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         Chapter7  Down off the High Yarner I t is [ascertained] that a disastrous encounter was had on the Staked Plains,in which there were two officers and  enlisted soldiers killed.” Thus read the first official army communication about the black troop tragedy. Dated August , , the notice came from military personnel at the headquarters of the Division of the Missouri in Chicago. Although they had very little news to report, and nearly all of it in error, officers released the eighteen-line statement in response to dozens of excited inquires from around the country. “Information . . . confirming the rumor received here a few days since,” the bulletin said, indicates that a “remnant of the party continued its march having suffered their loss and since reached Fort [Concho].” They hoped that “full details [might] be received in the course of a few days.”1 “Full details”—whatever that might mean—of Captain Nicholas Nolan’s lost troop expedition did not arrive in a few days. The men, both bison hunters and black regulars, first needed water, food, and rest. They were dehydrated and famished. Their skin was gray-colored, their eyes bloodshot and sunken. They needed to regain not only their physical well-being but also their mental and emotional stability. They needed to get back to their home stations and down off the high Yarner. The Comanches, likewise, needed to get down off the High Plains. They had not suffered from thirst or lack of food—they knew the Llano Estacado too well for that—but they needed rest from the hide hunters and the twomonths -long chase the hunters had been giving them.Plus,as we have seen, at the end of July the buffalo soldiers had joined the hated bison hunters in pursuit. The Kwahadas were tired.        Accordingly, many of Red Young Man’s band welcomed the news that Quanah, the government’s emissary from Fort Sill, was on his way with four companions to the Llano Estacado. In fact, the “runners” or scouts who had brought the news to the Comanche camp in the Blue Sand Hills had met Quanah in Yellow House Canyon, probably at the long water hole in modern Lubbock, the site of the battle of Yellow House Canyon the previous March. The runners, if John Cook is correct, told Quanah where the bison hunters and buffalo soldiers could be found and where he could find the Comanches in the Blue Sand Hills.2 Using the information, Quanah and his four companions headed south. On July , he found the soldiers and hunters in their Tobacco Creek camp and told them—incorrectly, of course—that the Indian people they sought were to the southwest in the upper Mustang Draw area.Quanah then headed in that direction, hoping to draw the pursuers away from the Comanches he had come to get,Indians he knew were in the Blue Sand Hills to the west. Two days later Quanah again rode into Nolan’s camp, now at Cedar Lake (Laguna Sabinas),and spent six hours with the soldiers and hunters. He left in the early evening “taking a westerly direction.”3 Johnny Cook saw two reasons for Quanah’s going “out of his way some forty miles in all to reach our camp and then get back again to the Indians.” Cook, who got his information afterwards from Four Feathers, one of the warriors in the Blue Sand Hills,said Quanah wanted first,to“show his commission and orders, thus hoping to allay the vengeance of the hunters, and check the movement of the soldiers against their camp.”Second, he wanted to “get us as far south as possible, when he would, under cover of night, turn and hurry to the sand-hills and get the . . . [Comanches] moving to Fort Sill.”4 With their supplies on three pack animals,Quanah and his companions, upon leaving Nolan’s camp, hurried to reach their friends in the Blue Sand Hills. Perhaps they had been joined by a few additional warriors and perhaps they were the Indians that José Piedad Tafoya, the hunters’ guide, and the other scouts had seen on July , the chance sighting west of Rich Lake that started the black troop tragedy. Among the supplies and equipment that Quanah carried with him was “a pair of army field-glasses,”issued to him at Fort Sill.Using the field glasses, the Kwahadas at the end of July kept a close eye on the bison...

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