Dear God in heaven—make this a swift strike. Keep your hand at my shoulder as you have always done, I pray. For their sake … for their sake and not for mine.
That night of the sixteenth as William Earl Smith worked at the mess fire with two other orderlies, a courier rode in from Fetterman carrying parcels bursting with mail for the men. All those smoky, glowing fires fed with greasewood helped to hold back the gloom as men read one another their news from the States, greetings from loved ones back East, or clippings from newspapers many weeks old. Spirits ran high, despite the plummeting temperatures as the wind quartered out of the north, rank with the smell of snow in the air.
One man was far from buoyant at that campsite halfway to Reno Cantonment. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge figured he had taken just about all he could of the brash and arrogant Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, and stomped over to the cavalry camp to have matters settled once and for all.
After presenting himself at Mackenzie’s tent, the colonels had themselves a good heart-to-heart—finding more in common than Dodge had supposed. The cavalry commander offered the infantry commander the use of two of his orderlies for the remainder of the march, besides suggesting they alternate days taking up the lead. In that way they would eliminate entirely the competition to be the first to arrive at the good camping grounds. Mackenzie’s largess must have relaxed Dodge, for they soon began to confide in one another their common complaints about their superior.
“General Crook passes for a Sybarite,” the high-fashioned and fastidious Dodge whined, “who is utterly contemptuous of anything like luxury or even comfort—yet he has the most luxurious surroundings considering the necessity for short allowance that I have ever seen taken to the field by a general officer.”
“I suppose I’ll have to agree with you,” Mackenzie admitted, an officer who took pride in his uniform and the dashing figure he cut. “The way he dresses himself—you couldn’t tell him from the lowliest man along.”
“There is no doubt of Crook’s courage, energy, will,” Dodge continued, “but I am loath to say I begin to believe he is a humbug—who hopes to make his reputation by assuming qualities foreign to him. One thing is most certain. He is the very worst-mannered man I have ever seen in his position, though his ill manners seem to be the result rather of ignorance than of deliberate will. I believe him to be warm-hearted, but his estimate of a man will, I think, be discovered to be founded not on what a man can or will do for the service, but what he can or will do for Crook.”
“He does have his own way about things, doesn’t he?” Mackenzie observed wryly. “Far different is he from the man I served in the Shenandoah.”
“Quite. Yes,” Dodge snorted sourly. “I arrived here an hour before my men this afternoon to hunt up a good campsite and reported to the general for instructions. He sent me on my way to hunt for myself—all the choice spots already appropriated for his Indians and his mules.”
“I’ve got the feeling those Indians and mules are Crook’s favorite hobbies,” Mackenzie observed. “Hobbies he plays with while we are about the business of making war on the hostiles.”
“It disgusts me that those damned redskins wash the entrails from the beef carcasses in the creeks where our men are forced to drink somewhere downstream. He scarcely treats you and me with the dignity we deserve,” Dodge grumped, “while he’ll talk for hours with a stinking redskin or one of his dirty scouts.”
By the time the two colonels shook hands and the infantry commander parted for his bivouac, it was clear to William Earl Smith, that unlettered former railroad brakeman from Peoria, that Dodge loathed the general while Mackenzie merely tolerated Crook until the time arrived for him to break off on his own with the cavalry. That very evening two men had forged a bond that would last out the waning of the Powder River Expedition.
Wind and icy snow returned to batter the command with the gray light of false dawn the morning of the seventeenth. Horses and mules stood facing south, their rumps and tails tucked into the freezing gale. Crook sent the wagons to the front of the march while the cavalry hung back in camp until nearly nine A.M. Fires were all but futile as the horse soldiers shivered and stomped about, finally allowed to break camp and set out on the road into the teeth of the growing fury.
Rather than flakes, the storm flung icy pellets at them, coating every man and beast with a layer of white, stinging the eyes and every patch of bare skin. Horses and mules plodded into the shifting winds, their muzzles straining forward with their task, barely able to breathe. Stout-hearted infantrymen struggled forward a foot at a time, hunched over, heads lowered as they covered mile after mile of that high, rolling mesa country. Somewhere past midday the command climbed to the top of the divide, where they finally looked down upon the Powder River Valley. Far to the northwest lay the Big Horn Mountains, all but their base hidden by the storm that failed to let up, icy flakes lancing down from a sky that continued to close in about the column with every passing hour, obscuring all but a frosty ring around the sun and creating that peculiar western phenomenon the frontiersmen referred to as a sun dog.
It was not until the late afternoon that the snow let up and the wind finally died, about the time Crook passed the order to make camp where the men could find room for their bedrolls and graze for the stock along the Dry Fork of the Powder. Some of Tom Moore’s packers had reached the campsite an hour before the first of the column, reporting that they had flushed out a small party of Indians who had scurried off east toward Pumpkin Buttes. The weary, cold men had struggled through another twenty miles of high prairie.
Just after dark two ice-coated frontiersmen showed up at the cavalry bivouac with a trio of Shoshone warriors, asking for General Crook’s camp. Mackenzie came out of his tent and introduced himself in a wreath of frost tinged orange by the nearby fire.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, General Mackenzie,” the taller of the pair replied as he dismounted and walked up to shake hands. “Name’s Tom Cosgrove. This here’s Texas Bob Eckles—but he goes by Yancy. We come to report in to Crook.”
“You’ve brought in the Snakes, I take it.”
“A hundred five of ’em, waiting up the road at Reno Cantonment for you,” Cosgrove declared. “Every last one hankering to get in their licks on Crazy Horse just about as bad as any, I figure.”
“The old chief Washakie with you again this time?”
“No,” Cosgrove said, shaking his head. “Old man’s got a fit of the rheumatiz pretty bad …” and he rubbed his own gloves together. “We both figured it wouldn’t do to have him out in this goddamn cold.”
“No matter—the general will be pleased to know you’re here,” Mackenzie added. “Myself, I’ve heard tell a little of you, Cosgrove.”
“Oh?” The squaw man stopped in his tracks and turned with renewed attention on Mackenzie.
“From a friend of yours who served me two years ago down in Texas.”
“At the Palo Duro?” Cosgrove asked, his voice rising in excitement. “By damn, you must mean that big gray-eyed Irishman Donegan!”
“One and the same.”
“Where would I find him?”
“Likely somewhere over by the packers, I hear,” Mackenzie offered. “Tell me, Mr. Cosgrove—is it true what I’ve heard about him and one of your Shoshone bucks standing over Guy Henry’s body, guarding it with their lives at the Rosebud fight?”*
“If what you heard was that they stood back to back and shot at Sioux until their guns was empty—then they set to swinging those damned rifles like they was war clubs—cracking skulls and breaking bones, pitted agin Sioux bullets … then you heard right, Colonel.”
Breaking camp at daylight on Saturday morning, the eighteenth, the column continued down the valley of the Dry Fork of the Powder through the austere, ocher countryside streaked and pocked with skiffs of icy snow beneath a graying sky. By midmorning, Mackenzie had clearly become impatient to reach Reno Cantonment. He turned to his orderly from Peoria, Illinois.
Together the two jumped ahead of the column through the rest of that morning, anxious to cover the nineteen miles. By early afternoon they had reached the Powder River itself, stopping momentarily at the icy, hoof-pocked ford.
“This is gonna play hell on Crook’s wagons,” Mackenzie muttered, then urged his horse down the graded slope into the water.
Through the sluggish, ice-choked water the two riders pushed their mounts, up the north bank where they plodded slowly through the ruins of old Fort Reno: now nothing more than a jumble of charred timbers, abandoned caissons, and wagon running gears poking their black limbs out of the icy mantle of white.
Turning upstream, Mackenzie and Smith crossed the last three miles to reach the Reno Cantonment, established in mid-October as a supply base for the army’s expeditions when Crook decided to press his advantage against the winter roamers. Situated on a low stream terrace some ten feet above the floodplain on the west bank of the Powder, the post sat nearly opposite the mouth of the Dry Fork in a big, gentle bend in the river. Here the soldiers could be close to water as they went about constructing their log and dugout structures on fairly level land.
Reno Cantonment also added a military presence here at the southern edge of those hunting grounds most fiercely defended by the Sioux and Cheyenne, while Nelson Miles’s Tongue River Cantonment established an undeniable presence at the northern edge of the traditional hostile territory. As far as the War Department saw the situation, it appeared they had the enemy surrounded and contained, if not corralled. All that was left was mopping things up.
A Pennsylvanian by birth, Captain Edwin Pollock of the Ninth Infantry had first joined the volunteers to fight the rebellion in the South, becoming regular army after the Civil War. An officer whom the carping Dodge characterized as “the most conceited ass that every existed. He thinks he can give advice to the Almighty and talks to General Crook and everybody else as if he tolerated them….” Pollock commanded the army’s new supply base on the Powder River, nothing more than fifteen log dugouts scraped out of the nearby embankments, along with a crude hospital and cavalry corrals—all of them the barest of shelter thrown up against the horrendous thunderstorms and the blinding blizzards that frequented that country. Nonetheless, here they were within sight of the Big Horn Mountains.
Earl Smith found the captain to be no different from most other officers—tolerable at best. Presenting themselves at the commanding officer’s quarters, Mackenzie introduced himself and asked Pollock to recommend a site for the cavalry camp.
“About a mile below the fort,” the captain replied, gesturing downstream. “There’s level ground enough for your battalions, with a high embankment that will block most of the wind coming out of the north and west. Close by, your stock will find good grazing along the bottoms and up on the benches.”
The first of the command reached the ford at midafternoon, the wagon train hoving into sight soon thereafter. But true to Mackenzie’s fears, the teamsters had their worst struggle of the journey so far in getting those 168 wagons and 7 ambulances down the icy corduroy of the south bank, and across the soupy quagmire of the river bottom, where the half-frozen gumbo seized hold of the wheels and refused to let go.
The cold air turned an icy blue as the sun began to fall into the last quarter of the southwestern sky, soldiers and civilians alike cursing, whipping, flogging the animals, throwing their shoulders against those wagons, icy water swirling about their thighs as the men struggled to muscle the first freighters across. The process only grew steadily worse as the river bottom became all the more churned with hooves, wheels, and boots. At last Mackenzie organized his men together in relays, throwing ropes around the struggling teams and hauling each wagon across the Powder by sheer willpower alone.
As each wagon clattered up the north bank onto the flat ground, a cheer went up from the exhausted relay that would now get a few minutes of rest while another twenty men slid down the icy bank, locked their frozen hands around the inch-thick ropes, then set their feet in the rutted mud and laid their backs into the task at hand.
One by one by one, Crook’s supplies crossed the murky Powder. From here on out, the expedition was firmly in this last great hunting ground of the Sioux and Cheyenne. Ten summers before, Red Cloud had warned the army that it would forfeit every soldier who crossed the Powder. But after a decade Red Cloud had become a toothless old lap dog, corralled at Camp Robinson.
Yet somewhere north of here lay the village of Crazy Horse.
From the way Smith saw Mackenzie staring into the distance that twilight, the colonel must have been trying to sense where he would find his elusive quarry—as he had done time and again chasing down the slippery Quanah Parker.*
Never before had the Fourth Cavalry marched so far north to fight an enemy. For Ranald Mackenzie the stakes had never been so high.
* Reap the Whirlwind, Vol. 9, The Plainsmen Series.
* Dying Thunder, Vol. 7, The Plainsmen Series.
Chapter 19
18–19 November 1876
“Don’t you agree, Seamus?” John Bourke asked that Saturday evening at their fire near the packers’ camp as icy shards of snow danced and pirouetted on a capricious wind about their bivouac. “That God is on the side of the heaviest battalions?”
“Sounds like a god-blamed army maxim.” Donegan answered in turn.
“Napoleon,” Bourke replied.
“But it sounds to me that if you have the heaviest battalions—the most men and secure supply lines—then you don’t need to worry about God being on your side, Johnny.”
“My point exactly!” Bourke cried with glee. “Here we are, within sight of the Big Horn Mountains once again, much better equipped than we were last March—ready, willing, and able to catch the Crazy Horse warrior bands laying low in their lodges to wait out the winter. While we have the men, the matériel, the supply lines to make that red bastard’s capture a sure thing.”
Behind them a voice called out, “Is that the Irishman’s voice I hear?”
Out of the dark appeared the swarthy half-breed. It brought a smile to Donegan’s face. “Last I heard of you at Laramie, Crook said you was taken terrible sick and the soldiers hauled your worthless carcass down to Cheyenne City in the back of a wagon.”
Frank Grouard held out his hand to shake, but Seamus promptly pushed it aside and gave the scout a fierce embrace. The half-breed pounded Donegan on the shoulder, saying, “There and then I figured I should go farther west, maybe back to Utah to get myself on the mend—but what do you know? On the train I laughed myself into a cure.”
“You’re pulling our legs!” Bourke declared, coming over to shake Grouard’s hand.
“The honest truth,” Grouard replied with a smile, holding a hand up in testament to the fact. “A good laugh will always cure what ails you.”
Seamus asked, “So how’d you end up getting here?”
“Rode in with the paymaster from Fort Fetterman.”
“Paymaster?” Bourke almost squealed in excitement. “Damn, but don’t they always show up where a man has no place to spend his money!”
Grouard went on to explain, “You’d been two days gone from Fetterman when I was fixing to take off. So I offered to guide that paymaster in here, protecting all that mail and pay for all you soldiers.”
“You made sure that paymaster reported in to the general so we can all have us a round of drinks, didn’t you, Grouard?” Bourke cheered.
“Sure as hell did,” Frank replied. “If I didn’t, I figure there’s a few hundred unpaid soldiers ready to stretch my neck with a rope!
Is that Frank Grouard out there?” Crook stuck his head out the flaps of a nearby tent glowing with lamps, the small space filled not only with a map-strewn table, two cots, and a Sibley stove, but with Mackenzie and Dodge.
Grouard began moving that way, saying, “It is, General.”
Mackenzie immediately push
ed past Crook and held out his hand at the flaps. “Ranald Mackenzie. Commanding, Fourth Cavalry. I’ve heard a lot about you, Grouard.”
“Good to meet you too, General.”
“Well, Frank—what have you seen?” Mackenzie asked as he slipped a glove back on his right hand.
“Seen heaps.”
Mackenzie scratched his chin. “So where are the reds?”
Gesturing with a slight toss of his head to the west, Grouard answered, “I make ’em over in the mountains.”
As Donegan stood there watching the three expedition leaders, he once more noticed the stark contrasts between the men. While Crook seemed oblivious to his dress—wearing worn and dirty wool coats and fur caps naked of any insignia or badge of office, even to the point of carelessly tying up the long ends of his bushy red beard into a pair of braided points with twine—Mackenzie and Dodge, on the other hand, were the noble specimens of a cavalry or infantry officer: wearing their complete uniforms with pride.
“John,” Crook said, turning to Bourke, “bring Three Bears to see us.”
“Something up, General?”
Crook’s eyes bounced over the small gathering of officers and civilizations at that fire outside his tent. “Yes. This time I’ve decided to keep Cosgrove’s Shoshones as reserves and let the Indians most familiar with this ground do my scouting for me.”
“Makes good sense,” Grouard replied.
“I’m glad you agree,” the general replied. “I’ve put Lieutenant Schuyler over the Snakes, to work with Cosgrove and Washakie’s two sons who came along. But come on inside now, Frank. We’ve got some talking to do before I figure to send some of those Sioux scouts north to feel out where we go from here.”
“Very good, General,” Bourke replied, pulling on his wool gloves and stepping away. “I’ll return shortly.”
Well after moonset eight of the Red Cloud Agency Sioux and six of the Arapaho slipped quietly into the dark, rationed for four days, instructed to scout north by west toward the mountains.
A Cold Day in Hell Page 23