Chapter 206: The Nemaha Massacre

Editor: nnpdad 11 May 2022

The river ran red.

At least one hundred men died on the banks or in the water of the Nemaha river that chilly autumn morning. Five score raiders who thought they had the element of surprise and stumbled into a cross-fire ambush. The Pawnee bowmen shot first, half a heart-beat later the black powder rifles thundered from the tree line and the Kansa were caught naked on the northern bank of the Nemaha river.

Some turned to run but the near constant crack of high-powered rifles filled the gap while the black powder guns reloaded. There seemed to be an extended pause of silence. The Kansa and their allies were stunned and the silence was deafening and then somebody yelled ‘Fire” and the rifles thundered again. Any surviving raiders broke for the river and the sharpshooters with their out of time weaponry made them pay. Their would be no survivors tales this day. The Pawnee had waited far too long to have their revenge for the devastation of a peaceful village a decade earlier. Many of our warriors had been part of the effort to clean up the murdered and desecrated bodies of those women and children.

The Pawnee fell upon the wounded with the wrath that accompanies a centuries-old blood feud, any who may have slipped away from the massacre found that Pawnee scouts were behind them and died a coward’s death.

The bodies were stacked and burned; any bits left over were buried later. It was as if a hundred warriors had walked off of the face of the earth. The spring floods would arrive eventually and almost all evidence of the one-sided battle would be washed away. But for that morning the Big Nemaha ran red and it was all Kansa blood.

While we cleaned up the battlefield the Pawnee war parties streamed south, where they would loot and take slaves from every Kansa camp that they found. All the warriors anticipated new slaves and fresh females to be taken. It wasn’t quite genocide but the Kansa would no longer exist as a power on the plains. The math had just changed for everyone even peripherally involved, even Henry Leavenworth would be rethinking plans once the news got out. The citizens of Rulo were only involved to the extent of defending their homes, we reported it as a Pawnee/Kansa event the entire way.

Getting to that point had taken some effort and extreme coordination. It was true that there weren’t many good fords on the Big Nemaha river but it was actually less true this time of year. We let our drone show us where we had to be. Without that drone we would have had to cover at least three viable ford points, without that drone we wouldn’t have been able to silently pick off the Kansa scouts. Without that drone we wouldn’t have been able to finely position our fighters to create interlocking zones of fire.

I was able to sit in the bunkhouse down by the stock pens with Amos and make minute adjustments via the handheld radios. We were able to point out each of the Kansa scouts on a map to Pete and he marshalled his men forward to ambush and eliminate them. When the field was set I was able to move to my sniper’s nest to sharpshoot and oversee the battle.