Cry of the Hawk

As Jonah poured the steaming coffee from the blackened pot, he listened to the nearby cherk-cherk-creee of the meadowlarks feeding among the tall dry grasses caressed by autumn’s cool nights. “Man who makes something big of himself is a man I wonder about, Major.”

Elliott accepted his cup. “How old are you—you mind me asking?”

“Thirty, this last spring.”

“You been out here long?”

He hoisted his cup in the fashion of a toast. “Just since the Yankees brought me west to keep telegraph wire up and follow General Connor to the Powder River.”

“Back a little more than two years then.” Elliott sipped at his coffee. “You figure we got a chance making peace with these bands?”

“Major—you’re asking the wrong fella. That’s for certain. I’ve fought the Injuns, bedded down one winter with a Pawnee gal who taught me a bit of her tongue … and I’ve tracked around a good chunk of this territory with North’s Pawnee Battalion.” He speared a thick slice of buffalo hump and turned it over in the cast-iron skillet. “None of that makes me no great shakes when it comes to knowing if the army can make peace with these bands.”

“I’ve been trying to find out if there is really much cause to hope.”

“Hell—it’s hard enough for most men to make peace with themselves, much less have to worry about making peace with each other.”

“Let’s pray the chiefs of the warrior bands aren’t as cynical as you are, Jonah.”

Hook smiled, liking the open, ready good humor of the soldier. “Glory be—but we might have a chance to make peace between the Cheyenne and the army yet. If all the Injuns was like Turkey Leg—and all the soldiers like you, Major.”

In that second week of October, the bands had begun gathering for the great peace council along Medicine Lodge Creek, not far from Fort Larned in Kansas.

Miles to the south down on the Cimarron River were camped the bulk of the Cheyenne bands, more than 250 lodges. They waited, skeptical of the white man’s good intentions and promises of presents. On Medicine Lodge Creek itself Black Kettle’s 25 lodges of Southern Cheyenne camped. Below them were more than 100 lodges of Comanches. And below them stood the camp circles of some 150 lodges of Kiowa, along with 85 lodges of Kiowa-Apache. Closest to Fort Larned were 170 lodges of Southern Arapaho.

A great and impressive gathering of more than 800 lodges, all in a joyous mood, for recent hunting had been good, and word had it the soldiers at the nearby post had just received shipments of the goods soon to be brought out to the great encampment in wagons: coffee, sugar, flour, and dried fruits; in addition to blankets and bolts of colorful cloth, and surplus uniforms from the white man’s recent war among himself, uniforms the War Department had in the last few months turned over to the Interior Department. And on its way was a sizable herd of the white man’s cattle to feed the gathering bands.

When the white commissioners arrived at the scene on the fifteenth, they and their military escort of the Seventh Cavalry camped across the creek, on the north side of the Medicine Lodge. Row upon row of tents housing the troopers spread in grand fashion across the prairie. Next to those tents stood a long line of the freight wagons bulging with the presents for those making peace with the Great Father back east, and closest to the creek were the tents erected for the commissioners themselves. In that flat meadow between their tents and the streambank, the great council had begun its informal sessions on 17 October. Yet it had not been until the nineteenth when the chiefs began making their formal speeches.

Behind the commissioners, both military and civilian, hung a large canopy beneath which the many clerks and stenographers sat, recording the proceedings, word for word. There too sat the many newsmen here to record for their readers back east this momentous gathering with the warrior bands of the Great Plains.

On each morning the council assembled, the Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs seated themselves on the right hand of the white men, or on the west. On the left-hand side sat the Kiowa and Comanche leaders. And in a broad crescent behind these chiefs sat the old men, councillors and leaders all. Beyond them along the stream itself the young warriors moved about in all their finery—feathers and bells, paint and totems, not shy in the least of showing off their weapons. Eager young boys at times attempted to mingle with the warriors, but only with caution, for youths were never allowed to attend councils as important as this.