The Return Of The Native - The Final Vengeance Of White Wolf, Savage, Defiant Comanche Chief

Bobby Grey Wolf Perkins was a direct descendant of White Wolf, Comanche chief who defied white intrusion into Indian homelands through a reign of terror.  White Wolf savaged white settlements, raping, disemboweling, torturing, and beheading, sending an unmistakable message to any and all who intended to take Indian lands. 

Jonathan Foreman, writing in The Daily Mail (12.8.13), said:

S C Gwynne, author of Empire Of The Summer Moon about the rise and fall of the Comanche, says simply: ‘No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.’

He refers to the ‘demonic immorality’ of Comanche attacks on white settlers, the way in which torture, killings and gang-rapes were routine. ‘The logic of Comanche raids was straightforward,’ he explains.

‘All the men were killed, and any men who were captured alive were tortured; the captive women were gang raped. Babies were invariably killed.’

‘One by one, the children and young women were pegged out naked beside the camp fire,’ according to a contemporary account. ‘They were skinned, sliced, and horribly mutilated, and finally burned alive by vengeful women determined to wring the last shriek and convulsion from their agonized bodies. Matilda Lockhart’s six-year-old sister was among these unfortunates who died screaming under the high plains moon.’

Not only were the Comanche specialists in torture, they were also the most ferocious and successful warriors — indeed, they become known as ‘Lords of the Plains’. They were as imperialist and genocidal as the white settlers who eventually vanquished them.

When they first migrated to the great plains of the American South in the late 18th century from the Rocky Mountains, not only did they achieve dominance over the tribes there, they almost exterminated the Apache, among the greatest horse warriors in the world.

Bobby Grey Wolf had lived in exile in Paris since the election of Joe Biden as President of the United States, a man determined to demean, diminish, and marginalize the greatness of the Indian people of America.  The removal of insignia, logos, and names of his heroic forefathers was an insult, and an indignity which could not be ignored. 

He wrote to the then President in no uncertain terms: 

My forefather, White Wolf, was a true American hero, a valiant, uncowed, defiant defender of Indian lands and Indian rights.  His defiance, and yes his savagery, were very American in nature, for he embodied the sane spirit of territorial integrity as those who fought at Bunker Hill.  And yet, his legacy is being discarded in an irreverent and historically ignorant attempt to right the balance.  How insulting, revolting, and deeply ignorant are your attempts to airbrush Indian valor from American life and culture

LaShonda Evans, President Biden's Chief of Intercultural Diversity responded in a presumptuous letter, suggesting that she and the President respected all Indian history and regretted and apologized for the murder of innocent indigenous people, their expulsion from lands east of the Mississippi, and their forced incarceration in reservations. As such the Administration stood firmly against racist references, allusions, and depictions. 

Bobby Grey Wolf was incensed at these patronizing and indifferent words; and from that moment on he decided to return from exile, take up the hatchet and the war cry and exact vengeance on the white supernumeraries in power in Washington. 

He seethed with anger at the ignorance of Biden and his progressive claques but the damage had been done.  Indians were not even a notable minority, and were reduced to selling trinkets and snake skins between Indian Ledge and Berkeley Flats.

He would avenge his grandfather, his great great grandfather, and the Comanche nation. It was one thing to defeat Indians in battle - a question of victor and vanquished, survival of the fittest, Darwinian and Machiavellian politics combined in a perfect storm - another altogether to have to put up with the derogation of the Indian brave. 

Bobby Grey Wolf was out for blood when he stepped on the tarmac of Dulles Airport, smelled the hot, fetid, scent of Washington and its cabal of political idolaters.  He would take scalps. 

He yearned for the Great Plains, painted ponies, and the whoops and war cries of battle but he didn't know where to begin.  He found himself caricatured, ridiculed, and tossed aside.

Worse, he got sidelined by a Filipino woman who was attracted to his Asian looks and masculine aggressiveness.  She was from Mindanao, a Muslim, and a separatist partisan, so they made a good couple, but  sex complicated things for both. 

Before long their tryst became a Sunday thing and then something durable. He knew that he had fallen for the identity mpolitics of America, preferring Asian eyes and a burnished copper tint to white, although it was white women he wanted to love and leave, a great satisfaction it would have been.

Vengeance would have been sweet.  He could not take scalps like White Wolf, and leave limbless, disemboweled bodies on the prairie like his great grandfather, but he could do some damage nonetheless; but too many years of Puligny-Montrachet had intervened, and he found his expatriate cultural niche accommodating.  The French love American Indians, and Rousseau's idea of the noble savage took hold every time a Parisian woman looked at him. 

 

America was either about cheap turquoise jewelry, snakeskins, and wampum or a jamboree of white, liberal guilt; and Bobby had no idea where to strike. American Indians has gotten lost in the miasma of inclusivity, guilty wokeness, and revisionist history.  What a choice.

The Indian's time had passed, and that of White Wolf, given revisionist history had never really existed.  Yes, he had been the terror of the plains, the scourge of the prairie, but  his savagery, his territorial imperative, his fierce, brutal tribal loyalty had all been subsumed into the image of the oppressed, the victim, the disregarded.  Besides which white people were obsessed with blackness and the few Indians left didn't matter.  They were imaginary numbers in today's calculus. 

Bobby's romantic sojourn was a happy one - she was delighted by the thought of love with a primitive and an American hero; and he withdrew from the vengeful hatred of everything white and succumbed to Asian gentility.

'Your bet, Chief' said a player at the blackjack table at The Sands, looking over at Bobby.  'How did he know?', he thought, but when he looked again, the player could have been a Comanche or an Apache.  A nod of recognition, the bet upped, and winnings shared at the bar. 

Vengeance is a hateful, spiteful, corrosive, and unnecessary thing.  No Hatfield and McCoy drive-bys for the Comanches who had been Lords of the Plains, and their memory still was alive, so if their lot was now Pine Ridge, turquoise, eagle feathers, and snakeskin, so be it.