by Mike Blakely
But enough of my bellyaching. You will tire of that all too soon.
“I will bridle my best pony for the long trail, and leave this camp before the sun has moved one fist across the sky,” I said to Burnt Belly.
The aged shaman nodded, and rose from the ground like a much younger man. “It is the best day to go. The moon rises full tonight. I know your medicine, Plenty Man. You do not sleep when the moon stays full. You will travel far, and return in two moons, when it is good for the young warriors to ride south and raid.”
“Tsuh,” I replied. “But after the full moon I will need dogbane and moccasin flower to help me sleep at night, or I will fall into one of my trances.”
“I will give you some, in trade for something I need.”
“What is it you need?”
“Bring me some good whiskey. I know you add water to weaken the cheap whiskey you bring for the young braves. This is good. But I want some real whiskey with spirit. I do not want it to taste like the piss of a coyote, and I do not want it weakened with water. You know I never swallow the whiskey, so there is no need to weaken it. I spit it into the sacred embers of cedar, and seek visions in its flames. A small horn of fine whiskey will do.”
I raised an eyebrow and grinned at the old man. “The young braves must not know that I weaken their firewater.”
“I would not tell, even under the worst tortures of the most evil Pawnee squaw,” he said. “Now, I want to loan you something.” He approached me, an old scarred man in breechclout and moccasins. “You have been making your arrows, and I know you want to finish. That groove in the dried mud wall is a good idea, for it is made of earth, and the earth knows the language of the wood, for they have lived together since the days when animals spoke and walked about like two-leggeds. But on the trail, if you want to straighten arrows, you need a small stone with a groove. I have brought one for you to use while you are on your journey.”
Here, Burnt Belly showed me both palms, empty. Now he raised his hands, clapped once, and revealed a grooved stone that had somehow appeared in his right hand. I knew a few sleight-of-hand tricks that I used to influence the Indians, but how Burnt Belly pulled off his magic, I will never know. That stone, the size of a turkey egg, appeared from nowhere.
“I will return it,” I said, the astonishment plain on my face.
“I go now to prepare the dogbane and moccasin flower,” he said.
WITHIN THE HOUR, I had caught and saddled my best trail pony—a sorrel paint stallion possessed of a smooth trot and ample endurance. His name was Major, for he had been given to me by Major James Henry Carleton for serving as his scout on a campaign against some marauding Mescalero Apaches. I had helped Major Carleton capture the camp of the renegades, and the paint horse I now rode had been the finest horse taken in the victory.
I first named the horse Major Carleton, but later began to simply call him “Major.” Eventually—discovering the peculiar mischievous nature of this animal—I would come to think of him as Major-Pain-in-the-Ass. At times, however, owing to his good behavior, I would brevet him General Nuisance, but sooner or later he would always get busted back down to Major.
He was a stallion, but his demeanor was gentle, unless a mare in heat happened to be upwind. Rather than unruliness, it was his curiosity that got him into trouble. I believe that Major thought he was part human. He habitually watched what people did with their hands, then would try the same things with his mouth. He possessed incredible dexterity in his lips and teeth. He could untie himself—and other horses—and open gates, often letting stock escape.
He understood the concept of the handle. He could carry buckets, pump water from a well, and dump wheelbarrows. I once caught him trying to work a coffee grinder. Anything a human might pick up, Major could not wait to carry. This included sticks of wood, blankets, shovels, axes, hats, and firearms. As you might imagine, he occasionally caused some commotion around camp. However, I was always so impressed and entertained by Major’s shenanigans that I could never bring myself to punish him for taking such initiative. This, of course, only served to encourage his high jinks.
As I saddled Major, he nipped at the back of my thighs to express his objection to the tightness of the cinch. Usually, I rode Indian style: bareback or with only a blanket. But when I rode for trade goods, I used my Mexican saddle. I did not want to look too Indian riding into some trading post or village. Once I explained this to Major, he heaved a huge sigh and accepted his lot.
I led a second pony—a bay—by a war bridle looped around his lower jaw. This mount I would trade for a couple of mules, which I would use to pack the whiskey kegs back to the camp on the Canadian. Before I rode west, I took a jaunt downstream, toward the camp of some Penateka Comanches who had been visiting for some time to get in on the good buffalo hunting on the ranges surrounding the Crossing.
On the way, I rode through a village of Nokoni Comanches—Chief Peta Nocona’s band, which stretched almost a mile along the river bottom. Passing Peta’s lodge, I saw his wife, Nadua, starting a cook fire, a number of buffalo tongues hanging nearby over a bare cottonwood branch. She glanced up at me, the blue of her eyes flashing in a way seldom seen in a camp of dark-eyed Indian women—like the tail of a deer warning her companions. At the time, I did not know the story behind this white woman living with the Comanches. Eventually, I would learn that her white name was Cynthia Ann Parker. She had been captured in a Texas raid at the age of nine. In time, Chief Peta Nocona had taken her as his wife—his only wife. She was well dressed and cared for, and seemed to go about her chores contentedly. She did not glance at me a second time as I rode by. I had been told by my Comanche friends not to try to ransom this white woman from Peta Nocona, for he loved her very much and would not part with her, so I rode on downstream to the camp of the Penatekas—the Honey-eaters from the oak-timbered hills farther down in Texas.
There was a warrior among the Penatekas who had captured a Mexican boy on a raid far to the south, across the Rio Grande. He had given the boy to his wife as a slave, and I had been told that the wife wanted to trade the boy for some goods from the old Spanish settlements. I found the lodge where the boy was kept, and saw him nearby, gathering wood. He looked to be about twelve years old. He was shirtless and shoeless in this cold, though he wore a pair of tattered cotton trousers which he had probably been wearing when captured. He had wood stacked high on his slender arm, and I saw sores on his shoulders where I feared his captors had beaten or burned him. Perhaps he had tried to run away, and had been punished. Or perhaps the woman who claimed him was just mean. These Penatekas lived closer to the Texas settlements, and were constantly harassed by settlers and the ruthless Texas Rangers. Constant warring had made them angry.
I found the woman who owned the boy. She was dressing a deerskin stretched on an upright frame made of willow branches stuck deep into the ground.
“Woman,” I said, in Comanche. “Do you want to sell that captive Mexican boy?”
She glanced toward me, but not at me. “He is useful to me, but he eats much.”
I resisted saying that the boy didn’t seem to have eaten well in weeks. “Perhaps I could bring something from the settlements that is useful, and does not eat at all.”
“I want two things.”
“What things?”
“A kettle of iron. And a knife.”
“That is easily done. I will take the boy with me, and bring back the kettle and the knife.”
“No,” she said. “I will give you the boy when you return with the things.”
My pony pranced sideways, anxious to ride in the cool air. “That is no good. Then I will have that boy around my lodge when I return, and I do not want to feed him any more than you do.”
“I want the kettle and the knife first,” she insisted.
I shook my head. “I must take him now if you wish to trade. If I do not take him now, I must make a second trip to sell him back to the Mexicans. That is no good.”
“
You might take him and never return.”
I drew myself upward in the saddle, as if insulted. “My word is good. Ask anyone. I will return with the things you want.”
“No,” she said.
I sat there on my horse for a few seconds, then reined away. I did not want to leave the boy with this woman, but I also did not intend to establish such a precedent—that I would go and fetch a ransom for a captive. I did not work that way.
“Are you going to bring the kettle and the knife?” she called after me.
I stopped and turned. “Only if I take the boy now.”
“I will kill him, then. He eats too much.”
“Then you will never get your kettle or your knife. Listen, woman. I have a knife here on my belt that I will give to you now. Then I will return with the kettle, and it will be a good one that is large, but not so large that you cannot pack it when your village wanders. And, as a reward for your trust, I will bring you a blanket. What color do you want?”
She looked toward the underfed boy and frowned. I removed the knife from my belt, rode back toward her, and held it out to her. She looked at the knife, snatched it from me, and drew it from its scabbard to inspect it. I could tell she was going to keep that knife.
“The color of the blanket does not matter,” she said. “As long as it is not blue. That color is bad luck.”
“Good,” I said. As I rode toward the boy, leading the spare pony, the Penateka woman yelled in a shrill voice, ordering her captive to drop the wood he had gathered near the fire, and mount the extra horse I had with me. The boy did as he was told. I handed him the reins, and he seemed to know what to do with them. We rode back up the river, through the camps.
Arriving at my lodge, I got down.
“Wife,” I said to Hidden Water. “I will ride now.”
“I heard the crier,” she said sarcastically. She was still kneeling on the buffalo hide with her friends, and she was bound to show off to them a little.
“Go into the lodge and fetch one of my old shirts and a pair of moccasins for this boy.”
She sighed in an impudent way that might make some Comanche husbands take a stick to their wives.
“Go,” I ordered. “I will bring something nice for you back from the settlements.”
She looked knowingly at her friends as she rose, and they giggled. She went into the lodge. I ordered the other women to leave us. They reluctantly obeyed, and I entered the lodge, signing to the boy on the pony to stay where he was.
Hidden Water had found a shirt and a pair of moccasins for the boy, and was waiting for me inside. The boy was not that much smaller than me, for I have never weighed more than 145 pounds in my life. She tossed the things out through the lodge entrance when I entered, and told the boy to get down from the pony and put the things on. Then she pulled the bear-hide cover over our lodge door.
Coming to me now in the privacy of our lodge, she said, “What will you bring me?”
“What do you want?”
“Many nice things. A blanket the color of the flanks of the forked-tail bird that darts after flying bugs. Some buttons made of the rainbow shell. Ribbons. A comb made of the shell of a tortoise. And a looking glass.”
Another Comanche woman had just traded a human being to me for a kettle and a knife, and my wife wanted finery.
“A blanket that color will be hard to find,” I said.
“You will do it,” she replied, a coy look on her face. She took my hand and pulled me toward our couch of soft buffalo hides. She wore a streak of vermilion coloring her scalp where her hair parted, and her cheeks were also colored, subtly, as if she could possibly blush. She pulled me down onto the couch with her, and bared her legs as she loosened my breechclout.
Outside, I could hear Major pawing the ground impatiently. “I promised the elders I would ride before the sun moved one fist across the sky,” I warned, my lips whispering close enough to hers that I could smell her breath, scented with mint and plums.
“This will not take long, and it will help you to remember to bring the things I want.”
“Tsuh,” I said. “It will make my memory good.”
WHEN I LEFT my lodge, I found the Mexican boy standing there, wearing the slightly oversized shirt and moccasins, holding the reins to both horses. I tossed him a blanket to wrap about his shoulders. I mounted the paint and the boy sprang onto the bay. I motioned northward, and we rode past the ruins of Fort Adobe, and up the trail that led us out of the Canadian Breaks to the vast treeless plains above the river valley. I paused at the brink to look down on the large Indian encampment. Over four hundred lodges from three bands of Comanches, harboring more than a thousand souls, dotted the valley for miles along the stream. It was a pretty sight to me, the lodges streaming smoke, their entrances all facing east, children and dogs running among women hard at work, men sitting in circles as they smoked and talked and boasted of their hunting skills and wartime exploits.
I turned away and thought about the long ride to Santa Fe. I reached into my saddlebag and pulled out some pemmican I had placed there when I saddled up. This I offered to the boy, who took it without hesitation.
“What is your name?” I asked, repeating the question in Spanish.
The boy did not answer. He chewed the pemmican, which was made of dried buffalo meat and venison, cactus tunas, walnuts, and plums, all caked together in rich buffalo tallow. We rode for a few miles, the ponies stepping into a trot in the brisk November air. The boy finished the pemmican.
“Toribio,” he said.
I nodded, and smiled, and we rode another mile.
Then he asked, in Spanish, and in a very small voice, “Cómo se llama?”
Two
My name? That takes some telling.
I was born with the given name Jean Guy. I will not tell my family name, for I am still a wanted murderer in my native France, at least in court or police records, if not in the memory of any living soul. After fleeing France, I chose the alias of Honoré Dumant, but the crew of the English cotton packet on which I stowed away thought I was saying Henri Dumant, so they simply called me Henry. Arriving in America, and traveling to the frontier, I was called Honoré by the French speakers who could handle it, until my friend Blue Wiggins started calling me “Ornery,” which was as close as he could come to Honoré with his American accent, and even then, it sounded like “Orn’ry.” About this time, Charles Bent, observing how green I was, started calling me Orn’ry Greenwood, which I accepted as a pretty good alias because it covered my French origins. Because of my youth, many of the traders I apprenticed under—including William Bent, Kit Carson, John Hatcher, and Lucas “Goddamn” Murray—called me Kid Greenwood. Once among the Comanches, my adoptive brother, Kills Something, named me “Plenty Man,” saying, “Him little, but him Plenty Man.” The Kiowas called me “Not-So-Big-for-One-So-Ugly,” for I have never been accused of good looks. While working as a skinner for Billy Dixon on the buffalo ranges, I was heard speaking French to someone, and so it was assumed that I was French, which I am, and I was called “Frenchy,” by which name I am still known to this day, as a ninety-nine-year-old genius telling you about the adventures of my wasted life.
Anyway, when the Mexican boy, Toribio, asked me my name, I gave him the Spanish version of my Comanche name, Plenty Man, saying, “The Indians call me ‘Mucho Hombre,’ but you may simply call me ‘Mucho.’”
On the long ride to Santa Fe, Toribio began to trust me, and told the story of his capture. It was in the Mexican province of Coahuila, on a ranch west of Monterrey, a remarkable distance south of the normal Comanche range. He was Toribio Treviño. The Penatekas had attacked his father’s ranch late one evening while Toribio was carrying fodder to horses. He had been easily captured. His father had jumped onto a horse, and come to rescue him, but had been killed by a Comanche arrow. Toribio saw his father scalped as he was dragged away by his captors.
In camp that night, he was beaten with sticks, and tied in a most cruel way,
his wrists and ankles bound behind his back and fastened to a tree limb above, so that he was almost suspended, facedown, with a heavy rock on his back. After a few nights of this type of indoctrination, the ill treatment simply ended, and Toribio rode with the warriors northward, as if he were one of them, though they did not feed him as well.
Arriving at the Penateka camp, he witnessed a victory dance that revolved around the scalp of his own father. He was given to the wife of the warrior who had captured him, and she beat him and burned him whenever she wanted—sometimes even when he slept. This woman had lost a brother to a raid in Mexico, and took her revenge upon this hapless Mexican boy, Toribio Treviño.
In spite of all his recent hardships, by the time we approached the ranch of Kit Carson and Lucien Maxwell, at Rayado Creek, on the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail, Toribio had become almost talkative and had put on several pounds. I had treated his cuts and burns with poultices of herbs that I had bought from Burnt Belly for such purposes, and he had healed well, for we were many days on the trail to the Beaubien-Miranda Land Grant where Kit and Lucien were building their ranch.
When we arrived, on a cold Saturday evening in late November, we found the Rayado Creek Ranch caught in the vortex of a fandango. More coal oil lanterns than I might have imagined the ranch possessed hung from beams and arbors and reatas strung from house to house, burning a liberal quantity of fuel. A bunch of Mexican laborers who rendered fine folk tunes on guitars and fiddles and squeeze boxes stood and played at the edge of a dirt dance floor that had obviously been sprinkled with water to lay the dust. Little children and grandparents and everyone in between—for the ranch was home to many families of workers—danced and whirled to the music. Fires and kettles and Dutch ovens and meat poles hung with sides of beef and deer carcasses told me and Toribio that this celebration would include an ample feast.