A Cold Day in Hell

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A Cold Day in Hell Page 22

by Terry C. Johnston


  “Now, General—if you wish to issue an order commanding the Pawnee to make up with their bitterest enemies,” North said, “I will do all in my power to have it obeyed.”

  After a moment more of reflection, Crook replied, “No, I don’t wish to force them to be friendly against their will. Still, if they were friendly, I believe it would be better for all concerned, and this expedition.”

  “Well, I’ll talk to my Pawnee about it and hear what they have to say,” Frank said. “We’ll head back to camp now and cut out those seventy head—the extra ponies the lieutenant here can turn over to the Sioux.”

  The task was done before twilight. Yet, as predicted, the matter appeared far from over, at least from the word brought to the North’s camp that night by Todd Randall, the same white scout who was married to a Sioux woman at the Red Cloud Agency and had been instrumental in helping the Pawnee trackers locate Red Cloud’s village the night before the guns and ponies were captured.

  “Just figured you ought to know to keep an eye locked on your horses, fellas,” Randall said. “Maybe best to keep ’em close to your beds.”

  North asked, “Why’s that, friend?”

  “The Sioux say they’re gonna get both them ponies you brothers picked outta their herd. Kill ’em somewhere up the trail.”

  Sitting Bull’s Scalp in Danger

  up North.

  DAKOTA

  The Fight with Sitting Bull

  CHICAGO, November 1.—The official report of the battle between Sitting Bull, Pretty Deer, Bull Eagle, John Sausarie, Standing Bear, and White Bear, on Cedar Creek, the general results of which were given in a Bismarck dispatch last night, states that a number of Indians are known to have been killed and five wounded. The report concludes: “I believe this matter can be closed now by vigorous work, but some cavalry is indispensible.”

  “Goddamn you, Soul!’ the big sergeant major bawled at the young private. “Be a little lively around here! We’re pulling out, by God!”

  William Earl Smith swallowed, saluted, and stood stiffly until his superior had passed down that row of dog tents coming down like fluffs of goose down upon the dirty snow. It had been snowing off and on for two days now, and colder than anything Smith had experienced back east.

  Once Stephen Walsh was on out of hearing range there in the cavalry camp below Fort Fetterman, Smith let out a gush of air he had been holding during the cruel tongue-lashing.

  “Great, big, overgrown Irishman,” he muttered under his breath, wondering if he had done the wrong thing by accepting this assignment to become one of Mackenzie’s five orderlies for the Powder River Expedition.

  He liked the general—why, Mackenzie had even offered Smith a drink from his own personal flask the colonel kept buried somewhere inside that big caped wool coat of his. But that sergeant major who ran roughshod over all of Mackenzie’s orderlies? Now, that was as close to genuine loathing as William Earl Smith had ever come.

  Why, that damned mick made fun of the way Smith ate, the way he sat in the saddle, even how the private spoke. What with the way the orderlies were cursed and treated by the commissioned officers too, especially the tyrannical Captain Clarence Mauck, who more than once had threatened to make William Earl walk the whole campaign … how Earl dreamed of stepping right up to those arrogant stuffed shirts and poking one of them in the nose for good measure.

  “Goddamn you, Soul—but it takes you longer to dress than a whole company!” Smith began to mimic the sergeant major’s gruff and peaty brogue. “Smith this … and Smith that,” he grumbled under his breath as he turned to finish packing his haversack. “Wished I was born with another name sometimes.”

  A few days back, when Walsh was bawling for him, the sergeant’s abuse had finally got to the private and Smith had made the mistake of answering in kind, “What the hell do you want?”

  Suddenly the sergeant had been towering there at Smith’s tent flaps, his big meaty paws jammed down on his hips, his eyes like twelve-hour coals, spitting mad. “If you ever talk to me that way again—I’ll tie you up by the thumbs!”

  Earl had seen men tied up by their thumbs for hours at a time, their arms stretched high over their heads, their toes barely scraping the ground, held only by their thumbs to a stout wooden bar overhead.

  Too, since joining the Fourth, he had heard reports of soldiers being placed in a big hole in the ground, so deep they had to climb down on a ladder. Or men lashed in a crouch around a stout piece of fence post then gagged for hours. Once Smith had seen that punishment—the soldiers who suffered it unable to move their cramped and tortured muscles once they were released.

  On their march north to Fetterman a pair of soldiers had made the mistake of being slow to salute Mackenzie and addressing their commander too informally. That evening in bivouac the colonel promptly had Sergeant Walsh see that the two offenders stood in one place for an hour and a half, unable to move in that frigid weather except for saluting a tree stump for their transgression. A day later a few men in one company were late in relieving others on guard. Mackenzie sentenced those guilty to carry the hundredweight sacks of grain for their horses up and down across a mile of the rugged terrain as their punishment.

  God must surely damn this army for putting some men over others, William Earl thought as he angrily jammed his supply of rations into the tiny haversack he would carry north.

  Two days back, when the temperature had started to fall through the bottom of the surgeons’ thermometers, one of Mackenzie’s other orderlies—Private Edward Wilson—had gone up to the fort, invited to join Lieutenant Henry Lawton, quartermaster for the expedition’s cavalry wing, as the two of them intended to drain the better part of a whiskey bottle at the sutler’s saloon. As both were in no condition to walk back to their camp situated on the north side of the river, they climbed atop their horses and headed back in the dark and the blowing snow. Somewhere along the wagon road leading down the bluff to the ferry, Wilson’s horse got away from him, prompting Lawton’s horse to gallop off wildly too. As a furious lieutenant came up alongside the orderly, he yanked out his pistol and swung it across Wilson’s face, knocking the private off his horse and unconscious with one blow. Sometime during the night Wilson came to, finding himself half-frozen, wet, and bleeding in the icy mud beside the North Platte. With the help of camp guards, he struggled back to his tent, where he passed out again before the sky grew light.

  Although Mackenzie gave Lawton a stern dressing-down for striking a soldier, the colonel did nothing more in the way of punishment. As much as Smith had admired Mackenzie before, to him it seemed the man was really no different from all the other officers who either abused their men, or allowed the abuse by other officers to go on without proper punishment.

  “Don’t you see? The colonel can’t bust Lawton down and order him to stay at Fetterman,” said another of Mackenzie’s orderlies. “He needs the lieutenant too damned bad—”

  “I don’t give a damn,” Smith argued in a hushed voice. “What Mackenzie needs is to show his soldiers that fair is fair.”

  Far up the bluff on Fort Fetterman’s parade that Tuesday morning, the fourteenth of November, a trumpet blared its shrill cry of “Stable Call” on the cold, brittle air:

  Oh, go to the stable,

  All you who are able,

  And give your poor horses

  Some hay and some corn.

  For if you don’t do it,

  The captain will know it,

  And you’ll catch the devil

  As sure as you’re horn.

  “Ain’t it the truth, Soul!” Smith groaned, mimicking again the big Irish sergeant’s brogue. “Ain’t it the truth!”

  The cavalry and Indian scouts had been camped down there, already across the North Platte, with a toehold at the edge of enemy territory. Every one of the six days they waited there after marching north from Laramie, the sky had seemed to lower that much more, spitting cruel, sharp-edged ice crystals out of the belly of those clouds.
While the cold Canadian winds came sweeping out of the north, the troops sat out their boredom.

  Each having a winter campaign of his own under his belt, both Crook and Mackenzie understood the importance of equipping their men properly for the task at hand. Sheridan had promised them that the men of the Powder River Expedition would want for nothing. For once that was a promise kept.

  Back at Laramie they had taken on their heavy underclothing, fur caps, wool gloves—since Crook was most unsatisfied with the poor quality of the horsehide gauntlets used on the March campaign—in addition to the normal issue of wool leggings, arctic overshoes or felt liners for their boots, along with two blankets apiece. That winter equipage would get a true test, for in the last two days the temperature had not once risen above zero.

  There was an A-tent assigned to every four men. The soldiers pitched these so that two tents faced each other, a lightweight Sibley stove then placed in the narrow opening and the flaps of the two tents then pinned together to seal in the modest warmth. Outside each tent stood piles of sagebrush and grease-wood stacked taller than the tents themselves. Some of the officers sported sealskin hats and long underwear made from perforated buckskin, pulling over it all a heavy overcoat with fur collars and cuffs.

  Personal belongings were crated, marked, and left in the custody of the post quartermaster. Mackenzie had them down to fighting trim, ready to be off in as light a marching order as Crook could afford as they stared into the teeth of a brutal winter storm already working on its second wind. Each cavalry company would carry two hundred rounds of ammunition for each man, while in the wagons were freighted an additional three hundred more per soldier.

  Last night at nine P.M. Mackenzie had come back from a card game and a conference with Crook and infantry commander Dodge. All evening it had been trying to snow, when the sky suddenly cleared and the bottom went out of the thermometers.

  “We’re going at dawn,” Mackenzie announced to his orderlies as he stomped up through the fresh snow. “See that the company commanders are informed.”

  Then the mercurial colonel disappeared into his tent for the rest of what was left of that horrid night.

  Chapter 18

  14–18 November 1876

  Bloody Fight Between

  Shoshones and Sioux.

  THE INDIANS

  Sioux vs. Shoshones—A Village of the Latter Wiped Out.

  SALT LAKE, November 2.—A report from Camp Stambaugh, Wyoming, says a village of fifty lodges of Shoshones was attacked October 30, by a large Sioux war party, estimated at 1,300 lodges, at Pointed Rock, near the scene of Captain Bates’ fight, July, 1874, and about ninety miles from Camp Stambaugh. As far as learned only one Shoshone escaped by the name of Humpy, who was the Indian that saved the life of Captain Henry, in Crook’s second fight this summer.

  The last of Dodge’s infantry was finally ferried across the North Platte that Tuesday morning in the overloaded wagons easing down the ice-coated banks, the teamsters doing their best to dodge the floating ice that bobbed along the surface of the swift and swirling river some fifty yards wide at the ford, each cake of the ice thrown against the ferry’s sideboards with a resounding and forceful collision.

  Even Richard I. Dodge had confided to his personal diary, “The river is my terror.”

  Almost as much as he wanted to keep his foot soldiers warm and dry, the colonel had itched to get a leap on the younger Mackenzie—but already the cavalry was moving away into the sere hills streaked with snow. Dodge didn’t have the last of his men across and on their way until 11:30 A.M. At stake each day in this unspoken race between foot and horse would be the best camping spots come sundown. Being second to get away from Fetterman put Dodge in a foul humor that would last for the next two days.

  After days of intermittent snow, the sun was out that morning, hung in the sky like a pale, pewter glob behind the thin clouds. The temperature hovered at fourteen below zero.

  To Seamus it didn’t seem it could get any colder as he mounted up, tucked the tail of his long mackinaw about his legs, and set out with some of the other scouts, waving farewell to Kid Slaymaker and those of his whores still up after the expedition’s last carouse before plunging into the Indian country.

  A little west of north. Into the Powder River country searching out the Hunkpatila. The Crazy Horse people.

  Donegan knew it was going to get a hell of a lot colder before he could once more hold Samantha in his arms. Before he would look into the face of his son and give the child a name.

  Far in the advance he could see the dark column slowly snaking up what had become a familiar road that would lead them to old Fort Reno, like a writhing animal twisting across the white, endless landscape. On and on the bare hills and knolls and ridges lay tumbled against one another, each new one as devoid of brush and trees as the last, stretching into the gray horizon. For all any of them might know, Seamus thought as he pulled the wool muffler up to cover his mouth and nose, they could be marching across the austere, inhospitable surface of the moon.

  Ahead of him and behind as well stretched Crook’s Powder River Expedition, perhaps the best prepared and equipped force ever to plunge into this forbidding wilderness. Especially at this season. It made quite a sight: far out on each flank the hundreds of Indian auxiliaries, the neat column of infantry, ahead of them the wagon train and Tom Moore’s four hundred mules, then the white scouts riding with Crook’s headquarters group, and in the lead marched Mackenzie’s cavalry.

  As the day aged, the weather warmed too much to make for good marching. The wind had piled the snow too deep at the sides of ridges and hillocks for easy passage, while the sun continued to relentlessly turn the snow to slush in open places, making for treacherous footing for the infantry following in the wake of all those wagons sliding this way and that as the drivers barked and cajoled, whipped and cursed their teams.

  Dodge halted his infantry at the camping ground on Sage Creek after slogging eleven grueling miles. Mackenzie and the teamsters were obliged to push on another four miles before they could find sufficient water in Sage Creek for their animals—what there was had collected in ice-covered pools of brackish, soap-tinged water. As soon as the horses were unsaddled, the men spread out to scare up what they could of firewood. All they found was the smoky greasewood. Nor was there much in the way of grass for the animals. Fortunately, Crook had freighted both firewood and forage.

  Shortly after taking up the march the morning of the fifteenth, some of the Pawnee discovered the tracks of three horses. Due to the condition of the ground, it proved difficult to determine if the animals wore iron shoes or not—so the trackers put their noses to the trail and took off at a lope.

  “Cant help but think we’re being watched by Crazy Horse’s scouts,” Crook mused that afternoon as they kept an eye on the horizon, watching for the return of those Pawnee.

  In the afternoon two of the soldiers riding on the right flank were run in by four Indians, who gave the pair quite a fright with all their whooping and gunfire, but it wasn’t until after the column made camp on the South Fork of the Cheyenne River, having put fifteen hard miles behind them, that the trackers returned to report that the trio of riders they had trailed all day had turned out to be white men.

  “Miners, I’d wager,” Seamus declared.

  “More’n likely horse thieves,” Dick Closter argued. The white-bearded packer spat a stream of brown tobacco juice out of the side of his mouth as he knelt to stir some beans in a blackened pot that steamed fragrantly, then smeared some of the brown dribble ever deeper into his snowy whiskers.

  That night the entire command—cavalry, infantry, wagon and mule train, along with the Indian auxiliaries—all camped together for the first time, spread out along the Cheyenne where they could find enough room to graze the animals and throw down their bedrolls against the dropping temperatures as the stars winked into sight, the sheer and utter blackness of that clear winter sky sucking every last gesture of warmth from the
heated breast of the earth.

  Each night Seamus did as most of the others, bunking in with another man to share their blankets and body heat, after spreading their saddle blankets over “mattresses” fashioned from what dried grass and sagebrush they could gather to insulate them from the frozen ground.

  At first light the column moved out again on the sixteenth, with Mackenzie’s cavalry once more beating the fuming Dodge onto the trail the horses churned into a sodden mush for the foot-sloggers. Less than an hour after starting, all hands were halted and turned out to get the wagons and ambulances hauled up an especially bad stretch of the Reno Road, where the narrow iron tires skidded out of control on the icy prairie, unable to gain any purchase. Grunting and cursing side by side with the teams, muscling the laden wagons up a foot at a time by rope, the men finally reached the top of the long rise where they could at last gaze at the distant horizon, north by east at the hulking mounds of the Pumpkin Buttes. For the rest of the day most of the column was in plain sight of the rest of the outfit, even though it was strung out for at least five miles or more.

  “Make no mistake about it,” the old mule-whacker told Donegan that night at camp after another eighteen exhausting miles, “we’re in Injun country now, sonny. How’s your belly?”

  “Just a touch of the bad water, Dick,” Seamus replied. He lay by the fire, an arm slung over his eyes, feeling the rumble of that dysentery bubble through his system. “I’ll be fine by morning.”

  Donegan wasn’t alone. Almost half the command suffered diarrhea to one degree or another already, forced to drink from the mineral-laced streams. The horses fared no better, many of them suffering the same symptoms, which made for a messy stretch of trail for the infantry forced to plod along behind them.

  Seamus slept fitfully that night as the sky closed down upon them, dreaming of holding Sam again, of clutching his son to his breast, smelling the babe’s breath after it had suckled Sam’s warm milk.

 

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