Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch Read Free Book Online

different. The Spanish mustang, the Indian pony, became the cow horse of the cattle kingdom, and the longhorn of Spanish descent traveled from the valley of the Rio Grande to Milk River, gaining flesh on the road.
    Somewhere during that expedition, as Coronado passed through the plains, he lost—or let loose—some of those sturdy Spanish horses, a move that helped give rise to a nomadic horse culture that would make the Plains Wars so fiercethree centuries later.
    In a spectacular loop of history, the “Indians” who confronted and tamed Coronado’s lost Spanish mustangs were actually descendants of the Asians who had come across the Bering Strait millennia before—the very same people who first broke and rode horses on the steppes. The ancient Asian horsemen had brought their domesticated beasts to North Africa—and when the Moors conquered Spain, the horses went with them. From there they would travel with the conquistadors across the Atlantic to Mexico. Within two hundred years the Plains Indians were mounted, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the Comanche were the greatest equestrians in America. The awesome horse culture that evolved under the Plains Indians would affect the lives of every race of people who came across the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.
    THE AMERICAN CIVIL War is often characterized as a conflict of “brother versus brother.” Given that nearly 180,000 Negro troops fought in blue against the gray, however, that familiar description is more a romantic exaggeration than a military fact. And the black soldiers left standing at the end of the War of the Rebellion played an important role in the shaping of the Southwest.
    In 1866, the year after the war’s end, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, two all-black regiments, were formed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. They would soon come to be known as the Buffalo Soldiers. The soldiers in these regiments were poorly paid; the discrimination against them was obvious to the point of disdain. But the Buffalo Soldiers, who rode their horses proudly and sometimes posed for photographs wearing plumed helmets, were instrumental in the settling of the area. The Negro troops knew, through the crucibles of danger, loss, inclement weather, inferior horses, outmoded weaponry, and the injuries of racism, that they were bad medicine . Their units had the lowest desertion rate in the US Army. They fought in the Indian Wars of the late nineteenth century, arrested rum- and gun-runners, guarded the construction of therailroads, and contributed to the accurate mapping of the Great Plains. And their legacy includes the cities where Western jazz evolved.
    The Buffalo Soldiers were not the only black people who contributed to the growth of the Southwest. Negro cowboys drove cattle from Texas to the cities in Kansas where the markets existed. Some who owned land tried to bilk herders out of money or demanded tribute if the cattle were to cross their property; others became desperadoes, even con men. And the fall of Reconstruction in 1877 brought a great migration of black people to Kansas, men and women who worked hard to carve out a rough civilization that was punctuated by gunfire, lynch mobs, and jail.
    The Old West was rife with such violence—a streak that would reappear with the bloody exploits of men like John Dillinger during Charlie Parker’s adolescence in the mid-1930s. But it was also enlivened by the provocative tension between the thrust of individual liberty and the desire for order and safety. Out there in the West, that tension made for an improvised world. The skills that Charlie Parker brought to such visceral prominence on those nights at the Savoy were the result of a tenacious ambition that first took shape in that latter-day Wild West known as Kansas City.
    EAST KANSAS, AT the Kaw River, is incipient timberland. In the nineteenth century, before the development of barbed wire, farms were surrounded by hedges