Donaho’s in Santa Fe would be the first stop. He had put the word out that he would pay for any white captives ransomed from the tribes. Maybe there would be enough money to buy a wagon as well as more trade goods. Then José would head out again, zigzagging through the wild, barren Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains, and across the prairie in search of the Comanche. Tonight he’d talk to Sun Name about arranging a regular meeting place. It would save time and trouble. At twenty-two, José had ideas that were new to the Comanchero trade.
Like most of the Comancheros, José Picdad Tafoya was part Pueblo Indian. His Indian mother had named him Piedad. Pity. Compassion. The irony of the name never occurred to José. It was just another part of him, like the coarse black hair and the piercing dark eyes in his gaunt face. Already his skin was toughened and beginning to crack from the hundreds of blast-furnace days he had spent scrabbling with the crude, heavy hoe, spreading the moisture evenly from the irrigation ditches into the stony ground before it evaporated.
He had decided early that the life of a New Mexico farmer wasn’t for him. Even if he could grow something, the bureaucrats of the south, from their offices and mansions in Mexico City, would strangle him. All they knew, those men, were regulations and tariffs and monopolies. Why be a poor honest man in a world of rich, dishonest ones?
So here he was, bantering with Sun Name, civil chief of the Yamparika Comanches. Sun Name wasn’t much older than José, but he had the dignity of command and the respect of thousands of people. Indians maybe, but it still counted for something. José could never hope to attain that kind of position. He would have to make do with money instead. And he intended to make a lot of it. It was the only thing that mattered to him. Ransoming this woman would be a good start.
If they could get Terrible Snows drunk they might be able to pass off that goose-rumped, knee-sprung paint they’d found on the Staked Plains. Terrible Snows looked like the type to take to whiskey, if he could be pried away from Sun Name long enough to make the introduction. He must be desperate for horses to ask for them in payment. Usually the Comanche used them for currency. But Terrible Snows didn’t look prosperous. Not even by Comanche standards.
The next problem would be to get the woman back to Santa Fe alive and unraped. Donaho had some crazy religious reason for ransoming captives. It wasn’t a profit-making enterprise for him. Gringos were funny. They’d pay good money for a woman who’d been used by the entire Comanche tribe, but take offense if the loveless traders got a little use from her too. There was no understanding gringos. The Indians were much easier to get along with.
From a distance the city of Santa Fe looked like a feature of the landscape, a geologic formation raised from the surrounding clay. José and his partner, his merchandise and burros moved down onto the open plain, a plaid mantle of corn and wheat fields and irrigation ditches laid out around the city.
Santa Fe from closer up looked like a gathering of beached Ohio flatboats. A prairie-dog town, traders called it. A town of low mud houses on streets that were little more than trampled footpaths between scattered farm settlements. It was the capital city of a Mexican province and the home of three thousand people. To the west soared a snowy mountain, waterfalls cascading down its sides. The water rushed to join the clear stream that flowed through Santa Fe, but the stream wasn’t as clear when it slunk out the other side.
It was twilight when Rachel, exhausted, aching, and coated with dust, rode into the main plaza behind José and Chino. Her moccasins had shredded on the stones of the mountain trails, and she was wearing a pair of Mexican straw sandals. Grateful not to be walking, she perched on the haunches of the little burro. And he in turn was probably grateful to have her light, accommodating weight rather than the heavy, awkward packs. Most of the ugly sores on his back were beginning to heal.
The group ambled past the governor’s palace. It was a sprawling, one-story, four-hundred-foot-long mud hut. The crude portico was held up by roughly hewn tree trunks, and the doors were so low the tall Missouri traders had to stoop to enter. There were few traders in town now though. Most of them had headed back toward Independence. Their huge caravans of covered wagons wouldn’t be pulling in, along with the rains, until July or August. Around the plaza, the stores they rented for the summer and fall were shuttered and bare.
In the traders’ absence, Santa Fe seemed almost asleep. The Indians and farmers, the merchants and housewives, their faces shrouded in seven-foot shawls, looked like sleepwalkers. It seemed as though time had slowed here. It was an easygoing city of rounded edges, flat, weed-grown roofs, and crumbling clay walls.
Rachel stared around her and clutched her only possession more tightly. José had given her a comb, a dirty, broken-toothed horn comb, that he’d found in the bottom of the pack. She had had to use a knife as much as a comb, but her hair was fairly untangled. José had watched her carefully as she used the knife. She wasn’t right in the head, and he didn’t want to lose her after going to so much trouble. Luckily, he had traded off the last of the mirrors, and Rachel couldn’t see the pink scar tissue of her nose. She was spared the sight of dirt caked on her face, collecting in the wrinkles and accentuating them, and the spikes of chopped hair sticking out all over her head. Perhaps in her state of mind she wouldn’t have recognized herself anyway.
From the military chapel across from the palace, a huge, brass bell began its solemn evening tolling. All movement ceased except for the clicking of rosary beads and the murmur of lips as everyone whispered their evening prayers. José and Chino weren’t religious, but they stopped too, and bowed their heads. One can disregard law, but not custom. Jangling smaller bells interrupted the tolling, and the slow parade of strollers started up again.
José led the caravan around the fires that were being lit in the big square. Far into the night, men would stand around them, warming the seats of their baggy, white cotton pants and talking. In front of the palace a white-haired porter with long, drooping mustaches lit the torches that flared on poles jutting from the walls. The flames sent great gushes of greasy black smoke spiraling into the darkening sky. From a bar somewhere down a winding alley drifted the music of a guitar, rising and falling.
Nodding and speaking to everyone he met, José made a slow progress through the crooked streets. Through it all, Rachel sat patiently on her burro. Her mouth twitched in a flitting smile, tickled by hidden little thoughts, like insects crawling in one’s clothes. It was dark when they finally drew up in front of a long, low fortress with walls three feet thick. The rafter beams stuck out under the roofline, looking almost like cannons in the dim light. The two windows were narrow and barred and set far back in the adobe. The big door was also recessed and made of heavy planks several feet wide and eight inches thick. When José pounded on it with his bone-handled quirt, it opened slowly, creaking on its wooden hinges.
“Who is it, La Paz?” A woman’s voice, speaking English, echoed through the hall behind the servant as he stood blocking the door. Tears welled up in Rachel’s eyes. When the door opened far enough to admit Mrs. Donaho’s round face, Rachel could hardly speak. For a few moments she was totally sane again. Her words had to force their way through the tightness of her throat. They came out in a harsh, strangled whisper, the English sounding strange in her own ears.
“Please, for the love of God, help me.”
The Donahos dispatched a message to Independence with a trader who was headed there. From there the message was to be sent on to Rachel’s husband in Texas with whomever was going that way. And there would certainly be people going. Independence was a funnel, a spillway of humanity, sending settlers and trappers westward.
Santa Fe wasn’t safe. Two plagues stalked its streets, typhoid and revolution. The first punched holes in its victims’ intestines, invaded their arteries and rotted the marrow of their bones. It left them to die in their own vomited blood. The Pueblos were responsible for the revolution. Every hundred years or so they were pushed too far by the authorities and ro
se up against their masters, leaving corpses as fodder for the rooting hogs.
Violence lurked among the baskets of fruit and vegetables in the market and blew around the comers of the buildings. And so the Donahos only ventured out when necessary. They decided to risk the uncertainties of the Santa Fe trail rather than stay where they were. As soon as Rachel was well enough to travel, they hitched up their own small caravan, left their adobe fortress in the care of La Paz, and began the eight-hundred-mile trek to their small frame house in Independence.
It took the Donahos six weeks to make the journey. When Comanche stopped them and demanded the customary tribute, Rachel cowered, hysterical, among the barrels and boxes under the wagon’s cover. Mrs. Donaho crouched next to her, her plump arms encircling her, and murmured while her husband handed over the goods he had brought along for just such a possibility. Mrs. Donaho chattered cheerfully for eight hundred miles, up mountains and down, across boiling rivers and baking deserts. She gossiped through torrential rains and mud that mired the wheels and collected into heavy and heavier weights on the soles of their shoes.
Starved for a woman’s ear and understanding, she talked to Rachel while they leaned into the wind, their voluminous skirts billowing out behind them. She was still talking as their wagons wound through the mud and noise and turmoil of Independence, Missouri. She was the first to spot the sagging roof on their cabin.
“Looks like the porch could stand some repair, Mr. Donaho. Like as not some riffraff has been camping on it all summer and fall. There’s probably someone keeping house in the necessary out back.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. Housing’s short here,” Donaho answered.
“So are necessaries. This place smells worse every time we come back.” Mrs. Donaho began setting her hair to rights, chasing stray gray wisps and herding them back into her bun. “Looks like we have company.”
He was waiting for them, sitting on the corner of the low porch, his legs hanging over the edge. The message had been delivered to Rachel’s family.
“Mr. Plummer, we’re glad you’re here.” Mr. Donaho held out his hand. L. D. Nixon’s face became even pinker than usual as he took the hand gingerly.
“My name is Nixon. Lawrence Nixon. I’m Rachel’s brother-in-law. I live in Independence now.”
“And where is Mr. Plummer?” called Mrs. Donaho from the wagon. “Did anyone deliver the message to him that we were coming?”
“Yes, ma’m. The Parkers are beholden to you for ransoming Rachel.” L. D. cleared his throat and looked up at his sister-in-law, sitting in the wagon. She spoke so low they could barely hear her.
“Have they found little Jamie, L. D.?”
“No. There’s been no word. Your father has been searching, though. We hoped you’d know something, Rachel. Your aunt Elizabeth was ransomed a year and a half ago.
“Where’s Luther? Is he alive?”
“We’re all glad to Have you back.” L. D. helped her down from the wagon and held her at arm’s length, trying to keep the pain out of his face.
“Where is he?” Her hands fluttered like birds, but her face was still, except for a small tic in the corner of her right eye.
“He’s alive. But he couldn’t come.”
“But I’m his wife, L. D.”
She would have to be told, but he couldn’t do it now. He avoided her eyes.
“Rachel, the past two years have been hard on him. Losing you and little James Pratt, and not knowing…”
“The past two years have been hard on him.” Rachel started to laugh, tumbling into hysteria. L. D. shook her to make her stop. The light went out of her eyes and wasn’t rekindled during the long trip home.
She crossed James and Martha Parker’s doorsill in east Texas on February 19, 1838. She never saw her son or her husband again, although Luther and his new wife, Angelina, lived in the next county. She died in her parents’ house at eighteen, exactly one year later.
CHAPTER 28
As time went on, Comanche raids on the settlements intensified. While President Sam Houston sent envoys to bribe the Indians with presents and honey talk, Texans were tortured and scalped, mutilated and murdered. Others would come home from plowing or hunting and find the smell of smoke and death, a pall over their homes. They found the mangled bodies of their families or an empty cabin and a bloody trail.
Some of them, like John Wolf, went mad. John found his wife naked and dead and almost slashed to ribbons. His two teenaged daughters were still alive, but they didn’t live long. They had been stripped and raped repeatedly, then nailed spread-eagled to the wall. Their breasts had been cut off before they were scalped. They died as their father was lowering them down.
John Wolf became a Comanche hunter. They called him Lone Wolf, and he roamed the frontier for years, ghosting in and out of Ranger camps. He made everyone nervous with his wild talk and his string of black scalps. But everyone fed him and in their hearts wished him well. Hollow-eyed and filthy, with gray hair and beard as matted as the tangled felt of a goat’s fleece, he dangled his strings of scalps like fish on a small boy’s line. Women’s scalps. Children’s. It didn’t matter to John. Just as long as they were Comanche.
And it didn’t matter to many of the Texans. They wanted the freedom to rid themselves of the Comanche forever. So they elected Mirabeau Buonoparte Lamar, the man who would give it to them. “Mark the boundary of the Republic with the sword,” he said. He was a poet, and not a man who looked the part of a warrior. But then, he didn’t have to lead the charges, just charge the expenses. He was willing to drive the country deeply into debt to rid Texas of the plague of Indians.
“Put honor before expense”, said President Lamar, and the Texas legislature voted a million dollars to buy Comanche blood. Two thousand men volunteered to join the army, newly formed to fight Indians.
“He wants us to do what, Sergeant?” Noah Smithwick didn’t mean to be insubordinate. He just wasn’t sure he heard the order correctly.
“The colonel says to dismount and prepare to attack.”
“Dismount?”
“Dismount, Smithwick. Dismount!” The sergeant rode along the line passing the word to the sixty volunteers. There was a jingling and a clanking, bridles, saddles, spurs, and weapons ringing the changes of war. Noah’s stomach cramped with hunger. The food had almost run out, and they were all on short rations. They were sharing out the last of the mule that had frozen to death on bivouack.
Some of the men were suffering from frostbite after the snowstorm had caught them. They had huddled in the rye bottoms of the Lampassas for two days, sleeping together to pool their bodies’ warmth. Now, from the sleeping Indian camp somewhere around the hill Noah could hear the faint sound of dogs barking, horses neighing, and roosters crowing. Stolen, no doubt, from a Texas farmstead. The comforting sounds taunted them as they shivered in the icy wind.
Above them, on a hill overlooking Old Owl’s scattered camp, Colonel Moore sat with Chief Castro of the Lipan Apache. His scouts had done well. The camp was still asleep, its people staying in bed longer this winter to conserve their scanty food and fuel supplies. The village spread along the clear San Saba River. Thin lines of gray smoke, like pencil strokes against the lavender sky, rose from the smoldering cooking fires. It was a tranquil scene, but Moore didn’t appreciate it.
Smug bastards. They haven’t even posted lookouts. We’ll teach them that they’re not safe anywhere. Colonel Moore turned his horse and rode down to join his men, dislodging pink granite rocks and pebbles as he went. Leaving his mount closely tethered with the others, he waved his men in behind him. The column started through the cedar brake and around the base of the hill toward the sleeping village.
Noah Smithwick passed through the thick growth of cedars that scraped along his leather pants and jacket. He had a strip of torn blanket wrapped around his neck and more strips stuffed into his moccasins. There was an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach, somewhere between last night’s dinner and this m
orning’s hurried meal. He had fought Indians before, but never this deep in their own territory and never in a village. His friend, Rufus Perry, walked alongside him. Old Rufe was seventeen, and he usually followed Noah when they patrolled together with the Rangers.
“You always look so calm, Noah. I’m as jittery as a bird in a butter churn.” Rufe spoke in a low voice that carried less than a whisper.
“Don’t be fooled, Rufe. I took too large a helping of fear with breakfast, and it isn’t sitting well with me.”
“I’d feel better on a horse.”
“I’d feel better back home in bed.”
“I know what you mean. It’s different, isn’t it? It’s so quiet down there. All of them asleep.”
“And no telling how many there are, nor any trees to hide behind. No, sir. Line ‘em up and let ‘em yell, out where I can see and hear them. Rufe, I don’t like this at all.”
Then the sergeant turned and made a chopping motion, and their talking ceased. The company’s single file became a rank as they lined up for the charge. Noah grinned over at Perry.
“Time to put all that fear to work.” He tensed his chest and shoulder muscles and crouched, ready to sprint toward the lodges, plainly visible now through the brush and scattered trees. The men broke into a trot and then into a full run. As they ran they screamed whatever occurred to them. “For Texas” was the most popular. Followed by “Remember the Alamo,” which had become an all-purpose phrase. But Noah had his own war cry. He bellowed it as he ran, the wind blowing his long red beard behind him. “Sheeeee-it!”
The Texans’ war cries and their rifle fire-woke Cub. His heart pounding, he sat up, disoriented from sleep. If this was an attack, where was the sound of galloping hooves? And that wasn’t an Indian war cry. His father had his breechclout and moccasins on and his weapons in his hands before Cub could even find his clothes. Cub’s hands trembled as he dressed. How humiliating it would be to die without his breechclout on. And it seemed to take forever to find his left moccasin.
Robson, Lucia St. Clair Page 32