The Chisholm Trail Read online

  REVIEWERS LOVE THE TRAIL DRIVE SERIES, TOO!

  “Lovers of Louis L’Amour-type westerns will welcome a new paperback series written by Ralph Compton.”

  —Nashville Banner

  “Compton’s attention to authentic detail makes you smell the bacon fryin’, hear it sizzlin’ in the pan.”

  —The Claude News, Claude, Texas

  “Louis L’Amour once pleaded that someone needed to depict the working cowboy…Ralph Compton is endeavoring to do that exact job.”

  —Tower Books

  FIRE AND THUNDER ON THE PLAIN

  When a summer storm struck two nights later, so did the renegades.

  They waited until the thunder and lightning became intense enough to stampede the herd. With the longhorns running toward the south, and the riders trying to head them, the band of outlaws rode in from the north. Slipping in behind the hard-riding cowboys, they began shooting.

  When Ten first heard the shots, he thought it was his own riders trying to head the herd. He changed his mind when a slug burned its way across his thigh, and another ripped off his hat.

  Ten reined up, drew his Henry, and began firing at muzzle flashes mixed in with the stampeding herd….

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles by Ralph Compton

  The Trail Drive Series

  THE GOODNIGHT TRAIL

  THE WESTERN TRAIL

  THE CHISHOLM TRAIL

  THE BANDERA TRAIL

  THE CALIFORNIA TRAIL

  THE SHAWNEE TRAIL

  THE VIRGINIA CITY TRAIL

  THE DODGE CITY TRAIL

  THE OREGON TRAIL

  THE SANTA FE TRAIL

  THE OLD SPANISH TRAIL

  THE GREEN RIVER TRAIL

  THE DEADWOOD TRAIL

  The Sundown Riders Series

  NORTH TO THE BITTERROOT

  ACROSS THE RIO COLORADO

  THE WINCHESTER RUN

  THE CHISHOLM TRAIL

  Ralph Compton

  Respectfully dedicated to the working cowboy. His is a saga sparked by the turmoil following the Civil War, and the passing of more than a century has not diminished the flame. While the old days and the old ways are gone, and the trails have grown dim, the working cowboy—from south Texas to the high plains—is alive and well. Our hats are off to you, pardner, wherever you are.

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

  Jesse Chisholm was born in Tennessee, the son of a Scottish father and a Cherokee mother. He spoke fourteen Indian languages and was trusted by whites and Indians alike. Many captive white and Indian children were returned to their families through his efforts. He was a frontiersman and scout who “got things done.” In 1832 he helped lay out a wagon road from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to Fort Towson, in Indian Territory. In 1836 he guided a group of gold seekers up the Arkansas River to the mouth of the Little Arkansas. Their destination was the site where Wichita, Kansas, would stand more than thirty years later. The gold mine didn’t exist, but Chisholm liked the area. He returned and built a trading post on the Canadian River.

  Chisholm often supplied Indian cattle to the military at Fort Scott, close to the Missouri border. For ten years, from 1843 to 1853, he drove herds along a military road that followed the border of eastern Kansas, taking cattle north to Westport and Kansas City. When Congress created Kansas Territory (Kansas and Nebraska Act—May 30, 1854), the route Chisholm took was called the “Kansas Road.”

  But there was trouble ahead for those who drove Texas longhorns to the northern markets. In 1855 there was an epidemic of “Texas fever” in Missouri, the result of a tick carried by Texas longhorns. While the longhorns were themselves immune, the tick was fatal to other cattle. Missouri took the issue to court and passed a law forbidding Texas cattle to enter the state. The controversy continued until 1861, when the rumblings of war became reality. The Civil War closed all the trails.

  By war’s end there were five million wild longhorns in the Texas brakes, but they were just as unwelcome as ever in Missouri. Texas needed a miracle, but it didn’t come until February 1867, when the Kansas Pacific Railroad reached Abilene. At that time, Jesse Chisholm’s soon-to-be-famous trail stretched from Red River to within a few miles of the Kansas town. Strangely enough, this most celebrated of all cattle trails was established in 1865 for a totally different reason. The government had decided to move three thousand Wichita Indians to a reservation in the southern part of Indian Territory.

  Major Henry Shanklin, in charge of moving the Indians, arranged for Jesse Chisholm to open a trail and establish supply points along the way through Indian Territory to the banks of the Red River. The proposed trail would cross the Salt Fork, Cimarron, and North and South Canadian rivers. These were treacherous waters, fraught with ever-shifting quicksand, where a safe crossing today might become a death trap tomorrow. With this in mind, Chisholm started from the Arkansas River with a large train of teams, driving before him a herd of one hundred horses. The animals were driven back and forth across each river until it was safe for crossing.

  The Wichita Indians followed, with thousands of ponies, accompanied by many mounted soldiers and guards. This group, passing over the trail blazed by Chisholm, formed a solid, beaten road. The area from which the Wichitas were moved later became the site of Wichita, Kansas. Once the railroad reached Abilene, it became the nearest point from which Texas longhorns could be shipped to eastern markets.

  The original Chisholm Trail led only from Wichita to the Red River, but as the rails moved west, Chisholm’s wagon road became the most direct route to northern markets. By 1870 every Texas trail from Austin to the Gulf Coast was tied to Chisholm’s trail on the banks of the Red, and as the rails moved west, so did the trail. When the railroad reached Dodge in 1872, it became the queen of all cattle towns.

  As a frontier scout and ambassador to the plains tribes, Jesse Chisholm had no peer, but he is remembered for the blazing of a trail that became western history. Ironically, Chisholm never knew of the glory days of his namesake. He died in Indian Territory in the spring of 1868.

  PROLOGUE

  Jesse Chisholm enjoyed an occasional trip to St. Louis, but not this one. He was there in response to a letter from Josiah Buckner, headmaster at the St. Louis Academy for Young Men. Buckner hadn’t gone into detail, but he hadn’t needed to. The problem would be Tenatse, now seventeen, the illegitimate result of Chisholm’s affair with a young Cherokee woman.

  The American Civil War had erupted when Tenatse had been thirteen, and it had seemed like the sensible thing to do, sending the boy away to school. There had been problems enough for Jesse Chisholm. Thanks to the war, he was torn between loyalties. Born and reared among the Cherokees, he had owned slaves and had embraced the southern culture. On the other hand, he had long been i
n close association with the Office of Indian Affairs, in the nation’s capital. He counted among his friends the personnel at many of the frontier forts. Thus he had been forced to walk a thin line between the Union and the Confederacy. Now the war was over and the nation was in mourning over the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, shot down by a southern sympathizer. The South had been beaten to its knees, but nobody had won. God alone knew what lay ahead. Chisholm left the street and made his way across the well-kept, shaded grounds of the academy. It was a sprawling complex of red brick, its wooden parts painted an ugly mud-gray. It had always reminded Chisholm of a prison. Perhaps it had that same effect on young Tenatse.

  The elderly woman at the desk in the reception parlor personally led Chisholm to Buckner’s office. Jesse put his feet down carefully, lest his boots make some unwelcome noise. People passed them in the hall without a sound. It was eerie. He wondered what the penalty was for violating that profound silence. His escort knocked on Buckner’s door and was given permission to enter. Instead, she opened the door and stepped aside. Chisholm entered, and she closed the door behind him. Buckner stood up behind his mahogany desk.

  “Good morning, Mr. Chisholm. Please be seated.”

  Chisholm took the chair to the left of Buckner’s desk. The headmaster sat down in his leather-upholstered swivel chair. He was bald, wore steel-rimmed spectacles, and had low-hanging jowls. He reminded Chisholm of a bulldog owned by one of the officers at Fort Gibson.

  “I presume,” said Buckner, “you know why I’ve asked you here.”

  “I have a fair-to-middling idea,” said Chisholm. “But let’s not beat around the bush, Mr. Buckner. What’s he done this time, and what do you aim to do with him?”

  “To answer your first question,” said Buckner, “it would be simpler to tell you what he hasn’t done. Curfew means nothing to him. He comes and goes as he pleases. He has been forbidden to play cards anywhere on this campus, at any time. He is indifferent to punishment. He counters all our efforts with the stoicism of…of…”

  “An Indian,” finished Chisholm. “What else?”

  “Have you any idea where and how he spends his time?”

  Chisholm said nothing, waiting. It was a question needing no answer. It was what Buckner was building up to.

  He wiped his brow and continued. “He’s been hanging around the dives along the waterfront, gambling with the undesirable element that frequents such places. His favorite seems to be a den of iniquity called the Emerald Dragon. His last visit there ended in a brawl in which he injured seven men, several of them seriously. One of them almost bled to death from being thrown through a window. The police finally subdued him and came after me.”

  “And?”

  “They refused to release him unless I paid his fine and took responsibility for him. Naturally I did not.”

  “Naturally,” said Chisholm, “so he’s still in jail.”

  “He’s still in jail.”

  Clearly, he would have liked to add, “where he belongs,” but resisted the temptation. He opened his desk drawer and took out an envelope.

  “As for what I intend to do with this unruly, incorrigible young man, I believe this will adequately answer your second question. Although it is now mid-June, I am refunding your tuition from the first of the month through the end of this year. You will find the boy’s belongings packed and in the hall, near the door where you came in.”

  Buckner looked at him with an almost smile, as though expecting him to protest. Silently vowing to deny him further satisfaction, Chisholm got to his feet and put on his hat. He took the envelope from Buckner’s desk and walked out without a word. He yanked the door shut behind him with a satisfying crash, stalking through the reception area and down the hall. There was only a worn duffel bag awaiting him, and it wasn’t quite full. Did it contain all Tenatse’s belongings? He didn’t care. He wanted only to be shut of this formal, dreary place. Shouldering the bag, he stepped out of the gloom and into the welcome sunshine.

  “Seventy-five dollars,” said police sergeant McDaniel, “and he’s all yours. Two-thirds of that’s his fine for disorderly conduct and inciting a riot, and the rest is for damage to the saloon. The barman knocked him senseless, so he didn’t kill nobody, but there was some sore heads, includin’ his. Here, let me get you his stuff, an’ then I’ll get him.”

  He opened a desk drawer and brought out a canvas sack. From it, he removed three items. There was a worn deck of cards secured with a length of string, a Navy Colt revolver, and a throwing knife.

  “No money,” said Chisholm.

  “None that we could find. Some of them likely rolled him ’fore we got there. It’s that kind of place.”

  Chisholm dropped the deck of cards into his coat pocket. The Colt looked well-used, and he picked it up carefully. He made sure it held only five shells and that the firing pin rested on an empty chamber. He then slipped it under his belt, muzzle down. The throwing knife was half a foot long, a flat piece of steel, both edges of its blade honed razor-keen. It had a narrow, flat handle and was blade-heavy. In skilled hands it could be deadly. Wrapping a bandanna around the lethal blade, he put the weapon in his coat pocket with the deck of cards. If Sergeant McDaniel expected a reaction, he was disappointed. Chisholm said nothing. The sergeant took a ring of keys from a desk drawer and got to his feet.

  “I’ll get him,” he said.

  Tenatse wore his hair short. The jet black of it, his high cheekbones, and the bronze of his skin were a startling contrast to his eyes. They were pale blue. Chisholm hadn’t seen him in a year, and he was shaken at the change in him. Physically, Tenatse was as much a man as he’d ever be. He stood more than six feet tall, and weighed at least 180. He wore drab-gray shirt and trousers, with sleeves and legs ridiculously short. He seemed to have grown from a boy to a man so rapidly that the transition hadn’t allowed him time to change clothes. He looked at Chisholm with a twinkle in his eyes.

  “Howdy, Jess. Sorry I ain’t wearin’ my Sunday go-to-meetin’ suit. This outfit’s on loan from the jail. I reckoned old man Buckner would be so glad to be rid of me that he’d let you in long enough to get my clothes, anyhow. Did he?”

  “There’s your bag,” said Chisholm. “It’s all they gave me. Take it back yonder and dig out something that fits you decent.”

  Tenatse slung the bag over his shoulder and turned back down the hall.

  “That bunch at the Dragon give him the full treatment,” said McDaniel. “When we got there, ’cept for the gun, knife, and cards, they’d picked him clean as a skint coyote. His duds was in rags.”

  Tenatse emerged wearing Levi’s, a faded blue shirt, and run-over boots. “I need a hat,” he said.

  He balanced the duffel bag on his shoulder, and when they left the jail, they walked in silence until they reached a park. They found a wrought-iron bench beneath an oak, and Tenatse stretched out his long legs, resting his feet on the duffel bag.

  “I reckoned old Buckner would kick me out,” said Tenatse.

  “I’ve never seen anything pleasure a man more,” said Chisholm.

  “Well, hell, Jess, I can read and write. What more do you expect from a no-account Injun?”

  “The truth. You aimed for Buckner to boot you out, didn’t you?”

  “What if I did? I’d have been out in six months, anyhow. All they want is your money. If I’d run off, he’d have just had the law drag me back. I’m underage, and the only way I could escape for good was for you to come and take me off their hands. Buckner had to want to be rid of me.”

  “So you started a fight.”

  “This big rooster called me a damn slick-dealin’, no-account, half-breed Injun, three generations lower than a yellow-bellied coyote. Then he got a mite insulting. I only hit him once, and the clumsy bastard fell through a window.”

  “Twenty-five dollars worth of window,” said Chisholm. “Were you slick-dealing?”

  “They couldn’t prove it. Besides that, after somebody slugged me,
they got all their money back. With interest.”

  “You were cheating, then.”

  “No more’n I had to. Look, Jess, I’m straight as folks will let me be. I don’t cheat unless I’m bein’ cheated. A man’s got the right to defend himself, whether it’s with cards, knives, guns or fists. That bunch was bruisin’ for a fight, so I accommodated ’em. I used ’em to get me out of Buckner’s clutches. I admit it. You wanted the truth, so here it is. I’m fed up to the gills with town living, neckties, boiled shirts, and Sunday afternoon tea parties. These ain’t my kind of people and I want to go home, to the frontier. If I’m that much of a disappointment to you, if you’ve had a bellyful of me, then I’ll go on my own. But I am going.”

  Nothing Tenatse had said had impressed Chisholm until now. Suddenly the years fell away and he saw himself in Ten’s place. Caught up in the confines of civilization, the young man’s words could well have been his own. Chisholm recalled the days before the war, when the Cherokees had occasionally sold him a herd of Texas cattle. Not being a cattleman himself, he put one of his trusted men in charge of Indian riders and they resold the cattle to forts in Indian Territory. Young Ten had grown up among Indian riders, and in the years before he’d been sent away to school, had held his own as a cowboy on these trail drives into Indian Territory. Chisholm got to his feet, a grin on his weathered face.

  “Come on, Ten, we’re going home to Indian Territory. It’s a wild, violent land, and with the coming of the railroads and the conquering of the hostile tribes, the western frontier will come into its own. It’s a time and a place where a man can make some big tracks. Time is your friend, but once you’ve ridden as many trails as I have, it will turn on you, becoming your enemy. Let us not waste any more of it. Let’s go home.”