“That young Cheyenne they caught up on Clear Creek is named Beaver Dam,” Frank Grouard told the white and half-breed scouts huddled by the fire late that Tuesday night, 21 November.
“Young and stupid!” snorted Baptiste Pourier.
Seamus Donegan shrugged. “Maybeso, Big Bat. But out in this weather, the way a man has to bundle himself up to keep out the cold—I couldn’t tell one Injin from another. Can’t blame the boy for making that mistake, I can’t. G’won, Frank—tell us what Crook learned.”
“Smart it was, for them Lakota and Arapaho scouts Crook sent out wasn’t wearing a bit of soldier gear—being fifty miles off in enemy country,” Grouard continued his story. “So this Beaver Dam come right up to them, figuring them to be a scouting or hunting party from Crazy Horse’s village. They waited till the boy was in the middle of ’em—jabbering away about all the villages in the neighborhood, him answering all their questions and such—before they grabbed the boy, tied him up, and hurried him back here to the general.”
“Means there must be Cheyenne in the country,” Seamus said.
“Damn if there ain’t a big bunch of ’em over on a branch of the Powder,” Frank went on. “But that youngster claimed he come from a small village of only some five or six lodges. He told Crook that his people would get afraid if he didn’t show up after he’d been out hunting—then they’d likely scamper off for Crazy Horse’s camp.”
“I’ll bet that got Crook’s attention!” Pourier said.
“Bloody well right,” Donegan agreed. “Crook’s been wanting to get eye to eye with Crazy Horse for the better part of a year now. Where’s Beaver Dam’s village, Frank?”
“Said it was up on the head of the Crazy Woman Fork.”
“He tell Crook where the Crazy Horse band was camped now?”
Grouard nodded. “A long ways off from here. Clear up on the Rosebud, near where we had our little fight with him in June.”
“That’ll be a goddamned long march—it will, it will,” Seamus muttered, stomping the deepening snow to shock some feeling back into a numbing foot. The cold was simply too much even for the double pair of socks he wore in the tall stovepipe boots he always bought two sizes too large. He feared he might lose some toes to the surgeon before this trip was over.
“So now Crook’s give out orders to all the units: moving northwest toward the mountains as soon as it’s light,” Frank explained. “He wants this expedition to come back with a worthy trophy.”
Big Bat cried, “Like Crazy Horse’s scalp!”
“The whole outfit’s moving in the morning?” Donegan asked.
“Yep, the whole shebang,” Grouard replied. “At least for now.”
“I figure Crook’ll break off Mackenzie soon enough—once he’s found the Crazy Horse village,” Seamus added as the wind seemed to stiffen and the snowfall thickened. “Damn,” he muttered again, stomping his feet. “Think I’ll go do what some of the others is doing, fellas: taking this last chance to write down a few words to send back to Fetterman with one of Teddy Egan’s couriers tomorrow. Too cold to sleep anyways.”
After midnight Crook sent off a Second Cavalry courier to race the ninety miles back to Fetterman with his wire to Sheridan:
Scouts returned to-day and reported that Cheyennes have crossed over to that other side of the Big Horn Mountains, and that Crazy Horse and his band are encamped on the Rosebud near where we had the fight with them last summer. We start out after his band to-morrow morning.
It was better that the two of them act as bold as they could. So Young Two Moon and Crow Necklace walked right along the string of horses on the picket lines, in among the soldiers and their tents as if they were two of the Indian scouts. Their bravado worked.
At the near edge of the camp a large fire blazed where many Shoshone and Arapaho scouts were busy cleaning weapons, drinking coffee, and playing several noisy games of “hand” on blankets and buffalo robes. There beside the fire a handful of their own people stood, singing Cheyenne war songs.
But they were not prisoners! Who were these Cheyenne in the soldier camp?
“I think that is Old Crow,” Crow Necklace whispered right against Young Two Moon’s ear. “And the other, he looks like a friend of my uncle’s—named Satchel.”
“I know of Satchel,” Young Two Moon replied, his gall rising. “Now I realize why these Tse-Tsehese are here. This Satchel is a relative of Bill Rowland at the White River Agency.”
“The white man married to one of our women?”
“Yes. That must be why they are here,” Young Two Moon replied. “Bill Rowland brought them here to find our camp in the mountains. To capture our ponies and take away our guns—just like the soldiers are doing at the White River Agency.”
“If these two are here with Bill Rowland,” Crow Necklace said sadly, “then there must surely be more of our people here with them.”
“I am ashamed for them,” Young Two Moon said, a sour ball of disappointment thick in his throat. “We have come to this: the white man making some of our relatives hunt down the rest of our people.”
After watching the singing and the games for a while, the pair moved on through the firelit darkness, walking below the soldier bivouac until they reached the camp where some Indians spoke a strange language.
“Who are these people?” Crow Necklace asked in a whisper.
For some time Young Two Moon stood and listened, studying the warriors who for the most part wore pieces of soldier uniforms. “I believe they must be the Ho-nehe-taneo-o, the Wolf People.”*
“Many, many winters have they have scouted for the soldiers.”
Looking about them in all directions, Young Two Moon grew frightened for the first time on this journey. The disappointment he had felt in finding Tse-Tsehese from the agency was now replaced by the beginning of fear for his people. He waited and did not lead Crow Necklace away from the camp of the Wolf People until the enemy had all gone to their war lodges made of blankets laid over bent willow branches, until the enemy’s fires burned low. In all that time of waiting his fear slowly boiled into hatred—until he decided they must do something to injure these ancient enemies.
When the whole camp had grown very quiet, Young Two Moon led his friend toward the enemy’s horses. They selected three of the nicest ponies the Wolf People had tied to a picket rope and cut them loose. Then the two started back across the length of the river bottom, skirting the camp to reach the spot where the other two scouts waited.
But in passing by the Arapaho camp, they found a fire still glowing cheerfully, around it a few Indians singing and eating, and a warrior frying cakes in a skillet. Beside the fire sat a large stack of cakes. The warm, luring fragrance was simply too much for Young Two Moon’s empty stomach. It growled at him not to walk on by.
“I must get me some of those cakes from that man,” he explained to Crow Necklace.
“I am hungry too. But what do we do with these horses?”
He thought a minute, trying to keep his stomach from speaking louder than his good sense. “We will let them go here. They should not wander far before we have eaten our fill.”
They released their stolen ponies, then walked boldly toward the fire. Just as they reached the light, two soldiers rode up and shouted to the Arapaho in English.
“Stop your singing and keep your eyes open!”
The soldiers rode off once the Arapaho fell silent. Grumbling, the Indians trudged off to their beds, disappearing within their makeshift war lodges. As the last Arapaho went to his blankets, the two Cheyenne scouts dashed in, scooping up a handful of the hot flour cakes, then cut loose three more ponies.
Crow Necklace claimed one, and Young Two Moon led the other two back to find their friends.
They found Hail and High Wolf curled up beneath their blankets, back to back—asleep. And discovered that their four Cheyenne ponies had wandered off.
“Hail, you come ride with me,” Young Two Moon said. “Jump up behind me. High Wolf
can ride a horse, and so can Crow Necklace.”
They did their best to follow the tracks of the four horses and eventually found them, heading north by west, wending their way back home to the village.
Now they climbed onto the backs of their own war ponies, and leading their three captured animals, the four young scouts set off at a gallop into the cold and the dark.
They had news to tell Morning Star, Little Wolf, and the other chiefs.
The ve-ho-e soldiers were coming!
* 21 November 1876.
* Pawnee.
Chapter 22
22 November 1876
“A damned sad place to be at this hour.”
Seamus turned at the voice, finding old Bill Rowland stopped a few yards behind him in the cold black seep of predawn. “A sad place to be any time of the day.”
The scout waited a moment more, then moved up quietly to stand beside the Irishman. Married to a Cheyenne woman back at the Red Cloud Agency, Rowland already had proved his worth by translating for the auxiliaries Crook brought along to hunt down the hostile winter roamers. Now that the general was no longer chasing after Crazy Horse, but had instead heard tell of a large Cheyenne village somewhere close in the mountains, the Powder River Expedition might well find a man with Bill Rowland’s talents highly valuable in very short order.
It wasn’t snowing again, cold as it was, but every molecule of moisture in the air had frozen, making it hurt to breathe, the very air around him like icy grit against Donegan’s skin as he slipped his hat back on his head.
“You know any of ’em?” Rowland asked, gesturing across the collection of grave sites at the outskirts of the old fort—now no more than a collection of charred stumps of construction timbers protruding like blackened, splintered bones poking from a gaping, rotted wound.
The Irishman shook his head, tugging his soft-crowned felt hat down upon his long hair that tossed in the harsh wind. “No. Not really, I didn’t.”
“Thought you might have,” Rowland said. “The way you come up here … when none of them others could give a damn if—”
“Sojurs like them don’t need reminding of dying when they’re fixing to set off to fight,” Seamus interrupted, then thought better of it. “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to snap your head off, Bill.”
The older frontiersman shrugged it off. “Don’t make no nevermind to me.”
“You come to fetch me?” Seamus asked, refastening the top collar button on his blanket-lined canvas mackinaw.
“They’re setting off. General wants us now.”
For a few moments more Donegan continued to gaze reverently over the dozen busted, dry-split headboards, each one bearing a wind-scoured and unreadable name, a good share fallen beneath the deep snow but more leaning precariously at their last stations there in the flaky soil above the gallant roll call of those who had given their all to this high and forbidding land.
“Tell me—the Injins leave this place alone, don’t they, Bill?”
“Yes,” Rowland answered quietly as he reached his horse and rose off the ground. “Place like this is powerful big medicine to the Cheyenne. They’ll go half a day around to keep out of the way of such a place.”
“Smart,” Seamus said as he took up the reins and stuffed a foot in a stirrup, rising to the saddle.
“For the Cheyenne?”
“For any man,” Donegan replied. “Any man what does his best to keep out of death’s way.”
He nudged the big bay into motion beside Rowland, putting behind them the crumbling adobe walls that would not hide the rusting debris of iron stoves and broken wagon wheels, a solitary broken-down wagon box, and a half-burned artillery carriage for a mountain howitzer.
He was venturing back into this hostile wilderness, crossing the milk-pale Powder River as he had times before, again to put his body into the maw of this ten-year-old fight … come here again to this tiny plot of ground to think and pray alone, remembering many faces, knowing very few names of all those who had dreams and hopes and families. For those who had fallen on this consecrated ground, Donegan would always say his prayers as his mother had taught him—to go down upon one knee and to bow his head before the presence of something he could not begin to comprehend, but knew existed just the same.
Although he knew not how God ever allowed one man to set himself against another.
It warmed him this morning, as he and Rowland caught up to the head of the column, to think on his mother again, now especially because he was a parent. Not really having known his father, knowing instead his uncles, who stepped into the breach to try helping raise their sister’s boys. Would Seamus’s own son come to know the feel of his father’s hand at his back when something frightened the youngster, that reassuring touch to let the child know his father was there? Would the boy come to love stroking, pulling, yanking on his father’s beard in loving play? Oh, how he prayed he would have many, many more hours of holding that soft-skinned, sweet-breathed infant against his shoulder, singing the child to sleep with the low, vibrant words of ancient Gaelic melodies and the lowing rhythm of his heartbeat. How he wanted his son to know these things, and pass them on to his own children.
From a huge patch pocket in the mackinaw, Seamus pulled the small amber jar Ben Clark had given him last winter. With his teeth Donegan dragged off his thick mitten and stuffed it under an arm before putting the cork stopper between his teeth and taking it from the jar. Inside he always kept a good supply of bacon tallow. Dipping some on a finger, he lathered it all around his cracked, oozing lips and the inside of his cracked and inflamed nostrils. How it stung! His flesh cried out as he laid on a thick coating of the sticky fat, then licked the fingertip clean, put the jar away in that big pocket, and quickly pulled on his wool mitten.
All the while wondering if any man knew where his grave was going to be. Deciding the not knowing didn’t matter when a man’s time finally arrived.
After an hour on the trail north from the Powder the order came, “Dismount!”
They were going to save what they could of the horses’ strength—especially now that Crook had some idea of where a village was and Mackenzie’s cavalry must be ready.
The soldiers in those eleven troops made no attempt to come out of the saddle as one. This was not parade drill, nor retiring the colors. A few hundred cold, bone-weary men who were anxious for action, ordered to walk beside their mounts for the next half hour until they would be ordered back into the saddle. Such walking by the troopers saved some reservoir of strength in the animals, besides helping the men stay warmer with the exertion as they trudged through the ankle-deep snow beneath the scummy clouds that lowered off the Big Horns.
Away to the northeast herds of buffalo dotted the prairie in black patches against the bleak white landscape, grazing in sight for the rest of the afternoon. Up and down throughout the remainder of the march they cut a swath through the stretch of monochrome and desolate country that took them ever nearer the foot of the Big Horn Mountains. That bitterly cold twenty-second day of November Crook had them cover all of twenty-eight miles of tortuous, bleak prairie travel before making camp on the banks of the Crazy Woman Fork. Common legend held that the creek earned its name from a crazed woman who had lived by herself on its banks for many years before dying about 1850. However, the English equivalent of “crazy” never had translated to mean true madness as much as it signified sexual promiscuity. It was likely the woman had been cast out of her village for her lascivious activity—a theory much more fitting the Cheyenne belief in the value of a woman’s virtue.
Cloud Peak rose in the distance, just under a hundred miles off, its helmet at times peeking from the top of the wispy white clouds that brushed across the painfully blue sky … before it began to snow again.
Through sandy ravines and across cactus-covered hillsides the expedition plodded on until late afternoon. As the last of Wagon Master John B. Sharpe’s teamsters were jangling in, the pickets to the northwest spotted a solitary ri
der appear atop a knoll carrying a white flag. Crook sent out a party to bring in the horseman.
Seamus joined the small crowd who gathered to listen as Frank Grouard interpreted.
“Says his name is Sitting Bear. From what I can tell, he’s come up from the Red Cloud Agency—sent by the soldier chief down there to talk the warrior bands into surrendering and coming back to the reservation,” Frank explained. “Not far north of here he says he ran into those five lodges the Cheyenne boy come from.”
“Are they running?” Crook asked.
“Going north, just like that Cheyenne boy figured they would.”
Crook mumbled his great disappointment under his breath.
Grouard continued. “Sitting Bear talked to ’em but they wasn’t about to turn around and head into the agency now. They’re scared—and hightailing it for Crazy Horse’s bunch.”
“To warn them?” Crook squeaked.
“You can count on it,” Frank replied. “That pretty much ruins your surprise on Crazy Horse, don’t it?”
Crook’s eyes narrowed as he gazed at the broad smile on Grouard’s face. “What the hell’s so funny to you, half-breed? I thought you wanted Crazy Horse as much as me.”
“Oh, I guess I do, General,” Grouard said. “But there ain’t a chance of us catching him now, is there?”
“Not if those Cheyenne are going to warn his Oglalla.” Crook stood pulling at one end of his beard, then another.
“How’d you like some good news from this here Sitting Bear fella?” Frank spilled it.
The general cracked a smile. “Why, you devious bastard! That’s why you’re smiling. But—if Crazy Horse is going to slip away before I can get there, what good news could you possibly have for me?”
“How about a village of Cheyenne dropping in your lap?”
“Cheyenne, you say?” Crook asked, taking a step closer.
“The biggest damned village the Cheyenne had together in a long, long time,” Frank exclaimed. “Sitting Bear’s been there—claims that village got more Cheyenne in it than they had when they camped alongside the Lakota and Custer marched down on ’em all at the Greasy Grass.”
A Cold Day in Hell Page 26