by Mike Blakely
I smiled. “You are as tricky as our ancestor Brother Coyote.”
“The trickster loves his life, even knowing his enemies lie waiting to take it from him at every turn in the trail. Do not let these times weigh so heavily on your heart, nephew. These troubles are not of your making. You have been guided here by spirit powers beyond your understanding to protect your people. You must do your duty, but do not suffer it too deeply. Good times follow bad. Our warriors live to fight and die for their home. That is the way to the rewards of the Shadow Land. Come.”
He beckoned me to step outside and I beheld a striking sunset blazing almost bloodred through the dust of some distant buffalo herd. A flock of a dozen mourning doves rocketed overhead, streaking at enviable speeds toward a favorite watering place. The voices of children at play bubbled up from the camp situated all along the Concho River. A drumming of hooves drew my attention across the stream, where two young warriors ran neck and neck on the racecourse. The aroma of cooking food made me hungry.
“The spirits have granted us a great day to be together once again,” he said. “Tomorrow we will call for a council of war. Kills Something will have two moons to prepare the warriors. You, nephew, must make many hard rides to gather supplies—powder and lead, knives and iron for arrow points. You must trade for these things a little at a time in many different places, so the whites will not know you are supplying our people. Then we will move our village to a place of strength. Where do you suggest?”
My answer came quickly. “At the Adobe Walls.”
He nodded. “Yes, the Crossing. That is the place I was thinking of, too. But all that will begin tomorrow. For now, we will go see what my third wife has cooked for our evening meal in her lodge. People laugh at me because I married her and she is not very pretty. But she makes me very happy when she cooks, and I already have two pretty wives. Come, I am as hungry as a coyote named No-Leg.”
THE COUNCIL WAS held the next day, and as Burnt Belly and I recommended to the elders, it was decided that the village would move to Adobe Walls after the warriors had been drilled and I had gathered the supplies. I would use pack mules to transport the wartime provender. Six warriors were assigned to me to help me with the pack mules. Two of them were my old friends of the warpath, Loud Shouter and Fears-the-Ground, who were now respected raid leaders and wealthy horse owners with two wives each and several children.
The only other warrior of any standing to accompany me was young Quanah, son of the great chief Peta Nocona, whose name would never again be spoken among the Comanches, for Comanches did not speak the names of their dead for fear of being haunted by specters from the Shadow Land.
The other three mule tenders were young warriors who did not relish the idea of being assigned to a mere supply run. Their names were Blackbird, Turtle, and Tobacco Boy. The day we left the Concho, these three boys rode with scowls on their faces, tugging angrily at the lead ropes of their mules, for we passed by their young friends outside of camp, going through all the fantastic battle drills the Comanches had developed to prepare for war. As their friends held wild races and rough contests designed to hone hand-to-hand fighting skills and rescue abilities, they could only mope and lead their mules, tied head to tail behind them.
As we left Kills Something’s village, however, I explained to them, mostly in sign language, how important and dangerous our mission was. We would have to ride to the fringes of enemy territory near the Texas settlements, and would be in constant danger of being discovered. If found and attacked, we would have to fight our way back toward Comancheria and use our most sophisticated tactics of evasion to get our war supplies back to Kills Something’s camp. This element of danger seemed to cheer the boys up and we got along better for the next few days. Each of my six men tended three mules, giving us eighteen beasts to load with ammunition and other necessities.
We went to Fredericksburg first, for it was the supply point nearest to the Concho River. I have told you about Fredericksburg before. Unlike the residents of any other town anywhere in Texas, the German immigrants of Fredericksburg were on good terms with the Comanches. So Loud Shouter rode to town with me. We claimed to be going into business together hunting buffalo for hides and meat. This was old news in Fredericksburg, for the town had forged a treaty with the Comanches saying the Indians would supply the settlers with wild game if the whites would refrain from hunting. In return, the German immigrants supplied the Comanches with domestic crops and manufactured supplies. We had no trouble purchasing a muleload of black powder, lead, bullet molds, and a pair of rifles.
Next, I left my Comanche helpers in a supply camp just upstream of the so-called Marble Falls on the Colorado River. The falls were of limestone, not marble, but misnomers were common on the frontier. From the supply camp, I rode alone to Austin, the capital of the Confederate State of Texas. Suspicions here were much more intense than in the remote village of Fredericksburg. Still, claiming to be a buffalo hunter and a trapper, I managed to purchase a muleload of supplies. When asked why I wasn’t attached to some Confederate unit, I claimed that I had already served with the volunteers at the battle of Valverde, and had been mustered out. This was true, even though the volunteers I served with were Union.
From Austin, it was on to Salado. I moved very quickly from town to town, keeping my Comanche helpers out of sight in camps to the west. This business of supplying guns and ammunition to Comanches and Kiowas was highly illegal and could have gotten me hanged—probably by a lynch mob—had I been discovered. Therefore, I made my supply sweep across the settlements hastily, lest news of my last purchase should reach the next town before my arrival. As long as I got back into Comancheria before anyone realized I had made multiple purchases of ammunition and guns, I figured I could get away with my crimes against Texas.
I was the first of a new breed of Comanchero. Allow me to explain what I mean by that. The original Comancheros came out of New Mexico in the 1700s, rode eastward into Comancheria and traded Spanish goods to the Comanches in exchange for hides, meat, and slaves captured from other tribes. In those days, the Spaniards considered the Comanches an unconquerable enemy nation of savage heathens. The Comancheros held the respect of the Spanish people for their bravery and ability to function beyond the Comanche frontier. They were flamboyant plains traders who captured the imagination of every adventurous boy and every dark-eyed señorita.
By the time of the War Between the States, however, the word “Comanchero” had taken on a sinister ring to Americans. The Anglos of that time did not consider Comancheria unconquerable. By unspoken policy of the American mind, the Comanches were an enemy who would eventually be removed from the land. The Comanchero, therefore, was a traitor and a criminal. This new breed of Comanchero was what I had become. Hell, I think I invented it, to tell you the truth. But I did not consider my actions wrong. The land simply belonged to the Comanches, paid for in blood. They should have been left alone to live in it as they saw fit.
But history teaches that all the should-have-beens in the world cannot prevent a civilization from being overrun by an aggressive, numerically superior, more technologically advanced nation. The Comanches had overrun the Apaches and Tonkawas a hundred fifty years before, and now they were being overrun themselves. It’s easier to see all that now, many years later. At the time, however, all I felt in my heart was the “now” of the situation. The Comanches were good people—no less perfect than any other civilization. They had won this land, and served it well as stewards. They deserved to hold it, and I was on their side, no matter how hopeless their cause.
You ask: Good people? What about the atrocities? Yes, some warriors participated in horrors of mutilation and torture. Rape was ceremonial, and believed to make the enemy woman good with Comanche seed. But these acts of terror occurred less commonly than you might think, for the history of the Comanche wars was written by whites—wartime propaganda. And the atrocities were most often in response to some white outrage. Women and children massac
red, whole villages intentionally infected with smallpox and other virulent diseases, warriors ambushed and slaughtered under white flags of truce.
I feel no shame in admitting my loyalty to the Comanches. Their way was as good as any other civilization’s. Better in many respects.
Anyway, after making a small purchase of supplies at Salado, I moved on to Gatesville, Waco, Meridian, and Fort Worth. Some of these towns boasted a precarious telegraph service by this time, fed by gossamer wires tacked to trees more often than actual poles. So, to distract attention from my stockpiling of powder and lead, and to keep the news of my shopping spree from spreading, I had the Comanche boys who rode with me cut the telegraph lines outside of each town the night before I was scheduled to make my next purchase.
I had to explain to the young warriors how the talking wire carried the white man’s messages by magical means. They didn’t want to believe me at first, but I convinced them finally and they agreed that the wire should be cut to aggravate the whites. To cut the wire, a couple of them would find a secluded spot along the line a good safe distance out of town. A warrior would stand on the back of a well-trained pony with a pair of nippers—supplied by me, of course—whereupon he would reach high and cut the wire.
In some places, however, the wire was too high to reach even standing on the back of a horse, so one warrior would throw his lariat over the wire, then feed the tail end of the rope through the honda to make a loop around the wire. By tying the end of his lariat to the tail of his horse, the warrior could pull the telegraph wire downward and sideways, low enough so that his partner could cut it. Simply cutting the wire would never suffice, however. A lengthy section had to be taken out of it and hidden to keep it from being too quickly repaired.
From stories I gathered later, these assaults on the telegraph wires were blamed on everyone from Union spies to cattle rustlers. No one ever dreamed that the Indians understood the significance of the early telegraph lines, so they were not even considered as the culprits. I had the Comanche boys use shod horses borrowed from nearby ranches to make the tracks along the telegraph lines look like those of white men. The boys would return the horses before dawn, so the ranchers would not come looking for stolen stock and discover our mobile supply camp. It wasn’t easy for me to convince a young Comanche to return a fine horse he had stolen, but Loud Shouter and Fears-the-Ground helped me maintain discipline in this matter, and the element of danger in taking and returning the mounts began to appeal to the boys.
I also ordered my men to build their fires like a white man would. Indians put one end of a stick or log in a fire so that it burns off and can then be pushed in to burn more. White men typically lay the middle of a stick over the fire so that both ends must then be pushed in, which is only half as efficient as the Indian method. Frontiersmen knew the difference and could tell by the remnants of a burned-out fire which method had been used, so I had my Indians use the white man’s method in order to take the onus for our shenanigans off the Indians.
In spite of all my precautions, I ran into some serious trouble outside of Jacksboro. Since the beginning of the Civil War, the Comanches had raided Jacksboro so often that the population had plummeted from about 1,600 to fewer than 700 souls. Since most the able-bodied fighting men were away at war, the town had been left vulnerable. This only seemed to serve Jacksboro right. Before the war, a local newspaper called The Whiteman had devoted itself to printing the policies of Indian removal from the surrounding area, and regularly published rabid editorials attacking the Indians. Now the red men were the ones removing the whites. The surviving settlers there had become quite vigilant in the face of frequent raids.
Because of all this, I made a rather small purchase of ammunition, along with an Enfield rifle, some camp supplies, and a farrier’s file. It was the latter that excited the local gossip after I left, for it was known that Indians often converted files to lance blades by firing them red-hot, beating their edges thin, and honing them to razor sharpness. After I left town, a half-dozen citizens, perhaps better described as vigilantes, tracked me down and overtook me. I could have quit my pack mule and fled on Tu Hud, one of the fine ponies that Kills Something had given me, but I risked talking my way out of the situation, so that I could save the supplies on the mule.
After the men from Jacksboro surrounded me, their leader said, “We’d like a word with you, sir.” He was older than the others, with gray beard stubble on his face. Like the rest, he seemed to come from rough stock. They all wore drab work clothes and rode well-worn saddles. I could not help noticing that a couple of them carried lariat ropes.
“What’s this about?” I replied, affecting a Southern drawl.
“What is your name?”
“John Palmer.” Yet another alias.
“And your business?”
“I’m a hunter and a trapper.”
“What about that file you purchased in town?”
I shrugged. “I like to keep my pony’s feet in good shape.” One of the men rode around my outfit, apparently looking for brands on my horse and mule.
“Where are you from, Mr. Palmer?”
“From South Carolina, originally, but I’ve been driftin’ west since I was a kid.”
Another man spoke up: “Are you kin to Elijah Palmer over to Denton?”
I shook my head. “I ain’t kin to nobody, sir. I’m the bastard son of a barmaid. That’s why I come to the frontier.”
The leader of the band raised his chin at me. “A man favoring your description purchased some powder and lead and a steel hatchet and some other things in Fort Worth recently. We know this is true from a reputable source.”
“Wasn’t me,” I said. “I ain’t been to Fort Worth.” The worry was sinking to the pit of my stomach, but I held on to my lying skills and refused to blink.
“Sounded like your description.”
“Well, I guess I ain’t the only ugly bastard in Texas buying powder and lead. I got all I need here on this mule.”
“Why would a man need a whole muleload of powder and lead?”
“I aim to go out among the buffalo with a hunting party of Indians.”
Just the word “Indians” made eyebrows rise. “Which Indians?” the leader demanded.
“Some Kickapoos up in the territory. Got to have enough powder and lead to take some hides and defend ourselves from them goddamn scalpin’ Comanches out there on the buffalo range.” The men now had me completely surrounded, and I was ready to draw a knife or a pistol and go down fighting rather than be lynched.
“How old are you, Mr. Palmer?” the vigilante leader asked. It may have been an absentminded gesture, but he fingered the coil of a lariat tied to his saddle as he said this.
“Thirty-eight, near as I can figure.”
“An able-bodied man like you ought to be serving in the war.”
“I served in Sibley’s brigade. I fought at Valverde and was captured at Glorieta Pass.”
They asked me a lot of questions about the campaign, all of which I managed to answer convincingly, for I had seen much of it with my own eyes.
“What happened to you after you was captured?” one of the men demanded.
“The Yankees gave me amnesty so long as I swore not to rejoin my unit.”
“No shame in breaking a promise to a Yankee, now, is there?”
“I’m loyal to Texas,” I said.
“Sounds like you’re loyal to yourself more than anything.”
I could feel the tension still building among these men, and I detected a murderous blaze burning ever brighter in their eyes. It was a look I had seen before in the eyes of cowardly bullies who had convinced themselves that they had the right to murder anyone who disagreed with their beliefs. I knew I had to break that gang mentality, so I addressed the leader of the bunch. “May I have a word with you privately, sir?”
This surprised the head man, but intrigued him, as well. He liked being singled out as the leader of the gang of thugs. After thinkin
g a few seconds, he said, “Boys, wait for me in the shade yonder. Not too far off, now.” The other men groused, but did as they were told. When they had pulled away, their captain said, “Don’t try anything funny.”
“Of course not. I simply need to confide in you. What I’m about to tell you cannot be repeated. Not even to your men.”
The man squinted. “All right.”
“I’m operating under direct orders from President Jefferson Davis himself. I was recruited because of my knowledge of the frontier and the Indians. I’ve worked as an Indian trader for twenty years.”
“What kind of orders do you have from Jeff Davis?” he said, rather incredulously.
“I’m to organize a battalion of civilized Indians—Kickapoos, Shawnees, Cherokees, and Choctaws—and harass the Union troops in New Mexico and Colorado.”
“Let me see those orders,” he said.
“They don’t issue written orders for this kind of campaign, sir. But they did supply me with some of this.” I reached toward my saddlebag.
“Easy,” he said.
I moved slowly and produced a bundle of gold U.S. coins tied up in a rag. I handed it to the vigilante leader, keeping it low, so the others could not see it. “Untie that and have a look.”
He did so, revealing ten twenty-dollar gold pieces. “What’s this?”
“A reward for your loyalty to the Confederacy. Drop the coins into your boot top and hand the rag back to me, down low so your boys can’t see it. You can tell them you checked my orders and handed them back to me. Don’t ride back to town too fast, or your boot may jingle.” I smiled.
He grinned back at me with one side of his mouth and began letting the coins fall into his boot top where he had tucked his trousers inside the leather. He handed the white rag back to me, as if to return my papers, and I replaced it in my saddlebag.
“In case you’re wondering,” I said, “that’s the last of my money. If I had more, I’d give it to you. I won’t need money where I’m going now.”