The Price of the Prairie: A Story of Kansas

"Camp Starvation," we christened our miserable, snow-besieged stopping-place. We had fire but we were starving for food. Our horses were like wild beasts in their ravenous hunger, tearing the clothing from the men who came too carelessly near to their rope tethers.

That splendid group of mounts that had pranced proudly down Kansas Avenue less than a month before, moving on now nearly seven days without food, dying of cruel starvation, made a feature of this tragical winter campaign that still puts an ache into my soul. Long ago I lost most of the sentiment out of my life, but I have never seen a hungry horse since that Winter of '68 that I let go unfed if it lay within my power to bring it food.

The camp was well named. It was Hadley and Reed and Pete and John Mac, that good-natured quartet, who stood sponsors for that title. We were a pitiful lot of fellows in this garrison. We mixed the handful of flour given to us with snow water, and, wrapping the unsalted dough around a sagebrush spike, we cooked it in the flames, and ate it from the stick, as a dog would gnaw a bone. The officers put a guard around the few little hackberry trees to keep the men from eating the berries and the bark. Not a scrap of the few buffalo we found was wasted. Even the entrails cleansed in the snow and eaten raw gives hint of how hungry we were.

At last in our dire extremity it was decided to choose five hundred of the strongest men and horses to start under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Horace L. Moore, without food or tents, through the snow toward the Beulah Land of Camp Supply. Pliley had been gone for three days. We had no means of knowing whether his little company had found Sheridan's Camp or were lost in the pathless snows of a featureless land, and we could not hold out much longer.

I was among the company of the fittest chosen to make this journey. I was not yet twenty-two, built broad and firm, and with all the heritage of the strength and endurance of the Baronet blood, I had a power of resistance and recoil from conditions that was marvellous to the veterans in our regiment.

It was mid-forenoon of the fifth of November when the Nineteenth Kansas moved out of Camp Crawford by the Shunganunga and marched proudly down the main thoroughfare of Topeka at the auspicious beginning of its campaign. Twenty days later, Lieutenant-Colonel Moore again headed a marching column, this time, moving out of Camp Starvation on Sand Creek – five hundred ragged, hungry men with famishing horses, bearing no supplies, going, they could only guess whither, and unable even to surmise how many days and nights the going would consume. It was well for me that I had an ideal. I should have gone mad otherwise, for I was never meant for the roving chance life of a Plains scout.

When our division made its tentless bivouac with the sky for a covering on the first night out beyond the Cimarron River from Camp Starvation, the mercury was twenty degrees below zero. Even a heart that could pump blood like mine could hardly keep the fires of the body from going out. There was a full moon somewhere up in the cold, desolate heavens lighting up a frozen desolate land. I shiver even now at the picture my memory calls up. In the midst of that night's bitter chill came a dream of home, of the warm waters of the Neosho on August afternoons, of the sunny draw, and – Marjie. Her arms were about my neck, her curly head was nestling against my shoulder, the little ringlets about her temples touched my cheek. I lifted her face to kiss her, but a soft shadowy darkness crept between us, and I seemed to be sinking into it deeper and deeper. It grew so black I longed to give up and let it engulf me. It was so easy a thing to do.

Then in a blind stupidity I began to hear a voice in my ears, and to find myself lunging back and forth and stumbling lamely on my left foot. The right foot had no feeling, no power of motion, and I forgot that I had it.

"What are you doing, Pete?" I asked, when I recognized who it was that was holding me.

Pete was like an elder brother, always doing me a kind service.

"Trying to keep you from freezing to death," he replied.

"Oh, let me go. It's so easy," I answered back drowsily.

"By golly, I've a notion to do it." Pete's laugh was a tonic in itself. "Here you and your horse are both down, and you can't stand on one of your feet. I'll bet it's froze, and you about to go over the River; and when a fellow tries to pull you back you say, 'Oh, let me go!' You darned renegade! you ought to go."

He was doing his best for me all the time, and he had begun none too soon, for Death had swooped down near me, and I was ready to give up the struggle. The warmth of the horse's body had saved one foot, but as to the other – the little limp I shall always have had its beginning in that night's work.

The next day was Thanksgiving, although we did not know it. There are no holy days or gala days to men who are famishing. That day the command had no food except the few hackberries we found and the bark of the trees we gnawed upon. It was the hardest day of all the march.

Pete, who had pulled me back from the valley of the shadow the night before, in his search for food that day, found a luckless little wild-cat. And that cat without sauce or dressing became his Thanksgiving turkey.

The second night was bitterly cold, and then came a third day of struggling through deep snows on hilly prairies, and across canyon-guarded bridgeless streams. The milestones of our way were the poor bodies of our troop horses that had given up the struggle, while their riders pushed resolutely forward.

On the fourth day out from Camp Starvation we came at sundown to the edge of a low bluff, beyond which lay a fertile valley. If Paradise at life's eventide shall look as good to me, it will be worth all the cares of the journey to make an abundant entrance therein.

Out of the bitter cold and dreary snow fields, trackless and treeless, whereon we had wandered starving and uncertain, we looked down on a broad wooded valley sheltering everything within it. Two converging streams glistening in the evening light lay like great bands of silver down this valley's length. Below us gleamed the white tents of Sheridan's garrison, while high above them the Stars and Stripes in silent dignity floated lightly in the gentle breeze of sunset.

That night I slept under a snug tent on a soft bed of hay. And again I dreamed as I had dreamed long ago of the two strange women whom I was struggling to free from a great peril.

General Sheridan had expected the Kansas regiment to make the journey from Fort Beecher on the Arkansas to his station on the Canadian River in four or five days. Our detachment of five hundred men had covered it in fourteen days, but we had done it on five days' rations, and three days' forage. Small wonder that our fine horses had fallen by the way. It is only the human organism backed by a soul, that can suffer and endure.

Pliley and his fifty men who had left us the night we went into camp on Sand Creek had reached Sheridan three days in advance of us, and already relief was on its way to those whom we had left beyond the snow-beleaguered canyons of the Cimarron. The whole of our regiment was soon brought in and this part of the journey and its hardships became but a memory. Official war reports account only for things done. No record is kept of the cost of effort. The glory is all for the battle lists of the killed or wounded, and yet I account it the one heroic thing of my life that I was a Nineteenth Kansas Cavalry man through that November of 1868 on the Plains.

CHAPTER XXIII

IN JEAN'S LAND

All these regiments made history and left records of unfading glory.

While the Kansas volunteers had been floundering in the snow-heaped sand-dunes of the Cimarron country, General Sheridan's anxiety for our safety grew to gravest fears. General Custer's feeling was that of impatience mingled with anxiety. He knew the tribes were getting farther away with every twenty-four hours' delay, and he shaped his forces for a speedy movement southward. The young general's military genius was as strong in minute detail as in general scope. His command was well directed. Enlisted under him were a daring company of Osage scouts, led by Hard Rope and Little Beaver, two of the best of this ever loyal tribe. Forty sharpshooters under Colonel Cook, and a company of citizen scouts recruited by their commanding officer, Pepoon, were added to the regular soldiery of the Seventh Cavalry.

These citizen scouts had been gathered from the Kansas river valleys. They knew why they had come hither. Each man had his own tragic picture of the Plains. They were a silent determined force which any enemy might dread, for they had a purpose to accomplish – even the redemption of the prairie from its awful peril.

The November days had slipped by without our regiment's appearance. The finding of an Indian trail toward the southwest caused Sheridan to loose Custer from further delay. Eagerly then he led forth his willing command out of Camp Supply and down the trail toward the Washita Valley, determined to begin at once on the winter's work.

The blizzard that had swept across the land had caught the Indian tribes on their way to the coverts of the Wichita Mountains, and forced them into winter quarters. The villages of the Cheyenne, the Kiowa, and the Arapahoe extended up and down the sheltering valley of the Washita for many miles. Here were Black Kettle and his band of Cheyenne braves – they of the loving heart at Fort Hays, they who had filled all the fair northern prairie lands with terror, whose hands reeked with the hot blood of the white brothers they professed to love. In their snug tepees were their squaws, fat and warm, well clothed and well fed. Dangling from the lodge poles were scalps with the soft golden curls of babyhood. No comfort of savage life was lacking to the papooses here. And yet, in the same blizzards wherein we had struggled and starved, half a score of little white children torn from their mothers' clinging arms, these Indians had allowed to freeze to death out on the Plains, while the tribes were hurrying through the storm to the valley. The fathers of some of these lost children were in that silent company under Pepoon, marching now with the Seventh Cavalry down upon the snow-draped tepees of Black Kettle and his tribe.

Oh, the cost of it all! The price paid out for a beautiful land and sheltered homes, and school privileges and Sabbath blessings! It was for these that men fought and starved and dared, and at last died, leaving only a long-faded ripple in the prairie sod where an unmarked grave holds human dust returned to the dust of the earth.

In the shelter of the Washita Valley on that twenty-seventh day of November, God's vengeance came to these Indians at the hands of General Custer. He had approached their village undiscovered. As the Indians had swooped down on Forsyth's sleeping force; as the yells of Black Kettle's braves had startled the sleeping settlers at dawn on Spillman Creek, the daybreak now marked the beginning of retribution. While the Seventh Cavalry band played "Garry Owen" as a signal for closing in, Custer's soldiery, having surrounded the village, fell upon it and utterly destroyed it. Black Kettle and many of his braves were slain, the tepees were burned, the Indians' ponies were slaughtered, and the squaws and children made captives.

News of this engagement reached Sheridan's garrison on the day after our arrival, with the word also that Custer, unable to cope with the tribes swarming down the Washita River, was returning to Camp Supply with his spoils of battle.

"Did you know, Phil," Bud Anderson said, "that Cuthter'th to have a grand review before the General and hith thtaff when he geth here to-morrow, and that'th all we'll thee of the thircuth. My! but I wish we could have been in that fight; don't you?"

"I don't know, Bud, I'd hate to come down here for nothing, after all we've gone through; but don't you worry about that; there'll be plenty to be done before the whole Cheyenne gang is finished."

"It'll be a sight worth seein' anyhow, this parade," O'mie declared. "Do you remember the day Judge Baronet took his squad out av Springvale, Phil? What a careless set av young idiots we were then?"

Did I remember? Could I be the same boy that watched that line of blue-coats file out of Springvale and across the rocky ford of the Neosho that summer day? It seemed so long ago; and this snow-clad valley seemed the earth's end from that warm sunny village. But Custer's review was to come, and I should see it.

It was years ago that this review was made, and I who write of it have had many things crowded into the memory of each year. And yet, I recall as if it were but yesterday that parade of a Plains military review. It was a magnificent sunlit day. The Canadian Valley, smooth and white with snow, rose gently toward the hills of the southwest. Across this slope of gleaming whiteness came Custer's command, and we who watched it saw one of those bits of dramatic display rare even among the stirring incidents of war.

Down across the swell, led by Hard Rope and Little Beaver, came the Osage scouts tricked out in all the fantastic gear of Indian war coloring, riding hard, as Indians ride, cutting circles in the snow, firing shots into the air, and chanting their battle songs of victory. Behind them came Pepoon's citizen scouts. Men with whom I had marched and fought on the Arickaree were in that stern, silent company, and my heart thumped hard as I watched them swinging down the line.

And then that splendid cavalry band swept down the slope riding abreast, their instruments glistening in the sunlight, and their horses stepping proudly to the music as the strains of "Garry Owen to Glory" filled the valley.

Behind the band were the prisoners of war, the Cheyenne widows and orphans of Black Kettle's village riding on their own ponies in an irregular huddle, their bright blankets and Indian trinkets of dress making a division in that parade, the mark of the untrained and uncivilized. After these were the sharpshooters led by their commander, Cook, and then – we had been holding our breath for this – then rode by column after column in perfect order, dressed to the last point of military discipline, that magnificent Seventh Cavalry, the flower of the nation's soldiery, sent out to subdue the Plains. At their head was their commander, a slender young man of twenty-nine summers, lacking much the fine physique one pictures in a leader of soldiers. But his face, from which a tangle of long yellow curls fell back, had in it the mark of a master.

This parade was not without its effect on us, to whom the ways of war were new. Well has George Eliot declared "there have been no great nations without processions." The unwritten influence of that thrilling act of dramatic display somehow put a stir in the blood and loyalty and patriotism took stronger hold on us.

We had come out to break the red man's power by a winter invasion. Camp Supply was abandoned, and the whole body made its way southward to Fort Cobb. To me ours seemed a tremendous force. We were two thousand soldiers, with commanders, camp officials, and servants. Our wagon train had four hundred big Government wagons, each drawn by six mules. We trailed across the Plains leaving a wide and well marked path where twenty-five hundred cavalry horses, with as many mules, tramped the snow.

The December of the year 1868 was a terror on the Plains. No fiercer blizzard ever blew out of the home of blizzards than the storms that fell upon us on the southward march.

Down in the Washita Valley we came to the scene of Custer's late encounter. Beyond it was a string of recently abandoned villages clustering down the river in the sheltering groves where had dwelt Kiowa, Arapahoe, and Comanche, from whose return fire Custer saved himself by his speedy retreat northward after his battle with Black Kettle's band.

A little company of us were detailed to investigate these deserted quarters. The battle field had a few frozen bodies of Indians who had been left by the tribe in their flight before the attack of the Seventh Cavalry. There were also naked forms of white soldiers who had met death here. In the villages farther on were heaps of belongings of every description, showing how hasty the exodus had been. In one of these villages I dragged the covering from a fallen snow-covered tepee. Crouched down in its lowest place was the body of a man, dead, with a knife wound in the back.

"Poor coward! he tried hard to get away," Bud exclaimed.

"Some bigger coward tried to make a shield out of him, I'll guess," I replied, lifting the stiff form with more carefulness than sentiment. As I turned the body about, I caught sight of the face, which even in death was marked with craven terror. It was the face of the Rev. Mr. Dodd, pastor of the Springvale Methodist Church South. In his clenched dead hands he still held a torn and twisted blanket. It was red, with a circle of white in the centre.

On the desolate wind-swept edge of a Kiowa village Bud and I came upon the frozen body of a young white woman. Near her lay her two-year-old baby boy. With her little one, she had been murdered to prevent her rescue, on the morning of Custer's attack on the Cheyennes, murdered with the music of the cavalry band sounding down the valley, and with the shouts and shots of her own people, ringing a promise of life and hope to her.

Bud hadn't been with Forsyth, and he was not quite ready for this. He stooped and stroked the woman's hair tenderly and then lifted a white face up toward me. "It would have happened to Marjie, Phil, long ago, but for O'mie. They were Kiowath, too," he said in a low voice.

After that moment there was no more doubt for me. I knew why I had been spared in Colorado, and I consecrated myself to the fighting duty of an American citizen, "Through famine and fire and frost," I vowed to myself, "I give my strength to this work, even unto death if God wills it."

Tenderly, for soldiers can be tender, the body of the mother and her baby were wrapped in a blanket and placed in one of the wagons, to be carried many miles and to wait many days before they were laid to rest at last in the shadow of Fort Arbuckle.

I saw much of O'mie. In the army as in Springvale, he was everybody's friend. But the bitter winter did not alleviate that little hacking cough of his. Instead of the mild vigor of the sunny Plains, that we had looked for was the icy blast with its penetrating cold, as sudden in its approach as it was terrible in its violence. Sometimes even now on winter nights when the storms sweep across the west prairie and I hear them hurl their wrathful strength against this stanch stone house with its rounded turret-like corners, I remember how the wind blew over our bivouacs, and how we burrowed like prairie dogs in the river bank, where the battle with the storm had only one parallel in all this campaign. That other battle comes later.

But with all and all we could live and laugh, and I still bless the men, Reed and Hadley and John Mac and Pete, whose storm cave was near mine. Without the loud, cheery laugh from their nest I should have died. But nobody said "die." Troop A had the courage of its convictions and a breezy sense of the ludicrous. I think I could turn back at Heaven's gate to wait for the men who went across the Plains together in that year of Indian warfare.

This is only one man's story. It is not an official report. The books of history tell minutely how the scattered tribes submitted. Overwhelmed by the capture of their chief men, on our march to Fort Cobb, induced partly by threatened danger to these captive chiefs, but mostly by bewilderment at the presence of such a large force in their country in midwinter, after much stratagem and time-gaining delays they came at last to the white commander's terms, and pitched their tepees just beyond our camp. Only one tribe remained unsubdued: the Cheyennes, who with trick and lie, had managed to elude all the forces and escape to the southwest.

We did not stay long at Fort Cobb. The first week of the new year found us in a pleasanter place, on the present site of Fort Sill. It was not until after the garrison was settled here that I saw much of these Indian tribes, whom Custer's victory on the Washita, and diplomatic handling of affairs afterwards, had brought into villages under the guns of our cantonment.

I knew that Satanta and Lone Wolf, chief men of the Kiowas, were held as hostages, but I had not been near them. Satanta was the brute for whom the dead woman with her little one had been captured. Her form was mouldering back to earth in her grave at Fort Arbuckle, while he, well clothed and well fed, was a gentleman prisoner of war in a comfortable lodge in our midst.

The East knew little of the Plains before the railroads crossed them. Eastern religious papers and church mission secretaries lauded Satanta as a hero, and Black Kettle, whom Custer had slain, as a martyr; while they urged that the extreme penalty of the civil law be meted out to Custer and Sheridan in particular, and to the rest of us at wholesale.

One evening I was sent by an officer on some small errand to Satanta's tent. The chief had just risen from his skin couch, and a long band of black fur lay across his head. In the dim light it gave his receding forehead a sort of square-cut effect. He threw it off as I entered, but the impression it made I could not at once throw off. The face of the chief was for the moment as suggestive of Jean Pahusca's face as ever Father Le Claire's had been.

"If Jean is a Kiowa," I said to myself, "then this scoundrel here must be his mother's brother." I had only a few words with the man, but a certain play of light on his cunning countenance kept Jean in my mind continually.

When I turned to go, the tent flap was pulled back for me from the outside and I stepped forth and stood face to face with Jean Pahusca himself, standing stolidly before me wrapped in a bright new red blanket. We looked at each other steadily.

"You are in my land now. This isn't Springvale." There was still that French softness in his voice that made it musical, but the face was cruel with a still relentless, deadly cruelty that I had never seen before even in his worst moods.

The Baronets are not cowardly by nature, but something in Jean always made me even more fearless. To his taunting words, "This isn't Springvale," I replied evenly, "No, but this is Phil Baronet still."

He gave me a swift searching look, and turning, disappeared in the shadows beyond the tents.

"I owe him a score for his Arickaree plans," I said to myself, "and his scalp ought to come off to O'mie for his attempt to murder the boy in the Hermit's Cave. Oh, it's a grim game this. I hope it will end here soon."

As I turned away I fell against Hard Rope, chief of the Osage scouts. I had seen little of him before, but from this time on he shadowed my pathway with a persistence I had occasion to remember when the soldier life was forgotten.

The beginning of the end was nearer than I had wished for. All about Fort Sill the bluffy heights looked down on pleasant little valleys. White oak timber and green grass made these little parks a delight to the eye. The soldiers penetrated all the shelving cliffs about them in search of game and time-killing leisure.

The great lack of the soldier's day is seclusion. The mess life and tent life and field life may develop comradeship, but it cannot develop individuality. The loneliness of the soldier is in the barracks, not in the brief time he may be by himself.

Beyond a little brook Bud and I had by merest chance found a small cove in the low cliff looking out on one of these valleys, a secluded nook entered by a steep, short climb. We kept the place a secret and called it our sanctuary. Here on the winter afternoons we sat in the warm sunshine sheltered from the winds by the rocky shelf, and talked of home and the past; and sometimes, but not often, of the future. On the day after I saw Jean at the door of Satanta's tent, Bud stole my cap and made off to our sanctuary. I had adorned it with turkey quills, and made a fantastic head-gear out of it. Soldiers do anything to kill time; and jokes and pranks and child's play, stale and silly enough in civil life, pass for fun in lieu of better things in camp.

It was a warm afternoon in February, and the soldiers were scattered about the valley hunting, killing rattlesnakes that the sunshine had tempted out on the rocks before their cave hiding-places, or tramping up and down about the river banks. Hearing my name called, I looked out, only to see Bud disappearing and John Mac, who had mistaken him for me, calling after him. John Mac, leading the other three, Hadley and Reed and Pete, each with his hands on the shoulders of the one before him, were marching in locked step across the open space.