A Cold Day in Hell

by Terry C. Johnston

  After no more than an hour the firing died off—without the soldiers firing a shot. Orders were passed along that a cold breakfast was scheduled for later that morning: no fires to be kindled that would backlight the soldiers and thereby provide easy targets for any of the skulking redskins. Only water from their canteens and hardtack. Nothing more than that as the men struck their tents and reloaded their wagons.

  And with the first graying of the horizon that Wednesday morning, the wagon master brought the worst news.

  “How many did you say?” Miner squealed in dismay.

  “Fifty-seven mules, Cap’n,” the civilian repeated. “Likely run off by the Injuns when they went to shooting into camp last night.”

  The nervous teamsters anxiously hitched up what mules they had left to pull the freight, down to five-mule hitches on more than half the wagons. The sun hadn’t yet put in its debut when Miner ordered the march, assigning Captain Malcom McArthur’s C Company of the Seventeenth Infantry to act as rearguard. Their column had no more than strung itself out, jangling little more than a mile, when McArthur’s men came under attack by a war party concealed in a ravine no more than two hundred yards to their left. From there, concealed by thick brush and stunted cedar, the warriors laid down a galling fire on the soldiers as the column ground to an immediate halt.

  Within moments more than two hundred warriors broke over the brow of the nearby foothills rising between last night’s campsite and the Yellowstone River east of that bivouac.

  McArthur and Second Lieutenant James D. Nickerson immediately formed up their little company and led them out bravely, making a countercharge on the attackers. Smith watched those foot soldiers go, all bellow and bluster, shouting their lungs out as they dashed across the uneven ground toward the hillside where the firing died off as the warriors scampered up the far slope, pursuing the enemy across a rising piece of ground until the Indians eventually disappeared over a nearby bluff.

  “That should cool their heels!” Miner cheered, setting the column back to its march as Company H of the Twenty-second went up to support McArthur’s men in their countercharge.

  But the wagons moved no more than eighty rods when the front of the column came under attack, this time from a brushy ravine on the right flank. Miner ordered another brief halt and across the next half hour the officers ordered out a squad here, or a squad there, engaging the enemy in long-range firing with their own infantry’s “Long Toms.” Yet Miner got the skittish civilian teamsters to move the train through it all—despite the fact that a gaggle of warriors swarmed in behind the column and darted back and forth over the campsite the soldiers had just abandoned.

  “Looking for anything of value,” Miner surmised as they kept on pushing west toward the Tongue River.

  By the time an hour had passed, those warriors on their backtrail were inching closer to put increasing pressure on their rear guard. All the while, more knots of warriors were making themselves known along both flanks of the march, firing at the wagons, the mules, and the long columns of infantry strung out on either side of the rutted trail. Here and there a mule was hit, calling out in its dying with an ear-splitting bray. The team was immediately ordered out of column as other wagons moved around and the procession continued while the teamsters and soldiers descended on the wagon to cut the dead and dying mules out of harness, then urged the remaining members of the team back into line during this slow-moving, deadly game of leapfrog. Despite the losses and their snail’s pace, as the morning waned and became afternoon, Miner refused to stop.

  “That would mean us having to square the wagons and fort up, just for the sake of a short stop,” he grumbled. “No—we’ll keep pushing for Clear Creek, something on the order of eight miles. Go pass the word that the men have permission to eat while we’re on the march.”

  The autumn sun hadn’t fallen far from midsky when three of the lieutenants loped to the head of the column and presented their case to an increasingly anxious Captain Miner.

  “There’s more of ’em than we can handle come dark, Captain,” Lieutenant Nickerson said.

  Miner growled, “How many do you figure we’re facing?”

  After glancing at the others, Lieutenant William Conway replied, “Five, maybe as many as six hundred warriors, sir.”

  The captain seemed to shudder at that, then stoically said, “Their numbers won’t make much difference come dark. I’m certain they’ll break off their attack by dusk.”

  “Even so, Captain—we may not have enough of the mules left by morning to push on for Tongue River,” Smith observed.

  “Then what?” Miner growled, turning on the lieutenant.

  “I figure we’ll be forced to fort up and take ’em on till General Miles figures out we aren’t coming.”

  “How long could that be, gentlemen?” Miner asked. “Worst case, that is.”

  They muttered and chewed on it. Then Smith broke the stalemate.

  “Longer than we have ammunition, sir.”

  Miner was nettled, the crow’s-feet at his eyes deeper than normal. “What are you proposing, then?”

  “Turn about and countermarch, sir,” Lieutenant Kell suggested.

  “Back for Glendive?”

  “Yes, Captain,” Smith agreed. “I suggest we do it while we’ve got ammunition to make that countermarch. We get bogged down by forting up—they’ll keep us holed up till we run out of ammunition. I say let’s get back to Glendive while we can.”

  “But we’re expected at Tongue River with these supplies,” Miner grumbled within his five-day-old beard. “Those supplies don’t get there—”

  “Sir, begging your pardon for the interruption,” Smith pressed on. “We fort up, run out of ammunition, and get overrun, we lose these supplies to them Sioux … meaning they’ll never get to the Tongue River troops anyway. But if we break off here and skedaddle back to our cantonment, I figure we can convince Colonel Otis to beef up our escort and make another go of it.”

  “How much of the stock have we lost?” the captain demanded gruffly.

  Benjamin Lockwood answered, “They’ve run off with more than sixty-some mules already … and wounded that many more, sir.”

  Miner cogitated on that for some time as his officers stood in silence. All around them the noncoms kept the men firing by squads—for the most part able to keep the swarming warriors at a safe distance from the column. The Sioux were clearly showing a healthy respect for those Long Toms, darting in here and there, but scampering out of range just in time as a squad came forward, dropped to a knee to aim, and fired. On one side then the other, at their front then at their rear, the enemy horsemen were making things more than ticklish for Miner’s escort. The situation was growing downright scary.

  “We get bogged down here, we’re pretty well cut off here, wouldn’t you say, gentlemen?” the captain asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Smith agreed. “So what’s it to be, Captain?”

  He slapped his glove against his dusty sky-blue pants and straightened. “Give the order, men—we’re turning about for Glendive. And, for God’s sake: let’s try not to let those red bastards kill any more of these blessed mules!”

  Gazing into the face of her sleeping child, Samantha hadn’t believed anything could be quite so beautiful.

  Four days old he was. Despite the sleeplessness, despite the tenderness and outright pain in her breasts, the hot shards of torment she felt down below where she had torn giving birth—no matter any of it now. She was completely in awe at the miracle of that baby.

  What she and Seamus had created together. Truly a gift from God.

  It was so hard to believe, still so much like a dream: the long, agonizing labor; the explosive delivery; the joy in seeing the tears streak her husband’s face; the sheer and utter happiness in holding the squalling child for the first time, listening to his little cry of protest.

  Oh, how he had taken to her breast that cold morning as Elizabeth Burt had shooed Seamus from the room.

&nb
sp; “You go off now and get yourself a whiskey and a cigar. And buy one for my captain, too, won’t you?”

  Then Elizabeth set about instructing Sam on the art of breast-feeding—how to hold the child just so, place the nipple against his lips and cheek to excite the sucking reflex, and then to relax. Just relax and enjoy such exquisite closeness. Oh, how the little one took to that! Surely, she had thought so many times since as the babe suckled, this was his father’s child! So in love with a woman’s bountiful anatomy were they both.

  The babe lay beside her on the bed this late afternoon. The sun would soon set beyond Old Bedlam and the evening gun would roar down on the parade. She was weary from the trips up and down the steps, laundering the diapering cloths. Never had she believed it possible that such disgusting stuff could come out of so beautiful a creature!

  Seamus helped as much as he could, often being the one to carry her work downstairs for her to the room where together they would boil the water and do the wash. Each evening he would carry the little child downstairs in his huge arms, clutched so lovingly against his great body, smiling to beat the band as they warmed water in a kettle on the woodstove, preparing the babe’s daily bath. In their time together Seamus had shown her much tenderness with his big, hardened hands—those same hands carefully, lovingly lathering the infant in that washbasin they had set in the middle of that small table right beside the warmth of the woodstove.

  “What will we name him?” Samantha had asked him that first morning while they gave their son his very first bath.

  “I thought that was best left up to the women in the family,” Seamus had replied, lifting the wriggling child from the water as she draped a towel around its rosy body.

  “Not in my family, we’re not,” Sam had declared. “In this family, boys will be named by their fathers.”

  “Then I will have to give it some thought.”

  “You do that, Seamus Donegan,” she told him as she pressed against him, the child held between them in that embrace. “You give good thought to this matter of naming your firstborn son. For this may well be one of the most important things you 11 ever do in life.”

  He had bent to kiss the top of the babe’s head, then bent to brush his lips against hers. Then he said, “Yes, one of the most important things I’ll ever do in this young fellow’s life.”

  She heard him on the stairs now. There was no other sound like his boots clattering up those steps, what with their high, two-inch leather heels so they would not slip through a stirrup, a bit of a shelf on the back of the heel to support a spur, and with stovepipes almost tall enough to reach his knees—yes, he had explained the usefulness of it all to her many times. But right now those boot heels announced his return from that conference he and a few others were called to have with Mackenzie and Crook.

  It was not until late that night as they lay in the darkness, with the babe nestled snuggly in the hand-me-down cradle set right against Sam’s side of the bed, that she lay against Seamus’s chest and knew he was not sleeping.

  In the blackness of their tiny room, she asked him in a whisper, “What’s keeping you from sleep?”

  Moments passed before he spoke. “I don’t know what to do. Before … before the babe arrived, I was damned sure that I wouldn’t ever go marching off to make war again.”

  She felt him shudder, not knowing if it was from fear, or from a sob. Then Sam suggested, “Mackenzie asked you to ride with him again.”

  “Yes. He’s kept after me, he has.”

  “And this time you didn’t tell him no.”

  “Not exactly, Sam. But—I said I’d tell him in the morning.”

  “Seamus, my love: it took me some time before I came to really understand who you were as a man. The sort of husband you’d make. And now the sort of father you will be to our son. I know you will have no peace in yourself if you don’t go off to do what it is that you need to do.”

  “Peace,” he repeated that word in a whisper in the dark. “I look at our son. I hold him in my arms. I gaze into his little face as he lies in my lap. And I grow scared.”

  “Why are you scared?” she asked, nestling her head in his neck.

  “Because I’m afraid that unless I go with Mackenzie, unless I keep going until this terrible matter is done, once and for all—there will be no peace for our son.”

  “You do have a job to do, Seamus,” she eventually said, feeling the sting of tears come to her eyes. “Part of that job is being here with me when you can to be a husband. Part of that job will be helping me to raise our new son. And a very important part of your job right now is finishing what you have begun.”

  For a long, long time he did not answer her. And when he did, Seamus quietly said, “Thank you for understanding my fear, Sam. And for understanding that I’m the sort of man who must go and look my fear in the eye.”

  “Go do this for us, Seamus. Go do this for your son.”

  “Yes,” he answered with a long, rattling sigh. “It’s about time that we finished what we started ten long years ago.”

  * Present-day Sand Creek.

  Chapter 4

  14–15 October 1876

  Telegraphic

  Gen. Merritt Marching

  Into Indian Land

  THE INDIANS

  Merritt on a scout—Bad Indians Still Raiding.

  CHEYENNE, October 13.—General Merritt left Custer City with 500 men on a scout to-day. Their destination is not positively known but it is surmised to be the Bell Fourche Fork of the Cheyenne river. The remainder of the command is still at Custer. The party of Indians who killed Monroe near Fort Laramie a few days since also raided the ranch of Nick Jones on the old Red Cloud road, stealing twenty-five horses. Monroe’s body was pierced by eight bullets.

  Captain Miner’s wagon train limped back to the Glendive supply depot after nine P.M. on the evening of 11 October, having hacked their way through the massing warriors, fighting for nearly every foot until the Sioux were certain the train was retreating to the east along Clear Creek. The warriors broke off their attack as the soldiers rumbled along a trail crossing higher ground, thereby giving the soldiers a commanding view of the surrounding countryside as darkness approached.

  After allowing the mules and those four infantry companies two days to recoup their strength, Lieutenant Colonel Elwell S. Otis of the Twenty-second Infantry determined this time to set out himself to deliver those much-needed supplies to the Tongue River cantonment. On the afternoon of the thirteenth he informed his troops that with the addition of one more company to bolster their strength, they would be moving out come morning—at which point forty-one of the civilian teamsters buckled under and stated flatly that they were not about to ride back into the breech.

  Like many of the other officers, Second Lieutenant Alfred C. Sharpe figured Otis’s soldiers would be all the better for not having those mule-whackers along.

  “So be it,” Otis declared, nonplussed, when the civilians bowed their backs and refused to go. “We’ll do with what we have for teamsters and fill the rest of the wagon seats with soldiers. I’m determined to go through to Tongue River this time … even if fighting takes us there.”

  Not only did they have the addition of G Company, Seventeenth Infantry, under Major Louis H. Sanger, this time they would haul three Gatling guns along with the wagon train.

  That afternoon Otis dispatched a courier to ride off with news of the attack on Miner’s train as well as the renewed attempt to reach Tongue River, that report bound for Colonel William B. Hazen, commanding the Sixth U.S. Infantry at Fort Buford.

  At midmorning on the fourteenth Otis’s eleven officers and 185 men departed Glendive cantonment, putting a scant ten miles behind them before going into bivouac for the night. Dusk had deepened, and many of the soldiers were preparing to turn in, when just past eight P.M. a shot was fired from one of the pickets, alarming the camp.

  “I’ll lay you odds we had a man blast away at another Injun ghost,” growled Lieutenant
Oskaloosa Smith as he trotted up beside Sharpe as they headed toward the disturbance.

  “Like it was on your trip out, eh?” Sharpe replied.

  Damn near a repeat, it turned out to be. Except for the fact that this time the picket reported spotting two horsemen when he offered his challenge—swearing to the officers on his mother’s grave he had hit one of them—although a hastily formed search party found nothing in the dark. Camp settled down and the rest of the night passed uneventfully. It wasn’t until first light when one of the outlying pickets brought within the lines a crippled pony he had spotted hobbling among some stunted cedar along the creek bottom.

  “Injun pony,” Alfred Sharpe observed as the officers looked the wounded animal over.

  A pad saddle was lashed around its middle with a single surcingle. Several blankets were tied behind the saddle. It wore a single rawhide rein, as well as a picket rope trailing behind the animal.

  “I’ll bet that pony threw off the bloody savage and he had to fetch himself a ride with the other red bastard,” one of the men surmised.

  Otis pulled on his gloves and looked into the sky at the emerging sun. “Time we got under way, gentlemen. Mr. Smith, see that this animal is put out of its misery.”

  Just before seven A.M. on that bright, clear Sunday morning, the fifteenth of October, they resumed their journey. The drivers formed up the wagons into four long lines to make their way across the rolling, broken ground as the soldiers went into position to form a square surrounding the train. In the rotation of the march, Lieutenant Sharpe’s company that day drew duty as the advance guard for the column. When his foot soldiers stepped out in lively fashion, making good time just in front of the first wagon and the rest of the escort, the lieutenant began to recall Sunday mornings he had enjoyed back east.