Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  “As you yourself said it, Stone Calf. Soon … I will have my answer.”

  * * *

  Anticipating the very real possibility that the retreating warriors might block the exit of his troops from the canyon, at noon Mackenzie had dispatched Captain Boehm with companies A and E to the far end of the canyon to be sure that the Indians did not sweep back on a counterattack, then ordered Captain Gunther’s H Company to ascend the dangerous trail to the top of the canyon to secure the south wall. Far away to the north across the chasm, Gunther’s men watched the milling warriors dispersing like puffball dust across the prairie beneath the fading afternoon light.

  A half-dozen Tonkawa women, wives who had come along on the campaign with their tracker husbands despite Mackenzie’s prohibition on the women attending the march, frantically pilfered through the piles of captured goods the soldiers were stacking in each of the camp circles. The women laid claim to the choicest of the plunder: new reservation blankets, fine clothing, a pair of tin snips, copper kettles and bone china, Minneapolis and Osage Mission flour, along with bolts of turkey-red and multicolored calico cloth. As the women bundled their ill-gotten booty into manageable packs, their husbands were already consumed with taking their pick of the captured ponies.

  As much as Mackenzie despised the practice of awarding the animals to his Tonkawa and Seminole trackers, the colonel explained to his officers, “I do so because it is the only way that it is practicable for me to get such dangerous work out of these men.”

  Before long greasy columns of black smoke were climbing up and down the twisting valley floor, the dark tracks of destruction rising more than a thousand feet to reach the level of the Staked Plain where the warriors and their families had fled, dispersing in a hundred different directions. For more than two miles along the Prairie Dog Town Fork, Mackenzie’s fires choked the red-hued walls, swirling on the fickle afternoon breezes as the great destruction continued.

  “Colonel, we found both of these among the refuse left behind by the escapees,” declared Captain McLaughlin as he strode up. He presented two scraps of crumpled yellowed paper to Mackenzie.

  Opening the first, the colonel read the message:

  Office Kiowa and Comanche Agency

  I.T., 4 Mo. 9, 1874

  Long Hungry is recognized as a chief among the Cochetethca Comanche Indians, and promises to use his influence for good among his people, while continuing to conduct himself in a friendly and peaceable manner. I ask for him kind treatment by all with whom he may come in contact.

  J. M. Haworth

  United States Agent

  Mackenzie wagged his head as he stuffed the notice inside his wool tunic, unfolding the second, read it, then passed it on to the officers assembled around him:

  No. 13—Kiowa and Comanche Agency

  I.T. August 6, 1874

  Wah-lung, of Sun Boy’s band of Kiowas, is registered and will not be molested by troops, unless engaged in acts of hostility, or away from his camp without special permission.

  J. M. Haworth

  United States Agent

  He snorted sourly, jabbing the second note in his tunic. “I’d say Wah-lung was damned well away from where he should be camped … and without special permission!”

  Around him, Mackenzie’s officers laughed.

  They were due, Seamus Donegan allowed. Damn well due that laughter.

  Although only three warrior dead could be confirmed, the soldiers had suffered only one serious casualty, and Private Hord would live. Yet more than inflicting casualties on the war bands, Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry had done the tribes even greater harm than drawing blood.

  Here, with winter racing down from the northern plains, the colonel had driven the Kiowa and Comanche and Cheyenne onto the prairie, without lodges, blankets, robes and clothing, without ponies, and without any of the meat they had dried against famine for the coming time of cold and snow. Mackenzie had robbed them of everything but their own lives.

  So it was that Seamus Donegan laughed with those too as one of the surgeon’s stewards dabbed fumaric along the raw, oozy bullet wound on his thigh. The soldier, a rotund fellow with iron-crusted hair, and by his accent clearly a former Confederate, began singing an old Civil War favorite as he worked the burning, hissing caustic into the Irishman’s flesh.

  “When I get to Heaven, first thing I’ll do,

  Grab me a horn and blow for Ol’ Blue.

  Then when I hear my hound dog bark,

  I’ll know he’s tree’d a possum in Noah’s ark.

  Go on, Blue; go on, Ol’ Blue!”

  The steward eventually had Seamus singing along with him, gritting out the words to the song, if only to keep from bellowing out in pain. Damn!

  This truly had to be as sweet a victory as Ranald Slidell Mackenzie had ever known.

  39

  November 1874

  Late that night after Mackenzie’s troops drove more than fifteen hundred ponies out of the Palo Duro Canyon, the cold rains of autumn returned.

  Up and out of the canyon the colonel gave orders that his Fourth Cavalry form a marching square around the captured herd, then pointed his nose to the southeast, intent on returning to his Tule Creek camp. With every one of those miles crossed, Mackenzie grappled with what to do about those captured animals. How well he knew from his own firsthand experience that the warriors could at any time sweep back in and recover some of their herd. Chances were that they would not attempt it that first night, miles away as they were along the north rim of the canyon wall. Still, the warriors and their families were there, not that far off and scattering across the plains, almost close enough that Donegan could count them like flies gathered on a piecrust setting on Samantha Pike’s windowsill.

  But prairie warfare wisdom had taught the colonel that they would make the attempt, as they had so many times before. And this time Mackenzie didn’t want to give them the slightest chance of succeeding.

  He had decided he was not merely going to capture the enemy’s ponies.

  This time he was going to slaughter them.

  With one company riding at the head of the march, two companies on either side of the pony herd in columns of twos, and a final company forming the fourth side of the marching square, Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry finally returned to the Tule Canyon campsite and Lawton’s wagon train shortly after midnight on 29 September. There the troopers turned the herd over to the infantry, who corralled the animals within the wagon corral while Mackenzie’s cavalry ate, then slept for the first time in more than thirty-six hours. Some, like Thompson’s scouts, had closed their eyes very little since the night of the twenty-fifth.

  It was a bone-weary Seamus Donegan who pulled his head inside his canvas bedroll and let the rain batter the prairie, rocking him to sleep with its drumbeat. Nothing was going to interrupt the sweet, delicious sleep and his dreams of Samantha Pike. And dream he did that night, as helpless as any man who had gazed into those moonlit blue-green eyes the color of teal feathers. A man never fought the exquisite torture of such dreaming, Hell’s own sweet sugar.

  After breakfast around smoky fires the following morning, Mackenzie assembled his officers and announced his decision.

  “Those of you who were with me at Blanco Canyon in ’seventy-one will remember how the warriors rode back in and reclaimed their herd from us,” he told them. “And those of you who rode with me on the North Fork in ’seventy-two will remember how they did it to us a second time.”

  “We can keep them corralled for you this time, Colonel,” sang out Lieutenant Lawton.

  Mackenzie only grinned while some of his officers laughed. “No, fellas. This time is going to be different. I can’t afford to be tied down guarding a herd of this size. We have a campaign to fight. And that means marching and fighting, then more marching and some more fighting. We’ll sleep when we can and eat what we get our hands on. But guarding a herd of ponies is the last thing I need any of my men doing when there is work to be done fighting
Indians. No, men—I have decided to destroy the herd.”

  While most of the officers and a few of the scouts murmured, the colonel turned to his adjutant. “Did you get the count I requested early this morning?”

  The lieutenant nodded, referring to his small tablet. “Yes, sir—1,424 animals. Of them, 1,274 horses. One hundred fifty mules.”

  “What have the scouts decided to take for themselves, Lieutenant?”

  “Three hundred seventy-six. That leaves us with something over a thousand to … to destroy, Colonel.”

  He sighed deeply. “Very well, men. I’ve decided to assign this task to Lieutenant Lawton.”

  The quartermaster stirred uneasily. “Sir?”

  “Assign some of your infantry to rope the ponies and take them to a spot you will determine for the slaughter. Designate others to complete the slaughter.”

  Lawton gulped visibly. “Yes, sir, Colonel.”

  From just past six o’clock that morning of the twenty-ninth, until after three that afternoon, the Springfield rifles of the Eleventh Infantry roared and gun smoke blanketed the prairie near that Tule Canyon camp. And when the ghastly gray pall disappeared on the chill autumn breezes late that afternoon, the multihued carcasses lay in steaming piles, the new stench already drawing the carrion eaters for miles around.

  Just as he had vowed to his officers, Mackenzie was not about to retire from the field after the battle of Palo Duro Canyon. Instead he strove to press his advantage over the warriors he had just stripped and demoralized. Again and again in the following weeks he sent his scouts out, ordering them to search in wider and wider circles, each night analyzing their reports, then determining to follow one trail or another, bringing his troops into position to strike here, then there at the bands who refused to move east onto the reservations.

  Mackenzie’s Fourth lay on the south. Price and Miles operated from the west and north. Buell and Davidson probed along the east. Those last holdouts among the southern warrior bands had to surrender, or be crushed by one of the army columns.

  In all throughout that autumn, the tribes on the Staked Plain lost more than 7,500 head of horses and mules to the army. Eventually most would be sold in auction. But without fail officers and enlisted alike would always speak of the great slaughter that took place after the fight at the Palo Duro.

  As well, it was an evil thing often spoken of in hushed tones around lodge fires for many winters to come.

  That night of the battle in the Place of the Chinaberry Trees, the rains had come, making the wanderers even more miserable. And the next day the bands continued their flight. Mamanti and Big Bow sought safety, so headed farther west onto the Staked Plain, where they ran into a large band of Mexican traders and Navajos. That band of larcenous Comancheros proved to be unfriendly and robbed the Kiowa of what little they had left after the fight.

  Big Bow decided to turn back to Fort Sill with his people. They joined Big Red Meat’s Comanches and limped onto the reservation as winter’s icy maw began to close down on the southern plains with a vengeance.

  * * *

  A few days following Mackenzie’s stunning victory far to the south in the land of Texas, a scouting patrol riding out of Fort Wallace on the Smoky Hill River in Kansas Territory spotted in the distance the blackened hulk of what appeared to have been a solitary wagon. It was the second of October when those scouts reined up at the bloated, bloodied, half-eaten bodies of the German family.

  Among the few things discarded and scattered through the bloodstained grass by the raiding party before they set the wagon afire, one of the scouts knelt to pick up the trampled, dusty leaves of the family bible. In a fine hand, the names of nine family members had been written in the front. This did not tally with the remains of five victims.

  On closer examination around the wagon, mixed in among the tracks of the unshod ponies, the scouts discovered several sets of small footprints. None of them wearing moccasins. It took little time for those scouts to conclude that four of the youngest German daughters had been carried off into captivity.

  “They’re Cheyenne,” declared the civilian scout as he rose from the dust where he had inspected the hodgepodge of moccasin tracks. The young soldiers had finished the last of the shallow graves. As he dusted his hands off on his buckskin britches, the scout added, “I’ll lay money on it.”

  “Just how much money do you have, Hickok?” asked one of the older soldiers.

  “You don’t think I’m right?” James Butler Hickok replied, grinning.

  “Naw—I won’t dare bet against you when it comes to knowing Cheyenne from Sioux from Kiowa mocs,” the corporal replied. He stuffed the bible inside his shirt. “C’mon, Bill—we’re heading back to Wallace with word of this. The army will want to know.”

  “You damn bet the army will want to know about this,” Hickok echoed.

  At the top of the knoll the young scout reined up, turned in the saddle for but a moment and gazed back into that little valley where they had scraped five shallow graves from the flaky Kansas soil. How he wished Bill Cody or Seamus Donegan were here now to help. Maybe together they could find those girls.

  “God rest your souls,” Hickok whispered as he put spurs to his horse once more, loping quickly to catch up to the soldiers. “May God rest your souls.”

  * * *

  When the warriors had pulled them up on horseback with them, Sophia recalled how the naked warrior stank of rancid grease he had smeared in his hair. But then, she recalled how her own father and brother stank as well. With little opportunity to take a bath, she thought …

  It struck her as funny now, months later, that she had even remembered such a thing. For she could not recall the last time she had been able to bathe, going week after week, brutalized by the squaws, gang raped by the warriors as she and her sister went for water or into the timber to gather wood. How she hated having to drive the camp dogs off as they continually sniffed her privates where the bloody, seeping stench had to be the strongest.

  Sophia started to cry again, but this time she did it silently. How quickly she had learned to cry in silence. At first she had not, and had been beaten by the squaws for it. Now she saved her tears for the darkness as she lay under her scrap of blanket, shivering, her belly so empty it had ceased complaining, her soul feeling helpless and lost. Wondering if anyone knew she was here. Hoping someone was looking for her and Catherine. Praying that little Addie and Julie were all right. Wondering if the little ones were still alive.

  It had been many weeks since she had last seen her youngest sisters. She caught herself sobbing. Praying that God would send someone to rescue them all.

  South across the Canadian the raiding party had taken the four after the attack on the German wagon, climbing onto the high, flat divide between the Canadian and the Red rivers. Descending into the land of the Red, Medicine Water’s war party again grew cautious, hiding at day and traveling only at night.

  It was some time after they had reached this high, barren land that she last saw her two little sisters. For days the two had ridden behind the same warriors, on and off the same ponies. Then one morning as the bands were breaking up, Sophia recognized the two warriors and saw that her sisters were not with them.

  Quickly she had swallowed down a cry of panic, calling out to God to bless their little souls, knowing that death would surely come as a relief to what they would have to suffer in the land of the living. As soon as Sophia had a chance that afternoon, she quietly said to Catherine, her older sister, “Julie and Addie—I think they are dead.”

  Catherine’s dark, sallow eyes seemed lifeless already as she turned slowly to Sophia and replied, “They are better off than we are.”

  Then Medicine Water began to wander some more, moving often from place to place, warriors coming and going with great celebration. Sophia figured they were fighting someone—most likely soldiers.

  In the deep canyon with the bloodred walls, it was quiet and peaceful. A good place out of the wind,
she thought. But of a morning a sudden panic grew among Stone Calf’s people and the tribe began retreating from the noise and commotion and shooting. How she yearned to go running to the soldiers who must surely be coming for her and Katie.

  But the squaws pulled knives on the girls and beat them with rawhide ropes until both were forced to turn about and retreat into the dark shadows of the Palo Duro with the rest of the warrior bands. Fleeing once more with the Indians onto the trackless wastes of the Staked Plain. Now it seemed the women and even more of the men took out their anger with the soldiers on her and Katie.

  After that Sophie wanted more than ever to die—of hunger, for they had little to eat now; of the cold, for they had abandoned blankets and robes and clothing fleeing from the canyon; of the severe beatings, because both warriors and squaws abused the two just short of death.

  Sophie prayed that the hand of God would lead someone to rescue her and Katie. To rescue them … or that God would finally take their souls to Heaven to be with Mama and Papa.

  * * *

  The cold wind pushed roughly through the abandoned Cheyenne camp this eighth day of November. They hadn’t been here long enough for a stench to collect.

  Billy Dixon had been scouting for General Nelson A. Miles since August, yet it was only in the last month that Miles had become a man possessed. Not a day passed, not a conversation occurred, without the commander mentioning the possible fate of those four German girls. In fact, there wasn’t a man who had come in contact with Miles over the last few weeks who didn’t know how driven the colonel was to make that singular rescue.

  So they had harried and driven and herded the war bands before them, never knowing for sure who had the four sisters. Kiowa, Comanche, perhaps Cheyenne. But they marched and fought and pressed ahead with the campaign, drawing ever tighter the noose Sherman and Sheridan wanted drawn around the last stronghold of the free Indian on the southern plains.

  Then this gray morning, Miles had ordered the charge into what turned out to be a Cheyenne village. After a brief attempt to cover the retreat of their women and children, the warriors had fallen back and the Tonkawas and Delawares rushed in to claim the spoils. The trackers informed Dixon and the other white scouts that this had been the village of Gray Beard’s band of Southern Cheyenne.