A Cold Day in Hell

by Terry C. Johnston

  Already he could see that he could not make it to the center of camp. Suddenly there were too many horsemen forming up, galloping to meet him. His way was blocked.

  In panic, his eyes shot over the nearby lodges being raised. But ahead, close at hand, there was a big one. Well painted with dream symbols. A tripod stood outside with many scalps hanging from it. This man must surely be a war chief. Besides, it was one of the few already erected and close at hand.

  Outside the big lodge he dismounted before his horse even stopped, and ducked within the lodge door without ceremony. Outside the children screeched in their high voices, the women shouting to their men that a white man had just invaded their camp, a lone white man. But inside the lodge all remained eerily quiet.

  Before him the middle-aged warrior looked Johnny over carefully. The wrinkled, copper-skinned woman said nothing at all, but went back to laying out the buffalo robes and blankets while her husband eventually went on loading his pipe.

  “Welcome,” the warrior said finally as he raised a twig from the fire he had started with flint and steel.

  When Johnny answered in Lakota, “Thank you,” no surprise seemed to register on the warrior’s face.

  “Sit. We will have something to eat soon. Would you like to smoke with me?”

  Bruguier answered, “Yes—”

  But there would be no smoking, not just yet, for at that moment a wide-shouldered warrior burst through the open doorway and stood to his full height within the lodge, towering over the old warrior and his sudden guest.

  “White Bull!” the young warrior cried, gesturing aggressively at Bruguier.

  “You are welcome too, One Horn,” White Bull said, gesturing for the warrior to sit. “Even though you left your manners outside this afternoon.”

  The young man sputtered angrily, “Is this man a friend?”

  White Bull pulled on the pipe stem, drawing smoke into his mouth and lungs for several moments, then exhaled it and regarded the smoke that he cupped in a hand and dragged over the top of his head in a sacred fashion. “He is in my lodge. And we will eat soon. You are welcome to stay and eat with us.”

  “Sitting Bull wants to know,” the young warrior spat. “If he is your friend, then the Bull wants you to bring this visitor to his lodge. But if he is not your friend, then Sitting Bull says we can kill him.”

  White Bull’s eyes dropped to look at Bruguier. For a long time he seemed to study the swarthy-skinned intruder wearing the clothes of a white man. After interminably long minutes, he looked back at One Horn.

  “We will go to Sitting Bull’s lodge … together.”

  “S-sitting Bull?” Johnny asked in a croak. “The same Sitting Bull who crushed the soldiers at the Greasy Grass?”

  “Yes,” White Bull said. “Come, now. We will go see my uncle.”

  Plunging through the long, jostling gauntlet of angry, oath-spitting warriors and keening, screeching women and old men, White Bull and Bruguier followed One Horn, who wore a provocative headdress with its single buffalo horn jutting from the wearer’s forehead. While the trip did not require that many steps, it nonetheless seemed like an eternity to Johnny. These people screamed to take his scalp, his hide removed one torturous inch at a time. They wanted him to suffer horribly. That much he understood in their Lakota harangue.

  Soon he could see the end of that gauntlet—the big un-painted lodge had its bottom rolled up some five feet all around its entire circumference so that the cool breeze could penetrate the interior. Perhaps so that onlookers could watch Sitting Bull’s conference with this sudden intruder to this camp of Miniconjou and Sans Arc who had joined the great chief’s Hunkpapa in their summer wanderings between the two armies—one army north, one army south.

  “This one is your friend, White Bull?” the chief asked when all were seated.

  “No, he is my guest.”

  “How is he your guest?” a very old man demanded from the far side of the fire.

  “He came to my lodge,” White Bull answered. “Therefore, he is my guest.”

  Sitting Bull looked at the intruder. “What is your name?”

  “Johnny Bruguier.”

  Even though he said his white-man name, and spoke it in English, it caused the chiefs and advisers to mutter among themselves … for the intruder must surely have understood Sitting Bull’s question spoken in Lakota.

  The Bull asked, “You speak our language too?”

  “Yes. It is the language of my mother.”

  With a nod Sitting Bull replied, “This is why you speak our tongue as good as a Sioux.”

  “I am a Sioux,” Johnny replied.

  “You are a half-blood,” growled another old man across the fire. “You are neither white, nor Indian. So you are not a Lakota. This one is like the Grabber! You remember him, Sitting Bull—the Grabber who leads the soldiers down on our villages.”

  One Horn pointed his finger angrily at Bruguier. “I say we kill this one!”

  There arose an instant and loud agreement from many of those squeezed together at the lodgepoles, pressing in a great circle surrounding the Bull’s conference. The chief regarded White Bull’s guest, then stared at the small fire, considering. Again he regarded the intruder once more while the crowd fell to utter silence.

  “Well,” Sitting Bull finally said in a loud voice filled with an awesome command all by itself, “if you are going to kill this man, then kill him. But if you are not—then give him a drink of water. Give him something to eat. And give him a pipe of peace to smoke with us.”

  So it was that from the crowd immediately appeared a canteen that was passed hand-to-hand to Johnny. Bruguier pulled the cork chain from the tin container wrapped in wool and stamped with the initials U S. A bowl of dried meat was set before him, and Sitting Bull motioned for him to eat as the chief went about putting the redstone bowl onto his short pipe stem and loaded it with tobacco.

  “Do you have a Lakota name?”

  “My mother had no brothers to name me at Standing Rock, and my father’s people are white from far to the north. I have no Lakota name.”

  Sitting Bull smiled and his eyes flashed over at White Bull. “This guest of yours, what shall we name him, nephew?”

  For a moment the middle-aged warrior studied Johnny, then motioned for him to stand, there beside the fire, for all to see. Only then did he turn back to Sitting Bull. “Do you see what I will name him?”

  “The way this half-blood dresses?”

  White Bull nodded. “Look at his big leggings.”

  A smile crept over Sitting Bull’s face as he stuffed a twist of dried grass into the flames to light his pipe. “Yes—this is good. Half-blood, you are now called Big Leggings.”

  Bruguier had gazed down at his wide, floppy batwing chaps and saw how appropriate the name was. Johnny smiled. White Bull motioned for him to sit and eat.

  Bruguier settled again, repeating his new name in Lakota. “Big Leggings.”

  Now this morning in the cold of early autumn Johnny again thought back fondly on that first day among these people, as a guest welcomed in White Bull’s and Sitting Bull’s lodges. Their welcome had helped to drive away most of his fear of the white man’s strangling rope. As the days became weeks, and the weeks became months, Johnny Bruguier thought less and less on what he had left behind in the white man’s mining settlements. Too, he thought less and less in the white man’s tongue.

  Earlier this autumn Bruguier had taken up arms against the soldiers when Three Stars Crook had attacked American Horse’s band of Miniconjou camped on Rabbit Lip Creek at the Slim Buttes. No matter that there were more soldiers than warriors from the surrounding villages, Three Stars had retreated, run away to the south, fleeing Lakota land.

  Many believed there would be peace now as the Lakota wandered north by west, back toward the Elk River while the air turned cold and the first snows lanced out of the sky. Winter was coming, and they must hunt the buffalo once more to make meat in preparation for the time
of great cold. The herds were gathering north of the Elk River.

  But so were the soldiers, scouts had reported.

  Sitting Bull vowed his people would stay out of the way of the soldiers if they could. But in this same camp Gall still mourned the loss of his wives and children at the fight along the Greasy Grass. In a flux of rage the fierce war chief said the soldiers would drive the buffalo away and make it a very hard winter for their people. He wanted to lead the warriors down on the soldiers soon and drive them off the Elk River for good.

  Still, Sitting Bull said they would wait. And see how the hunting went. So far they had not had much success. Which made for a restless anger growing among the people.

  That cold morning a day after they had crossed to the north side of the Elk River, Johnny was one of the few in camp awake to hear the distant call shouted by the scouts returning from the hills.

  “Soldiers!”

  Bruguier swept up his big blanket coat and mittens, pulling that big floppy hat down on his head, and jabbed his way out of White Bull’s lodge into the cold autumn air.

  “Soldier wagons!” came the cry as the scouts swept into camp.

  Already men were bursting from their lodges, weapons in hand, singing out to one another in excitement and blood oaths.

  “Soldier wagons in the valley beyond the eastern hills! Many mules! Food, blankets, and guns!”

  Then Gall was among them, raising his soldier carbine high overhead, shrieking that now was the time to finish what the white man had started.

  “Come! Let us make war again!” he cried.

  They answered him with hundreds of throats.

  “Come!” Gall bellowed for all to hear. “Let us finish what we started on the Greasy Grass!”

  * Yellowstone River, Montana Territory.

  † On the Cheyenne River, Dakota Territory.

  * The Moreau River, Dakota Territory.

  Chapter 3

  11 October 1876

  “We’re ready to roll, Captain,” said the lieutenant, who sported a thick and jaunty mustache as he saluted his superior officer.

  They both sat on horseback at the head of a jagged column of ninety-four wagons that fall morning as the horizon to the east was only then beginning to pale. Light enough to make out the rutted road to Tongue River.

  “Very good, Lieutenant,” Charles W. Miner replied to the battalion adjutant. “Let’s be off.”

  First Lieutenant Oskaloosa M. Smith reined about and raised an arm in the air, shouting out his order. “For-rad … harch!”

  In a pair of long columns of twos and stretched down either side of the wagon train, four companies of foot soldiers set off under the bellowed echoes of their noncoms. Civilian teamsters slapped long lengths of well-soaped leather down onto the backs of those six-mule teams harnessed to these wagons filled to the gunnels with freight bound away for the army’s cantonment at the mouth of the Tongue River. It was there Colonel Nelson A. Miles’s Fifth Infantry had been throwing up log huts against the coming of what boded to be a very severe and hoary high plains winter.

  Ever since August, in fact … when General Alfred H. Terry had turned Miles back to the Yellowstone with his regiment—there to build a winter cantonment under the orders specified by Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan. There to prevent the hostiles of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse from crossing the Yellowstone, from there having a straight shot of it into Canada. Very plainly the colonel chomped at the bit to be the one who would turn back the Sioux, perhaps even to capture the very chiefs who had mauled and butchered Custer’s regiment.

  “Here we will be a stone rolled squarely into the hostiles’ garden,” Miles was fond of saying as summer waned and slid headlong into autumn.

  The days gradually shortened as Terry and Crook lumbered about in search of the Sioux. And then the soldier chief called the Red Beard found a band of them camped beside the Slim Buttes. Yet in the end, Crook’s men—infantry and cavalry alike—had barely survived getting the hell out of Sioux country, down to eating their horses.

  Somewhere out there Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse still wandered about with their war camps filled with souvenirs from the fight along the Little Bighorn.

  “It won’t be Crook who gets a crack at them now,” Miles had told his officers. “Terry’s scampered back to Lincoln for the winter. And Crook’s gone lame with that horsemeat march. He’s headed back to Laramie with his tail stuck between his legs.”

  By autumn the free-flowing creeks were down to a trickle, no longer carrying a rush of water through this fickle country to the Yellowstone. And with the great river growing more shallow with every day, the steamer captains could no longer urge their paddle wheels clear up to the mouth of the Tongue, where Miles was building his base of operations for the winter. Instead, the pilots could navigate no farther than the mouth of Glendive Creek, a full 110 miles downstream from the Tongue. It was there that Miles had six companies of the Twenty-second Infantry go into camp, guarding the supplies off-loaded from the steamers, soldiers to act as escort for those wagon trains bound up the Yellowstone Valley before winter closed its fist upon this high land.

  In the last few weeks two companies of the Seventeenth Infantry had also arrived on a supply steamer. But they were both small companies—no more than thirty-five men each, which made for long days of weary tedium in their escort duties, what with at least three trips to the Tongue River and back each month. As well as keeping an eye out for the Indians rumor hinted were headed for the Yellowstone.

  But since August, Smith and the rest hadn’t seen so much as a feather, not so much as a warrior along the skyline. Except for the cold and their boring rations, and that grueling work offloading the steamers and loading the wagons … it was pretty tame duty. Then a few days back they had received intelligence from their scouts that some six hundred lodges of hostiles were south of the Yellowstone and moving north. With any luck the Sioux would be more interested in hunting buffalo than in making a nuisance of themselves.

  They had pulled those ninety-four freight wagons and an ambulance away from the Glendive Cantonment just past ten-thirty A.M. yesterday. It hadn’t been long before Smith had noticed the first of the columns of white smoke far in their front beyond the hills. Instantly he recalled how Captain Miner had told his small cadre of officers about his uneasiness, at their breakfast fire when others complained that things had been too quiet.

  “Those Sioux might even intend to intercept us.”

  By the time Smith had reined about and rode back that two hundred yards to the front of the column with his sergeant, most of the soldiers and civilians had already sighted the shafts of signal smoke. Refusing to halt for no reason, Miner kept them moving for the time being as the men grumbled among themselves and the wagons creaked with the cold trace chains jangling in sharp bursts of metallic chatter in the dry air.

  Beneath a brilliant autumn sun things remained quiet throughout the afternoon, despite those ominous signal fires ahead of their line of march. Near five o’clock yesterday the column went into camp at Spring Creek,* at a place the soldiers and teamsters had come to call Fourteen-mile Camp. By firelight Captain Miner wrote in his official journal for the day:

  The camp is in the bed of a creek, and commanded by hills at short range on all sides but the south, where it is open toward the Yellowstone River. There is a good deal of brush, and some timber along the banks of the creek. The corrals were made as compactly as possible for the night, and secured with ropes; the companies were camped close to them, two on each side; thirty-six men and four noncommissioned officers were detailed for guard; two reserves were formed and placed on the flanks not protected by the companies.

  “With all that smoke, them savages surely must be telling someone about us coming,” First Lieutenant Benjamin C. Lockwood had said as night had come down on the 160 men of Miner’s command.

  “Then that means they’re not strong enough to chance hitting us,” First Lieutenant William Conway replied
confidently.

  “Those fires just means they’re calling for more warriors,” Second Lieutenant William H. Kell advised. “We best cover some ground tomorrow.”

  Just past eleven o’clock last night the entire camp was put on alert by a single rifle shot. Smith joined other officers rushing into the dark toward the ring of pickets Miner had thrown out around the wagon camp and the grazing mules.

  “I’s the one fired that shot, sir!” a soldier admitted from the inky blackness of that night.

  “What for, soldier?” Miner prodded as the man stepped closer.

  “Saw a figure—took it to be a Injun, sir. Give him the challenge word, and he skedaddled off like I’d painted his ass with turpentine. I give a shot to either drop ’im, or speed ’im on his way.

  Miner rotated the pickets an hour later at midnight and the men had settled back in their bedrolls.

  Near three-thirty a brief rattle of gunfire brought Smith and the rest out of their blankets. Shot after shot was fired into camp from a distant bluff. As the rounds whistled overhead or smacked into the earth around him, the lieutenant could make out the bright, flaring muzzle flashes of the enemy guns as all the men were formed up, put on alert, ready for action. Here and there in camp a spent bullet whacked against the side of a wagon or clanged against a cast-iron kettle. Because of the distance, Miner declined to engage the warriors in a long-range duel. Instead, he kept his men ready for any try the warriors might make for the herd. It wasn’t long before Smith realized the warriors did indeed have the herd in mind: most of the shots were landing in and among the corral, wounding some of the mules, scattering many others that pulled up their picket pins and broke their sidelines.