Paulette Jiles - News of the World

Britt Johnson and Paint Crawford and Dennis Cureton were killed by the Comanche in 1871, on a freighting trip near Graham in North Texas. They were caught on the only open stretch between Graham and Indian Mound Mountain. They were buried where they fell and there their gravestone stands to this day.

Simon and Doris raised a family of six children, all of whose names started with the letter D . They were all musicians and the family traveled around North Texas bringing Irish jigs and cowboy ballads to barn dances and fairs for many years. The Horrells continued their crime spree in central Texas and New Mexico until several of them were killed in the great Lampasas Square Shoot-Out in 1877 and they finally made the Eastern papers.

San Fernando cathedral received a new front with twin towers but the old sanctuary and dome over the altar, built in 1733, remained unchanged. The camposanto graves had to be moved south of the San Antonio River but many of the original Spanish settlers had been buried under the floor and so there lie the bones of the Betancorts, perhaps content at last in this New World with the bells of San Fernando ringing out the aves and the angeluses. The bones of the Kiowa warriors did not lie in the earth but in the stories of their lives, told and retold—their bravery and daring, the death of Britt Johnson and his men, and Cicada, the little girl taken from them by the Indian Agent, Three Spotted’s little blue-eyed girl.

In his will the Captain asked to be buried with his runner’s badge. He had kept it since 1814. He said he had a message to deliver, contents unknown.

Anyone interested in the psychology of children captured and adopted by Native American tribes on the frontier should read Scott Zesch’s book The Captured. It is excellent. His book documents child captives from the Texas frontier, including his own great-great-uncle, and in each instance gives the background of death and terror these children endured before they were adopted or claimed within the tribe. There has not been a definitive study of the psychological strategies these children adopted in order to survive but one would be welcome. They apparently became Indian in every way and rarely readjusted when returned to their non-native families. They always wished to return to their adoptive families, even when they had been with their Indian families for less than a year. This was true for both the Anglo, German-Anglo, and Mexican children taken. I think the words of my Irish character Doris Dillon best expressed it. I’ll let you find her words in the story.

As always much gratitude to my agent, Liz Darhansoff, and editor, Jennifer Brehl, who gave their immediate and unstinting support to this story.

Thanks to June and Wayne Chism for the story of Wayne’s ancestor Caesar Adolphus Kydd, who was the original reader of the news in small towns in North Texas in the 1870s and was the inspiration for the Captain both in The Color of Lightning and in this book.

Paulette Jilesis a poet and memoirist. She is the author of Cousins, a memoir, and the bestselling author of the novels Enemy Women, Stormy Weather, The Color of Lightning, and Lighthouse Island. She lives on a ranch near San Antonio, Texas.

Lighthouse Island

The Color of Lightning

Stormy Weather

Enemy Women

Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Kola