Dan Simmons - Black Hills

The braves retreated from the village and tried to wade the Washita River, but we shot many of them down as they stood waist-deep in the rushing icy water. Those that reached the thick trees on the other side continued firing from vantage points there, but groups from all four of my converging detachments were sent in—the trees were not so tight that we had to dismount—and, one by one, the warriors were killed. Almost none allowed themselves to be captured.

Our own casualties were light—one of my officers killed and two officers and eleven enlisted men wounded. My second-in-command (you remember Major Elliott) and nineteen of his men had been seen chasing hostiles away from the river, and although we expected that detachment to return soon, it never did. We later learned that the Indians downriver had ambushed and killed Elliott and all his men.

Still, the victory was all but complete. I had fifty-three prisoners—mostly women and children who had remained hidden in their lodges during the fighting—and more than nine hundred Indian ponies. The women and children we would take back with us, but I ordered almost 850 of the ponies, mostly pintos, destroyed. I know how much you love horses, my darling, and knew when I told you upon my return that you were upset with the idea, but I believe you’ve come to understand that I had little choice. I let the women, children, and a couple of ancient men choose ponies for riding, but there was no way my troopers could herd the other 850-some Indian pintos all the way back to Camp Supply. Leaving them for the enemy to reclaim was unthinkable.

There are many memories for me from that battle along the Washita, but the screams of the ponies, the smell of the gunpowder mixing with the scent of the ponies’ blood in the cold morning air, the sounds of their heavy falling in the snow and along the icy banks of that river… well, they are indelible.

By ten a.m., I’d learned who it was we’d fought. The band belonged to the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle—the so-called peace chief—the very same Black Kettle who’d somehow managed to survive Colonel Chivington’s slaughter of his band at Sand Creek in Colorado. Black Kettle’s sister told me, through my interpreter, that the old chief had camped here away from and farther north of the other Indian villages now strung out along the Washita down this long valley—encampments of Apache, Arapahoe, Kiowa, and even Comanche—precisely because he, Black Kettle, had been afraid of an attack by cavalry (a fear that none of the other Indians appeared to have shared, although none of the other chiefs had been at Sand Creek). Black Kettle himself had been killed, we discovered, in the first minutes of the shooting as the old man attempted to flee, not even staying to protect his family or grandchildren.

The intelligence of the thousands of Indians camping so near did not alarm me—this many cavalry troopers could have handled any number of warriors they sent upstream at us—but it decided me on shooting the ponies and withdrawing for the time being.

I know that you remember, Libbie, the outrageous newspaper articles that soon sprang up comparing this fair-fight victory to Chivington’s massacre at Sand Creek. As we discussed at the time, this was not only untrue, it was libelous. Black Kettle’s band along the Washita had been harboring many of the braves who’d been terrorizing Arkansas. We found white men’s and women’s scalps. We found photographs, weapons, clothing, utensils, and other loot from the burned cabins. More than that, Black Kettle’s braves had two white women as hostages (one very young), and they cut the women’s throats at the first sound of our attack. These were not innocent, peace-loving Indians, however much Black Kettle had liked to call himself the “peace chief.”

Black Kettle’s sister kept talking and talking and talking, blaming everything on the few “hot-blooded young braves” who had joined the tribe, babbling away, but I soon realized that she was just playing for time. By noon, the first hundreds of warriors from the many villages downstream were beginning to appear on the bluffs across the river. By late afternoon, there would be thousands there, and I’m sure that’s exactly what Black Kettle’s sister wanted—for us to still be in that indefensible position as thousands of Arapahoe, Kiowa, returning Cheyenne, Apache, and Comanche fell upon us.

During the last part of this harangue, just as the last of the ponies were killed and just before I cut her off so that we could mount up and ride, I could not help notice the beautiful girl—young woman of seventeen, actually—who for some strange reason had been holding my hand while Black Kettle’s wizened sister droned on.

“What is this old woman doing?” I irritably asked my interpreter.

The interpreter laughed. “Why, sir, she’s been marrying you to that squaw, named Mo-nah-se-tah. I think you’re duly and properly married by now.”

I immediately dropped the girl’s hand and gestured Black Kettle’s sister to silence.

I well remember that retreat out of the valley and upstream along the river, looking back in the early-afternoon winter light—the many hundreds of Indians along the bluffs there now looking like so many black vertical pegs in the reflected sunlight, looking, from the distance, like heathen Druid monuments to some forgotten sun god—and the valley itself alive with flame and smoke (we had burned all the teepees) and the snow there not only trampled, but red, for several hundred yards, from the blood of the murdered ponies.

I was later criticized both from within the Army and from without for retreating when I had so many Indians virtually at our mercy (our wagon train was coming up, and there was enough buffalo and other meat in the captured village to feed my seven hundred troopers for months)—not to mention criticized even more harshly for not tarrying and searching for Major Elliott and his men—but you know the reason for my so-called retreat, Libbie, my darling. Of all the people on Earth, you are the only one to know the full reason.

But sometimes I wonder what those writers-of-editorials who called me coward or “squaw killer” would think if they knew the truth.

Let us recall more pleasant (or at least amusing) things, my darling.

Mo-nah-se-tah.

How you used to tease me about her. She stayed with the Seventh after the Battle of Washita River and was either a guest in a tent near my tent, or was in my tent. It was a long, hard, cold winter. (You know that on the march—even those first November days in ’68 when we were striking south toward the Antelope Mountains and the Washita River before the attack on Black Kettle’s band—I often would not have my command tent erected when we paused, but would sleep the few, cold hours of the long, cold night outside, on a buffalo robe, with our two large dogs on either side of me. Later, when that endless winter campaign was over… no, wait, even during it, through our many letters, I remember now… you teased me unceasingly about my “Indian bride.”)

I remember one early missive I sent you from the snowy wastes, one in which I described first the comic “wedding ceremony” along the Washita and then described Mo-nah-se-tah herself to you in terms that no “ordinary” young wife would have found bearable, much less amusing:

She is an extremely comely squaw, possessing a bright, cheery face, a countenance beaming with intelligence, and a disposition more inclined to be merry than one usually finds among the Indians…. Added to bright, laughing eyes, a set of pearly teeth, and a rich complexion, her well-shaped head was crowned with a luxuriant growth of the most beautiful silken tresses, rivalling in color the blackness of the raven and extending, when allowed to fall loosely over her shoulders, to below her waist.