Brothers of the Buffalo Page 19

  they would have to go out and find it for themselves.

  So Uncle Joshua, the oldest of the slaves on

  that plantation, took to stealing Master Manson’s pigs. That went on for a while till old Master Manson

  noticed some of his pigs were turning up missing.

  So he decided to pay a visit to Uncle Joshua.

  As soon as he got close to Uncle Joshua’s cabin,

  Master Manson could smell a stew cooking.

  When he walked in, Uncle Joshua was bent over

  a big black pot, stirring that stew.

  He didn’t hardly look up when Master Manson

  came in without knocking or even saying howdy-do.

  “What are you cooking there?” Master Manson said.

  “This here is possum stew,” Uncle Joshua answered back and kept on stirring.

  “It sure does smell like pork stew to me,”

  said Master Manson.

  “Yes indeed,” Uncle Joshua replied. “Possum stew sure does smell like pork, don’t it?”

  “Well that may be so, but I know how possum

  tastes and it does not taste like pork.

  So you had better let me taste that stew.”

  “Oh my, yes,” Uncle Joshua said.

  He started filling a bowl from the pot.

  But as he did so, he was talking under his breath.

  “Mmm-mm,” he said to himself. “This here is the best stew I have ever spit in. All that spitting is gonna make

  this stew real good.”

  Then he made to hand that stew to Master Manson.

  But Master Manson didn’t take it.

  “What’s that you said about spitting?”

  Master Manson said.

  “Don’t you know about that?” said Uncle Joshua.

  “All of us negroes, we always spits into our stew

  to make the meat tender.”

  Every one of us in this cabin, all twelve of us,

  has been spitting into this stew all morning

  to make it taste fine.”

  Master Manson never did taste that stew.

  He went away real fast and never again did bother

  Uncle Joshua when he was cooking possum stew.

  I WAS HUNGRY

  I was hungry and ye fed me. So it said in the Good Book, Wash thought as he stood waiting for the Indians to arrive at Fort Sill.

  The officers and men of the 10th were about to put those words from the Bible into action at their new post. Company D had been shifted again.

  Camp Supply, Fort Griffin, and now, in the spring of 1873, Fort Sill. We have been jumped around more than the pieces on a checkerboard.

  They were now at one of the biggest of the army posts on the frontier. Fort Sill had been formed in conjunction with the new Kiowa and Comanche Indian Agency in 1869. It was located in a dry country of little mountains called the Wichitas that rose up out of the plain.

  Just as at Darlington, there was a Quaker Indian agent. Friend James Haworth was the second Quaker posted here. Agent Tatum had given up the idea of peace after his Comanches and Kiowas had persisted in raiding. It reached the point where Tatum himself asked the army to chastise them. That did not sit well with his superiors, him having been told to always play the role of a pacifier, and so he had had to resign.

  Haworth was a true lover of President Grant’s peace policy. That had earned him the out-and-out hatred of Colonel Davidson, commander at Fort Sill as he had been at Fort Griffin. It seemed to Wash that their colonel wanted nothing more than to be given free rein to punish the Indians as he saw fit. Subjugation, Davidson said more than once to his troops, would be the only solution to the Indian problem. He was pleased that the buffalo hunters were killing off those big animals the Indians depended upon. Starve them out. That might force them to come in, or, better yet, to take up arms in a war that would not just offer their colonel a chance to pacify the savages but also lead to his own advancement. Few officers ever moved up in rank in peacetime, and Davidson was eager to get back the generalship he had lost.

  If our old colonel was here today, Wash thought, and not off on a three-day excursion, I have no doubt that what is about to happen would not be going on. He would regard it as useless tomfoolery or worse.

  But Wash didn’t think that. What they were doing could mean the difference between war and peace, at least for a little while. There were some of the frontier who believed there were but two kinds of Indian—those who were shooting at you and those who were not. But Sergeant Brown had been more subtle in his assessment of the different tribes.

  “Kiowas,” he said, “are touchy. If our Cheyennes is like dry prairie grass, easy to set ablaze, our Kiowas is more like gunpowder. Twenty years or so ago, they was at war with every other tribe. Moreover, Kiowas is clannish, with all different ranks and classes amongst themselves. Lowest are them who was originally Mexicans, stolen as boys, then raised Kiowa. The highest are sort of like lords and always the big leaders.” The sergeant shook his head. “Umm-hmmm. That makes them even more fierce fighters. Them Mexican Kiowas is always trying to prove themselves to be just as good as the ones born Kiowa.”

  Yet another element made Kiowas volatile. That was a nearly superstitious dread of being counted. Getting put on a list never troubled either the Cheyennes or the nearby Comanches. But a Kiowa saw getting counted as one step away from getting dead. Taking down their names and noting how many of them there were was like kicking a hornet’s nest. Kiowas would fight or run before allowing anyone to enroll them.

  “Man plans to count Kiowas,” Sergeant Brown said, “best count his ammunition first.”

  Still, despite their history of being warlike, the Kiowas now seemed to have made up their minds to follow the peace road. Much of this was due to their major chief, Kicking Bird. Kicking Bird was a tall, slender man with an affable bearing, always ready to reach out his hand to Agent Haworth or whatever military officer he had to meet with when he went to the fort. Even Colonel Davidson seemed to grudgingly respect Kicking Bird.

  For his part, Kicking Bird had formed a company of Kiowa scouts whose job it was to ride out among their people and see that things were peaceable and that no young warriors were slipping away to do such things as to murder surveyors. Even more than census takers, surveyors were hated by the Kiowas. Putting marks on the land troubled them as much as being counted. So doing what he could to protect even such detested people was a strong indication of Kicking Bird’s deep devotion to peace.

  Soon after Wash and Charley and the other men of Company D arrived at Fort Sill, Kicking Bird had come to visit. As they watched Kicking Bird shaking hands with the newly arrived officers and warmly welcoming them to his land, Charley had leaned over toward Wash.

  “I swear,” Charley whispered, “if that old chief been born a white man, he would be a United States senator.”

  But even with Kicking Bird endeavoring to keep things calm, the peace they had been enjoying was tenuous at best. Another of the tribe’s big leaders, Lone Wolf, had nothing but bitterness in his heart about the army. His favorite son, Tau-ankia, Sitting in the Saddle, had been shot and killed in December by men of the 4th Cavalry. Tau-ankia and a little party of Kiowa and Comanches had been on a raid into Mexico and were bringing back a string of horses when the 4th surprised them. The officer in charge, Lieutenant Hudson, had opened fire as the Kiowas were peacefully resting their horses. One of Hudson’s first shots killed Tau-ankia. On getting word of his son’s death, Lone Wolf had gone crazy with grief. He’d cut off his hair, killed his best horses, and burned his lodges, his wagon, and his buffalo robes, all as a show of how deep his mourning was. Then he had ridden off to find his son’s body and bring him back for a proper burial. But to add insult to injury, even though Lone Wolf did locate Tau-ankia’s body, he was attacked by another group of soldiers and forced to abandon his son’s remains among some rocks.

  “Think we’ll see Lone Wolf today?” Josh said as he put down
another box.

  “Not likely,” Wash replied. “His mind is on revenge for his boy.”

  “Little late for that, ain’t he?” Josh said.

  Wash nodded. One of the ironies about Lone Wolf’s desire for vengeance was that fate had already taken it on the man who’d killed his boy. Lieutenant Hudson had been shot and killed by accident at Fort Clark not long after that fatal encounter with Tau-ankia. Hudson’s roommate was cleaning his Spencer rifle and it went off by accident, as Spencers were prone to do. So the man who killed Lone Wolf’s boy died even before Lone Wolf got the news.

  Wash put that out of his head. Thoughts of death or revenge were not the things to focus on now. Instead, like the rest of the post he should be thinking of the big feast about to happen. He smiled at the thought of that.

  I would a sight rather feed an Indian than be fighting him. Some might declare that the only good Indian is a dead one. But they are mostly the same folks who venture a similar opinion about black soldiers. Nor have they reckoned the cost of making just one bad Indian into what they would call a good one.

  Hard as it was for some to realize, when all things were taken into account, the cost to the United States in 1874 for killing one Indian in a military campaign had reached about a million dollars. Providing Indians with rations was far more than charity. Nor was it just honoring the bargains made by promising in writing to provide the tribes with their basic needs in exchange for them giving up the bigger part of their land. It also meant peace, which was far cheaper than war.

  Keeping that peace had been harder in recent months. The incursions of the buffalo hunters had doubled and then doubled again. They had even set up a big camp at Adobe Walls in the very center of the Kiowa and Comanche hunting grounds, which was like waving a red flag before the face of a bull. The only thing to keep them pacified had been providing them their promised rations. Lately, though, despite the real danger of bloody conflict, rations for the Kiowas and Comanches had not materialized. No herds of cattle had been driven in to the agency. No wagons full of flour and sugar had appeared. For more than two months the rations had been late.

  A week before, Wash had thought that was about to change. A wagon had pulled in packed with boxes for the Indians.

  “Hallelujah,” Charley had exclaimed. “Food at last.”

  “Wait and see,” Sergeant Brown had said.

  Wash, Charley, and Josh had been detailed to escort the wagon in to the agency and to help unload those boxes.

  “Oh my Lord,” Charley had said when he saw the words on the boxes.

  Not flour or sugar or even coffee.

  “Soap,” Wash said. “Every box. Big white bars of soap.”

  Sergeant Brown had nodded wearily as Josh held up one of those bars of soap to show him.

  “Been more promises made to the Indians and broken,” Brown said, “than stars in God’s own sky. And it will be one of the Lord’s own miracles if this all don’t end up in another war afore this year is out.”

  “Amen,” Josh said.

  “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,” Charley added.

  Wash said nothing.

  Feeding Indians was not the army’s job. Still, on his own part, whenever possible, Wash had been quietly borrowing canned food from the commissary—with the help of a certain sympathetic sergeant—and then, when far enough away from the post to not be seen by their superior officers, dropping it where the Indians could get it.

  But now the drawn faces of those starving Indians in their camps seemed to have touched the hearts of every person at the post, aside from the absent commander. It was especially true of the army wives, most of whom were mothers and had seen the swollen bellies of the Kiowa children.

  Despite the lack of treaty rations, the post commissary had remained well stocked with food. Officers and men alike agreed to chip in whatever they could. By the time the soldiers had finished buying food, the commissary’s tills were filled with gold eagle coins and rolls of “shinplasters”—the new paper currency issued in twenty-five and fifty cent denominations. And a great stock of food was amassed. The better part of it was canned goods—tomatoes, pears, peaches, and meats, as well as sacks of sugar and rice and dried beans and box after box of hardtack.

  All was now stacked in great piles around the flagpole in the middle of the parade ground where Charley and Wash, the day’s duty officers in charge of raising and lowering Old Glory, stood at attention next to that flagpole. Though a crowd of people had gathered, it was quiet, everyone listening. It was so silent you could hear the soft flapping of the flag on the small breeze blowing in off the prairie. It was a day clear as crystal. The only clouds were those few that always linger around the top of Mount Scott in the distance. Overhead there a bird was circling that Wash thought at first might be a turkey buzzard. But as it floated lower, he saw it was an eagle, cocking its head to look down at the throng of waiting soldiers and their families.

  Then Wash began to hear the sound for which everyone was waiting. The solid beat of drums coming from outside the fort. But not the drums of war. Voices, too, a solemn sort of singing, repeating the same words again and again. Women’s high ululations were cutting in with piercing notes, along with the men’s deep voices, strong and solid as the beat of their drums. It stirred Wash’s heart in a way beyond words. He felt as if he should be moving his own feet. But he remained at attention.

  And here they came, a long procession of Kiowas and Comanches marching—no, dancing—from their villages ten miles away. Every man and women was wearing his or her finest clothing. The leaders wore eagle bonnet headdresses, so long they trailed down to the ground. All their faces were painted, but not for the path of war. Every single Indian, from the littlest toddler holding a mama’s hand on up to Kicking Bird himself, was holding up a green willow branch and waving it back and forth in time to the drumming as they entered the fort.

  Stiff at attention, Wash couldn’t move his head, but he cut his eyes over toward where Bethany was standing with Sergeant Brown’s wife and the other colored women of the fort. Her face looked as excited as he felt. She turned her gaze his way. Wash knew that the smile on her lips was meant to tell him how thrilled she was to be sharing that moment with him.

  More and more danced on in. Some were men who had surely seen hard fighting in their lives. They bore on their bodies the marks of battles they had survived. Healed wounds from bullets and spears and knives showed on their arms and legs and shoulders and chests. One tall old man had a half-moon scar on his forehead, perhaps from where some enemy tried to scalp him.

  They danced in to form a great circle around the flagpole, tromping down the colonel’s beloved grass. Then, as one, they raised their willow branches up and, pointing them at the flag, all joined their voices in one long shrill cry that made the hair stand up on Wash’s neck. Then they lay those willow wands down on the ground in front of all the foodstuffs piled before them.

  They were so close that Wash could see how thin most of them were, their faces drawn with hunger. But not one rushed in to grab any of the food. They had too much dignity for that. Instead, the drumming and singing kept on as they danced in place. Finally, at a signal from Kicking Bird, it stopped. The men remained standing as the women and little ones sat down on the ground next to them.

  Right on that green grass that will be matted and yellow tomorrow from all those dancing feet. Good thing Colonel Davidson is away.

  But the colonel’s wife was there and had been one of the women at the fort who had done the most to push the idea of feeding the Indians. So had the wife of Lieutenant Pratt. The two, along with most of the other women of the fort, stood together and watched in approval. Sergeant Brown’s wife, Martha, and Bethany were there as well. Even though he was at attention, eyes forward, he could see Bethany’s face. Had she placed herself so he could see her? It might be so, for her eyes were on his and a brilliant smile was on her face. She nodded at him. He almost forgot himself and nodded back, but
stopped at the last second. Her mouth shaped a word. Good? Was that it? Then another. Idea?

  It suddenly came to Wash. Bethany had helped him put together that bag of food he had dropped off for the Cheyennes before their transfer here to Fort Sill. It had been both her idea and his after he’d told her how starved the Indians were getting to be. It had reached the point where he wished he could share his own rations with them. But that was impossible.

  “Nothing we can do,” he’d said. “We are under orders not to go into the Cheyenne camp.”

  “No,” she had replied. “There is always something that can be done. Even if it is small.”

  “Well,” he’d said, “we could get some food and I could just accidentally drop it if I do run into any Indians whilst out on patrol.”

  Had Bethany passed that story on to Lieutenant Pratt’s wife? Or had the idea simply come from the pity and goodness in the hearts of the officers’ wives? No way to tell, Wash supposed. But there was a warm feeling in his chest as Bethany looked at him and nodded again.

  Wherever it had come from, that idea of feeding the Kiowas had met the approval of Davidson’s second, Major Schofield, the acting commanding officer. The major stepped up and gestured with his right hand. Two dozen enlisted men stepped forward and started prying the tops off the boxes, portioning out bags and cans of food to the waiting Kiowas and Comanches.

  It was all done in good order. Each Indian man came up one after another—no pushing or shoving—to be given his share of the food. Wash noticed how the head chiefs and their families were the last to take their rations. Kicking Bird, in fact, was the very last, waiting until everyone else had their food handed to them before he came forward.

  Sergeant Brown came up to where Wash was still at attention with Charley.

  “See them two there,” the sergeant said, jerking his thumb to indicate a pair of tall Kiowa men with big war bonnets. “Known hostiles. Last week they was at war, riding with Lone Wolf. But as long as the bellies of their families is filled they shall not be quick to go back on the war path.”