Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (81 page)

For Carson, the Indian wars were thus increasingly assuming a vicious, self-perpetuating pattern: Each engagement seemed to beget another. In order to keep the Navajos and Mescaleros safely on the reservation, he needed to pursue their common enemy. In order to preserve his two earlier victories, he now needed to secure a third.

On November 12, 1864, Carson left New Mexico for the plains of the Texas panhandle with some 400 men, including 75 Utes serving as scouts. His well-armed force was composed of two companies of cavalry, one company of infantry, and a battery of two 12-pounder mountain howitzers. Carson rode a beloved racehorse and wore a thick wool greatcoat.

Unlike during the Navajo campaigns, General Carleton had given Carson wide latitude to direct the course of the action. Carleton made it clear that he wanted no women or children killed—at least not “willfully and wantonly”—but otherwise, it was Carson’s fight to win or lose and to prosecute as he saw fit. On the subject of strategy, Carleton offered few words: “You know where to find the Indians, you know what atrocities they have committed, you know how to punish them.” Carleton did not want Carson to make peace, only war. “You know I don’t believe much in smoking with Indians,” the general wrote. “They must be made to fear us or we can have no lasting peace.” At this point, Carleton suggested, all treaties with Indians were but “theatricals simply for effect.”

The timing of the expedition was deliberate. Through the summer months and on into early fall, the Comanches lived a scattered existence, roaming the plains in small bands in search of migratory buffalo and whatever loot might present itself. But by mid-November they began to concentrate for the winter, setting up their lodges in extended villages along a few creeks and rivers. This was the time to catch them all in one place, Carleton knew. In their villages they could be “easily overtaken,” the general wrote, for they would be encumbered “by their families and by their stores of food.” They would be, in other words, sitting ducks.

They marched east for nearly two weeks through chilly but not unbearably cold weather, loosely following the course of the Canadian River. Each night as the men set up camp and bedded down, the Utes erupted in war dances. “Their groans and howlings became almost intolerable, it being kept up each night until nearly daybreak,” Captain George Pettis writes in a published article that has proven to be the best account of the expedition.

Tramping over the Staked Plains, the column of men passed the spot where in 1849 Carson had found Ann White’s still-warm body. He told the story of that sad day to the officers who rode with him, narrating the events in what Pettis described as a “graphic manner.” Literally and figuratively, Carson had been over this same ground, and he seemed to have ominous feelings about what was to come. One night on the march, while the Utes danced and keened their war songs, Carson had a dream about a great bloody battle, with the mountain howitzers thundering in the sky. When he woke up the following morning, he sensed that this battle was at hand.

And he was right. It was November 24, a day that President Lincoln had recently declared a new national “Thanksgiving” holiday. The weather was bright and crisp, the atmosphere “rarefied and electrical,” by Pettis’s description. That morning Carson’s Utes caught sight of the Comanche lodges—tepees of bleached buffalo hide shimmering bone-white on the drab plains. The scouts returned in the afternoon and reported to Carson that large encampments—with many hundreds of Comanches and Kiowas—were sprawled on the south bank of the Canadian River. Carson told his officers that “we will have no difficulty finding all the Indians that we desire.”

That night Carson ordered a moonlight march. For hours the men crept along in the blackness. Carson would permit no talking or smoking or unnecessary noise. Around midnight they dropped into the rugged gash of the Canadian River, where they found a deep-worn trail freshly left by the Comanche and Kiowa horses. There they waited in silence until the first streaks of dawn broke across the wintry sky. Rallying his men, Carson threw off his heavy overcoat and tossed it in the brush, to be retrieved later. Then he resumed the march, with his Utes now in the lead, decorated in feathers and painted for war.

As they pushed ahead, the thick grass and driftwood clogging the banks slowed the gunners who pulled the mountain howitzers, and they fell behind the rest of the troops. Carson sent Maj. William McCleave ahead with a company of cavalry to attack a smaller Kiowa village of some 200 tepees, a kind of suburb of the larger Comanche camps farther downriver. As McCleave and his men charged the village, the Kiowa warriors, led by a chief named Little Mountain, held their ground only long enough to allow their women and children to scatter and hide along the river.

Carson’s troops destroyed the village, whose tepees, Pettis said, were found to be “full of plunder, including many hundreds of finely finished buffalo robes.” The lodges weren’t
entirely
empty, it turned out. A chief named Ironshirt refused to leave and was shot at the door of his tepee. Elsewhere, the Utes found four elderly Kiowas cringing in their tepees; the Utes promptly split their heads open with axes.

It was discovered that the Kiowas had been holding at least three American captives: a Colorado woman and her two children, whom the Indians had kidnapped during a recent attack on a wagon train passing through Kansas. The prisoners were nowhere to be found, but as Carson’s soldiers ransacked the village, they found the clothing of an American woman as well as children’s clothing and photographs of a Caucasian family. Carson’s men made a bonfire of all the belongings they did not seize, including a U.S. Army ambulance and a wagon that had been stolen from a government caravan. Soon the village was engulfed in flames.

In the confusion, Kiowa riders had dashed downriver to the larger constellation of Comanche villages to gather reinforcements. Soon several hundred warriors were massing on the plain, their riders bolting this way and that. Periodically they made what McCleave described as “severe charges.” Pettis recalled how the warriors rode “with their bodies thrown over the sides, at a full run, and shooting occasionally under their horses.” Far outnumbered now, McCleave had clearly bitten off more than he could chew and realized he needed to find a defensive position.

Not far away, only a few hundred yards from the river, stood an old abandoned fort known as Adobe Walls. The Bents had built it years earlier as a satellite outpost of their then extensive empire, using it as a safehouse from which to carry on trade with the Comanches (who, because of their mutual hostility with other Plains tribes like the Arapaho and Cheyenne, were not allowed to camp near Bent’s Fort). Now Adobe Walls was nothing but a tumbledown ruin, its ramparts warped and sagging. Still, it was a well-known landmark on the plains, one that helped wayfayers orient themselves as they rode across the featureless solitudes.

Carson, who had joined McCleave’s company in the advance, decided to make the old bastion his base. It was a place he knew well from his years spent working for the Bents, a relic of his younger days as a buffalo hunter. Inside its high crumbling walls, he corralled the horses while his surgeon hastily set up a hospital. All around the ruins, he had his men sprawl in the high grass and fight as skirmishers.

Then, training his field glasses on the horizon, he saw something terrifying. Behind the Kiowas, a much larger wave of Indians was assembling. Fourteen hundred warriors, perhaps more, most of them Comanche, had gathered on horseback and seemed poised to make a great charge.

Luckily for Carson, the mountain howitzers had caught up to the company. He ordered the gunners to occupy a knobby hill outside Adobe Walls and unlimber the two artillery pieces. Then, with a sweeping gesture toward the mustering warriors, Carson told his artillerymen, “Throw a few shell into that crowd over thar.”

“Number one—
Fire!
Number two—
Fire!
” The twin howitzers boomed, and the Comanches and Kiowas rose high in their stirrups in astonishment. They waited and listened intently as the first shots lobbed skyward, then exploded wide and short of their mark. The warriors wheeled their horses and galloped away. By the fourth firing, they had moved safely out of range of the shells.

The howitzers had done their work, and the immediate danger had passed. “They won’t make another stand,” Carson reassured Pettis. In the welcome lull, Carson ordered his men to gather around Adobe Walls and then to rest and eat—something they hadn’t done in twenty straight hours.

The soldiers had a meager haversack lunch of dried meat and hardtack—“starvation would be averted for a season at least,” one allowed. After lunch, Carson planned to push downriver and attack the Comanche villages, one by one. But then he noticed something alarming taking shape on the blond plains. He had been wrong: The Comanche and Kiowa allies
were
massing again, this time in far greater numbers. As he watched the situation develop from his remove at Adobe Walls, Carson became increasingly anxious. Three thousand mounted warriors had emerged from the Comanche villages.

In a few short minutes Carson was facing one of the largest engagements of Native American fighters ever gathered in the West. Certainly Carson had never seen such a concentration of warriors. His men were outnumbered nearly ten to one.

Painted for battle and riding what Carson judged to be “first-class horses,” most of the warriors were armed with bows and lances, though many had rifles. Wave after wave raced toward Adobe Walls, then circled back and mounted another assault, firing under the necks of their galloping horses as they constantly revised their angle of approach. For hours the battlefield was enveloped in a haunting chorus of ululations, the mingled war cries of Comanches, Kiowas, and Utes “yelling like demons,” as Pettis put it. With each sortie, Carson’s men fell farther back to the safety of the ruins, defending their position with a furious crack of carbines and a determined shelling from the howitzers.

Still the Indians kept coming, Carson wrote, “repeatedly charging my command from different points, but invariably repulsed with great loss.” One howitzer shell passed cleanly through the body of a warrior’s mount (killing the horse, but not the man), and then resumed its trajectory, exploding another hundred yards deeper on the plains. Little Mountain, the Kiowa chief, also had his horse shot out from under him, in his case by rifle fire, yet he continued to exhort his men from the ground. Whenever the warriors drew within range of the mountain howitzers, the Indians were now careful to disperse and attack in smaller numbers so as not to present an easy target for shrapnel. Other warriors dismounted and fought lying down in the high grass, “making it hot for most of us by their excellent marksmanship,” Pettis writes.

Watching the fighting, Carson was increasingly alarmed. The Comanches and Kiowas had been aroused to a hornetlike fervor. Carson later said that they “acted with more daring and bravery than I have ever before witnessed.”