Having had nothing to eat since leaving Crook’s column, the men knew the plums and coffee were better than nothing at all. Fear is always a poor feast for an empty stomach.
Just past three o’clock, not long after the thickest of the fog lifted, Seamus watched Frank Grouard reappear at the top of a rise more than a mile ahead of the column. Expecting Frank once more to do as he had been doing most of the day, checking on the column’s advance as he kept far in the lead, turning around after a moment to disappear again over the hilltop, Donegan was surprised this time when the half-breed rode back toward the column, at a gallop.
Off on the far left flank Jack Crawford had seen Grouard too and was loping back toward the van of Mills’s column.
“C’mon, ol’ boy. Time to find out what’s got Frank so spooked he’s willing to kill his horse to tell about it.”
The half-breed was already telling his story to Mills and his officers by the time Donegan got near enough to hear snatches of the tale.
“… ridge yonder … some three miles.”
Grouard was pointing. Time and again he turned in the saddle, pointing toward the Buttes that they had been skirting to the east ever since morning.
“Herd of ponies. Forty. Maybe a few more.”
“Sioux?”
By now Seamus picked up all of Frank’s answer. “Chances are good, Colonel. That’s who we been following, ain’t we?”
“You see anything of a village?”
Donegan came to a halt in that knot of horsemen as Grouard replied, “A small one. Down in a little bowl made by a ravine that cuts down from the bluffs. Think the Sioux call it Rabbit Lip Creek.”
Glancing at the western sky and the aging of the day, the captain asked his head scout, “Can we take them at dawn?”
Grouard nodded. “Only time to do it. I saw hunters south of their camp. Coming in with game. Might be other camps nearby.”
The captain licked his lips, then grumbled, “Don’t doubt they’ve found game. Red bastards been running off everything in this country.” Then Mills stood in the stirrups, peering off to the east. “Crawford,” he said, flinging his voice to the scout, “did you pass anything back on your side of the column what might conceal the command for a few hours?”
“Yes, sir, Colonel,” Jack Crawford answered. “I can show you a place where we can lay in for a while.”
“Lead us there,” and Mills turned to his lieutenants. “Gentlemen, have the command follow that scout into hiding. We’ll discuss our options once we’re sure we haven’t been discovered.”
“Options?” Lieutenant Schwatka asked.
“Yes,” Mills replied. “Whether or not to attack.”
“I thought our primary mission was to secure food for the column, Colonel,” said George F. Chase.
Mills’s brow knitted in consternation and he said, “Just take your men into hiding, Lieutenant.”
Behind a low ridge northeast of the enemy village, with his troops concealed and pickets posted to guard against their discovery, Mills put the question up for discussion. About half of the officers and noncoms urged caution, voicing concern for attacking an enemy village of unknown strength, while the other half cheered for an immediate attack.
“It’s time we finally got in our licks,” added Adolphus Von Leuttwitz.
“But do we know just what we’re charging into?” asked Emmet-Crawford.
“Sure as hell Custer didn’t,” Chase groaned.
Bubb said, “Colonel Mills, as your second in command, I suggest we send word back to General Crook immediately, before we pitch into anything.”
“Request denied, Lieutenant,” Mills snapped, clearly tiring of the debate. “I’m sure you will all remember certain Academy courses in military strategy—even in philosophy—that teach just how often success, even victory, rests upon a man making his own luck, taking what advantages there are and striking quickly.”
“Besides,” Von Leuttwitz said, “we all know the Indians won’t stand and fight. They’ll scatter before a vigorous cavalry charge.”
Then Mills added, “I want you all to remember that we might do what some of you suggest and make a wide detour of that village—only to find that tomorrow some hunting party discovers our tracks and sets out in pursuit of our tired horses. No, I say—this is our chance to seize the advantage.”
After a spirited argument of it, Mills finally called an end to the discussion and told his officers he had decided they would retire a safe distance, and there the command would wait out Grouard’s scout of the village.
“And if it will make you all feel better, I’ll go with Grouard myself to determine the makeup of the village,” Mills explained, quieting the murmured clamor. “How many lodges and wickiups, how many warriors might be in there.” He looked at the half-breed. “We’ll find out what we’re facing.”
He then ordered Crawford and Donegan to lead the soldiers to the rear and hide themselves in a brushy ravine 150 feet deep with a narrow stream running through the bottom.
At twilight Donegan settled into the soggy mud beside Mills. “Colonel, you figure we ought to send a rider back to alert Crook that you’ve run onto a village?”
Mills turned as if smarting at the question. “I’ll know that answer as soon as I return from making a reconnaissance with Grouard, Mr. Donegan.”
“Didn’t mean to rile you, Colonel. But the both of us can remember what we pitched into over on the Powder River last winter, remember how we expected reinforcements to show up from the rear—”
“My memory isn’t faulty, Mr. Donegan,” Mills snapped, getting to his feet. “This, I assure you, is nothing like that. Our situation is that Crook remains far behind, and unavailable for support.”
“But if we give him a chance to know what we’re pitching into, maybe we could hold off till he could get here.”
“I’ll trust you to keep your nervous worries to yourself, Mr. Donegan—and leave the military planning to me. Your anxiety has already infected Lieutenant Bubb. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I figure it’s dark enough to reconnoiter the enemy’s stronghold.”
Seamus watched the captain move off through the soldiers, who dozed or talked in small groups, smoking their pipes and boiling their coffee over small fires ignited at the bottom of pits. A crumb of hard bread and a scrap of bacon broiled on a stick would have to do while some of the packers boiled down a soup of pork grease and a few handfuls of flour.
Seamus decided he would save what little he had left— certain there would be wounded. At times like this—with the waiting and the unknown and the dread—if a man only thought of someone else, he could feel the presence of something bigger than himself.
Refusing to listen to the growl of his aching stomach, he tried to sleep but only dozed, part of him painfully aware of every new sound in the misty night. Sometime later he made out Grouard’s voice. Donegan went over to hear the half-breed’s report on the layout of the village.
“You went in by yourself and just walked back out with them two ponies?” Seamus asked after Mills had turned aside to organize his lieutenants for the attack. Grouard held the leads to a pair of Indian horses—one a beautiful pinto, the other a sleek black stallion.
“I told the colonel the village might be too big for us. Then he said he didn’t take me for a coward.”
Donegan asked, “Too big—how many lodges?”
Looking away, Grouard answered, “Maybe forty, forty-five lodges.”
Seamus studied the half-breed. “We can take ’em, can’t we, Frank?”
“I went in there, didn’t I?”
“That should prove to Mills you aren’t a coward.”
“Told him the both of us couldn’t go no closer together. He smells like a white man. And the dogs was likely to start barking.”
“But you didn’t answer me straight, Frank: we gonna be able to take that village?”
When the scout did not reply as he continued to stroke the muzzle of the black pony, Seamus sai
d, “How’d you get your spoils of battle?”
Grouard shrugged. “I lived with the Lakota before. I can look Injun.”
“Good for you, Frank. Besides, the warrior those ponies belonged to won’t be needing them pretty soon anyway, right?”
“Injuns don’t need good horses like these—right.”
“But you’re a damn fool to take that chance of getting caught, and getting these sojurs killed with you.”
Grouard glared at Donegan. “Didn’t ever know you to get so worried about a little danger before, Irishman.”
“Maybe you’re right—just say I’m getting nervous in my old age,” Seamus replied. “This a bunch you know?”
Now he wagged his head. “Didn’t see a thing I recognized. Maybeso they’re Sans Arc. Maybe Miniconjou or Burnt Thigh—the Brule. Nobody I know in there.”
Donegan said, “You be sure to come get me when Mills is ready to go in.”
Grouard nodded and moved off with his two new Sioux ponies.
Trudging back to his clump of buffalo-berry brush he shared with Crawford, Donegan glanced at the clouds suspended low overhead. They seemed to hang just beyond the reach of his fingertips. Even in their grayness the clouds reflected the orange dance of the crimson-titted fires buried in their tiny pits. For a moment he stopped and peered off to the southwest, in the direction of that long ridge of buttes, wondering if the hostiles were paying attention to the night sky, hoping they would not notice the far-off glow reflected from so many soldier fires.
Then he tugged his hat brim down and set off again through the rain, hoping the foul weather would keep the Indians in their lodges. Praying.
When he reached the brush, Seamus pulled his collar up around his neck and sank back to the ground, leaning against the wet saddle and closing his eyes, tried for some sleep. Instead of peace he dreamed fitfully on Samantha. Finding her calling him out there in the fog, her voice edged with worry. He could not find her, no matter how hard he tried—going this way, then that, as he plunged madly through the soupy fog and driving rain.
She kept calling to him, never coming any closer. He suddenly shuddered in the cold, awakening himself.
In the darkness he crossed himself, thinking on these starving, worn-out men and animals. Their horses were covered with oozing sores, and what the men had left of their uniforms was now little more than wet rags that clung to their skeletal frames as they shivered in the cold. Some wiped their gun barrels to kill time, or polished their meager supply of cartridges to make the sleepless hours pass.
Sometime before midnight some of Moore’s mules tried to stampede but were kept from escaping by the horse guard. A while later at a clap of nearby thunder some of the cavalry mounts did make a break for freedom, but the troopers rounded them up and brought the horses back, once more driving the picket pins into the soggy ground that simply had no hope of holding those iron stakes secure.
They were a good bunch, Seamus decided. When these men should have been filled with nothing greater than fear at their own survival, nothing greater than despair—most had rallied at the prospect of getting in their blows, their spirits raised at this chance to even the score for the frustrating stalemate on the Rosebud, for Custer’s disaster on the Little Bighorn.
With nothing in their bellies they would be going into battle.
So it was the Irishman crossed himself and started mouthing the words that came back to him despite all the intervening years. Words taught him long, long ago by that village priest back in County Kilkenny. The sort of catechism one never forgot. Here on the brink of battle asking God to watch over and protect, to hold him in the Almighty’s hand.
After all these years wherein he had never darkened the door of a church—to discover that he was still steeped in that faith a fighting man never really lost.
Chapter 37
8-9 September 1876
If John Bourke had learned anything at all during his years with George Crook, it was that the general could surprise his men with a sudden change of his mind.
And he did just that at dawn on the morning of the eighth.
It was raining again, raining still. With every man in that bivouac expecting that they would be laying over for the day, just as Crook had promised, no one saw much sense in getting up and moving about. The news shot through their forlorn camp like a galvanic shock wave.
“Boots and saddles, boys!” the old sergeants bellowed.
One of those most surprised growled, “What the hell for?”
“What for, you ask?” sneered an old file. “Why, the general’s issued marching orders, me fine young fellers. So you’ll be dancing a merry tune soon enough, you will.”
Crook did indeed have them up and out of the mud, and marching off that Friday morning—the general’s very own forty-eighth birthday. It hadn’t taken long for the men to finish what crumbs of hard bread they could scrape from the bottom of their packs and haversacks, richer yet if they still possessed a sliver of the rancid bacon tucked away in one of their pockets. All most could do for themselves was to carve a stringy steak from one of the nearby carcasses. And if a half dozen of them could scrape together enough for a shared cup of coffee, they felt all the more royal for it—even close to human as the infantry set out on the flanks of the plodding cavalry, moving across that inland sea of mud and fog, wispy sheets of rain driven on the back of a biting wind.
No matter what was on the menu that morning, it had been more of the milky, bitter water for all, and a matter of tightening one’s belt another notch.
After no more than an hour the gaunt animals again began to falter, and the troopers went afoot. On either side of the straggling cavalry, foot soldiers plodded by in their gummy brogans, as cheerful as any man could be, calling out to their comrades in the cavalry.
“Say, yez boys! You want us give you a tow!”
“Yeah,” cried another footslogger, “for a small fee, why—we’ll be happy to tow you and your bag-of-bones horse there all the way to the Black Hills!”
For most of that morning the horse soldiers struggled to keep their animals going. But by noon the shooting began once more, and soon the backtrail was littered with carcasses, the bony dead over which the men clustered like predatory scarecrows, like flocks of robber jays, each with his own knife, hacking free a choice flank steak he would suck and chew on as he trudged forward in the wake of George Crook, doggedly making for the Black Hills.
They put twenty-four miles behind them that day, through the fog, across the muddy wilderness, dragging their weapons and what horses did not fall, what carcasses were not left behind to mark the passing of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition. That day at least the wind pummeled them from behind—not straight into their faces.
When the advance reached a tributary of the South Fork of the Grand River, they went into camp. It was a blessing to find that here there was wood, albeit wet wood. But the first firewood they had run across in something on the order of ninety miles. In no time hundreds of smoky fires smudged the twilit sky as the commissary officers selected the three poorest animals from each company to be shot, butchered, and fed to the men. For tonight Crook’s soldiers would not have to haunt the backtrail like thieves and shammers, butchering the fallen horses for the best steaks after the column had marched on.
Horse tenderloin wasn’t on the menu for Surgeon Clements’s sick cases that evening. At sundown the scouts brought in five antelope. There were plenty of plums as well as bullberries to be found with a little hunting along the banks.
Once some of the deadfall in that riverside camp began to dry out near the fires despite the continuing rains, and once the men started cooking their stringy meat on the end of sharpened tree limbs, John Bourke saw the spirits of most lift a few notches. He had never thought he would see morale sink as low as it had the past two days. What more they would have to face before Mills got back from Deadwood, he dared not consider.
For most it was impossible to sleep again that nig
ht, forced to hunker close to the fires they would keep feeding with damp, smoky wood until dawn. Amazing, John thought sometime after ten o’clock that night, how a little warmth could give a man a bit of pluck.
“Happy birthday, General!”
Coming up out of the dark was Wesley Merritt, along with Eugene Carr and William Royall, Alexander Chambers and ten more battalion officers.
“Gendemen,” Crook called out. “Come in out of the rain.”
Bourke and the general scooted shoulder to shoulder to allow the others room under the overhanging shelf of rock they had located along the riverbank.
“No birthday feast tonight, General?” Carr asked with a great smile.
“No, but a man won’t have a problem quenching his thirst!” Crook roared.
“I’m a hippophagist at last!” Carr said, then rocked with laughter.
“What’s that, sir?” Bourke asked. “I’ve never heard the term.”
“It means he eats horses,” Merritt answered grimly. Carr nodded and said, “I’ve become a real connoisseur.”
“I expect we won’t have to eat our horses too much longer,” Crook explained. “If our scouts are correct in the distance remaining to Deadwood City, we should expect to meet Bubb’s pack-train coming back sometime on the eleventh.”
Royall said, “Tonight let’s just be thankful we found some wood for the men.”
“That truly is a blessing,” Crook replied as he stuffed a hand inside his worn wool coat to pull out a sixteen-ounce German silver flask.
“Is … is that what I think it is, General?” Carr asked, flushed with anticipation.
Twisting loose the cap, Crook held it beneath his nose, then said, “Yes, gentlemen. A man’s due on his birthday, don’t you think? Especially when he’s celebrated as many birthdays as I have.”
Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876 tp-10 Page 40