Maynee and Alice were the best of
friends. Maynee was with her parents, Reverend John Lilley and wife Mary.
Alice was with her family but she and her brother John Brown roamed along the
wagon train on ponies, helping keeping stray stock headed in the right
direction for a while, then galloping ahead to find out road conditions.
Sometimes she and Maynee took messages to the Seminole Indians in the wagons
from the handsome Army official Elijah Brown in charge of the move from Kansas
by the Northern Seminoles back to their homes in Indian Territory after the
Civil War ended. Maynee spoke Seminole and Creek, having been raised in her
father’s Presbyterian mission school. She rode astride, as did Alice, much to
her mother’s patrician dismay. Alice was Seminole.
The mission school had burned, but
Reverend John Ramsey was opening a new school. She would teach there, after
their arrival. Over a thousand of the Seminoles had died in Kansas during the
war. Supplies from the government had not come in a timely fashion, and their
quality had been horrendous. Sanitation had been inadequate, with resulting
epidemics. Many of them had left
producing farms and solid homes when the Indian Territory had become a
battleground between the North and South. Many Indians of many tribes had been
enlisted on both sides.
In the late 1840’s many Seminoles
had moved to Mexico. Some members of
their families had stayed in Indian Territory, and during the war had stayed put,
eking out an existence labored with roving bands of gunmen looting and killing,
and groups of militia from both sides that appropriated their food. The horrors
of the last four years were finally coming to an end. Everyone was filled with
hope for the future, although knowing that it was like starting over again, as
they had in the late 1840s after the Seminoles were forced to leave Florida.
When they neared the North Canadian
River, a rider from the south eased into the wagon train as it circled up for
the evening camp. It was one of the sons of John Horse, who had been under
Maynee’s mother care during an epidemic just after their arrival. John Horse
was the leader of the black Seminoles (escaped slaves and their descendants)
who had come with the Seminoles who had helped them survive the Floridian
swamps.
When traveling from Mexico to the
Indian Territory, the Seminoles and the Seminole blacks traveled up the Devil’s
River, then down the South Concho River, up the North Concho, over the divide
to the Colorado River, then thru the badlands to the Brazos, and on up to the
little Wichita and Red, to the Wichita Mountains and home. Traveling through Comanche territory along
the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado was safer than along the roads of Texas
and its slave trade and anti-Indian attitudes.
Their guest had been sent to help
relatives who had gone with the Seminoles that had accepted the protection of
the Union. It would be the first they had heard of their relatives in Mexico
for three years. After he had been introduced to Army official Brown, Maynee
went with him. His older sister had been captured by slavetraders as the black
Seminoles headed to Mexico, but had managed to escape and return to Indian
Territory. She had helped at the school and was another of Maynee’s friends.
After greetings, their guest told
his story. He had some bad news, fresh on his mind. He had been with one of
Wildcat’s sons, who had died on the way. To avoid the big winter camp of the
Comanches at the head of the Colorado River southeast of Muchaque Peak, they
had swung west, counting on the freshwater spring on Sulphur Springs Draw, and
the seep springs at Tahoka Lake before coming down the Pease River.
At Sulphur Springs draw waterhole his friend
had developed a great pain in his side, and died in agony the next day. Maynee knew to call it appendicitis. Nothing
could have been done. (The first appendicitis surgery came 25 years later.) She
had to leave then, for Mr. Brown had requested her interpretative services.
With the Seminole lands on the other side of the river, what would be the best
course of action? Who needed help – who could manage on their own? For the next
three hours she sat with the Seminole and Seminole black elders’, becoming more
and more impressed with the officer’s respectful handling of his charges. He
spoke with his heart, and carefully thought out his duties.
This is a fictionalized version of the beginning
of my great-grandparent’s long relationship
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