by Mike Blakely
I looked at Kills Something, and clasped his hand in mine. Smiling, I said, “Nothing my brother asks is too great.”
Fourteen
The next morning, I borrowed a lean bald-face gelding from one of Peta’s warriors and struck out to the northeast to follow the trail back to Peta’s old meat camp. Kills Something and the others loped off to fulfill their own duties, scouting the area, and bringing our main village to this great camp-together that Peta had organized. My borrowed bald-face horse could cover some ground. He possessed a long-reaching trot as smooth as a boat skimming the surface of still water. This made for easy riding and for three days and nights I did nothing but ride by the light of the sun and the light of the moon. We rested only between sundown and moonrise, when I would nap, and hobble my pony to graze or sleep as he saw fit.
I knew I was getting near when I saw the ravens and vultures circling in the sky in the distance ahead. I had just pulled the reins of my war bridle to stop the bald-face gelding on a high point of land along the Pease River so I could get a feeling for the lay of the land. I was no more than twenty minutes from the camp, it seemed, judging from the carrion eaters that dotted the sky ahead.
Over my left shoulder to the northwest, I had been watching the approach of a blue norther. It looked like a big, windy one. A wall of clouds the color of a bad bruise boiled with menace and stretched for hundreds of miles away to the northeast and southwest. Below the blue clouds I saw a layer of dark brown dust that the winds had torn from the earth. It seemed from the dust that the norther was going to blow in dry. The clouds were now looming almost over me, and I knew any minute the wave of frigid air would tear at my Comanche braids and chill me to the marrow. The weather had been so mild when I left Peta’s big camp-together that I had carried only one blanket with me with which to stay warm. I was glad to be near the meat camp now, where I knew I could borrow a buffalo robe.
Already, my pony was snorting in anticipation of the cold northern air, and trying to prance right out from under me, so I made him charge down the high hill into the river valley where we might find some protection from the winds. Within minutes, an icy blast roared through the treetops, tearing away the last of the autumn leaves and sending them fluttering around me. When the wall of winter wind hit me, the temperature plummeted so quickly that I felt as if I had jumped into a pool of snowmelt. My pony ramped and kicked one hind leg out, accompanied by a resounding fart, as a greeting to the northern invader. A smattering of rain and sleet began to pepper me, but only for a mile or so, failing to totally soak me. Then, the dust cloud roared overhead, and grit began to collect in my eyes, nose, and mouth. I glanced up once to see a brown swirl cupping its dirty hand over me as a wave curls onto the beach.
To my relief, the dust soon began to dissipate, leaving only cold wind and occasional barrages of sleet to accost me. Even this did not concern me much, for I knew the camp was near, with plenty of meat and tipis for shelter. I had slept on the ground and eaten next to nothing for three days.
The ravens had been blown into the next river valley by the blue norther, but I knew instinctively where the camp lay. I came to the base of a high bluff between me and the camp and decided to ride up onto it so I could make my presence known and give signs of friendship before I blundered into the village.
I climbed to the top of the bluff overlooking the camp and drew rein. The cold had apparently driven many mothers inside the lodges to bundle up their children, for I saw only a few women tending the strips of meat that hung on racks and cured in the smoke over fires. Several adopted Mexican captives were in view. To my right, the wall of brown dust was blowing away. To my left, the cloudy sky promised much cold and little sunshine. The camp lay in front of and below me, but no one had yet noticed my presence on the bluff above them. I looked across the string of forty-seven lodges strung out along the narrow river. A woman emerged from her tipi now, wrapped in a red trade blanket. Dogs trotted through camp, in search of scraps. Wisps of smoke twisted away from the cook fires and smoke holes on the brisk north wind.
Now a sudden motion caught my attention on the far side of the camp and my eyes quickly pulled that way. For a moment or two, I could identify only an unknown object moving fast through the trees toward the camp. Then I made out the shape of a horse and rider in the lead, followed by more movement behind. The faint sound of hooves reached my ears. More riders charged through the cover of trees, then more. The leader broke into the open as a Comanche woman turned to look at him, caught completely by surprise. The lead horseman’s wide hat brim flapped in the wind and a puff of white smoke seemed to appear from his outstretched arm. I heard the pistol report and saw the woman fall backward, holding her face with her hands. Already the rider was charging past her and the sickening wave of panic swarmed from my head, into my chest and guts.
These riders had come under cover of the dust storm. These Texans, these soldiers, these attackers numbering in the dozens, the scores. They rushed into the lower end of the camp, revolvers blazing away at the fleeing forms of women, children, and Mexican slaves.
“No!” I shouted, feeling my eyes widen in terror. The next thing I knew, my gelding was charging down the bluff into the middle of a mounting massacre. I rode into the upper end of camp shouting, “Run! Run! The Texans have come! They are killing us!”
Mothers with wild eyes of fear threw back the hides covering their doorways and bolted, carrying their babies, dragging their older children, dodging any way they could in the confusion. Bullets popped against the hide lodges, adding to the chaotic din of gunfire, hoofbeats, and screaming women.
The riders kept coming, fifty, sixty, seventy, one hundred strong. There were some uniformed soldiers among them, but most wore civilian clothes and big hats. They bristled with pistol barrels and sawed-off shotguns.
I continued riding right into the teeth of the attack, not knowing what I would do, other than scream at the women to run. I pulled my revolver from the waist of my breechclout, realizing that I looked as Indian as any Comanche on the range, and I saw the leader of the charge riding right toward me. I fired a shot past his head, intentionally missing him, hoping to simply halt the charge without killing a fellow white man in the battle that had sucked me in. He tried to shoot back, but found his revolver spent, so he tucked it into a saddle holster and took hold of a short-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun tied to his saddle horn with a thong. Other attackers passed the leader as he slowed down and straggled to get his shotgun free.
The attack was about to engulf me, and I knew I had to put up some kind of a front.
Reaching deep into my stomach and chest for the wildest battle cry I could conjure, I felt my bald-face mount spring under me, right into the maw of the fray. I fired my five remaining shots over the heads of the white men, and this little bit of resistance stalled their attack and gave some of the fleeing women and children a chance to escape. I shoved my pistol back into my waistband, and reached for my bow in the quiver. I rode behind a tipi to string the bow. Four bullets tore through the buffalo hide of the lodge and sang past my ears.
A Comanche bow does not string easily, but such was my strength in this moment of terror that I had no trouble bending the bow to loop the end of the bowstring over the end. I knew I had to do some fancy riding now, for the hardest-looking group of white men I had ever seen had roared past me, leaving dead and wounded women behind as they looked for more victims.
Again, I screamed with all the rage of the grizzly and all the anguish of the mountain lion, and charged through the attackers. I notched one of my hunting arrows—I owned no war points. This I sent slamming into the thigh of a blue-coated soldier. I saw gun barrels angle my way, so I threw myself to the right side of my pony and flung another arrow over his withers as I charged crosswise through the column of attackers. Again, the white men scattered, and I wondered how fiercely they would have fought had Peta’s most scalp-decorated warriors risen to face them about now.
I felt the impact
of the bullet hit my horse’s neck. He stumbled, and I dropped to the ground, knowing the gelding was about to fall or roll on me. As the heavy thud of the poor dead horse shook the ground, I sprang to my feet to find a soldier charging me with a cavalry saber. I dodged the blade and jabbed the soldier’s horse in the flank with the arrow I had just drawn from my quiver, causing the mount to squeal and charge out of control. I ran now with bullets humming and horses pounding their hooves all around me. I jumped behind a meat rack and drew my bow, loosing an arrow that flew through the high crown of some cowboy’s hat without touching his scalp.
I noticed another cowboy charging my way, seemingly unaware of me, for he was looking everywhere in the confusion for someone to shoot at. So I grabbed a stick of firewood about four feet long and as big around as my arm, and rose from nowhere as he trotted by. He was looking the wrong way. One step and I was within reach. The hackberry branch hit him square in the face and knocked him from his mount. Luckily for me, the cowboy held one rein as he fell, keeping his horse from running off. I grabbed the rein, kicked the hapless young attacker in the other side of his face, and found myself mounted on the captured horse in an instant.
By now the main charge had passed me by and I knew that I could do nothing but pick up a straggling Comanche or two and try to carry them to safety. I saw the occasional arrow fly through the sky and knew that at least a few adopted Mexicans or enraged women had tried to put up some kind of a fight. I angled across the camp, and saw a mounted man in a hat chasing a woman who fled on foot. I knew her at a glance, even from behind. It was Hidden Water, sister of my friend Kills Something—Hidden Water, my former Comanche squaw-wife.
As I gave chase, the man fired, his bullet hitting Hidden Water in the calf, and throwing her to the ground. As she crawled desperately away, I let another war cry sing from my throat and notched another arrow. The white man looked back at me briefly, fired an errant shot at Hidden Water as she scrambled across the ground, and then turned tail to join the safety of the main party.
“Plenty Man!” she screamed as I rode up to her. “Please help me!”
“Get up!” I ordered. I held my hand out to her and cocked my foot in the way Comanches had of helping a second rider mount behind.
Hidden Water winced as she rose on her one sound leg. Blood streamed from the wounded right leg. My captured ranch horse was either scared to death of Indians or blood, for he wanted nothing to do with the wounded woman, but I yanked reins and kicked flanks and made the horse approach her, for she could not walk on the leg. Never the toughest Comanche woman, Hidden Water nevertheless grabbed my hand with desperate strength and hopped on her good leg so that she could step on my upwardly cocked foot to swing her wounded leg over the horse. I could tell by her gasp of pain that the leg hurt terribly, but she managed to get mounted behind me. I glanced down at her wounded leg, and it looked straight, so if the bone was at all touched by the bullet, at least it seemed that it hadn’t been completely shattered.
The only option I had now was to run, and this horse I had captured was inclined to oblige. He wanted out of that camp as badly as Hidden Water and I. I charged up the river valley, looking for others I might help in some way, but mainly looking for an escape route. The attackers were all ahead of me now, having left behind several dead and wounded women and children, and a few adopted Mexican captives who had put up a fight. As we galloped onward, a woman stepped from her hiding place in the brush ahead and waved me down. As I slowed and approached, she dragged a startled three-year-old from the brush pile and held him up to me.
“Take my son,” she begged.
Again, I had to urge the terrified horse closer to the woman, but I got near enough to grab the child by an arm and pull him to the saddle in front of me. “Hide!” I ordered. “When they are gone, go upstream, and I will bring help back.” I left the mother behind and galloped onward again, finding a steep draw up the bluff to the left that I thought I could negotiate.
Just as I started up the draw, I heard hoofbeats and shouting across the river. I turned and saw a Comanche woman running on a horse, with a child in her lap. A second glance told me this was Nadua, Peta Nocona’s wife, for I saw streaks of blond in her greased hair, and caught a glimpse of the terror in her blue eyes.
Two men chased Nadua. One wore the uniform of a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He aimed a revolver at the fleeing woman and surely would have shot her in the back, or tried, had not the other man intervened.
“Wait!” the man in cowboy garb shouted. “She’s white!”
So instead of killing Cynthia Ann Parker outright, the men overtook her and caught the reins of her horse to drag her back to their version of civilization, and the family she scarcely remembered, to kill her slowly with white women’s clothing, greasy food, and curious stares. As I left the scene, I heard Nadua wailing in terror and sorrow, screaming as she clutched her child, shrilling the piteous lament of a girl once captured from the Parker family—a good Baptist family that had moved too far into Comanche country—shrieking the first verse of a long death song sung by a good Comanche wife and mother who had lingered one day too many at an old meat camp. It was the most tragic song I ever heard sung by man, woman, child, or beast.
With my heart sinking into my guts, I turned away and urged the captured mount up the draw. Once he got started, I looped the reins over the saddle horn and began to reload my revolver while the cow horse climbed. From the rim of the river valley, I saw women and children darting among the bushes, and I shouted instructions to them in Comanche to hide and then move upstream when it was safe. A few shots were still echoing from the valley below, and I could only imagine the soldiers and rangers and cowboys were finishing off wounded women and children.
My mount sprang easily into a lope when I touched my heels to his flanks and we began to make our escape. Then I heard a war cry down in the valley and rode to the brink of the bluff to peer cautiously over it. I saw an Indianized Mexican named José, mounted and fleeing from the white man who had led the attack earlier. I knew José from my earlier visit to Peta’s camp. He had completely adopted Comanche ways, and looked Indian from his deerskin leggings to his braided black hair. Behind him, he carried a young Comanche girl and seemed about to make good on his escape into the timber when the white man giving chase loosed a lucky pistol shot that hit the girl in the back, mortally wounding her. As she fell from the pony, her death grip dragged José to the ground with her. He sprang instantly, drew his bow, and sent an arrow into the hip of the white man’s horse, which began to buck. Even as he tried to regain control of the horse, the white man continued to fire, and one of his shots happened to hit José in the elbow, spinning him to the ground as it shattered the limb.
The ranger got his wounded horse under control and sent two more deliberate shots into José’s body, but the Mexican would not easily die. He crawled up under a small juniper tree and began singing his death song. The ranger, and a Mexican vaquero who had ridden to the ranger’s aid, looked down on the wailing José for a few seconds, then the white man gave the order. The vaquero killed José with a load of buckshot. As I backed away from the bluff, I saw the two attackers picking up José’s shield, quiver, and bow. Hidden Water and I, with the wide-eyed Comanche child, picked our way carefully upstream.
Years later, I would piece together various intelligence concerning this massacre. The leader of the attack was a captain of the Texas Rangers called Sul Ross. A tough man with some experience as an Indian fighter, and a natural leader, Ross had been given orders by Governor Sam Houston to retaliate against Peta Nocona’s band for the raids of last fall. Houston was unusually friendly toward Indians, having lived among the Cherokee, so this was a rare order no doubt precipitated by political pressure and the severity of the recent Comanche raids.
Armed with his gubernatorial orders, Sul Ross had recruited forty rangers, and seventy civilians—mostly cowboys—and had also secured an accompaniment of twenty soldiers from the Second Cavalry a
t Camp Cooper. On top of this, he contracted two Tonkawa scouts to guide the punitive company into Comanche country. The two Tonkawas succeeded in finding Peta’s vulnerable meat camp, a feat that probably would have eluded the white men.
After the fight, Sul Ross would claim that the man he had killed—the Mexican named José—was actually Peta Nocona, the great chief. Largely on the basis of this claim, and the fact that his outfit had recaptured Cynthia Ann Parker after almost a quarter century with the Comanches, Sul Ross would become governor of Texas, and later president of Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University. His very name would become legend in Texas. Because Peta typically stayed deep in Comanche country and was rarely seen, Ross’s claim would not be disputed for decades.
A few years after the Pease River massacre, while returning a ransomed white girl to Fort Griffin in Texas, I ran across one of the Tonkawa scouts who had led Ross to the meat camp massacre—the Battle of Pease River, as the Texans gloriously referred to it. The scout, in broken English, told me his story as he gestured with a bottle of whiskey in his hand:
“Me tell Ross big camp ahead. Many warriors. Me lie, lie, lie. Want rangers kill Comanche squaws. Me hate Comanches. Big dust come up, cold wind. Dust hide soldiers; hide rangers, hide cowboys. Comanches no fight much—boys and squaws. Ross kill Mexican Joe. Him think he kill chief.” Here, the Tonkawa had laughed. “Him no see different—slave; chief.”
The Tonkawas had long since been pushed out of their country, caught between Comanches and white settlers. They had sided with the whites, for the Comanches had victimized them for generations. The Tonkawa scouts had led Sul Ross to a Comanche camp they knew was inhabited mostly by women and children, but had told the ranger leader he would be encountering Peta’s best warriors. This invalid intelligence had brought the blood of the white avengers to a fighting boil, and they had charged the camp intent on killing Comanches that had recently killed their own countrymen—their own kin in some cases.