Goodnight, Old Shakespeare

They were chattering in broken Spanish/Comanche and Charlie laughed at their Indian cunning

They wanted a buffalo from Charlie’s private herd, they yearned for one last buffalo running

Old Iron Head, the leader, warbled-on about a time when the land and buffalo was everyone’s—meant to be shared

Before the white man, the Iron Horse, and the barbed wire—so the Comanches figured a gifted buffalo was fair

Charlie kept fourteen head on a far hill, so he could gaze at ’em—as he drank whiskey in the evenings

Charlie’s favorite was old Shakespeare, a horse killing bull, but the beast had a spirit Charlie truly believed in

Now back in the time of blood and confusion, the Comanches were the fiercest of mounted tribes

But smallpox, syphilis, and whiskey had scoured their numbers and eroded their pride

Now in beat-up old Stetsons and calico shirts they smoked and waited in the shade of a Mesquite stand

Finally Charlie relented and yelled, “All right, ye red bastards—take one for the old days and civilization be damned!”

Charlie turned to me and declared: “Dammit Kid, once was a world you won’t ever be knowin’

The Comanche raids, the Staked Plains, the Bosque Redondo, the great trail from Texas up to Wyoming

The wild buffalo on a thousand hills, or a campfire song—one cowboy and his guitar a strummin’

Hang and rattle, boy, hold fast, and remember this well, the last of the buffalo runnin’s”

Now Charlie gave Iron Head his choice from the herd, and of course the chief picked Charlie’s favorite, Shakespeare

And as Charlie sat on the porch awaiting the run, we knew he was fighting back tears

The warriors waited on broke down old ponies as Charlie waited with his broke-up old heart

The Juan turned the bull loose and it was all Comanche Blood Memory, wild war whoops and arrows and shrieks

Old Shakespeare fought like the king of the bison, one you could kill but never defeat.

The Indians cut up the meat and sang a buffalo song, a deep guttural sound— their ancient prayin’

And Iron Head rode up and saluted Charlie Goodnight as the Comanche rode off ’cross the West Texas plain

And me I was wonderin’ did I see what I saw? The wild shrieks and the death of that bull?

It’s stuck with me more than most things I’ve witnessed and all that history I ever learned in school

Yes, I’s just a kid twelve years of age and the frontier was soon dyin’ then done

blood memory of that last great buffalo run.

* * *

Now I lie in the heart of the fat, black soil, Like the seed of the prairie-thistle;

It has washed my bones with honey and oil And picked them clean as a whistle.

And my youth returns, like the rains of Spring, And my sons, like the wild-geese flying;

And I lie and hear the meadowlarks sing

And have much content in my dying.

Go play with the towns you have built of blocks, The towns where you would have bound me!

I sleep in my earth like a tired fox,

And my buffalo have found me.

—Tom Russell