“From what I can make of the various reports,” Miles said, raising his head from his concentration over his field desk strewn with papers as twilight oozed light from the sky, “there were at least half a dozen Sioux casualties.”
“Hard to tell,” Kelly said with a shrug, then sipped more of his coffee nearby. “The way they always drag off their wounded. Could’ve been more.”
For a moment the colonel pressed his full lips together thoughtfully. “Their biggest loss isn’t in the casualties—is it, Kelly?”
Luther wagged his head. “No, General. You hurt ’em worse by getting your hands on everything they had to leave behind.”
“Not just getting my hands on it,” Miles replied, staring down at the ruins of the abandoned village, “but in destroying it. Among the captured herd we found some of the Seventh Cavalry horses. Damn well used up, they are—no more than skin and bones now.”
“Doesn’t surprise me a wit, General,” Kelly replied. He stuffed a hand inside his coat, patting among his vest pockets for a cheroot, maybe even some chew. Something to enjoy with his coffee. “You decided if you’re marching back to Tongue River in the morning?”
Miles looked up at Kelly, stared hard for a moment as if his scout had gone crazy, then shook his head. “No, by God—I plan on following Sitting Bull all the way to Canada if I have to!”
Chapter 12
22–23 October 1876
General Sitting Bull Ready
to be Rationed.
Red Cloud and His Braves on the Rampage.
Indications that Crook will
Settle Their Case
THE INDIANS
Sitting Bull Wants to Winter at
Some Agency.
WASHINGTON, October 21.—The following telegram was received at the Indian Bureau this morning: Fort Peck, Montana, Oct. 13, via Boseman—To the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Washington:—Messengers from Sitting Bull’s camp report that the entire hostile camp has crossed the Yellowstone at the mouth of the Big Horn, en route for this place. They claim to want peace. What course shall I pursue toward them?
[signed] THOS. T. MITCHELL Indian Agent.
After consultation with Gen. Sherman instructions were telegraphed to Agent Mitchell as follows: Inform Sitting Bull that the only condition of peace is his surrender, when he will be treated as a prisoner of war. Issue no rations, except after such surrender and when fully satisfied that the Indians can be held at the agency. The military will cooperate as far as possible.
[signed] S. A. GALPEN Acting Commissioner.
Through that long, cold night the grass fires glowed like flickering, crimson patches across the prairie below as Nelson Miles moved back and forth through his command like a man possessed.
The Sioux shouted and called out on all sides of their bivouac. Occasionally one of the pickets fired a shot or two at some noise, at a shadow, at one of the ghostly forms flitting in and out and around the abandoned village, intent on salvaging what they could from the army’s destruction.
At long last the eastern sky showed signs of resigning itself to day. Miles had his men awakened, guard rotated, and coffee put over what fires the men could keep lit with the meager supply of wood they scrounged after the Sioux had set the prairie ablaze the previous day. As soon as it was light enough for the command to move across the uneven ground, the colonel gave the order to form up and moved out that Sunday, 22 October.
Almost immediately two dozen warriors appeared along the high ground beyond the decimated village, backlit with the rose of sunrise. They swept far to the right, heading for the rear of the march where Pope’s E Company easily drove them away from the supply wagons. Then it grew eerily quiet as the Fifth continued its march into the coming of sunrise. After the deafening racket and din of yesterday’s fight, the utter stillness of this morning lay like a heavy, suffocating cloak upon each and every wary man.
The scouts led them east along the clearly marked Sioux trail. Easy enough to follow the travois scars on the prairie. That, and the wisps of smoke from the fires the hostiles set all along their flight. Stifling curtains of thinning gray obscured the rising sun, turning it a pale-orange button as the soldiers plodded on across the blackened prairie where ash rose up to clog their nostrils, sting their eyes, choke their every breath.
As much as his brain told him the enemy had fled on through the night to put as much ground between them as possible, Nelson’s heart nonetheless hoped that for some reason they didn’t have as much of a jump on his command as he might otherwise fear. All along the wide, hoof-pocked trail the scouts and forward units came across abandoned lodgepoles and camp utensils, refuse abandoned along with a few lame ponies and mules—even more possessions taken from the bodies of Custer’s dead.
Personal things, the sort almost every soldier carried: photographs from family and loved ones, ledgers and journals, gauntlets and hats, a watch or blood-smeared blue tunic.
“They’re heading east, General,” Luther Kelly reported that midmorning as he reined up, bringing his mount around in a tight circle, having just returned from a scouting foray with Billy Cross and Vic Smith.
“No sign of them angling off to the north?” Miles inquired anxiously. No matter what—he had to keep himself between Sitting Bull and that border.
Kelly shook his head. “They’re hurrying for Bad Route Creek, east of here.”
By midafternoon the rising wind gave such muscle to the smoldering prairie fires on both flanks of his march that Miles ordered a halt as the men choked and sputtered helplessly, a wall of flame advancing right for them. Into the fury of that blanket of smoke and ash the colonel sent out two companies to start backfires before the entire command was finally able to continue its wearying pursuit.
It wasn’t long before the warriors figured out the soldiers had countered their strategy. More than three hundred horsemen suddenly bristled from the hilltops, spilling over the crests in a shouting, screaming, boiling mass, aiming straight for the plodding foot soldiers.
Platoon by platoon was ordered to strengthen both flanks as sergeants bellowed out their orders for the men to drop to their knees, aim, and fire before the next squad was brought up into position while the first reloaded. Above the steady, deep booming of those big Springfields, Miles made out the discordant rattle of the smaller weapons and the old muskets the Sioux were using to harass their march. A long-distance battle, and a slow crawl they made of it, throughout the agonizing hours that Sunday afternoon.
Marching in a hollow square, with four companies of skirmishers thrown out in front spaced five paces apart, two companies on each side and two at the rear, and with one final company bringing up the rear of the supply train and another supporting the Rodman gun, they made eighteen miles before the sun sank out of the clear, cold sky and the warriors disappeared.
The land breathed a sigh of relief as the men made their bivouac and lit their fires. Stars winked into sight. The night grew colder than any gone before.
Come the morning of the twenty-third, Miles put them to the march in that same magnificent formation, up and down the broken country in a hollow square. But this day they saw no Sioux, reaching the Yellowstone late in the afternoon nearly opposite the mouth of Cabin Creek. His exhausted men had put another twenty-eight miles under the soles of their boots that day—more than forty-two miles from their initial engagement with the Sioux at Cedar Creek.
Nelson stood watching Kelly and four other scouts head back his way, urging their mounts back to the north bank of the river. Miles had ordered the five of them to cross the Yellowstone to determine the depth of the ford. In midriver Luther Kelly eased out of the saddle and settled his boots into the river that had christened him for life. While he stomped around in the coming dusk, checking out the sands of the shifting bottom, Vic Smith probed on over toward the south bank. In the distance smoke hung in the air from the enemy’s fires.
How Miles wanted to cross now as the Sioux were making camp there on the s
outh side of the Yellowstone. If only to be sure Sitting Bull was really settling in for the night, praying the chief would not pull a rabbit on him and suddenly turn back north, recross the Yellowstone, and make a dash for Canada. That was Nelson’s deepest, most unspoken fear as Luther Kelly splashed up the bank, into the cottonwoods, and dismounted near him.
“They’re across, by God,” the scout said, dripping from his waist down, shuddering with cold as the wind came up at twilight.
“And still moving south?”
Kelly looked over at Smith, who nodded; then Kelly said, “By all accounts, General.”
“How deep is it?”
Kelly gazed down at his britches. “I’m wet to the waist. No deeper than that. Your men can make it in fine order.”
‘You don’t think those Sioux will try to shake us and recross tonight?”
With that easy shrug of his, the mild-mannered Kelly regarded the south bank a bit, sniffled, then looked back at Nelson to say, “They’re every bit as tired as your men are, General Miles. Maybe even more tired. I can’t see ’em doing anything but stopping for a few hours—stopping to feed their children, bandage their wounded, and shiver out this goddamned cold night until they can start running again.”
Miles felt himself bristle with resentment. “Sounds to me like you don’t agree with my giving, chase?”
There was the scout’s quick, disarming smile, and Kelly said, “Nothing of the kind, General. Not many men would have the bottom you and this outfit have to herd those Sioux the way we’ve done. Pushed ’em real hard.”
“Because of it, I just might succeed in forcing their surrender,” Miles replied, finding himself becoming a bit testy not only by the extended chase, which had so far netted him nothing more than track soup, but by the scout’s easygoing attitude as well.
“I don’t doubt you’ll get someone to surrender before this is done,” Kelly said. “If it ain’t the Sioux, it may damn well be your own men.”
For a moment he stared at the scout’s face; then Kelly cracked a smile, his eyes crow-footing at their corners.
Finally Miles smiled along with him “Damn you, Kelly,” he said. “A laugh or two’s good for the soul when a man’s done himself proud.”
“It’s been a good chase, General,” the scout answered, taking up his rein and beginning to lead his horse away with the other scouts. “We’ll catch Sitting Bull yet.”
Monday. Some time after midnight. Twenty-three October. Damned cold too, here beside the frozen fog rising off Chadron Creek.
Keep the talk at a minimum were the orders. And no smoking.
Just after dark, Mackenzie led his command away from Camp Robinson and into the cold, clear winter night—more stars overhead than Seamus could recall seeing since last winter on the Powder River.
Since arriving on the central plains last August, the Fourth Cavalry had been quartered in three temporary cantonments: Camp Canby, the original Sioux Expedition cavalry camp; Camp Custer; and Camp of the Second Battalion. Earlier in the month, while Mackenzie was gone to Laramie conferring with Crook on the coming seizures of Sioux arms, his regiment had been reinforced by some 309 new recruits shipped in from Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis, bringing the companies up to full strength. Besides drilling three times a day with and without their mounts, the men of the Fourth Cavalry had been kept busy cutting, hauling, and trimming logs for their crude log barracks, mess halls, and storage rooms.
Last night, with each man packing one day’s rations and all of them in light marching order, Mackenzie had moved his troops away under the cover of darkness because the colonel did not want to be spotted by any agency tattletale who might scurry off to Red Cloud’s or Red Leaf’s and Swift Bear’s camps, letting the cat slip out of the bag.
A few hours back Mackenzie had briefly stopped his command at a predetermined rendezvous, where they awaited some riders who were to join up: the North brothers, Lieutenant S. E. Cushing, and forty-eight hardened trackers of their Pawnee Battalion, hurried north from the Sidney Barracks where they had been carried west, horses and all, along the Union Pacific line.
“By the Mither of God! I ain’t seen you since that summer with Carr!” Seamus growled happily in a harsh whisper at the two civilian brothers there in the dark as they waited while some of the Norths’ Pawnee probed ahead into the darkness.
Following the rendezvous, Mackenzie’s march was resumed across that hard, frozen ground, at a trot or at a gallop as the rugged land allowed, until early in the morning when the scouts reached the point where the trail leading north from the agency split: one branch leading to Red Cloud’s band, the other to Red Leaf’s Brule camp only a handful of miles away. It was there that Mackenzie deployed his command: sending M Company of his Fourth Cavalry along with the two troops assigned him from Wesley Merritt’s Fifth Cavalry to follow Captain Luther North and some of the Pawnee in the direction of Red Leaf’s village, that entire force under the command of Major George A. Gordon.
The remaining five troops of the Fourth followed Mackenzie as Major Frank North and the rest of the Pawnee scouts led them on through the darkness toward Red Cloud’s camp.
“That hot July of sixty-nine. Has it been that long?” Frank North replied now, also in a whisper. Mackenzie demanded that none of his surprise be spoiled.
“Summit Springs, it were,” Donegan replied, tugging at his collar, pulling his big-brimmed hat down as he tried to turtle his head into his shoulders. The wind was coming up.
“We had us a grand chase that year, didn’t we?” North asked.
“I rode with Carr this summer.”
“Don’t say,” North said, then stared off into the darkness. “He was a good soldier.”
“By damn if he wasn’t that bloody hot day when we caught ol’ Tall Bull napping,” Seamus replied.*
“Bet you four to one we’ve got Red Cloud and the rest napping this time too.”
“We’ll know soon enough,” the Irishman responded as they watched some of the Pawnee emerge out of the dark.
They sat for close to an hour, waiting for some of the Indian trackers to return. The men were allowed to dismount and huddle out of the wind, but smoking and talk were forbidden. No telling if the Sioux would have camp guards out patrolling.
It seemed like an eternity until the order came to move out once more, marching a few more miles until Mackenzie halted his five troops and the Pawnee Battalion, saying they would wait right there until there was light enough to see the front sights on their carbines. Then they would send the scouts to seize the pony herd while they charged into the village.
So for now those three hundred men waited in the dark and the cold, knowing they had that unsuspecting Sioux camp in their noose.
While the government continued to press the “friendlies” to sell away the Black Hills as a condition for receiving their annuities of food, blankets, and ammunition, Sheridan nonetheless demanded that those same agency Indians were dismounted and disarmed. No two ways about it. If the winter roamers who were still out making trouble would ever be resupplied with ammunition and weapons to press on with their war, those supplies would have to come from the “friendlies” who had stayed behind at the reservations. To make sure Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and the rest were cut off from all such aid, Sheridan ordered Crook into action against the agency bands.
The little Irish general was positive that the hostiles could never have defeated Custer without aid from the agency Sioux. He expressed his steadfast belief in this position to William Tecumseh Sherman:
Our duty will be to occupy the game country and make it dangerous and when they are obliged from constant harassing and hunger to come in and surrender we can then dismount, disarm and punish them at the Agencies as was done with the Southern Indians in the last campaign.
Phil Sheridan had a staunch ally in Ranald Slidell Mackenzie. He too believed that the hostilities would all be over by the spring of 1877, provided that the hostiles were corralled and the “fr
iendlies” forced to surrender their arms and ponies, the animals then sold on the open market and the funds thus acquired used to purchase cattle for the agency bands. Never disguised as an attempt to civilize the Sioux into becoming gentleman farmers, Sheridan’s plan was unashamedly to deny all mobility to the horse-mounted Lakota warriors.
Years before on the Staked Plain of West Texas, Seamus had come to admire Mackenzie’s patient even-handedness in pursuing his relentless war on the Comanche.* Yet, in many subtle ways, it was a different, a changed Mackenzie who last August marched eight companies of his Fourth Cavalry north to join in this grand Sioux campaign. Many times over dinner, or in officers’ meetings, in those off-the-cuff comments expressed to his cadre of scouts, the colonel made it exceedingly clear in so many subtle ways that he was no longer the same man: no more would he believe anything an Indian told him, nor could he believe that an Indian would honor his own word to a white man.
According to Mackenzie all this rumination and discourse over selling the Black Hills back to the government was nothing more than a waste of time—it was plain to see that the Indians had stalled the protracted negotiations at the agencies while their free-roaming brethren pursued their own hostile intentions in secret.
Like Sheridan, Mackenzie now believed the time for talk had come and gone with absolutely no lasting result.
For the colonel, one thing had grown more clear across the last five years in campaign after campaign against the hostiles—whether they were Kwahadi, Southern Cheyenne, or Red Cloud’s Sioux, what the Indian understood better than talk was force—might of arms, a cost in blood. He made no secret of the fact that he believed that the presence of the peace commissioners “unsettles the minds of these Indians.”
Upon his return to Camp Robinson, where more than 982 cavalry, infantry, and artillery soldiers had been marshaled to dismount the Sioux, he had wired Crook his recommendation that his command should indeed proceed with the capture of the two villages:
A Cold Day in Hell Page 16