Comanche Dawn
Authors: Mike Blakely
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Contents
By Mike Blakely from Tom Doherty Associates
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For London
Acknowledgments
For helping me get started on research for this work of fiction, I thank two anthropologist-novelist-rancher friends: W. Michael Gear and Kathleen Gear. For her guidance and assistance with final research, I thank my friend and fellow novelist, Lucia St Clair Robson. For loaning me the right book at the right time, I am grateful to Russel Buster.
For sharing his firearms, flints, black powder, and expertise pertaining thereto, I am grateful to my friend and fellow fiction writer, C. F. Eckhardt.
For making the horse a part of my life, I would like to thank my parents, Doc Blakely and Patricia Dawn Blakely. Also, I thank two friends from whom I have bought horsesâMike Siler and Marty Akinsâfor rare is the friend from whom one can buy a horse and remain a friend. For sharing their horses and horse stories, I thank Jack Hankins, Joe Siler, Mike Siler, Kym Bartholomew, Buddy Reid, Henry Wobbe, Sonny Andersen, and Mary Elizabeth Goldman.
For helping me understand cultures outside of my own, I thank the Comanche people, the Shoshone people, the Gathering of Nations Pow-Wow, and the many other friends and acquaintances who have taken me into their family circles to share their cultures. Special thanks to Floyd, of Taos Pueblo, for loaning me a tall horse and showing me the old trails.
For their guts and faith, I am grateful to my colleagues in New York City: Joe Vallely, Bob Gleason, and Tom Doherty.
Special thanks to the library system of the University of Texas at Austin, my alma mater.
For my own satisfaction and none of their own, as they remain above the necessity for spoken gratitude, I thank three horses I have known: Red Wing, who often kicked, bit, threw me off, fell on me, and otherwise earned my affection. Big John, who set the standard in my mind for cooperation between human and horse. And Red Man, who in learning to trust me taught me that I could still be trusted.
Introduction
If you believe, as I do, that a single horse can change the life of an individual human, then perhaps you may logically conclude and appreciate that the horse as a species can and has brought about sweeping changes in various cultures throughout the course of human endeavor. Perhaps never did the horse so affect a human culture more radically than that of the Comanche people, a nation born of the horse.
Horses came to the land of the Shoshoneâin and around present Wyomingâin the 1680s, when this novel begins. Some of the Shoshone people, for reasons both obvious and mysterious, so rapidly adopted the new horse culture that they broke away from their kin and drifted south, seeking more horses and better hunting grounds. These Shoshone searchers became known as Comanches. Within the span of a single generation, as early as 1705, the Comanche nation had become recognized by Europeans and Indians alike as a powerful and independent tribe. The warriors of the new nation became known as the greatest horsemen in history, possessors of the richest hunting grounds on the face of the earthâthe buffalo range of the Southern Plains.
Accordingly, my research for this novel beganâthough I was unaware at the time that such activity would one day pass as a novelist's researchâin the days of my boyhood with the land and the horse. This sometimes involved flying haphazardly off the horse and landing none-too-lightly upon the land. My resulting love and fascination for
equus caballus
and
terra firma
would later allow me a certain appreciation for and understanding of the nomadic nations of the plains.
Growing up in Texas, the term
Comanche
often seemed synonymous with
Indian.
As a nation, the Comanche people claimed and defended ownership privileges over vast stretches of prairies, woodlands, and mountainscapes ranging through present Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas. As a young Texan, I assumed that the Comanche people must have always ruled the Southern Plains. Imagine my surprise when, as an adult, I discovered the fact that the Comanche nation had not appeared in Texas until after 1700, and did not even exist as a recognized tribe until about that time. The catalyst if not indeed the primary reason for this phenomenal cultural migration seemed clear to me. The horse.
About the time that I began to research the horse-borne genesis of the Comanche nation for this novel, it so happened that horses came back into my personal life after an absence of several years. Like a Shoshone-turned-Comanche, I began to feel the power, beauty, mobility, nobility, and spirit of the horse in my heart and guts and soul. I felt possessed of the gifts of speed, endurance, and strength; I felt in control of things larger than myself; I felt awed by, consumed by, and tenuously linked to the very powers of the earth, the sun, and the sky. My journey into the history and culture of the greatest horsemen the world has ever known coincided with my own return to the ways of horsemanship. Without a horse to straddle, I could not have properly appreciated the Comanche, a proud nation of mounted nomads who by their own standards achieved wealth beyond their wildest dreams for a century and a half.
I am tempted here to list the written sources I drew upon in researching this novel, but find it sufficient to say that I read every book in the University of Texas library system that involved the Comanche, the Shoshone, or any number of other Plains Indian nations. I read every book I could find on the Spanish presence in New Mexico and Texas around the turn of the eighteenth century. I simply read every available source that in any way pertained to the subject of this novel, and this is in addition to interviewing anthropologists and Indian peoples and putting many miles of travel behind me in geographical research. I have judged for myself what seemed to me more accurate and likely and have used such gleanings from my research to structure a framework for this novel. The rest of the story, I believe, was given to me by the spirits.
âMike Blakely
Author's Note
In writing this novel, I used a precious few words of the Comanche/Shoshone language to lend color, feeling, and flavor. I do not profess an understanding of the language. Spelling posed a problem in translating, as the language includes certain vowel and consonant sounds not employed in English. Therefore, I have used only words that allow a reasonable phonetic spelling.
Even the Comanches' name for themselves created a problem in the writing of this book. In my research, I found this term spelled variously as
Numa, Nuhmuhnuh, Nemeni, Nimenem, Numinu, Nimma,
and
Nermernuh.
However, I have heard the word spoken by contemporary Comanche and Shoshone people, and to my ear it sounds as if it might be most accurately spelled
Noomah,
accented on the first syllable, with the
oo
sound spoken as in the English word
book.
Though I strive in this novel to accurately render a few Comanche/Shoshone words in English, my spelling choices are my own and should not be considered authoritative. My apologies to linguists who know more than I do about these matters. I am but a simple novelist.
Glossary
aho
â
hello
ahpoo
â
father
anah
â
ouch!
ekakuma
â
bay horse
esikuma
â
horse
hah
â
yes
ha-i'i
â
oh, my!
kiyu
â
horseback
kubetu
â
hard
kwitapuh
â
excrement
Na-vohnuh
â
Apache peoples
ohtookuma
â
sorrel horse
oo-bia
â
oh!
pinakwoo
â
behind
pogamoggan
â
war club
pookai
â
hush
puha
â
power, “medicine”
puhakut
â
shaman, medicine man, medicine woman
puku
â
horse
sohoobi
â
cottonwood
soohoo
â
willow
tecamaca
â
balsam poplar
toohooya
â
horse
tosa naboo
â
paint horse
tsah
â
good
PART I
True Humans
1
On the day of
his birth, a horse ran through his village. It made a sacred circle around the lodge at the edge of camp where his mother labored to give him life. This was not just any horse, but the very first ever seen by the Burnt Meat People of the True Humans. Among other nations, the True Humans were known as Grass Lodge People or Snake People. In seasons to come, they would be called
Shoshone.