Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873

by Terry C. Johnston

  Carter and the rest of Mackenzie’s troopers were again in enemy territory, this time stalking the elusive Comanche.

  The muscles along Carter’s spine ached from the pounding of the saddle on their endless march across a land hard-baked beneath a relentless sun. So he strained now, hunched over his journal, to capture many of the thoughts he had clambered to remember throughout the long day of following Mackenzie’s Tonkawa trackers who led the soldiers a little west of north, out of Fort Concho, on the trail of the Kwahadi warriors who had long scorned the white man and all his gifts and annuities, a band that proudly scorned signing the great treaty made at Medicine Lodge Creek four years before.

  The light was going, and still there was so much for him to get down, after brooding through much of the day on religion and God and the profession he had chosen for his life’s undertaking.

  It has been said in ecclesiastical circles that soldiers and sailors are neither atheists nor infidels but always cling fast to the hope of the immortality of the soul. Yet, by such close contact with nature, and sleeping perhaps for years under the canopy of heaven, they accept pretty largely the theory of the God of Nature and leave the mere theology of religion with all the various beliefs, creeds, etc., etc., to be taken care of by religious quacks and scientists who are lacking in their own service experience.

  Rubbing his eyes, Carter put the pencil away in a pocket of his tunic still damp from the day’s sweat, now cold against his skin with every insistent nudge of the breeze.

  Indeed, the army was the lieutenant’s religion. With God Almighty the Supreme Commander, the President and all the rest were only officers positioned in the chain of command.

  Born in Maine and later moved to Massachusetts with his family, Carter volunteered his service to Lincoln’s shaken Union as soon as he was old enough. For most of the war, he served with distinction in the 22nd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, an outfit possessed of a blood-soaked reputation by the time Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Young Carter celebrated the end of the “Great Rebellion” by informing his family he had chosen to make the military his life, and would be seeking an appointment to West Point.

  Following his graduation in June of 1870, Carter married his Massachusetts sweetheart in Boston. By November he and his young bride, Mary, had traveled halfway across the continent to report for duty with the Fourth U.S. Cavalry in the wilderness of west Texas—Fort Concho. The following February of ’71, the newly appointed colonel of the Fourth reported for duty at Concho: Colonel Ranald Slidell Mackenzie. A slight, morose man, Mackenzie had much in common with Carter—both ate little, slept even less, and neither cared much for cutting a dashing figure in uniform, as did a few of the gilt-braided and strutting peacocks of that same frontier Army of the West.

  Carter and Mackenzie were both true loners. Neither comfortable in the company of their wives, nor in the company of their fellow soldiers.

  He thought now a moment on Mary, and those early days back at Fort Concho before Mackenzie moved the regimental headquarters northeast to Fort Richardson, remembering how they both had laid in that canvas tent at night, listening not only to the howling, ever-present Texas wind and the yipping of nearby coyotes lurking close to the slaughter yard, but listening as well to the distant laughter and tin-plated plinking of out-of-tune piano keys across the river in the crude settlement of Saint Angela, that fleshpot so like many others just beyond the fringe of every military reservation on this frontier.

  Licking the drops of cold coffee from his thick mustache, Carter shoved a hand through his light-colored hair, listening to the musical snoring of some of the men already asleep in their blankets. Autumn was clearly here, this ninth day of October, and the nights grew cool all too quickly.

  Carter turned at the footsteps, recognizing by shape the form of his colonel, even before Mackenzie stepped into the dimming, crimson light of the coals.

  “Dawn still comes early this time of the year, Lieutenant,” the colonel’s voice declared quietly in the starlit darkness. “Especially after I’ve pushed every man of you so hard today.”

  Glancing over his shoulder at the thin rind of a moon rising off the purple horizon, Carter nodded. “Yes, sir.” Around the sliver of moon clung a wispy haze, a sure sign of a change in the weather. And at this time of the year, a change meant one thing—cold coming.

  “Why don’t you get into your blankets? It’s been a helluva ride we’ve had us,” Mackenzie said, holding his bare hands over the writhing, red coals. “And now the Tonkawas say the Kwahadi aren’t all that far ahead of us—camped a ways farther up Blanco Canyon.”

  “We’ve got the horses double hobbled, Colonel. If they hit us tonight—they won’t get away with much,” Carter replied, glancing northwest, toward the route White River took to cut through a hidden part of the Staked Plain.

  It was here that Blanco Canyon buried itself from view across this flat, austere tableland. Mackenzie had ordered bivouac made in the narrow defile of the canyon, a camp bordered on one side by the river and on the other by a line of sharply defined bluffs.

  They were friends, these two, compatriots of a sort, even though Carter no longer served as Mackenzie’s field adjutant this trip out. On this campaign the young lieutenant was back among his fellow fighting men.

  “I’ve ordered out a double picket, Lieutenant. Time to grab some sleep while you can.”

  “Thank you for the suggestion, Colonel. Good night, sir.”

  As the wind came up, biting now with the presage of the coming cold, Lieutenant Carter sank against his McClellan saddle and pulled the gray army blanket over his shoulders, his fingers groping into the saddlebag one last time for the reassurance of the leatherbound journal. He smiled, thinking how alike he and Mackenzie were: although they served in the cavalry, both men possessed a passionate distaste for horseback riding. Yet, like the colonel himself, Carter rode well and stayed in the saddle just as long as the job required. And for the past few days, that meant mounting up before the sun came up, along with staying planted in their McClellans until the light began to seep out of this prairie sky at dusk.

  It had been much like that for almost as long as Mackenzie had been commander of the Fourth Cavalry—vigorous, soul-hammering campaigns against the elusive horsemen of the Llano Estacado. At least since last May, when Carter had served as field adjutant to the colonel and together they had set off after those Kiowas believed responsible for the deaths of Henry Warren’s teamsters. Half a year gone now: all those baked, shimmering alkali flats that burned at a man’s eyes, powdery, stinging dust stived up by the horses’ hooves, caustic to a man’s nostrils and torture to his lungs. Finding graze for the mounts was an ordeal in itself every twilight in these chases—everything gone brown by this late in the year. What hadn’t been seared in the oven of a relentless summer on the southern plains was now made brittle by the drying autumn winds that sucked moisture right out of every horse soldier plodding along behind Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie.

  For the better part of a month they followed—drinking water that made them sick, and if not sick then at least the rest sat on a sore, much-abused part of their anatomy. By necessity Mackenzie cut the regiment to half-rations, then quarter-rations, far too little for a man and his mount to go on as they tumbled down one steep ravine and clambered up the rocky side of the next. The heat grew unbearable through the late summer months of tracking Kicking Bird’s band, thought to be somewhere out on the Pease River.

  Mackenzie never found them.

  A fruitless search they made that May—the Kiowa had disappeared, or more likely slinked back onto their reservation to disappear among the others. No one had given any serious thought to the notion that the chiefs would own up to their part in the butchery and slaughter.

  And now it was October.

  Carter closed his eyes, thinking how he had asked Mackenzie upon making bivouac earlier that evening if they’d ever find the Kwahadi Comanche, or if the warriors would simply disappear l
ike the Kiowa had done the previous May.

  Mackenzie had chuckled in that tight, nervous way of his, a humorless grin crossing his fair face ornamented with deep-set, sensitive eyes and a bushy mustache. “We’ll find them, Lieutenant. Or they’ll find us. Either way—I’ll have my fight of it.”

  There was no apprehension in Carter, least of all anything that could be called fear; fear at the possibility they would run across the most intractable warriors on these southern plains—the Kwahadis. And like Mackenzie, a serious, businesslike military commander, Carter believed there to be but one way to stop the Indian raids on Texas settlements and civilians.

  “Ride those goddamned warriors into the ground if we have to,” Mackenzie had said time and again, “and then whip them soundly.”

  After all, Mackenzie had six hundred troopers with him this time out, even though the Fourth was on forbidden, foreign, enemy ground. Less a frontier, more so a true wilderness populated by wild game and the equally wild Comanche, the Staked Plain was a land of centipede, scorpion and hairy tarantula, as well as a land where under every rock might hide a diamondback rattler or a wolf spider. Neither the land nor its people were to be trifled with. Many of the water courses at this time of the year were dried up, and what creeks and streams and rivulets survived this late in the season played host to a multitude of carcasses—testament to those animals that had become bogged down in the mire of mud, those carcasses now attracting birds of prey.

  As the cold wind with a clear taste of winter to it shouldered out of the north, Lieutenant Carter let sleep overtake him, happy for the rich, clean bite of the air, happy for the company of the other snoring horse soldiers here on these high plains of West Texas, happy to have as his commander the tenacious bulldog of the Fourth Cavalry. Sleep came so deliciously to him that night.

  “Turn out! Turn out!”

  Thrashing at his blankets, bolting upright into the shockingly cold air while grinding his fists into his sleep-matted eyes, Carter found his Spencer and then his feet.

  Everything around him was pure pandemonium: noisy horses, gunshots, screaming men and animals, orders hurled here and there above the commotion. And behind it all was the gallop of pony hooves and the yip-yipping of brown-skinned raiders flapping their blankets and rattling pieces of rawhide to scare off the army’s horses and mules.

  How Carter’s heart leapt with excitement, more so a relief from the tightly wound tension that had controlled him for months now.

  We’ve found the hostiles at last! he thought, racing for the sound of the shooting, where the regiment’s herd was picketed.

  He watched the backs of the last of the raiders disappear into the darkness after their ponies had kicked sparks from the dying fires with their slashing hooves as they tore through the regiment’s encampment.

  After those brief moments of sheer panic and confusion, the hammer of those pony hooves quickly faded north into the canyon, leaving the soldiers behind to ascertain the damage. Mackenzie called for report: no casualties … but some seventy animals were gone and unaccounted for.

  “Colonel Mackenzie,” called out the colonel’s guide and interpreter, Sharp Grover, “your Tonkawa trackers figure the Comanche content to run off the stock for the time being. They won’t be back now that we’re on the alert.”

  “Damn them!” Mackenzie growled, pounding a fist into the bracing air heavy with the frost of men’s voices. Then he suddenly whirled on his chief of scouts. “What do the Tonkawas believe the Comanche are going to do now? Shouldn’t we trail them back to their village?”

  Grover shook his head.

  From the lines on that war-map of a face, the scout was a man of middle years, Carter figured, watching Mackenzie’s chief of scouts scratching at his salt-flecked beard, perhaps digging for a louse hiding in that knot of coarse hair.

  “You won’t want your bunch of green recruits following them warriors anywhere in the dark,” Grover advised, “not when your outfit can’t see where you’re going … running into some blind ambush or what. No, Colonel—right now them warriors are out there in the dark rounding up what stock they run off from you.”

  “If they’re busy looking for the stolen horses, then we’ll go round up those warriors ourselves, Mr. Grover.” Mackenzie turned on his officers, who had clustered nearby, shivering in the cold, murky darkness for orders. “Captain Heyl.”

  “Here, Colonel,” replied E. M. Heyl.

  “Take Mr. Carter and a dozen men on the first horses you can saddle and mount,” Mackenzie explained. “See if you can locate anything out there … perhaps a trail those red bastards took running off with our stock.”

  With his own teeth chattering, Carter followed Heyl, and between them soon had a dozen more soldiers mounted on fourteen of the horses left to Mackenzie’s command, all fourteen loping into the gray light of cold, predawn darkness.

  “Captain Heyl, I suggest we find out if the Comanches overran any of the outer pickets,” said the lieutenant.

  Heyl replied, “Very good, Mr. Carter.”

  Gripping a pistol in his right hand, ready for any ambush that might surprise them, his reins in his left, Carter was relieved to find the farflung pickets still in place and alive. The horse-raiders had simply come upon the camp guards so suddenly, swept by them so quickly that the young soldiers hadn’t had a chance to fire a shot into the starlit darkness.

  The lieutenant was relieved as well to find the night dark enough that no one could really see the concern etched on his young face. Carter was beginning to wonder now about this enemy who hit and ran, appearing like ghosts out of the darkness. He was being shaken to his core as a young officer in this frontier army—for it seemed the army was being proved wrong about a few things regarding this new bareback enemy.

  One of those things the white soldiers had wrong was some unfounded belief that these Indians would never attack at night.

  That kind of superstitious thinking had probably lulled far too many outfits like this into a false yet suicidal sense of security, he thought as they pressed into the darkness, riding the circuit of picket posts.

  And got some soldiers killed as well.

  * * *

  Four risings of the sun ago, his young scouts had first reported seeing the dust rising above a large column of invaders coming out of the southeast.

  Soldiers—a long parade of blue-clad soldiers the young wolves had discovered beneath that spreading dust cloud.

  Quanah Parker knew these yellowleg soldiers were coming after his three villages—the bands of Comanche who normally came together and camped as one great village here in the Moon of Leaves Falling so they could hunt the great antelope herds together. They were, after all, the “Antelope Eaters”—the Kwahadi: those who had never signed a treaty with the white man as far back as elder’s memory could recall.

  Instead, for the most part they stayed out here crisscrossing the mapless expanse of their ancient homeland where they had been driven many decades before, here to hunt the buffalo and other game abounding on the Staked Plain. From here the young men occasionally raided to the east where the white man built his settlements.

  It was there many, many summers before that his father, Peta Nocona, had been on one such raid. It was then that his father captured the young white girl who would nine years later marry Peta Nocona—the Comanche chief called “Wanderer”—the woman with hair like summer-cured grass who would bear her first child, a boy she had named Quanah, meaning “Fragrant.”

  Twenty-six winters had come and gone since his mother had first suckled him at her breast.

  But now the son of Wanderer had no father, and no mother.

  In the short-grass spring seven winters gone—1864, in the reckoning the white man gave to time—Tonkawa trackers had led a large band of Tehannas to the Kwahadi village nestled in a tree-shrouded canyon, standing beside a narrow creek of cool water. And there they recaptured Quanah’s mother.

  With most of the other warriors, Wanderer and his
son had been away from the village that day—already gone for many suns on a hunt for buffalo and antelope. When the providers returned, there were many dead to mourn: women and children and old ones among them.

  But there was also the undead to mourn.

  A hard thing for Wanderer to accept. Harder still for the young warrior son. For years Quanah had struggled to find his own way to mourn the undead—his missing mother.

  To bury this hurt … to salve this awful, open wound of her capture, Quanah began raiding the settlements and soldier camps with a vengeance. If he could not find her among the white man’s buildings, then he would wreak a terrible revenge upon them.

  So it was when the young wolves he had sent out to scout their village’s backtrail had returned late one afternoon with the report of soldiers marching from the south. Into the land of the buffalo and the Staked Plain—the land of the Kwahadi Comanche.

  “Young men—gather your weapons!” he had told them as the autumn shadows grew long out of the west above their Blanco Canyon campsite. “We will strike these soldiers … drive off their horses! They will have to walk back to their forts when the Kwahadi are finished with them!”

  Above Quanah the twinkling stars went out one by one by one as storm clouds scudded out of the north across the dark sky, driven on by a stiff wind from the prairies far to the north. It was good—this cold and the coming storm would keep the white man close by his fires this night.

  Quanah, the Fragrant One, led his barebacked horsemen down on the camp of Three-Finger Kinzie—leader of the yellowlegs.

  Chapter 7

  October 1871

  Beneath the dimmest of cold moonshine in that bone-numbing air of predawn, Carter and Heyl made out what was clearly the hammered trail of the retreating warriors driving off the army’s seventy stolen horses and mules, a faint scar on the seared earth of the Staked Plain.