The Color of Lightning (45 page)
He stood up in the river of savory grasses with their colors of sepia and slate and the drifting phantoms of powder smoke. He be- gan firing. His rifle muzzle followed each target, hungry and seek- ing. The brass cartridge shells leaped from the breech like jewelry thrown to the wind. He made of himself a gift. He shot and cocked and shot again. He was hit many times.
Ahó, ahó,
they shouted. The Kiowa words with the rising tone that meant
Kill him, kill him.
Or perhaps one of them said it in the falling tone
ahô, ahô
that meant
Thank you, thank you.
W
B
r i t t, d e nni s, a n d
Paint were found the following day by fellow teamsters and were buried where they had fallen. Their grave marker was cut by hand into native stone and it is in the middle of a field and it is not easy to find. Some reminiscences taken down in the early 1900s say that the men were scalped, other accounts say they were not. Some say the cavalry found them and buried them and others say they were found by other freighters. No
one knows who made the headstone.
In May of 1871 General William Tecumseh Sherman arrived in Texas to investigate the endless complaints of Texans concern- ing Indian depredations. His entourage passed near the place where Britt and his companions had been killed five months before and was watched, from a distance, by Setanta, Satank, Horseback, and other Kiowa and Comanche on a raiding party. They let Sherman’s column go unmolested, but the day following, the war party rode down on a train of freight wagons and killed Nathan Long, N. J. Baxter, Jesse Bowman, James and Samuel Elliot, James and Thomas Williams, all freighters for Henry Warren, government contractor. The wounded were brought in to Fort Richardson, where Sherman
was staying. A fort with stone barracks and a dusty parade ground at the edge of the Red River Valley. When Sherman got the news and realized the attack had missed him by a matter of hours, he rode out to the site and saw the bodies of men who had been tied to wheels and burned alive. There was no mention of Britt Johnson and his black companions. The men of the Warren massacre were all white men, and a Texas state marker in good gray granite has been erected and their names carved into it.
Because of the Warren Wagon Train Massacre, President Grant rescinded the Peace Policy and the Quakers were removed from their position on the board of the Indian Bureau. Thus the long Red River War began and was finished only when the buffalo were de- stroyed and Ranald MacKenzie ran Quanah Parker to earth in Palo Duro Canyon in 1874 and shot seven hundred of his horses. When Quanah Parker surrendered, there were at least two white warriors with his small band, who had fought alongside him for many years. And so it ended.
Mary, Jube, and Cherry lived out their lives in the turbulent frontier era of cattle drives and land disputes. They did nothing that made the white community take note of them but went quietly on with the school and the barbershop, and Mary died in her mid-eighties without ever marrying again. It has been said by neighbors that she was faithful in visiting Britt’s grave and tending to its upkeep until she was very old and became bedridden. Despite genealogical research, it is not known what happened to Cherry and Jube.
Millie Durgan returned to the Elm Creek community at the age of eighty, traveling south from the Kiowa reservation with her Kiowa children and grandchildren. Sain-to-odii was unable to speak English, but she was polite and somewhat bemused by the com- munity’s efforts to bring forward a birthday cake. She remembered almost nothing of her life before her capture.
Except for three pieces of hard evidence, Britt’s history is en- tirely oral; stories of his courageous journey to retrieve his wife and children, his rescue of other captives, his freighting endeavor, and his companions remained in the memories of the people of north
the col or of l ightning
343
Texas long enough to be recorded and written down. He is invari- ably spoken of in terms of respect and admiration. One man de- scribed him as “a magnificent physical specimen,” and others told of his travels and his freighting business. The elements of legend have collected around his historical figure, and its image remains bright and untarnished. He left nothing that could be traced either in land or written material or heirlooms. Only his gravestone, on which is written,
Britt Johnson, Dennis Cureton, Paint Crawford, Killed By Indians 1871
. All he had was the story of his life, which was as good as any other man’s, and in the end it is all we have.
W
I
ca m e u p o n br i t t
Johnson’s story while researching
Enemy Women
. An early draft of that book ended with the protagonist’s journey into north Texas immediately after the Civil War. Britt Johnson is mentioned in many histories of north Texas, and the accounts are often contradictory or confusing. They all come down to two or three oral histories taken down in the early 1900s, and three pieces of hard evidence; a census of 1860, an 1864 muster of a scouting company, and the diary of Samuel A. Kingman, who was present at the signing of the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 and whose diary mentions Britt Johnson in search of captives. The story of Britt’s journey to rescue his wife and children from captivity is beyond doubt, as are the brief accounts of his life afterward. Entering Britt’s name in a search engine will lead to several good
Web sites.
This is a work of fiction, but any full rendering of Britt’s story would of necessity be close to fiction since there is so little to go on, but that little is arresting and quite moving. I have sorted out the names of his children and of his former “owner” as best I could. Many of the Comanche and Kiowa people named here were real
people, such as Kicking Bird, Toshana, Hears the Dawn, Aperian Crow, Esa Havey, Setanta, Satank, and Old Man Komah. Others are invented. Sergeant Elijah Earl was a real person, as were Dennis Cureton, Vesey Smith, Paint Crawford, and Medal of Honor win- ner Emmanuel Stance. I have tried to give them all a living presence and dreams and daily speech.
The character of Samuel Hammond is in no way a portrait of the remarkable Lawrie Tatum but is an exploration of Tatum’s di- lemma; a Quaker sent as agent to warlike tribes of the south plains. Colonel Grierson was a real person, the first commander of Fort Sill. With one exception, the names of the captives are genuine, including Elizabeth Fitzgerald, who led a charmed life, and all of those taken in the Elm Creek raid of 1864.
This book is a novel, but its backbone—Britt’s story—is true. Britt’s story returned to me repeatedly as I read through north Texas histories over the years, and I often wondered why no one had taken it up. And so I did.
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M
an y t h an ks t o
my agent Liz Darhansoff and editor Jennifer Brehl for their unfailing encouragement and sup-
port. To my brother, Kenneth Jiles, for advice on firearms; all mis- takes are mine. To my niece Denise Jiles Pollard for genealogical researches on Britt Johnson and his family. To nephew Matt Jiles Holtmann for the 1886 copy of
My Story of the War.
To June Chism for accompanying me on travels to the Red River and hiking the Wichita Mountains and for introductions to ranchers Loretta and Lane Corley in Oklahoma and De and Clint Brown in the Cross Timbers, and many thanks to the Corleys and the Browns for their hospitality and guided tours of the Red River bottoms and Spanish Fort. To Caroline Raskin for the loan of an original signed copy of Elizabeth Custer’s
Boots and Saddles
and for the literary loan of her Mount Vernon Street house in Philadelphia, to Sky Lewey for the Wilbarger book. Thanks to Sergeant Lee Coffee (USA Ret.), Buffalo Soldier re-enactor, for the story of Emmanuel Stance; and in memory of Melody, the Buffalo Soldier horse. For listening to long descriptions of a work-in-progress, thanks to Susan Lawson and Donna Stoner, and for an early read, thanks to Laurie Wagner Buyer. Much appreciated.
Paulette Jiles
is a poet and memoirist. She is the author of
Cousins,
a memoir, and the bestselling novels
Enemy Women
and
Stormy Weather.
She lives in San Antonio, Texas.
Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Stormy Weather Enemy Women
Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Kola
Designed by Nicola Ferguson
Jacket design by Ervin Serrano
Jacket photograph collage: lightning by Alan R Moller; prairie evening by Eastcott Momatiuk/Getty Images
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE COLOR OF LIGHTNING
. Copyright © 2009 by Paulette Jiles. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.