Daughter of the Sword by Jeanne Williams Page B

there’d be a fuss over the western lands just opening up, and slaves would be running away north whilst the abolitionists would be helping them. The whole border’d be the way Kansas is right now. No, this boil’s coming to a head! Cain’t be no real peace till it’s lanced and the poison’s drained and the wound can heal clean instead of growin’ a thin scab over a putrefying abscess.”
    Violently, Sara pushed back her chair. “No matter which side wins, it won’t help my people!” Her eyes gleamed and in that moment she was hostile to them all, even Thos. “If only Tecumseh had been able to get the other tribes to join those of the Northwest who fought on the British side in 1812! He journeyed south and west, telling chiefs the white tide would soon be lapping against them, but they didn’t believe! Tucumseh fell in battle, and with him died the spirit of the Shawnee.”
    â€œI’ve heard of him,” Dane said. “The British commissioned him a brigadier general. He was a military genius.”
    â€œWhich the British commander wasn’t,” rejoined Sara, though obviously surprised and pleased that the great leader of her tribe had been heard of in England.
    â€œBut would it have made a difference to the Indians if the British had won?” Deborah asked.
    â€œWho knows? In return for Tecumseh’s help against the Americans, the British were ready to promise that they’d prohibit further taking of Indian lands. The point is that if, right then, the Indians east of the Rockies had united, they might have had some chance of holding their lands, which instead have been nibbled away as the tide crumbles the sand.”
    Springing up, she began clearing away the dishes. Deborah helped, wishing to comfort her friend but not knowing what she could truthfully say.
    It hadn’t been only settlement from the East, but the time of the free-ranging Indian had been numbered from when Coronado, seeking for golden Quivira, had written to the king of Spain that though he found no gold, the soil was “rich and black … well watered by arroyos, springs, and rivers … the most suitable that has been found for growing all the products of Spain.”
    He spoke of the plums, nuts, sweet grapes, and mulberries, doubtless in an effort to assuage the disappointment of his gold-hungry sovereign. Spain never colonized Quivira but though she’d had to surrender her claim, first to Mexico, then to the United States, to the region north of the Rio Grande and her settlements in Texas, California, and that vast area in between, those lands were lost to the Indians as surely as was New England and the East Coast. Here on the plains in the heart of the country, proud Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Sioux would challenge the white man for a little while, but they were few and scattered.
    Thos said in a strained voice, “I guess you’d be glad, Sara, if all of us whites killed each other off!”
    She turned on him in a swirl of yellow skirts. “How could I want you or your family dead? Or Johnny?”
    â€œWhoa!” Johnny, too, rose and stretched, went over to tilt up Sara’s flower face, gaze down at her in stern tenderness. “Listen, honey! Weren’t the Shawnee driven from Ohio by the Iroquois and later from the Cumberland Valley by the Cherokee and Chickasaw? Did they pay you for the land or help you settle elsewhere?”
    She gave him a mutinous stare, lovely and small in his gnarled brown hands. “If one must be robbed, better by one of the same color!”
    â€œMaybe. But the Lakotah who now watch the Holy Road, the Overland Trail, and see thousands of wagons use up the game and grass and firewood, ruin the hunting and wintering grounds so that Nebraska comes from “Nablaska”—trampled flat—those Lakotah whipped Mandans and Arikara on the Missouri and got their lands, took the Black Hills from