Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  Donegan chuckled. “Don’t doubt it a bit.”

  At least fifty thousand dollars in trade goods were spread among most of those sturdy freight wagons. And when it came time for Charlie Myers to open shop somewhere down in Indian country, he would not be displaying trade goods meant to make a settler’s eyes shine. Nor those geegaws meant to quicken the pulse of a settler’s wife. No, this trip to buffalo country meant that Myers had carefully planned and purchased his stock. Only those goods he knew from experience would be highly desired by that rare breed of hunter had he packed beneath the heavy canvas tarps in the many wagons he contracted to haul his investment all the way to the Canadian. Besides rifles and pistols, lead, powder, knives and reloading equipment, Myers made sure he brought along the usual blankets, tenting, tin cups and plates, in addition to coffee, sugar, flour and assorted tinned foods. But there was as well a wide assortment of rugged clothing, pinch and slouch hats, bandannas, tobacco, pipes and decks of cards. In addition, Myers had packed the supplies he would need for the construction and operation of a full-blown trading post, located more than a hundred fifty miles from the closest place that could even be remotely called civilization.

  Besides Dixon’s well-respected outfit, and that of Jim Hanrahan, Emanuel Dubbs had thrown in with the grand procession to march south of the dead line. Dubbs had long been a success at the buffalo business, but had heretofore always done his hunting in the fall through the spring. This would be the first time he had thrown in for a summer operation. And to make the whole scheme complete, blacksmith Tom O’Keefe had his heavily laden wagon ready to roll with the others. With plans to establish more than a frontier outpost in mind, these men clearly had their sights set on erecting a small community of their kind right in the heart of the Staked Plain.

  “Let’s roll!” came the shout from Leonard’s lips.

  An instantaneous roar burst from the throats of the near sixty hunters and skinners. It was answered by shouts and whistles and cheers from the crowd of Dodge City citizens, store owners and saloon girls who lined Front Street for the raucous departure.

  Up and down the dusty, rutted path, drivers called out hoarsely to their teams, “Hi-ya! Hi-ya! Hup-hup, hi-ya!”

  Above the wide backs and sturdy yokes, more than forty long, silken-black whips cracked the dry, spring air. Bulls snorted as they leaned into their yokes and traces. Horses whinnied as their riders brought them around in the growing orange light of that Thursday morning, the twenty-sixth day of March, eighteen and seventy-four.

  It was enough to make the hair stand on the back of Dixon’s neck and give him a case of goose pimples. Damn, if he weren’t proud to be leading this procession south, his heavy-barreled .50 across his thighs, a good horse beneath him, and the smell of spring blowing in off the far prairie.

  The hide men were coming to buffalo country. And they were coming to stay.

  * * *

  “You wanna come along when I take him out there with me, Bat?” Seamus asked of the young, handsome twenty-year-old hunter.

  William Barclay Masterson nodded eagerly, an even-toothed smile adding to his good features. To any who met him, he was just what his best friend, twenty-four-year-old Billy Dixon, proudly called him: a chunk of steel, and anything that struck the young hunter drew fire as sure as sun. They were the youngest of the bunch, those two.

  “I figure it time to haze him from hell to breakfast before he causes us trouble,” Masterson declared.

  “Every one of us thinks Fairchild’s got it coming,” Dixon said, a comment that elicited approval from the dozen or so who had gathered to discuss the increasing concern over the greenhorn’s eagerness to have him a go at an Indian, any Indian.

  Across the last four days out of Dodge, the more hardened hunters had grown weary of the tenderfoot’s boasting that he would be the first to raise hair in Indian country. With each mile that brought them closer and closer to the dead line, those same experienced plainsmen grew more anxious that Fairchild would himself prove the spark of real trouble. For the past day a handful of them had even been talking over plans to teach the greenhorn a lesson about both Indians and courage that Fairchild would not soon forget.

  “He’s bad medicine from the forks of a creek, all right,” Charlie Myers grumbled.

  “He’s the fancy-pants sort that wants the rest of us to jump the buckets, and leave us to pay the fiddler when it comes due,” agreed Dutch Henry Born.

  Hanrahan snorted. “I’m in, Billy—for certain. That Fairchild’s a wolf with hydrophobia, a goddamned blizzard in July.”

  Their plans quickly laid during that noon stop to rest the animals, Donegan asked for two others to accompany him onto the prairie and away from camp once they had finished supper that coming evening. Word that Fairchild was due for his comeuppance quickly spread among the rest of the teamsters, hunters and skinners through the long afternoon. An air of anxious expectation settled over their encampment on the South Canadian as twilight came down in fits and starts on the land.

  Tonight, like every night gone before it, a few of the men brought out some stiffened buffalo hides and pegged them out atop the new grass. Others dragged fiddles from battered cases, a few squeeze boxes or mouth harps, and began the evening ritual of music and dancing. The hides provided secure footing for the lively jigs and gyrations of these hard men on a joyful lark. What a sight it had been for Seamus Donegan that first night they camped on Crooked Creek, watching the likes of Shoot’em-Up Mike dancing arm in arm with Light-fingered Jack, or Shotgun Collins performing a genteel bow in front of Prairie Dog Dave before they tripped the light fantastic, energetically clogged a mountain step or stomped through a favored Virginia reel. Those who didn’t dance ringed the buffalo-hide dance floors, clapping and singing along in merriment.

  Firelight and starlight, rollicking music and likable companions. Throughout those crisp spring evenings each man was required to entertain the others in some manner be it playing an instrument, singing a favorite song, dancing or merely a rendition of a remembered story. And while some like Billy Dixon were hard pressed to come up with any manner of talent in those areas, night after night the Irishman regaled one and all with his recitation of Irish poetry and songs, sung a cappella. Without fail, Seamus brought tears to the eyes of these hardened men, with an unexpected remembrance of home to their hearts. Then as quickly he was up and stomping his big boot, roaring out a bawdy Irish drinking song learned in those smoky pubs dotting Boston Towne.

  Their second day’s march had seen the outfits cross the turbulent, red-tinged and spring-swollen Cimarron. A brackish and most capricious river that concealed sinks and a swirling bottom laced with sucks and quicksand, the teamsters spent much of the afternoon locating a suitable ford, then driving their nervous beasts across the tumbling, ever-shifting torrent.

  “Keep your team moving,” Billy Dixon had instructed his two skinners atop their plank seats after they had double-teamed Frenchy’s wagon. “Whatever you do, keep these damned oxen moving. You stop, they’re likely to sink.”

  Donegan had sat there in the saddle, watching as the Dixon’s skinners moved their wagons down the slope. “Never seen anything like this before—I only heard of rivers the nature of this, Billy.”

  “The Cimarron’ll swallow a tree or a buffalo, it gets the chance. Don’t you doubt it will make a grip on a horse or those wagons of mine.” He immediately read the hesitancy and shouted at his timid skinner. “Be at it, boys! Let ’em have the reins and don’t spare the whip! Don’t stop now!”

  Frenchy and Mike McCabe obeyed, whipping the reluctant bulls across the Cimarron, hollering and cursing the snorting, bellowing oxen through the boiling red waters, the first teams to lead the way to the south bank, where the hunters were determined to make camp for the night.

  “We’re in Injun country now,” Dixon had told Donegan on the south bank of the Cimarron that night as the sun sank a’red in the west.

  Donegan had sniffed the breeze in a long
draught, then grinned impishly. “Wondered why the air smelled different, Billy.”

  A third day’s march took them squarely into no-man’s land and brought them to Beaver Creek, the primary tributary of the North Canadian River. To that night’s camp came the first of the buffalo hunters like the English brothers, Jim and Bob Cator, and others like Fred Singer, hide men who had already ventured south on their own hook, all of whom were most happy to bump into such an impressive army of well-armed frontiersmen. It was from that point on that Myers and Leonard asked the hunters to begin scouting in earnest for a suitable location for their trading post.

  Past the mouth of Palo Duro Creek and on to the fast-running, steep-banked Moore’s Creek they drove their long procession of wagons. A pretty place with good timber and water, but not nearly enough grass for what they knew would be the demands of so many hunters coming to and fro from their planned post. Myers decided they would follow Moore’s Creek on south and thereby strike the Canadian.

  It was here they camped near the ruins of the old Adobe Walls their first night by the Canadian. And cemented plans to pay their respects on Fairchild, the unsuspecting easterner who had long been claiming an unrequited fondness for Indian scalps.

  6

  Late March–Early April, 1874

  As the stars blinked into sight one by one overhead, Seamus Donegan sighed and leaned back against the saddle and blanket. This appeared to be the end of their journey south.

  And later in the evening they would pay their respects to the tenderfoot in hopes of giving him enough of a scare that he would likely forget he had ever hungered after an Indian scalp.

  The place was beautiful, Seamus had to admit. Here, near the ruins of the adobe walls that had once enclosed an old trading post, two small streams flowed in from the north while another came in from the south. Whereas the rest of the surrounding countryside was pocked with high, steep-banked streambeds, those three streams gave this particular valley a smooth, more gradual slope. It had been an ideal setting chosen by the traders working for the Bent brothers, who wandered into this valley back in 1838 to establish some business relations with the Kiowa and Comanche.

  For better than four years William and Charles Bent had already conducted trade with many of the southern tribes from their mud fortress located on the north bank of the Arkansas, just across the river from what was then Mexican territory. Yet because the Cheyenne, Arapaho and occasionally the Ute would come in to trade at Bents’ Fort, the Kiowa and Comanche, and even the Apache, had never ventured that far north and west. Therefore the Bents would go to the tribes living with the buffalo on the Staked Plain. Here, as they had done on the Arkansas, the traders built their much smaller post of adobe—mud and straw. Two commodities of which there was never a short supply. A modest trade was carried on for a handful of years before the simmering hostility of some of the roving warrior bands forced the Bent traders to abandon the buildings. It was, in fact, none other than veteran mountain men Kit Carson and John Smith, both then employed by the Bents, who decided to pull out and strike for the Arkansas when a large war party of Kiowa raiders killed a Mexican herder and drove off all but three of their horses, threatening to make things hot for the white men if they remained.

  Across the next two decades, the crumbling walls were visited only by a passing war party, the curious antelope or turkey, or an occasional field mouse escaping the diving pursuit of a swooping red-winged hawk. But in 1864 the Civil War finally came to the Staked Plain, played out in high drama among the crumbling remains of what was even then coming to be known as the Adobe Walls.

  Ever since the beginning of the war of rebellion, Kiowa and Comanche warriors had vigorously attacked commerce plying the Santa Fe Trail that linked New Mexico’s forts and cities with the east. At long last the army ordered an expedition into the field, under the old mountain man, Kit Carson, to punish the warrior bands that had threatened to close down travel along the now-famous trail. Marching his dragoons east from Fort Bascomb, Colonel Carson led a sizable contingent of both California and New Mexico volunteers, along with some Ute mercenaries anxious to chastise their ancient enemies.

  Carson’s scouts led the soldiers to a village upstream from the old ruins, and the battle opened. During the running skirmish that found the soldiers chasing the Indians down the creek valley, the white men and their Indian allies were suddenly surprised to find even more villages boiling with angry warriors. Carson was forced to order a retreat and seek a defensible spot. The crumbling adobe walls offered him just that. With their horses corralled and his two mountain howitzers wheeled into action, the unshakable old mountain trapper held the enraged warriors off until the Indians tired of the contest.

  While the bands did dog his retreat back to New Mexico, they never did any serious damage to the Fort Bascomb column.

  For the last ten years, the Kiowa and Comanche had ruled this valley like sovereign kings. Only an occasional knight errant, some courageous buffalo hunter, had ever laid eyes on the ruins of the adobe walls. But with the falling of the sun that March afternoon, some sixty bearded and long-haired white men rode into the valley of Bent Creek. Without any man really having to give voice to the sentiment, most realized they had arrived. The grass was tall, even at this early season reaching for the bellies of their horses. Here timber stood aplenty for firewood and rafters and cross-beams. Besides, the timbered bottoms held a great assortment of deer and turkey and other wild game. And water—not only the creek and its small feeders, but a number of springs bubbled on the nearby hillsides.

  “You got any idea what went on here?” asked young Bat Masterson of the rest that afternoon as they slid from their saddles and in silence peered over the overgrown ruins.

  Dixon shook his head. Myers and Donegan muttered in wonder. Others began peering on tiptoes over the remains of the old mud walls.

  “I bet this was a old Spanish mission,” ventured Sam Smith.

  That had pricked Donegan’s curiosity. “Any particular reason you say that, Sam?”

  The hunter just shrugged. “S’pose it’s as good a idea as any, Irishman. Bring the church to these damned red heathens, don’t you see?”

  Some of the others chuckled as Smith strode off, then entered the walls themselves with a few others.

  “Lookit this, will you?” shouted Fred Singer.

  Donegan and some of the others joined the hunter inside. “What’d you find?”

  Johnson plowed at the grassy soil with his boot heel. He knelt and brought up a palm filled with dirt, and a few multicolored beads. “Traders were here, I’d say.”

  “Not Dodge City traders, that’s for sure,” Myers said.

  “Injun traders,” Singer declared. “No one else got a need to offer beads like these’uns.”

  The valley of Adobe Walls had been the ideal location for a trading post more than twenty-six years before, and that valley remained a paradise here in 1874 at the northern edge of the Staked Plain.

  Later that evening as he settled beside Seamus at their mess fire, young Bat Masterson counted himself in—eager to have himself a major part in the joke they had planned for the tenderfoot now that the stars were out in full array and the music had begun drifting over the encampment. Here and there around the circle of fires men danced and whirled and jigged atop the buffalo hides pegged down on the new grass. Few showed any visible worry that by venturing this far south they had now plunged their fists far down the throats of the Kiowa and Comanche.

  “I figure we ought to seize time by the forelock,” Billy Dixon said quietly to Donegan.

  The Irishman nodded and arose, stretching. “You fellas see all those turkeys roosting in those cottonwoods up from camp?”

  Several of the conspirators answered enthusiastically.

  “You think we can bag us a few tonight?” Fairchild asked, his face no mask to his boyish delight.

  “I figure we’ll clean up, we do it right,” Charlie Myers said.

  Fairchild rubbed
his hands together with glee. “I can’t wait, Irishman. Let’s be to it.”

  “Whoa,” Donegan called out. “I think the others will agree with me. We got a few more minutes till it gets slap-dark and the turkeys all roosted in the tree branches for the night. Then we can fetch our rifles and go on our turkey shoot.”

  He winked at some of the others then watched as Billy Dixon, Jim Hanrahan and Andy Johnson nonchalantly slipped away out of the firelight and into the darkness, unseen by the eager Fairchild, busy discussing the hunt with Masterson and Myers.

  Within a half hour Myers led Fairchild and Masterson out of camp toward the distant stand of cottonwood where the three other jokesters had just built a particular sort of fire that could not be seen from the hunters’ camp. Then Dixon, Hanrahan and Johnson slipped quietly back into the brush to watch the show begin, awaiting their next cue.

  Masterson halted and turned on Fairchild, saying, “I’ll go first. Charlie, you bring up the rear. Now, we all got to be quiet or we won’t sneak up on them turkeys roosting up yonder.”

  Fairchild bobbed his head eagerly as Masterson led off, the other two following in single file. After something on the order of two hundred yards, young Bat rounded the bend of the creek, stopping suddenly as he threw up his arm in surprise. Fairchild bumped into him, Myers into the tenderfoot. All three gaped at the discovery of a campfire. Bat quickly whirled about, motioning first for complete silence, then pointing down the backtrail that would take them toward camp.

  “God, you don’t suppose it can be?” Masterson asked in a harsh whisper after they had quietly shuffled back into the brush.

  “I ain’t so sure that it don’t look like no white man’s fire to me,” Myers hissed.

  Masterson shook his head, from the corner of his eye seeing how wide Fairchild’s eyes were growing. “None of our boys would be camping out here anyway,” Bat went on, making a grand show of the frightened swallow he took.

  “In-Indians?” Fairchild gulped, his face gone ashen beneath the rising moon.