Chapter Ten Oklahoma Territory—November 27, 1893 #2
“Let me find the words.” She loaded the bullets into the chamber, one after another.
“Much change is forced upon the Osage. Pioneers have been vicious: stealing horses, harassing women, causing havoc. Last week, as my sisters and I foraged rose hips along a ridgeline, several cowboys burst from the thicket and stole three of our horses—before I could even unholster my gun.” She spun the chamber closed, the movements of her fingers tense and jerky, as if terror still knotted into her joints.
She looked in my eyes. “Do your people tell you this?”
I’d heard the lawlessness of No Man’s Land spilled over into Native territory, with outlaws and renegades causing all manner of havoc. But there seemed a haze in my perception.
“There’s much I do not know,” I said.
“I’m not just curious about horses.” Niabi frowned at my timberline, the wind lofting and dropping the heavy limbs.
“I keep my eyes on the horizon. Watching the changes overcoming our land. Threats surge along the borderline, and I must learn,” Niabi said.
“Training my horse, sharpshooting—this is about protection.”
I rubbed at the dirt smudged along my cuticles.
I hadn’t realized how monstrously white men plagued their border.
I remembered the stories my grandmother told when I was a child.
Harrowing accounts of how tribes were dragged from their homelands, of how land was stolen or tricked away.
Of trails of tears and unspeakable violence, of a bitter agony thread through generations.
But the papers told another story. I didn’t know what was real.
The tale went that the Cherokees sold their ranching land for the rush.
Decades ago, they’d sold other land to the Osage.
Then the Osage moved from Kansas to Oklahoma Territory.
An awareness grew that perhaps I’d glimpsed only a fraction of the truth. As is true with most stories, there seemed a distance between what the storyteller told for entertainment and what was truth. “I heard the Osage bought their land from the Cherokees,” I said. “Did your people want to move?”
“Of course not.” She lifted one of her necklaces, rubbed it between her fingers.
“Why would we choose to leave the land of our ancestors? We weep, having left them.” She scratched her nails along the ridge of her pendant.
Let it go. “White men always want, they continue to take and take. When my grandmother’s grandmother was just a child, we were forced away from the wide river valley of our homeland.
Twenty years ago, when we moved again, a leader named Wah Ti An Kah thought that the forested hills of Osage Nation would be safe.
That white men couldn’t put their iron into that ground—and so they wouldn’t force us to move again. They would leave us alone.”
I stared at her, not quite understanding. My heart stretched, a bleak, heavy sadness squirming. They had left their home so they might be undisturbed. And then my people had opened surrounding land for the runs.
Niabi raised my pistol, aimed at the heaps of clay I’d set up as targets. “I always hold my posture until the shot plinks,” she said.
My fingers clutched at my chest, still untangling what Niabi had shared. “Don’t lift your gaze till the smoke clears.”
Niabi exhaled, and her bullet thunked. The clod of red clay splattered, soil rushing earthward. The dust thinned, and Niabi eased. “Like that?”
I nodded, fiddled with my top button. “Thank you for sharing of your people.”
She shrugged and turned back to our targets.
I didn’t know how to make sense of such sorrow.
But watching how the trauma of displacement haunted Niabi, I realized: I didn’t understand her story at all.
And I wondered, once again, how men could be so brutal.
Niabi gathered her basket to head homeward, and I invited her back anytime.
“Visit me too,” she said. “I would welcome you.”
She straightened her blanket cloak, pulling her long black hair free from the wool.
And then she walked across my meadow and into the woodland.
As she disappeared into the forest’s shadows, an ache crept and bubbled across my back.
I longed for her to return, but I also worried that she might.
Niabi was vibrant and fresh—and in friendships, I only knew how to destroy.
And now, weeks later, I was out chasing that quickening of excitement in outlaw country. A twangy rattle sounded in the buckthorn, jarring me back to the present. I lifted my Winchester as something burst from the thicket.
The jake thrust through the bushes, head twisting about, a clutch of ten turkeys wobbling behind him. Being surrounded, while wandering the woodland, looked suffocating. The turkeys were almost in range when a bang ricocheted. The jake toppled.
I dropped to my stomach.
Shots rang out, my Winchester pressed beside me into the mud. By God and all high nation—the outlaws had sighted me.
A riot of shots, the squabble of birds, the silence of aftermath.