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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Author’s Foreword
Maps
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Epilogue
Teaser
The Plainsmen Series by Terry C. Johnston
High Acclaim for The Plainsmen Series by Terry C. Johnston
About the Author
Copyright
with admiration I dedicate
this novel of the Indian Wars
to Fred H. Werner,
the Beecher Island historian
who taught me how it really happened!
The fighting was of the closest and fiercest description, and the Indians were under the fire of one of the most expert bodies of marksmen on the plains at half pistol-shot distance in the unique and celebrated battle. The whole action is almost unparalleled in the history of our Indian Wars, both for the thrilling and gallant cavalry charge of the Indians and the desperate valor of Forsyth and his scouts.
–Cyrus Townsend Brady
We are beyond all human aid, and if God does not help us there is none for us.
–Major George A. Forsyth on the island, first day of the siege
… Several years later I met one of the younger chiefs of the Brule Sioux … who wished to talk to me about the fight on the Republican. He asked me how many men I had, and I told him, and gave a true account of the killed and wounded and I saw that he was much pleased. He told the interpreter that I told the truth, as he had counted my men himself; and for four days they had been watching my every movement, gathering their warriors from far and near.…
I then questioned him regarding their numbers and losses. He hesitated for some time, but finally told the interpreter something, and the interpreter told me that there were nearly a thousand warriors in the fight.… Regarding their losses, the chief held up his two hands seven times together, and then one hand singly.…
“That,” said the interpreter, “signifies the killed only. He says there were ‘heaps wounded.’”
Just as he started to go he stopped and spoke to the interpreter again.
“He wishes to know whether you did not get enough of it,” said the interpreter.
“Tell him yes, all I wanted,” was my reply. “How about yourself?”
As my words were interpreted he gave a grim, half-humorous look, and then, unfolding his blanket and opening the breast of his buckskin shirt, pointed to where a bullet had evidently gone through his lungs, nodded, closed his shirt, wrapped his blanket around him, turned, and stalked quietly from the tent.
–Major George A. Forsyth
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
June 1895
Author’s Foreword
I think we should take a moment to talk of a few things before you, the reader, jump into this novel with both feet. Just to give you a sense of what it is you are about to read.
This, above all, is the story of a time and characters largely forgotten with the pace of our comfortable, relatively untroubled lives. What strikes me as a shame is that even most of those who have a speaking acquaintance with the long struggle to open the West really know little or nothing of this nine-day battle and siege on a dry, obscure riverbed island, somewhere in the trackless Colorado Territory, much of it still unmapped at the time of this story—1868.
In a study of the era of the Indian Wars, again and again one runs across instances of small groups of determined defenders holding out against overwhelming odds of screeching, equally determined horsemen. Perhaps by now you have read Red Cloud’s Revenge, so you understand a little about desperate men surrounded and fighting for their lives in both the Hayfield Fight and the Wagon-Box Fight. Men who were prepared to sell their lives as dearly as possible before the enemy overwhelmed them.
Across the years, I have found in my reading of the history of the Indian Wars that time and again in every one of those skirmishes and battles I run across references that clearly and unequivocally state that the white men thus surrounded and desperately fighting for their very lives nonetheless stood ready to take their own lives at a moment’s notice should the fight be lost and the red onslaught breech the walls of whatever fortress the white men had chosen for their final stand.
Time and again in the writing of the Old West, one runs across the well-considered, oft-repeated, and most-popular old saw that in the end a white man must take his own life before he was captured alive by a band of hostile warriors. For, to be taken prisoner simply meant unspeakable agony and torture. A slow death.
No death for a hero.
But the reader must stop, and consider the nineteenth-century mind of those who ventured beyond the confines of just what scant civilization the West offered at the time. We are asked to consider that it was the last brave act of desperate, overwhelmed, and very courageous men to take their own lives. So in any group of fifty “hardy frontiersmen,” one will find stories of both the brave and the cowardly. Tales of those ready to die and those pleading to live, penned down on an island in the middle of Cheyenne hunting ground on the Central Plains. Without hope.
This story of the fight for Beecher Island: human conflict, and pathos and passion—white men and red alike colliding on that far-flung, unknown prairie riverbed beneath a cruel late-summer sun on the high plains. Warriors time and again hurling nothing more than their naked, brown bodies against the fiery muzzles of the white man’s powerful carbines. Eventually four white men flung themselves against the tightening red noose around the island, volunteering to try to escape from that siege, each one of the four hoping to carry word to the outside world of the horror and desperation of those survivors he had left behind.
Fifty hand-picked frontiersmen, chosen a’purpose to engage the cream of Cheyenne cavalry on the Central Plains—no better or more exciting a backdrop for our cavalryman-turned-plainsman once more—Seamus Donegan (Shamus as the Irish pronounce it).
The writer of historical fiction assumes a perilous task: While he must remain true to history, there are the demands of fiction pressing the novelist to pace, dramatize, capsulize, omit. So with not only the battle and siege of Beecher Island studied and restudied, the site visited and walked over, a sense of place and time finally in my grasp—the story of those nine long summer day
s in 1868 all but lay before me. I had only to let the soldiers—Major Forsyth, Lieutenant Beecher, Sergeant McCall, and scouts Sharp Grover, Jack Stillwell, and John Donovan, all actual participants of that tragedy—tell their tales.
Into their midst ride my two fictional plainsmen: Seamus Donegan and his uncle, Liam O’Roarke, galloping across these bloody pages stirrup to stirrup with the likes of Forsyth, Beecher and the rest.
To write this work of history, I relied on many sources, a few of which I’ll make mention. The first three I called upon most heavily, drawing much of the human element of the story as those were three firsthand, primary accounts (the first two by participants of the battle and siege, the third by the leader of the army column to rescue Forsyth’s fifty frontiersmen).
Maj. George A. “Sandy” Forsyth did not publish his story of Beecher Island until more than a quarter-century had passed. In an 1895 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, the major wrote the piece upon which I draw extensively not only for its rich detail, but for its chronology and its view of some of the primary characters as well. True to the sort of man that he was and had proved himself to be, not only in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War but on Beecher Island too, Forsyth chose a simple, yet eloquent title for his story: “A Frontier Fight.”
Cyrus Townsend Brady’s Indian Fights and Fighters continues the tradition of firsthand accounts by recounting the story of a civilian hired on by Forsyth—a young man not yet twenty who had come west from New York City for excitement, clean air, and unparalleled vistas. His recollections are but part of what actually occurred during battle and siege, and through them we see that young Sigmund Shlesinger got much more than he had bargained for when he migrated to the Plains intent upon finding adventure.
Every bit as exciting for me was the drama attending the dash to rescue Forsyth’s fifty. How fitting it was that one of the major’s old friends and Shenandoah comrades should find himself already in the field, perhaps the closest column to that island where Forsyth’s men sat huddled, waiting out the days of rancid horsemeat and sand-seep for water. Capt. Louis H. Carpenter’s own account of his two-day race across the rolling prairie at the head of his H Company of Negro “buffalo soldiers” to lift the siege is told in his own words, “The Story of a Rescue,” which appeared in the 1895 Journal of the Military Science Institution of the United States, vol. XVII.
To gain some insight into the Indian side of that long struggle, I relied on two sources. The first is one I have used repeatedly in the first two volumes in this series: George Bird Grinnell’s The Fighting Cheyenne. For although we know much more of what happened on the island itself from the recollections of the white men, there was high drama and tragedy attending the loss of Roman Nose’s powerful war-medicine moments before he was to lead his warriors into battle against Forsyth’s scouts. No Shakespearean tragedy can elicit finer emotions than this tale of that great war-chief’s eventual decision to ride into the face of the white man’s guns, singing his death-song, stripped of any spiritual protection.
I was able to learn much of the participants and the mood of those Cheyenne bands that summer of 1868 through the story of Charlie Bent as told in George E. Hyde’s Life of George Bent, from His Letters, published in 1967 after Hyde’s extensive research and cross-referencing.
From the scouts’ firsthand accounts, mingled with the Indian accounts of their massed charges and eventual abandonment of the siege, I moved to more modern-day renderings of the story. James S. Hutchins’s chapter on “The Fight at Beecher Island” in Great Western Indian Fights gives us a capsulized and readable version of the story highlights, in a well-researched and thoughtful presentation.
When one is writing of the fighting Cheyenne on the Great Plains, he would be remiss if he did not consult Donald E. Berthrong’s The Southern Cheyenne, published in 1963.
Yet with all these volumes at my fingertips, it was the work of one man above all whose story of Beecher Island made sense to me in a way no other writer’s had. Greeley, Colorado, historian Fred H. Werner has invested a lifetime in pursuit of truth while debunking much of the myth that is so often taken as the story of Indian Wars of the West. This lifelong journey has proved a labor of love for him. Fred has invested not only his time but his own money as well to self-publish his many volumes in his “Western Americana Series,” dealing with the drama of clashes from the Dull Knife Battle, to the pathos of the Slim Buttes Battle. It was to Fred Werner’s volume, The Beecher Island Battle, that I found myself returning again and again throughout the months of study and writing, referring repeatedly during each of my visits to the battle site itself.
Perhaps now you will understand why this work of historical fiction is dedicated to historian Fred H. Werner, with my sincerest appreciation for his keen scholarship and my gratitude for his reading the final manuscript in hopes of purging it of errors. Should any still exist, blame not Fred Werner.
Still, as a historical novelist, I assume a task beyond the mere retelling of history. For in picking up this volume, you, the reader, demand of me to add something that history alone can’t convey to most folks: a warm, throbbing pulse that truly allows you, the reader, to relive the bloody, tragic, but always exciting history of the winning of the West.
All that remained was for the novelist in me to flesh out the drama of Beecher Island: that stalk, battle, siege, and rescue.
This dramatic story chronicling the clash of cultures across a quarter-century will actually take over the next half-dozen of our years to relate. We began The Plainsmen, our account of this epic struggle of the Indian Wars, with that story told in Sioux Dawn of a bitterly cold December day in 1866 as Capt. William Judd Fetterman led eighty men beyond Lodge Trail Ridge and into history. Red Cloud’s Revenge carried on the bitter contest waged on the Northern Plains along the Bozeman Road during a summer of blood. Now, with The Stalkers, we find ourselves more than two years into this captivating era, a time like no other, a time that would not come to an end until another bloody, cold December day in 1890 with another massacre along a little-known creek called Wounded Knee.
The fever of that quarter-century made the Indian Wars a time unequaled in the annals of man, when a vast frontier was forcibly wrenched from its inhabitants, during a struggle as rich in drama and pathos as any in the history of man.
Into the heart of the red man’s paradise of the Central Plains, both government and entrepreneurs alike were thrusting the prongs of their railroad and freight roads. To protect both the settlers on the Kansas plains and travelers alike, the army erected its outposts: Forts Harker and Hays, Larned, Dodge, and Lyon. And, far out on the Federal Road to Denver, Fort Wallace.
Here, where Major Forsyth will receive word that a warm trail beckons him. At Fort Wallace, Forsyth’s fifty begin their stalk. To think of it, riding as one of only half-a-hundred riflemen, following the trail of those most feared warriors on the Central Plains, proven warriors who had taken scalps at the Platte River Bridge or the Fetterman Massacre.
Fifty of you, against who knows how many you would face.…
There can be no richer story than to peer like voyeurs into the lives of those half-a-hundred who volunteered to stalk the Dog Soldiers, volunteered to put their lives on the line for the men and women left behind. So it is we are left to wonder, as only a reader in the safety and comfort of his easy chair can, if we too would have measured up with the gallant defenders made to bleed on that island stinking with rotting horse carcasses, wide-winged buzzards hovering overhead. Would we have possessed the grit to stand in the face of charge after charge of Roman Nose’s hundreds, stand and stare down the muzzles of our Spencer carbines as the brown horsemen came screaming down that dry riverbed?
It’s important too that you realize you are reliving the story of real people. From Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, Maj. George A. Forsyth, and Lt. Fred Beecher … to civilians like Jack Stillwell and Sigmund Shlesinger (both only nineteen years old), crusty frontiersmen like old Pierre Tr
udeau, or simply hardy settlers like John Donovan wanting a crack at the Indians. Not to forget all the faceless others who hugged their rifle-pits, silently followed Forsyth’s orders, and waited beneath a hot sun across nine grueling days in September 1868. Indeed, you are reading a story peopled with flesh and blood that walked and fought, cried and cheered on that hallowed ground now swept clean beneath the relentless march of spring floods and prairie drought.
So it is that good historical fiction fuses the fortunes, adventures, and destinies of numerous characters. Glory-seekers and murderers, settlers and cowards, army officers and soldiers (like Captain Carpenter’s “brunette” orderly, Reuben Waller, one of those Negro soldiers who would gladly accept the danger inherent in the rescue of those white men slowly dying on that murderous island). Remember as you read—these were actual, living souls striding across that crude stage erected on the high plains of western Kansas and Colorado Territory … all, save two.
Into their midst, I send my fictional characters, Liam O’Roarke and his nephew, Seamus Donegan—late of the Union Army of the Shenandoah, cavalry sergeant turned soldier of fortune, having sought a change of scenery in the West, and some escape for his aching heart. With each new volume in this “Plainsmen” series that will encompass the era of the Indian Wars, you will follow Seamus as he marches through some of history’s bloodiest hours. Not always doing the right thing, but trying, nonetheless, for Donegan was no “plaster saint” or “larger-than-life” dime-novel icon.
History has itself plenty of heroes—every one of them dead. Donegan represents the rest of us. Ordinary in every way, except that at some point, we are each called upon by circumstances to do something extra-ordinary … what most might call heroic. Forget the pain, the thirst, and hunger on that sandy island as each man wondered when it would come his turn to die. Forget the blood and vomit and maggot-ridden wounds stinking each man’s nostrils.
Each of us does what he must in the end.
That’s the epic tale of the fight at Beecher Island. If you will listen carefully now, you’ll hear the grunts of the lathered horses and the balky mules straining to carry their riders to the island in the pre-dawn light … the eerie, humanlike cries of panic as each animal went down, killed by the Indians in those first frantic minutes or sacrificed by the scouts themselves. You can hear the cursing of frightened, wounded men or the silent cries of those who fell wordlessly, dead before they hit the sand.
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