by P. J. Keogh
Scanlon, halting the roan, looked down. “I told him not to be a fool.”
“What should we do with him?” Fisher, too, was looking at the youth’s remains.
“Leave him.” Scanlon breathed deeply. “There are enough damn peones on this place to dig a hole, and toss his corpse into it.”
He reined the mare. Fisher walked his mount around Pedro’s body, and followed.
From a hill overlooking the trail, old Manuel watched. He shook his head. The young one, Pedro, born to be exaltado y loco, was now where the hot-headed, crazy ones go. Que sera sera.
The old man turned his horse. Sanchez was dead. Whatever scheme he had planned would be buried alongside him. Manuel had known that latter for a fact when the Sun came up, and he saw the troopers ride into the valley. He pointed his wiry gelding east. Roped behind was a pack-mule. It carried Manuel’s stock-in-trade.
While ever there were Comanches wearing paint, there would be business to be done by comancheros.
Chapter 30
The trail that Scanlon and Fisher took from hacienda Sanchez led through Mora town.
A stocky man of late middle-years stood on the sidewalk outside the post-office building there. He had a pugnacious, officious look.
Caleb Whitehorn had seen the pair ride by, that morning, with Carson, Hickock and the troops, and had wondered what was afoot. Now he knew. News travels fast in a small place. Already, word was out, of happenings at the hacienda on the hill, and Whitehorn was in a frame of mind to offer congratulation. “Good work, Men,” he called out, “if what I hear is true.”
“And what might that be?” Scanlon drew the roan to a halt. His voice weighed heavy with disgusted resignation. Fisher knew the major better than most. Hearing danger in the tall man’s tone, he tensed.
It could have been that thirty years of army storekeeping had blunted Whitehorn’s hearing. Perhaps he just was not a sensitive man. Whichever, what Lije heard passed the old colonel by, and he grinned, showing crooked teeth. “They tell me the high-falutin’ Dago on the hill up there has got what he’s been askin’ for, all these years. I believe that you men had a part to play. I wanted to say, well done is all. It’s past time these Spic bastards were shown who’s boss.”
Fisher saw the silent rage flare in Scanlon’s eyes, and knew that this crooked-toothed blusterer might well die, where he stood. The buffalo soldier yanked his gelding’s head around, urging the horse ahead of the roan mare, putting himself and his mount between Scanlon and the loud-mouthed one.
“Go easy, Major,” he warned “The bastard don’t rate the price of a ball.”
A hostile quiet had fallen upon the street. Most of Mora’s citizens were Mexican. Few had the time of day for Whitehorn. Many would have been happy to see him shot down, and done with.
Scanlon saw all this, and knew that he could kill the man, and ride out free and clear. None here would bear witness against him in a Gringo court of law.
He relaxed. What Fisher said rang true. “It’s alright, Lije,” the major said. “He ain’t worth the effort. It ain’t worth the effort.”
Whitehorn, thick-hide though he may have worn, had sensed the hatred rising from the street, and dismissed it as no more than Greaser cussedness. Then he saw the tall rider’s anger, and knew a fear like none he had experienced in all his years of life. Seeing Scanlon’s tension ease, he felt his fear subside. But a change was working in him. A sudden loneliness replaced the fear, and swept away the bluster. At that moment he was solitary, isolated like a trooper cut off by the enemy. Abruptly he turned toward his office door, seeking refuge behind it.
There was a cantina across the street from the post-office. Scanlon walked his mare to the hitching rack that stood outside the place. “I need a drink,” he said.
Fisher, never prone to contradict a statement of that kind, dismounted to follow Scanlon inside to where the liquor was.
“Tequila,” the major ordered at the bar. “Una botella y dos vasos”
They took their liquor to a corner table, and drank in silence for a while. Then Fisher asked, “What now, Major?”
Scanlon grunted. “Been asking myself that question. I guess, I’d figured to make good my promise to Carson, then head south, settle with Armandez, and get on with fighting the French. Events got ahead of me. Now I don’t know.”
“You can still head south. Go see your compadre, Juarez. Be a general in the Mexican Army.”
“I guess I can, at that.” Scanlon chuckled bleakly at the thought. “And what about you?”
Fisher sucked in his cheeks. “I figure I can go and be a top-sergeant in the U.S. Army. That’s TOP-sergeant, mind.” His lip curled slightly as he emphasised the rank.
“You’d go back?” Scanlon was surprised. In light of Fisher’s account of the treatment black troops had to stand for in the army, he would have reckoned Lije to be happy being out.
“That was the deal you struck with Carson,” Lije reminded him. “Pull this off, I get full reinstatement of rank.”
“Or an honorable discharge.”
“Yeah. With full back-pay either way.” Fisher was pensive. “That would be kinda temptin’. But I’ve been thinkin’ on it some. I calculate the army needs us buffalo soldiers. And since it was the army freed our people, we owe it sump’n in return. Just as important, for all the lousy hand we’ve been dealt, us buffalo soldiers need the army even more than it needs us. Those things bein’ so, some fool bastard’s got to be top-kick in the 9th. I guess it might as well be me.”
Scanlon considered Fisher’s words. Lije’s race had drawn the low cards up to now. But, if nothing else, the buffalo soldier had a race.
Recalling all that had been said and done in weeks past, the Irish-Mexican found himself envying the Black. “Well, First-Sergeant Fisher, at least, no-one would doubt where you stand.”
He lifted his vaso in a kind of toast. “I wish you luck. And don’t blow your back-pay in one go.”
They emptied the bottle, and left the cantina. Climbing aboard their horses, they rode out of Mora.
Author’s Note
LOST LANDS is a work of fiction. However, it has a sound historical basis. What are now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah and parts of Colorado and Wyoming were claimed by the Spanish Empire, and then formed parts of independent Mexico.
In 1836, Texas, with its, by then dominant, English-speaking population, revolted and broke away. Its annexation by the US, nine years later, was a major factor in the outbreak of the war between the US and Mexico, which resulted in more than half of Mexico’s area’s being ceded to the US.
Many Americans, including Illinois Congressman Abraham Lincoln, opposed the Mexican venture as an abuse of presidential power, or as a war to expand slave soil.
Ulysses S. Grant, though he had fought with distinction in that war, harbored to the end of his life, strong reservations about its rightness. It was, in part, Grant’s sense of indebtedness to Mexico that caused him to apply the military pressure that hastened the French evacuation of the country in 1867.
Resentment festered, and festers still, among Spanish-speakers, because of the 1846/48 war and the resultant loss of land. Over the years, various plots have been hatched to restore ‘las Tierra’s Perdidas’ to Mexico, though none have succeeded. Sanchez’s COULD have been one such.
MAXIMILIAN’S WAR came about when continental European powers, taking advantage of America’s War of Secession, defied the constraints of the Munro Doctrine, and sought to restore Bourbon rule to the New World. Maximilian, a minor Austrian princeling, was declared Emperor of Mexico, and with European military aid—chiefly French—set out to make good his claim. Though supported by many of the ‘rico’ class of Mexico, he was opposed by the masses led by Mestizo lawyer, Benito Juarez, Mexico’s rightful Presidente.
In 1866, under pressure from a US government no longer in conflict with the southern states, and with a European war with Prussia looming, the French withdrew their army.
His forces defeated, Maximilian was executed by firing-squad at Santiago de Queretero in the Summer of 1867.
THE ‘BLACK DECREE’ was an infamous order to execute anyone guilty of resistance to Maximilian’s rule.
THE COMANCHEROS—ones who deal with the Comanche—did, for many years, ride out of New Mexico to trade with the southern plains tribes for the spoils of raids along the Texas frontier. Needless to say, they were hated by Texans, and their memory remains so to this day.
THE LLANO ESTACADO, true to Scanlon’s unspoken prophecy, became rich cattle country. In 1874, US General Ranald McKenzie crushed the Southern Plains Alliance at the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon. Later, Stockman Charles Goodnight moved beef into the canyon, establishing his JA ranch there. Others followed, including the Farwell brothers of Chicago, whose XIT ranch covered more than 3,000,000 acres.
THE NEW MEXICO VOLUNTEERS were formed under Union Army Colonel E.R.S Canby in 1861, in order to combat the expected Confederate thrust west from Texas. Their campaign against the southern forces proved of short duration.
Following the Confederate withdrawal, the New Mexico troops, and General James Carleton’s California Volunteers, who had come east to join them, became an Indian-fighting force active against Apache and Navajo bands in the South-West.
LA GLORIETA PASS, New Mexico, was the sight of a small-scale but vital civil-war battle, the outcome of which put paid to Confederate plans to take control of the western mineral-fields. Preacher-turned soldier John M. Chivington, later vilified for his part in the massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek, was instrumental in the Union victory.
His Colorado Volunteers were guided in their flanking movement by one Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Chavez, New Mexico Volunteers.
THE BUFFALO SOLDIERS were the troopers and non-coms of the 9th and 10th Regiments, US Cavalry, white-officered Negro formations raised in 1866 for frontier service. They were given their epithet by the Indians because of their frizzy hair, which resembled that to be found between a buffalo’s horns. Despite suffering prejudice and numerous examples of unjust treatment by those in the army who resented them, they proved to be among the finest fighting units to serve in the west, being—inter alia—instrumental in the conquest of the Llano. Many famous soldiers learned their business as officers of the Negro units. General John Pershing, commander of US forces in Europe during the Great War, won his nickname, ‘Black Jack,’ as a result of his service with the buffalo-troops.
THE YANKEE RADICALS—some inspired by hatred of Negro slavery, others by sheer malice—constituted a thorn in Abraham Lincoln’s side throughout the Civil War period, due to their belief that he was too forgiving of the ‘erring sisters’ of the South. Resistance to Lincoln’s intention to ‘bind up the nation’s wounds’ was high. Indeed, some conspiracy theorists have argued that members of this ‘Jacobin’ faction conspired with John Wilkes Booth in Lincoln’s assassination.
GENERAL WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN, aware that the run-down post-war army’s resources were stretched by Indian conflict, did argue at one point that settlement of the South-West had been premature, that the forts there be abandoned and that such settlers who remained be left to defend themselves. The writer has, however, employed licence here, since this recommendation was made later than 1867, the year in which the story is set.
CHRISTOPHER ‘KIT’ CARSON, a legendary figure, is widely remembered as a mountain-man, hunter and scout. What is not so well recognised is his record as an officer in the Union forces of the Civil War period and later. As a brevet brigadier-general, he commanded the garrison at Fort Garland, Colorado, from 1865 to shortly before his death in 1868. He died from the long-term consequences of a riding accident.
JAMES BUTLER ‘WILD BILL’ HICKOK is another whom folklore sells short. Though he was, indeed, a fast-shooting gambler and trail-town tamer, who died in squalid circumstances, there was more to Hickock than that. As a Civil War officer, he served the Union with distinction in Missouri, Kansas and the Indian Territory. Later, he became a highly-regarded military scout and US Marshal. Credited with a hundred killings, most held to be justified by the standards of his day, he was murdered by Jack McCall in the gold-rush town of Deadwood, Dakota Territory during the summer of 1876.
RICHENS ‘UNCLE DICK’ WOOTTON trapped beaver in the streams of the southern Rockies when the fur-trade thrived. Later, like many others of his calling, he scouted for the army and guided wagon-trains west. In the 1860s, he fashioned a road of sorts across the summit of Raton Pass, charging the legendary Charlie Goodnight and other north-bound drovers for its use.
THE SPANISH-IRISH are a hybrid-race more numerous and significant than may be widely recognised. Close relations—based upon trade, a mutual religion and common historical enmity toward England—for long existed between these two nations. Irish seamen settled in Spanish ports, Spanish seamen in Irish. Intermarriage was commonplace. Irish mercenaries served the Spanish Kings. Many soldiers and sailors of Spain’s Armada were wrecked along the Irish coast from Donegal to Kerry. Settling there, they added a distinctive strain to the Irish race—and to the writer’s ancestry.
This relationship, of course, translated to the New World. Indeed, Spain’s last Governor of Mexico, Juan O’Donaju, was a man of Irish forebears.
PEONAGE, sometimes called ‘slavery by another name,’ peonage was a system of servitude, not dissimilar to the serfdom of medieval times. Widely practiced in Spain and its empire, it survived in Mexico for many years. The U.S. Congress outlawed the practice in 1867.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
P.J. Keogh
Born in Leeds, England, of Irish stock, P.J. Keogh has enjoyed a varied existence. Educated by Jesuit priests, then at Leeds Polytechnic, Leeds University, and the University of Aston-in-Birmingham, he has been a lecturer and a laborer, an entrepreneur and a trucker, a part-time soldier of the Queen, and—briefly—her guest.
He has worked and travelled all over Europe, the U.S.A., and Canada.
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