Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876 tp-10

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Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876 tp-10 Page 58

by Terry C. Johnston


  Her eyes smiled first.

  “Good,” he sighed. “I was afraid something we had for dinner had given your stomach a twist.”

  Now her whole face smiled, and she licked her lips in the dry autumn-night air. Looking up at him from the corners of her eyes as she had that very first night they had met back in the Panhandle of west Texas, Samantha straightened.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “Let’s finish our walk.”

  Minutes later she snuggled even closer to his side as they moved along, both her arms encircling one of his. Sam asked, “Are you going to take Colonel Mackenzie up on his offer and go with him, Seamus?”

  “I’m not even going to consider it. Not with the baby due next month. It has been eight months, hasn’t it?”

  “Near as I could count, Seamus,” she said with that giggle. “I never was much good at arithmetic.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I want to be here when the babe comes. I’ll stay here and Mackenzie can march without me.”

  “But—he asked you himself to go along. There at dinner tonight. Seamus, how can you turn him down, with all that you were through together in Texas? After all, he’s the colonel of the Fourth Cavalry, for God’s sake! Asking you to scout for him.”

  “I scouted for him one winter already,” Donegan replied with a single wag of his head. “That was enough. So I’ve got a far better plan for this coming winter: to stay close to the home fires when the winter winds come howling off those mountains north of here.”

  It took her several moments; then she finally said the words as if she had been rehearsing them: “Seamus, long ago I realized what you were—the sort of man you are. I think I knew what you were before you ever asked me to be your wife. I knew what you had to be before I loved you, what you were when you rode off to fight for Ranald Mackenzie two winters ago.”

  “But don’t you see—it took that winter campaign for me to find out just how much I loved you, Sam.”

  “And you came back to me, didn’t you, Seamus?”

  He looked at her a moment while she stopped and turned into him. “Yes,” he replied a bit quizzically. “I came back to you.”

  “And you came back to me twelve days ago. Which just goes to prove that you will always return, because you love me.”

  He bent slightly and kissed her. “Never any doubt of that in my mind.”

  “And now I’ve come to realize it too, Seamus. No matter that you went away last winter. No matter that you’ve been gone since spring.”

  “All that is in the past because I’m going to stay with you now. This babe will know it has a father. I want to be there when your time comes. No, Sam. Mackenzie can go find the hostiles without me. It will be a cold day in hell before I go marching off to fight again.”

  A sudden look of something like pinched confusion crossed her face; then Sam squinted her eyes and murmured under her breath an oath against the pain while she slowly bent at the waist, doubling over. He held on to her the best he could, afraid she was going to crumple then and there in the dried and brittle grasses at the outskirts of Fort Laramie, there at the edge of the timeless, leafless trees.

  All he could do was grow more frightened as he steadied her. Breathing in shallow puffs, Sam panted rapidly, like a dog come in from chasing hares across a meadow. This business of women and babes was something he did not understand. Something he doubted men would ever understand.

  “Oh-oh-oh-oh!” she grumbled, weaving her body side to side slowly as she groaned, rubbing at her belly.

  In moments her breath grew deeper. No longer as fast as it had been. And slowly she straightened.

  “I wish I could take the pain from you myself,” he told her.

  She glanced up at him as she began to rise, her eyes glistening. “Pain is just part of all the joy this child will bring us.”

  “There was times I hurt just like that,” Seamus explained, not knowing what else he could say to make her realize he was trying to understand, “—after eating horse meat day after day. We had us nothing else. Believe me: I know just how bad a bellyache can hurt.”

  When she finally straightened and drew back her shoulders, Sam put her two mittens along Seamus’s cheeks and sighed, “Silly man—how I love you so. But I don’t think it’s anything I ate.”

  “You had me scared there for a minute. Are you feeling good enough to finish our walk?”

  She pulled his face down with her mittens to kiss his lips. Smiling, Samantha gazed into his eyes, saying, “I’m afraid I’m going to ask you to take me back to our room early tonight.”

  “Tired, Sam?” Then he shook his head, feeling like a fool. “Of course you are. A woman this close to having a baby is bound to get tired easy enough.”

  “No,” she explained softly, letting his cheeks go and taking a secure hold on his left arm. “At least your son waited until his father returned before he made his debut.”

  “W-what?”

  “You silly, silly goose,” she said, patting his arm. “You better get me back to our room now, so you can go fetch Martha Luhn or Elizabeth Burt.”

  She started out again, but he was rooted to the spot. This was confusing him—scaring him really—making him stammer like a schoolboy presenting a handmade valentine to a freckle-faced girl with braids and ribbons and rosy cheeks. “F-fetch them … why?”

  “Yes, Seamus—I’m going to need someone there who knows about this sort of thing.”

  “S-sort of thing?”

  “Don’t you see, Seamus?” she replied as she tugged that tall plainsman back toward the buildings, the parade, and their room beyond. “I think your son is coming tonight.”

  Afterword

  What began with such bright hope and almost cocky optimism in the winter campaign quickly deteriorated into a disappointing spring after the Powder River debacle, then nearly fell completely apart in the first days of what would turn out to be a disastrous summer.

  Back in the fall of seventy-five Sherman and Sheridan had hatched a brilliant plan to take President Grant off the horns of his thorny dilemma: in order to wrest the Black Hills from the Sioux and Cheyenne, the government had to find a way that would compel the tribes to break the law. Then Washington City could send in the army to settle the matter quickly, efficiently. All those who would not obediently return to their agencies would be deemed hostile and subject to annihilation.

  That plan was succeeding beautifully in all respects, except one. Instead of convincing the winter roamers— those true, free-roaming warrior bands—to give up their old way of life and return to the reservations, the warrior bands had gone and whipped the army. Yet despite losing so many of its battles, the army was eventually to win the war.

  For the better part of seven years following the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, Congress had steadfastly refused to entertain any idea of taking back the territory it had granted the tribes in that historic agreement—despite the growing clamor from various and powerful economic and political constituencies back east who were coming to agree that the Black Hills, rich in gold that could be found at the grass roots, should be settled and mined. In a turn of the biblical phrase: it was the duty of white Christians to subdue that portion of the earth and make it fruitful.

  It simply would not do to leave so fruitful a region in the hands of savages who were doing nothing to reap the harvest from that land.

  But now that Reynolds had been driven off the Powder, now that Crook had been forced back to Goose Creek to lick his wounds, now that half of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry had been rubbed out, forcing General Alfred Terry back to tend to his own psychic wounds on the Yellowstone—now that the army had suffered so many setbacks, Congress was suddenly of a new mind. Washington’s conscience was a’changing.

  Yet it wasn’t just the nation’s representatives who clamored for results. Reeling from the startling banner headlines that second week of July in their very own Centennial summer, the body politic, the public itself, raised a strident demand for act
ion. Raised their own call to arms!

  As John S. Gray puts it:

  The Secretary [of War J. D. Cameron] solemnly proclaimed that the terms of the Sioux treaty had been “literally performed on the part of the United States.” (By sending thousands to invade the reservation?) Even most of the Sioux had likewise honored the treaty, but some “have always treated it with contempt,” by continuing “to rove at pleasure.” (A practice legalized by the treaty!) They had even gone so far as to “attack settlements, steal horses, and murder peaceful inhabitants.” (These victims were white violators of the treaty who dealt the Indians worse than they received!)

  Cameron’s report went on to read like nothing more than perfect bureaucratic doublespeak:

  No part of these operations is on or near the Sioux reservation. The accidental discovery of gold on the western border of the Sioux reservation, and the intrusion of our people thereon, have not caused this war …

  Citizens back east knew their government had been feeding, clothing, educating the Sioux and Cheyenne at their agencies. And now those ungrateful Indians had bitten the hand that fed them! Shocked and dismayed, the public cried out that simple justice required stern punishment.

  So Sherman and Sheridan wouldn’t find it at all hard to get what they wanted by midsummer, within days of the disastrous news from the Little Bighorn reaching the East. Suddenly after three years of balking at General Sheridan’s request for money to build two forts in the heart of Sioux country, Congress promptly appropriated the funds to begin construction at a pair of sites on the Yellowstone: one at the mouth of the Big Horn and the other at the mouth of the Tongue.

  A few weeks later—after a delay caused only by some heated, vitriolic debate over the relative merits of Volunteers versus Regulars—Congress additionally raised the ceiling on army strength, a move that allowed recruiting another twenty-five hundred privates for a sorely tried U.S. cavalry. By railcar and riverboat steamer, these new privates were uniformed and outfitted and were being rushed to the land of the Sioux by late summer.

  On the last day of July, Congress authorized the President to take all necessary steps to prevent metallic cartridges from reaching Sioux country. Two weeks later Grant signed into law a bill that raised the strength of Enlisted Indian Scouts to one thousand. And only three days later he put his name on a bill raising the manpower strength of all cavalry companies to one hundred men for each company.

  Sherman and Sheridan now had their “total war,” just the same sort of scorched-earth warfare they had waged so successfully through Georgia and the Shenandoah. In their minds there were no noncombatants. Any woman or child, any Indian sick or old, was deemed the enemy by virtue of not huddling close to the agencies. As far as General Sheridan was concerned, it wasn’t just a matter of using his troops to drive the roamers back to their reservations. This was a war of vengeance against an enemy who had embarrassed, even humiliated, his army.

  The last, but by no means the least, of the pieces to their plan, was that Sheridan was finally to get what he had wanted ever since he had come west at the end of the Civil War.

  With war fever infecting Washington by the end of that July, Secretary of the Interior Chandler turned over to the army “control over all the agencies in the Sioux country.” Both the agents at Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were to be removed without cause and their duties assumed by the commanders of the nearby Camp Robinson (at Red Cloud) and Camp Sheridan (at Spotted Tail). The army would soon begin to demand the “unconditional surrender” of every Indian who returned to the reservations in the wake of the army’s big push. No matter that they might be coming in from a hunt, all Indians on the agencies had to surrender their weapons and ponies. They were considered prisoners of war.

  So what of those who had remained on the reservations?

  It made no difference to the army now in control of the agencies. Not a single penny of their appropriations, not one mouthful of flour or rancid ounce of bacon would be given out until the Sioux had first relinquished all claim to their unceded lands.

  “Give back the Black Hills or starve!”

  Only 40 of the 2,267 adult males required by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 to sell their Paha Sapa eventually signed the agreement the government commissioners foisted upon them.

  But by then the Battle of Slim Buttes had already taken place. And Slim Buttes was clearly the beginning of the end.

  The Sioux and Cheyenne had already ridden the meteor’s tail to the zenith of their success at Rosebud Creek and the Greasy Grass. Yet within eleven weeks of their stunning victories, their demise and ultimate defeat were already sealed at what was an otherwise inconsequential fight at Slim Buttes. In a matter of months Crazy Horse would surrender in the south, and Sitting Bull would limp across the Medicine Line into the Land of the Grandmother with the last of his holdouts.

  Both of them giving up the good fight.

  To learn more about what took place during that dramatic summer among both the warrior villages and the army camps in the territory surrounding the Little Bighorn River country, I offer the following suggested titles I have used to write my story of this Summer of the Sioux:

  Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry, by George F. Price

  Battles and Skirmishes of the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877, the Military View, edited by Jerome A. Greene

  Blood on the Moon: Valentine McGillycuddy and the Sioux, by Julia B. McGillycuddy

  Campaigning with Crook, by Captain Charles King, U.S.A.

  Campaigning with King: Charles King, Chronicler of the Old Army, edited by Paul L. Hedren

  Centennial Campaign: The Sioux War of 1876, by John S. Gray

  The Chronicles of the Yellowstone, by E. S. Topping

  Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors, by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas, by Mari Sandoz

  Death on the Prairie: The Thirty Years’ Struggle for the Western Plains, by Paul I. Wellman

  First Scalp for Custer: The Skirmish at Warbonnet Creek, by Paul L. Hedren

  Following the Indian Wars: The Story of Newspaper Correspondents among the Indian Campaigners, by Oliver Knight

  Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay: The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars, by Don Rickey, Jr.

  Frank Grouard, Army Scout, edited by Margaret Brock Hanson

  Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891, by Robert M. Utley

  General George Crook: His Autobiography, edited by Martin F. Schmitt

  The Great Sioux War, 1876-77, edited by Paul L. Hedren

  “I Am Looking to the North for My Life”: Sitting Bull, 18761881, by Joseph Manzione

  Indian Fights and Fighters, by Cyrus Townsend Brady

  Indian Fights: New Facts on Seven Encounters, by J. W. Vaughn

  Indians, Infants and Infantry: Andrew and Elizabeth Burt on the Frontier, by Merrill J. Mattes

  The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull, by Robert M. Utley

  Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, by Joe DeBarthe

  The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill, by Don Russell

  My Sixty Years on the Plains, by W. T. Hamilton

  My Story, by Anson Mills

  Nelson A. Miles: A Documentary Biography of His Military Career, 1861-1903, edited by Brian C. Pohanka

  On the Border with Crook, by John G. Bourke

  Paper Medicine Man: John Gregory Bourke and His American West, by Joseph C. Porter

  Personal Recollections and Observations, by General Nelson A. Miles

  The Plainsmen of the Yellowstone, by Mark H. Brown

  Rekindling Campfires, edited by Lewis F. Crawford

  The Shoshonis: Sentinels of the Rockies, by Virginia Cole Trenholm and Maurine Carley

  Sitting Bull: Champion of the Sioux, by Stanley Vestal

  The Slim Buttes Battle: September 9 and 10, 1876, by Fred H. Werner

  Slim Buttes, 1876: An Epi
sode of the Great Sioux War, by Jerome A. Greene

  War Cries on Horseback: The Story of the Indian Wars of the Great Plains, by Stephen Longstreet

  War Eagle: A Life of General Eugene A. Carr, by James T. King

  Warpath: A True Story of the Fighting Sioux, by Stanley Vestal

  War-Path and Bivouac: The Bighorn and Yellowstone Expedition, by John F. Finerty

  Warpath and Council Fire: The Plains Indians’ Struggle for Survival in War and in Diplomacy, 1851-1891, by Stanley Vestal

  Washakie: An Account of Indian Resistance, by Grace Raymond Hebard

  Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer, interpreted by Thomas B. Marquis

  Yellowstone Command: Colonel Nelson A. Miles and the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877, by Jerome A. Greene

  There are some who place no confidence whatsoever in Frank Grouard’s recollections when he told Joe DeBarthe years later that he scouted north from Crook’s camp and ran across that piece of ground just east of the Little Bighorn that would come to be known as Massacre Ridge. But by carefully studying the maps of the terrain between Goose Creek and the Greasy Grass, by considering how fast (or how slow) a man on horseback might travel in hostile country after dark, and finally, by adjusting what the half-breed scout recounted by as little as one day—I was able to see just how feasible it would have been for Grouard and his skittish horse to have found themselves among those naked, mutilated, bloated bodies of the Custer dead.

  So it seems to me more than reasonable to expect that Grouard could get his facts skewed by a day or so—seeing as how he dictated his Ufe story decades after the fact.

  Yet when I’m given an opportunity to read an account fresher than Grouard’s, something written closer to the event—I’ll go with it every time.

  For example, there isn’t all that much written on the harrowing adventures of those men who went for that scout with Lieutenant Frederick Sibley. And what is available often varies in the details. Here I have relied on four sources: Sibley’s own account, Frank Grouard’s recollections, those of John Finerty, and the dictated recollections of Baptiste “Big Bat” Pourier. Since Grouard, Pourier, and Sibley all related their stories many years later, for this novel I have primarily embraced the Chicago newsman’s version (with few, minor exceptions)—since I could draw what I believed was a fresher tale from the reporter’s dispatches written immediately after his return to Camp Cloud Peak.

 

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