Buffalo Trail

by Jeff Guinn

  “But they gave you gifts and didn’t threaten you?”

  “No, they acted like superior beings and not in the least afraid. As we left, we bent over and showed them our bare asses just to see what they would do. We knew we could outrun them if we had to. But they didn’t do anything. Of course, after that we followed them, and didn’t let them see us.”

  “They kept coming south?”

  “Yes. And at the mouth of the river by the deep canyon, they stopped and camped for the night with another small party of hunters who’d been there all through the cold months. You probably know the ones. They’re led by two men with long face hair down almost to their bellies. We’ve been watching them and expect to kill them soon. There was much rejoicing when the big party of hunters arrived—I think they knew each other and were friends. But the next morning, the big party left, still coming south, and now they are camped in a meadow not far from the Great River. It’s also near the place of the old walls. You know the one, where some seasons ago my people and yours lost a fight to white soldiers with guns on wheels.”

  “We didn’t lose,” Quanah said. “The white soldiers ran away after it got dark. But that’s not important. So this big party of white hunters has made a camp?”

  Iseeo nodded. “I think they mean to stay. They’re building their usual tipis of wood.”

  Quanah thought for a moment. “Iseeo, you were right to come and share this news. I’ll repeat it to the Spirit Messenger.”

  “Can’t I see him?” Iseeo asked plaintively. “I hoped he would give me a blessing.”

  “I’m sorry, but he can’t be disturbed when he’s talking to the spirits. I’ll tell him about this good thing you’ve done, though if you really want his blessing, convince your chief to join in the great fight with us. That’s what the spirits command.”

  “I’m trying. Lone Wolf says that you Comanche don’t respect the Kiowa.”

  “Fight with us. That will assure our respect. Gather your friends, go back to your village, and tell this to Lone Wolf. We need his decision soon.”

  • • •

  AFTER THE FIVE KIOWA rode away, Quanah went to Isatai’s tipi. As he expected, the fat man was sprawled out snoring on his blankets. Both of his old, ugly wives squatted nearby, sorting through the latest presents brought by the other Quahadi. Some were small trinkets—beads and ribbons—but most of the tributes were varieties of food. Someone had just killed a deer, and given Isatai a haunch. There were corn cakes and fruit jellies and also several skinned rabbits. The villagers felt that such an important Spirit Messenger shouldn’t have to waste his time hunting.

  The wives gestured for Quanah to let their husband alone, but he shook him awake anyway. “Come on. We have something to do.”

  Isatai protested, “Let me alone, I’m tired.” His voice was thick with sleep. “Maybe I was receiving a message from the spirits in a dream.”

  “Well, were you?”

  Isatai rubbed his eyes. “I can’t remember now. Why are you bothering me?”

  “Some Kiowa came to the village. They told me about a big new camp of white hunters near the Great River, close to those old ruined walls. We need to go see.”

  It took a while to get Isatai up and out of the tipi. He wanted to eat first, and then he had to apply new face paint, which he said demonstrated respect for the spirits. Quanah waited impatiently. He hadn’t been out of the village for several days as he waited for word from Lone Wolf of the Kiowa and Gray Beard of the Cheyenne. He hated any sense of being hemmed in, and he always felt that way if he stayed in camp too long. It would have been simpler to go spy on the newly arrived whites by himself, but he couldn’t depend on Isatai not to say or do something foolish while he was away. It was better to drag the pompous fool along.

  They packed some food, because they knew they would be gone overnight. Quanah didn’t inform Wickeah that he was leaving. Let her wonder if maybe he’d gotten so tired of her sharp tongue that he was deserting her for good. Wickeah’s unwomanly assertiveness, Quanah thought, compared unfavorably to high-spirited Mochi’s attitude. Mochi could fight better than most men, but she still deferred to her husband, Medicine Water, as a respectful wife should. Soon, maybe, Mochi would set a proper example in Wickeah’s own tipi.

  • • •

  IT TOOK A FULL DAY to reach the ruins that marked the old battle site. Isatai hummed most of the way. When they stopped for a meal and a few hours’ sleep, he complained about the pemmican that Quanah had brought. “There was some tasty fresh venison in my tent. You could have brought that.”

  “Eat what we have.”

  “You shouldn’t speak so rudely to me. I’m the Spirit Messenger and deserve respect.”

  Quanah struggled to keep his temper in check. It was important to keep Isatai placated and cooperative. “Forgive me. I’m worried about the Kiowa. I believe the Cheyenne will be with us, but we need the Kiowa too.”

  Despite his complaints about the pemmican, Isatai gobbled it down. “The Kiowa will join us. Buffalo Hump’s spirit says so.”

  “Does Buffalo Hump’s spirit explain how to make certain that happens?”

  Isatai stopped chewing, closed his eyes, and hummed. “All right. The spirit says, dance.”

  “What?”

  Isatai opened his eyes and shook his head. “Sometimes the spirit just says a word or two and that’s the message.”

  “Can you ask him to tell us more?”

  “No, I think the spirit feels that you have your answer.”

  “Dance,” Quanah said. “The spirit wants me to dance, and then the Kiowa will do what we want?”

  “I don’t know. This message was for you and not me, so you have to interpret and obey it.” Isatai resumed stuffing his mouth with pemmican.

  • • •

  AFTER THEY REACHED the battle site, it was easy to track the white hunting party. They had made no attempt to cover their tracks—there were the marks of wagon wheels and many hoofprints, all going north. Quanah and Isatai carefully used the rolling hills to hide themselves from any scouts the white hunters might have left behind. They soon reached some streams emanating from the Great River and followed the most promising one. Almost immediately, they heard sounds peculiar to white men making permanent camp—pounding and sawing on wood, metal smashing on metal.

  The Indians ground-tethered their horses and proceeded on foot. They crept up the side of a medium-sized hill and dropped on their bellies just behind the crest. Peering over, they saw a low grassy meadow rimmed by creeks, other hills, and, almost a mile away on the left, a flat-topped mesa. Down in the bowl of the meadow, swarms of whites were hard at work putting logs and boards in place for three buildings. The two farthest from the hill where Quanah and Isatai watched were medium-sized. Nearest to the Indians, the whites constructed a big corral. They had many animals down in the valley and obviously needed a place to keep them together. Inside the corral, using part of it as an outer wall, was the skeletal wooden outline of the third building.

  “They intend to stay,” Isatai whispered. This was the first sensible observation Quanah had heard him make in many days. “They will build a whole town, maybe.”

  Quanah burned at the thought. It was bad enough the hunters came to kill buffalo that belonged by natural right and even white treaty to the People. But now, a town? Such an insult. He forced himself to remain calm. He counted the men in the valley and decided Iseeo the Kiowa was probably right. They numbered about ten times the fingers on his hands, and they moved with the confidence of men who knew what they were doing. Many had the long, dangling hair that identified them as the hunters of buffalo. All had guns close to hand, pistols on their belts, and rifles propped within easy reach. They were clearly on guard, which was only to be expected. These were seasoned fighters, not fools. Quanah studied them carefully, picking out clues to their intentions. Some were dig
ging a well, another sign they meant to stay. In a temporary camp, they would have been content to fetch water from the nearby creeks.

  One of the long-haired men walked away into the high grass to take a shit. A red dog romped along behind him. Both the animal and the man looked familiar, and then Quanah remembered. This was the young man he’d seen many months earlier, the one scouting for buffalo sign. The longhair squatted with his pants tangled around his boots; Quanah thought he could probably rush him and cut his throat, but there was also the dog to consider. It might scent him, start barking, and then the rest of the whites would come after him. Quanah could easily escape, but Isatai wouldn’t. Killing this longhair would have to wait for another time.

  “Can we go back now?” Isatai asked. “We’ve seen the white men. I want some of the good food back in my tipi.”

  “I want to watch a while longer,” Quanah said. “You can go back down the hill and wait by the horses. There’s more pemmican in the pack on my pony. Why don’t you go eat some, then keep watch on our mounts. Alert me if any whites are coming that way.”

  For the rest of the day, Quanah watched the activity down in the meadow. Most of what he saw was to be expected: trees being cut along the banks of the creek and hauled into the white camp, where they were trimmed, cut to size, and used on the buildings. The well was completed, and buckets of water drawn up. Then something astonished Quanah. One of the buildings had sides of logs, which was what he’d expected. But some of the whites hitched a strange-looking machine to a horse team and proceeded to cut out huge chunks of earth and grass. They fashioned these into thick bricks and began piling them all along the wood-frame sides of two buildings, gluing the bricks together with handfuls of mud. Buildings of dirt and grass? Who would want to live in them? It was a very curious thing.

  It grew dark. Isatai wormed his way back up the hill and insisted that it was time to leave. “Just a little longer,” Quanah said. “I want to count their fires, see how many stay and how many leave.”

  None of them left. Instead, they built some half-dozen fires, slaughtered a cow, and cooked the beef—Isatai’s stomach rumbled so loudly when he smelled the roasting meat that Quanah feared the whites below would hear it. After the men had eaten, Quanah prepared to creep away. Surely the white men would send out guards to patrol the area around their camp. But that didn’t happen. The young longhair who was the leader placed a few men at the edges of the meadow, but no farther out. There was no need to move Isatai and the horses away, or for Quanah to move from the crest where he lay so comfortably.

  He watched idly as the white men cleared away the pots and plates from dinner, rinsing them with buckets of well water. As he watched, he thought again of the message Isatai claimed to have received from the spirits. Dance. Of course, Isatai was a fool and a liar, and he had probably just blurted the first word that came into his empty head. Still, the word seemed to have some meaning. Dance.

  One of the men below was a white man and yet wasn’t, his skin an off color. Like Isatai, he was big and fat. He rummaged in a wagon and produced a thing with strings. Then he grasped another long, narrow thing with a single string—it looked like a very fragile bow. He rubbed this skinny bow across the thing with strings, and this made musical sounds that Quanah liked very much. So did the other white men, who began to hop about, some singing along and others linking arms and whirling—dancing.

  “So white men dance too,” Isatai whispered, startling Quanah, who had been so absorbed in the scene below that he hadn’t heard his rotund companion coming back up the hill. “I suppose everyone dances. The People have ours, and the Kiowa and the Cheyenne have their bloody sun dances. I wonder why the white men are dancing tonight.”

  And then, in an instant, Quanah had it, the way to make everything work. Of course the word “dance” was key to gaining the cooperation of the Kiowa and assuring the continued support of the Cheyenne as well. It was so obvious—why had he not have thought of it sooner?

  He dragged Isatai back down the hill and, once they were mounted, set the fastest pace possible back to the Quahadi camp.

  EIGHTEEN

  Cash McLendon considered himself smarter than most of the men he met in the West. From his time in St. Louis society, he knew how to waltz, which utensils to use when during multicourse dinners, and the surest, least detectable methods of stealing industrial secrets from competitors. With the exception of Jim Hanrahan, a seasoned businessman who’d served in the Kansas state legislature, such things were certainly beyond the ken of almost everyone else at the new Adobe Walls site. But they far surpassed McLendon in skills required for frontier construction. Left to his own devices, McLendon would have struggled to put up a tent that wouldn’t immediately fall over. He had no idea which type of tree furnished the best wood for ridge logs, as opposed to an entirely different type of lumber required for fences. It astonished him that great bricks of sod could actually be cut from the meadow using a special plow, and that these earth-and-grass bricks could be used to form thick walls. Two of the structures taking shape in the undulating meadow actually had glass windows. Whatever social skills they might lack, these rough-and-tumble frontiersman used the materials at hand to construct honest-to-God buildings.

  At first, as soon as they’d picked the site and spent a full day resting after the trip from Dodge City, everyone pitched in. Deep trenches were dug; then thick cottonwood logs were laid down in them to provide a foundation to which slimmer upright logs could be nailed. It was hard, sweaty work, but required sure hands all the same. A single misplaced log would weaken an entire wall. Just constructing the two-hundred-by-three-hundred-foot corral for the Myers and Leonard store took almost two weeks. Its log fence stood eight feet high, and the wood had to be cut and hauled back to the meadow from groves of cottonwood about six miles away. The walls of the three buildings that bordered the corral—a store, a mess hall, and a stable—were what the building crew called picket, logs chinked with mud, pocked occasionally with shooting slots so gunmen could stand inside and fire in case of attack. There was a heavy double door in front, also made of wood. The door faced east so that it could be open on cool mornings to let in breeze and sunshine. There was also a smaller, lighter back door.

  Tom O’Keefe’s blacksmith shop was much smaller, a square fifteen by fifteen feet, and also had wood picket walls. But unlike the Myers and Leonard store, there were wide gaps between the logs. O’Keefe would spend most of his days laboring by the roaring fire necessary to bring metal to molten heat, and so he required constant fresh air blowing through.

  Hanrahan’s Saloon, twenty-five by sixty feet, had sod walls three feet thick at the base and two feet thick at the top. They could be penetrated by bullets, but defenders could also easily poke holes in the walls with tools or gun barrels and fire out. The great advantage was that sod bricks were virtually fireproof.

  All three structures had the same roofs: in each, a thick central ridgepole supported a framework of smaller supporting poles. When these were in place, they were covered by several layers of sod and dirt. Though bullets could penetrate, rain couldn’t. There was some space between the buildings, almost thirty or forty yards. The meadow was deep enough so there was no need to cram one on top of the other. All of the buildings faced east.

  After the first few days, most of the construction was done by crew members rather than the hide men themselves. They felt themselves above such menial labor, even though prior to leaving Dodge they’d agreed to lend a hand. Fred Leonard, O’Keefe, and Hanrahan hadn’t expected free labor: every man was paid four dollars a day plus meals—not bad wages for hunting camp skinners and cooks—but this was a pittance to hunters accustomed to making that much from the sale of one or two hides. So, one by one, the hide men announced that they needed to scout the area, and rode out for days at a time, often bringing some of their crewmen with them and slowing camp construction accordingly. The three businessmen argued that they
were breaking their word, but the hide men responded that they were heading out for the long-term benefit of the camp. For maximum hunting success, everyone needed to know all the freshwater springs in the area, and where the draws and hollows were where significant numbers of buffs might try to shelter in case of bad weather. Of course, they would also be on the lookout for Indians. None had been seen since they’d been accosted by the butt-baring Kiowa; apparently the Cator brothers were right, and most of the Indians had drifted away. Still, it was important to be sure.

  Even Billy Dixon quickly got bored with camp construction and rode out with Frenchy, Mike McCabe, and Charley Armitage, three of his most veteran crewmen. Bat Masterson begged to come, but Billy, being less tactful than usual, said no because it was to be a long, wide scout, with a pace so blistering that an inexperienced hand like Bat could never keep up. That sent Masterson into a prolonged sulk; after Billy and his three companions rode off, Bat disappeared too. McLendon found him on the banks of the northernmost creek several hours later. Bat was slouched in the shade, scribbling away in his notebook. As usual, he refused to let McLendon read what he’d written.

  “It’s private, C.M. Now, tell me, is the camp work all done for the day? I swear I’ll puke if I have to help secure one more ridgepole into place.”

  “You’re in luck. I think the last nail was driven not too long ago, and tomorrow we’ll commence putting in shelves for the store and saloon.”

  Bat tucked his pencil behind his ear and snapped the notebook shut. “Glad to hear it. Once they’ve got an array of items for sale, we can have some relief from the monotony of bacon and beans for dinner, washed down with water. I’m parched for beer or something stronger.”

  “Water will continue to suit me fine, since Jim Hanrahan’s bound to charge at least a nickel a beer. I’m down here to make and save every cent that I can. You ought to be too.”