Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  As Luther Thrasher slowly walked around the scene, a bandanna covering his mouth and nose, he knew he would not soon forget this sight. Much less the sickeningly sweet odor of decaying, bloated flesh. It had been two days since he had seen these men.

  All seven were laid out in a row, facing the sky, horribly mutilated. Thrasher had never seen anything like this. Oh, he had heard stories told. But never actually laid his own eyes on anything so savagely gruesome.

  Piled in the tall, dry grass, still hitched to the wagon, lay the four oxen, their sides bristling with arrows or pocked with bullet holes infested now with flies and beetles. Rear haunches had been sliced off and carried away as food by the raiders.

  It made Thrasher aware of the noise here in the awesome silence of this grassy swale near the creek. The noise of the huge deerflies crawling over and in and through the blood and gore of the men and their terrible wounds.

  Young John Keuchler’s skull was caved in, as were the skulls of both James Shaw and his son Allen. Harry Jones, along with both Oliver Short and young Daniel Short, had been entirely scalped, from brow to nape of the neck, taking off the tops of the ears with the scalp. All were still fully clothed, their garments ripped where the warriors had slashed the victims, pockets turned inside out looking for something to steal.

  But most horrific was the condition of Oliver Short—that compass smashed into his forehead, blood pooled and dried now in the corners of his wide-open eyes. Staring back at Luther Thrasher.

  “Captain.”

  He welcomed the diversion, walking over to where Crist was pointing at the ground.

  “Look at the boot prints,” Crist suggested. “They run off this way—and I mean he was running.”

  Thrasher nodded. “Yes, those are Shaw’s prints. The old man was running when they got him.”

  “Dragged him back here to the others. Think he was the last?” Crist asked.

  Then Luther nodded. “God bless his soul—but if he were the last, and had to watch what happened to the rest of these … to his son as well … then, God bless James Shaw’s soul.”

  28

  Moon of Plums Ripening, 1874

  Lone Wolf and Mamanti had hurried their people west on the trail to Palo Duro Canyon after those two days of fighting at the Anadarko Agency had driven off not only Big Red Meat’s band of Comanches, but the hostile Kiowa bands as well. Davidson’s buffalo soldiers had seen to that.

  Now, along with the Comanches, the Kiowa were fleeing almost due west, across Rainy Mountain Creek and Elk Creek, striking for both the North and Salt forks of the Red River before they would arrive at the Prairie Dog Fork which would lead them to the deep red hues of that deep canyon slashed into the flat, forbidding desert face of the Staked Plain. It was there in the Palo Duro that Lone Wolf would make plans with Mamanti to lead more raids south of the Red River, into the land of the white man’s ranches and settlements.

  At Lost Valley, Lone Wolf had claimed revenge on the young white man for the death of Tauankia. Now he could get on with this business of making war.

  Almost single-handedly Lone Wolf had irritated the pride of Big Red Meat and pricked the manhood feelings of the chief’s Comanche warriors—stirring up the two-day skirmish at the Wichita Agency.

  And yet Lone Wolf knew it was but the beginning.

  This was to be a glorious war, he thought as he watched the other head men of the Kiowa bands gather in a large circle beneath the mesquite trees along a narrow stream here west of the North Fork of the Red River. It had been a brutally hot summer, hotter than any summer the old men in the tribe could remember in their long lifetimes, in the stories of the ones gone before. So it was they gathered at twilight as the weary village on the move quieted for the night and the men could talk about the route they would take over the next few days. More especially, they were gathering to talk about the news brought in by scouts that afternoon: a long supply train of wagons had been spotted to the north of the Washita, in the direction of the Antelope Hills and moving south. It was within easy striking distance. A brief skirmish would be all that was needed, and Lone Wolf’s people would have not only the supplies captured, but a resounding victory under their belts. Lone Wolf was filled with happy anticipation.

  Still, even with as much success as his war band had enjoyed in the last two moons, Lone Wolf did not like the looks on some of the faces as the old men and warriors settled to the ground on pieces of buffalo robe and blanket for this council.

  Mamanti called for a burning brand. It was hurried from the fire by a young student of the shaman. Mamanti stoked the great pipe, then offered his prayer to the four winds and the sky, finally praying to the Earth Mother to protect them as the Kiowa people walked across her breast in peace, raced their ponies across her breast in war.

  As the pipe made its slow, deliberate path around the great circle of their council ring, Lone Wolf angrily sensed that the atmosphere had become grave, when it should have been much more joyous. And after Mamanti had discussed his opinion on the route to take over the next few days, Lone Wolf knew why so many of the others wore such dark, morose masks of doubt and defeat on their faces. It was even more plain to see as one after another of the Kiowa head men spoke that they had lost their militant fervor—while that same fever still burned in Lone Wolf’s breast.

  “But our women and children grow very hungry,” Woman’s Heart complained.

  “We can feed them on the juicy hump of the buffalo when we have gone a little farther,” Mamanti reminded them. “They have only to wait.”

  “They are hungry now,” Big Tree said, then his eyes touched each one of the militant ones. “Each of us knows the white hunters have been there before us. Not one among you can guarantee there will be buffalo when we reach the Staked Plain.”

  “This is true,” Woman’s Heart agreed. “The buffalo hunters—they have killed most of the great herds already. And we cannot find the buffalo that remain.”

  “We have not looked hard enough,” Lone Wolf said, growing disgusted with the direction this talk was taking. He never would have thought—

  “I must go back,” Satanta said suddenly, stunning the entire assembly.

  “Go? Go back?” Lone Wolf asked his old friend, the cold catching in his chest like a winter storm.

  Satanta nodded. “If the soldiers catch me making war again, catch me even roaming with a war band … they will put the iron bracelets on my hands and feet. Carry me back to Tehas where they will work me on the tracks for the smoking horse again. I could not take that, old friend.”

  For the moment Lone Wolf was confused. He felt sympathy for his longtime friend. They had fought the white man, gone on raids together as young men, held out together as long as they could—even been threatened with hanging death at the end of Yellow Hair Custer’s rope. Yet Satanta had remained strong, resolved.

  And now …

  “You will go back too, Big Tree?” Lone Wolf turned to ask of the other war chief, who with Satanta had been imprisoned in Tehas.

  Big Tree nodded. Only that.

  “So. This is what we come to?” Lone Wolf asked as the others averted their eyes from him. “I now see Kicking Bird is not the only one who likes the taste of the white man’s greasy bacon, the texture of the white man’s worm-infested flour, eh?”

  Woman’s Heart stood, haughty and furious at the affront, ready to leave the council. “No, I do not like the taste of the white man’s food. But when it is all I have to feed my children, I will take it. No longer can I feed them on your promises, Lone Wolf. Their little bellies grow emptier with every day. Your promises don’t even fill our hearts any longer.”

  “I make no promises that are not true!” Lone Wolf snapped. “We will find the buffalo. We will unite with all the Comanche and Cheyenne who wish to live free. We will live as our fathers did—and drive the white man out of this land. And we will attack that wagon train near the Washita, wipe it out—”

  “No!” Woman’s Heart shoute
d, pointing, his hand trembling. “No more can we allow the Tonkawas and Delawares and Pawnee trackers to lead the yellowleg soldiers to our villages and kill our families. The buffalo are going, Lone Wolf! Listen! Can you hear the great herds moving north? See there—along the skyline to the west? There are no buffalo out there. And soon there will be no free Indians there either. Not Cheyenne. Not Comanche.” His throat seized a moment. “And not Kiowa.”

  “I will be there,” Mamanti said harshly, holding up his sacred stuffed owl—a symbol of not only his office, but his occult power as well. “And so will my people.”

  “You will be dead, Mamanti,” Big Tree said suddenly, a sad, bitter tone to his voice. “And there will be no one to grieve for you. The Tonkawas will see that your families are killed by the same soldiers that will harry and hunt and track you down. Until the only Kiowa left are those of us who will return to the reservation.”

  For long moments it was quiet, until Satanta said, “I go now.” He arose slowly, his huge bulk still a powerful image in the life of his people. “Tomorrow, we start back to the reservation.”

  “You will beg the agent to let you live beside the stinking camp of Kicking Bird, where his people grow ill?” Lone Wolf asked.

  Satanta nodded, his face almost impassive. “Yes, if we must, we will live in that camp beside the stinking water filled with human offal. Where the air is filled with the stench and the sickness of the soldier fort. At least there we will know that the soldiers will not attack at dawn, will not murder our women and children and the old ones.”

  “It is for the old ones that I keep fighting,” Lone Wolf said as he stood. “It is for the little ones too.”

  Surprising most in that circle, Lone Wolf suddenly crossed the council ring and embraced his old friend of long-ago days.

  “I will always remember the Satanta I grew up with,” he said, tears moistening his eyes. “The Satanta who carried his red lance into battle, wetting it with the blood of many an enemy—Tonkawa, Pawnee, Caddo and white man. That is the Satanta who will always live in here.” A finger tapped against his heart.

  For a moment the White Bear could not speak, and when he did, Satanta was still reluctant to bring his eyes to Lone Wolf’s. But slowly he brought Lone Wolf’s hand to his breast, laying it over his heart.

  “And it is here in the heart of Satanta, that you shall always live, my friend. For you are the last of the mighty Kiowa.”

  * * *

  The ninth of September, he thought, rocking on the seat of the high-walled Pittsburgh freight wagon.

  James McKinley had himself enough of buffalo hunting for now. Across two seasons he had hunted the great beasts south of the Arkansas, then pushed south of the Cimarron. And then he had gone even farther with the others last spring, all the way to the Canadian and the settlement that came to be known as Adobe Walls. McKinley had been there in Jimmy Hanrahan’s saloon the morning those screaming brown horsemen raced out of the sun and almost battered in the doors before he and the rest could throw tables down for barricades and start returning gunfire at the hundreds and hundreds streaming into the meadow.

  McKinley shuddered involuntarily now—as yet unable to shake the vision of that day-long siege, still troubled by it all the more at nights. He awoke sweating at times, even though the season was slowly turning. A brief, noisy, crackling thundershower came across this land most every day now. Turning the air damp and chill. Yet he still awoke sweating, afraid. Knowing how lucky he and the rest had been.

  Even with those brief daily thunderstorms, the drought continued. The ground only drank up each brief cloudburst, without becoming so much as muddy.

  Giving up on the idea of hunting buffalo until the Indian war was settled, McKinley had hired out to wagonmaster Jacob Sandford as a contract teamster once the government got its southern campaign rolling. He was employed to haul freight from Fort Dodge to Camp Supply, and from there on south as Colonel Nelson A. Miles marched steadfastly into Indian country. By now, the ninth, Miles had established a cantonment on the banks of the North Fork of the Red River, near the caprock of the Staked Plain. From there he was already striking out at the infernal warrior bands who had attacked Adobe Walls, who were continuing to murder and plunder and burn up and down the entire length of the Panhandle of Texas.

  With the sway and rock of the big wagons pulled by a six-hitch of mule, McKinley could let his eyes droop against the warm autumn sun and doze a bit. His team obediently followed the wagon before them, forever plodding southwest out of Fort Supply for the base camp established by Miles. There were thirty-six wagons, most covered by dingy canvas. Strung up and down the trail on either side of the column were some fifty soldiers, I Company of the Fifth Infantry. And out in the van as skirmishers sent ahead of them all rode Lieutenant Frank West and a dozen troopers from the Sixth Cavalry. In command of these men and the train was Captain Wyllys Lyman of the Fifth Infantry, widely known as an officer Miles himself trusted highly.

  They had begun this long, circuitous march back at Miles’s base camp. With empty wagons Lyman had led the escort northeast to the Canadian, where they were to have met a wagon train due out of Camp Supply on 5 September. For two anxious days Lyman had waited while his teamsters languished in camp before the captain sent out six of his own men under Lieutenant Frank West to find out what had become of the train from Fort Supply. The following day an alarm was raised when a teamster named Moore was found murdered and scalped not far from camp. Every man was put on alert.

  Late on the eighth, the wagons from Camp Supply showed up at Lyman’s camp on Commission Creek—a full four days late. The campaign supplies were off-loaded into the captain’s wagons for the return trip. Plans were to heave about at sunrise the next morning, laden with what fodder an army on the move badly needed.

  Then sometime in the early morning hours of the ninth, a ripple of excitement shot through the sleeping encampment. Four men had found their way into camp, leading not only four weary, muddy horses, but a teenaged captive. He was a red-haired herd guard who the four white men had taken prisoner on their frightening trip north. Yet they had discovered this pony guard was actually a white boy. Evidently taken captive as a small child, the youth called himself Tehan, for the land where he had been taken by the Kiowa, his adopted people.

  Around the fires the grimy, muddy four gathered, hunger and trial written on their gaunt faces. Lieutenant Frank Baldwin, Miles’s own chief of scouts, was accompanied by three civilian buffalo hunters known to McKinley: Ira Wing, Lem Wilson and William Schmalsle. The four greedily gulped at half-boiled coffee and stuffed their mouths with hardtack and raw bacon, grease dripping off their whiskered chins as they told of their harrowing trip north to locate the overdue Lyman.

  “Miles was goddamned worried about you, Captain,” declared Baldwin. “Especially when he got word that some of the hostiles slipped around behind his column and might be between Kansas and him. He was afeared for you and your train.”

  “Who are these hostiles?” Lyman had asked.

  “Two hundred Cheyenne, we’re told. Got reports on ’em making trouble,” Baldwin said between gulps of coffee.

  “Eat up, men,” Lyman told the four. “Then you can tell us of your journey here.”

  When they did, Baldwin told a tale of three days of running into war parties time and again, of being forced to escape for their lives in the dark up sheer canyon walls, of running smack into an Indian village, mistaking the lodges for what they thought were the army’s conical Sibley tents.

  Just this morning at their breakfast fires, Lyman had confided in Sandford’s civilian teamsters what he would not share with his own soldiers: that in the report from Miles brought them by Baldwin, the colonel had expressed worry that some of the hostiles had slipped around behind his own column as they had marched south. Lyman strongly suggested that the drivers keep their eyes moving from here on out, searching the distant hills along the road. He wanted no surprise if indeed the warrior bands had sli
pped behind the Miles command—chopping the colonel’s supply line as neatly as they would with a scalping knife.

  That morning as the sun poked its head over the blackjack oaks in the east, Baldwin saluted and bid the wagon train farewell. The lieutenant was continuing on to Fort Supply with Miles’s dispatches and two of his civilian scouts, Wilson and Wing. William Schmalsle had been selected to ride back with Lyman’s train, placed in charge of the redheaded Kiowa captive Baldwin was sending back for Miles himself to interrogate.

  The autumn sun on its morning climb was finally beginning to warm the air a little this ninth day of September. To James McKinley, it damn well promised to be a beautiful day.

  Then the air resounded with gunfire and the screams of warriors.

  McKinley’s heart shot to his throat as men began shouting up and down the long column of thirty-six wagons. Unlike most of the others, civilian and teamster, this survivor of Adobe Walls knew what it meant to be under attack.

  29

  September 9–11, 1874

  Lone Wolf had watched the progressive battle all morning. From the first moment of attack, the Kiowa and Comanche warriors had harassed the white men and the soldiers up and down both sides of their long column. Horsemen darted back and forth, sniping here and there, looking for a soft spot to attack, hungry for coup counting.

  If the days were numbered that a young man could make a name for himself earning scalps and ponies, then this might surely be one of the last great battles for these young warriors. It was a glorious day to fight, Lone Wolf thought through the long morning as the wagon train ground slowly toward the Washita.

  From hill to hill he and Mamanti rode as the morning progressed, stopping from time to time to watch the fighting as the wagons and their soldier escort plodded forward, for the most part keeping the brown horsemen at bay. Now as the sun hung just past mid-sky, Big Red Meat rode up and halted beside the two Kiowa chiefs.

  “I am tiring of this fight,” the Comanche growled.