TC43

TC43

Lange led his wagon train off the Oregon Trail entirely. They struck north and went cross-country to reach a vast wilderness called the Nebraska Sandhills. This is a sea of sand dunes anchored by grass and dotted with innumerable small freshwater lakes renewed by rains. There was plenty of green stuff for the animals to graze, but the going was slow. It seemed they had entered a purgatory and only Joshua Lange’s regular entries in the Printer’s Manuscript prevented them from losing track of the days. But at last they reached what Jashua Lange hoped to be the New River and the pilgrims turned west to follow it toward its source.

A bison gets thirsty eating grass all day out on the Great Plains and the New River had become a reliable source of water. At times a herd came near to the source where the stream was narrow. When the herd was taking drink Takoda struck with the Windgate, taking just one of them according to the needs of the Kuwapi People. It was done in such a stealthy way the rest of the herd barely noticed. In this way the Kuwapi were able to sustain themselves without ranging far afield to hunt.

Later the People saw the first white settlers use the ford at the river. The whites used fire sticks to drop some of the animals merely to clear the way and did not even take the animals for food. Fair enough, Takoda thought, there is plenty for all. But by the second year the herds had grown noticeably thinner, and the People remembered the fire sticks.

The year after that no large animals were seen at all. The People had to scratch a living from small game, or from the scrawny solitary black-tail deer they sometimes saw. A few of of the people murmured openly, recalling with fondness the time of Chief Bad Heart Bull. Perhaps they forgot how even during that Golden Age it was still Takoda who led the hunts.

The army of the Whites set up an outpost six land miles (and twelve river miles) east of the place where the Kuwapi camped. It was named Fort Price and there US Army Captain John Smalley commanded a company of mounted rifles detached north from the 6th Calvalry Regiment. Despite his bitter hatred for the dead-end post he had been assigned, snack in the middle of the biggest zone of nothing in the American West, Smalley maintained good relations with Chief Takoda and the Kuwapi. For one reason, they all somehow spoke passable English. The son of the Chief actually spoke it better than most Whites. He considered the People to be peaceful folk.

But one day eight whiteskins came north mounted on horses, cracking whips, two leading on Point, two on Flank herding strays, and two on Drag eating their dust, with a cook with the chuckwagon in the rear and a man riding way out front looking for water and picking the best path for seven hundred animals bulkier than any animal save the bison. The whites drove their herd to an island in Squaw River where the best grass grew. They did this without the basic courtesy of offering Chief Takoda one or two head as toll.

Miffed, the Chief dispatched hunters to take payment in kind with a few well-placed arrows. The white men fired back with fire sticks. Two Kuwapi hunters were killed, which was more than Wanica could afford to pay for the meat. The Kuwapi withdrew halfway up the eastern flank of what would one day be called Treehouse Hill and watched the herd move to the north bank.

John Morrison told his boys to stand fast while he rode hell-for-leather downstream to Fort Price. There he told Captain George Smalley he wanted to “donate” twenty head of cattle to the United States Army but presently he had a slight Indian problem. Soon after that the bugle sounded. Fort Price vomited forth three officers and forty mounted men, plus John Morrison.

Three miles from Fort Price is a low ridge of sandstone running north to south, and the New River, which was really just a large creek, cut through it in a short twisting little canyon with steep walls and no path except for the river itself.