Author’s Foreword

Perhaps most of you read this sort of thing last. After you’ve given the story a chance—and only when you’re willing to come back here and give these thoughts a moment of your time.

But not while there’s a story to be told.

That’s all right with me. Just as long as you remember while this story is still fresh in your mind that what you have read is the true stuff of history. Everyone here lived and walked the high plains of Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado in 1868–69. Everyone except two: Seamus Donegan, the reluctant Irish warrior, and the mulatto-turned-Cheyenne, Jack O’Neill. The rest of the characters in this account were breathing, living beings.

Through them you will not only learn of an obscure fight on the high plains in the summer of 1869, but you will ride along as a participant in the months leading up to that fated confrontation between the Fifth Cavalry and the feared Dog Soldier Society of Tall Bull’s Cheyenne which occurred at an obscure place given the name of Summit Springs—not far from present-day Sterling, Colorado—by the victorious leader of the blue-clad soldiers.

A time rich in momentum! Our grand republic speeding onward toward her centennial. At long last the nation had been joined by rail. In May of 1869 the Union Pacific and Central Pacific united in Utah by driving a symbolic golden spike to wed their rails. At the very least it was the hope for riches, if not gold itself, that would finally bring about the greatest of all Indian wars and effectively drive the nomadic tribes from the plains and back onto their reservations.

Furthermore, that year was a pivotal, fateful one for the frontier army. On March 3, just before the regiments took to the field for spring campaigns, Congress slashed both the appropriations and size of the army from 55,000 troops to almost 37,000. Those officers who remained after the Benzine Boards got done paring away the Civil War “fat” were once again left reeling under the cuts of manpower and matériel, complicated by a lack of national will to get the job done.

Yet within that core of the victorious Union army there remained some of the best fighting men this country has ever known. Besides Grant—who was to be inaugurated that spring of ’sixty-nine—there were his two closest subordinates, William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan. While the former reorganized the army and railed against the forces in Washington City who would emasculate the frontier army, the latter set about taking the fight to plains Indians.

Instead of merely reacting each time the Sioux or Cheyenne attacked a settlement, Phil Sheridan devised a plan whereby the army would search out and destroy those peaceful villages to which the guilty warriors returned after they had their fill of blood, booty and white prisoners.

Major Eugene Asa Carr’s role in Sheridan’s first winter campaign of 1868–69 is not generally known even by those conversant with General George Armstrong Custer’s more glamorous defeat of Black Kettle’s Southern Cheyenne on the Washita River. Yet Custer’s Seventh Cavalry would not have enjoyed success at the Washita in November of 1868, much less brought about the capture and eventual surrender of Satanta’s Kiowa near Fort Cobb or Medicine Arrow’s Cheyenne on the Sweetwater that following spring, had it not been for the fact that Carr’s Fifth Cavalry had simply left the tribes no place to run.

Perhaps even fewer readers know of this dramatic Battle of Summit Springs and how it effectively brought to an end the Cheyenne depredations against the settlers and freight routes across the central plains. Truth is, historians agree the victory of the Fifth Cavalry was of more lasting consequence than was Custer’s campaign against Cheyenne and Kiowa in Indian Territory. Carr broke the grip of terror and bloodshed at the hands of the Dog Soldiers along the upper Republican and Smoky Hill rivers. The Fifth Cavalry effectively ended all cohesiveness of the powerful warrior society. Never again would the Dog Soldiers be the force they were before that July day in 1869. The remnants of that once-great fighting fraternity split: while most wandered south under Bull Bear to surrender in small bands at Camp Supply in what is now Oklahoma, only a few pledged allegiance to White Horse, who hurried north with his faithful to continue the fight alongside their northern cousins.

So successful was the Fifth Cavalry in this victory that in the fall of 1869 both the Nebraska legislature and the Colorado territorial assembly presented Major Carr with their unanimous resolutions of commendation and appreciation. Nebraskans praised the Fifth Cavalry for “driving the enemy from our borders and achieving a victory at Summit Springs, Colorado Territory, by which the people of the State were freed from the merciless Savages.” Soon afterward, the Coloradans praised both Carr and his soldiers for ending a reign of terror by the Cheyenne during which “the prosperity of the Territory has been greatly retarded during several years past … [and] defenceless women and children of our pioneer settlements have been murdered by Savages, or subjected to a captivity worse than death.”

As you read the story, realize there was a flesh and blood Tom Alderdice, Kansas settler and former scout for Major George A. Forsyth at Beecher Island.* There was as well a Mrs. Alderdice, Susanna by name, kidnapped by Tall Bull’s band in raids along the Solomon. In that same camp was the second white female captive, Mrs. Maria Weichel, whose husband Gustaf was killed in a like raid. In one of those interesting footnotes to history, one can note that at Fort Sedgwick, where Mrs. Weichel recuperated, she fell in love with one of her attendants, a hospital steward. They were married soon after the Fifth Cavalry departed on the August campaign north to the Niobrara River country.

There is color beyond compare here during the fateful spring and summer of 1869 on the central plains—a story the reader can continue to study in many fine books he will find available in the library. If anything, this is a tale of the Fifth Cavalry at a crossroads in its own history. To enjoy the richness of that unit’s activities on the plains, read Across The Continent With The Fifth Cavalry, compiled by George F. Price. From its pages I have drawn many firsthand reports and accounts of the winter and summer campaigns of 1868–69.

Herein you will come to learn of the stoic Eugene Asa Carr, senior major of the Fifth Cavalry. The story of his career fighting Comanches in the southwest following the Mexican War, all the way through the end of the Indian Wars on the Northern Plains, is splendidly told in War Eagle—A Life of General Eugene A. Carr by James T. King.

A second firsthand account of that summer campaign and Summit Springs fight is given by soldier J. E. Welch, which appears in Cyrus Townsend Brady’s book, Indian Fights and Fighters.

My firsthand accounts from the Cheyenne side of the fight were gleaned from George Bird Grinnell’s monumental work, The Fighting Cheyennes, which in detail explores the skirmishes that led up to the defeat for the Dog Soldiers at Summit Springs.

Should any reader want to gain more of an overview of this period of the Indian Wars, he should put his hands on any of the following, highly readable studies: The Long Death—The Last Days of the Plains Indian by Ralph K. Andrist; The Indian Wars of the West by Paul I. Wellman; War Cries on Horseback—The Story of the Indian Wars of the Great Plains by Stephen Longstreet; The Buffalo Soldiers—A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West by William H. Leckie; and most especially one should read and reread Robert M. Utley’s Frontier Regulars—The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1891.

But as much as this is a story of the Fifth Cavalry and its soldiers, it is even more so a tale of the Indian and civilian scouts who led the soldiers across the plains, tracking the nomadic and highly mobile warrior bands. Of invaluable help to this novel in this regard was the book Man of the Plains—Recollections of Luther North, 1856–1882, edited by Donald F. Danker. Time and again I referred to it for the rich story of the North brothers and their famous Pawnee Battalion of scouts.

Standing more boldly outlined against lesser or more finely-etched characters is no less than William F. Cody himself. Unlike what the public is served in television’s popular version of the shortlived era of the Pony Express, the real character is all the more exciting. In the brief period encompassed by this novel, Bill Cody first rides for General Philip H. Sheridan and the army. It is his taking on a dangerous task for Sheridan that no one else will accept that leads the general to select Bill Cody as chief of scouts for Carr’s Fifth Cavalry. The legend was well on its way.

In addition, the first use of the now-famous nickname “Buffalo Bill” was made that winter of 1868 as the young scout was hailed by some buffalo soldiers who earlier had witnessed his incredible marksmanship among a buffalo herd near Fort Hays, Kansas.

The first of many controversies that would mark Cody’s life began with his association with the North brothers and their Pawnee scouts in the summer campaign in ’sixty-nine. All of this and more are there for the reading in the best and the worst of accounts: Last Of The Great Scouts—The Life Story of Col. William F. Cody (as told by his sister, Helen Cody Wetmore); Buffalo Bill—The Noblest Whiteskin by John Burke; Buffalo Bill and The Wild West by Henry Blackman Sell and Victor Weybright; and Buffalo Bill—His Family, Friends, Fame, Failures, and Fortunes by Nellie Snyder Yost.

Yet I can recommend no more highly any study of Cody’s life than I do the marvelously written The Life and Legends of Buffalo Bill by Don Russell. The author brings to his story a wealth of knowledge and a lifelong study of the frontier period of the Indian Wars that provides a rich tapestry against which the exciting career of Cody is splendidly portrayed.

By citing the most heavily used of my sources, I’ve attempted here to establish some of my credentials for telling this story. After all, the writer of historical fiction assumes a perilous task: while he must remain true to history, there are the demands of fiction pressing in on the novelist at every turn. So with not only the battle of Summit Springs studied and restudied, but the winter campaign of 1868–69 for the Fifth Cavalry as well, it remained for me to visit the sites, walking over the ground as I do with every one of these stories in hopes of gaining a sense of place and time, if not to hear the nearby ghosts speak at my shoulder. The story of that dramatic summer in 1869 spread itself before me.

Bill Cody and Bill Hickok, Frank and Lute North, and Major Eugene Asa Carr were there to help me—I had only to let them, indeed all the actual participants of that marvelous time, tell their tales.

Into their midst ride my two fictional plainsmen: Seamus Donegan, who is growing old before his time; and the mulatto-turned-Cheyenne Jack O’Neill, who is sent after the Irishman with a deathbed vow to Roman Nose at the Battle of Beecher Island.

Yet unlike the three previous volumes in the Plainsmen series, Black Sun will portray for the reader some other elements of the life of the frontier scout that were new and interesting to me: the hijacking of the beer shipment by Cody and Hickok did occur as I have portrayed it; in addition, Cody’s tracking down horse thieves to Denver City to regain Major Carr’s animals is another actual incident. All in the life of that era and the hardy few who stood the test of all that was thrown against them.

As a historical novelist, I long ago assumed a task beyond the mere retelling of this history. For in picking up this volume, you demand of me to add something that history alone can’t convey to most readers: a warm, throbbing pulse that truly allows you to relive the bloody, tragic, but always exciting history of the winning of the West.

So it is that this story of Black Sun tells something of the wide-ranging and often frustrating life of the frontier scout, besides the more dramatic tracking of the fierce Dog Soldiers, the battle, and the rescue of but one of two women captured by the Cheyenne.

The soldiers did gather around the grave they dug for Susanna Alderdice beside Summit Springs to sing their hymns. They did stand their crude, hand-lettered headboard beside her resting place. And they did turn over most of the money found in the village to the sole surviving white woman, Maria Weichel.

The dramatic story chronicling this clash of cultures across a quarter-century will take over the next half-dozen years to relate. We began the Plainsmen, our account of this epic struggle of the Indian Wars, with that story told in Sioux Dawn of a bitterly-cold December day in 1866 as Capt. William Judd Fetterman led eighty men beyond Lodge Trail Ridge and into history. The tale continued with Red Cloud’s Revenge and The Stalkers, so that now with Black Sun we find ourselves more than two years into this captivating era, a time like no other, a time that would not come to an end until another bloody, cold December day in 1890 with another massacre along a little-known creek called Wounded Knee.

The fever of that quarter-century made the Indian Wars an era unequaled in the annals of time, when a vast frontier was forcibly wrenched from its inhabitants in a struggle as rich in drama and pathos as any in the history of man.

Into the heart of the red man’s paradise of the central plains, both the government and daring entrepreneurs alike were thrusting the prongs of their railroad and freight roads. To protect both the settlers on the Kansas plains and travelers alike, the army erected its outposts: Forts Harker and Hays, Larned, Dodge and Lyon. And, far out on the Federal Road to Denver, Fort Wallace.

It is we who are left to wonder, as only a reader in the safety and comfort of his easy-chair can, if we too would have measured up. Here you have the chance to judge, for in these pages you are asked to relive the story of real people. Indeed, you are reading a story peopled with flesh and blood that walked and fought, cried and cheered on little-known but hallowed ground now swept clean beneath the relentless march of spring floods and prairie drought.

So it is that good historical fiction fuses the fortunes, adventures and destinies of numerous characters. Glory-seekers and murderers, settlers and cowards, army officers and soldiers. Remember as you read—these were actual, living souls striding across that crude stage erected on the high plains of western Kansas and Colorado Territory … all, save Donegan and the blackhearted renegade, Jack O’Neill.

With each new volume in this Plainsmen series, which will encompass the entire era of the Indian Wars, you will follow Seamus as he marches through some of history’s bloodiest hours, marching as well among a changing cast of actual historical characters.

Donegan is the sort who is not capable of always doing the right thing, yet he tries nonetheless.

History has itself plenty of heroes—every one of them dead. Perhaps the thing I like best about Seamus Donegan is that he represents the rest of us. Ordinary in every way, except that at some point, we are each called upon by circumstances to do something extraordinary … what most might call heroic.

That’s the epic tale of the Indian Wars. If you will listen carefully now, you’ll hear the grunts of the lathered horses and the balky mules straining to carry their riders into the midst of the Dog Soldier village after four grueling days of relentless pursuit. You’ll hear the shrieking panic of the white women struggling to escape their captors and rushing for the blue-clad saviors on horseback. You can hear the war-cries of the warriors who will not retreat, but instead turn to fight, protecting the flight of families and old ones.

Sniff the air—you’ll likely smell the burning fragrance of gunpowder or the aroma of boiled coffee (if you’re lucky enough to have any left). Run your tongue around the inside of your cheek one last time now, trying to remember how good that mule haunch tasted last winter—especially when mule meat was all that stood between you and starvation in the snows of a winter wilderness.

The fight for survival that harsh winter happened every bit as did the gallant chase after the Dog Soldiers the following summer. Carr’s Fifth Cavalry caught Tall Bull’s camp at a little known spring near the South Platte River. As history, this story needs no false glamour, no shiny veneer of dash and daring. What has through the centuries been the story of man at war—of culture against culture, race against race—needs nothing special in its telling.

My hope is that you will enjoy this ride stirrup to stirrup with Seamus Donegan and Bill Cody.

Come on along—we’ve no time to waste. Tall Bull and his band of deadly warriors are four days ahead of us now and gaining ground. If you’re of a mind to, you’ll sleep this night curled up in a blanket on the frozen ground and warm your hands over buffalo-chip fires.

Saddle up, my friend. We’re riding out now and not looking back.

—Terry C. Johnston
Summit Springs Battleground
Colorado Territory

July 11, 1988