Chapter 97

“Breech birth. They’re trying to turn the baby into position.” With that, he clamped his mouth shut and took up his scythe with a vengeance.

We finished the harvest before nightfall. The storm, a gully-washer holding ice pellets amongst the drumming raindrops, struck shortly thereafter. The day disappeared before its allotted time, snuffed out by thick, black clouds eclipsing the sun. This was the world James Andre Tiller greeted with a lusty bellow on October 5, 1868.

* * * *

A few days later, word reached us that Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer had attacked Black Kettle’s Southern Cheyenne winter camp on the Wichita River in Indian Territory as a part of General Phil Sheridan’s Winter Offensive. Black Kettle had survived Chivington’s murderous assault at Sand Creek, but he, his wife Medicine Woman, and a large number of Cheyenne women, children, and warriors fell to Custer’s attack.