Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Dixon muttered as he tore off running. He was heaving, his chest burning before he knew it. How his legs were staying under him, he had no idea—just that they were pumping across the heaving land. Without anything to eat in two days, with that bullet wound in his calf that still seeped, without any sleep in more than twenty-four hours, he ran.

  “Amos! Amos! It’s me!” he hollered, thundering past the frightened surgeon and his two stewards, who were cowering among the mesquite brush.

  Chapman was struggling to elbow his way above the lip of the wallow as Dixon approached.

  “Goddamn you, Dixon!”

  “Amos—why in hell you shooting at the doctor?”

  “Doctor?” Woodall asked, his voice catching in his throat.

  “I brung you a surgeon, boys,” Dixon replied, grinning.

  “Shit, Billy,” Amos growled, looking sheepish. “Don’t you go blaming me for not knowing. I heard two shots a while back, then another one not long ago, and then made out them three on horseback coming our way. I just figured they’d made quick work of you and was coming up to do in the rest of us.”

  Grumbling about how ungrateful the men in the wallow were, Surgeon Fouts crawled around the edge of the pit, examining the wounds of all, including Dixon. The stewards stood nearby, nervously glancing at the body on the ground.

  “This one’s dead?”

  “Smith. Private,” Woodall said. “Killed in action, Surgeon.”

  Standing and straightening his coat, Fouts again glanced over the scene perfunctorily. “I see. For this motley band of couriers, you almost cost the life of one of my stewards. Hell, you might damn well have shot me.”

  Dixon watched him turn and mount up, ordering his stewards to ride double.

  “Doctor? Ain’t … ain’t you gonna tend to these men?”

  “Not a one of you are going to die,” he hurled his words over his shoulder. “I must report the unfortunate loss of government property to Major Price. A horse is a costly piece of equipment.”

  “That son of a bitch,” growled Woodall. He started to rise, wincing as he struggled up. Harrington and Rath held him down.

  “You stay put. I don’t want you bleeding no more,” Dixon told him.

  Such was Price’s determination when the major rode up with the rest of his command. He looked with disdain upon the muddy buffalo wallow, more so at the poor condition of its defenders, yet did not order the surgeon to attend to their wounds. Instead, Major William R. Price chastised the defenders for their destruction of government property in killing a fine horse, which he was now going to have to account for in a report that would reflect on his campaign record.

  “Where you going, Major?” Dixon asked as Price gave the orders for his column to move out.

  “To escort Captain Lyman’s supply train to General Miles’s base camp.”

  Dixon was fast growing furious. “You ain’t leaving anyone with us?”

  Price looked them over. “You held them off once, Dixon. I don’t have any doubt you can again, if need be. Besides, we’re sweeping the country clear of hostiles as we go.”

  Billy was sputtering mad, his rage burning with more fire than had that Kiowa bullet when it burrowed through his leg. “How ’bout some doctoring supplies.”

  Price snorted. “If the surgeon ascertained that you needed medical attention, he would have left them.” The major started to rein away.

  Dixon grabbed the officer’s bridle. “What about ammunition? We’re low, goddammit. If those red bastards do come back—we don’t stand a lick of a chance, Major!”

  “Release my horse,” Price hissed. When Dixon had done so, Price went on. “I do not feel compelled by your situation here to leave you any arms or ammunition. We have driven the warriors before us and you should not have any need for resupply from us.”

  “For God sake—leave these men some food, Major,” Dixon pleaded, shaking his head in disbelief. His hand shook as he pointed to the wounded in the buffalo wallow. “These men … none of ’em et in more’n a day and a half.”

  “I have nothing, sir.”

  “You got a whole goddamned supply train!”

  “Step back, Dixon—or I will have you placed under arrest!” Price snarled, then kicked his horse savagely and loped away from the wallow.

  As the major rode on down the slope, a few soldiers who had been within earshot eased out of column and scurried past the muddy depression, handing the five survivors what they could of their rations of dried beef and hardtack, quickly glancing at the muddy, bloodied body of Private Smith, then hurrying back into formation.

  “God bless you,” Woodall told them, each and every one, as they gave what they could in the way of rations, a few cartridges for the defenders’ army carbines before they marched out of sight, moving south for Miles’s cantonment.

  “The general will send someone back for us soon as he hears,” the sergeant reminded the men left behind at the wallow. “Miles won’t let that strutting peacock of a major get away with this, he won’t.”

  The sun rose that day, climbed to mid-sky then fell into the far west, eventually drying the muddy soup at the bottom of the buffalo wallow before twilight descended for a second time on the five defenders. Stars came out and an autumn moon rose in the southeastern sky, slowly, hour by hour climbing past mid-heaven.

  Billy could not quite force his eyes to stay open, nor keep his ears alert for all his fatigue. He knew it must be some time past midnight as his eyelids drooped, heavier and heavier—

  The distant blare of a bugle brought them all alert.

  “That wasn’t—” Woodall began in a hopeful gush.

  Then it was there again, a little more clear this time.

  “By damn—it’s out of the south!” Dixon roared. He was swallowing the lump in his throat, biting his lip as Rath and Harrington hugged one another, then pounded Woodall on the back.

  Dixon fired his Sharps. Chapman raised his and fired as well. Now the bugler blew a different call, and then the men in the wallow made out the sound of voices coming toward them out of the night-black. White voices calling for direction.

  “This way!” Dixon yelled, his voice seizing in his throat. “We’re … we’re over here!”

  Billy held his hand out to Amos Chapman as the sound of the mounted horse soldiers drew closer and closer. They shook in silence, neither one having to speak what was in their hearts.

  35

  Late September 1874

  For seven days that last week of August, Colonel Ranald Slidell Mackenzie marched his 640 men north from Fort Concho toward the caprock of the Staked Plain, where he would engage the red lords of the southern prairie.

  Never before had the Army of the West ordered into the field an expedition of comparable battle experience, readiness and downright grit. Both the geography and the climate would soon do their best to crack the colonel’s resolve. It had already proved to be the hottest summer in any man’s memory, an excruciating torture of dry water holes found by the advance scouts, stifling clouds of dust raised by wagon tires and horse hooves, as well as nothing but sun-withered grass to feed the animals following each day’s punishing march, any of it cruel enough for man and horse alike as Mackenzie demanded more and more of his “Southern Column” with each subsequent day.

  But already Seamus had realized this was a real fighting unit, filled up and down the ranks, tunic, stripe and braid, with men who would take their due and not grumble about the heat and food, the saddle galls and the bad water. On that tough ride north, it didn’t take long for the Irishman to realize the Fourth Cavalry was the one outfit Sherman and Sheridan had to send out to crush these tribes of the southern plains. Mackenzie’s men would do it, by damn—these soldiers who would follow their colonel not only to Hell and back, but twice around the Devil on the way.

  Then on 30 August, Sharp Grover, Seamus Donegan, the Fort Richardson post guide named Henry W. Strong and three of Grover’s Seminoles fou
nd enough graze along with enough water in both Catfish Creek and the nearby Freshwater Fork of the Brazos River to satisfy the colonel’s requirement for a supply camp. Mackenzie halted his columns just south of the majestic caprock, allowing his troops to recoup themselves and their animals after the brutalizing march. Here stood a massive series of hulking buttes and rocky cliffs rising at times more than a thousand feet over the surrounding prairie noted for its stark, naked austerity. Those cliffs supported juniper and cottonwood and mesquite of the famed Llano Estacado. Ancient home to the Kwahadi Comanche.

  Here were given rise the four tongues of the Red River, each racing turbulent and earth-colored to the east, each cutting across the centuries its own meandering canyons into the ocher and red, yellow and pink escarpments of this no-man’s land. With each spring came the runoff, with each autumn more thunderstorms, swelling each trickle to overflowing, slashing away at the loose, sandy soil, water careening down every dangerous scree-covered slope to create a broken maze of cliff and canyon spiderwebbing the southern reaches of the Texas Panhandle.

  This was to be the third campaign in four years for Mackenzie’s famous Fourth. And would prove to be the singular career effort that would finally win a reputation for the ambitious, nervous-ridden, harsh and eccentric colonel who would again drive his men to the point of breaking in his search for Quanah Parker’s Kwahadis. In addition to eight companies of his own Fourth Cavalry, four companies of the Tenth Infantry and one company of the Eleventh Infantry marched under Mackenzie. His scouts were organized under Lieutenant William A. Thompson and Sergeant John B. Charlton, the same soldier who was credited for firing the fatal shot into the breast of Kiowa chief Satank three years before. These soldier scouts were joined by Grover and Donegan, a dozen Tonkawas, a handful of Lipan-Apaches and thirteen coffee-skinned Seminoles.

  One of the Lipans, Seamus had recently learned, was actually a Mexican half-breed named Johnson who had for many years operated out of the Rio Grande country as a Comanchero gun-runner to the Comanche, trading in captives and cattle and horses stolen from the settlements and reservations. When the half-breed had seen the writing on the wall and presented himself to Mackenzie, offering his services as a guide to the trackless expanse of the Llano Estacado, the colonel snatched Johnson up without hesitation. While the soldiers established the base camp, Johnson was directed to take the Seminoles north to begin scouring the country, looking for trails, sign, smoke—anything that might lead Mackenzie to the enemy.

  Johnson’s trackers returned to tell the colonel they had cut three separate trails.

  Leaving three of his infantry companies behind on Catfish Creek to garrison his supply base on 20 September, Mackenzie immediately pushed his column north—450 men, twenty-one commissioned officers, three surgeons, both white and Indian scouts along with Lieutenant H. W. Lawton’s supply train and its infantry escort. His cavalry Mackenzie divided into two battalions: the first, Troops D, F, I and K under Captain Napoleon B. McLaughlin, who had attained a credible Civil War record and been the virtual hero of Mackenzie’s attack on the Kickapoo village at Remolino, Mexico, in 1873; the second composed of A, E, H and L under Captain Eugene B. Beaumont, blooded at Gettysburg and a genuine hero in Sherman’s siege at Atlanta, under whose command Mackenzie’s forces had attacked the expansive Comanche camp on the North Fork of the Red River in 1872.

  After two days’ travel, the horrid drought that had wreaked its vengeance on the southern plains finally broke. Whereas before the men and horses had to march through stifling dust raised by thousands of hooves and iron tires, now the soldiers and their mounts were forced to muck through thick, red gumbo, sleep in the cold mud like homeless litters of shoats, and grow accustomed to living day and night soaked to the skin beneath a relentlessly gray autumn sky.

  Mackenzie drove his cavalry hard. The supply train struggled to keep up as the colonel’s scouts sniffed and probed here then there, feeling their way north along the face of the caprock, trying to sense where the warriors and their villages would be found. Knowing, as they talked about every night over smoky fires of wet wood when wood could be found, that the enemy was slowly being squeezed between five columns. One day soon the fight would come—when the Kiowa and Comanche and Cheyenne no longer had anyplace to turn, to escape. One day … soon.

  For two days, the twenty-second and twenty-third, Mackenzie called a halt on colorful Quitaque Creek, hoping his outfit could dry out and ready itself to move on into the broken country formed centuries before by the tributaries of the Red River. The next day his command was again battered by a horrific thunderstorm that sent lightning crashing against the pink and white buttes, torrents of swollen creeks rushing past his huddled forces who cowed before the brutal winds whipped out of the north. After nearly three days of intermittent northers, the weather eventually cleared on the twenty-fifth.

  As quickly Mackenzie was among them, whipping his men into formation, bawling orders. He was late, and impatient for it.

  They made twenty grueling miles that day, only the Fourth Cavalry able to reach Tule Canyon, leaving his infantry and supply train to muck along through the mire and mud as well as they could far to the rear. During that grueling day, even the cavalry were ordered to intermittently walk as a means of preserving their mounts.

  At dusk a bone-weary Seamus Donegan followed the rest of the scouts back into that canyon to find Mackenzie’s troops making camp.

  “You crossed a fresh trail, I understand,” Mackenzie demanded without ceremony as he hurried up to his chief of scouts.

  Lieutenant Thompson nodded.

  Sharp Grover moved up to talk. “Maybe as many as fifteen hundred ponies.”

  “Where’s it headed?” the colonel inquired, his eyes alive with keen interest.

  “East,” answered Henry Strong.

  “But it is my estimation they are drawing us off, Mr. Strong,” said the colonel. “A village that big can’t be moving east—toward the reservations. We’ve flushed them and they’re fleeing north!”

  Mackenzie was a whirl of motion, turning to holler into the twilight illuminated with a hundred fires. “Beaumont! Get me Captain Beaumont!”

  While McLaughlin’s First Battalion was allowed to recoup in the canyon, Mackenzie ordered Beaumont’s Second Battalion to follow the trail. Gratified that he wasn’t needed to ride along with the Seminoles to show Beaumont the way, Donegan tore at some dried beef and soaked his hardtack in a steaming cup of coffee that night before he collapsed in his bedroll, the fragrant wisp of a lace handkerchief under his cheek.

  Mackenzie found nothing that night, for all his trouble groping around in the dark.

  At dawn the colonel moved another five miles down the Tule Canyon, still probing, most every man among them watching the scouts who, to the trailwise, had grown all the more wary. Sign was to be found everywhere a man cared to look. At sundown Thompson’s scouts returned to the new camp with reports of warrior activity in the entire area.

  “They’ll hit us tonight for sure, Seamus.”

  “These Comanche like that?” Donegan asked, glancing at the sky as he asked.

  Grover looked up at the coming full moon as well. “It’s another Comanche moon, Irishman. The third since they hit you at Adobe Walls. Damn right these bastards attack at night. Mackenzie knows that as well as any man.”

  Donegan nodded. “Aye, I forgot you rode with the colonel—fighting these same bloody h’athens a few winters ago.”

  Hoofbeats hammered through the rocky canyon. Voices called out greeting as the solitary horseman rode past. The Comanchero stopped for a moment, his horse lathered, speaking in broken Kiowa with Henry Strong.

  “What’s Johnson say?” Donegan asked Grover, knowing Sharp understood some of the Kiowa tongue, the universal language of the southern plains.

  “Said he saw some buffalo running northwest of us, almost due north in fact.”

  “What’s up there?”

  Grover shrugged as Johnson pulled away
from the white scouts, intent on searching out Mackenzie in the camp stretched like a rawhide thong alongside Tule Creek. “Don’t rightly know, Seamus. But if the buffalo are running, it’s likely someone’s running ’em.”

  It wasn’t long before criers were coming through camp, with orders to prepare for an expected attack from the hostiles. As Donegan and Grover picketed their horses, then hobbled the animals’ forelegs, the older scout suggested “cross-lining”: with a length of rope tying a fore-hoof to the opposite hind leg.

  “You act like these Comanche gonna run off with the horses,” Seamus said as he tightened the last knot on his horse.

  “Damn right I do,” Grover replied. “When I last rode with Mackenzie, the bloody Kwahadi did just that: run off the regiment’s horses—including the colonel’s personal mount. Damn, was he mad. I doubt a man ever forgets something like that.”

  “Mackenzie been waiting for a crack at these bastirds, is it?”

  “Look around you, Seamus,” Grover said, pointing out the colonel’s preparations. Squads of skirmishers, what the soldiers called “sleeping parties” of a dozen to fifteen men, were placed out among the rocks around the entire herd. Every man was on alert, pickets placed every twenty feet along the length of the perimeter. “Mackenzie may’ve been beat once. But he learned his lesson well. And the colonel ain’t a man to be beat a second time. He’s come here to this country to win this ride out. Mark my word—Mackenzie’s gonna win.”

  Three hours after sunset, the Comanche came.

  More than 250 horsemen tore in among the regiment’s herd where Beaumont’s A Company held their ground, driving back the baffled raiders. But instead of being driven off by the skirmishers and pickets, the Comanche began their traditional circling of the herd, feinting in and back out again, looking, probing, testing for a weak spot. After thirty minutes of panic and sporadic gunfire, the ghostly horsemen disappeared into the autumn night as quickly as they had come.