Souls of Great Chiefs

In 1839, fifteen-year-old Cole Jasper Coaler sketched in his Greek and Algebra rule books maps of the United States, beginning east of the Mississippi, he drew the states and their borders green shadings for the wild forests, then finally on its own page, the Republic of Texas: the state itself as big as the entire eastern part of the country he drew, bordered by the shape of repeating rifles and colt revolvers and arrows and lances separating it distinctly from the rest of the world, horses and phantom humans of mythological shape dabbed by his own blood, shaded in a dark turquoise with many souls drowning beneath terrifying shadows lurking underneath, in the shape of teeth and whale intestines, as though its endless desert of the Texas plains were an ocean unto itself. 

Then he quit school and traveled out west of the Mississippi, was known by many Natives as The One Who Wanders With Pen. He lived among the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne off-and-on for more than thirty years, camping in the wilderness while traveling, staying in forts too occupied US Cavalrymen and homesteads with families and riding out with Texas Rangers, hotels and saloons and brothels while he could afford it, sketching in notebooks depictions of what he saw. 

When he returned to Tennessee, he painted up his sketches and notes. The paintings would be presented in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The gallery terrified its viewers. They closed the exhibition early that evening and removed the paintings the next morning. The building is said to be haunted ever since.  

Coaler said he wanted to paint their spirit, how the heartbeat sounds, basing his paintings on memory, his journals and sketches, and imagination.

At night, people walking by the metropolitan reported seeing ghosts and hearing battle cries and tribal music, Chiefs Quanah Parker, Iron Jacket and Isatai as painted by Cosler amidst a Sun Dance, a phenomenal blur, with the warriors dancing around a honeylocust tree—with images of deer antlers and the skulls of bison, yellow and teal rainbows and fire cloaked stallions carved into the sapwood—the sun outlined by the moon, appearing as a black hole so close as to be touched, shaped so much like the crown of the head with the bright circle of light dripping red as it were the blood of the universe. 

In one of the exhibit’s first paintings, Comanche warriors led by Chief Iron Jacket—wearing Spanish armor over his chest, the thick braids of his hair rolling past his shoulders and painted to almost appear as snakes—attack Texas Rangers on a prairie grassland with cedar elm trees, each tree with fain features in the bark to resemble humans, winds shaking them. The forefront tree’s shadow is shaped with its branches and leaves like the crucifixion of Christ. Three Rangers lay dead there, the tree appearing almost as a congregation of ghosts giving service to the dead. .

Blood appears to drip from the sun, as though it is melting, or it the splashes of blood ripping up from the human flesh into the sky. 

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In another battle painting, in the backdrop, a community of homesteader cabins burn to the ground. The fires spiral toward the skies appearing as though the heavens have been lit on fire, the gloom in the clouds surging toward the primary focus of the painting, like the breath of a ruined god bringing forth a plague. 

In the forefront, a Comanche village. Charging and rounding the grounds are the combined forces of Texas Rangers and a U.S. Cavalry unit, horseback, setting the teepees on fire, firing at women and children point blank, chasing those who flee, pulling them back by the hair. 

One woman is being dragged by three soldiers toward the thick trunk of a tree which burns from the branches. She claws at the dirt with one hand, scratching the men with her other, biting with her teeth into the wrists snd fingers of one soldier and kicking with one free leg like a horse through the waist of another soldier.  

Boys and girls running and screaming; a few have been gathered and lined up and shot. 

Older men, with their eyes of legendary, almost ancient warrior-hearts are scalped alive. The breasts of dead women are being cut from their chests and shaped into tobacco pouches. 

Far off, the size of insects on top of the Wichita Mountains can be seen the Comanche Warriors.

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The details of the paintings seem to vibrate off the canvas and beat into the pulse of those who see it, as though it infects their memory to torture just by laying eyes on it. 

In one, titled “The Plague of Buffalo” you can see a party of white hunters departing the grounds on the banks of a river where they leave behind thousands of tongueless bison. On the carcassases are a great deal of meat still rotting. Hundreds of buzzards and crows devour the tarnished flesh from the bones. The eyes of the bison, moist and glistening and the same color as the river, as though their tears fill it up. 

Another painting, a wave of Comanche warriors, horseback, hundreds in number, led by Chief Quanah Parker with a war lance made of bone and decorated by eagle feathers, like Agemenon leading a fleet of ships across the sea toward the beaches of Troy, gliding under the sun, seemingly cloaked by its light and rays. 

On a hill beneath them at a fort that very much resembles the Alamo, are settled the buffalo hunters, the bison skins hanging out of wagons outside the fort.  

A storm of arrows pierce the sky, beading downward and beaming straight for the hunters like bladed rain. 

The next painting reveals the Comanche war party returning with hundreds of scalps staked through the arrows they carry over their shoulders. 

Another painting where a crew of hunters must take cover in the open fields, laying down on opposite sides behind the bodies of dead bison big as whales, firing and knocking warriors off their horses, bleeding out with arrows struck through their legs and shoulders, chest and heart and neck and stomach. The gunfire from one rifle, the way it sparks and surprised the soldier, feels like the first fire made by man, and another round of gunfire resembles with such bright colors a ferocity of the galaxy, bursting orange and turquoise and devil-red that it seems like the birth of our world emerging from the dark. 

In one of the final paintings, American cavalry officer Colonel McKenzie follows Native scouts between canyons in the night in search of Comanche Chief Quanah Parker. They beat on, with fear in their eyes, headed deeper and deeper into the dark. 

Quanah Parker sits horseback on top the canyons watching the American party. His straightened black hair shines in streaks as silver as the stars and a smile which is the crescent moon at a certain angle. His band of warriors behind him, like sketches of spirits in the sky, their shadows casting out into the valley ahead of the American party in the shape of owls and wolves, bears and snakes and animals not known to man, snakes with wings and sharks with hind legs, fitting the mode perfectly of those olden-time angels of rebellion of the land’s underneath. 

You can hear their heartbeat, the hooves of the nervous horses, the howling war cry like a screeching train as though through time their spirit carries on ceaselessly as a chant beating through space and night forever.