Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873

by Terry C. Johnston

  Sharp studied the handsome officer’s smile beneath that droopy mustache. He liked Mackenzie. “I suppose you’re right, Colonel. Jacksboro is a might close to Fort Richardson, ain’t it now?”

  “And a man with your reputation can’t stay hidden for long, can he?”

  “So, what you figure to do now, since this outfit hasn’t got a single animal left for your cavalry to ride after the Kwahadi run off their ponies, and your horses to boot?”

  Mackenzie slung the dregs of his coffee into the grass at his feet. “We do have one left, a damned burro—twelve years old and sore-backed as well. That bloody Quanah Parker and his Comanche didn’t get everything!”

  They laughed together, a sudden, furious joy shared between them beneath the starshine. There wasn’t anything else men like them could do but laugh, here in the middle of this grassland kingdom of the enemy, set afoot of a sudden. At first the other officers and nearby soldiers did not know what to make of it—how their regimental commander and chief of scouts could be laughing in the face of such adversity. But then, one by one, the rest joined in.

  Lord, did the laughter help that night.

  Mackenzie assigned two of his companies to escort the Comanche captives all the way due south to Fort Concho. That seemed to be the best idea—getting the prisoners that far from their menfolk.

  On their own long walk back to Fort Richardson, Sharp Grover had a lot of time to think on things again, just as he’d had those nine hot, September days to brood on that sandy scut of island in the middle of the Arickaree Fork of the Republican back in ’68.* Never again, he had promised himself, would he go riding out with civilians just looking to stir up some trouble. Major Sandy Forsyth had stalked the Cheyenne of Roman Nose until they found him. And then it had come down to the nut-cutting.

  Things were a lot different now with the Kiowas, who by and large had settled down. There were reports here and there of bands of the young men and their war-chiefs slipping off the reservation and crossing the Red River into Texas. In fact, last summer down at Howard’s Wells in nearby Crockett Country some wild-eyed Kiowas had found an unescorted government contractor’s wagon train camped and swarmed over the Mexican and gringo teamsters. Every man jack of them was killed. And the one woman along, a teamster’s wife, the Kiowas had allowed to live—Marcella Sera.

  There would be times, Grover supposed, that the woman would wish she had not lived, having now to go through each day a prisoner of that memory of what she had witnessed. Remembering the screams of her husband and infant son, the agonized terror given voice by the other eight teamsters as they were tied to the wheels of their freight wagons and consumed by leaping flames.

  By the fall of 1872 most of the Kwahadis came into the reservation at Fort Sill, bringing with them a few white captives to exchange for their women and children who had been held ever since the Fourth Cavalry’s attack on their Blanco Canyon camp.

  Now there sprang some new hope eternal among most on the Texas frontier that Mackenzie had indeed struck the Kwahadi a harsh blow. The early part of the summer had been unusually wet, with the prairie grasses growing taller and richer than ever before, feeding the Indian ponies and buffalo and the white man’s cattle at the same time. Then the dry winds of August had come to sear the prairie and turn the land golden before Mackenzie’s raid on Mowi’s Comanche village.

  But autumn always came, and with it the touch of gold to the cottonwood and the red-tinged alder like crimson fire in the draws and down in the watercourses. Swamp willow turned with the season, bloodlike arrowpoint leaves tangled in a mat of blazing color. Indian summer arrived like a peaceful benediction for the land and Sharp Grover both. And still he wondered if ever he would see Jack Stillwell, ever lay eyes again on the tall Irishman.

  A life full of memories made his old eyes sting at this moment as the wind shifted out of the north—what with this thinking back to how close he had been to Seamus Donegan’s uncle, Liam O’Roarke. How both he and Seamus had been forced to watch Liam lay there at the bottom of a sandy riflepit, the side of his head turned to maggot fodder on some nameless river on the high plains. And in his own way, Sharp Grover prayed his letter and the other would get to Seamus through Jack Stillwell, no longer a young nineteen-year-old scout, as he had been when he heroically crossed a hundred miles of prairie wilderness back in ’68 to carry Major Forsyth’s desperate plea for rescue—but now an able and proven frontiersman carrying on where Sharp had cashed in his cards.

  The air smelled of cold, Sharp thought as he poked the top button of his coat through its hole and turned up the collar.

  “Why don’t you come in, Sharp?”

  He turned, smiling the way that crinkled the corners of his farseeing, plainsmen eyes, and blew his wife a kiss. “I’ll be in. Just a little while longer now.”

  Sharp felt it in his bones, in his blood, that change in the wind. Knowing the old buffalo did as well, how they read the seasons with their noses if nothing else, turning south when the wind shifted out of the north. Natural that the old buffalo hunters so readily became like their prey, he figured. Practiced in their habits after so many years of following the herds, coming in the wake of those nomadic bands that followed the herds as well.

  Sharp turned back to the little cabin he had built her. Got halfway there, then stopped as the gale picked up intensity in the yard. Dry leaves scattered before him, whispering with names and faces and times gone before and never to hold again in his hands. Sweet Jesus and Mary, he hoped he was doing the right thing in sending word out for Seamus Donegan.

  The whispers of that very winter Sharp Grover was the first to hear turned into the killing blizzard of ’72. In west Texas, with nothing to stop the snow and wind roaring out of the west and tumbling the cold straight down from the arctic north, the drifts rose hour by hour, day by day. At forty below zero a man could not stay long outside in the wind. There wasn’t much a fella found need of doing outside anyway, as long as the wood box was filled and he kept a pathway tromped down to the tall lean-to he used as a barn for their horses.

  Up north along the Kansas Pacific and the Smoky Hill, a train had tried to plow its way west into the brunt of the blizzard and impaled itself in a monstrous drift, unable to grind its way backward to free itself. Inside, the crew and passengers settled in to get through the storm, then send word out once the blizzard had passed.

  But then a faint, rumbling roar was heard coming across the rolling, white tableland aswirl with icy buckshot. The thunder grew louder and louder out of the north when suddenly the first loud thump collided with the side of a passenger car. Then another, and another. Until up and down the entire length of that train, the ice-shrouded black beasts were hammering against the cars, more thousands upon thousands coming behind, pushing against the first, migrating south blindly through the blizzard. Most of the animals ended up crossing the tracks in front of and behind the train. But those buffalo that could not move merely waited with the patience taught their kind across the ages, huddling here out of the lee of the wind that drove the icy snow in brutal, horizontal gusts.

  Most of those beasts died there where they stood, frozen in death beside the windows where they were butchered and the passengers lived on their meat for eight days until a rescue train arrived from the east to pull the missing train out. The wide cut through the snowdrifts was packed solid with huge, black, furry carcasses, frozen in time along the Smoky Hill Route of the Kansas Pacific Railroad.

  Death would not be a long time coming for the rest of the great Arkansas herd.

  * * *

  The blizzard had put a lot of men out of work, more men set adrift and aimless than ever before come freeze-up for the railroad gangs. Construction on the Santa Fe Railroad had made it to the border of Colorado and stopped. By New Year’s Day there were more men in Granada, Colorado, and back in Dodge City, Kansas, than anyone had thought possible: Irish, German, and Scandinavian too. Along with the ones who still had no home to go home to some seven
years after the war. Still wandering.

  All of them in their own way talking about spring and throwing in together and buying a wagon and an outfit to punch into the buffalo herds. Still, there were a number of them who weren’t waiting for spring green-up to get started after the beasts. On a quiet morning in the middle of Dodge City’s main street, a man could stand and listen, and in all likelihood hear a distant booming of the big rifles not that far from the town itself. In fact, by spring a man could travel west from Dodge to Granada without ever being out of sight of one buffalo hunters’ camp or another.

  But what with the buffalo hunters still staying well north of the Cimarron, and the fact that Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry had enough hostages to keep the Kwahadis quiet, along with the Kiowas, subdued now that their chiefs were serving terms down in Huntsville prison—all made for a fairly quiet winter of it on the southern plains.

  More quiet than young Billy Dixon could say he had known out here.

  Four years ago he had freighted for Custer’s Washita expedition that had charged in and wiped out old Black Kettle’s Southern Cheyenne. And later that winter Billy had stayed on to teamster for Custer’s Sweetwater campaign while the Seventh Cavalry stalked the Kiowa and the other bands of fighting Cheyenne. Dixon recalled how Yellow Hair Custer had gone out to parley with the Kiowa chiefs, Satanta and Lone Wolf, then turned around, making the chiefs his prisoners. What a dangerous gamble that had been, holding the two as hostage to assure that the Kiowas would indeed come back to their reservation and live in peace at the new post the Tenth Cavalry was building at Medicine Bluff—Fort Sill.

  And this spring of ’73 had brought changes there as well.

  No longer did Colonel Benjamin Grierson command the Tenth. When he was ordered east on a recruitment detail, his lieutenant colonel, John W. Davidson, was placed in temporary command at Sill.

  West of the post across Cache Creek, at the Kiowa-Comanche agency, Lawrie Tatum had himself enough and resigned with plans to return to his Iowa farm. He was replaced by another eager Quaker, James Haworth, who still believed the tribes could be pacified without the might of the army being brought into play.

  Hell, Dixon thought—back to that winter campaign down in Indian Territory, Sheridan had proved to everyone the only thing that Injuns respected: force. He had Satanta and Lone Wolf strung up and ready to hang if the tribes didn’t come in.

  And the time would come, Dixon believed, that Sheridan would rue the day he hadn’t hung those two murdering bastards from a tall tree beside Rainy Mountain Creek.

  If they’d only keep whiskey and guns out of their hands, Billy thought, there’d be no problem with the Injuns, and a man could make his living hunting buffalo.

  But there was those who wanted easy money, not wanting to have a thing to do with the smelly, bloody carcasses that were the refuse of the hide trade. Their kind set up tent camps just north of the reservation boundary and from there sold their whiskey to the Indians for hides and ponies and squaws. Cheyenne agent John D. Miles finally had himself enough of the whiskey peddlers late that winter and prodded Lieutenant Colonel Davidson to take some action. Lieutenant R. H. Pratt was dispatched with twenty troopers from D Company of the Tenth Negro Cavalry to break up some of the “whiskey ranches.”

  The cold had settled on the land and made it a miserable march north from Fort Sill, but the same storm had also caused the whiskey peddlers to hunker down until the weather broke. Pratt arrested fifteen of them, destroyed hundreds of gallons of gut-wrenching liquor, besides confiscating a large supply of weapons and powder, sugar, flour, coffee and bacon. In storage ricks behind their crude cabins, the peddlers had stacks of buffalo robes, as well as a sizable herd of cattle given to the tribes by the government as part of their annuities. The warriors had been trading off anything and just about everything, including wives and daughters, to get their hands on the mind-numbing whiskey.

  Prisoners, trade goods and cattle were all pushed on to Camp Supply in the northern part of Indian Territory, but not without some casualties. Thirteen of Pratt’s twenty troopers sought out the surgeon at Camp Supply upon returning from their police duties. Most lost fingers or toes to frostbite that brutal winter on the central plains.

  Dixon wondered if the army thought it was worth all the trouble those brunettes went to, losing those fingers and toes and riding off into a prairie snowstorm to capture those fifteen lazy whiskey peddlers when all that happened after the white men were delivered to a court in Topeka was that they were each fined ten dollars apiece and sentenced to thirty days in jail.

  The young buffalo hunter shook his head, his long, black hair brushing his shoulders as he rose to the saddle. Billy Dixon was fixing on heading south for the Cimarron to see what the herds looked like down there. Funny, he thought, how the government never did nothing the same way twice.

  Seemed like the army and the government fellas just wanted the Indians to cause trouble.

  Maybe that was it, Billy decided. If the warrior bands stirred up a bunch of shit, then the army would have reason to go in and squash ’em.

  It almost made him laugh on this bright spring morning, heading south into buffalo country. Almost … if it hadn’t been so damned scary too.

  Yes, indeed: old Phil Sheridan himself would likely rue the day he didn’t string up them Kiowa butchers from a tall tree standing beside Rainy Mountain Creek.

  Chapter 11

  Spring 1873

  Damn, but the air smelled good.

  Billy Dixon stood stretching the kinks out of his body, wiggling his toes before he stuffed his sweat-stiffened stockings down the tubes of his tall boots. Morning like this, with the frost ablaze like sparkling pink diamonds as the sun rose out of the east, a man wondered why anyone would ever sleep a night with a roof over his head.

  The five skinners he had hired to come along were beginning to stir. Even red-headed Mike McCabe relished every last minute of sleep, his head buried beneath his blankets and canvas bedroll.

  Dixon wanted coffee.

  From the creek he pulled a pot of water. Beneath the trees he found enough squaw wood to rekindle the coals from last night’s fire. Then he stretched out on his bedroll once more and waited for the water to come to a boil as the others rousted, stomped onto the prairie and sprayed the ground in their morning ritual.

  Dixon pushed a small quid of tobacco inside his cheek and lay back, his head pillowed on the crook of his arm, as contented as any man could be here across the Arkansas River, south of the “dead line.” He had brought his outfit into territory expressly given by treaty to the Indians for their own hunting. If soldiers caught a hide hunter down here, it would be trouble with the army. If on the other hand a wandering party of warriors ran across a hide outfit like Billy’s south of the Arkansas … there might be nothing left but some blackened, bloating carcasses sprouting arrows beside the smoking char of what had been their wagons.

  Ever since the treaty at Medicine Lodge Creek had spelled out the buffalo hunting ground for the southern tribes back in ’67, the warriors had become all the more steadfast in their vigilance to keep the white man out of this country. Billy had seen what the young bucks could do with a man tied to a wagon wheel, the whole thing ablaze … or a teamster would be lashed to a single-tree and slowly roasted like a pig on a spit, until his skin turned black and his gut burst open with the intense heat—

  He shook the thought off, knowing it did no good to brood on the danger. Dixon had never shirked a challenge. And now, with the big herds north of the Arkansas killed off, the challenge lay south of the “dead line.” South of there was Indian country, where a white man dared go only if he was stupid, or had fifty-caliber balls.

  To go there—south across the “dead line” to the gentle, rolling southern plains, which served as both the arena for the coming struggle and the reward itself for their beauty stretched away from Billy in every direction—satisfied Dixon’s soul. And in any direction he cared to look, all was peace. Up no
rth among the soldiers at Fort Dodge, word had it that there was an Indian war going on with the Modocs out west in Oregon. Up north the Sioux and Cheyenne were said to be causing trouble. Back east … well, Dixon just smiled, those starched-collar fellas made their own problems for themselves.

  Out here though, a man could lose himself. With some hope, maybe even find himself again.

  From the wide and mighty Platte River beside the well-tracked Emigrant Road that had carried countless thousands west to Oregon and California or down to Salt Lake City of the Mormons, from there all the way south to the Rio Grande River, the southern great plains rolled on and on to the horizon. Sloping gently all the way from the Rocky Mountains down to the ninety-eighth meridian, this tableland was for the most part level and semiarid, covered with a thick carpet of tangled root grasses, making this land one of the most ideal natural grazing pastures in the entire world.

  Most of the year the southern plains suffered from a lack of moisture, constantly buffeted by drying winds; it could very well be called the “Great American Desert.” Yet in April, May and June, this great pasture received the blessing of rain which immediately turned the land green before the arrival of the drying winds of July and August came along to sear the plains and force the grass to seed in an endless cycle of life and death and rebirth once more.

  From autumn to spring, for three seasons of the year, a man had to be wary of the dark horizon and any shift in the wind. A norther could blow in over a matter of an hour, catching man and beast unprepared for the onslaught of arctic cold driven before a furious gale. It was not uncommon on the high plains for the temperature to drop more than fifty degrees in that hour that it took the wind to shift out of the north, bringing the maw of the arctic itself to a land so recently a parched furnace.

  To the east of the great flatlands, the southern plains began to bunch and roll themselves into the hill country, and even mountains like the Wichitas, cut with numerous streams and dressed in thick hardwood forests. Just west of the southern plains, however, the land became much more austere, cut crudely with breaks and badlands and buttes as it rose to the most severe piece of real estate of all: the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plain. A few rivers bravely cross the land between these two extremes, rivers that rose like a ladder that would take the migrating buffalo herds north from the Pecos, Colorado, Brazos, Pease, Red, Washita, Canadian, Cimarron and the Arkansas. Most of these were typically bordered with low, sandy banks, filled with gypsum and enough other salts to make them unfit for drinking.