Brothers of the Buffalo Page 13

  “You men been jawin’ about not havin’ seen any Indian fightin’ yet,” Sergeant Brown had growled as he passed on the orders. “You soon goin’ to have to find something else to grouse about. We are going to Fort Griffin, Texas. Down there is the Texas frontier. That is right on the route what the Kiowas and Comanches and Cheyennes and Arapahos take in their raiding. Plus there are more than enough bad white men and buffalo hunters down there to stir up trouble—some of them just about within spittin’ distance of the fort.”

  It took less than a week for Wash to learn just what the sergeant meant. The Flat. That is what they called the little town that sprung up below the fort. The buffalo hunters used the Flat as their base of operations, but the army could not go after them as they had the whiskey runners. Nothing illegal about hunting buffalo unless it was on Indian land.

  And there was no way for anyone to say if the hides the white hunters were getting came from Indian land or not. Though it was a safe bet, as Charley put it, that the majority of those hunters were risking their scalps for every hide they peeled off a dead buffalo. The only places where the big beasts remained plentiful were on the Indian lands to the northwest.

  The buffalo hunters were only part of the potential for trouble in the Flat. There dwelt more than the usual amount of lawbreakers in the hastily constructed settlement, a good many of them unreconstructed rebels. Shifty looks in their eyes and big hogleg pistols strapped on their belts. Pretending to be law-abiders during the day but out rustling cattle after dark.

  Of course, not all of those among the five thousand folks in the Flat were lawbreakers. There were ranchers, farmers, and cowboys coming through on drives to Dodge City. Those cowboys were the big reason that there were more dance halls and saloons than restaurants. And the Flat was still growing, getting bigger and more out of control every day seeing as how there were no reliable peace officers.

  “Sooner or later,” Sergeant Brown said, “we going to have to declare martial law and clean that place up.”

  Despite the sergeant’s words, the Flat did hold some who were more kindly disposed toward colored soldiers because they were also black. Some were cowboys, but even more were farmers, teamsters, or ordinary tradefolk. It had surprised Wash how many from the East that had come to settle the West were former slaves and their families, chasing a new life away from the old ways of the past. Some saloon owners would even serve drinks to black men. And allow them into their card games—which Charley Smith had mentioned to Wash on three separate occasions thus far.

  “Man,” Charley had said, “first chance I get, I am going to try my luck down there.”

  Bad idea, Wash had thought. But he’d said nothing. Telling Charley not to do something would just set his cap even more in that direction.

  Sergeant Brown had also, thus far, not been exactly right about Indian fighting being more likely in Texas. Raiding parties often passed close to the fort. In the last few weeks they had twice gotten word of such renegades and set out after them. But it had been to no avail. Such parties moved like the wind and were just as hard to catch before they would swing northwest up onto the buffalo range. Up there, there was no chance of tracking them. Whatever trail they might have left was obliterated by the buffalo herds they passed through.

  But there were, for sure, more red men to be seen at Fort Griffin. There were double the number of Indian scouts they’d had at Camp Supply. In addition to the Osages who’d accompanied them, there were Indians of another sort. Tonkawas. And not just a few of them. Their whole tribe was living right next to the fort.

  Tonks, Sergeant Brown called them.

  “Our Tonks,” he said, “are not exactly well liked by the other red men down here. Matter of fact, they are just plain hated. Back in ’62, the other tribes hereabouts, Kiowas, Comanches, Shawnees, Caddos, Seminoles, Delawares—even some Osages—got together a war party and about wiped the Tonkawas out. When they got done, only 250 Tonks was left.”

  The surviving Tonkawas had taken refuge at Fort Griffin, where some had already been employed as scouts. Unlike the other southern Plains tribes, the Tonks had a long history of working for the white man better than fighting him. That was one of the reasons why the other tribes didn’t like them. But not the only reason.

  “You know why else the tribes don’t cotton to our Tonks?” Charley asked a week after their arrival.

  “Why?” Wash asked.

  “Corporal Waller, he say it is on account of the fact that they eats them.”

  “Who eats who?”

  Charley let go a deep chuckle. “Our Tonks is cannibals. Corporal Waller, he say that whenever Tonkawas are riding with the cavalry and there’s a fight, as soon as one of the Indians from another tribe gets killed those Tonks make sure they get to that body first. They cuts out the best parts and eats them right there. Just like having a picnic lunch.”

  “No!” Wash said.

  Charley chuckled again. “Want to bet?”

  “Never mind.”

  There were no fewer than twenty-five Tonkawas working as scouts at Fort Griffin. Soon after his arrival, Lieutenant Pratt, due to his liking for Indians and their ways, was put in charge of them. Wash watched as the lieutenant strode across the yard, his hand extended toward the head Tonkawa scout, a pleasant look on his face. It was something like the face he showed to his black soldiers. A way of looking at them that was different from most white officers. Pride, but not the sort of pride their former slave owners had shown about those few men and women who’d became their favorites, the same pride of ownership felt toward one’s best horse. No, Lieutenant Pratt’s pride in his black underlings was of another sort. Pride, perhaps, that they were proving to be just as good soldiers as any white man.

  His feeling toward the Indians, though, seemed to be a more complicated kettle of fish. Sometimes he seemed to be looking at them with the expression of a father seeing his firstborn child. Or like he wanted to adopt them into his family. Wash had learned that there were some white men on the frontier who seemed to love Indians. They dressed like them, married Indian women, let their children be raised as Indians. But that was not Lieutenant Pratt, even though he seemed to like nothing better than to be in their presence. But not to learn from them.

  As he watched the lieutenant take the Tonkawa scout’s hand and pump it, a thought came to Wash.

  Maybe it’s more like he wants to take them up like handfuls of red clay and mold them into some other shape.

  That was a curious thing. But any man who served on the frontier generally had more than one thing about him that the civilized world would call curious.

  I need to take my mama’s advice. Just look the other way when it comes to the strange behavior of white men.

  Strange behavior or not, Wash was more than glad that Lieutenant Pratt had come to the Texas frontier with Company D. Not just for his treating negro soldiers like men and not “mud turtles”—which is what the local white Texans, mostly unreformed rebels, called the black cavalrymen. It was especially because wherever Lieutenant Pratt went, he brought along his wife and his children and their whole household staff, including Sergeant Brown’s wife and Bethany, who had formerly worked for Captain Nolan. Their weekly conversations about Shakespeare’s plays had been able to continue, a discussion that was about to bring them to Romeo and Juliet.

  Wash shook his head at that. It seemed as confusing as it was pleasant. His simple goal of proving himself to be a man and providing for his family back home was getting more complicated every day. First Sergeant Brown had put those ideas into his head about someday being able to go to school. And foolish as such an ambition was for a negro soldier to have, it stayed in his head, buzzing about like a gnat through his dreams. And now, since his meetings with Bethany, an even more impossible possibility had begun coming up again and again in the back of his mind. That somehow, some way, she might be a part of his future and more than just a ship passing in the night.

  Impossible, Wash thought.
And even as he thought that, along she came, a little parasol over her head.

  “Good morning, Miss Bethany,” he said.

  She smiled back at him, sending a shiver down his back. “Good morning, Private Vance.”

  Just his name. But the nice way she spoke it, made Vance sound almost as pretty as her smile. If Wash had been a dog he would have rolled over on his back and wagged his tail.

  But even though he wanted to say more, like commenting on the weather, he kept his mouth shut. A man on duty was not to engage in idle conversation with a civilian. One who got caught doing that would find himself on a punishment detail. And there were those who would give a trooper harsh punishment quicker than you could say Jack Robinson.

  Lieutenant Pratt was not the only officer who was sent to Fort Griffin with them. They had also been blessed with none other than the former commander of Camp Supply, Lieutenant Colonel John W. Davidson, who had finally been given a larger command than that little understaffed outpost.

  Openings for advancement were as scarce as hen’s teeth in the Army of the West. However, the man formerly in charge at Fort Griffin, Colonel Benjamin Grierson, who was the first man ever to command the black 10th, had been promoted to superintendent of the Mounted Recruitment Service in St. Louis. Davidson had been the next former general in line.

  The first thing Colonel Davidson had done was to impose a passel of strict new commands. No frivolity. No talking while on duty. No card games. No walking on the grass! As at Camp Supply, the commander loved his fresh-planted lawn more than all his black and white soldiers put together. Anyone seen putting one toe on the grass of the parade ground would get sent to the guardhouse.

  Wash gently shook his head as he continued around the parade ground’s perimeter. Davidson’s orders had made the new commander even more unpopular than he’d been with the enlisted men at Camp Supply. Even the officers beneath him disliked him. His first order on arrival had been to dismiss the entire staff that Colonel Grierson had left in place. That staff change had lasted less than a week. When the Adjutant General’s office for the Department of Texas got word of it, the colonel had been informed that he could do no such a thing.

  So Davidson took out his frustration on the enlisted men, looking for any opportunity to bedevil them with new rules that made no real sense.

  We may not be walking on the colonel’s grass, Wash thought as he finished his round and saluted to the private who was taking his place, but we are all walking on eggs.

  As he entered the main barracks, Charley and Josh beckoned Wash over to join them where they’d saved him a seat. The show was about to begin. They had a special visitor, one of their own 10th Cavalry, but serving in Company H, which was stationed elsewhere. He had been sent to Fort Griffin as a courier. He’d be there for only one night before returning to his own post, but there was time enough, he’d declared, to share a story.

  It was one the men were eager to hear. The grizzled veteran, whose name was Corporal Reuben Waller, had played a part in the great rescue at Beecher Island.

  “Think of that,” Josh had said. “Beecher Island. Where some of our own negro cavalrymen rescued the survivors of that grim fight.”

  Charley was grinning from ear to ear as Wash took his seat. He looked happier than if he’d won three pots in a row.

  “Wash,” Charley said, bouncing his legs up and down like he was about to get up and start a jig, “you here just in time.” He pointed at the far door. “Here he comes. The man of the hour!”

  Wash looked where Charley was pointing. Two men of about the same size and age were walking into the barracks. The one on the right was Sergeant Brown. The other had to be Reuben Waller. They were alike enough to have been twins, aside from the abundant white hair of the one who had to be the Beecher Island hero.

  “Men,” Sergeant Brown said, “you ready to hear a story?”

  He swept the crowd with his eyes as if he expected someone to disagree.

  No chance of that. Everyone was as awed and silent as a bunch of farm boys seeing an elephant for the first time.

  “The corporal here joined up when the 10th was first formin’, back in ’67. Already knowed a bit ’bout war, having seed it from the other side. His old master was a general in the reb army and took him along as a body servant. Twenty-nine battles he saw!” Brown paused to let that number sink in. “Twenty-nine. And you know what one of them was? Fort Pillow.”

  A few men gasped at that. There was not a black man alive who had not heard of that infamous engagement. The Union fort in Tennessee had been manned by black troops and a few white officers. The white officers were spared when they surrendered the fort to General Bedford Forest, but the unarmed colored troops were massacred by the rebels. “Remember Fort Pillow” had become the battle cry of black men in blue for the rest of the war.

  At the mention of Fort Pillow, Corporal Waller dropped his head for a moment and closed his eyes. Then he lifted his gaze again to look at the men arranged around him with hard eyes like those of an eagle and shook his head. There would be no further talk of Fort Pillow that night. Instead it was time for stuffing the tenderfeet, telling grisly stories about Indians to the rookies.

  The room was silent as the grizzle-haired veteran lowered himself into the camp chair set in front for him. He flopped his hat into his lap and settled back.

  “Well,” Waller said, his voice surprisingly high and thin. He paused, pulled a corncob pipe from his pocket, held it up, and looked around.

  Immediately, a dozen sacks of tobacco were offered to him. He chose one, slowly filled his pipe, put the sack in his pocket, pulled out a match, and struck it on his boot. It was still so quiet in the assembly hall that everyone could hear the flaring of the flame and then the pock-pock-pock of his indrawn breaths as he puffed the pipe into life before letting out a hiss of white smoke.

  “Beecher Island,” he said. “Beecher Island.” He looked around. “You want to hear about that one?”

  “Yes, sir!” at least a dozen men answered.

  The corporal allowed a grim smile to visit his lips. “Beecher Island. Uh-huh, uh-huh. It was one great sensation. Beecher Island on the Arickaree Crick in Colorado. September 1868 it was.”

  He raised his pipe, looking down the length of it as if it was a telescope showing him that scene.

  “Them hostiles had surrounded Major Forsyth and Lieutenant Beecher and their brave men. Most of them was grave wounded and compelled to live on the flesh of horses for nine days on that small island out there in the middle of the crick.”

  Another dramatic pause as he let this sink into everyone’s imagination.

  “One of Forsyth’s men, Jack Stillwell it was, he slipped through the Indians, rode to Fort Wallace, and brought word of the terrible fix they was in. Right away it was boots and saddles and we was entered in the race for the island. Twenty-six hours of hard riding and then Colonel Louis Carpenter and myself, being his hostler, rode first into the rifle pits they had dug out. What a sight we saw. Thirty dead and wounded men surrounded by dead horses that had lain in the hot sun for ten days. Those poor men were in a dying condition when the colonel and myself dismounted and began to rescue them. Before long the rest of the men of Company H were all in the pits, and we began to feed those men from our haversacks. They were eating all we gave them. If the doctor had not arrived and bade us to desist, we would have killed them by feeding them to death. And then when they was strong enough, they began to tell their tale.”

  Waller drew deep on his pipe, expelling a ring of smoke that hung above his gray-haired brow like a halo over a saint.

  “God bless the Beecher Island men,” Corporal Waller exclaimed, raising his hands as if he was in church and praising the Lord. “There were two thousand Indians attacked them. All under the great Cheyenne chief Roman Nose. Those murderous hostiles were preparing to raid Kansas and Colorado before they ran into Major Forsyth and his brave crew. There were no other soldiers within miles. All that Roman Nos
e had to oppose him and his thousands of braves was Major George Forsyth, Lieutenant Fredrick Beecher, and their scouts. The Indians had them surrounded. Every one of their fifty horses was shot by the Indians in less than an hour. But seeing how outnumbered they was, those brave men started to dig rifle pits in that sand, using spoons and pocketknives. Five men were killed as they dug, Beecher among them, and many wounded, but they dug out good deep rifle pits in the sand. Then old Roman Nose fixed up for a grand charge he thought would be fatal to the white men. But that was the greatest mistake Roman Nose ever made.”

  Waller looked round the rapt circle and cleared his throat. “A bit dry here, boys,” he said.

  Six canteens of water and three bottles containing something stronger were thrust out to him. Despite his other strict policies, Colonel Davidson was a heavy drinking man and did not mind at all if others did the same. There was never a problem finding whiskey at Fort Griffin.

  Waller carefully selected the largest of the bottles, swigged back a good slug, corked it, and slid it into his breast pocket next to his new tobacco pouch. Then he lifted his hand to his chin, leaned forward, and held out his pipe as if it was a sword.

  “Well, now to the fight!” He slapped his free hand hard against his hip like a man whipping his horse into a charge.

  “Here they come from a hundred yards away. Two hundred Indians, three hundred Indians, a thousand Indians. Then opens up the Spencer carbines of them thirty-five remaining brave scouts. Firing and loading again and again. Renegades falling off their horses like leaves from the trees in fall! Roman Nose and his grand charge is wiped off the face of the earth.”

  The corporal settled back and rubbed his hands together as if dusting them off.

  “Hurrah,” someone shouted from the crowd of men.

  Waller nodded in the direction of that shout. “Hurrah, indeed. By that brave stand made by the Forsyth and Beecher scouts, hundreds of settlers was saved from massacre and destruction.”

  The corporal looked around as if to judge if any of the men gathered around him might measure up to be the equal of those famous souls. Wash stood up straight as he could and met the veteran’s eyes. Waller nodded back.