Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (20 page)

“Shit no,” the old man answered, his arm sweeping an arc across the surrounding prairie. “No wolf or buzzard I know would chew on your carcass … not when we've left the carcasses of more'n enough good buffalo out there for 'em to eat!”

After selling what he had in the way of hides back in Dodge City to the Mooar brothers that spring, Billy had ventured south once more with a new outfit and a new bunch of skinners. This time they pushed past Crooked Creek and the Cimarron. On to Coldwater and Palo Duro Creeks. Farther south than any of them had ever been, or dared push into Indian country. They were past the land of the Cheyenne, pressing into the haunts of the Kwahadi and Kiowa. For certain this was not a white man's land.

Dixon found piles of old bones where the Indians and Mexicans had once hunted these austere plains. Those bones and a prairie dotted with buffalo chips were the only evidence that the herds had been here of a time.

But there were no buffalo.

One thing was coming clear in his mind: if a man was to keep making money at this hide business, he would have to dare to ride farther and farther south each season. And if he wanted to make his fortune in buffalo, then a man had to say to hell with the red devils.

To hell with the Kwahadi of Quanah Parker. And to hell with the Kiowa of Satanta and Lone Wolf.

Chapter 14

August 1873

“Excuse me, fellas,” the stranger said as he rose from his chair and eased over to the table where Seamus Donegan and Jack Stillwell sat. “Did I hear one of you say the name Sharp Grover?”

Here in this smoky watering hole in Dodge City, Murray & Waters Saloon, the Irishman glanced at Jack, then looked up at the young man's face. An open, friendly and well-groomed face with a waxed mustache beneath the handsome nose. Black hair hung to his shoulders.

“We did,” Seamus answered. “You know him?”

“I might have—if it was the same Sharp Grover who worked for Silas Pepoon in the winter of 'sixty-eight.”

“Pepoon?” Donegan asked.

“Chief of scouts for Custer's campaign against the Washita tribes,” Jack Stillwell explained. He looked up at the stranger. “Yeah—so it must be the same Sharp Grover.”

“I was hoping there wasn't two of them. The man was like a father to me back then. Jesus, Mary and Joseph—but it's been five years already, ain't it?” His large, callused hands grew nervous. “May I join you fellas for a drink—bringing my own?” He hoisted the nearly full bottle.

“Have a seat,” Seamus said. “Never turn down a man who wants to bathe strangers in whiskey.”

“I figure friends of Sharp Grover's will be friends of mine soon enough,” he replied, holding his hand out to the Irishman. “Billy Dixon's my name.”

They introduced themselves then watched Dixon pour a round.

“You made some money I take it?” Seamus inquired, throwing a thumb over his shoulder at the gaming tables.

Dixon smiled. “Never was one to have much luck at that. No, Mr. Donegan. Made my money bringing in some hides that are already on their way back to a tannery in New York.”

“Buffalo man, eh?” Stillwell said. “You can't be much older'n me. How long you been doing that?”

“I'll turn twenty-three on the twenty-fifth of next month—September,” Dixon replied proudly. “Been a hide hunter for the past few seasons—since the spring of 'seventy. First laid eyes on the herds when I was a teamster for Custer's Seventh Cavalry down to the Washita. We herded the Kiowa into Fort Cobb then went chasing after the rest of the Cheyenne, clear west to the Sweetwater in 'sixty-nine.”

“That's how you met Sharp?”

“He showed me things—taught me some tricks to get along out here. Truth of it—I'll never be able to repay Sharp Grover for his friendship that winter down in Indian Territory.”

Stillwell nodded, gazing down at his glass. “Sharp took a lot of us young ones under his wing, Billy. I only got a year on you myself.”

“By the saints! Don't you two young'uns know how to make a man feel his age?” Seamus grumbled, a smile cracking the side of his face. “I got ten years, couple thousand miles, and more than my share of scars on both of you young hellions. So, here—let's drink a toast to a grand old man: Sharp Grover!”

“Here, here!” Stillwell replied as he hoisted his glass.

“To Sharp Grover it is!” Dixon agreed.

Less than two years before, trader Charlie Myers had parked his hide wagons beneath a lone cottonwood tree and erected his little sod trading house right here on the road west from Fort Dodge. The following spring of 1872, the construction gangs laying track for the Santa Fe Railroad raised their own tents nearby and the little settlement of Buffalo City was born. There was no shortage of customers for Myers, and soon enough a man named Hoover, who became the biggest trader in whiskey, was selling out of his wagon with its hinged sidewalls that allowed the buffalo hunters to walk up the planks right into the wagonbed.

Card players and whores weren't long in arriving either. One outfit called it quits on a too-quiet Hays City and moved out, packing bar, bottles and beds in ten wagons for the trip west. Those half-dozen girls who unashamedly showed their assets as they rode into Buffalo City, accompanied by the cheers and hoots of a joyous throng of stinking buffalo men, were sure to make a living bringing progress to the plains. Before there was a bank, a postal office or a sheriff, the fleshpots were open for business and promising a brisk trade.

The hide hunters came to this country, for here in southwestern Kansas roamed the immense Arkansas herd. So to southwestern Kansas flocked a thousand hide hunters.

By August, Buffalo City had come of age as a wild and woolly gathering place for all the best and the worst of mankind streaming onto the central plains. More and more newcomers burrowed dugouts or shoveled sod loose to build their earthen shanties on neatly platted town lots, measured and staked out by Charlie Myers using only a length of rope. Now the main street measured two blocks long, with two general stores among the watering holes and whores' cribs. Old Mexican Mary still persisted in plying her trade, as she had from the earliest days of Buffalo City—entertaining her customers on a pallet of blankets she laid on the floor of her dugout carved out of a creekbank near the Arkansas.

Old Maria laughed when she learned of the death of one of those six fancy whores recently come to town and working out of an honest-to-goodness featherbed—a whore who died of “galloping consumption.” Maria laughed till she cried when she heard another had poisoned herself when, drunk and curious, she had tasted the vial of wolf poison she found in a hide hunter's coat pocket before she could be stopped.

Between the hunters and the railroad construction gangs, the girls didn't lack for customers, night and day, working their cribs in nonstop shifts. And when the buffalo men pulled out for the prairie, the Irish and German laborers took up the slack. They had already seen to it that their track reached the sod-and-pole corrals where stood immense piles of flattened buffalo hides and huge ricks of bleaching bones, waiting for shipment east to the tanneries and fertilizer factories.

It was a wild place, in every sense of the word—where the only law was a man's pistol and his Sharps rifle, and perhaps the well-honed skinning knife he might have to use to carve up a bothersome antagonist. Arguments and fights and brawls and gun battles occurred with such regularity in those early days that no one really grew concerned enough to call for a badge. The only law was in the weight of the weapons a man packed, like those old fukes kept handy beneath the crude bars in every saloon. Both barrels sawed off short, loaded with buck or ball, these ready shotguns settled more than one argument and quieted more than one rowdy, overzealous railhand.

Like the ever-wandering frontier and the ever-nomadic buffalo themselves, Buffalo City did not last long—at least as a name for the town. When the federal government refused to approve the name for a postal drop, stating that Kansas already had a Buffalo and a Buffalo City both, it suggested the town assume the name of the nearby fort.

It was to this newly christened Dodge City that Seamus and Jack bid farewell that late summer, farewell as well to Billy Dixon. Although the sun was only then creeping over the horizon as they mounted their horses to ride to the fort to pick up their civilians and army escort, the music from out-of-tune pianos still punctured the quiet of the morning, as well as the raucous, discordant shouting of men too long without sleep and filled with a bellyful of puggle.

On the afternoon of the sixth day out from Dodge, Jack Stillwell led the fifteen others into Camp Supply after a hundred monotonous miles of trail south from Kansas. Here in the vee of land formed by the mouth of Wolf Creek, dumping itself into the North Canadian, the troops of George Armstrong Custer's winter campaign had built Camp Supply back in '68. And here almost five years later a permanent stockade of log and sod had replaced canvas tents. Ten-foot-high walls complete with loopholes, a blockhouse at each corner, and eighty-foot-long barracks housed the troops of the Tenth Cavalry beneath sod roofs that leaked in the rainy months, spilled dust the rest of the year.

A dispensary, a hospital with three wards, along with a large mess hall and a separate kitchen and bakery, joined the quartermaster stores, stables and headquarter's offices inside the palisade walls guarded by sentries.

Officers and married soldiers were given small log cabins just outside the stockade walls. Because the floors were always more damp than dry, and because of the lack of glass which dictated a lack of windows for the cabins, the laundress wives of the enlisted men and officers alike found themselves harvesting a crop of toadstools each morning as a part of their housekeeping routine.

“This is where Sharp and Dixon met, back to the winter of 'sixty-eight,” Stillwell reminded Donegan as they dismounted.

Seamus watched the two easterners Stillwell was escorting climb down from their army mounts, unabashedly rubbing their saddle galls, and with a bow-legged gait walk up the four steps to the post commander's office to report their arrival.

“We'll be ready to leave after breakfast in the morning, Mr. Stillwell,” said the lieutenant in charge of the escort detail.

“Can't get you to calling me Jack, can I?” Stillwell said to the older man.

“All right … Jack.” The officer smiled. “We'll see what we can do about that.”

“That's better, Lieutenant Marston,” Stillwell replied. “We're gonna be spending a whole lot more time together. All the way down to Fort Richardson before you and your soldiers can turn back north.”

Ben Marston nodded. “That's a bit of a journey in itself.”

“I'll bet your men can't wait to get back to Fort Hays.”

“Actually,” Marston whispered, leaning in close to Stillwell and Donegan, “all my men have been thinking about lately is Dodge City and its attractions … and getting back there as soon as they can get you dropped off and turned around.”

Seamus grinned. “You don't really blame those boys, do you, Lieutenant?”

Marston laughed easily at that and nodded. “Can't blame a young man a bit for wanting to horn up the prairie like a young bull in the rut. Ah, we were all young of a time.”

Donegan snorted, looking at young Stillwell. “By the saints but there's more talk of me getting to be an old man! What've I done to deserve this hacking, pray tell?”

“One day you won't mind wearing your age, Mr. Donegan,” Marston said. “The wrinkles and the gray hair. But for now, fight it with all that you've got.”

“I plan on it, Lieutenant. I didn't survive Lodge Trail Ridge and the hayfield fight
*
not to wear my scars proudly. There were times at Beecher Island and out to the Modoc's Lava Beds
†
where I caught myself wondering if I'd see another winter come and go.”

“And look at you now,” Stillwell piped up. “Riding down into Kiowa and Comanche country—just like you know you're going to die an old man.”

Marston chuckled, then waved as he strode away. “After breakfast, we'll meet you and the bureau men right here.”

They watched the lieutenant lead his eleven soldiers toward the stables before Seamus spoke quietly.

“Did I hear the lieutenant right, Jack—did he say
bureau
men?”

Stillwell gazed at Donegan a moment, a quizzical look crossing his face. “He did, didn't he?”

Now it was Donegan's turn to be confused. “Wait a minute. I thought you knew who those two were, Jack. Here you're asked to guide them down here—”

“I never said I knew who they were or what they were up to,” Stillwell protested.

“Bureau.”
Seamus repeated the word. “Sounds like only one thing to me.”

“What's that?”

“How many bureaus you know of in the government?”

Stillwell held up his hands in a helpless gesture. “I don't know a thing about none of that government folderol, Seamus.”

Donegan stared for a moment at the nearby headquarters' office where the two had disappeared minutes ago. “Only one I've heard tell of is the Indian Bureau. So maybe this had something to do with those two Kiowa chiefs you were telling me about.”

Stillwell shook his head. “I don't tally it that way, Seamus. Those two fellas aren't going down to Texas to see some old Kiowa chiefs now. They could do that right here. C'mon, the Indian Bureau has agents and sub-agents all over the place in Indian Territory. They don't need to send two soft-assed dudes from back east out here to talk with Satanta and Big Tree … now, do they?”

With a shrug, Seamus breathed in the late afternoon air. “Be suppertime soon, Jack, me lad. I can't make no sense of it—but things just ain't fitting together with those two bureau men. And when me own mind can't make things fit like they should, Seamus Donegan looks for him a place to find a bottle of whiskey and someone to share it with. C'mon, Jack—you'll do to share my whiskey!”