Come Sundown

by Mike Blakely

  THE BLIZZARD AND the starvation did end, of course. A large herd of buffalo was located by scouts and Kills Something’s people moved way out onto the Llano Estacado to hunt and feast. Westerly and I went along and enjoyed the new season of prosperity. Men went down to the Texas settlements, and even into Mexico, and returned with horses and captives. Quanah’s party, though only five strong, enjoyed tremendous success, helping to build Quanah’s reputation. As spring came on, the people broke into smaller camps and scattered across the plains all along the great escarpment known as the Caprock—a continuous uplift stretching hundreds of miles and sculpted by eons of erosion into innumerable canyons. They knew that if they were attacked here by Texans, they could ascend the escarpment and flee onto the vast high plains where the Texans still feared to ride.

  The spring and summer was a good one for Kills Something’s people, though I knew Little Bluff and his Kiowa and Comanche followers were stirring up trouble to the north, raiding wagon trains on the Santa Fe Trail, attacking camps and ranches, and even riding into lonely New Mexican villages to kill and steal. I feared this would bring retribution down on all of us. Through Comanche travelers, we also heard of soldiers attacking Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux camps for reasons no one could explain. We even heard that the old Cheyenne chief Lean Bear, a longtime friend of whites, had been murdered by soldiers without warning or reason. In retaliation, some Cheyenne warriors—especially the Dog Soldiers—had raided ranches and stagecoach stations, killing and taking captives and loot. All this worried Westerly, for most of her family still lived out on the plains with the roving Cheyennes.

  WHEN THE GRASS got high enough to provide ample graze, Westerly and I gathered a large herd of horses we had acquired in trade, and rode back to Adobe Walls to rendezvous with John Prowers and his wife, Amache, who was, of course, Westerly’s sister. Kills Something sent four young men to escort us and help us with the horses. We found John and Amache already in camp, waiting for us. They had raised a fine Cheyenne lodge just outside of Adobe Walls. Inside the walls, John had constructed a makeshift corral for his horses, and a fortification of sorts, should some hostile party attack, be it Pawnee, Apache, or a renegade band of Rebel deserters.

  Westerly immediately went off with her sister, whom she had not seen in months. John and I had the chance to converse in the shade of a brush arbor he had raised inside the adobe walls, for the spring days had begun to get very warm around high noon, and the shade was welcome. He had built the arbor in a place where the southern breeze could snake through the ruins of Fort Adobe, making the place quite comfortable. I sat on a small keg of black powder, leaned against the adobe wall, and whittled on a set of bois d’arc stake pins I was making to keep the best of the horses safe from theft during our coming trip to William’s stockade. John lounged across the ground in the shade of the arbor. He always seemed most comfortable sprawled out on the earth herself.

  “Nobody thought Kit could do it,” he was saying. “Everybody thought the Navahos were untouchable up in those canyons. Kit came at them from the west—out of a new fort they built in Arizona country, called Fort Canby, after you-know-who. Kit had orders to kill any braves he found on sight—like you and him did with the Mescaleros.”

  I winced a little at the memory, but John did not notice.

  “A lot of the same men you fought with at Valverde are still with ol’ Kit. They were all eager to see Canyon de Chelly and, by God, they did. They rode into that canyon and took to huntin’ Indians. Killed a few. Captured some women and children. A couple of squaws were killed, I think, by accident or something. But the main thing was, Kit found their crops. He had his boys chop down three thousand peach trees up in one of those side canyons. Three thousand! And they had squash, and pumpkins, and beans. There was a cornfield in there that Kit told me took three hundred men all day to destroy.”

  “You’ve talked to Kit yourself?” I set aside a finished stake pin, and picked up another bois d’arc stob to whittle on.

  John nodded. “Saw him in Santa Fe last February. He told me all about it. Said destroying those crops hit the Navahos harder than a thousand bullets could have hit ’em. But that was only the start. The Navahos fought back. They attacked supply trains and killed or wounded some teamsters and enlisted men on escort duty. They even ran off a herd of mules from Fort Canby, right under Kit’s nose. That got General Carleton plenty mad back in Santa Fe, and he sent orders to Kit to stop coddling the Navahos and go into Canyon de Chelly and roust ’em.”

  “I’ve heard some fantastic tales about that canyon.”

  “Kit said it beats just about all he’s ever seen. The walls go up a thousand or fifteen hundred feet. There’s water in hidden places up the side canyons. Said there’s regular stone houses two and three stories high built into the cliffs. Some places the main canyon’s miles wide, but there’s other places in the side canyons where a man has to turn sideways to slip through. The Navahos would shoot down from those cliffs and roll boulders down, too. In fifty-eight, Colonel Miles scouted the entrance and said no command should ever enter it. But Kit had orders to do just that.”

  “I don’t guess General Carleton cared to lead the campaign himself.”

  John chuckled. “No, he left it to Kit. But you know how cautious Kit is. He thought it out and planned. He waited till it snowed, knowing the Indians would be near starving by then. He set up a supply camp at the west canyon entrance and sent out parties to explore, kill warriors, capture women and children, and destroy any more food they could find.”

  “Ruthless business,” I grumbled. I didn’t like the sound of it at all. Kit destroying crops? Starving Navaho children in the middle of winter? This was the man who always asked what was right.

  “Kit said it was the only way to stop the Navaho raids.” John sat up suddenly, and drew two ragged lines, roughly parallel, in the loose dirt—a crude map of Canyon de Chelly. With his trigger finger, he made a point at the west end. “After Kit set up his camp at the west entrance to the canyon, here, he sent Captain Pfeiffer way around to the east entrance of the canyon.” He scraped a half-circle in the dirt that went far to the south and entered the east opening between the lines. “Pfeiffer fought his way through first—east to west—and turned up at Kit’s supply camp with prisoners and a few scalps. Well, that ended the mystery as to whether or not a company of soldiers could make it through the canyon. Took all the fight out of the Indians, and Kit’s boys started to mop up. Next thing you know, Navahos were coming into Fort Canby to surrender by the hundreds. There was more than three thousand of ’em before it was all over.” He dusted his hands and lay back down on the ground, propped up on one elbow.

  “What did they do with all those prisoners?”

  “They marched ’em to the Bosque Redondo, where the Mescaleros were being held.”

  “That’s a long march.”

  “It was bad, too. The army hadn’t planned rations for that many prisoners. A lot of those Navahos took sick and died—old folks; children. And more died when they got to the Bosque. Some kind of fever. They were supposed to be growing their own food there, but worms and grasshoppers had eaten all the crops and Indians starved by the scores. That wasn’t Kit’s fault. He was just following orders and the army didn’t provide him with the food he was supposed to have for those poor savages.”

  I shook my head. The fact that I had resigned as Kit’s scout for his Indian wars was but little comfort when I thought of Navaho children dying far from their canyon homes in a desolate prison camp. “I’ve caught wind of trouble in Cheyenne and Arapaho country, too. What have you heard?”

  Now John’s mood darkened, for this business struck closer to his home in Boggsville. “The army ordered troops to go out on the plains, find some Indians, and attack them. Nobody really knows why. Rumors of raids, I guess. I heard old Chief Lean Bear rode out to parley with Lieutenant Eayre and was fired upon not twenty paces from the troops. He died wearing the peace medal President Lincoln had give
n him in Washington.”

  I remembered that chilling day in New Mexico, when Paddy Graydon fired on Manuelito’s people, and my knife blade got stuck suddenly in the stake pin I whittled.

  “They say Lieutenant Eayre’s detachment would have been clean wiped out if old Chief Black Kettle hadn’t prevented the warriors from slaughtering them. Eayre only had about a hundred men, and there were five or six hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors camped nearby that Eayre didn’t know about. William went out there and calmed things down. His boy George was there, too.”

  “And Charles?”

  “Charles didn’t show himself. He’s out there running wild somewhere. Did you hear about Satank?”

  “Nothing since he left our camp after the big buffalo hunt last fall.”

  “A couple of months ago, he rode up to Fort Larned to talk to the officers. Some excitable young sentry pulled a gun on him, and Satank shot an arrow through the boy before he could even fire. Killed him. The bugler started blowing, so Satank’s people ran off the horse herd so the soldiers couldn’t follow.”

  “Oh, no. Now Satank’s a marked man, and he sometimes camps with us.”

  “It gets worse,” John said. “The army’s building a new fort on the Canadian at the mouth of the Conchas.”

  “That’s on the old Comanche Trail to the Llano Estacado.”

  “That’s no accident. The rumor is that General Carleton is going to send Kit out here to punish the Kiowas and Comanches for raiding.”

  I tipped my head back and laughed.

  “What’s funny about that?”

  “Carleton thinks he can send a single regiment out here to do battle with the Kiowas and the Comanches? That’s funny, John. But it won’t be funny if it actually happens.”

  “Well, Kit rounded up more than three thousand Navahos in the last campaign, didn’t he? And with just a few hundred soldiers.”

  “The Kiowas and Comanches don’t have any peach orchards to chop down. They don’t live in little stone houses up in some canyon. The army will be lucky to even find any Kiowas or Comanches to do battle with, and if they do, they better be ready for an entirely different kind of campaign.”

  “You know Kit,” John said. “He’s savvy to the ways of these wild Indians.”

  “If I know Kit the way I think I do, he’ll have the good sense to resign if he’s ordered into Comancheria.”

  John seemed confused by my stance on this subject. “I thought you and Kit were pals.”

  I whittled a couple of strokes on the stake pin. “Kit taught me to always ask myself one question. Is this right? And it’s not right for the army to charge in here and punish a bunch of Indians when they don’t know if they’re guilty of raiding or not.”

  “They have been raidin’, Orn’ry. You know that.”

  “Some of them have. But you can’t blame the whole tribe for the actions of a few young hotheads out to make names for themselves.”

  “Well, the chiefs have got to start controlling their hotheads, or there’s gonna be a war.”

  “Somebody needs to tell them that.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Believe me, I have, John, but these Indians know I’m not the Big Captain. If General Carleton wants to avoid an Indian war the likes of which the army has never seen, he better have some respect for the Comanche and Kiowa leadership, show his face, and have some talks.”

  “General Carleton doesn’t have much use for smokin’ the peace pipe with Indians.”

  “No, he’d rather send a regiment out here to force them out of their own country and onto some death trap of a prison camp. And that’s not right. Not only that, it’s not possible. You’re talking about battling the best light cavalry the world has ever seen on their own ground, and their tactics are like no cavalry maneuvers ever taught at West Point. Don’t forget where you are, John. This is Comanche country, paid for in blood generations before we were born. They’ll defend it as sure as you’d defend your country if somebody invaded it. What if I moved into your neighborhood and spread a bunch of damned diseases among your children and then scattered your game off until you were starving, then sent soldiers in to attack you?”

  John stood, dusted himself off, and walked to the edge of the adobe walls, obviously agitated. He looked out at the Cheyenne tipi his wife had raised. We both heard the laughter of Westerly and Amache coming from inside. He shook his head and turned back to me. “You’re my brother-in-law, Orn’ry, and to me that means as much as you being a blood brother. I guess we’ve married ourselves into a mess with our squaw wives, but they’re Cheyenne, not Comanche. Not Kiowa.”

  “I was adopted Comanche before I ever met you, John. Before I ever met Westerly. Anyway, if the army goes after the Comanches and Kiowas, who do you think will be next?”

  John nodded and looked at the ground. He knew I was referring to the Cheyenne and Arapaho problem. “I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “There are men out here on the frontier who would rather make their reputations skirmishing with Indians than marching straight into battalions of Rebels. But they don’t know what they’re getting into. They don’t have the proper respect for the Plains Indians as fighters. Kit’s successes are deceptive. The Mescaleros were small in number. The Navahos were dependent on their crops. These roaming plains tribes will prove far more difficult to conquer. It can’t be done in one winter’s time. It would take years. Maybe decades.”

  “What if Kit does come, Orn’ry? What are you going to do?” I tossed aside the stake I had whittled on a bit too much. “I don’t know.”

  “You know he’ll want you to guide—scout for him.”

  “I’ve thought of that.”

  “What if he asks you?”

  I picked up another bois d’arc stick, my sharp blade slicing through the bark to the bright orange-yellow heartwood. “I’ll guide a peace delegation out here to negotiate a treaty. But I won’t lead armed troops to attack my own people.”

  John looked at the toe of his boot. He did not reply. He stood there in the sun for a moment, then kicked at a piece of an old adobe brick and returned to the shade of the brush arbor. His body folded like a marionette whose strings had been cut, and then stretched out once again across the ground. He pulled his hat over his eyes. For a long while he said nothing. I thought he had gone to sleep to the rhythm of my knife blade on the wooden stake pin I was fashioning.

  “You’ll never guess what I went and did,” he said, pulling his hat aside to grin at me.

  “You didn’t soil your britches, did you?”

  He laughed hard. “No, I bought a hundred head of cows at Westport and drove them all the way across the plains to Boggsville. Cost me near every spare dollar I had. They fared the winter better than the sheep. Coyotes caught a couple of cows down when they were calving and killed ’em. Lost a calf to a wolf, and one to a lion, but I still came out with a decent calf crop.”

  “Sounds like a risky investment.”

  “It is. But that high plains prairie grass sure puts the weight on them beeves come springtime. If we come out of all this Indian trouble, Orn’ry, I might just make a rancher. I’m going to buy another fifty or so cows when we sell the horses.”

  “Are you looking for investors?”

  “You want in?”

  “Sure. I haven’t got much use for cash money. I’ll throw in with you.”

  John smiled and lay back with his fingers intertwined behind his head.

  “You’ll never guess what I went and did,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Have you ever seen a white buffalo?”

  John scoffed. “That’s a tall tale. I don’t think they even exist.”

  I laughed, and peeled away another curl of wood with my blade. “Have I got a story to tell you …”

  Forty

  I rode my old paint stallion, Major, into the herd of Missouri shorthorn cows and their half-grown calves. John Prowers had herded the shorthorns from Missouri. The c
ows made way for Major, allowing me to push through the herd with my lariat ready in my right hand. I was looking for late calves that had been born after the spring roundup and had not yet been maimed with John Prowers’s brand and ear mark.

  Looking over the backs of the cows, I finally spotted the last of the unmarked calves—his long, notchless ears betraying him. I slipped into position, my loop hanging from my palm. The calf was not even aware of me yet, so I was able to approach his right flank. The cows parted, and I whistled to spook the target to my right. His ears swiveled. He saw me, and trotted away. My loop whirled twice—vertically to my side, rather than horizontally overhead as when roping a beef by the head. The rawhide noose flipped under the calf’s belly, and stood on edge in front of his hind legs for a second. Before the stiff rawhide loop could collapse, the calf stepped into it and I jerked slack. Taking two wraps on the saddle horn, I reined Major away quickly to tighten the loop on the calf’s hind ankles before he could kick it loose. I dragged him away by the heels, scared and bawling.

  I rode between Westerly and Amache to get to the branding fire. They, along with Rumalda Boggs, William Bent, William’s daughter, Mary, and her husband, R. M. Moore, had been holding the herd loosely bunched so I could heel-rope the “slicks” as Tom Boggs called the unmarked calves. We had gathered this herd on the south bank of the Arkansas, across from the site of Bent’s Old Fort—Fort William, as the trappers sometimes called it. As my pony dragged the calf from the herd to the fire, I could look across the river and gaze upon the place where once great adobe walls had towered, like those of a castle. It was all gone now, but my memory could still see it. Just below our herd was the river ford where an Apache arrow had once hissed through the air and imbedded itself in my shoulder blade. The scar itched as I remembered.