Wolf Mountain Moon: The Battle of the Butte, 1877 tp-12

by Terry C. Johnston

  On Casey and Hargous’s skirmish line gunfire began to wither, tapering off until it grew quiet. Even deathly quiet, as night crept over the ridges to the east of the Tongue.

  “I think we’re done for the day, fellas,” Kelly declared, warily getting to his knees and waving Buffalo Horn in from his crevice.

  “They’ll be back,” John Johnston groaned. “And when they do, there’ll be more of ’em than ticks on a strop hawg’s back.”

  “Amen to that,” Donegan said as he dusted the snow from the elbows of his canvas mackinaw and slapped the knees of his thick buffalo leggings. “Get what sleep you can tonight, boys. I figger tomorrow’s fight’s gonna start early … and last just as long as Miles can hold ’em off.”

  * The Stalkers, vol. 3, The Plainsmen Series.

  * Sioux Dawn, vol. 1, The Plainsmen Series.

  † Red Cloud’s Revenge, vol. 2.

  # The Stalkers, vol. 3.

  * A Cold Day in Hell, vol. 11, The Plainsmen Series.

  Chapter 28

  8 January 1877

  Just how did a man sleep when he knew that dawn would bring him battle with Crazy Horse?

  It was a restless camp that cold night beside the Tongue River as patches of stars appeared between the snow-laden clouds. Fires burned every few yards throughout the bivouac, sleepless soldiers huddled around the flames in their blankets, every man taking his turn at the double guard Miles had put out on the picket line. Because of the extreme cold, a soldier could stand no more than an hour of running guard duty out there in the darkness, where every clump of sage and oakbrush was sure to conceal a skulking warrior sneaking in for a scalp.

  Certain that Tom Leforge lay dead somewhere on the battlefield, Kelly gave the order to fall back to the soldier camp when the Sioux and Cheyenne retreated at dusk. But try as he and the others did, they weren’t able to convince Buffalo Horn to retreat with them. The Bannock wanted the chance to pick off a stray Sioux or two as the enemy turned its tail. One way or the other, Seamus figured, there was no man who could question the courage of that Indian.

  About an hour after dark Leforge slipped in, shuddering from his hours of lying in the snow somewhere between the Indians and the scouts on the battlefield. He hadn’t dared to show himself, so close to the warriors was he. The squaw man gulped down his supper and coffee, then immediately rolled up in his blankets and fell fast asleep, back in the bosom of the soldiers.

  Buffalo Horn himself finally showed up at the scouts’ fire later that night, long after it had become fully dark.

  “You shot two more?” Donegan said, asking in sign as well.

  The Bannock nodded, then began to motion with his hands, speaking English words when he could remember how to put those words together in some understandable fashion.

  “Cheyenne. Two,” he explained, patting his belt where the two fresh scalps hung—their flesh frozen hard. “Two follow you to soldier village.”

  Kelly asked, “These two Cheyenne warriors—you say they were following us back here?”

  “I wait by tree. Cheyenne no see Buffalo Horn,” he explained, nodding. “I see Cheyenne. I shoot two.”

  “Some of them get away?” Donegan asked with his hands.

  “One, maybeso,” Buffalo Horn answered, and accepted the cup of coffee the Irishman picked up and handed him.

  Seamus turned to pour himself another cup, finding the eyes of the old woman burning like coals into Buffalo Horn. He held up the pot for her, and she nodded. He poured her more coffee. She took a sip, then nudged the young girl closer to her side beneath the old blanket and stared into the fire to show that she no longer wished to acknowledge the white man standing at her elbow.

  “You can hate him,” Seamus said to her quietly in English. “But he is a warrior. Just like your husband and sons and nephews. They are warriors and they make war. They take scalps of their enemies who are brave. Those two scalps came from Cheyenne warriors brave enough to follow us back to camp.”

  Only once did her eyes flash up to his, just for a fraction of a second as she brought the tin cup to her lips and drank.

  “You are warm enough?” he asked her in sign after setting the coffeepot down.

  She would not look at him anymore. Instead she began speaking softly to the child under her arm. Seamus went back to the far side of the fire and squatted down in his blankets, propping himself against a large downed cottonwood trunk. He stared and stared at the flames until he drifted off.

  Late that night he heard the woman’s voice, then both of the other women calling out to the surrounding darkness. Rubbing his eyes, Seamus listened as Kelly and Buffalo Horn were aroused as well. Cheyenne voices drifted in from beyond the darkness.

  “Bet they want to know if our captives are still alive,” Kelly explained.

  Seamus asked, “You figure that’s what she’s telling them?”

  Back and forth the women yelled into the night, the disembodied male voices floating in from the darkness that ringed the scouts’ fire there in Miles’s soldier camp. Frank Baldwin showed up first, then Miles came over, rubbing a bare finger in his gritty eye before he stuffed his hand back into a mitten.

  “What you make of it, Kelly?”

  “All this talk—they’re probably trying to figure out if there’s a way they can free our captives—get them to slip away—”

  A shot rang out, quickly followed by another, both coming from the direction of the warrior voices.

  “The red-bellies are firing into camp!”

  Sergeants bellowed orders into the darkness, and pickets hollered in reply. A couple more shots rattled the night as Miles put the entire camp on alert. The soldiers had themselves convinced that these opening salvos just might mean an attack was imminent.

  But Donegan knew better. No attack was coming—not with the way the old woman and the others peered into the darkness without taking cover. Instead they remained huddled together around the fire, shouting into the night until they no longer received an answer.

  It became clear that the Cheyenne warriors had pulled back from the picket lines, while the night grew all the colder, all the quieter still. Seamus watched the women, the children too—sensing that Miles was about to have himself his long-awaited fight with Crazy Horse. If the Cheyenne and Lakota had tried this hard to free some women and youngsters as night fell, what might the morning bring?

  He sat there in the cold, snow falling on the thick wool blankets, flakes like huge curls of ash as they drifted down through the fire’s light … thinking on Samantha and the boy. Remembering his own family. Knowing how cold must be the hearts of those Cheyenne who wanted nothing more than to rescue their kin. Knowing his own heart would hurt every bit as much if the tables were turned and this enemy had captured Sam and the babe from him.

  How he would fight with the last fiber in his body, the last pump of his heart, to free them.

  When, he asked himself, would the army ever realize that this whole war was about family, about how the brownskins were fighting to protect their families, their homes, the land where the bones of their ancestors had been buried?

  Tomorrow the Bear Coat’s soldiers would be fighting an enemy with everything in their culture to lose, an enemy who found itself backed into a corner. An enemy who suddenly had nothing left to lose.

  A half mile away a tall volcano-shaped butte punched a black pyramid out of the starry sky to the south. Behind that ridge the enemy village was no more than twenty miles away, perhaps closer than that.

  Dawn would damn well get here soon enough.

  Morning Star had been ready to go back in to the White Rock Agency* before the soldiers attacked his village in the Red Fork Valley. But now he had seen again what the ve-ho-e soldiers did to the people they defeated. Perhaps it would be better to die out here as a free man than to live on a tiny piece of ground the white man gave him. To live where he could not move his lodge when he wanted, when the human waste and offal began to smell, when the seasons turned.<
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  But he would not go back now.

  “We must get our people back,” Morning Star told the great council that was convened as the snowflakes grew fat and thick.

  Fires leaped into the cold night sky all around them.

  Crazy Horse came to stand beside Morning Star. “This Old-Man Chief my Lakota people call Dull Knife will not be alone when he rides against the Bear Coat’s soldiers come morning. No more will he have a dull knife. He will have the strength of the Lakota joining with his warriors. And that makes for a very sharp weapon!”

  The crowd roared with courage, warriors yelping like wolves, some pawing the earth, snorting, and throwing their heads about like buffalo bulls in the spring when heady juices flow.

  “We can wait no longer!” Little Wolf cried. “Let every man among you prepare his family to leave this place. At first light the lodges must come down, all your possessions should be packed and loaded on travois. Ready to flee upriver.”

  “Our fighting men must say farewell to their families tonight,” Morning Star reminded them, thinking of the sons he had lost in the Red Fork Valley fight. “None of us knows for sure who will return.”

  “Mitakuye oyasin! We are all related!” Crazy Horse declared to thunderous approval. “Because all families are my own, I go to rescue the Shahiyela prisoners taken by the wasicu soldiers. We are all relations this night! We will all be brothers in arms come dawn when the soldiers awake to find us waiting!”

  How loudly they cheered and stomped, that multitude of men who would go fight, women and children who would stay behind to wait the outcome of the battle. That night in the cold and the snow no one said anything about how few rifles and pistols the warriors had; no one spoke about how they had but little ammunition. But the courage was strong in those arms that held aloft the bows and quivers bristling with iron-tipped arrows the likes of which had wiped out Long Hair’s soldiers beside the Little Sheep River.* Many shook war clubs made of smooth riverbed stone or broken knife blades. No one said anything about how few guns they would be carrying into battle … because it did not matter.

  They had strong hearts and the prayers of their people—the most powerful weapon a warrior would take with him into the coming fight.

  “We have courage!” Morning Star called out when the chiefs had decided to set off at once, move downriver into position, and be ready when the soldiers awakened at dawn.

  Little Wolf cried, “And we have war chiefs among us who will never give up—leaders who commanded us at the Rose-berry River,* men who led us at the Little Sheep River when Sitting Bull’s vision of soldiers falling into camp came to be!”

  Then Crazy Horse shouted to the war-fevered throng. “And we have what truly matters most: there are many among us who have been in battle with the soldiers many, many times—many warriors who are hardened like iron, those who are veterans of war against the wasicu … our hearts will not turn to water!”

  They laid their plans quickly, deciding to draw the soldiers out at first light. Decoys would be sent north to lure the Bear Coat’s men over the ridge and behind what the Tse-Tsehese called Belly Butte,† into the basin below it, where the main body of warriors would rush in from both sides, and as they had done at the Pine Woods Fort,# they would crush the soldiers in one swift, overwhelming attack.

  Decoys were called for, and among all those who volunteered for the honor more than three-times-ten were selected to ride the strongest ponies. Some of the older warriors were chosen to stay behind with the women and children to guard the camp, to hurry the village south if for some reason the battle turned to disaster.

  Then, as the anxious crowd grew expectantly quiet, Morning Star looked at Little Wolf, Crazy Horse, Little Big Man, and Hump. “It is time to go,” he said.

  Overhead somewhere the great northern star was spinning its path across the sky to mark the passage of the night. They had miles to ride before they would be in position for the coming attack, before the decoys could lead the soldiers into the trap.

  “Yes,” Crazy Horse agreed. “Young men and old, all warriors who will ride into the dark guided by the Great Mystery to protect our homes and our families … remember there is no greater honor than to die defending what you hold most dear!”

  As the men sprinted to their ponies, accompanied by the rattling clamor of shields, bows, lances, war clubs, and rifles—the noise of more than two thousand voices was deafening as men, women, and children all sang out the brave-heart songs. Although they had little, stripped of nearly everything by the soldiers, the Ohmeseheso had not given up. They had not given in. There was fight enough left in every one of the Tse-Tsehese to defend their people and their land.

  He knew that in the great hoop of all things it mattered little how his people would fight when they were wealthy in ponies and weapons, when they were strong and numerous and well fed.

  What mattered most was how the Ohmeseheso fought when they had so little that there was nothing left to lose.

  It made Morning Star’s tired, wounded heart brave enough to believe that this might well be his people’s finest hour.

  His sister was held prisoner by the Bear Coat’s soldiers!

  Crooked Nose Woman had gone on a simple journey with Old Wool Woman and the others to visit Tangle Hair’s people, those Dog Soldier clans who stayed close to the Sacred Mountain of Noaha-vose.

  And now the soldiers had captured her! Every warrior knew what ve-ho-e soldiers would do to a pretty girl if they caught her. There was no honor among the white man for a Tse-Tsehese rope chastity belt.

  Wooden Leg knew he had to do everything in his power to free her and the others.

  When the big-throated guns ended their afternoon fight with the soldiers, Wooden Leg did not return to the village with the rest of the warriors when darkness came. Instead, with a few others, he hung back among the brush and the cottonwood and the fog rising off the river as the snow fell harder and harder. Then he crept in across the dry snow—walking a few careful steps through the sagebrush, stopping to hold his breath and listen before proceeding, his eyes peering into the coal-cotton darkness. Far away now he could see the dancing specks of light: many soldier fires.

  But between here and there would be many guards. They would be out in the dark. Wooden Leg and the rest could get only so close to the camp before they started to call out to their people.

  “Crooked Nose Woman!”

  A bullet whined somewhere to his right. A nervous soldier guard, no doubt.

  “Crooked Nose—it is your brother!”

  Another soldier bullet sang out, this time a little closer.

  He slipped off to the right, away from the direction where he had seen the orange jet of flame spew from the soldier’s gun.

  Now he was growing desperate. He heard no answer. Were his people already dead?

  “Crooked Nose woman—Wooden Leg calls to you!”

  “Brother! There are too many!”

  “Wimeca yelo! I am a man!” he shouted to her. “I can come rescue—”

  “No, Wooden Leg!” came her answer. “Do not risk such a foolish errand. I know you to have the strongest heart. There is no need to prove your bravery to anyone!”

  Oh, how his spirit leaped just to hear her voice! “Tell me you are safe!”

  “We are safe.”

  “The soldiers—did they? Have they … harmed you in any way?”

  “No. The soldiers gave us food, and we have a fire to warm the young ones.”

  “The children?”

  “They have cold feet. Very cold. But there is a good white man looking after them.”

  “You are warm and have food?”

  “Yes, and Old Wool Woman is here with all of us,” came his sister’s answer.

  “I will think of some way to rescue you, Crooked Nose Woman!”

  “I am afraid for the rest if the fighting starts, brother!”

  “Be strong—and do not be afraid, Sister,” he called out to her, even though his own vo
ice cracked with emotion. “We will not leave this place without you!”

  “But the village must flee! The soldiers … they will march and destroy our village again!”

  “Do not fear that, Sister,” he told her, trying to make his voice sound as brave as he could make it. “Crazy Horse will bring the others back here come morning. Then we will free you.”

  “Go with the wind, Brother!”

  There was another shot fired from the soldier guards. “Wooden Leg—are you all right?”

  “They did not hit me,” he answered, looking left and right, low along the ground to see if he could make out anything moving across the dimly lit snow. “I will be back for you tomorrow,” he promised.

  Her voice called out in a hopeful echo, “Tomorrow.”

  “Before the sun rises.”

  How very hard it was to tear himself away from the mere sound of her voice.

  As soon as another warrior had informed him that his sister had been captured, Wooden Leg had leaped onto his pony and gone to the place where the soldier scouts had surrounded and seized the prisoners. He had followed along that trail, then left his horse behind and crawled as close as he could to the soldier camp. But try as he might, Wooden Leg was unable to see any of his people among all the white men, animals, and wagons. For a long time his heart was so heavy—certain his people had been killed by the Ooetaneo-o* scouts working for the Bear Coat. Just the way the Ho-nehe-taneo-o† and the Sosone-eo-o# scouts had killed women and children in the valley of the Red Fork back in the Big Freezing Moon.

  Then the skirmish with the ve-ho-e scouts had started nearby, which brought the soldiers out of their camp with one of their wagon guns. No better time was it for Wooden Leg to fight the white man. After all, his heart was hard and cold, just to think that the soldiers had killed his sister.