Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (17 page)

Black-bordered advertisements proclaiming “Grand Railway Excursion to the Land of the Bison!” and “Buffalo Hunt on the Plains!” were in every newspaper, promoted by the Kansas Pacific.

Customers from all points east were routed west to Phil Sheridan Station, Kansas—near the site where Forsyth's fifty civilians stood off five hundred Cheyenne for nine days. Make no mistake, the conductors told their passengers as the railway employees buckled on their sidearms once past the Ellsworth Station—this was the Great Plains, home to the savage red man. Details of buffalo soldiers were assigned to protect the watering and refueling stops like the one at Buffalo Tank. But by the time they reached Sheridan, the eastern dudes come to shoot a shaggy buffalo got their money's worth.

There among a collection of dingy sod hovels and hillside dugouts, the owners of watering holes and saloons and whorehouses plied their trade. Here too flocked the gamblers ready to fleece those newly arrived from the east of their easy money. And surrounding the tiny, stinking town for miles around were thousands of buffalo hides, pegged out and drying, ready for shipment to the tanneries back beyond the great Missouri River.

While most of his kind swirled as headily as nectar-sucking hummingbirds around such places as Sheridan and Dodge City, Billy Dixon had always done his best to steer clear of such fleshpots. It was out here to the prairie that men like him came to reclaim a big piece of themselves.

The winter drifts were staying long this year, Billy had noted as he had ambled south from Dodge, already a growing, rowdy and raucous new town. But with the persistence of the spring sun, the drifts were shrinking at last. Each one a murky gray by now, windblown and carved in sharp relief, the final sprigs of snow gave way to the onslaught of spring. Snowmelt seeped into the ground, trickled into every arroyo and coulee, roared down every creek and stream toward the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.

Soon enough the buffalo would be coming north once again in their annual dance of mating and mauling, snorting and grazing with their noses always into the wind.

And when they did turn north, the hide hunters would be there to greet them, in numbers never before seen on the southern plains.

Billy Dixon had wondered on it, watching the throngs of men coming into Dodge, some with their own outfits, others having to count on getting outfitted right there in the buffalo country. A team, a wagon, blankets and knives, and a big-bore gun … why, anybody's cousin could call himself a buffalo hunter.

Dixon snorted as he savored the aroma of the coffee grounds he had just dumped into the roiling water, then pulled the old kettle to the side of his small fire. He leaned back to let the coffee brew while he tore at the venison he had jerked two days before.

Anybody and everybody was coming to the southern plains this year, in numbers never seen since the rush to the California gold fields in '49. Out-of-work railroad laborers, burnt-out settlers needing a new stake in life, men with failed business back east, fortune hunters looking for the next mother lode, each of them with his own story and his own reason for being here in buffalo country with a rifle and skinning knife, their eyes straining at the horizon, waiting for the first of the herds to come in sight now that winter had fled the land.

Back some five summers ago, when Dixon had first come to this country driving wagons for Custer's Seventh Cavalry, the dim-sighted buffalo were so unconcerned and unafraid of man they had to be shooed aside from the path the regiment and wagon train was taking. The country was a paradise, like a hive. And hunters such as Billy Dixon were the bees. One day the white men would be swarming south of the “dead line.” For now, Dixon and his five were alone.

At this camp, they had busied themselves the first two days cutting the tall grass and stacking it so the stock would have proper graze without having to let the animals forage far from camp, where warriors on fleet ponies could run off the horses and wagon mules. This morning was the day Billy had chosen to take one last look south of their camp. McCabe rode horseback beside him, and with them came one of the old skinners in the lightest wagon, hitched to a tandem of mules.

If trouble raised its head, Dixon wanted his bunch to move and move quickly.

From the day they had crossed the Arkansas and pushed south into Indian country, Billy's outfit had spotted small war-parties in the distance. For the most part, that's where the warriors had stayed, never venturing too close, firing only from long-range at the intruders, respectful of the hunters' big-bore, far-shooting guns. They seemed content for the time just trying to push the white men north, back across the river and out of buffalo country.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Dixon cried, reining up suddenly on the slope leading down to Crooked Creek.

The other two with him had no trouble seeing the war-party across the creek, each warrior painted and feathered, milling and talking among themselves.

“It won't be too long they'll figure out there's only three of us, by gor!” McCabe cursed.

“Let's fort up!” suggested the old skinner as he lashed reins to the brake and hopped to the ground. He dragged his own rifle from beneath the seat and found himself a spot in the shade of the wagon.

One of the warriors came to the middle of the stream and waved his arm, signaling the white man to go back. To return north. Behind him a dozen younger ones milled and shouted their challenges to the outnumbered white men.

“I'll knock him down, you want me to,” offered the old skinner.

“I don't figure they want to draw any blood today,” Billy replied. “Else't they'd roared across the creek and been done with us.”

“Day ain't over yet, Dixon,” McCabe growled. “They're standing their ground where they are because of our guns. If we start rolling back now—they'll sweep down on us and make easy pickin's.”

A shot whined overhead, causing the three white men to duck. Down at the stream, the older warrior had turned about and was shouting at the younger men smeared with ocher and red earth and bright yellow pigment. Then another of the hot-blooded bucks fired his rifle at the wagon. Lead slapped through the sidewall.

“Goddamn 'em!” snarled the old skinner. “Let's fight the red bastards, Dixon!”

“This is still my outfit, and if I say stand—we'll stand.”

“I didn't join up with you to get my scalp raised, Dixon,” spat McCabe.

“Who'd want red hair like yours?” Billy asked, smiling.

“Just let me show 'em we're not to be trifled with,” McCabe pleaded.

“Over their heads,” Dixon agreed. “Let's see if we can shoo them off, like flies off a fresh hide.”

The two others began firing over the warriors. The Indians stirred, their horses prancing, splashing in the stream then easing back to the far bank, continuing to shout their own brand of obscenities.

But the old man in the creek stood his ground, shouting something after each shot fired between the two groups. He had a single feather tied beneath his left ear, where it fluttered beneath the old warrior's jawbone as he harangued the white men.

Finally Billy tired of the long-distance gun battle and waved his arms, signaling that he and the others were withdrawing—to the north. The war-chief nodded in no little satisfaction, then turned his pony out of the creek and waved his painted warriors away from the scene. Their job done, the white men turned back to where they belonged.

“My ass was puckering like a whiskey keg bung-hole,” said the old man.

“What you think they were?” McCabe asked.

“Cheyenne, most likely,” Billy answered.

“Chances are you're right—still far enough north for Cheyenne.”

“Man's gotta push far down on the far side of the Cimarron to bump into Kiowa, don't he?” Dixon asked.

“Them, or the godblamed Comanche,” said the skinner.

“You like hunting on the other side of the Arkansas, boys?”

They both eyed him, not sure just what he was asking.

“I like keeping my hair, red or no,” McCabe answered.

“How 'bout making money.”

McCabe looked at the skinner. “That too.”

“Then we ain't leaving,” Dixon said. “We'll just go back to camp, pull up stakes and make it look like we're pulling out.”

“We ain't gonna make it back to camp afore dark,” the skinner declared as the empty wagon rattled and bounced over the grassy prairie.

“Then we'll ride till it's slap-dark,” Dixon told them. “And bed down where night finds us.”

“Night finds us,” McCabe repeated. “Night … or them murdering Cheyenne do.”

Chapter 12

July 1873

With a nerve-rattling screech of iron upon iron, the great hissing weight of the eastbound freight was eased into the station at Hays City, Kansas, beside the Smoky Hill River.

It was almost as if the great black monster sighed as it settled itself there this early evening beside the battered platform that had seen countless thousands of boots and moccasin soles over all those years it had stood here beside the Kansas-Pacific. To most who found themselves meeting this train at twilight, this appeared to be just another eastbound chain of freight cars and passenger wagons shuddering to a stop behind the wheezing engine as it hissed its first of many spouts of steam among the legs of those gathered in the fading summer sunlight on that scuffed platform of cottonwood planks.

Seamus Donegan rose slowly from his horsehair, leather-covered seat beside the window on the far side of the train, away from the station platform. He was in no real hurry, he figured, time enough to let the other passengers scurry down the aisle in their rush, down the iron steps and into another life than the smoky, dusty, confined life they had all shared for what time they gave themselves over to this black snorting monster that had pulled the Irishman here all the way from Redding, California, and the land his uncle Ian O'Roarke had come to call his own.

Seamus was moving east, heading back to the only place he could ever admit to feeling was home. Ireland.

With a sense of some completeness now fully a part of him, the tall Irishman set the battered brown slouch hat atop his shoulder-length curls then tugged the heavy canvas mackinaw onto his arms. The sun had just settled at the edge of the far prairie, giving a pink tint to the underbellies of the summer flecks of clouds overhead. The air would be growing cool soon enough.

Seamus had been a long time returning to these plains, gone to the edge of the western world, tracking down Uncle Ian and fighting Modocs in the devil's playground called the Lava Beds.
*
And he had spent more nights than he cared to now remember wrapped in his bedroll at the edge of this endless prairie wilderness.

The plaintive howls of wolf and coyote, the whisper of wind and the hammering hoofbeats of summer thunderstorm on his gum poncho, the minute cry of insects at work in the dark, a sound almost lost against the aching immensity of the whirring of the faraway stars a man could almost make out coming from that great black velvet canopy overhead. A great, arching skyscape just out of reach above the bed he made in that lonely land of the high plains that only a true, wandering soul could learn to love.

“This land will bake your brains in the summer … freeze your balls in the winter. Nothing like the high plains, Seamus.”

He snagged the worn leather of his holster belt, slung it over his shoulder as he recalled those words of Abner Grover, the prairie scout who had for a time shared a riflepit on a stinking island in the middle of a nameless river bottom somewhere up high on the Colorado plains.

Pulling up the scarred remains of his trail-weary saddlebags, he hefted the saddle that had cradled his ass for so many miles, and half that many years. With his free hand Seamus retrieved that last item of his belongings wedged into the narrow seat: the brass-mounted, blue-barreled .44-caliber Henry repeater. Much as if the rifle were coming home, he swept his huge paw around the action, his hand cupped in a made-to-order groove ready to receive the weapon.

He was alone in the car. The noise was all outside now: the calls of friends and family to those who had stepped off the wheezing monster. Stevedores hustled, shouldered back the huge doors and disappeared into baggage cars to retrieve luggage and trunks and freight bound for off-loading at this stop on the central plains. A clanging of bells, a rush of pouring water from the railside tank and another loud exhaust of steam greeted the Irishman's ears as he turned his bulk sideways and eased down the aisle for the narrow door at the end of the passenger car.

Three steps and his tall, mule-eared boots clattered to a halt on the platform. He glanced up, then down, and found a uniformed station man hurrying past with papers rolled beneath his arm. Seamus held out the Henry rifle like a man who required a toll to be paid before passing.

“Where might I get my animals?”

“What sort of animals, mister?” the man asked, irritated.

“Horses.”

“You bring with you in from Denver City?”

“Aye. Farther still. California.”

The harried man pointed back down the track. “Likely they were loaded in the last few cars. There ain't another platform, but they run a ramp up to the cars and put 'em down in the corrals.”

Seamus looked downtrack then turned around to utter his thanks but found the small man hurrying on to other duties at the far end of the passenger platform.

In the fading light of this early summer's eve, every form took on a unique texture of its own here in the clear air of the central plains. Ever since the iron rails had catapulted him over the California mountains and onto the plains, his nose had reveled in that special quality to the air that bespoke this high land yearning against and for the endless sky. Not that the land hugging the boundary of California and Oregon wasn't pretty. It just wasn't country for him.