Through Time and the Valley

3. Carson Creek

3 Carson Creek About six hours later we came to a spring oflive water, a welcome sight after a long afternoon in the saddle. The air had been still and steamy along our course, and we had been pursued every step of the way by hordes of deer flies, a grayish insect about three times the size ofa house fly. These loathsome creatures had the bite of an ice pick and drove our horses to distraction. Bill and I spent most of the day slapping flies on the necks of Suds and Dollarbill, and when we arrived at the spring on Carson Creek, our hands were covered with blood. We left the horses hobbled in a lush green meadow and made our camp in a hackberry grove beside the creek. While Bill went back to the meadow to doctor a gall on the mule, I kindled a fire 21 22 -- Through Time and the Valley and put the evening meal on to cook: rice and jerked beef simmered in bouillon broth, fried bacon, raisins, and sassafras tea. Jerked beef, once a staple in the diet of pioneers, can now be purchased in almost any quick-stop grocery store. I made our jerky from a recipe given to me by my grandmother, the late Mrs. B. B. Curry of Seminole, Texas. One summer evening, as we were sitting on her front porch, she told me about her childhood in the old Quaker community of Estacado in Crosby County, where she often saw strips of beef hanging on lines to dry in the sun. When Bill returned from the meadow, we spread a slicker on the ground beside the fire and sat down to a good hot meal. The jerky lacked the taste and flavor of the roast from which it had come, but we found it filling and satisfying. Aftersupper, we nursed cups of hot sassafras tea and watched the sun slide behind a hill, until our growing shadows reminded us that we had chores to do before dark. Ordinarily, we would have pitched the tent, dug a trench around it, and covered our saddles with the tarp-normal precautions against rain. But it was a beautiful evening, withoout a cloud in the sky, and we decided that it could not possibly rain in the night. As a hedge against this prediction, we pitched the tent, though we did not bother to trench around it or roll out our bedding inside. We would sleep under the stars. As the cloak of night wrapped itself around the land, we crawled into our blankets on the banks of Carson Creek. It was in the winter of 1864 that Colonel Christopher (Kit) Carson marched his men from Cimarron, New Mexico, to the creek in the Texas Panhandle which now bears his name. During the Civil War, the government in Washington had been forced to withdraw most of its troops from the frontier garrisons on the Southern Plains and to throw them into the war against the Carson Creek - 23 Confederacy. The Kiowas, Comanches, Southern Cheyennes, and Arapahos, by this time allied against the expansion of white civilization , took full advantage of the withdrawal. They attacked military posts and wagon trains in Kansas, pillaged the settlements below the Red River in Texas, and left the whole country in a state of panic. By the middle of 1864, Washington was flooded with reports ofshocking depredations, and the decision was made to punish the Indians. Kit Carson, who had already distinguished himself as a scout under John Charles Fremont and as commander of the summer campaign against the Navahos, received his orders in October to march to the Canadian River to punish hostile Kiowas and Comanches, reported to be in their winter camps along the river valley. On November 6, Carson left Cimarron with 350 mounted men, seventy Ute and Apache scouts (some with wives), twentyseven wagons, and two mountain howitzers. On November 24, Carson's Indian scouts, enveloped in buffalo robes to protect themselves against the bitter cold, reported finding an encampment of one hundred and seventy-six teepees down the river. Carson ordered a night march to get his force within striking distance of the village, and early the next morning they attacked. In the first wave were the Utes and Apaches, wearing only their paint and feathers in the extreme cold. As Carson's army advanced toward the village, the Kiowas fled...