Big Chief, Big Wampum - Taking White Scalps In The Biggest Financial Scam In Recent Memory

White Wolf was the most savage, bloody, brutal killer of whites the Union Army had ever seen. His approach was simple - rape, slaughter, behead, eviscerate any white settlers that squatted on Indian land, and no more would follow. 

Defending his land against foreign intruders, and as bloody a warrior as Genghis Khan, White Wolf knew that a purposeful barbarity would intimidate the enemy.  Just as Genghis Khan posted severed heads on roads leading to conquered villages, gruesome warnings to the next settlements in his sights, so did White Wolf use unconscionable savagery as a tool of war.  He knew that the Christian soldiers would see his tribal, animist, ferocity, understand that they were up against a frightening, unfathomable enemy with no moral restraint and would turn tail. 

 

Jonathan Foreman, writing in The Daily Mail 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.

 

Arthur Grey Wolf Marshall was a direct descendant of White Wolf, and after the Comanches were finally routed in the late 19th century, White Wolf's offspring and extended family were interned in a reservation in southeastern Colorado, a miserable, pestilential place of scabies, alcohol, child molestation, and sexual abuse.  It was only through luck, happenstance, and great ambition that Arthur's great grandfather left the reservation and settled in Waco, Texas where he sold turquoise beads and eagle feathers to tourists along Route 24.

This of course was small potatoes for the descendant of such a great Native American warrior, and the grandfather got into gun-running, rustling, and 'enforcement' thanks to a Comanche-Cheyenne joint venture that organized, armed, and trained an all-Indian gang that matched today's Salvadoran Mara Salva Trucha carbine for carbine.  The gang which called itself Lords of the Plains, taken directly from the old Comanche term for their nation, was as intimidating and brutal as any in White Wolf's day, and the Rangers and federal troops either came up empty or were killed in trying to neutralize them. 

Eventually time and tide changed, the gang was beaten and scattered, and its members went to the Northwest or the East Coast where they evaded federal marshals and through a combination of canniness, subterfuge, and old Indian sorcery, and they were lost to official America. 

Arthur's father did well in Pennsylvania, parlaying a native sense of trading into stocks and bonds, and before long was a wealthy man.  He lived on the Main Line, so completely reformed and Americanized had he become, even to marrying Margaret McKinnon, a troubled, dangerous woman from South Philly. He taught her the manners and ways of patrician Philadelphia, and it wasn't long after that they were accepted.  His generosity went a long way to sealing the bond, and the Marshall Auditorium, the Marshall Vocational School, and the Randall P Marshall central park (the family had changed its name from old Comanche surnames) were testaments to the new, respectable life of a former Indian chief. 

As generations would have it, Arthur rebelled against the racial homogenization of his family, and wanted to return to his Indian roots.  He wanted to take scalps, send the white man fleeing in terror, restore the indigenous greatness of his tribal nation, and let it be known that Indians would never forget Andrew Jackson and the great white push westward. 

 

He let his hair grow and thatched it into a ponytail fastened with ancient cowrie beads.  His dress, his mannerisms, and his speech became more and more Comanche.  Tall and imposing in his fine-tooled boots and white Stetson, he was an impressive figure, admired by many and sought out by school administrators who, in the spirit of inclusivity and diversity, encouraged him to preside over ceremonies, awards, and official events.  Grey Wolf Marshall became the go-to student leader, bound for Harvard and greater things beyond. 

Yet none of this took hold of the boy and in fact it rankled.  This coddling and liberal preferentiality was angering and petty.  He wanted to rediscover and resuscitate his true, warrior Indian spirit and not become some white boy's toy.  He wanted scalps!

Of course in this modern day and age, such barbarism was a thing of the past; but the spirit of brutal combat, absolute victors and bloodied losers was not.  America was still a Wild West nation, and although hatchets, spears, arrows, and carbines had disappeared, the will to dominate and eviscerate still remained, especially in the descendants of the great Comanche, Sioux, and Apache warriors of the plains. 

 

Arthur had been around the corridors of power long enough to observe the Achilles heel of white people - money, scads of it, more than they could ever need, treasuries full to overflowing with it, the sign, the meme of American success - but knew that a fool and his money are soon parted.  It was not to Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and JP Morgan that he looked for inspiration, but Madoff, Enron, and especially Rudy Kurniawan, an Indonesian swindler, scam artist, and bigtime crook who took wealthy wine investors for millions, preying upon their pretentious wine savvy, their eagerness to be courted, and the promise of millions to be made. 

Kurniawan was a genius, a one man leveling crew, a brilliant master of the con and an even more brilliant understanding of human weakness.  And he was a foreigner, a minority, a person of color just like Arthur. 

Thanks to his Harvard pedigree, Arthur secured a position at Bear Stearns and learned the trade of creative financial instruments, credit swaps, inverted ratio investments, and promissory hedges; and it wasn't long before he became the young genius of Wall Street, an Indian no less who had given up feathers and war paint to make his fortune. 

 

Arthur's first million was legitimately earned, albeit thanks to naive investors new in the market or over-ambitious in their goals. It was the classic Wall Street above board feint - other people's money - and he was a whiz. 

At the same time he knew that far more could be earned 'offline' in the borderlands of legality and propriety, and he and his Harvard classmate John Soaring Eagle Robinson, the prized catch of the Admissions Committee which was desperate for some red Indian blood on campus, formed their own investment company.  Both young men were Comanches, distant cousins in White Wolf's extended family, and both had the same undiminished Native American nationalism.  To take the white man for all he was worth, to send him to reservations of financial ruin, was an ambition they both shared. 

They first picked low-hanging fruit - liberals who felt privileged to be working with Native Americans, the minority they had admired and championed for most of their lives.  These progressives willingly suspended disbelief, put aside niggling doubts about the young Indians financial propositions, and signed away millions in the hope of honorable profit. 

These investors, so concerned about image, political continuity, and the larger issue of minority rights, were loathe to blame the Indians for their losses, so they backpedaled and blamed it on the vagaries of the market.  In fact that is exactly what they believed, so snookered had they been by Grey Wolf and Soaring Eagle. The suckers never knew they had been taken to the cleaners. 

The young Indians went on to bigger and better things.  Taking some losses in the interests of high-visibility profit - i.e. on occasion they let the suckers win big, thus burnishing their portfolio - meant little compared with the millions they were earning every week. 

One day as both young men were enjoying a cigar on the balcony of Arthur's Fifth Avenue penthouse, Arthur turned to his friend and said, 'Let's do it', and they both stood up, looked out over the park and gave one big loud war whoop, so loud that it resonated up and down the avenue and far into Olmsted's reserves. 

They had vindicated their ancestor, White Wolf's bloody legacy.  They had restored the image of the heroic, courageous Indian.  They had shown that the Indian blood that coursed through their veins meant valor, honor, and respect.  They whooped and hollered again, romping like teenagers 'scalping' each other, doing a war dance around the table, the single malt, the Cubans, and the foie gras.