Ranald Mackenzie would be commanding officer at Fort Sill after the Red River Uprising for two years, then he would be sent to help corral the Indians who had killed Custer. By now, both he and Nelson Miles were generals. In 1883, Mackenzie went insane and was confined to an asylum. He died, forgotten, on January 19, 1889, at his sister’s home on Staten Island, New York and was buried at West Point.
Also buried at West Point earlier had been Ronald’s reckless fellow officer, George Armstrong Custer. As Ranald Mackenzie rode across Texas in 1874 to keep his date with destiny at the Palo Duro Canyon, Custer was leading an expedition searching for gold in the forbidden Black Hills. Less than two years later, the outraged Sioux and Cheyenne ended his career on June 25, 1876, at the Little Big Horn.
The Palo Duro is the largest state park in Texas and it is worth a trip to that site about twenty miles southeast of Amarillo. When you stand at the bottom as I have done and look up at those steep walls, you can only marvel at the bravery of both red and white men who were willing to risk their lives on those crooked trails. Palo Duro was, indeed, the last big Indian battle in Texas.
Two inventions would finally close down the open ranges and change the west forever: barbed wire (we call it bob warh here in Oklahoma), patented in November of 1874, and the proliferation of the windmill, which would pump water and make arid stretches of land usable.
The giant herds of millions of buffalo would be wiped out in only a few short years. By 1889, a census found only 1,091 American buffalo left alive. The last wild buffalo in Oklahoma Territory, a “lonely old bull,” was killed near Cold Spring, in Cimarron County, in October, 1890. It is ironic that when Teddy Roosevelt authorized the Wichita Wildlife Refuge in the Kiowas’ old hunting grounds, buffalo had to be imported for it from the New York Zoological Society. Their descendents roam freely on the Refuge, which is near old Fort Sill and is a popular tourist attraction.
I’ve received many letters, curious about how I started writing. A fellow Oklahoman, the famous romance writer, Sara Orwig, discovered me in a graduate class she taught at Central State University in Edmond, Oklahoma. When I told her I was one of the few white people in the world who knew the whereabouts of the Cheyenne Sacred Medicine Arrows, she encouraged me to write about that subject and it became my best-seller, Cheyenne Captive. Some of the characters mentioned in the book you just finished—Captain Baker, the blond socialite, Summer Van Schuyler, and Shawn O’Bannion—were characters in that book.
That was followed by a sequel, Cheyenne Princess, about the rich and powerful Durango ranching family in the Texas Hill Country during the Great Indian Outbreak of 1864. If you read that one, you may remember that I told you the true story of little Millie Durgan, the white child who was carried off during the Elm Creek Raid and adopted by the Kiowas. According to her grandchildren, little Millie was in the Palo Duro Canyon ten years later when Mackenzie made his famous raid and was one of those who walked all the way back to Fort Sill in the cold.
If you’ve read those two novels, you know how much research I do, even to the small details. It is a fact, according to old-timers, that longhorns always milled to the right, that Kiowas took one ear when they scalped a man, and yes, there was a terrible plague of grasshoppers on the plains during the summer of 1874.
Would you like to drive along the old Chisholm Trail? Start down in San Antonio, Texas on U.S. Highway 81, which roughly follows the Chisholm Trail, and drive it up across my state and on up into Kansas.
I love the Lone Star State second only to Oklahoma. It was down around Bandera, Texas that I heard the tale that became the basis for my next book.
It seems once upon a time, there was a blond wisecracking, arrogant gunslinger everyone called the Bandit. Now Bandit got into trouble one night in 1873 because he shot the Oklahoma Kid for cheating at cards in a tough Bandera saloon. He was forced to escape from the Kid’s vengeful gang on a stolen horse.
Down below the border, he crossed the path of an elegant Spanish Senorita, whose mother had been an American. This rich beauty, a distant cousin to the Texas Durangos, was on the run herself for personal reasons. Bandit, who had always lived by his wits and his gun, didn’t expect to be mistaken for a missing wealthy heir. And she didn’t expect to get carried off by the Indians. Neither one meant to get mixed up with Colonel Mackenzie’s cavalry, who had sneaked across the Rio Grande without written orders to clean out the raiding Kickapoo, Mescalero Apache, and Lipan warriors.
This sheltered lady’s name was Amethyst and she wore that jewel because it was just the color of her smoky lavender eyes. She’d never met a rough, tough-talking American gunslinger and he’d never met a real lady before. And in the magic of the Mescalero moonlight, they clashed like fire and gunpowder! First Bandit stole the lady’s jewelry, then he stole her innocence.
And then she stole his heart!
Come along for romance, heart-stopping adventure, and Indians as the Bandit from Bandera meets the elegant lady in my next western tale. . . .
For further reading, here’s just six of the forty-four reference books I used:
Bat Masterson, The Man & the Legend, by Robert K. DeArment
The Buffalo Soldiers, a Narrative of Negro Cavalry in the West, by William H. Leckie
The Buffalo War, the History of the Red River Indian Uprising of 1874, by James L. Haley
The Comanches, the Destruction of a People, by T. R. Fehrenbach Life of “Billy” Dixon, by Olive K. Dixon
Wild, Wooley and Wicked, the History of the Kansas Cow Towns and the Texas Cattle Trade, by Harry Sinclair Drago
And to all you readers who share my love for the old west . . .
’long as I got a biscuit . . .
Georgina Gentry
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Comanche Cowboy (The Durango Family) Page 45