Merline Lovelace
Authors: Untamed
Dear Reader,
During my career as an air force officer, I became an avid student of military history. As a transplanted Oklahoman, I’ve become just as intrigued by this state’s fascinating history.
Countless warriors have marched across the mountains and prairies of Oklahoma. Their ranks included Native Americans; the Vikings rumored to have rowed up the Arkansas River and carved runes in the rocks; Spanish conquistadores; and French dragoons.
In 1803 the United States Army assumed responsibility for exploring and mapping the vast territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. In
A Savage Beauty,
I detailed the adventures of the first U.S. military expedition into the area that eventually became Oklahoma.
This novel opens some twenty years later and is set at the first military outpost in Indian Country. It’s a tale of extraordinary courage, convoluted politics, fierce passions and betrayal.
Hope you enjoy it!
All my best,
A SAVAGE BEAUTY
THE CAPTAIN’S WOMAN
THE COLONEL’S DAUGHTER
THE HORSE SOLDIER
THE FIRST MISTAKE
Untamed
To my own handsome Oklahoman. Thanks for bringing me to the land of blue skies and endless horizons, my darling.
S
he was born to a woman of the People and one of the pale-skinned warriors who rowed up the river and wintered in the land where eagles flew. Violent storms struck after these warriors departed in their canoe with its great, carved prow. Long droughts followed. The People suffered. Blaming the child with the strange blue eyes, they cast out both her and her mother.
Ever after, it seemed, the birth of a babe with light-colored eyes presaged disaster. Crops failed. Spaniards in iron hats raped and pillaged. Frenchmen bartered for furs and sold the vast land that wasn’t their own to men who called themselves Americans.
These men, too, brought disaster. They pushed farther and farther into the land of the People, dug up the earth with their plows, drove away the game. Then they built a fort where the three great rivers flowed together….
Indian Country
October, 1832
“G
it off my land!”
The farmer planted his feet wide at the door of his cabin. His face twisted with rage, he glared down the long barrel of his rifle at the squad of soldiers who’d come to evict him.
Lieutenant Zachariah Morgan kept his horse steady and his finger easy on the trigger of his pistol. His small troop of mounted rangers were spread out on either side of him as he tried yet again to reason with the moose-headed squatter.
“I repeat, Billingsly, this is not your land.”
“The hell you say! I got me a piece of paper with my name on it that gives me legal claim to this patch of dirt.”
Zach smothered an oath. He’d heard this same song sung many times by whites duped into believing they’d bought title to land in Indian Country. Each time, he’d been forced to remove the angry squatters at gunpoint. This time looked to be no different.
“Your quit-claim deed is fraudulent. This land belongs to the Cherokee.”
Or the Osage, he thought wryly, depending on which treaty a man chose to consult.
President Thomas Jefferson had first proposed moving all tribes living east of the Mississippi to the vast, uncharted Louisiana Territory at the time of its purchase in 1803. Successive presidents had heeded the clamor of their land-hungry white constituents and negotiated treaties with the various eastern tribes to cede their holdings in exchange for lands in the West.
Some tribes had begun voluntary migration decades ago. Others, like the Cherokee, still resisted, although bands of that tribe had already relocated to the vast area officially designated as Unassigned Territory but already becoming known as Indian Country.
Then, two years ago, President Jackson pushed the Indian Removal Act through Congress over the violent objections of such outraged legislators as Tennessee congressman David Crockett and Virginia senator Henry Clay. Cherokee chief John Ross had taken to the courts to challenge the act, but most tribes had given in to the inevitable and ceded their
remaining lands in the East. Unfortunately, so many different officials had scribbled so many hurried cessation treaties that no one was quite sure which tribes were supposed to settle where.
The resulting confusion had only increased the age-old hostility between the Osage and the tribes migrating into the territory they’d long considered their own. Years of bloody confrontations had led to the establishment of Fort Gibson, smack in the middle of Indian Country, and the futile hope that one regiment of infantry and a company of mounted rangers could keep peace between the tribes. In the process, they were also supposed to keep out the white settlers already attempting to claim a piece of Indian Country.
Like this one.
Zach tried again to reason with him. He’d spent two years practicing law before accepting an appointment to West Point. He knew the intricacies—and the absurdities—involved in claims such as this man’s.
“Listen to me, Billingsly. You can get your investment back from the company that sold you that false quit-claim. If the company won’t give it to you, the state that certified the deed must pay you back. You can take your case to the courts and—”
“I ain’t taking my case nowheres,” the burly squatter snarled. “This is my land, I tell you.”
Zach was fast running out of patience. He and his
men were tired, dirty and hungry. They’d been out on patrol for close on to a week now. In that time, they’d escorted a Pawnee raiding party back north of Kansaw, returned three Osage captives to their tribes and forcibly evicted two other stubborn squatters like this one.
“You have a choice,” he snapped. “You can pack your wagon, round up your livestock and come with me voluntarily, or travel to Fort Gibson in chains.”
“I’ll send you to hell afore I let you take me anywheres.”
“They’re soldiers, Thomas!”
The nervous cry came from the woman cowering just inside the cabin.
“Maybe you should listen to the lieutenant.”
She edged out into the harsh sunlight and added her voice to Zach’s. She was small and birdlike, almost lost in her homespun skirt and short-blouse. Her brown hair fell in untidy strands. When she brushed them back with a nervous hand, Zach’s breath left on a hiss.
Her face looked as if the farmer had taken a barrel stave to it. Or both of his hamlike fists. One of her eyes was completely closed. Ugly purple bruises rimmed the other. A red scar cut across her temple, and livid finger marks ringed her throat.
“Your pa tried to tell you that deed wasn’t any good.” Her voice was little more than a hoarse whisper. “We could—”
“Close your mouse-hole, woman!”
She put a timorous hand on the man’s arm. “We could go back to Georgia. Your pa would help you with this court business. You know he would.”
“I told you to shut your hole!”
The squatter released his grip on his rifle long enough to fling out his arm and send the woman crashing back against the cabin wall. She hit with a mewling cry.
The buckskin-clad sergeant mounted next to Zach spit out a curse. “You cow-handed bastard. Why don’t you try your fists on someone nearer to your own weight?”
“I’ll show you who’s cow-handed.” The farmer slammed his rifle butt against his shoulder.
Zach didn’t hesitate. A boyhood spent in Indian Country and years of military training had taught him a simple formula for survival. When confronted by a snarling beast of the four-legged variety, back away. When facing one of the two-legged variety, try reason. If either approach looked as if it would fail, fire.
Zach saw murder in Billingsly’s contorted features and squeezed off a shot a mere heartbeat before the farmer’s rifle belched fire.
The man’s wife chose the same instant to throw herself at her husband in a desperate attempt to deflect his aim. Billingsly’s shot went wild. The ball
Zach had intended for the man’s right shoulder took him square between the eyes.
He went down like a felled ox.
Zach’s sergeant spit a wad of chewing tobacco into the red dirt. “Good shooting, lootenant.”
Accepting with a nod what amounted to a high compliment in the ranger company, Zach swung out of the saddle and strode to the woman. She stood rooted to the dirt, staring down at the blood spurting from the neat hole in her husband’s forehead.
“I’m sorry. I shot to wound, not kill. My aim was off.”
The last was a lie, but Zach didn’t want the woman thinking she’d helped precipitate her husband’s death.
He needn’t have been so concerned. When she raised her head, the eye that wasn’t swollen shut blazed with joy.
“I’ll thank the Lord every night for your poor marksmanship!”
Grabbing Zach’s hand, she brought it to her lips and covered it with fervent kisses.
“Here now!” he protested. “There’s no need for that, Mistress Billingsly.”
“My name’s Hattie. Hattie Goodson. I wasn’t married to that…that pig. His pa bought my indentures, then passed them to Thomas.”
“Yes, well, you’re free of the pig now. Bundle up
your things and we’ll take you to Fort Gibson. You can stay there until you arrange passage back to Georgia.”
“I can’t go back there with Thomas dead. His pa will come after me and make me serve out my time!”
Her bruised face, which had showed such fierce exultation mere moments ago, now folded into tight seams of desperation.
“He has a meaner fist than his son. He’ll kill me for sure.”
“No, he won’t.”
Zach knew full well indenture constituted a time-tested means for individuals to pay off debts, learn a trade or find homes for large broods of children who might otherwise starve. The law required those who’d sold themselves, or been sold, into service to fulfill their obligation. He also knew the law protected those in service from the kind of mistreatment this woman had endured.
“I’ll write a paper for you to take to the magistrate,” he promised. “In it I’ll describe the beatings you’ve taken. I guarantee you won’t have to serve out the rest of your time.”
She looked doubtful but had little choice in the matter. An hour later, Zach helped her scramble onto the back of a mule. The meager possessions his men had scavenged from the cabin were piled behind her. A milk goat baaed and balked at the end of a rope lead.
Zach swept Billingsly’s mounded dirt grave with another glance and swung into his saddle.
“Fire the cabin,” he instructed his sergeant.
“Yes, sir.”
The late-afternoon sun slanted at a sharp angle by the time Zach’s small troop topped a hill and spotted Fort Gibson below.
The outpost sat on the banks of the Grand River, some three miles up from its juncture with the Arkansas and the Verdigris. A natural rock shelf on the east bank extended into the river and provided a landing spot for the steamboats that chugged up the river with ever-increasing frequency.
One of which, the rangers saw with whoops of delight, was tied up at the stone quay this very moment. The lanky woodsman who wore sergeant’s stripes shot Zach a brown-toothed grin.
“Now there’s a welcome sight! She’ll mean an extra ration of whiskey tonight for sure.”
“That she will.”
It also meant newspapers, letters, visitors, and, of late, another boatload of Creek, Cherokee or Choctaw en route to new homes in the West. Resigned to the escort duty he and his fellow officers would be asked to perform in the coming days, Zach urged his weary mount down the sloping track to the fort.
The return of a patrol would normally excite attention at the post. The return of a ranger patrol provided even more than the usual entertainment.
Unlike the infantry, the rangers were not regular army. The men were volunteers, and colorful ones at that. Colonel Matthew Arbuckle, Fort Gibson’s commander, had recognized early the impossibility of patrolling the vast Indian Country on foot, much less keeping up with mounted Indian warriors, and lobbied hard for a troop of dragoons. Ever parsimonious, the War Department had granted him authority to mount a company, but no funds to recruit, train, horse or equip it. The result was a unit of rugged frontiersmen with no uniforms, no training and precious little discipline.
Some of the rangers who cantered down the hill wore moleskin trousers, coats cut from green blankets and floppy brimmed hats decorated with turkey feathers. Most chose fringed buckskins topped off by a variety of headgear ranging from wolfskin caps to shiny black beaver top hats. They were a ragtag bunch at best, but the poorest shot in Zach’s squad could take down a deer at a hundred yards.
The regulars in their canvas pants and blue wool shirts paused at their work details to call out greetings to the arrivals. Several pressed around the troop, eager for news. One of those wore the
shoulder pips of a lieutenant. A tall northerner with sandy hair and luxuriant mustaches he combed three or four times a day, Nathaniel Prescott had graduated from the Point a year behind Zach.
“You’ve timed your return perfectly, Morgan. The steamboat delivered another band of Cherokee for resettlement. We’ll no doubt— Good Lord!”
His startled gaze locked on the battered face of the woman sitting astride her mount.
“Who’s that?”
“Her name’s Hattie Goodson. She was indentured to a squatter.”
Prescott’s glance swept the dismounting squad. When he saw no evidence of the squatter, he drew the inevitable conclusion. “I assume this squatter was so unwise as to tangle with you rangers?”
“You assume correctly.”
He tipped a nod toward the woman. “What are you going to do with her?”
“I’m hoping Sallie Nicks will take her in,” Zach replied, referring to the gracious and much-courted widow of the fort’s original sutler. “At least until I can make arrangements for her to return to her home.”
“I’m sure Sallie will oblige you if she has room. The steamboat discharged a full load of passengers.” A note of excitement charged his friend’s voice. “I must tell you, the
Bonne Chance
has delivered the most ravishing Englishwoman ever to set foot in Fort
Gibson. I’ve exchanged a mere half-dozen words with her and already I’m hopelessly in love!”
Zach snorted. “You fall hopelessly in love with
every
passable female under the age of fifty who so much as smiles at you, Prescott.”
“That’s true,” Nate admitted cheerfully. “But when you see Lady Barbara, you’ll agree she’s a diamond of the finest cut. And you will stare, I’m sure, when I tell you she’s come in search of your mother.”
He had the right of it. Zach gaped at his friend in utter astonishment. “An English lady has come in search of my mother? Why?”
“She was somewhat vague as to her reasons, but evinced considerable interest when she learned Louise Morgan’s son is an officer. Of sorts,” Prescott added in a good-natured jibe.
Regular Army right down to his leathers, the New Englander still shook his head over Zach’s decision to serve with the rangers.
“Colonel Arbuckle assured her he’d release you from your duties long enough to escort her to your parents’ plantation. You lucky dog!”
The homestead Zach’s parents had carved out of the wilderness hardly qualified as a plantation, but he didn’t bother to correct his friend. He was still puzzling over the fact an Englishwoman had business with his mother.
“What was this woman’s name again?”
“Lady Barbara Chamberlain. From the little in
telligence I’ve been able to gather about her, she’s the daughter of Sir Harold Chamberlain, now deceased, and sister to Sir Harry Chamberlain. She’s also unmarried.”
“She’s putting up with Sallie Nicks, you say?”
“She is. But don’t try to steal a march on me,” Nate warned with a growl. “I saw her first.”
“Only because I was out on patrol. Will you look out for Mistress Goodson for a few moments? I’d better make my report to Colonel Arbuckle.”
Nate eyed the young woman’s bruised face and shapeless garments with some apprehension, but consented readily enough. Zach lifted Hattie out of the saddle, explained that he was leaving her in the lieutenant’s care for a bit, and strode across the trampled grass toward the post headquarters. He was just passing the coal house when a flutter of lace on the path that led to the river snared his attention.