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

land of the Kiowa and buffalo. Even more telling, Leavenworth had brought his riflemen to accompany the return of a Kiowa child to her people, a girl who had years before been captured by the Osages. The old chief, Dohauson, was much impressed with the effort taken by the white man and his warrior society to return this one small child to her people. The Kiowa pledged their undying friendship to the Great Father far to the east where the sun was born each day.
    A decade later, in 1844, a white man came among them, sent by “Hook Nose Man” Bent, the trader in the mud house far up on the Arkansas. This old man who now built the log and mud trading house a few miles above the old Adobe Walls, west of Indian Territory, was named “Wrinkled Neck” by the Kiowa. Here the tribe traded for looking glasses and brass tacks, powder and lead for their old muzzle-loaders, iron barrel hoops for their arrow points. Still, Bent’s trader lacked one thing most desired by the Kiowas: Mexican captives.
    For nearly twenty years Wrinkled Neck’s trading house flourished, until cholera spread its deadly scourge across the southern plains in the winter of 1861–62. The disease that no man feared in the morning while taking his breakfast, yet left that same man dead by supper, had been carried north by the Kiowa gone south to raid into Mexico. On their winter count robes the tribe called this time of despair, dying and stinking bodies in the camps … the “Spotted Winter.” Cholera finally died out, but not until it had killed nearly a fourth of the tribe and scattered the rest to the four winds in fear and superstition.
    It was a time too that the white man had made his presence known in Colorado Territory, coming for the tiny yellow rocks. So many white men marched greedily west that the buffalo were being pushed farther east along the Arkansas.
    Satanta recalled the following winter, when the warrior bands were camped on upper Walnut Creek, which flows into the Arkansas at the great bend the river makes in Kansas Territory. The snow came so early that season, drifted so deep and stayed so long, that the Kiowa remembered the year as the “Winter When Horses Ate Ashes.”
    As soon as the white man stopped fighting himself far to the east, the many tribes on the plains were instructed that they would now be compelled to make peace with the Great Father in Washington City. Soldiers were coming to enforce that peace.
    By this time there were few Indians who had not learned of the massacre of Black Kettle’s Southern Cheyenne on the Little Dried River—what the white man called Sand Creek.
    Yet in the autumn of 1865 five warrior bands warily met with white peace-talkers at the mouth of the Little Arkansas. Only Kicking Bird, a courageous chief who throughout his life counseled for peace, favored holding talks with the Great Father’s representatives. Lone Wolf and Satanta sneered at any suggestion that the Kiowa must fear the white man and his soldiers.
    At that council Satanta told the white man, “There are three chiefs in the land of the Kiowa: the Spanish Chief, the White Chief, and now me. The Spanish Chief and me are men. We do bad toward each other, sometimes steal horses and take scalps from men, but we do not get mad and act the fool. The White Chief is a child and gets mad quick when my young men, to keep their women and children from starving, take from a white man something so simple as a cup of sugar or coffee or flour. The White Chief is angry and threatens to send his soldiers. He is a coward. Tell your White Chief what I have said.”
    That’s why now, in Satanta’s fifty-ninth summer, he was leading this raid on the white man’s wagon train. This was, after all, what his people had done for as long as any man now alive could remember. To make war—as a man.
    â€œWhite Bear—the wagons have stopped!”
    â€œHow far?”
    The young scout