“The chiefs are meeting,” the deep voice sang out. “The Great Council meets.”
Storm Arriving took his arrowheads, his honing stone, his carving knife, and his small piece of flat iron up in a flap of thick leather. He gave the bundle to Mouse Road to put inside with his other arrow-making tools. Then he stood, arranged his hair and his earrings, and set his long knife in the wide belt that cinched his pale buckskin tunic about his waist. He motioned for One Who Flies to get up.
The vé’ho’e stood and raked his white hair back behind his ears. He brushed the dust from his seat and buttoned the front of his blue coat.
“Are you stupid?” Storm Arriving asked, not unkindly. “Is it that you do not understand that you may die today?”
One Who Flies looked at him with eyes suddenly sad. “No. I am not stupid,” he said. “I understand the danger, but I am an officer in the Army of the United States of America. I must behave with a certain level of dignity. I have failed at this in the past, but today I will not.”
Storm Arriving took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I think that I have misjudged you,” he said. “You are still a crazy vé’ho’e, but perhaps you are not the whining coward I once thought you were.”
One Who Flies looked out toward the center of camp, his features melancholy. “I do not wish to die,” he said in a confidential tone. “I do not think that any man truly wants to die.”
Storm Arriving thought of his father in his final days; a once proud and powerful man struck down by the spirits, unable to speak, unable to use his right arm, unable even to hold his own water. He had watched his father hobble off through the snow-shouldered trees to ask the sacred persons to finish the job they had started.
“You are wrong about that,” he told One Who Flies. “There are times when a man may truly wish to die. But wished for or not, it is always better to die bravely.
“Come. We must go.”
Custer could hear the arguments as he entered the meeting. He stood outside the open door of the rough-sided building that Colonel McCormack used for staff meetings. It was a small, one-room cabin that was large enough for the command staff at The Whit, but it was too small by far to hold some of the personalities now inside.
“It’s foolhardy,” said one of the generals. “Premature and foolhardy.”
“But we must do something,” said another, turning palms up on the polished table.
“I agree,” said Custer from the doorway. The assembled officers rose.
“Mister President,” they said in loose unison.
Custer moved to the empty chair at the head of the table. Samuel, his aide, followed in behind, and the two special service guards took up their posts by the door.
The generals were shoulder to shoulder and there was a fair amount of shifting of chairs and sotto voce muttering as the officers retook their seats.
On the long table lay maps of the frontier territory. Custer noted with irritation that a great deal of the paper was blank.
He remained standing as the others settled in. As he prepared to speak, he leaned forward on the table to confer his earnestness and trust.
“Thank you for joining me this morning. To reiterate sentiments already spoken in this room, we must do something. We cannot continue to treat this ‘Indian Problem’ as if it were going to somehow resolve itself and disappear because frankly, gentlemen, it will not. Samuel?”
Samuel stepped forward with several sheets of paper. The pages were covered with rumpled lines in the thin aide’s tiny script, accompanied by glyphs and sketches so cryptic that no one else could ever guess their meaning. He shuffled the sheets and, after settling his glasses on his narrow nose, began in an unsteady tenor.
“Gentlemen, the president has asked me to provide you—as far as is possible given the limited resources of Fort Whitley—with an historic perspective on this situation, so that you might better appreciate the true scope of the Indian Problem.” He swallowed and launched into the body of his report.
“It has been over four score years since the territory was acquired from France. Since that time, the United States have been unable to successfully establish a presence in the territories.” He squinted as he leafed through the papers until he found the one he sought. He pushed his spectacles further up on his nose and continued.
“The Army’s victories in warfare and successes in relocation and civilization of tribes such as the Osage and Pawnee—actions many of which were led by President Custer himself—have not been repeatable against the Cheyenne and their allies: the Arapaho, the Lakota, and others. In the past twenty years there has been an escalation of aggression along the Kansa, Yankton, and Santee borders. What started with acts of vandalism and theft has grown into arson, assault, and murder; all are now frequent occurrences along the frontier. More recently, we have seen increased attacks against our patrols and forts. Skirmishes, ambushes, and raids on supply transports have all become commonplace. In the estimation of many—including some of the great strategists in this very room—the possibility of large force contact is inevitable.”
The officers mumbled amongst themselves. Custer smiled grimly. He knew that last statement would cause a stir. Admittedly, he was probably the only man present who felt that such a dire statement was true. The statement had succeeded, however, in starting the minds of his all-too-complacent commanders down the path he wanted them to travel.
Samuel went on, chronicling the attacks and losses of the past five years. The list was long and thorough; Custer had kept close watch on all efforts to advance into the frontier. The generals, however, had failed to adopt new, bolder actions, as the fear of even greater failure and the prospect of career-ending disgrace weakened their devotion to duty.
Samuel delivered his list in a dispassionate monotone, placing the evidence before them. The officers began to fidget as their own failures and losses were read out loud. The old man’s reedy voice laid down the names of the dead like sheaves of wheat. Dates and facts buzzed about the room; carrion flies, lazy and bloated, each one droning closer than the last.
“And just this week, the Alliance attacked and downed the Abraham Lincoln. Value of the craft is estimated at $250,000. Wounded: Private Louis J. Lescault. Killed:….” He paused a moment as Custer had instructed him. The news had come only hours before.
“Killed: Lieutenant Elisha H. Reed. Missing and presumed captured: Captain George A. Custer, Jr.” Samuel organized his papers and sat down.
“Are you sure?” asked Meriwether. At forty-five years of age, he was the youngest general in the room. A solid Methodist from Carolina, he had a son of his own in the Army; a young man near the age of young George.
To answer Meriwether’s question, the president leaned back in his chair and reached into his vest pocket. He pulled out a chain to which a gold watch was attached. It had been a fine piece of workmanship, but its case was dirty and dented, almost obscuring the ornately-etched “R” on its cover. He pulled the cover open, revealing the broken crystal and the hands forever stilled at 1:58. Custer laid the bent and broken timepiece on the table.
“This came to me a few hours ago. Kiowa natives, working on behalf of U.S. forces, traveled deep into the Unorganized Territory and, utilizing information provided by Private Lescault, discovered the wreck of the Lincoln. A shallow grave had been opened by local wildlife. They found this watch near the body. It belonged to Lieutenant Reed.” He let the watch lay on the table as a tangible reminder of the sacrifices made trying to tame the Frontier.
“What we have done up to this point,” he told them, “has not worked. We move ahead only to be beaten back, burned out, starved off, or killed trying to hold our land.
“Our land!” The watch danced as his fist hit the table. He stood and began to pace the narrow width of the room.
“Three generations ago we bought that land. It is ours. Yet, for the past eighty years we have done nothing with it, nothing except send men into it to die. And I tell you now that
it must stop.”
He returned to the head of the table. “Today, I call an end to this ridiculous practice of encroachment and retreat. The enemy does not treat this as a series of unrelated incidents. They treat it as a war, and so should we.
“I leave for Washington within the hour. There I will address the Congress and I will not leave those marbled halls until we have declared war on the Cheyenne Alliance.”
The assembly rose with a shout of denial. They all spoke at once, each drowning the objections of the other until Meriwether raised a hand for silence.
“You would send us into another war over this? Haven’t we laid down enough dead in these territories?”
“And how many more men will you consign to their deaths with your current methods?” Custer forcibly reigned in on his own anger. “Gentlemen, we must take this logical next step. I refuse to waste good men in futile efforts. If young men are to die for the Frontier, I say let them die with the hope of victory in their hearts.”
“But, Mr. President…war?”
“What else can we do, John?” Custer pointed to the watch that lay forlornly on the table. “I will have no more of that,” he said. “So, what else? Shall we give it up? Those savages have held that land for eighty years, gentlemen. Eighty years. Shall we wait eighty more? Shall we leave it to the British colonies in Canada? To New Spain? Shall we let the French take it back? Shall we simply walk away from it and say to our neighbors ‘Go ahead. Be our guests. Take it if you can?’”
The officers spoke quiet denials, some shook their heads, and a few sat down looking bewildered.
“I do not relish the prospect, gentlemen, but war has become necessary to our safety as a people, and to our prestige as a nation.
“But how can we?” Meriwether asked. “The Cheyenne are not a recognized nation. We can’t declare war on a group of renegades. They’re not even citizens.”
Tibbings spoke. “We did it during the War Between the States. As far as we were concerned, you and yours were nothing more than a group of renegades. Citizens or not.”
“We had rights. The states had rights.” Others rallied to old sides until Stant raised two fists and slammed them down upon the table.
“Quiet! All of you!”
The others froze and looked.
Stant was an older man, grey of hair and whiskers, but still as strong and vigorous as a man in his thirties. A veteran of several wars and countless battles, he had served with Custer during the Kansa campaign.
“The question of whether or not the United States can declare war on the Cheyenne Alliance is irrelevant.” The others took their seats as Stant spoke. “Our commander-in-chief has given us our orders and whether they are a nation, whether they are citizens, it makes not a whit of difference. They are an enemy force within our borders, and it is high time we rid ourselves of them. Now just settle down the lot of you and take your orders like soldiers.”
Custer viewed the faces before him. He saw pain in their eyes. Pain, sadness, worry, fear, but he also saw, in every gesture and every glance, the resignation he needed.
Sway them with logic, drive them with discipline, he had often said. He only hoped that it would work half as well with the Congress. Civilians were so unpredictable.
He picked up Reed’s battered watch, put it back in his pocket, and walked over to the side of the table. Leaning in between Colonel McCormack and General Stant, he put his finger on the border that separated Yankton and Santee from the guesswork that lay beyond it.
“This is our biggest problem,” he said. “The Missouri and Santee rivers. Once we get beyond them, we have to be able to stay there.”
Heads nodded in agreement.
“Now, let me explain to you my thoughts on how this should proceed.”
After the meeting, as his luggage was being loaded onto the coach that would take him through the fifty miles of draining muck and to the rail spur at Candide, Custer turned and looked to the northwest.
He saw the walls of the fort, the low, rising land beyond them, and the faint haze that hung forever above the Gulf of Narváez. The air from off the inland sea was cool and smelled of low tide. It calmed him somewhat, breathing the fresh air and feeling the forenoon sun on his back, but his knowledge of actions now in motion tightened his gut and made his throat dry.
At that very moment, messengers rode to the north and east with orders. Within hours, squads of heavily-armed reconnaissance teams would ford the great rivers of the frontier, their objectives to see, to report, and not to die. Within days, troops from every region of the Union would begin to move, to gather, to prepare for what every American had hoped would never come again: another war.
The last war had been long and vicious. A field in Maryland still lay fallow, poisoned with the outpourings of the twenty thousand men who lived and died there in so short a time. Farmers in Kentuckee and Virginia plowed their furrows and watched as the bright curving blades turned up white bones and black cannonshot. Men still limped for want of a leg that lay under the grass in Georgia or beneath the trees of Penn’s Sylvania. Custer had seen that war from many fronts. He had fought in battles from the Atlantic to the Gulfs. He had led the campaign that had swept clean the Missouri Territory. He had seen a thousand men die in the drawing of a breath and had risen from lieutenant to the brevet rank of brigadier general in three short years, standing all the while ankle-deep in the blood of men. The War Between the States had defined him. His subsequent commands in the Kiowa and Kansa campaigns had established him, had made him a national hero, and had paved the way for his rise to the Presidency.
Even so, even though it had made him who he was and made possible all the good things he now enjoyed, he hated war. He hated the death, the waste, and the excess that was war. He felt in his pocket for Lieutenant Reed’s battered watch. He held it in his hand, feeling its scars with his callused fingertips, and tried to see beyond the veil of haze that hung across the Gulf. He wished he could see, by an application of will, through it to his only son, just to see if his dearest boy still lived. But the lands did not open up before him, the distances kept their secrets, and when Samuel came to tell him the carriage was ready, he turned away knowing no more than he had in hours prior.
Chapter 5
Hatchling Moon, Waxing
Fifty-three Years After the Star Fell
Along The Red Paint River
Two Cuts still ran like a wild whistler, keeping low to the ground and blending his color as they passed through brush and tall grass. Without a rope saddle to steady her, Speaks While Leaving had to lay close along his back and guide him with her feet and her calm commands. The People were encamped nearby—she could taste the smoke in the wind—but she did not realize how close she was until she came upon the first guard. She passed by the outer guard before he could stand. He shouted a whoop of warning and Two Cuts whistled in alarm.
“He’kotoo’êstse,” she said to him and “Nóxa’e.” Be quiet. Wait. But he did neither. They approached the last rise and three more guards stood up from their posts. The smell of the camp, of woodsmoke, and the sudden appearance of men drove Two Cuts into a panic. He trumpeted dire warning, the three-tone call resonating loudly from his hollow crest.
He turned to flee and Speaks While Leaving, rather than fight with a frenzied mount, slid from his back and tumbled to the ground. She watched him go, head high to watch for pursuit, her thin rope trailing in the wind of his flight. He had done what she had asked, and she would ask no more of him today. He would find his way to the main whistler flocks to the west of camp. Tomorrow she could find him again. She thanked the whistler and the spirits for their help and lied down in the grass, exhausted.
The three guards ran up to her. “Népévomóhtâhehe?” one of them asked. Are you all right? Her dress torn and bloodied, her legs bare, they were right to ask.
“Héehe’e,” she told them. Yes, I am fine.
“You should hurry then. Storm Arriving is before the Council with a
man that fell from the clouds, just as your vision foretold.”
She stood and swayed. “Ne-a’éše,” she said. Thank you. Then, sleep dogging at her heels, she ran down the slope.
There was a large crowd around the opening of the Council lodge. Men and women stood shoulder to shoulder. The three men near the doorway listened closely and turned periodically to report in barely-audible whisperings the important points of the proceedings to those nearby. Those people in turn passed the observations onward—word for word, so as not to distort the words of the chiefs. The process was repeated with rapidity and accuracy. As Speaks While Leaving came near, she could see the information from the lodge move outward with the nodding and turning of heads. Whispers spread like the ripples from a stone cast into still water. She arrived just as the latest ripple reached the limit of the crowd.
“Red Wolf speaks,” a large man from the Ridge People band told them. “‘You cannot believe a man like this. He says he is the son of Long Hair. He says he fell from the clouds. If you believe the first thing, then he is a liar because Long Hair is a liar. The second thing he says must then be not true. If you believe the second thing instead, then you cannot believe the first, because the thunder beings would not send us the son of a great enemy. I do not believe either of the things he says.’” The people nearby signed their agreement with Red Wolf’s words. The speaker noticed her, his brows growing close in concern.
“Eestseohtse’e,” he said, recognizing her. The others nearby turned to see her. “Are you all right?”
“Héehe’e,” she told them, “but I must speak to the Council about this man.”
The Year the Cloud Fell Page 10