Kiowa Vengeance

by Ford Fargo

  “We’ll use what little light we have left to get started burying these civilians,” Dent said. “We’ll make a dry camp. We couldn’t risk a fire, even if there was anything around here to burn.”

  “I bet dem Injuns has found t’ings to burn,” Nagy said, then sighed. “Pittman! Cash!” he barked. “Grab your spades. Dese men was partners, I don’t guess dey’ll mind sharin’ a hole.”

  ****

  Once the burying was done, they spread bedrolls and sat for awhile in the darkness. Their eyes slowly adjusted to the dim starlight.

  “I ain’t never seen nothin’ like what we seen today,” Trooper Pittman said softly. He was a stout young man from Ohio, short but powerful looking.

  “I wish I could say you get used to it, lad,” Corporal Sligo said in his Irish lilt. “But ye never do.”

  Nagy grunted. “I been fightin’ my whole life, boys,” he said. “Mostly Italians and Poles, and damned Austrians—when dey put down my people’s revolution in ’forty-eight, I left Hungary and came here. Fought Comanches and Apaches in Texas, took a few years off to fight Johnny Rebs, and been fightin’ Sioux and Cheyenne since. No, you don’t get used to it, but you learn to move on and not dwell on it. Dwellin’ on it will get you killed damn quick, and dat’s gospel troot’.”

  “They cut their peckers off,” Trooper Stacy said. His voice cracked. “You think—you think they was still alive?” Stacy’s eyes were wide. He was no older than Pittman.

  Sligo answered him. “I reckon that’s one of them questions the sarge meant we ought not dwell on, boyo.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Maybe some of ‘em was alive,” Charley said. “But probably not. The Kiowas are in enemy territory, trying to kill as many people as they can. They can’t take time to really do their worst to them they catch.”

  Charley was stretching the truth, and the veterans knew it. For one thing, it was hard for even a warrior with the charisma and prestige of Stone Knife to keep complete control over his men in the field—it wasn’t the Indian way to take or give orders, just suggestions. And even when pressed for time, a skilled and determined warrior could put a world of hurt on a dying man in his last five or ten minutes of breathing.

  But about half of the soldiers in this troop were recent replacements, and had never been in the field. They deserved to know the truth, but they didn’t necessarily need to know all of it on a night when their life might depend on a decent sleep.

  “Damned savage animals,” Stacy said. His voice was a mixture of grief, fury, and terror, and he seemed near tears. Dent knew that the trooper was at least eighteen years old, maybe nineteen, but he seemed younger than he had earlier in the day. The captain felt a twinge of sympathy for his subordinate.

  Charley Blackfeather did not feel any particular sympathy. Neither of his own sons had lived to see eighteen summers, but they had both been more seasoned than most of these soldiers. Charley himself, by the age of eighteen, had been at war for years.

  “Damn savage animals!” Stacy repeated. He pounded his fists into his legs. “Filthy Injuns. We ought to kill them all. Every dirty one, everywhere we find them—men, women and children. Wipe them out!”

  “We ain’t hard to find,” Charley said, although not unkindly.

  Angry as he was, it took Stacy a moment to comprehend Charley’s words.

  “Oh,” he stammered, once the Black Seminole’s meaning sunk in. “Oh! I didn’t mean you. You’re—well, hell, Charley, you’re civilized.”

  “You reckon so?”

  Stacy heaved an exasperated sigh. “You know what I mean. Civilized men don’t do things like we seen today. Just them dirty savages.”

  “That’s enough, Stacy,” the captain said. “We all need to keep our heads.”

  “If’n we want to keep our hair,” Amos interjected.

  Captain Dent flashed an annoyed glance at Amos, then continued. “Too much anger, too much fear, can cloud your mind. I’ve seen it more than once.”

  “Yes, sir,” Stacy said sullenly.

  “But he’s right, sir,” Trooper Pittman said. “We ought to kill all the savages, it would save all this from happening.” He looked apologetically at Charley. “I mean, you know, not the civilized ones,” he said.

  “We’ll catch these renegades,” Dent said firmly. “But we can’t punish every Indian we see after this, for things they didn’t individually do. That’s what started the present mess to begin with. Buffalo hunters firing on a Kiowa hunting party that had a treaty right to be where they were.”

  “Beggin’ the captain’s pardon, sir,” Sligo said. “But it also didn’t help, that Wolf Creek posse—you was in that, wasn’t you Charley?—killin’ several Kiowas what attacked them first. And then that rancher, Ward Sparkman, killin’ several from the same group—for stealin’ his cattle. I’m surprised they didn’t ride for his Crown-W ranch, west of here, to get revenge on him for that.”

  “Sparkman has a small army of cow hands,” Charley said. “These raiders was goin’ for easier targets.”

  Dent spoke. “The cases you speak of, Sligo, involve Kiowa combatants. I’m expressing my anxiety that—not only you boys, but the other troops, when they find out what happened—may misdirect your anger toward Old Mountain’s village, or at him if he still comes in to the fort to meet with Colonel Vine as he promised to do. That would have far-reaching consequences.” He looked at Stacy and Pittman.

  “Yes, sir,” Stacy repeated, just as sullenly as the first time. Dent stared at them for a moment, then heaved a deep sigh.

  “You’re from Pennsylvania, aren’t you, Stacy?”

  “Perry County, sir. My folks have a farm there.”

  Dent smiled, though he doubted the lad could see it in the faint starlight. “Not too many Indians back there, are there, soldier?”

  Stacy laughed despite himself. “If there are, I never seen ‘em, Captain.”

  “Oh, there’s not,” Dent said. “Not anymore, not for a long time. I’m from Johnstown, myself.”

  “I didn’t know that, sir.”

  Dent nodded. “And I do mean from Johnstown. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. When I was about the age you are now, I figured something out. Coal mining might suit my old man, but it sure didn’t suit me. So when I was eighteen years old I followed my older brother out to Colorado—it was still part of Kansas Territory at that time, and there was a gold strike on.”

  Dent chuckled softly, seemingly more to himself than to his audience. “ ‘Pike’s Peak or Bust,’ that’s what we all said. We were Fifty-Niners. My brother Clay and me, well, if we were going to be miners we were going to be gold miners.”

  “I’m assumin’, Captain,” Sligo said with a grin, “that ye didn’t strike it rich.”

  “No,” Dent said. “I didn’t, and that’s a fact. But I didn’t bring this up to discuss my poor mining skills. There were a lot of folks like Clay and me, you see, pouring in from all over the country. All over the world, really.”

  “Gold does that,” Nagy commented.

  “Indeed it does. And the result was that the whole region filled up with white people. The city of Denver sprang up practically overnight. That area had been a hunting ground for the Cheyenne and the Arapaho for as long as they could remember, and the southern part of it served the same purpose for the Comanche and Kiowa. And the Treaty of Fort Laramie all the northern plains tribes signed in ’fifty-one, that gave the U.S. the right to build forts and settlers the right to pass through on their way to Oregon, guaranteed those hunting rights would be undisturbed. But with that many miners showing up all at once, well, of course there was tension with the local Indians from the outset. There were skirmishes and raids, on both sides.”

  Dent’s voice trailed off and he was silent for several moments. Finally he cleared his throat and continued.

  “That’s when I first saw the sort of things we’ve seen today. We came across some miners that had been stripped and staked out. Not long
after that, our camp was attacked by Cheyennes. Fortunately, it wasn’t just Clay and me—we’d joined up with six others for safety in numbers, and we fought them off. But not before my brother had his brains smashed in by a war club.” Dent’s eyes narrowed as he squeezed in the echoes of his grief.

  “I don’t understand,” Pittman interjected. “If they killed your own brother right in front of your eyes, how can you be lecturin’ us now about treatin’ ‘em fair? With all due respect to you, sir, I mean.”

  “That’s my point, gentlemen,” Dent said. “Believe me, I was a lot hotter after that than you are now, and I was hungry for blood. So were a lot of people I knew, who’d also lost folks. It was just sort of understood by us at the time that Indians are no better than rabid animals. It was never even a question.”

  “What changed?” Stacy asked.

  “Nothing, at first,” Dent said. “Except that a war came—a war to preserve the Union. Colorado was organized into a free territory right after Lincoln was elected, and a militia was raised. I joined up. We ended up marching south, to New Mexico, to stop the Rebs from grabbing up the West. We fought them at a place called Glorieta Pass—it was a hard fight, but we destroyed their supply train and pushed them back. I wound up promoted to lieutenant. Us Colorado men won ourselves some glory that day, and if it had ended there we would’ve kept our honor and added to it. But it didn’t end there.”

  Charley saw that most of the troopers were listening intently to their captain’s tale. A few of the veterans—including Nagy, Sligo, Amos, and Cash—did so with sad demeanors, and Charley assumed they had heard the captain tell the next part of his story before.

  Charley Blackfeather had not heard Tom Dent’s yarn, but he had figured out where it was headed. He had heard all about the events in Colorado at that time, while serving in an all-black Kansas Union regiment.

  “The Cheyenne and Arapaho had signed a new treaty right before the war started,” Dent said, “giving up most of their hunting grounds. At least, some of them signed it. There were a good number of Indians who claimed that the chiefs who signed didn’t represent their bands, so the treaty didn’t apply to them. So they kept hunting as usual.”

  Charley grunted, but did not speak. It was a familiar account, all right. Government men almost never bothered to learn about Indian politics, so long as they could find someone—anyone—that would put his mark on one of their damn papers.

  “After Glorieta Pass,” Dent continued, “our regiment was used as a sort of home guard to protect folks from hostile Indians. Our commander was a man named Chivington—a preacher that hated Indians more than he hated sin.

  “In no time Chivington had us attacking Cheyenne hunting parties. We would attack, they’d fight back and people would die. Always more on their side than on ours. And of course, the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers stepped up their raids on settlers.

  “But not all the Indians wanted to fight. There was an old Cheyenne chief named Black Kettle—his people and some of their Arapaho allies came into Fort Lyon for peace talks—same as Old Mountain is supposed to do tomorrow at Fort Braxton. The Army told them they were safe, and had them camp at Sand Creek. Black Kettle flew an American flag over his tipi, and a white flag as well, so everyone would know they were peaceful. The Indians settled in, and most of the young men left on a buffalo hunt to get their families food.

  “Chivington led us out to Black Kettle’s camp. He trained artillery on it, and ordered us all to charge in and attack. And take no prisoners. One of the company commanders, Captain Silas Soule, pointed out that the Indians at Sand Creek were peaceful and were supposed to be under our protection. And that most of them were old men, women, and children.

  “‘I don’t care,’ Chivington said. “Kill them all, children included—nits make lice. God damn an Indian, and God damn any white man who feels sorry for one.’”

  Dent sighed deeply and cleared his throat again before continuing.

  “Anyhow. Captain Soule refused to give his company the order to charge. I wasn’t sure what to do at first. I hated Indians, you see. But this. Babies, old men, young girls. And all thinking they were safe. I knew it was wrong. I knew it would stain the honor of the whole regiment, and of every man in it. I knew God was watching. And I remembered the words of my father’s hero, Davy Crockett—‘first make sure you’re right, then go ahead.’”

  “What did you do?” Pittman asked.

  “I disobeyed Colonel Chivington’s orders. Captain Soule and I held our companies back, while the others attacked.”

  Dent grimaced. “It was terrible. They were slaughtered—women with babies in their arms, old men trying to surrender. And there was nothing we could do. All that anger and hatred that our soldiers had, poured out on those innocents. And my own hatred and anger flowed away, till all that was left was sickness and shame.

  “And that wasn’t even the worst of it. Our soldiers hacked up those people’s bodies in ways that make the Kiowa work we saw today look amateur. Unborn babies ripped from their mothers’ bellies, used as saddle decorations. Fingers, ears, noses taken for souvenirs. Private parts—men’s and women’s alike—fashioned into hatbands and tobacco pouches.”

  Dent’s voice quivered, and he paused to regain control. The troopers sat at rapt attention. So much, Charley thought to himself, for the greenhorns getting a peaceful night’s rest.

  “ ‘Civilized men don’t do such things,’ you said earlier,” Dent told Stacy. “Civilized men do, and when they do, it is worse. It is worse because civilization means structure, and order, and control. But giving in to blind, unreasoning hatred throws all that to the winds. That’s why I am telling you this story, men.”

  He circled slowly, so that he faced them all in turn.

  “Our job is to protect civilians. We will carry out that task by reining in Stone Knife and his band, killing them if they resist. But then we shall rein ourselves in, gentlemen. We shall not give in to our passions, stoked though they might be. We are here to bring civilization to this frontier. We are not savages. We are cavalrymen in the United States Army.”

  He did not speak again for several moments. Instead he kept scanning the faces, and looking into the eyes, of each man under his command. Some seemed ashamed—others seemed proud. All seemed more in control of their fear than they had been a short time before.

  Tom Dent exhaled slowly. He seemed suddenly very tired. “Now—get some sleep, men,” he said. “You’ll need it. Sergeant, make sure everyone is aware of his assigned picket duty.”

  “Yes, sir,” Nagy said. The Hungarian gathered the troopers around him a short distance away, giving instructions. Dent stood immobile, staring into the distance.

  Charley Blackfeather walked over and stood beside him.

  “So what happened then, Captain?” he asked.

  “Hm?”

  “After the massacre. After you and the other officer disobeyed.”

  “Oh. Word got out about what Chivington had done, and there were investigations. And a public hearing for Chivington himself. Captain Soule and I were both called in to testify. The sad thing is, many of the citizens of Denver supported Chivington, even lionized him. Shortly after giving testimony, Silas—Captain Soule—was murdered by persons unknown. No charges were brought against anyone for the massacre, not even Chivington. The Army brass were thoroughly disgusted by him, however, and his political aspirations were finished. I was offered a commission in the regular cavalry, and have served in that capacity since. And there was plenty to do—Roman Nose gave us quite a fight, stirred up as he and his followers were by what had happened to their fellow Cheyennes at Sand Creek.”

  Charley nodded. “That was a smart move on the Army’s part,” he said. “Putting you to use instead of punishing you. You’re a good man, Captain, and an honorable warrior.”

  “As are you, Charley. And I’m sure you have compelling tales of your own—I look forward to hearing them.”

  “Oh, I’ve been in a scrap or two,
here and there,” the scout said.

  “I have no doubt.”

  “You’re right, though,” Charley added, “to be worried about Old Mountain and his lieutenants comin’ in to parley with Colonel Vine. We’re fixin’ to run across a sight more dead folks tomorrow—farmers and small ranchers, mostly—and word’s gonna spread like wildfire. No matter what happens between us and Stone Knife, folks all around are gonna be stirred up and thirsty for Kiowa blood.”

  “Just like the young Kiowas are thirsty for white blood,” Dent said. “It never ends.”

  “Not as long as there are hotheads on both sides, eggin’ it on,” Charley said. “And mark my words—there’ll be a passel of white folks crowded around Fort Braxton within a couple of days, if Old Mountain doesn’t get in and out of there fast. They’ll be sayin’ that the old man’s peace talks was just a distraction for his son to attack the settlements.”

  “I think Old Mountain is sincere,” Dent said.

  “So do I,” Charley agreed. “He’s no coward, and he’s nobody’s fool. He knows that to keep resisting will mean the death of his people—not just the warriors, but the women and children. Stone Knife hasn’t figured that part out yet—or he has, and he just doesn’t care. He’s fighting for pride, like most young men.”

  Dent shook his head sadly. “I honestly don’t know what I’d do, if I were in their place.”

  “I’ve been in their place,” Charley said. He chuckled softly. “I reckon you was most likely in short pants around that time. My people fought the Army for years, back in the Florida Everglades. My leader was a man named John Horse—hell of a fighter. Even we eventually had to surrender, though, or see all our children die. They sent us out West, to Indian Territory.

  “So I’ve been in both their positions—Old Mountain and Stone Knife. You have pride and honor, and you don’t want to give up your home and your way of life. But in the end you have to make sure there are still some of your people left alive. You do what you have to do—you don’t like it, but you do it and try to make the most of it. And that way there’ll be future generations—to remember what and who we was, and what and who they are. And that way we live on.”