His heart lay heavy and cold in his chest, remembering another winter battle, another winter retreat, another journey into the wilderness to escape the soldiers.*
With the next beat of that weary heart he heard the distant, muffled boom of the big wagon gun.
Hopo! The soldiers were still shooting, even though there were no more warriors on the ridge to shoot at.
But a moment later Wooden Leg understood. The incoming whistle rushing out of the blizzard clouds warned him.
No longer was that big-throated gun aiming for the ridge. Now the soldiers were shooting at the retreating Indians.
Off to the right near the riverbank where no horsemen rode, the shell exploded harmlessly, but with enough clatter and a shower of rocks to hurry on any of those who believed they could tarry behind for long. As the ridge disappeared behind him in the swirling fury of the storm, Wooden Leg listened to another boom of the wagon gun. He rode a little farther. And heard another boom, more distant. Finally the last of the gun’s roars—muffled and sodden through the thickening storm.
Then there were no more. And the quiet that wrapped itself around the young warrior was deafening.
Quiet enough to hear the howling, wolfish wind and the groans of the wounded carried across the backs of ponies, cradled by horsemen if possible, any way the wounded could make this journey back toward the village that was sure to be on the move already.
Out of the dance of snow Wooden Leg suddenly recognized the two Lakota who had been with him to rescue Big Crow. He hurried his pony toward their horses. Between them walked another pony, Big Crow astride the animal, but bent over and tied against the horse’s neck. The Lakota rode knee to knee with the wounded war chief, each of them holding on to Big Crow so he would not fall.
“He is dead?”
One of the Lakota shook his head. “I think he is alive.”
“Big Crow!” Wooden Leg said with excitement from just behind the wounded man’s pony.
Without raising himself up or twisting around, without so much as moving his head, the war chief mumbled, “Is that you, Wooden Leg? I cannot see.”
“It is me,” he answered. “I am here with you, Uncle.”
“Good,” he said with a fluid-filled cough. “Then you tell these Ho-ohomo-eo-e* that they must let me go and leave me behind.”
“Leave you behind?”
He gasped in pain. “You must leave me here, Wooden Leg. I am going to die anyway.”
“This is what you truly want?”
“It is my last wish,” Big Crow declared bravely. “Carry me no farther.”
After explaining to the two Lakota that a warrior must not ignore a dying man’s last wish, Wooden Leg led the others a little ways up the now-dry fork of a creek that in spring would flow down to the Tongue River. After no more than four arrow-flights in distance, Big Crow spoke again.
“Here. No farther. Find a place. Then leave me.”
“Yes—the rocks are good here,” Wooden Leg told the dying man.
When his pony came to a stop beneath him, Big Crow said quietly, “Go back to the rest of the warriors. Go on to the village. Tell my people that I have done my share to rescue the prisoners taken by the soldiers.”
“I will tell them,” Wooden Leg promised, his throat tasting sour with this parting from a great warrior. “For many generations to come, unto my grandchildren’s grandchildren, the Ohmeseheso will know that an honorable man has died fighting for his people.”
Not far ahead stood some large sandstone rocks on the north side of the ravine. Among them the three found a narrow crevice and therein made a place for the dying man.
Wooden Leg sighed with the heavy weight of a boulder on his chest. “You Lakota choose to bury a man on the open prairie,” he explained to them as they cleared the last of the loose shale from the floor of that crack high in the tall rocks. “Tse-Tsehese warriors prefer to be buried among the rocks of this earth. The quicker to return our bodies to the dust of our Earth Mother.”
Across the floor of that narrow crevice they spread a buffalo robe; then all three gently carried Big Crow up to that crack far up the side of the sandstone formation. With a valiant struggle Wooden Leg finished the task by himself, inching the war chief’s body back into that crevice the width of his hand at a time.
“Big Crow, can you hear me?” Wooden Leg asked when he could move the man no farther.
For a long time there came no answer. He feared Big Crow had died while he’d been placing him in the death position. At long last the young warrior touched the war chief’s face. It was cold. He sighed, ready to leave this hallowed place.
“I am no longer of this earth,” Big Crow said in a hushed whisper that surprised the young warrior before him. “Eshesso! This be the way of all things! Go now, Wooden Leg—and protect our people … always.”
For a few moments longer the young man sat there by the body he had folded back into the rocks, then covered with a blanket upon which he’d laid the beautiful warbonnet, all that time wondering if he really had seen Big Crow’s lips move or not. The man’s skin was cold and his eyes were closed as if in death.
Wooden Leg wasn’t sure if he had heard those last words with his ears … or in his heart.
When he finally stood, the two Lakota warriors patiently waiting at his back, Wooden Leg whispered in reply.
“Like you—I will lay my body down and give my life to … to protect my people.”
*Blood Song, vol. 8, The Plainsmen Series.
*Lakota.
Chapter 37
8-10 January 1877
Damn, if it wasn’t cold, despite all the fires these soldiers had blazing in their bivouac.
Maybe it was merely the howl of the wind, or the icy rip of each flake of snow as it slashed against a man’s skin—but Luther Kelly couldn’t remember when he had ever been colder.
After the last shot was fired from Pope’s artillery, Miles could finally order Lieutenant Mason Carter’s men of Company K, Fifth Cavalry, out of the snow and into the timber to begin building fires near the wagon camp. They were shortly joined by Lieutenant Cornelius Cusick’s F Company of the Twenty-second, who trudged back across the ice on the Tongue River to shouts of victory.
During the five long hours of that morning’s battle, the men of both outfits had hunkered down in their snowy rifle pits, shivering without stop as the fight raged on around them—unable to make themselves warm as the blizzard rolled in, not even allowed to move about to relieve themselves for fear of being picked off by troublesome Indian marksmen.
Then, once they had a few minutes around their fires and Miles had sent two other companies chasing after the retreating warriors, the colonel ordered Carter’s and Cusick’s weary troops back to the bottomland to dismantle what tents the wind hadn’t toppled and hurtled away down the valley. What tents the soldiers brought back to the wagon camp at the foot of the plateau they struggled to raise where they could, in no special pattern, as the blizzard continued to build in strength throughout the afternoon.
Surgeons Tilton and Tesson had their stewards remove the nine wounded from the battlefield, making them as comfortable as possible in tents erected near fires down in among the cottonwood near the riverbank. Corporal Augustus Rothman of Casey’s A Company was the lone fatality—dying instantly when a bullet smashed into his forehead during that gallant charge up the ridge against overwhelming odds. His fellow soldiers wrapped the body securely in a gray blanket and placed Rothman in one of the wagons until Miles would determine where ultimately to bury the corporal—on the battlefield or back at their Tongue River Cantonment.
Late that afternoon Ewers and Dickey brought their outfits limping back as twilight deepened the already gloomy weather. They reported in to the colonel their estimation that they had followed the retreating warriors for some three miles before turning around to fight their way back through ever-deepening snowdrifts piled up by the ground blizzard, to struggle against a wind that continued to chip awa
y at their resolve.
At dusk the snow became an icy sleet, then gradually turned sodden. By dark the blizzard had wrung itself out and become a cold, driving rain. Men scurried here and there to secure dry wood where they could find it and prepared to spend a wet, miserable night around smoky fires.
Just past dark the first sniper fired into camp. A picket answered the shot. A few minutes later a second bullet tore through the bivouac, striking a cast-iron skillet with a loud clang and scattering the surprised soldiers. Luther Kelly momentarily looked up from his beans, then calmly scooped another spoonful into his mouth.
“Goddammit!” Miles roared, interrupted at his supper and leaping to his feet. “Baldwin!”
“Sir?” Frank Baldwin was there immediately.
“You and Bailey get moving to the company commanders,” Miles growled. “Tell them to put out their fires for the rest of the night.”
“P-put out their fires?” Bailey repeated.
“Yes—you tell them it’s my order!” Miles snapped. “I don’t want a single man killed by these damned snipers.”
Kelly watched the two officers take off in different directions, waiting with Miles to hear the first loud protests drift back from the cold, drenched soldiers ordered to extinguish their fires for their own safety.
“Some Cheyenne snipers fired into our camp the night after Mackenzie drove them all into the hills,” Donegan explained as he reluctantly kicked some more wet snow onto the hissing limbs at their feet.
The last of the yellow-and-blue flames went out with a sizzle, and the entire bivouac slowly pitched into darkness.
“Bringing up Mackenzie, eh?” Miles grumbled like a man nursing a wound that would not heal.
Donegan started to apologize. “Didn’t mean nothing by it—”
“Well, gentlemen: I certainly feel we’ve accomplished every bit as much today as Crook did with Dull Knife’s Cheyenne,” Miles bristled defensively. “And we did it without any of Mackenzie’s goddamned cavalry!”
Kelly flicked his eyes at the Irishman and gave a tiny shrug before he said, “A damn good job of it too, General. I think what you and your men can be most proud of is that you’ve bested the Lakota and Cheyenne on their own ground—where they chose to fight you.”
“Bloody right,” Miles said. “They picked this ground for their fight, didn’t they, Kelly? And they damn well took the high ground, too—didn’t they, Kelly? And—by the planets—we still drove them off! But, Mr. Kelly … I say Casey, Butler, and McDonald are due the lion’s share of the praise!”
“Right, General,” Kelly replied with genuine agreement. “You put the right officers at the right place on the field. Make no mistake about that, Seamus Donegan—the general here accomplished this whole campaign with no more than one officer to lead every company.”
“True as sun there.” Then Donegan cleared his throat. “I can’t remember when I’ve seen soldiers any braver than the men of those three companies who took the ridge.”
Miles nodded thoughtfully in the rainy darkness. “Yes, thank you, Mr. Donegan. These men … men of mine were stalwart today, weren’t they? Despite the ground, the weather, and nearly running out of ammunition—they stayed in the scrap until the job was done, by damn!”
“Are we headed back to the Yellowstone?” Kelly asked.
“Perhaps in another day,” the colonel answered with a sigh. “I’ve got an itch to find out what became of the hostiles’ camp. So in the morning I mean to scratch that itch.”
Near daylight on the ninth the rain had again become a wet, soggy snow as the men turned out, boiled coffee, and fried their ration of salt pork. Some chose to soak their hardtack in their coffee, while others softened up the frozen, rocklike crackers in the bacon grease at the bottom of their mess kits. It was just about the most miserably cold, wet camp that Luther Kelly could remember ever awaking to.
After breakfast Miles selected six companies to join him in his search for the Crazy Horse village upriver. In addition, he brought along Lieutenant Hargous’s mounted detachment, as well as his company of scouts. He left behind only Cusick’s F Company of the Twenty-second to throw out pickets around the wagon camp as well as to post spotters atop those bluffs the Sioux and Cheyenne had defended the day before.
Behind the colonel and his staff, behind his scouts and mounted riflemen, the half-dozen companies were spread out in a wide skirmish formation that extended from the hills on the west side of the Tongue all the way across the river to the bluffs on the east bank. Miles led them out at a cautious pace, no man certain when they might encounter the enemy’s rear guard or an ambush.
Instead, all they came across near midday that Tuesday was a campsite the enemy had abandoned sometime before the battle. Because of all the recent snow and rain, it proved impossible for the scouts to tell just how old the site truly was. For the better part of a quarter of an hour, the men all watched Miles silently move among the now-dead fire pits until he stopped, staring south for the longest time.
When he finally turned, the colonel told his staff, “Inform the company commanders that we are doing an about-face.”
Baldwin argued with his characteristic enthusiasm, “But, General—they can’t be that far ahead of us!”
Wagging his head with resignation, Miles replied, “That may well be, Lieutenant. But I don’t think we’re going to catch them again this time out. Not this outfit. We’re already in trouble with our rations and grain for the stock.”
“We’ll march back to bivouac?” asked James Casey.
“Yes,” and Miles nodded.
“Let me volunteer to pursue them with a battalion,” Baldwin offered. “I can follow their trail and catch Crazy Horse unawares just like I caught Sitting—”
“No, Lieutenant,” Miles interrupted as Baldwin was warming up to his appeal. “From the looks of things the hostiles are trying to make their way to the Bighorns.”
“I can follow them even there,” Baldwin pleaded. “You just give me the men and some animals—”
“And your men would eat what, Lieutenant?” Miles paused a moment to let that sink in for all of them gathered around him. “I don’t have enough in the wagons for this outfit to have full rations on our march back to the Yellowstone, much less to supply a battalion that might be in the field for God knows how many days. And the weather, Mr. Baldwin … this goddamned weather! No man can say with any certainty just what the sky is going to do to us next in this country! No, Lieutenant—let’s all just say we’ve done our damage, and that we’re going home.”
Kelly stepped up with his reins in hand. “As chief of scouts, I agree with the general,” he told the officers. “The Crazy Horse people are done for. It’s just a matter of time—no more than weeks at the most—before he has no choice but to take his people in to the reservation.”
The colonel nodded with that support. “Yes, I think Crazy Horse is finished, Kelly. If he doesn’t turn his village around and come in to surrender very soon, I’m certain a lot of his people are going to die from a cruel recipe of hunger and bitter cold.”
In the icy bottomland of the Tongue River, Miles ordered his six companies to turn about and march north to their bivouac.
The weary, hungry foot soldiers reached their wagon camp near dusk.
* * *
A crusty layer of new snow greeted the soldiers on the morning of the tenth as they rolled out to another day promising more subfreezing temperatures, in addition to a long march north and repeated crossings of the Tongue River.
In the last few predawn hours no groans were heard from the surgeons’ tent. Seamus figured Dr. Tilton had finally put enough laudanum down Private Bernard McCann to put the poor soldier completely out. For the last two nights McCann had clearly been in tremendous pain from the bullet wound that had smashed through his upper right femur, the heaviest bone in the body.
Merciful God, if you plan on taking the man, make it quick, Seamus had asked through the long hours of the past tw
o nights when he could not sleep for listening to the soldier’s pain. Let him go in peace, I pray you.
“We’re eating with the general this morning,” Kelly announced as he came up out of the cold dawn to the sheltered place where Donegan had hunkered out of the wind between a couple of fallen cottonwood.
As Seamus finished wrapping his blankets inside the thick, waterproof canvas ducking of his bedroll, he asked, “What’s on the menu?”
“Same as yesterday. Same as the day before,” Kelly replied. “Same as we had the day before that.”
Standing, Seamus rubbed his stomach with one hand in mock delight. “You sure know how to get a man’s appetite up, don’t you?”
Then the grin washed from Kelly’s face. “You’re still serious about this morning, are you? Still set on leaving us to ride south?”
With a nod Seamus said, “I’ll light out after breakfast with Miles. Go see for myself how the country looks southeast from here.”
“Injun sign?”
Donegan got to his feet and tossed the bedroll atop his saddle and blanket, lying there at the bottom of the tree where the two rifles stood ready. He wagged his head in resignation, then sighed, “This army’s flushed ’em … again. No telling where they’re scattering now.”
Miles turned at the sound of their approach, along with most of those staff officers and a few of the scouts who had bedded down at a nearby fire. The colonel stepped away from his headquarters group, once again looking massive in his buffalo coat and dark, bushy beard.
“So, Kelly—have you convinced Mr. Donegan here to stay on with us?”
“I don’t think there was ever a chance of that, General,” Kelly replied, shrugging in apology.
“You could have a dangerous ride ahead of you,” Miles said, holding his hand out to welcome Donegan to the fire.
Seamus shook the colonel’s hand. “Not the first one of those I’ve had.”
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