Wind River

by Charles G. West

  “Well, I guess that’s as good as any. Me, I’m ready to see some white folks for a while, some stores and saloons and”—he paused to emphasize the last—“some women.” The word triggered his memory and he recalled some of the towns he had seen and the people he had met, especially the women. He told Sam about places the half-breed could barely imagine, places like New Orleans and St. Louis, where a man with as much dust as he had could have a right entertaining time of it before it ran out. The half-breed listened for a while but fell asleep long before Waddie finished talking.

  It wasn’t quite daylight when Waddie was awakened by Sam. “Morning,” he stated without emotion.

  A light sprinkling of snow had fallen during the night, giving the woods around the creek a cold, colorless appearance, causing Waddie to shiver when he walked out of the tiny cabin to relieve his bladder. When he was comfortable again, he spent a few moments looking around the camp for signs of anything out of the ordinary. Everything looked in order. “I reckon we’d best get on with it,” he decided and he and Sam walked down to the creek bank.

  “Want me to git it?” Sam asked when they were directly over the cave.

  “No use you getting wet. I’ll get it.” He waded into the icy water and pulled the stones and driftwood away from the opening. He would have let Sam go in after the dust but it represented all the sweat he had lost for the past five years and he had to make sure all of it was brought out. He trusted Sam. He had lived with the man for two years. But when it came to gold, it didn’t make sense to trust a half-breed to bring out all the sacks. There might be too much temptation to leave a couple there to be collected at a later date.

  Sam handed him a torch from the fire to use as a light. The cave was a good place to hide gold, but it might also be a good place for some kind of critter to hole up for the winter too, so Waddie took a good look around before crawling up inside. There were thirteen sacks in all. Five of these contained dust that he had panned before Sam joined him. The other eight were to be divided evenly between the two of them. Waddie handed them out one by one to make sure he didn’t drop any in the rushing water. Sam took each one and placed it safely on the creek bank. Then he extended his hand and helped Waddie pull himself up from the cave.

  “Well, I reckon that about does it up fair and square,” Waddie said, as he divided up the sacks. “You satisfied?”

  Sam nodded.

  “Well then, I reckon we better get going.” He extended his hand. “It’s been nice knowing you, Sam. Good luck to you.”

  Sam smiled his toothless smile and took the outstretched hand. Waddie never saw the ten-inch skinning knife in the half-breed’s other hand as it struck the little Irishman under the rib cage. At first he didn’t know what happened, the knife had struck with such force. It felt like a log had been lodged in his insides. When he staggered backwards a few steps, still holding Sam’s outstretched right hand, only then did he realize what had happened. As he stood there, reeling in shock, the half-breed pulled the knife from his gut. The fiery pain that resulted caused Waddie to scream in agony. He started to fall but Sam caught him with a second vicious thrust that buried the knife again in his gut, right up to the hilt. He held Waddie up on his feet, using the knife as support, until the poor little Irishman went limp. Then, withdrawing the blade, he stepped back and let Waddie fall to the ground.

  Sam stood over the body for a few minutes, watching for any movement that might indicate the necessity for another thrust of the knife. Waddie was moaning as his lifeblood ran into the sand of the creek bank. It would be only a matter of minutes before he would be still. Sam felt no animosity toward the little man who had taken him in as a partner. It was simply that, with him dead, there would be more gold for himself, so he waited patiently, without remorse, for Waddie to die. When the body quivered, then jerked once and was finally still, Sam began to gather up the thirteen sacks of gold dust.

  With both arms filled with the sacks, he turned to face three mounted Cheyenne warriors, calmly watching him. He had been so preoccupied with Waddie’s death throes that he had not heard them come up behind him. At once his eyes opened wide in alarm and he dropped his armful of gold dust to the ground.

  “Peace!” he screamed and held up his arms.

  “Peace, Crow dog,” the tall warrior on the Medicine Hat pony spat back at him. In almost the same instant, three arrows struck the half-breed in his chest, knocking him backward into the stream. He was still barely alive when one of the warriors waded into the creek and took his scalp.

  The tall warrior watched the scalping with only mild interest then picked up the sacks of yellow dust. One by one he emptied them into the water. “For this dust the white man chooses to drive a whole nation from their hunting grounds . . . Nothing more than dirt.”

  * * *

  “Damn, it’s cold out there!” Andy Coulter stomped into the Sutler’s store, followed by a wintry blast of cold air.

  “Well, shut the damn door before we all freeze!” Squint yelled at him from his chair propped against the wall behind the potbelly stove. “A body would think you ain’t enjoying the season.”

  Andy snorted, ignoring the attempt at humor. He wiped his running nose with the back of his hand and hurried to warm himself by the stove. He stood close for as long as he could stand it before turning around to warm his backside. When the wet buckskin of his coat began to smoke, he took a step away from the stove and turned to face it again. “I’m shore glad as hell I ain’t goin’ out on no patrol today. A man would freeze to his saddle in thirty minutes.”

  “Hell. Andy, you’re gittin’ plumb girlish in your old age. Why, the cold weather ain’t hardly hit yet. It’s still a few days to Christmas. Winter won’t hardly start for a month or two.”

  “That right? Well, why don’t you go out and take a swim in the horse trough if the weather’s too warm for you?”

  Squint laughed. “I ain’t the one complaining.”

  “I just come from the colonel’s office. A dispatch rider just rode in half froze to death.”

  “In this weather?” Squint snorted. “Why didn’t they telegraph it? Dang if I’d ride all day in weather like this. I’d tell them damn soldier boys to wait till spring and send a pigeon. Must be mighty important. Hell, you could kill a man in weather like this.”

  Andy peeled off his heavy fur gloves and threw back the hood on his coat. The heat from the laboring potbelly stove finally began to penetrate the layers of clothing. “I swear, your belly burns up while your backside freezes over.” He turned to toast his behind again. “Wires cut again, south of the fort, second time this month.”

  Squint lowered his chair to the floor and held his hands up to the stove. “Well, what was so all-fired important that they couldn’t wait till the line was fixed?”

  “I’m fixin’ to tell you if you’ll give me a minute,” Andy replied. “Naturally the colonel didn’t discuss it with me but Tom told me it was from the commissioner of Injun Affairs. He said they was sending out orders that all Injuns have to report to their agencies by January.”

  Squint didn’t understand at first. “He wants all Injuns to go back to the reservation? By January? Hell, that don’t make a whole lot of sense.”

  Andy shrugged. “It didn’t to me, neither. Tom said the government has had enough of the raidin’ and killin’ in the Black Hills and all Injuns that wasn’t back on the reservation by January would be considered hostile and would be dealt with by the army.”

  “Andy, you know as well as I do that ain’t gonna happen. In the first place, how you gonna get the word to all the tribes? They’re all in winter camps now, scattered all over hell’s half acre. Even if you could get the word to ’em, they can’t hardly move a whole village of people that far in this kind of weather.” His hands warm again, he tilted his chair back against the wall. “I’ll tell you one thing, that ole buck Sittin’ Bull ain’t gonna take his warriors to no reservation anyway. Hell, he ain’t got no reservation. He ain’t nev
er signed no peace treaty in the first place.”

  Andy scratched his matted hair and spat a brown stream onto the hot stove. He watched it sizzle for a moment before he spoke. “Looks to me like the politicians back East decided they want that gold in the Black Hills. The Injuns won’t sell it to ’em, so they’re just gonna take it. I fear there’s gonna be some killin’ in the spring. This ain’t gonna be like last summer. That ole coyote has got every wild-ass buck in the territory running to join up with him.”

  CHAPTER 24

  The winter of 1875 was a long one for Lieutenant Tom Allred. Garrison life at Fort Lincoln was designed, he suspected, to test a man’s ability to withstand monotony. There had been very little action. The hostiles were holed up in their winter camps. The snows were so heavy and frequent that most of the fighting was confined to an occasional sortie to rescue an isolated settler attacked by some roving band of Indians. For the most part, the garrison simply waited for spring to come. Once in a while, Squint would get so antsy he couldn’t stand it any longer and he would ride out to hunt. Game was hard to find, but he always managed to come up with something, and at least he would get away from the fort for a couple of days. Tom sometimes accompanied him if he wasn’t scheduled for guard mount or some other detail. The conversation on these occasions generally got around to the coming spring and the prospects of a serious Indian war. This inevitably brought up the subject of Little Wolf. Tom was still unsure about his feelings toward a brother who had abandoned his own race and elected to become a savage. Squint reminded him that the boy had little choice. Still Tom found it hard to sympathize with a man who was regarded as one of the most fearsome savages in the territory. He had not merely taken up Indian ways, he had become one of the Cheyennes’ most infamous warriors.

  “You got to remember,” Squint said one day when they had stopped by an ice-covered stream to build a fire to warm by while they ate their midday meal. “’bout the only thing Little Wolf remembers ’bout being white is that your folks sold him to a mule skinner.”

  “Granted, and he was only nine or ten, but that’s old enough to know that he’s white and that he has a brother and sisters. I can’t understand how he could forget that.”

  “From what I can tell, them Injuns that adopted him was mighty kind to him, better’n your folks I expect. They’re the only real family he had.”

  Tom wasn’t comfortable with the topic. He shrugged. “Yeah, I expect so. Still, he didn’t have to turn out to be such a damn savage. Hell, Custer’s put a price on his head. I wonder what he’d think if he knew he was my brother?”

  Squint grunted. “I doubt he’d think highly of it. I don’t think I’d let on if I was you.”

  “I don’t intend to.”

  Squint cocked his head to the side and eyed Tom curiously, a thought just occurring to him. “What do you intend to do if you come face to face with Little Wolf in a fight?”

  Tom’s face lost all expression, a faraway gaze in his eyes. “I’ve been giving that a lot of thought,” he said. “I guess I’d kill him.”

  “Your own brother?”

  “A damn Cheyenne,” he retorted. “I’d kill him.”

  Squint looked long and hard at his young friend. “You seem mighty damn sure of that.”

  “Brother or not, I’m a soldier, and if he’s decided to side with the hostiles, then I guess I have no choice.”

  * * *

  The spring of ’76 brought an increase in Indian attacks on the stubborn prospectors still holding out in Sioux territory. Scouts brought back reports that more and more Indians were leaving the reservations now that the winter was over and fleeing to join Sitting Bull. There were reports of large concentrations of Cheyenne and Arapaho in the Sioux camp and there was much talk among the warriors of joining Sitting Bull to make a last great stand against the army.

  At Fort Lincoln, preparations were being made for a large-scale expedition into the field. Supplies were brought in from the East as well as fresh horses and ammunition. Captain Benteen had Tom drilling the men every day to smooth off the rust that accumulated after a winter in garrison. At last, orders came down, and Benteen passed the word along to Tom. The plans called for a major campaign to settle the Indian problem for good and all, punishing all the tribes that lived along the Yellowstone. General Terry himself was going to lead a thousand men west from Fort Lincoln. This included Colonel Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. The attack would be three-pronged. They would be joined in the campaign by troops from Fort Fetterman in Wyoming under the leadership of General George Crook, who was pretty well known as an old Indian fighter. From Montana, General John Gibbon was leading a force down the Yellowstone to meet them.

  It was going to be a long time spent in the field. Squint was undecided until the last minute about whether he wanted to go on another campaign. He didn’t mind the prospect of fighting Indians—it was the long marches that tired him out. Had it not been for Andy’s persistent badgering, he might have chosen to pack his mule and head for Oregon. Peace and quiet were more on his mind of late, and the thought of a rippling mountain stream far back in the quiet mountains with plenty of fish and game was almost too much to resist. But on that frosty spring morning when the troops moved out toward the west, Squint found himself riding the Appaloosa with Joe on a lead line, Andy on one side and Tom on the other. Once again he was going to war.

  It was slow going until they reached the Yellowstone. There, General Terry loaded himself and his infantry on a steamboat named the Far West and steamed up the river. Custer’s cavalry was sent overland with orders to scout along the way. This suited Custer just fine. He preferred to be out from under the general’s command, so the Seventh continued west to rendezvous with General Terry at the mouth of the Rosebud River.

  The weather was getting warmer as the Seventh made its way westward. There was little sign of hostile activity along the way. Squint and Andy stayed away from the column most of the day, but their scouting resulted in nothing worth noting so the column moved along at a rapid pace. All told, Custer employed about forty scouts, many of them Pawnee and Poncas. Some were civilian like Andy and Squint. Custer liked Andy and he often sent for him to scout out in advance of the column. Squint, on the other hand, wasn’t overly fond of the cocky little colonel whose devoted underlings still insisted on addressing their leader as General Custer, his brevet rank in the War Between the States. He was too vain to suit Squint and vanity wasn’t a quality Squint looked for when picking a man to follow into battle. Consequently, he stayed close to Captain Benteen’s troops and away from the front of the column. This way, he was also close to his friend Tom Allred.

  Captain Benteen was a rather astute commander with experience in the field. He knew a good scout when he saw one. He also knew of Squint’s opinion of their commanding officer, an opinion not so distant from his own. So, when scouts were discussed or evaluated, Benteen said very little about Squint, preferring to keep his talents anonymous. The result was a happy situation for all involved, including Custer. Squint cared very little for recognition and none at all for promotion. He was secure in the knowledge that he could take care of himself and that all he owed his employers was an honest day’s work. As far as he was concerned, he worked for Benteen. Let somebody else scout for Custer.

  * * *

  On a warm afternoon in the latter part of June, Andy rode back to the column at a gallop. He pulled up and wheeled in beside Custer. “General”—Andy was not above a little bootlicking now and then—“the Rosebud is about a mile on the other side of that there rise.” He pointed in the direction of a low line of trees in the distance.

  “Did you see any sign of General Terry’s forces?”

  “Yessir. They’s there all right, camped on the banks. The steamboat’s there too.”

  Custer was irritated. Maybe, Andy thought, he wanted to get to the Rosebud first and he was a little agitated because the boat beat his cavalry. The colonel spoke, “Very good, Coulter,” and dismissed him. To
his bugler, he ordered, “My compliments to Major Reno and Captain Benteen.”

  “Yessir!” the bugler snapped and was off at a gallop to summon the two battalion commanders.

  When Benteen rode off to the head of the column, Tom steered his mount over beside Squint’s Appaloosa. They rode along in silence for a few minutes. Up ahead, Andy was waiting. When they caught up to him, he pulled in beside them.

  “Won’t be long before supper,” he said. “The Rosebud’s up ahead.”

  “That’s why Custer sent for Captain Benteen, I reckon,” Squint said.

  “Yep,” Andy replied. “Maybe General Terry will invite us to take supper with him on that there steamboat.”

  Tom and Squint laughed. “He might,” Squint said. “Maybe we should bring a bottle of wine for the occasion.”

  They made camp on the banks of the Yellowstone, across from the “walk-a-heaps,” as the Indians called the infantry, and soon the night was dotted with small cook fires. The following day they were allowed to relax while Custer went aboard the Far West to receive his orders from General Terry. Tom took advantage of the opportunity to peel off his uniform and take a bath in the river. Squint joined him, but Andy was satisfied to splash a little water on his face and neck, saying that his buckskins fit him about perfect now. If he took them off and got all wet, they might not go back on as comfortably.

  The next morning the regiment was ordered to prepare to march again. The scouts had discovered a large Indian trail that led along the Rosebud. From the looks of it, Squint guessed that maybe an entire village had traveled that way. Custer was ordered to take the Seventh and follow the trail. It was the general consensus among the commanders that the end of the trail would, in all likelihood, be a sizable Indian village, maybe even Sitting Bull’s camp. So, at about noon on the twenty-second of June as recorded in Tom’s diary, the Seventh started out along the Rosebud.

  For two days the column followed the trail along the river until it abruptly left the Rosebud, leading west toward the Little Big Horn valley. After a brief rest period, Colonel Custer signaled the troop to move out. Squint, at Andy’s insistence, was scouting far in advance of the column. Andy had a strange feeling in his gut about the trail. For one thing, it was evident that a lot of Indians had passed that way. Add to that the fact that they didn’t seem to care that they were leaving a broad trail to follow. Finally, the trail was leading straight to the Little Big Horn valley where there were reports that Sitting Bull might be encamped. For these reasons, he borrowed Squint from Captain Benteen. He had a feeling he didn’t like about this expedition, and he wanted Squint’s experience and savvy to help him scout.