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

plains!
    Still … when he did listen, Satank heard the faintest whisperings of the spirits long gone the way of breath-smoke, telling him the final days had come and were now upon his people. With the going of the buffalo, they told him, so would go the Kiowa. The bones of his people left to bleach in the sun on the high prairie like the carcasses left to rot by the few white hunters who were bravely daring to cross the Arkansas into the last sacred hunting ground guaranteed the Kiowa and Comanche by the treaty-talkers.
    Long, long ago, nothing had been so complicated as this. He was a young warrior then, like his son now. Satank had taken his first wife and they had been joined by two small children come to bless their lodge. Days filled with nothing more worrisome than raiding and hunting the buffalo with his bow. Each summer, he purged himself at the sun dance the medicine men held along one creek or another in this vast, rolling grass kingdom ruled by the brown-skinned sovereigns of the southern plains. It had been so good … but only for half his life, Satank remembered.
    Even when his enemy was as bloodthirsty as was the old Kiowa chief, it was good, simply because a warrior clearly understood his enemy—the Mexican.
    The dark-skinned men marching out of the south and west of the great Staked Plain would often talk soft and sweet while stroking their dark beards or smoothing their dark mustaches when they coveted something dear to the Kiowa. Satank himself had immediately liked the long, scraggly mustaches of the Mexicans—so grew one himself—an oddity among a warrior society that normally plucked every single facial hair, including eyebrows. He wore his mustache as proudly as any symbol of manhood.
    While the Mexicans often talked sweet when they wanted something, on the next occasion of meeting with the Kiowa, the Mexican could be as brutal as any warrior: butchering the Indian men, women and children without qualm or remorse. What bothered most Kiowa about the Mexicans was that the dark-skins would lure the Indians into their villages and settlements with promises of barter and trade-goods, and once the gates were shut, those Mexicans would slaughter the ignorant bands as retribution for past raids upon herds of cattle and horses or for carrying off a few women and children to become new members of the tribes.
    The Kiowa learned quickly to hate the Mexican, and hate him with everything he had. But unlike the white American who had for so long had little to do in this great kingdom of grass and hills, the Kiowa did understand the Mexican. They were alike in many ways.
    Then the white man began to arrive in such numbers, no longer just content to push down from the land of the Lakota and Osage and Pawnee, crossing the Arkansas, the Cimarron and the Canadian on his way only to trade with the Mexicans in Santa Fe. Now the white man came out of the east, his walking soldiers in blue uniforms and his rolling wagon guns rumbling along behind, marching to fight the Mexicans, to take land away from them.
    Just like the white man had later begun taking this grand, grass kingdom of rolling hills from the Comanche and the Kiowa who had ruled it from atop their fleet ponies.
    In those years following the white man’s war with Mexico, the number of Tehannas multiplied like puffballs on the prairie after a spring thunderstorm. Not that they were there to kill the buffalo, no—instead these built their lodges beside the creeks and scratched at the earth and raised their animals and kept to themselves while the Kiowa most loved to be in the company of one another. This was something hard for Satank to comprehend—that the Tehannas would want to set themselves off from others of their own kind.
    Twenty winters after the white man’s war on the Mexicans, in the summer after Yellow Chief was killed, word came to the Kiowa that the treaty-talkers wanted again to speak to the warrior bands. Two