A young woman named Gonkon came in and laid blankets on their laps and then brought wooden trenchers of tongue and tamales wrapped in shucks and sat these on their laps over the blankets. The tipi was the first he had ever seen with a liner inside. It was very comfortable. He ate and listened to the odd and pleasing sounds of a tonal language.
Kicking Bird and many others were going out in the spring to meet the Comancheros near the Alibates flint quarries and did not understand why they should not. It was a great fair, a festival on the open plains, and when the two-wheeled carts came from New Mexico there were horse races and gambling games and shooting at targets. The Comancheros sometimes tried to trade for one of the Mexican captives, tried to redeem them. They had to know the person’s name, however, and often it was too late, the captive had become Kiowa like us. The captive had forgotten his name, and it was too late.
Samuel listened attentively as Onofrio translated. He told them that it did not matter what the customs were. They were now under United States law under the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, and the United States had just fought a great war against slavery so that the taking of captives and selling them was not allowed. Raiding is not allowed because it is murder. I have said this many times. The soldiers have not bothered you before. But my heart has hardened. Where is the girl named Millie Durgan? She would be eight or nine years old now.
Kicking Bird shook his head. They did not know of any girl named Millie Durgan. Not alive. There had been a captive taken five years ago, but the girl died from some disease a long time ago. There were no white captives with the Kiowa.
“What about Elias Sheppard, thirteen years old, taken near the town of Blanco? Clinton and Jeff Smith, Adolph Korn, Alice Todd? The Lehmann boy, Temple Field? And many others.”
I will ask here and there. Perhaps some other bands have some captives.
Samuel was silent when he heard this translated. The silence lay between them like a delicate invisible structure that no one wanted to disturb. And finally Samuel said that he would withhold all rations until they were brought in, and if not, he had the soldiers at his orders.
They went on into the country around Rainy Mountain and then on to the Antelope Hills. From the crest of the hills Samuel saw a herd of mustangs in full flight across the undulating plain. They ran with nodding heads, and their thick wavy tails streamed behind them. They had trim legs and small hooves, crested necks and long flowing manes. They bore within themselves the Andalusian and Soraya blood from the horses who had escaped from the Spaniards centuries ago. He wondered what they were running from. There had to have been two hundred or more. Then he knew they were running because they wanted to, because the plains were open and level and they were made to run. The herd broke apart around a breakwater of standing stones and came together again and then they bolted through the belt of trees, the cottonwoods and willows. Through the bare limbs Samuel saw the stream of flashing tails and ribs and backs plush with winter hair. Then the wild horses splashed snorting into the Canadian River.
They rode through a herd of sedate buffalo with long winter pelts. The cows moved away with their half-grown calves and the bulls with their elderly beards turned slowly in a studied way with their eyes on the riders. Their fat split hooves ground circles in the snow as they turned to keep the travelers fixed in their line of sight. The next day with Onofrio’s help they found a Comanche village near the tall spires of limestone on the south bank of the Canadian. The tipis smoked like ovens from their conical tops.
Onofrio went ahead with one hand lifted and calling out in Comanche. Samuel and Beatty hung back. Samuel looked all about himself on the bare plains and thought what a miracle of endurance it was to live like this solely on God’s bounty, on whatever came to hand, in this sere country. To find their way across it from the Wichita Mountains up to Colorado and even on to Wyoming, and south to the Rio Grande. People of great courage and fortitude, born with an unsatisfied wanderlust so that their greatest joy was to break down the tipis and move on. They traveled alongside the rivers of the plains with their belts of trees and then crossed from one river to another and found things they had left behind in some other camp, or with delight they came upon a garden they had planted last year and was now bearing fruit. They did not live in the same world of time that Samuel did. There were no hours. No birthdays.
And he must bring this to an end. That was his job. That was why he was here.
The headman of the band was a man named Toshana. The man smiled and said, Ah, here is Keeps All the Stuff, come to visit us. He sent out the camp crier to call out that they had an honored visitor, for the men to come. He offered his pipe and so they went through the ritual of smoking and then ate. Toshana said they had no captives either. That if the agent wanted them to stop taking captives he should tell the army to come to them and they would settle it by force. But that was the only way it would ever be settled. He smiled as he said it.
“It is known everywhere that you have taibo captives,” said Samuel. His face was still. He felt as if there were a band around his throat, frustration and anger.
Yes, perhaps some Mexicans.
Then Eaten Alive came into the tipi with a five-or six-year-old child. The boy’s brown skin was broken with sores and lacerations, he was thin and shivering and dressed in a piece of bed-ticking that nearly enveloped him.
You see here, said Toshana. We just got him from the Apache, see how they treat them. If you want to take him with you, you can. I will not ask you to pay.
“Where did he come from?” Samuel held his hand out to the boy and felt an anguish in his heart at the sight of the child. The boy ducked his head and shrank away.
We don’t know. The Apaches didn’t say where he came from.
“I will contact the military in Santa Fe. Maybe they have a report of a missing child.”
Toshana was silent for a while, and then he said, But there are thousands.
Samuel nodded. Thousands. He gathered his thoughts and said that there were several white captives, at least four or five young boys and one who would be grown up now, perhaps eighteen, and several girls. They were United States citizens and could not be abandoned.
We are only Comanche here, said Toshana. Only Comanche.
Hears the Dawn spoke in a low assenting voice. He said that the people to the south were Texans anyway. They were not Americans. There were the Spanish in New Mexico, and the old people spoke of the French coming from far to the east and south, and then there were Americans north of the Red and Texans to the south. Beyond the Texans were the Mexicans. Isn’t that right?
Samuel turned to Onofrio and said, “Tell him that they are all white people and there are different nations among the white people. The Texans are now Americans.”
Onofrio spun a thin shred of bark between his fingers.
He said, “There is no name for white people. Nobody says ‘white.’ Only white people say ‘white people.’ In Comanche the name means something like ‘a captive.’ Taibo. In Kiowa they say ‘the hairy mouth people.’ Beards, you see. I think the Sioux say Wasichu but it does not mean white. And I have heard from others that the Chippewa and the Cree call you-all Long Knives. Kitche-mokoman.”
Samuel listened with his head to one side, watching the flames that burned sedately on a layer of flat sandstone. The Comanche men around him listened as well with great patience to a language they could not understand.
Toshana said, I am chief now that the Texans killed Peta Nocona. His wife was Nautdah, and they took her away. They said her name was Cynthia Ann Parker.
Samuel heard Siinti-on Parkar, but he knew who it was. She had starved herself to death in the house of her white relatives.
They took her captive and Peta Nocona’s child Topsannah and they both died in the house where they kept them. She was with us for twenty-five years. You take captives too and so it is hard to listen to what you have to say. She was my aunt, the girl my cousin, and now they are dead.
“That
’s different,” said Samuel. “We only took her back again.”
But you did not get back her brother. His taibo name was Chon Parkar, and they took him but he got away and came back to us, his people.
“I know.” Samuel nodded politely and made a conciliatory gesture. “Adults who have spent their lives with you will be able to make their choices. It is only fair. But they must be brought in so we can see they are not being held against their will.”
We are only Comanche here.
Samuel said, “Nonetheless, I have come to warn you. The Texans are now Americans. So are the people of New Mexico. They have all become Americans and they are under American law. This is the last time. You will stop raiding and you will bring in the captives. If not I will send the soldiers.”
Toshana laughed. But you are Gai-ker. You do not fight.
“You will see.”
Samuel stood up to leave. The fire had burned down and the woman named Gonkon came in with more firewood. Before he left he said that he knew there were at least four boys with the Comanche, and if they were not brought in he would have the headmen arrested and thrown in jail. In a jail with stone walls, and there would be manacles and chains.
Eaten Alive started to speak but then shut his lips around his words and sat and thought for a moment. He was very angry. He would come in for rations in a few weeks since it was a cold fall and the grass was poor. He expected to be given his live beef and his sugar and coffee. If he had a captive he would bring him. He said that he would raid when he pleased. That he knew the Indian agent had goods brought to the agency in wagons from Forta Wurt but he himself would not raid the wagons. That the wagons were driven by a man named Breet, and the only reason that man was still alive was because he was a good friend to a Comanche named Tissoyo but this kind of thing cannot last forever.
“Bring them in,” said Samuel. He took the wordless young Mexican captive and put a blanket around him. “Or you will go to prison. My heart has hardened.”
Chapter 32
BRITT ASKED ALL three men, Dennis and Paint and Vesey, to ride with him as guards and drivers to take a load of trade goods from Fort Worth up to Oklahoma to the agency. He asked Major Pinney for an escort from the Ninth, and so three black soldiers came as well. Britt took both wagons and asked four heavy horses of Elizabeth Fitzgerald so that he had six to a wagon. Elizabeth asked only five dollars for the teams’ use. He could carry nearly twenty tons with two wagons and six-horse teams. They would carry mostly metal goods. Angle irons, plow blades, and massive rolls of copper wire for messages of some kind that would come down these wires from Kansas to Oklahoma. They carried crates of the strange bulbous glass cups that were somehow supposed to help this process.
It was the last week of November of 1870 and cold. Better than the heat. Better for men and horses. They made it in five days from Fort Worth to the agency without trouble. They arrived at the burning rock oil and the spring near it in good time early in the evening. Britt was pleased. During the night Britt had two men standing guard for four hours each. He slept with the quiet, secret speech of the running spring water in his dreams. A spring in the desert plains. He awoke with a blanket wrapped around his head and his nose cold and his breath smoking in the thin winter air. He listened to the sound of Vesey and Dennis laughing and the horses grinding up corn from their feed box on a wagon tongue. He had dreamed he was sitting alone in the cabin at Elm Creek and that the Medicine Hat paint had come up to him out of the tangled winter grapevines and spoke to him. The paint wanted to tell him something, something urgent. What, what? said Britt in his dream. He sat up in his clothes and the shadow of the little ravine was chill, the lines of thin strata like bricks a strange puzzle.
One of the soldiers with them played something on the harmonica as Paint shifted the crisping bacon from one side of the skillet to the other.
“What’s that song?” said Britt.
“‘Annie Laurie,’ sir,” said the soldier.
“My wife wants to hear a harmonica,” said Britt. “It’s a new thing.”
“Yes sir, my cousin sent me this from Chicago. A Chicago company makes them.”
They came into the agency with a loud noise and much calling and shouting. Britt stood in the wagon seat with the reins of the front team in his hands and nodded as men came out from the sawpit and the stables and wagon sheds to meet him. He signed the receipt for the accountant. He unloaded at the agency warehouse.
Then they reset the load for Fort Sill; kerosene in barrels and the lamps themselves packed in straw, the sacks of rolled barley and corn for the cavalry horses and a church bell for the chaplain’s new small stone church. It was a heavy load. The cavalry was preparing to move, they said. Before long they were to take to the field and come to grips with the horse Indians of the plains.
Britt and his men and the two wagons passed by Cache Creek on the south bank. At one of the wide places, on the north side, the Kiowa were camped. They had the wide plains around them and the long galleria of the timber on Cache Creek to one side. They did not bother him because he and the men with him were well armed, although they came to watch him arrive and then pass by. The heavy wagons and twelve horses jangled and thudded across the dry earth and then went down the slope into the water. They stood in a long line drinking in the roiled water, and the men with him, Dennis and Paint as well as the three enlisted men from the Ninth, sat with their rifles in their hands. As Britt stood knee-deep in the water, checking harness, he saw a boy come down to the bank with a buffalo-stomach bucket. His feet in moccasins that patted the red dust lightly and the bucket swinging from one hand. Then the boy looked up and stopped. Although he had black hair, Britt saw that he was a white boy.
“Who are you?” said Britt.
The boy stared at him with narrow blue eyes. He stepped back a few paces into the brush.
“Do you know your name?” asked Britt.
“Chon,” the boy said. “I Chon Digasun.” The wind tore at his hair. The boy stood rigid with water slopping on his shins. “You leave me alone.”
“John Dickson,” said Britt. “I will come back. When I come back from Fort Sill, I will come by here and I’ll have money to exchange for you.”
“You leave me alone.”
The boy turned and ran back to the tipis. He left the bucket where it fell.
ONE BY ONE, captives were brought in. Samuel checked his lists. There was no word of little Alice Todd, the Whitlock boy still unaccounted for, the names Kuykendall and Massengill and Dickson, the two Smith boys, Herman Lehmann, written out clean and accusing. A distant band of Comanche brought in a boy with a thin, sensitive face, a wide mouth, and hooded eyes. He never looked at anyone from the moment he was brought in. He kept his head high and stiff and his eyes half closed and his gaze on the floorboards. He moved slowly and carefully. He seemed to be injured in some obscure way. His adopted father had bargained over his price, holding out for one more pound of coffee, another blanket. The Comanche had been traders for a century or more, and they were skilled at it. The boy listened with his beautiful eyes on the windowsill. Listened as he was sold by the man he had adored and whom he had imitated in everything. Followed across the hot plains, the man who had given him his Comanche name and approved of his aim with a rifle and his torture of a Mexican captive.
He stood up like an automaton and followed the Indian agent, expecting to be killed, and when he was not killed, he was flooded by a feeling of contempt. He was crushed into whiteman’s clothing and led to a building.
By late November there were four of them. All of them boys and angry and silent in the stone schoolhouse. Samuel was not sure who they were. He sat with each of them alone and tried to find out their names but they had trouble pronouncing the words. Kleenton, Haydoff, Tempah. The smallest one only knew his Comanche name, Toppish. The soldiers plunged them into tin bathtubs and took away their weapons and their buckskins and cut their hair and they all looked like thin unfinished wraiths with uneven hai
rcuts and mistrusting expressions. They refused to sleep in the schoolhouse and so Samuel had an army tent placed in the schoolyard and they settled in there; they slept on the bare dirt floor of the tent in the cold, in their new woolen clothes and their shoes beside their heads. They were afraid of the schoolhouse walls.
He asked for the names of their parents, but they had forgotten. He asked them to remember where they were from, but they had only vague images of a double-log cabin and a truck patch and sisters or mothers or fathers who were dead. Samuel guessed that one of them might be Clinton Smith, whose brother Jeff was still missing. Another was Adolph Korn, who spoke only Comanche and German. The third boy with the thin and sensitive face might be Temple Field who was taken in the Legion Valley massacre, but the last and smallest did not match any information he had. They were smaller than they had been described in the circulars, they appeared four or five years younger, as if the prairie sun and wind had shrunk them or held them in suspension from the time they had been captured. The schoolteacher showed them how to hold pencils in their hands, but Clinton seemed to think of the pencil as a weapon and held it like a knife until Beatty placed it in his fingers correctly and held his own hand over the boy’s callused hand and drew the point across a sheet of paper.
Temple watched with his half-closed eyes and whispered, “What for? What for?”
The Color of Lightning Page 30