That is, until Black Horse was shoved forward with the butt of an infantryman’s rifle.
Sophia brought a hand to her mouth, knowing the haughty Black Horse would likely cause trouble. He had refused to abuse the four white prisoners, saying instead that a true warrior found no honor in humiliating children, even women.
She had watched his back straighten as the Negro blacksmith named Wesley gripped Black Horse’s wrist and yanked it down onto the anvil where he enclosed it in a tight bracelet. The warrior turned to the women who were tormenting the Cheyenne men and suddenly cried out his war song. No more would he take this shame heaped upon him. As Wesley glanced up from his work at the sudden commotion, barking something to the Cheyenne warrior, Black Horse slapped the heavy shackle into the blacksmith’s face and bolted off.
As if that cold day were only yesterday, Sophia remembered the shouts and orders from Captain Andrew Bennett’s soldiers as they brought their weapons to their shoulders, aimed and fired. How the puffs of smoke burst from the muzzles and Black Horse stumbled, fell to his knees then struggled to his feet to run again, bleeding horribly as more of the Cheyenne men struggled to escape.
At the same time, other warriors who had been among the women back in the trees began to let fly a hail of iron-tipped arrows at the infantry soldiers still guarding more than thirty prisoners destined for Fort Marion in the Florida swamps. As more soldiers bolted from the barracks and mess hall, the Indians melted back into the trees and disappeared, fleeing into the nearby sandhills on the south side of the North Canadian River. It was there the army later learned that the Cheyenne had secreted most of their firearms prior to surrendering earlier that spring. Among the highest of those sandhills, the warriors and women threw up what breastworks they could and prepared to receive the soldiers charging across the river.
By that time, reinforcements had hurried the two miles from nearby Fort Reno, built just the previous year. Captain William A. Rafferty, Troop M of the Sixth Cavalry, also brought with him a Gatling gun he struggled to get into position to spray the enemy village. While the mules were hauling the ten-barreled gun into position, Troop M under Captain S. T. Norvell and Troop D under Captain A. S. Keyes of the Tenth Cavalry rode up, crossed the river in fours and dismounted to join in the fray.
Despite the army’s numerical advantage and the Gatling gun, the Cheyenne turned back every charge Neill’s troops attempted, until the light drained from the cold, spring sky. At twilight the lieutenant colonel suspended the fight and, in leaving a cordon of troops around the sandhills to prevent escape, withdrew with his wounded: eight white troopers, eleven buffalo soldiers, six of the brunettes wounded seriously enough that surgeons doubted they would survive the night. In the bloody fight several Cheyenne were undoubtedly killed or wounded before most of the survivors later drifted back to the camps of Little Robe and Whirlwind at the agency.
But during that cold, stormy night however, 250 Cheyenne did not choose to return to Darlington. Instead they slipped past Neill’s troops and turned toward western Kansas, fleeing toward the land of their Northern Cheyenne cousins.
Neill prepared his forces to attack the village at dawn, but found it deserted when his troops marched in unopposed on the morning of the tenth. Among the sandhills on the far side of the village, they found only seven dead bodies—six warriors and an old woman.
That hot June afternoon on the train, Sophie bought a bottled drink that fizzed when the vendor opened it for her. It tasted good and sweet, like nothing she had ever had before.
She wondered now why Catherine had been so silly a goose to ask if Addie and Julie would recognize them. Such a strange thing for Katie to say—they had only been separated less than half a year. People didn’t change in half a year, did they?
Had what horrible things they had suffered changed them so much that their little sisters would not know them?
With a sigh, she sank back into her seat, recalling the morning she was visiting Lucy Miles at the agent’s house, the day before the prisoners were scheduled to leave for Florida. It had been a heartrending day, as Lieutenant R. H. Pratt of the Tenth Cavalry, who would be leading the prisoners’ escort, appeared at the agent’s office with interpreter Romero and two of Sophia’s captors.
“Gray Beard and Minimic want you to write their words in a letter, Romero tells me,” Pratt had explained to the agent. “They want you to read their words to their people after they are gone to be punished in that land far away.”
The two war chiefs spoke at length, often interrupted by interpreter Romero, and Miles wrote down at length what he made of the rambling discourse:
Your Gray Beard and Minimic want me to write you to tell their people to settle down at their Agency, and do all that the Gov’t. requires of them. They say tell them to plant corn, and send their children to school, and be careful not to get in any trouble … that we want them, to travel in the white man’s road. The white men are as many as the leaves on the trees and we are only a few people, and we should do as the white man wants us to, and live at peace with him.
Many, many things Sophia decided on that long, hot rail trip east to Leavenworth, many things had changed.
And would never be the same again.
* * *
Far south of the Kansas Pacific rail line where Sophia and Catherine German rumbled ever eastward that second day of June, 1875, Sergeant Reuben Waller stood again on the parade at Fort Sill, I.T. But this time he was a visitor.
Waller had arrived here yesterday, carrying dispatches for Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie along with mail for the last two companies of the Tenth Cavalry still stationed in Indian Territory. This morning he had planned to saddle up his escort and head north to the Cheyenne Agency at Darlington where Troops M and D were posted. In their ranks Reuben had lost a couple friends in the April ninth skirmish among the sandhills south of the North Canadian River. He wanted most of all to visit their graves, hoping they were marked. If they weren’t, Waller had vowed, he would himself carve a cross or a marker to place at the head of each.
A man needed to be remembered when he had been brave enough to walk this dangerous land. This was the promise Reuben Waller made to every trooper who fought with his H Company under Captain Louis Carpenter. None of his men would ever go into battle and fall, to have his name forgotten as he was buried. Reuben had seen enough of that nameless anonymity already while he was but a private in the newly formed Tenth U.S. Negro Cavalry back to ’sixty-six.
Waller remembered how many times he had carried a small notebook and the stub of a pencil with him into those early campaign battles on the plains, how the others would line up in the hours before marching out to fight, asking him to write their names on those little slips of paper they could pin to their tunics, so should they fall during the fight against the Indians, someone would know their names when prayers were said over their lonely graves hastily scraped from the sandy soil in this wilderness.
He remembered now, and felt his heart rise to his throat for it. No man who served with Reuben Waller had ever fallen and not been remembered by his fellows. There had always been friends to gather at the side of those shallow pits, friends to sing a spiritual or the Old Hundredth, someone who would use the departed’s name in that final prayer before returning dust to dust.
So now this Wednesday morning, in what the Comanche themselves called the Moon When the Grass Is Tall, it seemed fitting that Reuben held his half-dozen here at Fort Sill before leaving, for there was much excitement electrifying their former station. Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry proudly told the visiting buffalo soldiers that their colonel finally had what he had wanted most: the Kwahadis had promised to ride in and surrender this early summer day.
Not long after arriving here back in April to take command of Fort Sill, Mackenzie had dispatched Dr. J. J. Sturm with Sergeant John Charlton and two of the agency’s trusted Comanches to attempt finding Quanah Parker’s Kwahadis. On the far western side of the Staked Plain, Sturm and
Charlton had eventually located the warrior band clinging desperately to their old ways and tenacious in their desire to be left alone. The white men and friendly Comanches had been immediately disarmed and led to a lodge where the head men began three days of intense discussions with the peace delegation.
Sturm offered Mackenzie’s two guarantees: if the Kwahadi came in, they would be allowed to retain some of their ponies, and none of their leaders would be sentenced to prison; if the Kwahadi refused, Three-Finger Kinzie vowed he would hunt down and exterminate them to the last Kwahadi.
How could Quanah trust the word of the white man when so many promises had been made, only to be broken?
Sturm reminded the Kwahadi of who had captured more than a hundred of their women and children three winters before, then did as he had promised—protected the Comanches from a lynching by the Tehas citizens of Jacksboro before releasing those prisoners, allowing them to return to their people. This was the same Three-Finger Kinzie.
A man of honor, as was the war chief of the Kwahadi, Quanah Parker.
It was with no small sadness that Reuben had laid in the steamy darkness of the barracks last night, staring at the top bunk and thinking back on his own time as a slave, a slave to a white man. Brooding on how it had felt to have nothing, to be robbed of everything by the white man. Yet, thinking too how he had persevered and come west to become part of this new Army of the West. How this land was now as much his as it belonged to any man, red or white. Here, on the frontier of a rapidly growing nation extending from sea to shining sea, Reuben Waller hoped one day to find a woman to share the rest of his life, to raise children who would enjoy the fruits of what he and others had fought so hard to win for their descendants, no matter their color.
To plant roots here, as the Kwahadi and the other warrior bands had sent their roots deep so many generations before. His roots, like theirs, would be free, for he had fought to open this land and make it safe for settlement.
He had closed his eyes last night, fighting back a few tears, as he prayed these years he had given to the Tenth Cavalry were not how a few white soldiers joked: that the white man had brought the black man west to fight the red man, taking his land away from him … so the white man could eventually settle on this country once bled over by black and red.
Into the bright, morning sunlight he now stepped off the porch in front of the massive mess hall, a place he had taken so many of his meals in years past. From the trees fully leafed in summer green, the sounds of celebration echoed. The commotion was growing across the creek, coming nearer now from the place where the Comanche would live with the Kiowa in a place filled with croups and agues and festerations, troubled by constant putrid fevers and tick-sicks.
The air buzzed with a new level of excitement as Colonel Mackenzie himself stepped onto the porch from his headquarters office, resplendent in his freshly brushed uniform. He slowly squared his hat on his head and pulled on his antelope-hide gauntlets before he descended the steps to the gravel walk ringing the grassy parade.
With a contingent of officers from his Fourth Cavalry, men who themselves had battled the powerful and wily lords of the southern plains in four campaigns, Mackenzie stopped beside the tall flagpole that stood at the center of Fort Sill, I.T. There he would await the leaders of the holdouts.
Cheering, beating drums and singing their war songs, the Kiowas and those Comanches who had already surrendered lined the road and pressed through the trees, dogs barking and chasing about with children who beat on tin plates or cups with twigs.
Then Reuben saw him.
Riding as proudly as he had ever seen any Indian ride a wild pony. The two, man and pony, looked as one: both bred on the windswept reaches of the Staked Plain. Horse and warrior. This pair like no other.
He led more than four hundred of his people, ready to surrender more than 1,500 ponies to the army, knowing he had chosen as a free man to surrender. Let no man ever make the mistake of declaring that the U.S. Army had defeated Quanah Parker.
Through the parting crowd he rode slowly, never looking at the cheering warriors and women, the children who poked their heads between legs to catch a glimpse of this famous warrior. Never did he look at the staring, gawking soldiers or the white women who watched from behind the safety of parasols.
Instead, Quanah Parker never took his eyes from the man he had sparred with so many times in the past five summers.
At long last his bare brown knees tightened against the pony’s ribs. The proud animal immediately halted at the edge of the gravel walk that led to the central flagpole. Quanah slipped his left leg over and dropped to the ground, standing there but a moment, as if getting accustomed to the feel of this gravel beneath his moccasins, before he stepped onto the manicured lawn and strode purposefully toward the blue and gold and brass assembly of officers.
With only a wave, he halted his warriors from following, commanding them to remain behind among their war ponies. Silently, Quanah Parker walked on alone, carrying his brass-studded Winchester repeater across his arms, clutched there with his fan of eagle wing feathers.
Mackenzie took a step forward, then turned slightly, motioning wordlessly that his officers were to remain behind as well.
As the two met, alone, there beneath the summer sun and that red and white striped flag snapping in the hot June breeze, the crowd fell silent as if a great hand had passed over them all, red and white alike.
For a long moment the two simply beheld one another, face to face at last. Then Mackenzie smiled, yet not the smile of conqueror. It was instead the gaze of respect one courageous warrior gave another.
It was a look that gave Quanah Parker the confidence that he had indeed done right to bring his people in, to save them by putting their feet on the white man’s road at long last.
Slowly he knelt in the shadow of that snapping flag, laying down the rifle at Mackenzie’s feet, then stood to find the stoic soldier chief’s eyes misting, to find Three-Finger Kinzie saluting him.
Epilogue
June 20, 1875
He yanked again at the starched celluloid collar one of Sharp Grover’s friends in nearby Jacksboro had loaned him. The suit was a little tight, but if he didn’t do much moving around in it, Seamus Donegan figured he just might get through this hot afternoon.
Then he could rip off the tie and collar and shed himself of this burying suit, all of it making the Irishman itch and sweat even more here in the heat of this midsummer’s day in North Texas.
The collar was the worst part of it all, he decided, sticking a couple fingers back inside it and stretching again. As big as Grover’s friend had been, his neck still wasn’t as thick as Donegan’s.
Every now and then a breeze came along, bringing with it the scent of lilacs Rebecca had planted along the walls of the cabin years ago. It was a delicate fragrance that readily made him think on Samantha. He smiled now, knowing not a single one of these others would know why he smiled: thinking now how she always placed a drop of that lilac water between her breasts, right where she knew he loved to dip his nose and drink in the fragrance of her. Breasts so smooth, like the soft belly of a newborn puppy—
By the saints, what that woman had given him.
And again his mind wandered in these moments as the murmuring crowd grew restless, warm and restless, his thoughts wandering back to just what it was that his two uncles had given him.
Liam would have loved to hear this fiddler, Seamus decided, watching the man’s nimble fingers stride up and down the neck, his elbow like a piston as he drove the bow back and forth over the catgut strings, accompanied by another, shorter man, energetically pumping out accompaniment on his concertina. Yes, indeed—he decided as he put one big foot to tapping lightly the hard-pounded earth of Sharp Grover’s front yard, Liam would have loved this music. And likely were he here, his big brawling uncle would have one arm already clamped around the waist of some comely, likely colleen, her hand clutched securely in his roughened paw as he swun
g her ’round and ’round to the amusement of some and the befuddlement of others.
A lively, lusty soul, this Liam O’Roarke, not given to finding fault with most any man, least of all finding fault with any member of the fairer sex—he had unwittingly passed down much to his nephew.
Seamus looked over the gathering Sharp had called forth, friends and erstwhile business associates from Jacksboro and the surrounding countryside. There were soldiers here from Fort Richardson. A few others of the army trade who were able to ask for and be given leave, marching all the way down from Fort Sill or up from Fort Concho. Once more he looked through the milling crowd hanging back for these moments of prelude in the shade of the great spreading oaks and cottonwoods. Seamus found that singular black face, creased now in middle age like his own, worn with worry and the war map of his own far travels on these plains, nonetheless brightened by those eyes that had seen the glory and still believed in one Union after all.
Reuben Waller’s eyes found that Seamus was watching him from afar. The sergeant, dressed in his freshly laundered uniform, those gold chevrons bright at his shoulder, smiled, his whole face gleaming, just as it had been that autumn day on the parade at Fort Wallace eight winters gone as Seamus and his fists stepped between a lone buffalo soldier and seven bullies from George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry.*
The face might have begun to sag a little, what with the years and the miles the army had asked of the man, but those eyes and that smile would likely never be brighter. From across the shady yard Waller hoisted his tin cup in salute to Donegan as the Irishman stood with Grover, waiting.
His heart filled again with gratitude to have such friends, men like Reuben Waller, who had come all this way from Fort Concho to be here this morning after receiving word on the wire from Richardson’s post telegrapher. Men like Sharp Grover too, who now stood beside him, perhaps to support Donegan in this great undertaking. Perhaps, Seamus believed at times, to keep an eye on him, to keep him from bolting.
Dying Thunder Page 43
