Yellowstone Kelly

by Clay Fisher

  “Yes.”

  “And also that you will go with him?”

  “We were to meet beyond the mouth of the Musselshell if we escaped Bear Coat and could come together again.”

  “Would you still do it?”

  “With the last breath of life that is in my body.”

  “Do you think you could do it? That your people, here, have the strength and the courage to go on from this place if they were free to do so?”

  Gall’s mouth straightened. “That is a cruel thing to ask, my brother. You know we are not free to do so and cannot be set free to do so. We are in your trap.”

  The minutes were speeding now. What he would do, Kelly must do quickly. His own mouth grew hard.

  “Do you have any guns left? Any powder and lead?”

  “Three guns, but no more bullets.”

  In the floor of the cave to Kelly’s left was a foot-deep crevice. He moved to it, not looking down as he dropped his Winchester and cartridge belt into it. “Perhaps you can find a gun and some bullets,” he murmured. “Then it is only a day’s march back over to the Big Dry. There will surely be a few stormbound bulls wintering there as always.”

  By now, even Black Fox and Frog Belly were coming awake. They and the five warriors moved up behind Gall, their combined black eyes beginning to burn with a last excitement.

  Beyond them the women, and even the children, closed in, sensing rather than understanding what it was Lone Wolf had done and what he meant to do. Only Crow Girl remained crouched against the back-wall rocks, her thin arms tenderly clutching to her wasted breasts the crudely bundled form of the hungrily nursing five-month-old infant. Her tortured face was strangely composed and at peace now, as the blessed sedative of motherhood worked its never-ending miracle. In the aroused stillness which followed his depositing of the rifle and pointed reference to it and to the buffalo in the Big Dry, Kelly could clearly hear the greedy suckling of the child and the eerie, toneless crooning of its demented mother. He caught Gall’s dark eyes upon him and was grateful for the look of compassionate sympathy which showed in their slant depths. He returned the look and hurried his remaining words.

  “You will be good to her? And to the little one?”

  “Do you need to ask that, Lone Wolf? You know that I have loved this Crow child even as you have loved her.”

  “Nevertheless, I ask it.”

  “Then I shall tell you. Though I have not touched her as a man touches his woman, and will never do so, now, she shall be as a daughter to me and her son as my grandson. From this day forth, she shall know no want which is in my power to prevent. Nor will the child lack for any love that a man may give his own blood.”

  He put a deliberate emphasis on the last statement, and Kelly asked quickly. “Your blood, my brother?”

  “Aye. It is best that you know, Lone Wolf. I am not proud to tell you, but it is a matter of honor within my own lodge. The child is not yours.”

  Kelly caught his breath with a short, hissing intake, but Gall raised his hand to signify he had not finished.

  “My nephew had his way with its mother even as she first lay in torment from the wound he had given her. It is Sayapi’s son she suckles, my brother, not yours. She herself has told me this in shame. I am sorry.”

  Kelly bowed his head silently, accepting it.

  It was more of a relief than an added pain, and somehow it seemed to bring together and tie off the last open artery of the deep injury Crow Girl’s unexplained Indian disaffection and pitiful end had left in his sorrowing heart. Suddenly, it was not so dark in the cave. His six months’ search for his Absaroka mate was over, his half-year hunting of her Hunkpapa captor done. His love for the one and his hate for the other had died within the same span of tragic yet healing moments. He understood them now where he never had before. And there remained within him, finally, only a great feeling of loneliness and brotherhood and wordless kinship with them both, and with all of their desperate, hunted kind.

  When he raised his head to Gall again, the last doubt of his decision had left the mind of Luther Kelly.

  “Go in peace, my Sioux cousins,” he said to the still-eyed group behind Gall. “The soldiers will not follow you beyond this place. Woyuonihan—!”

  With the parting expression of respect, he touched his forehead after the Hunkpapa fashion, but Gall did not return the traditional gesture. Instead, he touched his own dark fingers to his left breast, then held out his hand. Kelly took it, and the silent grips closed hard.

  “From this time that my hand touches yours,” said Gall softly, “I will fight no more. I will lay down my gun and go to the Land of the Grandmother. I will not again paint my face against the white man.” He took his hand away from Kelly’s, stepped back, concluded yet more softly.

  “Go in peace, my brother, and do not look back. It is not a good thing for men to look back. It only tightens the throat and makes the chest ache a little longer.”

  Kelly turned away. He lowered himself over the drop-off to the trail below, began sliding and stumbling downward through the darkness. Within seconds he was lost in the building howl and yammer of the blizzard.

  He did not look back.

  Ten minutes later he told half-breed Billy LeBeau of his rotten luck in the rocks above; of first losing his rifle and cartridge belt down a deep crevice in a bad fall, then coming upon a pitchforked divide in the draw where the Sioux could have gone any one of three ways and where the returning wind and fresh snow had already wiped out the old trail and buried the new. It was the devil’s own piece of heathen good fortune for the Hunkpapa, of course, but there was no help for it from their standpoint. With the hostile track clean gone and the cursed blizzard blowing sixteen ways at once, they had better forget about Gall and concentrate on getting those soldier boys back out of the canyon before the snow was four feet over their frozen ears.

  LeBeau agreed, and Captain Snyder did not argue.

  The column was ordered about, sent double-time down and out of the gulch.

  In its van, rifle-spined, head erect, broad chest squared to the December blast, Luther Kelly broke the trail. The wind had the bite of a rabid wolf. The temperature was past the last line below zero and still skidding. It was bitterly, gallingly, unbelievably cold.

  But Kelly did not feel it.

  He felt only the growing warmness in his quieting heart and was finally content.

  His romancer’s view of the frontier and of his own fabled near-decade upon it were no more. The frontier itself was no more. With the breaking of the Sioux power and the surrender of their fierce High Plains pride, an era was ended. Gall had fallen, Sitting Bull must follow. And, after him, Crazy Horse. Then, as surely as the weary moon will set when the fierce stars grow pale, Dull Knife and his battered Cheyenne.

  Whatever he, Kelly, had done that was wrong, or had failed to do that was right for these Indians, must be resigned to the long years ahead. In the context of his own time, no man could hope to know the rightness or wrongness of his small personal part upon a stage so vast and poorly lit as that encompassing the death struggle of the Dakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne. But he could know that in the latter cruel weeks of that fateful winter of 1876, he had left behind, forever, something that was precious and young and impossible and could never come again.

  It was time to grow up and go home.

  To abandon boyhood and its golden dream.

  To bid goodbye and godspeed to a time of magic which can come to a few men—the brief vintage years of a virgin land—those incredible, sometimes legendary years which he himself had known so fleetingly and yet so well.

  Kelly smiled softly and looked ahead.

  How was it Omar Khayyám had put it in the Rubáiyát?

  The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

  Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

  Shall lu
re it back to cancel half a line,

  Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it …

  BEYOND THE

  YELLOWSTONE

  The end of the last major Indian resistance in the American West came to pass exactly as Luther Kelly had predicted it would and almost in the identical sequence he had foreseen.

  With the pulling out of Gall, the hostile house of cards came down, never to be rebuilt. Within the same fateful span of days that saw Snyder run the Hunkpapa war chief to his final earth, Baldwin caught and routed Sitting Bull’s main band, Miles forced the surrender of Pretty Bear’s followers and Ranald Mackenzie, moving up from the south in independent command, trapped and smashed the last of Dull Knife’s Northern Cheyenne. Wesley Merritt had already broken up the Camp Robinson Cheyenne, Anson Mills had done for American Horse and his Oglala. It remained only for Miles to track down and destroy Crazy Horse, which he did on January 8, 1877, but a few brief days after his December ’76 defeat of Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa. Catching Tashunka Witko’s main Oglala band on the headwaters of the Tongue, in the snowbound fastnesses of the Wolf Mountains less than eighty miles from his cantonment on the Yellowstone, Bear Coat, with full artillery support, literally hammered the last of the big Sioux bands to pieces. Completely routed, the remaining Oglala fled deeper into the mountains.

  Miles did not go after them. Instead, at Kelly’s behest, he sent Johnny Brughière in with the surrender terms. Crazy Horse was beaten. He came in. His simple reply to Miles—the real funeral oration of the High Plains hostiles—was delivered by his friend Little Chief. Facing Miles, the proud Cheyenne dropped his buffalo robe to the ground, drew himself erect, spoke without humbleness or arrogance.

  “We are weak, compared with you and your forces; we are out of ammunition; we cannot make a rifle, a round of ammunition, or a knife; in fact, we are at the mercy of those who are taking possession of our country; your terms are harsh and cruel, but we are going to accept them and place ourselves at your mercy …”

  It was the end. In the swiftly following weeks, the various independent bands came in, their chiefs repeating to Bear Coat Gall’s prophetic promise of “fighting the white man no more from that day on.” Little Hawk, White Bull, Two Moons, Hump, Little Big Man, He Dog, The Rock, Horse Road; the list read like a veritable Who’s Who of the Dakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne high commands; and with the stoic surrenders of their chiefs came upward of another two thousand fighting Indians of the plains to add to the like number of Sitting Bull’s brokenhearted followers already in transit to the reservations. With the news of Crazy Horse’s decision, Gall and Sitting Bull, with the pitiful remnant of the Hunkpapa, made good their vow and fled to Canada. The Sioux and Cheyenne wars were over.

  Kelly, at last free to do so, requested of Miles a leave of absence and left the country in redemption of the pledge made following his failure to report his final grim meeting with Gall. He later returned to serve the government in several field capacities, including his classic trailing and bringing to bay of Chief Joseph and his desperate Nez Percé, after General Howard and upward of four thousand troops from three commands had been unable to effect the same end in fifteen hundred miles of army cat and Indian mouse maneuvers. But something had died with Gall’s defeat and the breaking of Crow Girl’s mind. By his own admission, these later days were never the same for the romantic scout as those earlier ones along the Yellowstone.

  Luther Kelly went on to a full life of continuing adventure. He rose to be a major in the regular army; a confidante of two Presidents; governor of a Philippine municipality; agent of a great Arizona Indian reservation. Surveyor; cartographer; Indian Bureau troubleshooter; Alaskan adventurer; California rancher. There will probably never be a full accounting of his incredible life. He himself has made sure of his. Any reader of his personal memoirs will understand that statement.

  Major L. S. Kelly may not have invented modesty, but he should have been granted a patent on it.

  He writes graphically and beautifully about everything and all things relevant to the wonders of the northwest frontier in the 1870s, excepting “Yellowstone” Kelly.

  One must go to such obscure sources as the following (from a rare issue of the New Northwest for March 8, 1878) to see him in relationship to his beloved fosterland.

  Kelly, you may know [the yellowed paper states dramatically], is the man of the Yellowstone Valley Who-Never-Lays-Down-His-Gun. The Indians also call him “Lone Wolf.” He has traveled up and down that valley for eleven years, and has challenged death in a thousand ways. He has gained one of his names by the accuracy of his aim, and the other by his lone life. He orders up the Indian hand and goes it alone every time. He is held in high esteem by Miles and his staff, and by them regarded as their best card in playing cutthroat euchre. He is not like the average scout and frontiersman. He is a man of education, soul, and manners as exceptional as those of an “old school gentleman.”

  Kelly has not been demoralized by the life of the hunter. He has no bad habits and not even the swagger and general bearing of the frontiersman. The secret of his life is in his ambition to know and be somebody, and he has taken this way of realizing his ambition.

  He is what might have been called a surveyor in George Washington’s time, and he has one of the rare accomplishments of a certain surveyor of that time—he cannot tell a lie. When the Yellowstone Valley is settled up, Kelly will be one of the permanent men, and it is not improbable that his beautiful physique will be seen in the halls of the Montana legislature, or in those of congress, as the “gentleman from the Yellowstone District.” He is only twenty-eight, is the oldest settler, and may be called the father of the fertile valley.

  In the thoughtful remove of the nearly eighty years since the publication of this flowing tribute by his Montana contemporaries, it is apparent that Luther S. Kelly deserves also to be called that simpler, more enduring, less colloquial thing—a man to be remembered.