunting Big Red Meat’s warriors.
“What are they saying to the chief?” Davidson asked, turning to Jones.
“The Kiowas are saying all the Comanche warriors are women. Saying they are afraid of your few buffalo soldiers. Hold it,” Jones said, cocking his head to listen to more of the increasing fervor of the rabble.
He bent his head low. “Colonel—we might have trouble here.”
“Why do you say that, Jones?”
“The Kiowas just told the Comanches to fight us, to start things—that they would help the Comanches to kill us all.”
That look on Davidson’s face was the whitest Reuben Waller had ever seen a white man get. But as quickly, the shock of the interpreter’s words faded beneath the sudden whoop of warriors crying out their war songs. Chief Big Red Meat cried the loudest as he leaped from his pony, shaking his blanket to frighten the soldier horses, then wheeled and dashed for the thick brush.
“Stop him!” Davidson cried out. “Shoot him if you have to—but stop him now!”
A half-dozen soldiers fired their Springfields. Big Red Meat was still running: not a bullet touched him before he reached the blackjack oaks for cover. But those shots were as quickly returned in spades as the Kiowas and Comanches tore off their blankets, exposing rifles and pistols—firing point-blank into the ranks of the buffalo soldiers, then turning to flee back in the thick timber.
“Dammit, Colonel! There’s friendly Penatekas over there! Your men are firing into their camp,” shouted the interpreter.
In frustration Colonel Davidson jabbed a fist into the air as the Kiowas and Big Red Meat’s Comanches mingled among the friendly Comanche village. “Do your best to separate the hostiles before you shoot—but shoot, by God!”
Quickly the anxious troops were brought to order as snipers began to chip away at them from the surrounding woods.
“First platoon ready!” Waller was hollering above the bedlam, trying to maintain control over his squad. “Fire!”
Nearby, Carpenter was commanding the second platoon. The red-faced captain shouted his own orders now. “Fire!”
“Reload, men. Reload!” Waller demanded of them in the lull while Carpenter’s squad volley-fired into the brush where the warriors had disappeared.
After about ten minutes the fighting died off and Davidson called for a report of casualties.
“Not a man was hit—wounded or killed?” asked the colonel, shaking his head in disbelief as he received the news. “How many of the enemy can we account for?”
His adjutant, Sam Woodward, shifted his feet nervously. “None of the companies can account for any enemy casualties, Colonel.”
To Waller it was next to impossible for all that lead to be hurled back and forth between the soldiers and warriors for more than ten minutes, not to have any wounded on either side of the skirmish.
“All right, dammit,” Davidson growled. “We’ll try to drive the hostiles off so we don’t harm the peaceful bands. Company L—you will dismount and go on foot to clear the commissary and the corral of those Kiowa snipers who are giving my rear and right flank the fits.”
As L Company held down Lone Wolf’s snipers, Carpenter’s men remounted and followed their white captain into the teeth of the Indian’s weapons—succeeding in driving the Comanche and Kiowa backward, but scattering the warriors in all directions across the Washita River, where they began plundering the cabins of a friendly Delaware named Black Beaver, along with looting trader William Shirley’s store, where the warriors unfurled bolts of colorful cloth as they rode across the yard, slit open grain sacks and smashed every piece of china and crockery. Carpenter pursued, pushing his mounts across the Washita into the timber where the warriors whirled to fight, but only momentarily.
Waller heard the hiss of the bullet, felt the burn along his side, sensing the warmth and wetness more than the coming of any pain. He looked down as his horse fought the bit, its screams filling the air as Waller dabbed his fingers at the flesh wound.
After all these years, he thought, to finally feel a warrior’s bullet after all these years. He swallowed down the pain and rode on, encouraging his men as the icy sting washed over him in hot, blue waves that threatened to pull him from his saddle.
With the hostiles scattered and running, Davidson recalled his troops as the shooting died off. The colonel directed his companies to secure the agency and then ordered the destruction of the Noconas’ lodges and property as the summer sun sank like an angry red protest in the west.
From time to time through the dark of that night, snipers crept back close to the soldier lines on the south side of the Washita, succeeding in keeping Davidson’s troops awake and watchful. Behind Waller and his men rose the glow of those great bonfires as the people of Big Red Meat’s band watched their lives go up in smoke, everything they owned turned to ash.
Reports trickled in of casualties: no soldiers killed, with four wounded, but the warriors had murdered trader Shirley’s Negro houseboy, who had gone running for help when the trading house was attacked, in addition to the murder of three white civilians working in their fields a few miles downriver and two Delaware employees of the chief named Black Beaver.
Beneath the first gray light of dawn the following morning, 23 August, the warriors resumed their sniping as they attempted to keep the soldiers at bay while some three hundred warriors worked their way into position on some high ground overlooking the Wichita Agency.
“Captain Carpenter,” Davidson ordered, “I am placing E and L at your disposal. Take them and your H—and drive the enemy from that ridge.”
In a brief but furious battle that required the three companies to skirmish for every foot of ground from the bottom of the slope all the way to the crest of the hill, the warriors ultimately gave way and fell back, some running upriver, the rest disappearing down the Washita. Despite the uneasy calm that came over the battlefield, something nagged at Reuben Waller while the rest of the three companies celebrated their victory there on the hilltop.
He had smelled that odor before, and not all that long ago either.
“Fire, Captain,” he explained to Carpenter moments later after riding down to the agency grounds. “Look yonder through the trees there. The smoke. The Injuns set it to drive us off.”
“And the wind is most definitely coming our way, Sergeant,” Carpenter said, sensing the seriousness of the threat. “Take your squad and set some backfires before the wind drives those flames onto the agency grounds.”
While Waller and his men did as Carpenter had ordered, the wind itself was far from cooperating with the puny efforts of humankind. It shifted out of the north, immediately causing the brunettes’ backfires to roar out of control, rampaging in sheets of flame licking right in the direction of the agency buildings. What should have been a temporary maneuver turned out to be a dirty, smoky, stinking fatigue duty that lasted all afternoon before the soldiers got control of the fire lines and managed to save the sawmill, school and offices of the Anadarko Agency.
“The bastards’re probably laughing up their sleeves at us, Sergeant,” growled a disgusted Carpenter.
“Might be
—but I figure the army’s going to get the last laugh on them, Captain,” Waller replied, his smoke-blackened face gleaming in the afternoon light. “Come a day real soon, we’ll be the ones to call the last dance of the night.”
27
Late August 1874
As far as things went in the military scheme of things, that brief skirmish at Anadarko down in Indian Territory really settled very little.
Yet it did have one lasting effect on the rest of the forthcoming campaign. Davidson’s four companies of buffalo soldiers had once and for all cut the deck: separating the peaceful reservation Indians from those bands that were clearly hostile. Only those who had not answered the daily roll call at Sill, Anadarko, and the Cheyenne Agency up at Darlington, were now fleeing west toward the headwaters of the Red and Brazos rivers on the Staked Plain. These were the bands the army wanted to crush.
And the army now had a clearly drawn line between those who walked the white man’s road and those who would fight to the end.
Already Sherman’s and Sheridan’s campaign to bring peace to the southern plains was in motion: five columns were converging on the Panhandle at last.
Up and down the rungs of echelon, the army was so sure of its impending victory and in the cunning cleverness of its five-pronged attack that when a party of government surveyors requested a detail of troops to accompany them through southern Kansas, the army refused.
“Not only am I without men to spare you—what with the strength General Miles has taken from us for his campaign—but there are simply no hostile Indians in this area where you are headed,” explained the officer, jabbing his finger at his map, that finger landing in Kansas, just north of Indian Territory.
Captain Oliver Francis Short had to swallow down his anger and leave before he grew any more furious with the soldier. It was something he had had to learn to do in his forty-one years. His was one of eight teams completing the survey of public lands in Kansas for the government. Born and raised back east in Ohio, Short had been a resident of Leavenworth for the past twenty years. In fact, he had been a member of the original survey party platting Kansas Territory in the fifties.
Dying Thunder Page 27
