Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  He smiled, his browned, crooked teeth flashing in the winter sunlight as he reached beneath the smoke-blackened Navajo blanket he had cut a hole through and pulled over his head like a poncho. From somewhere inside his smelly clothes the half-breed pulled a small photograph wrapped in the folds of some crumpled oiled paper.

  The tears instantly stung her eyes as she looked down at the serious faces of her two little sisters.

  Sophia touched them both with her callused fingertips. “Addie,” she said aloud.

  He shushed her harshly.

  Then she gently touched the face of the other sister. “Julie,” she whispered now.

  In the chromo they both wore simple smocks, clothes clean. Both had well-scrubbed faces and hands. Sophie glanced at her own, cut and dirty, the blood caked around her fingernails like dark crescents. Both Adelaide and Julia had on small frock caps and dark capes. Julie sat, her legs tucked under her smock; Addie stood beside her, her hand gently laid on little Julie’s shoulder, a table behind them.

  Sophia found it difficult to keep herself composed, starting to cry as she brushed her fingertips back and forth over the faces of her sisters, knowing they were safe now, that someone had given them a bath and fed them and made warm, clean clothing for them to wear, and even took a photograph of them.

  The half-breed reached for the photograph, ready to take it from her.

  “No!” she growled, fighting him for it as he struggled, his eyes wary again.

  He grabbed her wrists as she cried out, hissing for her silence. She let the small rectangular photograph go, sobbing as she watched it pass into his hands.

  “Good,” he said, then smiled. But it was not a cruel smile, like so many she had seen the Cheyenne wear in the months she had been separated from her younger sisters. This was a kind smile.

  Surprising her, the half-breed turned the photograph over and handed it back to Sophia. She stared at the writing on the back for a long time, disbelieving at first, then finally took the photo into her own hands once more, cradling it across both trembling palms as she read:

  Headquarters Indian Territory Expedition

  In the field, January 20th, 1875

  To the Misses Germaine: Your little sisters are well, and in the hands of friends. Do not be discouraged. Every effort is being made for your welfare.

  (s) Nelson A. Miles, Colonel and Brevet-Major

  General, U.S. Army

  Commanding Expedition

  “May I … may I keep this?” she asked in a gush, holding it to her breast.

  He smiled that smile again, then nodded.

  “I want my sister to see it,” Sophia said. Her eyes looked over the half-breed’s shoulder. “Have you seen her? My sister, Katie? Catherine German?” She tapped the photograph with a dirty finger. “Have you shown this to her?”

  He shook his head, shrugging. “No. I do not see her yet. You keep.” He gently touched the hands she held against her breast then rose. “I go talk with Stone Calf now. General Miles wants you home … soon.”

  It had such a good sound to it. Home.

  Yet in all her joy at seeing the faces of her sisters in that photograph, in all the hope she experienced in reading and rereading the words of the soldier who vowed to rescue her, Sophia felt a twinge of cold emptiness. She doubted that with all that had happened to her, witnessing what had happened to her family, experiencing the cruelty of the women who beat her and the men who repeatedly brutalized her in unspeakable ways—Sophia German doubted she would ever again feel truly safe.

  For what was a home after all? If not a place where a person was supposed to feel safe and loved.

  She cried silent, bitter tears that fell on that sepia-toned photograph of little Addie and Julie German. Praying now that God would take away the bitterness and the pain, and allow her once more to be someplace safe.

  To Chief Stone Calf and his head men, the half-breed presented the colonel’s formal demand for surrender—along with the stern declaration that the two white girls were to be brought back to the reservation alive. Stone Calf said he would consider Miles’s demand and told the half-breed emissary that in the interim he would take charge of the two prisoners to assure their safety until he had decided the course his people would take.

  Through the excruciatingly cold days of February, a few more small bands of Cheyenne trickled into the Darlington Agency in Indian Territory.

  Stone Calf’s band broke camp as soon as the half-breed rode off to the northeast. The Cheyenne marched to the south for days, then began circling, circling back to the northeast themselves. Sophia caught a glimpse of her older sister, Katie, one cold afternoon as the Cheyenne were going into camp. And though they did not speak to one another, Sophia knew from the look on Catherine’s face that she too had seen a copy of the photograph, and knew the army knew where they were—preparing to rescue them. Katie laid a hand over her heart, to signal something to her younger sister, but with the next breath an old squaw was upon her, beating her with a quirt, driving Catherine back among the jumble of camp gear.

  Sophia stood there as long as she could, her hand held over her own heart as well.

  It was a time of extreme cold when the Cheyenne village marched back to country where there were more trees and vegetation and there were places on the ground where the snow had been blown clear as they trudged along the frozen creekbanks. Her feet grew so numb she knew her toes were going to fall off, lost out the open, cracked sides of her dry-split broughams. There seemed to be much excitement in the band over the last few days. Warriors came and went, and Sophia believed they were preparing to do battle with the soldiers once again.

  But old Chief Stone Calf had taken a delegation of a dozen or so warriors with him from his village and rode in to see the agent and the soldiers at the Darlington settlement. Two weeks before, he had sent in Gray Eyes, Mad Wolf, Cedar and Red Eagle with word to the soldier chief that he was coming in, with a request not to send out yellowlegs to hunt his people down now that they were drawing so close to the reservation. With word that he was in fact returning the two white girls to the Cheyenne Agency.

  And now, with Stone Calf saying it with his own lips through the interpreter, Colonel Thomas H. Neill immediately dispatched an ambulance to go with Mad Wolf and Gray Eyes to Stone Calf’s village.

  So it was that there arose a rustle of some excitement at the far edge of camp that early afternoon, the first day of March. Her muscles crying with fatigue, Sophia stood from the work she was doing at the fire. She did not mind cooking for the old women. It kept her warm, like the shred of old, greasy blanket she had been given never could.

  Suddenly Long Back was over her, beating her with his rawhide shield. Then Long Back’s first wife was beating her too. Sophia collapsed to her knees, crying. This must surely be the end—for she had so little strength to go on.

  Please, God, she prayed then, huddling fetally beneath their brutal blows in her tattered clothes and dry-split shoes, just let them kill me now and be done with it.

  Then she heard a foreign voice, a woman’s. And she blinked through her swollen eyes and tears into the bright winter sunlight, watching warriors dragging a shrieking Long Back and his woman off her. And saw for the first time in many days the face of her sister, Catherine.

  Katie was smiling. Behind her other warriors held Catherine’s angry captor, a warrior named Wolf Robe. They grasped him as if he were a prisoner, the same way they restrained Long Back now. Then there were gentle hands lifting Sophia. At first she jerked away, afraid, for they were big, strong hands just the same. But then she realized she had not been touched this way in a long, long time. With gentleness.

  She blinked her swollen, teary eyes and looked into the bright light, seeing first the glimmering brass buttons, rows and rows of them swimming against a sea of dark blue. Gold braid and stripes and shiny rifles and gleaming black belts and holsters. They had beards and mustaches and blue eyes and green eyes and … then she realized they were he
r people.

  No matter that she did not t know their names—these were her people.

  * * *

  Word drifted down from Darlington through the blue grapevine to Reuben Waller at Fort Sill that Agent John Miles had been so distraught upon seeing the condition of the two elder German girls that he could not bring himself to speak, much less question them about their five and a half months of brutal captivity. He left that part of his duties to his wife Lucy.

  Days later, when he had been given the details of Lucy’s interviews with Catherine and Sophia, an enraged Miles penned his report that their Cheyenne owners had hired the young women out as prostitutes.

  While Long Back who held possession of Catherine had not himself treated her brutally, yet he had permitted his Lodge to be visited regularly by the young Bucks of the tribe—He no doubt realizing a pecuniary benefit …

  Ironic as well that a few days later, when, as promised, Stone Calf’s band finally reached the agency to surrender to Colonel Neill, the agent’s rage would mellow to such a bitter sadness at the sight of those destitute Cheyenne. At the end of that momentous day, Miles wrote to his boss, the Indian Commissioner:

  A more wretched and poverty-stricken community than these people presented after they were placed in the prison camp it would be difficult to imagine. Bereft of lodges and the most ordinary cooking apparatus; with no ponies or other means of transportation for wood or water; half-starved, and very little to eat, and scarcely anything that could be called clothing, they were truly objects of pity; and for the first time the Cheyennes seemed to realize the power of the government, and their own inability to cope successfully therewith.

  There was a palpable and explainable joy among the Tenth Cavalry down at Fort Sill when they learned that the agent’s wife had asked the German sisters to help in identifying the warriors who had murdered members of their family, as well as those warriors who had brutalized them in an unspeakable manner. In Reuben Waller’s barracks a cheer went up among those buffalo soldiers when they learned that those two young women had courageously walked down a line of Cheyenne warriors and pointed out at least fifteen of the guilty.

  Perhaps there was some justice in this part of the frontier after all, Reuben thought that night as he lay on his cot, the winds of winter still howling outside in the blackjack oaks along Cache Creek. Justice that didn’t come at the end of a white racist’s rope, nor at the muzzle of an army carbine, much less the tip of iron arrow point.

  As the late winter wound down into a rainy spring, the Tenth Cavalry concerned itself with adjusting to the news that they would be going south and that a new commanding officer would be stationed at Fort Sill—Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie of the Fourth Cavalry. Too, every soldier from Camp Supply down through the distant string of Texas posts were shifting the emphasis of their duty from fighting Indians to feeding their wards and seeing that the tribes did not wander back to the Staked Plain where the last few holdout Comanche still roamed.

  The warriors who had caused blood to flow from the Smoky Hill down to the Rio Grande were coming in and giving themselves up to the army. Back near the end of February, Reuben’s own H Company had watched as Lone Wolf himself rode into Fort Sill with Mamanti and Poor Buffalo. In abject, stony silence they had laid their weapons at the feet of the soldiers standing at attention there on the windswept parade, then reluctantly allowed the buffalo soldiers to take away some four hundred ponies, all they had been able to save when Mackenzie’s scouts captured the herds grazing in the Palo Duro Canyon.

  One by one the bands had come in, their property piled up and put to the torch, their ponies and mules sold at auction to pay reparations to the cattlemen of Texas. The women and children were escorted to the swamp beside Cache Creek where Kicking Bird’s loyal suffered disease and despair, while the haughty warriors of the Kiowa nation were led to an unroofed, unfinished stone icehouse being built at the foot of a hill east of the post. There, once a day, a wagon rolled up to the outer wall and stopped while soldiers threw raw meat over that wall to the inmates. When no more warriors could be accommodated in the icehouse, the buffalo soldiers had to turn the new prisoners over to Kicking Bird.

  Now at the beginning of April, Colonel Davidson and his Tenth Cavalry were on their way south to garrison the posts of southwest Texas. Carpenter’s H Company was the last to leave, here to watch the arrival of the men who had crushed the spirit of so many warriors with their fight at Palo Duro Canyon. And for the first time, Reuben laid eyes on the thin, pale hero of that battle, the man who had gambled heavily in sending his men down into that mist-shrouded crevasse to hand the tribes a dawn surprise.

  On 18 April the Comanche war chief Mow-way rode in to Sill with nearly two hundred of his people. The following day saw the stunning surrender of the powerful Comanche warlord, White Horse, and his band of holdouts.

  One of the greatest, one only, remained among the canyons and the bluffs of the Staked Plain—where he had been born and raised by his Comanche father and his white mother. Quanah’s people ran and hid, sleeping when they dared, taking game when they found it. Living life on the run, as Mackenzie had wanted to force them to do all along.

  Reuben Waller was glad too that he and his H Company were now marching south. There was little pride that a soldier could take in the role of prison guard to a defeated people.

  For now it would be troopers from the Fourth Cavalry, and not the Tenth, who would escort Kiowa, Cheyenne and Comanche prisoners from Fort Sill down to the ancient Spanish Castillo de San Marcos, what had become known as Fort Marion in Florida—stone walls built near a stagnant, mosquito-infested swamp … a hot, sticky land so far from the stark beauty of the Staked Plain where the prairie wind blew strong in a free man’s unfettered hair, day and night, winter or summer.

  42

  June 2, 1875

  Little had Sophia German known a year ago just how much her life would change in so short a time.

  Here she sat on the leather-covered, horsehair-stuffed seats of this railroad passenger car, her head craned out the open window, wind whipping and snarling her hair, her eyes smarting with the black smoke and fiery cinders flung back from the belching smokestack atop the huge, wheezing locomotive pulling her east atop these two iron rails. So much new in the last two days, foreign tastes and smells and textures. The odor of damp steam and coal smoke, of cinders and warm oil. This railroad was a marvelous, magical thing, she had decided—providing as it did the single heartbeat each day to so many small Kansas towns clustered along the tracks stretching from horizon to horizon. From nowhere and gone again.

  “Get your head in here, Sophie,” admonished her older sister. Catherine had always taken on that role with her younger sisters, and especially now that Katie had recently turned eighteen.

  Next month Sophia would observe her sixteenth birthday. She and Catherine had come to talking about it in that way: observe instead of using the word “celebrate.” There still seemed to be little to celebrate, even birthdays, which for a girl in her teens should be more than enough cause for great celebration and joy.

  So she pulled her head back in past the green roller shade and dropped back to her seat, sweeping the hair from her eyes, grinding the tears and cinders from them as well. She had so tried to wrench a little joy from every day, from everything she did, from every person met. But Catherine was certainly not like that Lucy Miles who smiled incessantly and made you happy to be around her, an Indian agent’s wife.

  No, Catherine was still sad about what had happened to them.

  Sophia did miss Papa and Mama and Stephen and Joanna and Rebecca. Mostly Stephen and Papa. They were happy all the time, and now they were gone. That amazed her a bit, that she should allow herself to remember, where for so long Sophia had refused the memory a place within her, holding it at arm’s length and refusing to turn her head in its direction, as if … it simply did not exist. But just then, she had remembered. There was really no helping it, for she really did remember
all the terrible, bloody aftermath of that awful day among the rolling, grassy hills.

  Sophia often thought, as she did now, on the feelings she had for her captors and tormentors, for the men who had abused her so horribly. And repeatedly.

  After she and Catherine had silently marched along the lines of warriors with Lucy Miles and a clearly inebriated Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Neill, the fourteen whom the girls had pointed out were separated from their people, and there began a process of finding more whom Neill could use to fill his quota, putting them in iron shackles in preparation for their long trip to Fort Marion near the ocean in faraway Florida. Sophia had also pointed out Buffalo Calf Woman, Mochi, telling what role in the murders and later torture was played by this wife of war chief Medicine Water. But Stone Calf himself escaped punishment due to the protests from the two German girls that the old chief had done what he could to protect them once he could read the writing on the wall and saw that surrender was inevitable.

  So much time had it taken that sixth of April, a cold, blustery, spring day, that near sundown Lieutenant Colonel Neill grew irritated and quickly brought the chore to a conclusion by ordering eighteen warriors arbitrarily taken from the line without any evidence or testimony of their guilt. He had his half-breed interpreter, Romero, explain that he would find the guilty parties at a later date, that he was using these eighteen only as substitutes for the time being.

  But for the next three days Neill did nothing to have the Mexican-Cheyenne Romero interrogate the prisoners further.

  On 9 April the lieutenant colonel explained to Agent and Mrs. Miles that one Cheyenne was likely as guilty as the next, and that he had decided to let his selection process stand. Thirty-three prisoners were ordered out of their holding cells and escorted over to the blacksmith’s hut to be fitted with the white man’s iron shackles.

  That mid-morning, Sophia stood at the window of the school, watching the process as one by one by one the warriors stepped forward between a pair of guards and submitted to having the straps of heavy iron riveted around their ankles and wrists. Throughout the whole process, Cheyenne women had gathered among the nearby trees, taunting their men, shaming them for submitting. Yet while the eyes of the warriors held much hate for their captors, they did not protest.