A Cold Day in Hell

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Who was it?” someone cried out from the crowd.

  “Were they friends?”

  “Were they our enemies?”

  “They were Shoshone!” one of the Lakota shouted.

  “Enemies!” a woman screeched.

  “How many?”

  The other Lakota answered, “Not many. We can kill them all!”

  “Yes! Kill them all!” was the cry taken up by the young warriors.

  In a matter of moments the whole village was abuzz with battle plans and preparation. The various leaders from the warrior societies quickly decided who among them would go to fight, and who would have to be left behind to guard the village while most of the fighting men were absent. Before the sun had climbed off the bare tops of the cottonwood trees, the war party galloped off. Women went about preparing for a great feast when the men would return.

  The next day their victorious warriors came home, carrying the many scalps and fingers taken from the enemy dead, as well as the hands of twelve Shoshone babies killed in the fight where they left no survivors—bringing back a lone infant they would raise as one of their own people, taken from the breast of a brave Shoshone woman. But for that victory, the People had paid a heavy price.

  Because of the battle casualties, the Tse-Tsehese moved camp down the foot of the mountains, and the village remained in muted mourning that first night. The following day at sunset they began their victory dance. It began snowing again, fat flakes falling so thick that they hissed into the great skunk, that huge bonfire the warrior societies built and lighted for the celebration. Each warrior’s wife brought out the scalps her husband had taken while he recited his battle exploits—telling how the enemy had been packed and ready to move for the day when the warriors attacked; telling how the enemy ran, leaving all their goods and ponies and took to the hills where they could throw up some breastworks of rocks and brush; from there the Shoshone put up a hard fight—Little Shield, Walking Man, Young Spotted Wolf, and Twins were all seriously wounded in the fight, and the Shoshone killed nine Tse-Tsehese warriors in their desperate defense; the fighting raged until sundown, when the last of the enemy was killed. The dancing and feasting continued throughout the night as the stars whirled overhead.

  And in the morning, Little Wolf, another of the Old-Man Chiefs, came to tell Morning Star that someone had stolen his ponies overnight while the camp was celebrating.

  “Who could have done that?”

  “Not the Shoshone,” Little Wolf speculated.

  “No, not them. The attack took care of them.”

  “I think the Ooetaneo-o, the Crow People. From the tracks I followed a ways, the thieves came from the north.”

  “Over the mountains?” Morning Star asked.

  “Yes, I think so”

  “Why would they steal only your ponies?”

  Little Wolf wagged his head, as if attempting to sort it out. “Perhaps to lay a trap for one of us, a few of us—whoever will go after those ponies. Not the whole band.”

  “Are you going after your horses?”

  “No,” Little Wolf said, gesturing with his hands moving outward from his chest. “I give the ponies to the Crow People. I will not go after them.”

  Morning Star watched his old friend walk away. It was a strange feeling inside him now. For this was the only time in his long, long memory that the People allowed stolen ponies to go with the thieves without giving chase.

  The village moved again that day, to the mouth of Striped Stick Creek on the Powder River. As the women raised the lodges and started the fires, many of the men rode down the Powder hunting for deer and antelope. In the evening when they returned they brought the news of finding many, many tracks of iron-shod American horses tramping through the snow and mud, finding the ruts cut by the white man’s wagon wheels too—all of them moving north by west along the divide south of the Powder River.

  “Surely they go to that small soldier camp beside the Powder,” Little Wolf observed that night as the old men and war chiefs gathered to discuss what course of action to take.

  “There are always wagons coming and going from that place where the soldiers live in their dirt lodges,” Yellow Eagle said. He was one of the hunters who had seen the tracks for himself. “This was not the same. Too many wagons. Too many horses and walk-a-heaps.”

  Last Bull growled, “They are coming to look for us!”

  “We do not know that yet,” Morning Star quieted the alarmist.

  “We should find out,” Little Wolf decided.

  And the rest agreed. They decided to select four wolves to investigate what the tracks truly meant. The Old-Man Chiefs instructed the two Servant Chiefs to handpick certain young men with specific talents to go on this important mission. The Servant Chiefs went first to the lodge of Hail. There they took the young man by the arms and brought him to the Council Lodge. Again they went out and returned with Crow Necklace, one of the most respected Crazy Dog little chiefs. Again they went out and brought back Young Two Moon. Finally they returned to the Council Lodge with the last of the sacred four, High Wolf.

  When the wolves were seated in a line before the old chiefs, Morning Star explained, “We have selected you four because we know we can depend upon you to go out and follow the trail Yellow Eagle and the others discovered to the south. When you find the trail, stay with it. Do not leave it until you learn who made the tracks, and where they are going. Why they are in this country.”

  Then Little Wolf said, “Perhaps the trail will meet another party somewhere. As Morning Star has said, we are depending upon you to find out the answers to all our questions and to return with what we must know. Now, go catch up your strongest ponies, but return to this lodge before you set out on your journey.”

  When the four had returned with their horses, weapons, blankets, and coats, the chiefs led them through the village in a long procession behind the Old-Man Crier who sang out, “Behold! I come with four young men for whom we will look in the days to come. For whom our ears will listen in the days to come. They are going out to look for the tracks of those who have sneaked into our country. This sacred four will return here when they have news of these enemies!”

  The four companies drawn from units of the Fourth, Ninth, and Twenty-third infantries to man Reno Cantonment certainly enjoyed their visitors and did all they could to join in on the revelry those first two days after Crook’s men were paid and all hell broke loose. The carouse allowed Pollock’s men a brief respite from the ongoing construction expanding the warehouses, cavalry corrals, teamster shed, blacksmith shack, and the company mess kitchens, each one built of logs “half-above-ground.”

  During the night of the nineteenth three shots were fired in the raucous camp, leading Colonel Dodge to call upon General Crook to have the sutler’s saloon closed. Dodge came back to the infantry camp grumbling and cursing the general: Crook had refused because he was a personal friend of the trader, and together they were partners in an Oregon sheep ranch.

  So rowdy was the nonstop celebration that Dodge himself went to appeal to Pollock, asking that the cantonment commander close down the trader’s saloon. Little did the officers know that the sutler was in cahoots with another civilian who had set up an awning over his peddler’s cart some distance upstream in a copse of cottonwood, where many of the horse soldiers had been going to cut and peel the cottonwood bark to feed to their mounts as the snowstorm continued into the night.

  More shots were fired in the cavalry camp by drunken soldiers after moonrise. Investigating, some of Dodge’s officers discovered the whiskey peddler, confiscated his goods, and knocked in the tops of the kegs with their rifle butts, spilling all that heady saddle varnish across the frozen ground.

  Still, they were too late for one of the Fifth Cavalry troopers who had already stumbled away from the scene by himself, down to the icy bank, where he tripped and fell into the Powder River. Soaked to the gills, he belly-crawled onto the muddy bank, exhausted and unable to move any farthe
r. At sunrise his bunkie awoke and went looking for the missing trooper, finding him dead in the frozen mud beside the river. His company scratched a hole out of the unforgiving, icy ground and laid their comrade to rest late that afternoon of the twentieth as the howling gales of wind-driven snow began to taper off, there to sleep through eternity beneath the flaky sod of Indian country.

  That afternoon a party of thirty-four starving Montana miners stumbled into the cantonment. Just days before, the blizzard had caught them out and unprepared. For better than forty-eight hours they had trudged on through the jaw of the storm, the mighty winds at their backs, pushing them farther and farther south. Perhaps remembering how well some Montana prospectors had served him so ably at the Battle of the Rosebud, Crook graciously supplied the hungry civilians with some of Quartermaster John V. Furey’s rations, blankets, and tents for shelter.

  Throughout the night of the twentieth the gusty winds continued to bully the land with snow flurries, keeping most of the men huddled close to their wind-whipped fires. Nonetheless, Crook’s auxiliaries were far from deterred in expressing their new friendship for one another—holding mutual feasts, dancing, and serenades far into the night.

  Snow lay drifted against the sides of the tents when the sun finally peeked over the ridges to the east on Tuesday morning, the twenty-first of November. Mackenzie had his cavalry battalions up early, breaking camp and saddling up to move another mile downstream so the horses could find more grazing where the wind had blown patches of ground clear. Seamus hung back with the packers near the teamsters’ camp. To him, all that packing up and moving no more than a mile seemed work for work’s sake. Just like the army way of things. And that made it something the Irishman loathed.

  “Seamus! Seamus!”

  Donegan turned to find old Dick Closter lumbering up from the latrines dug north of camp. “What’s up, mule skinner?”

  “They’re back!”

  “Who’s back?”

  Closter turned, his white beard brilliant against his smoke-tanned face. “Them Injun scouts Crook sent out! They’re back!”

  “Good to hear,” Donegan grumbled, and tucked the muffler higher around his ears. “Maybe now the general will find out where we need to go—”

  “I’ll lay you ten to one the general’s Injuns know where to find Crazy Horse!”

  That got the Irishman’s attention. He bolted to his feet. “Where’s those scouts now, by damned?”

  “Yonder,” Closter said, pointing. “They was heading for Crook’s camp, taking their prisoner to show him off to the general.”

  * Big Horn Mountains.

  * Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory—autumn, 1866.

  † Big Horn River.

  Chapter 21

  Freezing Moon 1876

  Snow fell off and on throughout the first three days Young Two Moon and the others pushed southeast toward the course of the Powder River. From time to time the clouds parted and they would see patches of startling blue, but the broken sky did not last for long. Again and again the heavens darkened, lowered, then spat sharp, icy flakes in a swirl around the scouts and their ponies.

  They shivered as they rode ever onward. They shivered each night they made camp and lit their small fire, sat around the low flames, talking in quiet voices, and one by one tried to sleep while the ponies stood nearby, rump-tucked to the north wind. The four grew colder as the journey grew longer.

  The third day they pushed past Warbonnet Ridge—which they named because the three trees that grew upon it made the prominence resemble a warrior’s feathered bonnet from a distance—then on to House Ridge, which they named because at its top sat a large boulder that resembled a white man’s house. It was there the four turned their faces into the cold wind, urging their ponies north by east toward the Powder River at last. Once they neared the divide that would take them into the Powder River Valley, the young scouts put more distance between themselves, spreading apart in a broad front, moving slowly, slowly, studying the frozen ground, the icy mud in every coulee, the tracked-up snow in every bottom, searching for tracks.

  By the time the sun set that third day, the Cheyenne warriors reached a wagon road that appeared to take them down to the river itself. The storm had returned on the back of a ferocious wind, making it difficult to see left or right, up or down in the dark.

  Hail stopped them on the road after a short distance. “Now I believe we can take this road and follow it down across Powder River, until it reaches the top of those three bald buttes, and stay there till morning; from there in the daylight we can see much country.”

  With only nods of agreement, the other three followed Hail, the oldest among them. Upon reaching the buttes, they moved in the lee of the tallest, halted, and let the ponies blow. After some time Hail spoke again.

  “With this storm it is useless to climb this hill until it is near daylight.”

  Young Two Moon said, “You are right. We won’t see anything, not even a fire’s light in this weather.”

  High Wolf added, “Let’s just stay down here out of the wind and try to keep warm until there is enough light to see come morning.”

  Together the four walked their ponies into the crevice between the tall butte and one next to it, keeping their ponies close at hand for the warmth the weary animals put off. Young Two Moon dozed fitfully, unable to really sleep, each time awaking with his muscles cramped from the cold ground. His belly growled for food, but he did not really hunger for the dried meat they had brought along in the small parfleches. The cold and the hunger were merely trials that an honorable young man had to suffer for what good his people expected of him.

  He was nudged and only then realized he had finally fallen asleep near first light.

  Hail said, “Now we must climb this hill and be ready when day comes to look over the ridge up and down Powder River Valley.”

  Bellying to the top, the four immediately made out the firesmoke hanging in a layer low in the supercold air, off in the middistance along a bend in the river. As the light slowly brightened, the scouts gradually made out the whiteness of the soldier tents against the stark and spidery blackness of the leafless willow and cottonwood. When the graying light ballooned a bit more, Young Two Moon saw some of the white soldiers along with some Indians dressed in soldier uniforms and some Indians wearing their own native clothing all turning their horses loose to graze the snowy ground. One group led their herd to the base of the bluff where the scouts watched, leaving the ponies and returning to their fires. Another group of Indians drove their ponies across the icy river to graze on the far side of the Powder. And still a third group of soldier scouts returned to the herd beneath the tall bluff, climbed a distance up the side, and sat down to watch the ponies.

  Because of those enemy herders, the four wolves dared not speak to one another, nor could they move without alerting those soldier scouts watching over their animals. They could only lie flat and motionless, mouthing their silent words to one another as the day became brighter and the river bottom came alive with men, wagons, mules, and horses.

  Crow Necklace, the youngest among them, wanted action, whispering, “Let’s go down there, make our charge, and drive off some of those horses.”

  “No,” Hail scolded between his chattering teeth.

  “We can steal those horses,” Crow Necklace persisted. “It will be easy, and we can return to our families with something to show for this cold journey!”

  “No,” Hail snapped, his eyes watching the soldier scouts below them on the slope. “If we do as you suggest, we might not ever make it home to our families.”

  “Hail is right,” Young Two Moon asserted. “Look, Crow Necklace—the snow is deep. There are many people down there. They could overtake and capture us. Look, see how far it is now to the foot of the mountains where our village lies. Our ponies are tired from the last three days. The enemy’s horses are strong. And it is a long, level stretch of ground where we would have to run—we would not even make it i
nto the breaks before they would catch us.”

  They lay on the frozen ground among the squat sage for most of that day,* afraid to move for attracting attention. Not until late in the afternoon as the sun pitched into the southwest did the soldiers and the soldiers’ Indian scouts begin driving in all their horses for the night. Still the four wolves waited as the soldier fires began to glow, the dancing flames shimmering against the skeletal cottonwood trees and willow, the orangetitted flames reflected off the low, heavy clouds. How Young Two Moon yearned for some of that warmth for himself.

  Long after dark they pushed themselves back from the brow of the hill and crept down toward the soldier camp, finding the horses all tied in long lines to picket ropes strung between the bare trees.

  “I think we should leave our ponies here,” Young Two Moon suggested. “Two of us should go in, and two of us should stay with the horses.”

  Hail nodded. “It is a good plan. If the soldiers or their scouts catch the two, then the others can mount up and escape in the dark.”

  “I will go,” Young Two Moon said emphatically. “Who chooses to go with me?”

  Eagerly Crow Necklace replied, “I will go with you!”

  Turning to the younger man, Young Two Moon said, “This is good, for we may have ourselves a chance to get some soldier horses down there.”

  “High Wolf and I will wait for you here,” Hail said. “Be careful.”

  Young Two Moon gripped Hail’s wrist and looked into his friend’s eyes. “If you hear guns, or we do not come back soon—mount up and ride like a snow wind back to our village. Tell my family that I died doing my duty for my people.”

  Hail grinned, saying, “You will be back. And you will be the one to tell the village of these soldiers yourself. Now, go. And we will rest here with the ponies until you return.”