Kiowa Quotes

When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war, You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You could blame the river. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate. You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame whole nations. You could blame God. You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate of an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote.

She never learned to value those things that white people valued. The greatest pride of the Kiowa was to do without, to make use of anything at hand; they were almost vain of their ability to go without water, food, and shelter. Life was not safe and nothing could make it so, neither fashionable dresses nor bank accounts. The baseline of human life was courage.

At first she thought the writing would be easy. She was extremely confident in her ability to dream, to imagine, and she supposed that expressing her dreams in words, in writing, would be entirely natural, like drawing breath. She had read widely from the time she was a child, and she knew how to recognize something that was well written. She admired certain lines and passages so much that she had taken complete possession of them and committed them to memory. She could recite “The Gettysburg Address” and “The Twenty-Third Psalm.” She could recite “Jabberwocky” and Emily Dickinson’s “Further in summer that the birds” and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” She knew by heart the final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead,” and if challenged she could say in whole the parts of both Romeo and Juliet. And she knew many Kiowa stories and many long prayers in Navajo. These were not feats of memory in the ordinary sense; it was simply that she attended to these things so closely that they became a part of her most personal experience. She had assumed them, appropriated them to her being. But to write! She discovered that was something else again.

Johanna bent her head far back to look up into the leafy canopy and the rainy sky. There was a cautious wonder on her face. She said something in Kiowa in a low voice. So much water, such giant trees, each possessing a spirit. Drops like jewels cascaded from their spidery hands.

Kiowa who saw it happen said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something-Just Boom-then down. Not like in the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle-not like that. Kiowa said. The bastard just flat fuck fell. Boom down. Nothing else.

Lots of loose ends don’t ever get tied up. Play the hand you’re dealt. Move on.” Kiowa

We danced, the way Kiowas danced, when called by our people, by our ancestors, to help each other heal.

Oh, man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker," Azar said. " You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like Shredded fuckin' Wheat" "Go away," Kiowa said. "I'm just saying the truth. Like oatmeal.

A Kiowa’s first and last resort was courage. A Kiowa did not beg or plead or appease. She knew at the bitter end she could starve away the despair, deny any sustenance to surrender. She wiped her face again and climbed up into the wagon. Ausay gya kii, gyao boi tol. Prepare for a hard winter, prepare for hard times. She braided her hair as if for battle. And so she became quiet and stilled.

On the North American plains in the 1930s, a Kiowa Indian woman commented to a researcher that “a woman can always get another husband, but she has only one brother.

They stood there for a while, with no sound but the flapping of the flag. “It’s not that simple, Kiowa.” “Of course it’s not simple. Who said it was simple? But you know what? Lots of loose ends don’t ever get tied up. Play the hand you’re dealt. Move on.” Kiowa

She said something in Kiowa in a happy tone. My name is Ay-ti-Podle, the Cicada, whose song means there is a fruit ripening nearby. She gestured back toward the big bay saddle horse and tossed her hair back. It was as if she wanted to include Pasha in this newfound happiness.

In the interests of truth, however, I want to make it clear that Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to Kiowa. Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own.

Of course it’s not simple. Who said it was simple? But you know what? Lots of loose ends don’t ever get tied up. Play the hand you’re dealt. Move on.” Kiowa

Or Kiowa teaching a rain dance to Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen, the three of them whooping and leaping around barefoot while a bunch of villagers looked on with a mixture of fascination and giggly horror. Afterward, Rat said, 'So where's the rain?' and Kiowa said, 'The earth is slow, but the buffalo is patient,' and Rat thought about it and said, 'Yeah, but where's the rain?

would have liked to kiss her on the cheek but he had no idea if the Kiowas kissed one another or if so, did grandfathers kiss granddaughters. You never knew. Cultures were mine fields. He patted the air with a gentle motion. Sit. Stay.

Why did you come to the frontier? [...] To track down a common thief? To revel in a moment's revenge? I thought there was more to you than that." Still Glass said nothing. Finally Kiowa said, "If you want to die in the guardhouse, that's for you to decide.

Kiowa was to do without, to make use of anything at hand; they were almost vain of their ability to go without water, food, and shelter. Life was not safe and nothing could make it so, neither fashionable dresses nor bank accounts. The baseline of human life was courage.

How are the Indians on cats?" "I never saw one. Plenty of dogs, though." "They eat the dogs, don't they?" "That's the Shoshones," I said. "A dog or coyote is sacred to a Comanche. You would be cursed." "But they do eat human beings occasionally?" "That's the Tonkawas," I said. "Never the Comanches." "A Comanche who ate a man would be killed by the tribe immediately, because supposedly it becomes an addiction." "Interesting," he said. He was scratching his chin. "And this Sun Dance they all talk about?" "That's the Kiowas," I said. "We never did that.

raw state militias patrolling the west with seasoned troops better capable of confronting the Indians of the Great Plains. South of the Arkansas, this meant eradicating the Kiowa and the Comanche, who were blocking movement along the Santa Fe Trail into New Mexico. North of the Platte, it meant killing Red Cloud and Sitting Bull. General Ulysses S. Grant, the Army’s commander in chief, had long planned such a moment. The previous November, the day after the Sand Creek massacre, Grant summoned Major General John Pope to his Virginia headquarters to put such plans in motion. Despite his relative youth, the forty-three-year-old Pope was an old-school West Pointer and a topographical engineer-surveyor whose star had risen with several early successes on western fronts in the Civil War. It had dimmed just as rapidly when Lincoln placed him in command of the eastern forces; Pope was thoroughly outfoxed by Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Pope had been effectively exiled to St. Paul, Minnesota, until Grant recalled him to consolidate under one command a confusing array of bureaucratic Army “departments” and “districts” west of St. Louis. Grant named Pope the commanding general of a new Division of the Missouri,

She never learned to value those things that white people valued. The greatest pride of the Kiowa was to do without, to make use of anything at hand; they were almost vain of their ability to go without water, food, and shelter. Life was not safe and nothing could make it so, neither fashionable dresses nor bank accounts. The baseline of human life was courage. Her gestures and expressions were not those of white people and he knew they never would be. She stared intently when something interested her, her questions were forthright and often embarrassing. All animals were food, not pets. It took a long time before she thought of coins as legal tender instead of ammunition.

Our forefathers’ deeds touch us, shape us, like strokes of a painting. In endless procession their deeds mark us. The Elders speak knowingly of forever.

He enjoyed not being dead. Lying there, Kiowa admired Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's capacity for grief. He wanted to share the man's pain, he wanted to care as Jimmy Cross cared. And yet when he closed his eyes, all he could think was Boom-down, and all he could feel was the pleasure of having his boots off and the fog curling in around him and the damp soil and the Bible smells and the plush comfort of night.

By the 1770s, the Teton Sioux had overrun the Arikara, or Ree, on the Missouri River and made it as far west as the Black Hills, where they quickly ousted the Kiowa and the Crows. Over the next hundred years the Sioux continued to expand their territory, eventually forcing the Crows to retreat all the way to the Bighorn River more than two hundred miles to the west, while also carrying on raids to the north and south against the Assiniboine, Shoshone, Pawnee, Gros Ventre, and Omaha.

The Captain never did understand what had caused such a total change in a little girl from a German household and adopted into a Kiowa one. In a mere four years she completely forgot her birth language and her parents, her people, her religion, her alphabet. She forgot how to use a knife and a fork and how to sing in European scales. And once she was returned to her own people, nothing came back. She remained at heart a Kiowa to the end of her days. After three years his daughters and his son-in

He was realistic about it. there was that new hardness in his stomach. He loved her but he hated her. No more fantasies, he told himself. Henceforth, when he thought about Martha, it would be only to think that she belonged elsewhere. He would shut down the daydreams. This was not Mount Sebastian, it was another world, where there were no pretty poems or midterm exams, a place where men died because of carelessness and gross stupidity. Kiowa was right. Boom-down, and you were dead, never partly dead.

In roughly that same time period, while General George Armstrong Custer achieved world fame in failure and catastrophe, Mackenzie would become obscure in victory. But it was Mackenzie, not Custer, who would teach the rest of the army how to fight Indians. As he moved his men across the broken, stream-crossed country, past immense herds of buffalo and prairie-dog towns that stretched to the horizon, Colonel Mackenzie did not have a clear idea of what he was doing, where precisely he was going, or how to fight Plains Indians in their homelands. Neither did he have the faintest idea that he would be the one largely responsible for defeating the last of the hostile Indians. He was new to this sort of Indian fighting, and would make many mistakes in the coming weeks. He would learn from them. For now, Mackenzie was the instrument of retribution. He had been dispatched to kill Comanches in their Great Plains fastness because, six years after the end of the Civil War, the western frontier was an open and bleeding wound, a smoking ruin littered with corpses and charred chimneys, a place where anarchy and torture killings had replaced the rule of law, where Indians and especially Comanches raided at will. Victorious in war, unchallenged by foreign foes in North America for the first time in its history, the Union now found itself unable to deal with the handful of remaining Indian tribes that had not been destroyed, assimilated, or forced to retreat meekly onto reservations where they quickly learned the meaning of abject subjugation and starvation. The hostiles were all residents of the Great Plains; all were mounted, well armed, and driven now by a mixture of vengeance and political desperation. They were Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and Western Sioux. For Mackenzie on the southern plains, Comanches were the obvious target: No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.

North Texas was a good place to be a black man; slave or free, they were all expected to carry arms. Every hand was needed to a gun or a plow or a branding iron and there were no records and what with the chaos of the war and incessant guerilla warfare with the Comanche and the Kiowa a person could pretty well do what he liked and he could be whatever he took a mind to as long as he had a strong back and a good aim. Britt walked to meet the men out of the smoke of the grass fires that burned in long, thin lines across his pastures.

This was the first of the St. Augustines. Previous memos had borne messages from Zwingli, Lévi-Strauss, Rilke, Chekhov, Tillich, William Blake, Charles Olson and a Kiowa chief named Satanta. Naturally the person responsible for these messages became known throughout the company as the Mad Memo-Writer. I never referred to him that way because it was much too obvious a name. I called him Trotsky. There was no special reason for choosing Trotsky; it just seemed to fit. I wondered if he was someone I knew. Everybody seemed to think he was probably a small grotesque man who had suffered many disappointments in life, who despised the vast impersonal structure of the network and who was employed in our forwarding department, the traditional repository for all sex offenders, mutants and vegetarians. They said he was most likely a foreigner who lived in a rooming house in Red Hook; he spent his nights reading an eight-volume treatise on abnormal psychology, in small type, and he told his grocer he had been a Talmudic scholar in the old country. This was the consensus and maybe it had a certain logic. But I found more satisfaction in believing that Trotsky was one of our top executives. He made eighty thousand dollars a year and stole paper clips from the office.

The typical load was 25 rounds. But Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than Khe, and he went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and water and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighed fear. He was dead weight. There was no twitching or flopping. Kiowa, who saw it happen, said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something - just boom, then down - not like the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle - not like that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom. Down.

The next morning I drove to an antique store and asked them if they had some of the old tin salt and pepper shakers. Back when Kiowas were made prisoners of war and placed in concentration camps, the U.S. government didn’t allow us to practice our culture. The only thing we had were government rations called commodities, and in those commodities were tin salt and pepper shakers. Most looked at them and saw salt and pepper shakers, but we looked at them through Kiowa eyes and we saw gourd dance rattles. In secret, out of the military’s sight, we practiced our culture, and we modified the rations we had at our disposal. When Kiowas danced with rattles made from tin salt and pepper shakers, it was a proud act of resistance.

Everything the Kiowas had came from the buffalo.… Most of all, the buffalo was part of the Kiowa religion. A white buffalo calf must be sacrificed in the Sun Dance. The priests used parts of the buffalo to make their prayers when they healed people or when they sang to the powers above. So, when the white men wanted to build railroads, or when they wanted to farm or raise cattle, the buffalo still protected the Kiowas. They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens. They chased the cattle off the ranges. The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them. There was war between the buffalo and the white men. The white men built forts in the Kiowa country, and the woolly-headed buffalo soldiers shot the buffalo as fast as they could, but the buffalo kept coming on, coming on, even into the post cemetery at Fort Sill. Soldiers were not enough to hold them back. Then the white men hired hunters to do nothing but kill the buffalo. Up and down the plains those men ranged, shooting sometimes as many as a hundred buffalo a day. Behind them came the skinners with their wagons. They piled the hides and bones into the wagons until they were full, and then took their loads to the new railroad stations that were being built, to be shipped east to the market. Sometimes there would be a pile of bones as high as a man, stretching a mile along the railroad track. The buffalo saw that their day was over. They could protect their people no longer.

The arrival of cotton growers in most cases displaced the indigenous inhabitants. In the antebellum decades, native peoples who had inhabited the cotton-growing territories of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi had been pushed farther west. Now pressure resumed. In October 1865, the Kiowa and Comanche were forced to give up land in central Texas, west Kansas, and eastern New Mexico—land that was turned, among other things, into cotton plantations. Shortly thereafter, many of the Texas plains Indians were pushed into reservations in Oklahoma, and so were the last southwestern Indians during the Red River War of 1874 and 1875, thereby freeing up further land for cotton growing.28 Yet Oklahoma ultimately provided little protection for these Native Americans. By the 1880s, the old Oklahoma and Indian territories came under pressure from white settlers who hoped to displace the native population from the most fertile lands.

Reading Group Discussion Questions 1.​Discuss Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd’s work as a newspaper reader. What does he bring to his audience, and what does he gain from his work besides financial compensation? 2.​Why does Kidd accept the difficult job of returning Johanna home? What drives him to complete the job despite the danger and obstacles? 3.​Why do you think Johanna wants to stay with her Kiowa family? What do you think she remembers of her life before she was taken? 4.​What connects Kidd to Johanna? Why does she seem to trust him so easily? 5.​What does Kidd worry may become of Johanna once she’s returned to her family? What does he know of the fate of other “returned captives”? 6.​Doris Dillion says that Johanna is “carried away on the flood of the world,” and is “not real and not not-real.” She describes her as having “been through two creations” and “forever falling.” Do you agree with her assessment? Does Johanna remain this way through the course of the novel? 7.​Discuss the various tensions in the novel: Indians and whites, soldiers and civilizations, and America’s recent past and its unsure future. In what ways do these tensions underlie the story of Kidd and Johanna? 8.​Imagine the perspective of Johanna’s Kiowa family. Why, do you think, they would’ve taken her in and raised her? Why would they give her up? How do you think they felt when they let her go? 9.​Partway through his journey with Johanna, Kidd feels as though he was “drawn back into the stream of being because there was once again a life in his hands.” What do you think this means? What

In the evening he saddled his horse and rode out west from the house. The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him. He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch and you could see the faint trace of it bearing south over the low prairie that lay between the north and middle forks of the Concho River. At the hour he'd always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened an above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.

(The Kiowa didn’t scalp, and the real Mescalero did not live in pueblos, but factual accuracy, for May, was something that happened to other writers).

I am an elder, and I keep the earth. When I was a boy I first became aware of the beautiful world in which I lived. It was a world of rich colors—red canyons and blue mesas, green fields and yellow- ochre sands, silver clouds, and mountains that changed from black to charcoal to purple and iron. It was a world of great distances. The sky was so deep that it had no end, and the air was run through with sparkling light. It was a world in which I was wholly alive. I knew even then that it was mine and that I would keep it forever in my heart. It was essential to my being. I touch pollen to my face. I wave cedar smoke upon my body. I am a Kiowa man. My Kiowa name is Tsoai-talee, “Rock Tree Boy.” These are the words of Tsoai-talee.

... the fleet-footed pronghorns of the American West run laughably faster than any of their existing predators. But then, their speed isn't meant for existing predators. It might be a vestige of their need to escape constant harrowing pursuit by American cheetahs-- until a geological moment ago. The absence was palpable to me as I rode a train past New Mexico's Kiowa National Grassland, an American Serengeti, windswept and empty except for a lonely wandering pronghorn still running from ghosts.

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

Wаlk lightlу in thе spring; Mоthеr Earth iѕ рrеgnаnt.” - Nаtivе American (Kiowa) рrоvеrb

The big man glanced at him, a friendly look. Across the hogan, Leaphorn noticed, two of the women were smiling at him. He was a stranger, a policeman who had arrested one of them, a man from another clan, perhaps even a witch, but he was accepted with the natural hospitality of the Dinee. He felt a fierce pride in his people, and in this celebration of womanhood. The Dinee had always respected the female equally with the male — giving her equality in property, in metaphysics and in clan — recognizing the mother’s role in the footsteps of Changing Woman as the preserver of the Navajo Way. Leaphorn remembered what his mother had told him when he had asked how Changing Woman could have prescribed a Kinaalda cake “a shovel handle wide” and garnished with raisins when the Dinee had neither shovels nor grapes. “When you are a man,” she had said, “you will understand that she was teaching us to stay in harmony with time.” Thus, while the Kiowas were crushed, the Utes reduced to hopeless poverty, and the Hopis withdrawn into the secret of their kivas, the eternal Navajo adapted and endured.

A woodenness came over her. A Kiowa’s first and last resort was courage. A Kiowa did not beg or plead or appease. She knew at the bitter end she could starve away the despair, deny any sustenance to surrender. She wiped her face again and climbed up into the wagon. Ausay gya kii, gyao boi tol.

Your Comanche don’t hunger much after señoritas. White women are easier to steal, and don’t eat as much besides. The Kiowa are different. They fancy señoritas.

JOSH DEETS SERVED WITH ME 30 YEARS. FOUGHT IN 21 ENGAGEMENTS WITH THE COMMANCHE AND KIOWA. CHERFUL IN ALL WEATHERS, NEVER SHERKED A TASK. SPLENDID BEHAVIOUR.

When the wild herds were destroyed, so too was the will of the Kiowa people; there was nothing to sustain them in spirit.

Still she stood by the grave and then lifted her head to the flat countryside. A woodenness came over her. A Kiowa's first and last resort was courage. A Kiowa did not beg or plead or appease. She knew at the bitter end she could starve away despair, deny any sustenance to surrender. (...) Ausay gya kii, gyao boi tol. Prepare for a hard winter, prepare for hard times. She braided her hair as if for battle. And so she became quiet and stilled.

Colorado was swept clean of Indians. Cheyenne and Arapaho, Kiowa and Comanche, Jicarilla and Ute - they had all known its mountains and plains, but now no trace of them remained but their names on the white man's land.

Shortly after this incident, Cody was ordered to ride from Lamed to Fort Hays, a distance of sixty-five miles, to advise General Sheridan that the Kiowa and Comanche were on the warpath. In his memoir, Sheridan wrote: "This intelligence required that certain orders should be carried to Fort Dodge, ninety-five miles south of Hays. This too being a particularly dangerous route-several couriers having been killed on it-it was impossible to get one of the various `Fetes,' `Jacks,

Kiowa

I do not speak Kiowa, and I never understood her prayers, but there was something inherently sad in the sound, some merest hesitation upon the syllables of sorrow.

In the autumn of 1874, the Kiowas were driven southward towards the Staked Plains. Columns of troops were converging upon them from all sides, and they were bone-weary and afraid.

There was a woman whose body was swollen up with child, and she got stuck in the log. After that, no one could get through, and that is why the Kiowas are a small tribe in number.

William looked at Tyler. “I’m going after her.” “You want us to come with you?” Tyler asked. “My men and I could—” Holding up his hand, William shook his head. “No. We can’t go storming into a Comanche village and not expect things to go horribly wrong. If I show up there with a bunch of soldiers, they aren’t going to take it as a friendly move.” “Going alone isn’t the best idea you’ve ever had, either. What if another band of Comanche or Kiowa come your way?” “That’s why I’m taking the sorrel. He’s the fastest horse we have. He can outrun any Indian mount.” William looked back to Juanita. “Would you pack me some supplies? I’ll head out as soon as they’re ready.” Juanita nodded and hurried with Pepita into the house. “I should have known she’d do something like this,” William said.

a young Harvard student, traveled west to Oklahoma to live among the Kiowa and participate in the solemn rites of the peyote cult. In one photograph the land appears as a blur of dust, the sky fading to gray, the air darkened by soil worked loose by the wind, the farmhouses

And so there were no old people left to tell the young men when to raid and when not to raid or even the reason for raiding. None to restrain them. The Comanche had no clans; the names and the structure of the clans had been disassembled and left behind in pieces when they ran from the California fever. The wagon fever. Anyone who remembered the names of clans or why we do not eat fish or dog had died. There was nothing to stop the young men from killing or to calm them. The Kiowa have a lot, they are rich. They all own a lot of songs, and they have a way of making counts of days and years, and some small manlike images. They have songs and year-counts and the little images and stories. They are rich with ritual and legend. They know the names of the beings that are stars. They have the story of their beginning. So we stay close to them, it is like being beside a good fire. Jiles, Paulette. The Color of Lightning: A Novel (p. 147). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition.

The two of them also seemed to have developed a light, hidden contempt for all the devices of civilization. For a life that must be maintained by washing things made of textiles and china and wood in water that had to be heated and soap that had to be made, for the elaborate techniques of making bread and fermenting vinegar and protecting chickens from predators when wild eggs lay in nests for the gathering. Contempt for the digging in the ground to make outhouses, for the footings of palisades, furrows, postholes, to extract rock for permanent and immovable walls. They seemed to have forgotten the years of childhood that preceded their life with the Kiowa as if it had only been a time of exile from their true lives in movement across the face of the great high-hearted plains and its sky and its winds. The smell of horse, the spartan lives, the unaccountable gifts of food that fell to the hand from nowhere. The men in a state of war from the moment they were born as if there were no other proper human occupation. Jube would have grown to be an aristocrat on horseback, silent and honed and lethal, and yet he had been returned to the nation of houses with roofs and white men, to the country of devices and printed books.

The Kiowa was used to rescuing huge vessels like battleships and messaged her first question, “How much diesel fuel do you have?” “None,” came the answer from the NR‑1. “Well, how long can you keep your power on?” “Twenty years.

AND SO THE Kiowa and the Comanche lived and raided and hunted out on the long rolling plains while the telegraph and the railroad approached from the east, bringing news of the corruptions of Washington and the Communards of Paris and the street fighting there. Samuel Hammond still refused to issue the orders that would have sent the army after the Kiowa and Comanche and bring them back by force to the reservation. So a band of Comanche rode down on Ledbetter’s Salt Works west of Fort Belknap. The men left the hot salt pans and retreated behind a palisade and charged their small field cannon. They knew they had no help from either the Rangers or the army nor would they go back to where they had come from in the southern states, now an occupied country, and so they fought until they ran out of ammunition. Jiles, Paulette. The Color of Lightning: A Novel (pp. 288-289). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition.

the young men of the Comanche and the Kiowa rode with their hair floating in the night wind and their faces painted in beautiful colors of red and black and yellow, with hail marks and lightning strokes. Always there came that impeccable and otherworldly moment when they closed with the enemy, when they took the enemy’s women and children captive, whose faces were distorted in mortal terror and their eyes as round as dollars. Jiles, Paulette. The Color of Lightning: A Novel (p. 289). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition.