Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 Read Online Free PDF

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    Moon of Ducks Coming Back 1871
    Satank gazed into the sky overhead, so incredibly blue now that the spring storm had passed and the thunderstorms had rolled on to the east where the civilized Indians lived on their reservations, pretending to be white men.
    The ducks were coming back. They and the geese filled the sky these lengthening days, flying north in great, dark vees against the pale, azure blue of the sky reflected in the small ponds and puddles of water left after each passing spring thunderstorm.
    The old man liked this time of the year best. It made him feel like a randy young colt again.
    Bald Head, the white Indian agent over at Fort Sill, called this time April.
    Satank liked his way better. It was this time of the year he remembered the tingle of juices flowing in his veins and the strength of mating surge through his loins. Ah, the ways of a young man!
    And for the first time in his life, Satank actually grew jealous of his own grown son, married now, with two sons of his own.
    Among his people, the Kiowa, Satank’s name meant “Sitting Bear.”
    And sitting was something he most enjoyed these days. He drank deep of the clean air left behind in the storm’s wake as the dark clouds cleared off and rumbled eastward. It was near here that he had been born nearly seventy winters before. This was the land they had fought the Comanche for, the land they held along with the Comanche across many summers of hunting buffalo. And riding side by side, the two tribes had struggled against the hated white Tehannas.
    Even the merest thought of the white man spoiled Satank’s mood. That thought come here now to cloud up the sky of his mind and moods like the dark thunderclap clouds so full of noise and wind and fury.
    The Mexicans far to the south and west had rarely ventured this far into Comanche and Kiowa land. And if they had, it was only to trade along the well-established routes carved out long winters beyond remembering across the high Staked Plain. Yes, the Mexicans came to trade in cattle and horses stolen from the white man. And there were occasionally the Comancheros who dared ride into the land of the Comanche and the Kiowa to trade as well—to trade in human captives.
    A life his grandsons would not have for their own, this chasing after the buffalo for all the Kiowa needed to survive in this great land where they had come from the far north. Yet it was here, among the Republican and Arkansas herds of the shaggy, black beasts, that the Kiowas and Comanches did not yet realize they were playing out the final acts of a great tragedy like no other in the history of the world.
    The first act in that long played-out drama had seen the coming of the strange, pale men out of the south armed with powerful weapons, some marching on foot, others riding atop the big elk-dogs. It was the coming of the horse that ushered in the second act of the tragedy. For now the Kiowa and others had their first guns. More important—now at last they rode as true kings of all they cast their eyes upon.
    It was the horse that evolved the Kiowa into a truly nomadic people, free and wild—yet a people in every way totally dependent upon the buffalo season after season after season, dependent for food, and shelter and clothing, and for the very purpose to their lives. The Kiowa was as irretrievably bound to the buffalo as much as any prisoner was shackled by irons to his cell. No matter that for Satank’s people the cell had no roof save that of endless powder blue overhead, no walls save that of the far horizons at the curve of the earth in all four directions.
    They were locked in this prison, unaware that the death of the buffalo would soon spell the death of their culture. Yet, for the last five winters, Satank’s spirit helper had been telling the old man to listen fervently to the wind. But the old man had laughed at that—simply because the wind always blew out here on the