Come Sundown (9 page)

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Authors: Mike Blakely

BOOK: Come Sundown
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“Silence, woman,” Bear Tooth said, shoving her aside. “I have already told him.”
The old crone laughed so hard that her knees buckled, and she patted the ground in appreciation of the whole ridiculous scene.
“You may refuse the gift I have brought for you,” I said. “That is your choice. But that woman will suck the
puha
out of you like a calf sucking a cow. So I will keep my horses, but I cannot accept any of yours, because you will need them when your powers start to weaken.”
“My powers are plenty strong!” Bear Tooth declared.
“I see that, but you have not been with her very long. You will need all the wealth you can get hold of when things start to go bad.”
Hidden Water gasped at my gall. “I would kill him for saying such a thing about me!”
“Woman, shut your mouth!” Bear Tooth growled.
Hidden Water implored Kills Something now. “Brother,”
she said, “tell my husband that I never made Plenty Man's power go bad.”
Kills Something would not even look at her. “I am not your brother.”
Now Chief Peta Nocona stepped forward, into the circle made by his people. “A strong warrior,” he said, “proves his faith in his own
puha
by giving away all his horses. Plenty Man comes here and offers all these horses to a man who has taken his wife. That is the strangest thing I have ever seen, but I see that Plenty Man's powers are great because of it. He shows Bear Tooth that he is not injured by having a woman taken away from him—especially one that would run away willingly. If Bear Tooth believes in his own powers, he will give
all
of his horses to Plenty Man to prove it. Then we will see if this woman truly has the bad power to weaken a warrior's medicine.”
“As Peta Nocona says,” Bear Tooth announced, “you will take
all
of my horses. I have twenty-two.
And
I will give away everything I own in a big give-away dance tonight. Everything but my sacred weapons.”
“Everything!” Hidden Water screamed with great indignation. “No, you will not!”
“Everything! My lodge, my robes, even the mocassins on my feet! Even those on my wife's feet! You will see that my medicine is good, and we will work to get new things. I will hunt buffalo, and my wife will tan the hides and make a new lodge.”
“But I have a lodge! Almost the biggest in camp!”
“No longer! Plenty Man, any boy in camp will show you which horses are mine. You will take them with you when you go away. I have spoken!”
Before I could respond, Bear Tooth wheeled away and stormed off through the crowd of people, with Hidden Water jabbering at his heels.
Peta Nocona looked at me and smiled slightly. “There is going to be a dance and a feast tonight. You should stay and enjoy the hospitality of my people.”
“We will,” I promised.
The old Nokoni lady was still laughing as the crowd of people
began to disperse, for all were now excited about preparing for the give-away dance. Kills Something rode up next to me. “You have strange medicine, brother.”
“It is stranger to no one than it is to me,” I admitted.
 
 
WE MADE CAMP on the outskirts of the village, and rested a while. Then I strolled among the Nokoni lodges to look for captives I might ransom. The only white person I saw was Peta Nocona's wife, Nadua, whom I had last seen in the camp at the Crossing on the Canadian. As I saw Nadua preparing buffalo meat for the feast, I approached her casually, and spoke to her.
“Do you know who I am?” I asked.
She glanced at me and nodded, then went on about her work. “I have been told that there is something I should not speak to you about.”
She stopped her work and stood to face me, though she would not look at my face. “I have a child. My son, Quanah.” She pointed to a boy of about five years of age attempting to climb onto a gentle old horse near the lodge. “Do not speak of taking me away. My husband would be angry. I must stay with my child.”
“That is good. If you choose to stay with the True Humans, that is up to you. But if you wish, I can take a message to your old people, so they will know you are well.”
“No,” she said. “They must not know anything of me. They will try to come and get me. Please do not tell them where I am.”
“Do not be afraid,” I said. “I will say nothing unless you want me to.”
She looked about nervously. “Go away, so I can work.”
“
Tsuh, tsuh.
I am going to speak to your son, but I only want to encourage him about riding horses.”
Nadua nodded as if to give me permission. I think she just wanted to be done with me. It was clear that I made her very nervous.
I walked toward the horse that Nadua's son, Quanah, was trying to mount. The old horse had a rawhide thong tied into its
mane. The thong dangled just low enough for the boy to grab. He was supposed to be able to climb up that thong and mount the horse, but he was young for this maneuver, and having trouble. He had a quiver full of practice arrows on his back and a little bow over his shoulder, and these impeded him when he tried to climb onto the horse.
“Do you need help?” I asked.
He turned, looked up at me, and smiled, but said, “No.”
Looking around, he spied a log on the ground from a tree that had been blown over in a storm. He led his old nag up next to this, climbed up on the log, grabbed the rawhide thong—higher up this time—and succeeded in clawing his way high enough to throw his leg over the pony's back. Pulling himself upright, he looked back at me, smiled again, and said, “You see, I do not need your help.”
“I see that. Show me how you will hunt the buffalo on that horse.”
Quanah lifted the bow over his head and pulled an arrow from his quiver. He goaded the old horse to a trot as he did this, and without touching the reins of his war bridle made the horse stop and turn using only his feet and legs to signal the mount. Now he notched the arrow onto the string and came trotting back toward me. The log became his buffalo, and he sent an arrow thumping into its flank. The wood was rotten enough that the blunt arrow stuck. This was impressive enough, but within two seconds, that little Comanche rider had another arrow notched, and as he trotted by the log a second time, he sent another arrow into the log only a finger's width from the first.
“Yee-yee-yee-yee-yee!” I yelled. I glanced back at Nadua, and saw that she was smiling at her son's accomplishment.
Little Quanah, which meant “the Fragrant One,” held his bow above his head in triumph and urged the old mount into a slow lope. He rode in a circle around his imaginary kill and grinned at me as he passed. Suddenly, the old horse stumbled, and fell to both knees, pitching Quanah forward. He grabbed the mane, breaking his fall, but he hit the ground hard anyway, and one end of his bow jabbed him in the thigh, scratching a
red streak across his flesh. Worse still, the old horse stepped on the boy's shoulder as it struggled to regain its footing. The hoof luckily slid off him before the animal put its full weight on that leg, but it still scraped Quanah's shoulder badly.
The white man in me wanted to run and pick the boy up, but I held myself back. This was a Comanche camp, and everything about the Comanche way prepared a True Human—man, woman, or child—to accept pain and go on without complaint. Several older boys who had seen Quanah fall gathered around to laugh at him, but he ignored them. I knew his scrapes and bruises had to hurt, but the little warrior did not even touch them. He just picked up his bow and his spilled arrows and went to catch his horse.
Angrily, he grabbed the reins of the war bridle, but he did not jerk them, nor did he strike the old mount. Instead, he pulled the pony's head down to his level and gave it a good long lecture about watching where it was going and keeping its four feet under it, lest he should have his mother cook it for the give-away dance that was going to happen that very evening. That settled, Quanah led his pony back over to the log and remounted.
As he rode away to some other adventure, I looked toward his mother. She watched him disappear behind the lodges, no emotion showing in her face. I had to wonder if she remembered being coddled as a child after some accident; if she recalled her white parents comforting her after a fall, or calming her fears after a nightmare. Her blue eyes darted toward me for a second, then she stooped back to her work with the buffalo meat.
After leaving this camp, I would not see Nadua, or Quanah, for seven years. And oh, how things would change.
S
even years flew, like seven good friends ridden down the trail, never to return. Seven winters, as the Indians would say, each colder than the last. Seven times the earth circled the sun, spinning as it circled, its own moon whirling about it in turn. And me, in the middle, wasting seven years of my life among the Indians.
I don't mean to suggest that nothing happened to me in seven years. Plenty happened. I rode, traded, ransomed captives. I sold the horses and robes I acquired and spent money on jags with my friends. Some of the money I buried for later use, or deposited in banks that were beginning to show up in the Texas and Colorado settlements.
I scouted for Kit Carson on some of his punitive expeditions against renegade Jicarillas. Otherwise, I tried to keep peace among the Indians, as did Kit and William Bent. But the whites were coming in increasing numbers, making peace difficult to achieve. Settlers pressed onto the fringes of the rich Comanche ranges. Prospectors found gold in Colorado, stirring the Cheyennes to warfare. Hunters shot buffalo by the hundreds and thousands, driving the nations of the plains to acts of utter desperation.
That is all I will say about those seven years, for you want to know about the battles at Adobe Walls. About Kit and Quanah. I must include William Bent, too, for in those days, the societies of seven nations revolved around the wisdom and diplomacy of this gifted Indian trader of the plains and mountains. I will hold to my narrative of those events, and not bore you with every little thing that happened to me, personally, during those years. Suffice it to say that I fairly wallowed in the revelries and agonies of life.
In September of 1860, I completed a successful summer trading expedition among the Comanches and Kiowas here at the Crossing on the Canadian River. I took a large herd of
horses to William Bent's trading post at Big Timbers. My Comanche friends, Kills Something, Fears-the-Ground, and Loud Shouter rode with me to help herd the horses and to hold council with the Cheyennes. When we arrived at William's substantial stone trading post, we found that he had turned it over to the U.S. Army. An officer there told me that William had established a new trading post and ranch at the mouth of the Purgatoire River, where it emptied into the Arkansas River, a day's ride above Big Timbers. The place was called Bent's Stockade.
So we camped at William's former trading post, which the army was now calling Fort Fauntleroy. I stayed up most of the night, keeping the horses bunched. Kills Something relieved me before dawn, and I caught a few hours of sleep. The next day we rode up the Arkansas, letting the horses graze as we trailed them, for I wanted them to arrive in good shape. In the late afternoon, we spotted a small gathering of Cheyenne tipis across the Arkansas, near the left bank of the mouth of the Purgatory. On the opposite bank of the Purgatory's mouth, we found William's Mexican workers busily clearing fields and building rail fences. We saw the defensive stockade surrounding the ranch buildings and pens—a great circular wall made of vertical timbers set side by side, sharpened to points at the top. Effective, but not nearly as impressive as the towering adobe walls of Bent's Old Fort had once been, or even the stone-walled trading post at Big Timbers, now housing Fort Fauntleroy.
As we swam our horses over the Arkansas, I heard a bell ring three times from the stockade, and assumed it sounded to announce our arrival. We landed just upstream of the Arkansas's confluence with the Purgatory and rode toward the stockade. Riding around the curved north wall of the stockade, I gathered that William had had his laborers dig a huge circular trench, into which the butt ends of the timbers had been set upright and lashed together with rawhide. The result was a battlement too high to breach and too thick for a bullet to penetrate. Each log tip had been sawn to a point, probably by two men laboring over a double-ended logging saw. My only concern was that it might be set afire, especially in years to come as the green timbers cured.
Coming through the gate, I saw William letting down the rails to a large log corral. I recognized Kit Carson standing there with him in a plain store-bought suit. A third man was there, and I recognized him as William's son-in-law, Tom Boggs, who had been gone several years to California. Tom and I had both served as couriers for the U.S. Army during the Mexican War, and I had bought my first horse from him, years before. I herded the ponies between a large cabin, which I assumed was William's, and a bell standing on a post—the one that had tolled three times to announce our approach across the river. With the help of my Comanche friends, I worried the horses into the corral, then got down to shake hands and slap shoulders with the men I had not seen in too long.
“Mr. Greenwood,” William said, “I thought you would never more be seen among civilized men. Where have you been?”
“Out yonder,” I said, gesturing toward the wild Comanche range.
“There's a lot of yonder out there,” Kit said.
“Less than last year.”
“That's true.” Kit gave me a big Mexican-style
abrazo,
almost squeezing the wind from my lungs in his crushing embrace.
“You back for good?” I asked Tom Boggs.
“For good or bad, I'm back,” Tom said. The years in California seemed to have treated him well, for he looked lean and strong, his face bronzed by the outdoor elements. I had always admired Tom for his good looks, common sense, and rock-solid character.
“How's Rumalda?”
“She's fine, Orn'ry, and she'll be glad to see you alive. We'll ride up to my cabin later and surprise her.”
About this time, two young men rode in through the stockade gate from the field the Mexicans were clearing. They dismounted and approached. I didn't recognize either, but the younger of the two looked Indian, though he wore white man's clothing. The older was clearly of Anglo stock.
“Mr. Greenwood,” William said, “you remember my eldest son, Robert. He's nineteen now. Just back from St. Louis.”
“Yes, good to see you again,” I said, shaking Robert's hand.
“You've grown so much I didn't recognize you. Last time I saw you, you were no more than twelve.”
“Likewise, good to see you, Mr. Greenwood.” He spoke perfect English, but his face looked very Cheyenne, for his mother was the daughter of a chief. “I remember you well from when I was a boy.”
“You remember Robert's elder sister, Mary, don't you?” William said.
“Of course.” I glanced around, but did not see a woman present.
“Well, she married a danged old saloonkeeper in Missouri.”
“Is that so?”
The American man beside Robert Bent began to chuckle, and held his hand out to shake mine. “I'm R. M. Moore,” he said. “I was that danged old saloonkeeper. Now I'm not sure what I am, other than a greenhorn out West.”
I shook his hand. “Perhaps you're an empire builder, like your father-in-law.”
“Maybe a stockade builder at best.”
My Comanche friends had been standing by patiently, so I introduced them. They shook hands with the newcomers and the white men they already knew and respected, then mounted and rode toward the village of tipis downstream to meet or get reacquainted with the Cheyennes camped there. The rest of us sat on the ground, Indian style, and shared intelligence from our far-flung travels. Tom told about California. Kit told about the Jicarilla and Ute troubles. William groused about the gold fever to the north and the Cheyennes' retaliatory raids on wagon trains and settlers. I related what I knew about the Texans' encroachments on Comancheria, and the battles spawned because of it. Robert Bent and R. M. Moore told us of news from the east—particularly the rumors of impending warfare between the Northern and Southern states.
When I asked William why he had abandoned his stone trading post, he said, “The new Indian agent showed up with a wagonload of annuities owed to the Cheyennes. Damned fool. It was months late, half what they were promised, and he wanted to store it all in my commissary. I told him he could
build his own commissary, that I was a private trader and didn't feel obligated to store the government's property. I was afraid the Cheyennes would attack my post to get the things they were owed, and I didn't intend to get caught in the middle of that. We stayed up all night augerin' about it, and I finally just decided to turn the whole damn place over to the government. The agent promised rent, but I've yet to see it.”
When I asked Kit about Lucien Maxwell, he said, “Aw, Kid, you ought to see the place on the Cimarron. Lucien took and built him a gristmill thirty foot tall, of stone. He got claim to the whole Beaubien-Miranda Grant, by act of Congress. He figures he owns more than a million acres of land. All I know is that it takes more than two days to ride acrost it.”
“That's what brought me and Rumalda back from California,” Tom said. “She owns about two thousand acres of the Vigil-St. Vrain Land Grant, and we're confident Congress will recognize it, too, even though it's even bigger than Maxwell's grant. We're squattin' on Rumalda's land right here and now, as a matter of fact. This is the parcel she got—the northeast corner of the grant. Ceran St. Vrain is Rumalda's godfather, and he saw to it she got a share of the grant.”
The talk of land turned to talk of family, so I asked Robert Bent how his two younger brothers were doing in school. “I remember how Charles ambushed me with his practice arrows when he was no more than six,” I said. “He almost unhorsed me.”
Robert chuckled, but his face showed that he missed his younger brother, and worried about him. “He hasn't changed a whole lot. Charles stays in trouble all the time in school. He'll fight any bully that calls him ‘half-breed' and makes them call him ‘Cheyenne' before he'll let them up off the ground. He just wants to come back to the plains. He doesn't have much use for school.”
“He better find a use for it,” William growled.
“And George?” I asked.
“George gets along fine until Charles drags him into some kind of trouble. You'd think it would be George keeping Charles
out
of trouble, since he's older, but he lets Charles talk him into the damnedest schemes.”
“You mind your language, son,” William warned.
“Sorry,” Robert said, looking at the ground. “Anyway, all George can talk about these days is the war fever. He wants to join the South and fight. I kept telling him to stay out of it, but he's got his mind set on going off to fight. I think a lot of it is Charles egging him on, even though Charles is only thirteen, and too young to take up a rifle if the fightin' does start.”
We sat on the ground for hours and talked. Most of the men gravitated to the corral fence where they could lean against the rails as their legs stretched out across the dirt, or crossed Indian style. I ended up using the bell post as my backrest. I looked up to study it once. It was a large bell—like one that would grace the belfry of a church—with two trunnions resting in an iron cradle upon which it could swing, pendulumlike. An iron arm jutted from one side of the bell, and from the end of the arm dangled a rope, which was now swaying gently in the breeze. It was a nice, big bell for such a far-flung frontier settlement, and the post made a fine backrest as I talked with my friends and new acquaintances.
When dusk approached, we decided to ride to Tom Boggs's cabin, a couple of miles up the Purgatory, to surprise his wife, Rumalda, who was a friend of mine from the old days in Taos. Tom and Rumalda and the other newcomers had built cabins upstream at a place they were calling Boggsville, in honor of Tom.
Tom had chosen a fine piece of property for his fledgling settlement. The ground was almost level, sloping just slightly toward the bed of the Purgatory, which flowed a mere arrow shot away. Old cottonwoods shaded the ground he had staked out. As we rode through a scattering herd of sheep, I saw smoke issuing from the cabins that stood in rows along what might someday be streets. As we rode into Boggsville, I smelled food, and my hunger started to gnaw at me, so I asked Tom Boggs, “What's on the menu tonight, Tom?”
“The
menu
?” he replied. “Antelope, cantaloupe, and shit. But we're out of antelope and cantaloupe.”
All the men roared with laughter at my expense, but I didn't even care. It felt good to be back among these friends.
 
 
AFTER A COUPLE of days of feasting and yarning and overseeing the ranch work, Kit announced that he was riding west to do some elk hunting in the San Juan Mountains he knew so well as an old trapper and trader. William and Tom and their partners were too busy building their new enterprises, but I relished the idea of taking the trail with Kit. We loaded one mule with provisions and equipment, and led two others on which to pack elk meat.
On a clear day, a rider who stood in the stirrups of a tall horse, and rode just a little west of Boggsville, could see the Spanish Peaks, ninety miles away. It was wide-open country, still green in September, blazing hot at noon, and cool enough for a blanket at night. It was peppered with antelope and sometimes trodden under by buffalo; blustery, usually dusty, but sometimes boggy; consistent in its constant production of surprises.

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