A Cold Day in Hell

by Terry C. Johnston

  Perhaps Mackenzie was dwelling on the same dark thoughts that tormented Donegan: more soldiers buried in more unmarked graves, those final resting places abandoned to the ages.

  Come the end of this month a full decade will have passed, he thought that next morning as he huddled beside a grease-wood fire and clutched his hands around a steamy tin of coffee. Ten full years since we buried Fetterman’s dead inside Carringtons stockade.*

  Ten long, long years of scooping holes out of this bloody wilderness where dead soldiers can sleep alone and forgotten for all of eternity.

  That Friday, the first of December, a horse fell beneath a Fourth Cavalry sergeant, rolling over on the soldier, crushing him so that he died in agony within minutes, his lungs filling up with blood as he thrashed on the snow in the midst of his friends helpless to save him.

  A quiet and somber camp again that night as Crook grew restive and anxious, awaiting Luther North and the Pawnee he had sent north to pick up the Cheyenne trail, hoping it would eventually lead him to Crazy Horse. Just past nightfall word began to circulate that they were to be ready to march back to Reno Cantonment at dawn.

  On top of the twenty-eight miles of icy, windblown, snow-drifted prairie the command put behind them before reaching the north bank of the Powder that second day of December, the continued and extreme cold was taking the last bit of starch out of the horses. The temperature continued to slide down ever more rapidly as the sky cleared.

  Early that Saturday evening two Cheyenne scouts came in from the Red Cloud Agency. To Crook they reported having learned that the Sioux war chief Lame Deer and a sizable war party was on its way from the Belle Fourche for the Little Powder.

  Into the night wild speculation coursed its way through the column. Was it too much to hope that Crook would move them back to Fetterman and Laramie to retire the expedition? Or—as some of the senior officers hinted—could the general really be contemplating another march to the Belle Fourche and the Black Hills in hopes of snagging himself another victory by cutting off Lame Deer’s band?

  The last of Mackenzie’s command did not dismount on the banks of the Powder until well after dark, not eating until nine o’clock—for the first time since breakfast. And Furey’s wagon train did not roll in until shortly after midnight.

  At dawn on the third orders came down for the cavalry to mount fifty of the best men from each company on fifty of their strongest horses and be prepared to move out by nine. That Sunday morning chief medical officer Joseph R. Gibson turned over his wounded to Marshall W. Wood and some of his five surgeons, who would begin the southward trek with the casualties to Fort Fetterman the following day under the command of Major George A. Gordon.

  With the rising of the cold buttermilk-yellow sun, Tom Cosgrove reported to Crook that his auxiliaries were anxious to be relieved of their duties and return home, certain from the trophies they had discovered in the Cheyenne camp that a disaster had befallen some band of their people.

  “How soon do you wish to leave?” Crook asked.

  Cosgrove turned slightly, gesturing with an arm as the Shoshone battalion mounted in the distance and began to move in his direction. “We’re pulling out now,” he explained in his Texas drawl.

  “I see,” Crook replied, his brow knitting in disappointment.

  “With your permission, General—we’ll be mustered out so that we can return to see to the safety of our homes and families.”

  “Yes, well,” Crook muttered, cleared his throat, and blinked into the brilliant cold light lancing off the glittering snow. The Shoshone came to a halt in a long, colorful line behind Cosgrove and Eckles, knee to knee in silence as their horses pawed the icy snow and thick streamers of frost wreathed their muzzles. “Very well, Captain Cosgrove. Your men have served me well for many a campaign.”

  “We’ll go where you need us, General.”

  “You always have,” Crook replied, smiling bravely.

  Twisting in his saddle, the civilian motioned forward Dick Washakie, the great chief’s son. “Before we go, my men wanted to present you with a gift.”

  “A gift?”

  Washakie brought his pony to a halt beside Crook, handing a ceremonial pipe down to the general who stood on foot.

  Feathers fluttered from the long stem as Crook inspected it, then finally whispered, “This is … quite a gift, Captain.”

  “And for Major Pollock,” Cosgrove said as a second Shoshone came forward bearing his gift, “a war shirt.”

  Captain Edwin Pollock, commander of Reno Cantonment, stepped forward, his cheeks red with embarrassment as he took the buckskin shirt that had been painted black—the color of war—and decorated with scalp locks as well as yellow horsehair plumes. “Th-thank you. Thank all of these fine men,” Pollock stammered.

  “And especially for Lieutenant Schuyler,” Cosgrove said, motioning a third warrior forward to lay his gift at the feet of the young officer who had commanded the Shoshone battalion atop the high ground the day of the battle, “this token of their regard for you as a war chief.”

  For a long moment Walter S. Schuyler was speechless as he picked up the bow case and quiver filled with iron-tipped arrows, as well as a saddle cover of beaded buckskin, a pair of beaded moccasins, and a war shield ringed with eagle feathers.

  “General Crook,” Cosgrove said with finality and a salute as his horse pranced backward of a sudden. “Till we meet on another war trail, on another battlefield.”

  Crook, Schuyler, Pollock, and the rest saluted as the two old Confederates snapped their arms down, reined right in silence, and kicked their ponies into a lope. At the end of the long, colorful line of Shoshone they signaled with their arms only, and as one all the warriors heeled smartly into a column of twos, their unshod ponies kicking up clods of icy snow, feathers bristling and scalp locks flying on the cold breeze as they climbed the far slope, crested the top, and began to fade into the distance.

  Donegan somberly watched the old friends slowly disappear in the cold, sunlit distance of that snow-caked land, those brave men hurrying southwest toward the Wind River Mountains, sensing the remorse at that parting of men who have together borne the terrifying weight of battle and utter hardship.

  For the rest of the morning while the command was packing up, the Irishman found his throat all but clogged with a sour ball of sentiment, his eyes close to betraying him as he thought on all those years he had watched friends fall in battles, or perhaps just as painful, watched friends ride off—perhaps never again to gallop stirrup to stirrup into the jaws of death.

  “I figure you ought to know what the general’s up to with this march, Johnny,” Seamus declared later that day as he brought his horse into line beside Lieutenant Bourke’s shortly after the column moved out up the Dry Fork of the Powder, headed south by east.

  “Hell, this is as much a mystery to me as any man,” Bourke replied with a shrug.

  “Crook ain’t said a thing to you where we’re going or for why?”

  With a shake of his head the lieutenant answered, “Only thing I know is that the general conferred with Mackenzie about making this march.”

  Seamus’s eyes narrowed. “Mackenzie?”

  “That’s right. I was there when the two of them studied the general’s maps.”

  “Looking for what?”

  “Where best to make the crossing of that country between the Little Powder and the Belle Fourche.”

  “By the saints! That’s back to that god-bleeming desert country we crossed last September!”

  Nodding, Bourke replied, “About sixty miles worth of desert crossing, Seamus.”

  “No wood, no graze, and damn well no water to speak of!”

  “Sixty miles of it,” the lieutenant said. “But both Crook and Mackenzie figure the gamble is worth the test.”

  “To save some days?”

  “Exactly. About ten days by the looks of things on the maps.”

  “Crook wants Crazy Horse even more’n I ever dreamed he could
hunger to get his hands around that red savage’s throat.”

  That day they put twenty miles under them before stopping for the night at Buffalo Springs on the Dry Fork. Then Crook kept them there—in camp and in the dark—for both the fourth and the fifth. As did many of the men during that interminable wait, Seamus wrote his loved ones.

  Finally on the morning of the sixth Crook moved them out again, marching only seven miles in the wind-driven snow, where they found little water—what there was proved to be muddy and loaded with alkali salts—as well as finding they had no firewood. The command had all but emptied the wagons of forage for their animals, and there was little hope of any reaching Mackenzie’s men from the south anytime soon, what with the severity of the recent storms likely blocking rail shipments to Medicine Bow Gap, the same horrid weather blocking wagon shipments from there north to Fort Fetterman on the North Platte.

  The men huddled together as best they could through the night, suffering greatly, as did their horses, while winter continued to pummel the high plains. Just before dawn the surgeons reported that the mercury in their thermometers hovered at thirty below zero. Hundreds of men reported cases of frostbitten fingers, toes, noses, and ears at sick call upon awaking.

  They packed up in light marching order in a severe snowstorm that morning of the seventh, ordered to make ready for the fifteen-mile march north by east that would take them to the Belle Fourche. Off in the shimmering, icy distance to the south stood the hulking monoliths of the Pumpkin Buttes, orange and ocher against the newly fallen snow. Only the leafless branches of cottonwood and willow marked each frozen water course winding its way down to the Belle Fourche. Few if any birds were seen roosting along the line of march, while far overhead the great longnecks honked, these last to hurry south in great undulating vees. For as far as the eye could see, the land lay beneath a solid sheet of white—more desolate, bare, and destitute of life than ever Seamus could have imagined it.

  In camp late that night after the wagons had finally rolled in so the men could boil their coffee and prepare supper of what deer, elk, antelope, jackrabbits, and even a few porcupines they had managed to kill along the trail that day, a few soldiers grumbled their bitter recriminations about Crook, sharing their tales of how the general had punished another command and its horses three months earlier.

  “Some say Crook figures to find Crazy Horse near Slim Buttes,” Billy Garnett explained.

  “Now, that’s hard to believe,” Seamus said. “Surely the general’s smart enough to know those Lakota aren’t still in this country, that they’re gonna move on after all this time. That’s better’n four months now!”

  With a shrug Garnett replied, “Can’t figure what Crook’s thinking. Only know what we all know: the general’s been wanting that red son of a bitch for the better part of a year now.

  “Sweet Mither of God! Crook ain’t gonna find Crazy Horse anywhere near them Slim Buttes or the Black Hills country.”

  “Shit!” Garnett scoffed with a grin. “So, mister know-it-all, why don’t you tell me why in the hell Crook’s gonna take us off in this direction if he doesn’t expect to find Crazy Horse in this here country?”

  But for the life of him … Donegan couldn’t come up with a single good answer.

  * The Big Horn Mountains.

  * Blood Song, Vol. 8, The Plainsmen Series.

  * Sioux Dawn, Vol. 1, The Plainsmen Series.

  Chapter 44

  8 December 1876

  THE INDIANS

  Mackenzie’s Official Report—What Crook Says.

  CHICAGO, December 1.—The official report of Colonel Mackenzie was received to-day. It states that about noon on the 24th, while marching in a southwesterly direction towards the South Pass of the Big Horn mountains, five advance scouts met him, reporting the main camp of Cheyennes about fifteen or twenty miles distant. About sunset the command began moving toward the hostiles, reaching the village after daylight, completely surprising the Indians, and compelling them to vacate the village suddenly, taking refuge in a ravine. After a brisk fight, lasting an hour and skirmishing until night, they capitulated. The entire village, having 173 lodges, was destroyed, 500 ponies captured, and 25 Indian bodies found. It is almost certain that a much larger number were killed. Five soldiers and one officer were killed on our side, and twenty-five wounded, besides one Shoshone scout belonging to the United States. Fifteen cavalry horses and four horses of the Indian scouts were killed. The command moved to the camp on Powder River, whence this report was made on the 26th instant. Lieutenant McKinney, of the Fourth cavalry, who was killed, was one of the most gallant officers and honorable of men. General Crook, in transmitting the above report, says: “I cannot commend too highly this brilliant achievement and gallantry of the troops. This will be a terrible blow to the hostiles, as the Cheyennes were not only the bravest warriors but have been the head and front of most of the raids and deviltry committed in this country.”

  What or who George Crook was relying upon for his information about where he would find the Crazy Horse people was as much a mystery as anything in the world. Perhaps he was doing no more than grasping at straws in his hope of finding his archnemesis.

  But for some reason the general clearly had grown satisfied that the Oglalla warrior bands had now abandoned the country of the Rosebud and Tongue River and were wandering east toward the country of the Little Missouri and the Moreau.

  In explaining his intent to prolong the campaign, the general wrote Sheridan:

  I shall endeavor to ascertain these points before leaving here, so that in case they leave the Rosebud country, I will not make that march as it would unfit the horses of the command for any further service this winter, and in case Crazy Horse has gone to Slim Buttes, I will go there via the Black Hills.

  “You see, Mr. Donegan,” Crook explained in his tent that night of 8 December along the frozen banks of the Belle Fourche, “General Mackenzie and I have decided against pursuing the defeated and impoverished Northern Cheyenne.”

  Mackenzie himself cleared his throat, then stated, “Instead we think better of marching the expedition down the Little Powder, where the general desires to establish a temporary base of operations.”

  “Right in the heart of the country haunted by the Sioux and Cheyenne hostiles!” Crook exclaimed, slamming a fist down into his left palm. “Squarely in the country where our deadliest enemies clung tenaciously and have likely taken refuge from our two columns.”

  “Two columns?” Donegan asked, perplexed.

  “Ours to the south, and north of the enemy—General Miles and his Fifth Infantry.”

  “But they’re all the way up yonder on the Yellowstone,” the Irishman replied.

  “Exactly,” Crook said.

  Mackenzie moved up to explain, “Don’t you see—our intelligence tells us that the Crazy Horse hostiles are somewhere between us.”

  From the sound of things in that tent, Donegan decided Crook and Mackenzie had grown tired and frustrated of the past two weeks of teetering back and forth between bouts of sulking despair and fits of self-righteous exultation over the Red Fork fight. On the one hand, at times they brooded: with the escape of most of the Cheyenne, had it been no more than a hollow victory? But at other times the two commanders cheered themselves in thinking: by destroying all that meant wealth to that powerful warrior band, hadn’t they in fact delivered a solid thumping to a steadfast enemy?

  Then yesterday a courier had arrived from Fetterman, giving Crook real cause to rejoice: receiving a telegram from Sheridan, forwarded on from William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the U.S. Army.

  Please convey to Generals Crook and Mackenzie my congratulations, and assure them that we appreciate highly the services of our brave officers and men who are now fighting savages in the most inhospitable regions of our continent. I hope their efforts this winter will result in perfect success and that our troops will hereafter be spared the necessity of these hard winter campaigns.

 
But in that same leather courier packet lay some less than happy news. In a short and apologetic dispatch from Major Caleb H. Carlton, commandant at Fetterman, Crook and Mackenzie learned that bureaucratic bungling had further delayed supplies in reaching the Sydney, Nebraska, depot, much less getting them to the Medicine Bow depot by rail where they were to be off-loaded into wagons and freighted up to Fetterman, on from there to the Powder River Expedition. Not only rations and ammunition for the men, but the desperately needed grain for all those horses and Tom Moore’s mules.

  “And with Crazy Horse’s hostiles wintering somewhere between here,” Crook said, jabbing a finger at the Belle Fourche River on the map below him where his own expedition sat in bivouac, “and General Miles up here on the Yellowstone,” as Crook slid his finger across all that unknown hostile territory to the north of them that cold night, “I’m mad as hell that I can’t go get him here in the heart of the winter.”

  “For no other reason than the delay in getting our supplies brought up to us,” Mackenzie snapped.

  “What … what does all this have to do with me?” Donegan asked, growing more confused by these two military commanders confiding their frustrations in him. “I’m afraid I don’t under—”

  “Look here,” Crook said, tracing a finger in a small circle around that country to the north and west of their position on the Belle Fourche. “I had hoped to move over to the Little Powder, march down from there to the Powder itself, and upon reaching that stream send out our Indian scouts—the Sioux and the Cheyenne, who know this country so well.”

  “We had planned to lie in wait,” Mackenzie explained, “until the scouts located the Crazy Horse village, and then we could go after them with our cavalry and pack train.”

  Crook cheered, “Just as Mackenzie’s battalion did so splendidly against the Cheyenne!”

  The Irishman wagged his head slightly, still not all that sure what they were trying to tell him. “Sounds like it will work. But why me … just where are you fitting me in with all of this?”