Comanche Cowboy (The Durango Family) (47 page)

“I’m looking forward to it,” he murmured, blowing in her ear until she shivered. “And by the way, I’ve a little something for this anniversary.”

When she saw what it was—the tiny charm dangling on the delicate gold chain—her vision blurred with tears. “Oh, Maverick! You didn’t forget! You didn’t!”

“Never, baby. Come here to me.”

He placed the chain around her neck and turned her small face up to him with his big hands. “Cayenne Carol McBride Durango, I think it would take years just to tell you how much I love you!”

“I’ve got time,” she whispered, snuggling contentedly against his chest. “Now tell me how much,” she teased.

“Well,” he began as he kissed the tip of her nose, held her very close. “Once upon a time, there was this tough old trail boss who saw a sassy redhead in a green dress and he loved her from the very first moment he saw her. . . .”

Everyone’s heard of Custer’s Last Stand, but only historians show interest in the Red River Indian Uprising of 1874 despite the fact that it was the greatest army expedition against the Plains Indians ever undertaken and involved famous people such as Quanah Parker, Bat Masterson, and the most competent Indian fighter of them all, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie.

It is a fact that the wagons carrying food to the Kiowa were ambushed and the drivers tortured to death sometime between July 2 and July 4. It was hard to tell from the condition of the bodies. Pat Hennessy himself had been tied upside down to one of his big wagon wheels and slowly roasted alive. There’s some who say it wasn’t Indians at all, but white men masquerading as Indians so they could rob him. The massacre site is about fifty-eight miles northwest of my home here in the Cross Timbers section of central Oklahoma. There’s a small town on the massacre site now named for Pat. The town’s name has been misspelled as Hennessey.

Many of Oklahoma’s rivers are notorious for quicksand. The Cimarron is one of the worst. I know it well since it’s only twenty-six miles from my front door. Just a short distance from where I had Cayenne and Maverick trapped by the quicksand was once the scene of Oklahoma’s worst railroad disaster. Early on a rainy morning, September 18, 1906, a trestle gave way near the town of Dover, dropping a Rock Island train into the rushing flood waters of the Cimarron. No one knows for sure how many died that night, probably less than a dozen. But you might be interested to know the giant locomotive from that wreck, old #628, is still there, sunk deep in the quicksand of the Cimarron.

Some of you may laugh at the use of vanilla as perfume. But I can tell you it was common on the frontier. One of my earliest memories is that of my Texas grandmother, born the year of the Red River Uprising, dabbing vanilla behind her ears. She told me many times that “strong scent” was for “hussies.”

The vanilla plant, a member of the orchid family, seems to have been discovered by the conquistadors deep in Mexico. By the way, Mexico doesn’t produce enough vanilla for its own use and its labeling laws are not as strict as ours. Look with skepticism at those giant bottles of “pure vanilla” being sold cheap to tourists. Not only is it possible that you aren’t getting pure, undiluted vanilla, but it may contain coumarin. Coumarin has a medical component, Dicumarol, which is closely related to the anticoagulant, warfarin, used in rat poison. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned the use of coumarin in our food back in 1955.

An interesting legend that has never been unraveled completely is that of the black man who played cavalry charges on a bugle, fighting on the Indians’ side at Adobe Walls. The black cavalry served heroically in the old west. Although the legend says that the dead black was a soldier who had gone over to the warriors, there’s also the possibility that he was a dark mixed-blood who had been adopted and raised by the Indians.

Speaking of the soldiers who participated in the Red River Uprising, between them, these men were awarded some thirty or so Congressional Medals of Honor during this campaign. This medal is our country’s highest award for bravery and gallantry above and beyond the call of duty. That so many were awarded tells you something about the soldiers who served. There were, of course, no medals for the brave Indian warriors except for scalps, many of them taken from innocent settlers who paid for the greed of the buffalo hunters with their lives.

A few buffalo hunters did get their just deserts. The horrible torture inflicted on Buck and his pal in Chapter Eighteen came straight from my research books.

Some of you will be curious as to what happened to the major players of the Red River Uprising. The four little German sisters were indeed adopted by Colonel Miles. The four grew up, married, and reared families. The last of the four, Julia, died in California in 1959, at the age of ninety-two.

Billy Dixon, the buffalo hunter who actually fired the famous shot at the battle of Adobe Walls, became an army scout. During September, he was one of the heroes of the battle of Buffalo Wallow and won one of those Congressional Medals of Honor. Finally, he became a rancher and lived to be an old man, dying in his bed of pneumonia in 1913. His final resting place is the Adobe Walls battle ground.

I have walked that Panhandle site while researching this book. Adobe Walls is a little more than a hundred miles northeast of Amarillo and is hard to find unless you’re very determined. There’s not much to see except for granite markers commemorating the battle and the burial sites of some of those killed there.

Bat Masterson and his friend, Wyatt Earp, went on to their destinies as colorful legends of the west. Eventually, Bat became a writer on the
New York Morning Telegraph.
He died at his desk there on October 25, 1921.

Quanah Parker became something of a celebrity after the Uprising. He was not punished because he had never signed any peace treaties with the whites, so he was not guilty of breaking away. He spent the rest of his life leading his people down the peace road and entertaining famous celebrities such as Teddy Roosevelt, for whom he arranged a wolf hunt in 1905. After seeing the stars on cavalry officers’ insignia, he decided he deserved stars, too, and painted giant ones on the roof of his home near Cache, Oklahoma. The town of Quanah, the county seat of Hardeman County, Texas, is named in his honor. His war bonnet and lance are on display at the excellent Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in the town of Canyon., Texas.

Finally, Quanah was buried in full chief’s finery next to his famous mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, and little sister, Topsanah (Prairie Flower). You may visit the graves situated on Chief’s Knoll in Fort Sill’s old cemetery. His monument reads:

Resting here until day breaks and shadows fall and darkness disappears is Quanah Parker, last chief of the Comanche. Born-1852. Died-February 23, 1911.

The other leaders of the Uprising were not so lucky. Seventy-two of them were gathered up and shipped to prison at Fort Marion, St. Augustine, Florida, where many died from the unaccustomed humid environment. The prisoners became tourist attractions for curious whites, but finally the survivors were allowed to return to their families.

Colonel Ranald Mackenzie never did get his prized gray pacer back that the daring Quanah had stolen. After the great chief surrendered in 1875, he offered to return the horse but Mackenzie, perhaps in deference to the chief’s courage and pride, declined to accept it.

Mackenzie had perhaps the most tragic ending of them all. He came from an illustrious family, won many honors in the Civil War, and would be wounded seven times in his long military career. His father, naval Commander Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, is remembered because of a controversial incident aboard his ship, the
U.S. Somers,
during which Slidell hanged three young sailors accused of mutiny. One of the three was Philip Spencer, son of our nation’s Secretary of War. No one would ever accuse a Mackenzie of wavering in the face of command! Herman Melville, author of
Moby Dick,
wrote a book about the Spencer mutiny called
Billy Budd.

Ranald Mackenzie would be commanding officer at Fort Sill after the Red River Uprising for two years, then he would be sent to help corral the Indians who had killed Custer. By now, both he and Nelson Miles were generals. In 1883, Mackenzie went insane and was confined to an asylum. He died, forgotten, on January 19, 1889, at his sister’s home on Staten Island, New York and was buried at West Point.

Also buried at West Point earlier had been Ronald’s reckless fellow officer, George Armstrong Custer. As Ranald Mackenzie rode across Texas in 1874 to keep his date with destiny at the Palo Duro Canyon, Custer was leading an expedition searching for gold in the forbidden Black Hills. Less than two years later, the outraged Sioux and Cheyenne ended his career on June 25, 1876, at the Little Big Horn.

The Palo Duro is the largest state park in Texas and it is worth a trip to that site about twenty miles southeast of Amarillo. When you stand at the bottom as I have done and look up at those steep walls, you can only marvel at the bravery of both red and white men who were willing to risk their lives on those crooked trails. Palo Duro was, indeed, the last big Indian battle in Texas.

Two inventions would finally close down the open ranges and change the west forever: barbed wire (we call it bob warh here in Oklahoma), patented in November of 1874, and the proliferation of the windmill, which would pump water and make arid stretches of land usable.

The giant herds of millions of buffalo would be wiped out in only a few short years. By 1889, a census found only 1,091 American buffalo left alive. The last wild buffalo in Oklahoma Territory, a “lonely old bull,” was killed near Cold Spring, in Cimarron County, in October, 1890. It is ironic that when Teddy Roosevelt authorized the Wichita Wildlife Refuge in the Kiowas’ old hunting grounds, buffalo had to be imported for it from the New York Zoological Society. Their descendents roam freely on the Refuge, which is near old Fort Sill and is a popular tourist attraction.

I’ve received many letters, curious about how I started writing. A fellow Oklahoman, the famous romance writer, Sara Orwig, discovered me in a graduate class she taught at Central State University in Edmond, Oklahoma. When I told her I was one of the few white people in the world who knew the whereabouts of the Cheyenne Sacred Medicine Arrows, she encouraged me to write about that subject and it became my best-seller,
Cheyenne
Captive. Some of the characters mentioned in the book you just finished—Captain Baker, the blond socialite, Summer Van Schuyler, and Shawn O’Bannion—were characters in that book.

That was followed by a sequel,
Cheyenne Princess
, about the rich and powerful Durango ranching family in the Texas Hill Country during the Great Indian Outbreak of 1864. If you read that one, you may remember that I told you the true story of little Millie Durgan, the white child who was carried off during the Elm Creek Raid and adopted by the Kiowas. According to her grandchildren, little Millie was in the Palo Duro Canyon ten years later when Mackenzie made his famous raid and was one of those who walked all the way back to Fort Sill in the cold.

If you’ve read those two novels, you know how much research I do, even to the small details. It is a fact, according to old-timers, that longhorns always milled to the right, that Kiowas took one ear when they scalped a man, and yes, there was a terrible plague of grasshoppers on the plains during the summer of 1874.

Would you like to drive along the old Chisholm Trail? Start down in San Antonio, Texas on U.S. Highway 81, which roughly follows the Chisholm Trail, and drive it up across my state and on up into Kansas.

I love the Lone Star State second only to Oklahoma. It was down around Bandera, Texas that I heard the tale that became the basis for my next book.

It seems once upon a time, there was a blond wisecracking, arrogant gunslinger everyone called the Bandit. Now Bandit got into trouble one night in 1873 because he shot the Oklahoma Kid for cheating at cards in a tough Bandera saloon. He was forced to escape from the Kid’s vengeful gang on a stolen horse.

Down below the border, he crossed the path of an elegant Spanish
Senorita,
whose mother had been an American. This rich beauty, a distant cousin to the Texas Durangos, was on the run herself for personal reasons. Bandit, who had always lived by his wits and his gun, didn’t expect to be mistaken for a missing wealthy heir. And she didn’t expect to get carried off by the Indians. Neither one meant to get mixed up with Colonel Mackenzie’s cavalry, who had sneaked across the Rio Grande without written orders to clean out the raiding Kickapoo, Mescalero Apache, and Lipan warriors.

This sheltered lady’s name was Amethyst and she wore that jewel because it was just the color of her smoky lavender eyes. She’d never met a rough, tough-talking American gunslinger and he’d never met a real lady before. And in the magic of the Mescalero moonlight, they clashed like fire and gunpowder! First Bandit stole the lady’s jewelry, then he stole her innocence.

And then
she stole his
heart!

Come along for romance, heart-stopping adventure, and Indians as the Bandit from Bandera meets the elegant lady in my next western tale. . . .

For further reading, here’s just six of the forty-four reference books I used:

Bat
Masterson,
The Man & the Legend, by Robert K. DeArment

The Buffalo Soldiers,
a Narrative of Negro Cavalry in the West, by William H. Leckie

The Buffalo War,
the History of the Red River Indian Uprising of 1874, by James L. Haley

The Comanches,
the Destruction of a People, by T. R. Fehrenbach
Life of “Billy” Dixon,
by Olive K. Dixon

Wild, Wooley and Wicked,
the History of the Kansas Cow Towns and the Texas Cattle Trade, by Harry Sinclair Drago

And to all you readers who share my love for the old west . . .

’
long as I got a biscuit . . .

Georgina Gentry