After a moment of reflection that dark Thursday night while icy points of snow lanced down from a lowering sky, Nelson A. Miles sighed. “Yes. Sitting Bull. He’s still out there waiting for me, isn’t he?”
Captain Edmond Butler inquired, “Will we go after him now?”
Miles watched the first snowflakes whirl to the cold ground. “We’ll march the command back to Tongue River, recoup, then set out again—yes. By all means,” he replied gravely. “Although that old Hunkpapa is still out there, roaming free for now … I have nonetheless accomplished one thing I set out to do. I have succeeded in dividing the Sioux against themselves. We’ve damn well whittled away at their forces wherever we can find and engage them.”
“That’s more than either of the other two columns have accomplished in all their marching through this country!” declared Andrew S. Bennett.
“We won’t dare name names here, Captain,” Miles cautioned flatly, waving off that comment pointed at both Terry and Crook. “From the reports of their disgraceful failures of late, I judge that the nation sooner or later will understand the difference between doing something and doing nothing.”
Kneeling at the edge of the fire, civilian Luther S. Kelly filled his tin with coffee steaming into the sharp autumn air, then stood to ask, “Will we fight on into the winter, General?”
“You have my assurance of that, Mr. Kelly!” Miles said enthusiastically as he turned to regard his chief of scouts. “Along with my guarantee of a job for as long as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse are free. Those two may try to hide from me this winter—but we will find them. While they and their criminals take shelter and recoup in their camps, my soldiers will not retire from the chase. On the contrary: I will endeavor to keep the tribes divided, and take them in detail. Never more will the hostiles band together.”
“As you wrote General Terry, sir,” said adjutant Hobart Bailey, “this is surely the beginning of the end for the Sioux.”
Miles nodded, turning back to his chief of scouts. “Make no mistake about it, Mr. Kelly—there’s no other outfit, not one other column, that you will find venturing out until spring. No one else to do what needs doing now as the cold descends around us.”
Kelly took the coffee tin from his lips. “Then I take it you won’t be giving Sitting Bull any rest.”
For a moment Miles stared into the winter clouds blotting out the starry night sky. “Gentlemen, there’s no one else who dares tackle what lays before us this winter. It’s up to us, and us alone, to finish this matter with the Sioux. Once and for all.”
Until the Sioux had all become agency farmers on their reservation plots, Colonel Nelson A. Miles would be the sort of man with the dogged determination to track the warrior bands and wear them down piecemeal.
Luther S. “Yellowstone” Kelly, the Fifth Infantry’s chief of scouts, was beginning to realize just how dogged Miles could be.
“My endeavor has been to convince the Sioux, first, of our superior power, and second, that we will deal fairly and justly with them,” the colonel explained that Tuesday, the last day of October, after his headquarters group had reached their post at the mouth of the Tongue on the Yellowstone River.
Kelly observed, “But Sitting Bull is another matter altogether, isn’t he?”
Miles nodded. “Precisely.” He looked down at those few lines inked on the map to the north and east of his Tongue River Cantonment. “Sitting Bull leads the worst set of rascals I have ever seen together.”
Ezra P. Ewers said, “You’re doing well to break up their confederation, Colonel.”
“We’ve only begun, Captain,” Miles replied. “I will waste no time in laying plans to strike these outlaws … and strike them hard.”
On the following day seven of his companies returned to the cantonment. And on 3 November the last three companies came in. That same day all of the remaining Fifth arrived upriver from Fort Leavenworth, including the regimental band and some additional headquarters staff. The entire party had steamed up the Missouri aboard the General Meade until they had reached Fort Buford at the mouth of the Yellowstone back on 22 October. Under the command of First Lieutenant Frank D. Baldwin they had marched the rest of the way to the Tongue River on foot. Baldwin, who had served as Miles’s battalion adjutant during August’s fruitless maneuverings under General Terry, had himself been on detached service at Leavenworth. As soon as he arrived at Tongue River, the lieutenant began to grump about missing out on the regiment’s fight with the Sioux at Cedar Creek.*
“Mr. Baldwin here proved himself more than capable during our campaign against the southern hostiles two years ago,” Miles explained to Kelly.
“The general flatters me,” the bearded Baldwin said in that quiet, unassuming manner of his.
“Balderdash!” Miles cried, turning to look at Kelly again. With emphatic jabs with the stem of his clay pipe, he said, “If it weren’t for Baldwin’s gutsy charge into Gray Beard’s Cheyenne camp with his men in wagons—I don’t think we would have routed them the way we did.”†
“General, you give me too much credit.”
“Hush, Lieutenant,” Miles replied with a grin. “I want Mr. Kelly to know just who he’s dealing with here. Indeed, with my officers, I feel I have some of the finest Indian fighters a commander could put in the field. Mr. Baldwin, had you not made the charge you did without regard for your own safety—why, I don’t think we would have rescued those two little girls# alive, snatching them from the clutches of their captors.”
“Mr. Kelly,” Baldwin said, turning to the scout with a smile of admiration and some hopes of steering the conversation away from himself, “is it really true what I hear of how you introduced yourself to the general here?”
Miles snorted, “With that goddamn bear’s paw?”
“So,” the lieutenant said, “the tale is true.”
“It was only a cinnamon bear,” Kelly replied with a shrug.
“Now, don’t you go belittling what you’ve done!” the colonel chided, turning to Baldwin. “See how you two are cut of the same mold?” Miles laid one hand on Kelly’s shoulder, the other on Baldwin’s. “This chief of scouts of mine—I like him because he’s a straight-talking, no-nonsense sort. And the lieutenant here—I admire him because he came up the hard way.”
Baldwin said, “Just like you did, General.”
“Without the starch, and pull, and politics of the academy,” Miles added gruffly. “The way others have greased their way up the ladder!”
“We’re going to find your general’s star out there,” Baldwin declared emphatically. “Out there, maybe even this winter. Why, I’ll bet that old reprobate Sitting Bull himself is the star you’ve been waiting for.”
“If not for Crook and Mackenzie—that star might already be on my shoulder,” Miles grumped, turning back to his desk and taking the pipe from his teeth. “Their column will be on its way north from Fetterman shortly to find and defeat Crazy Horse, if they aren’t on the march already.”
“But in a matter of days we’ll be shadowing Sitting Bull ourselves!” Baldwin said enthusiastically. “The Fighting Fifth will round up the last of the great hostile bands!”
Already the post was alive with preparations for that renewed campaign a restless, discontented Miles was determined to pursue. But on this campaign the Fifth Infantry would be marching north. This time they would be facing a Montana winter.
Kelly hoped Miles and his officers sure as hell knew what they were doing.
*A Cold Day in Hell, vol. 11, The Plainsmen Series.
*Trumpet on the Land, vol. 10, The Plainsmen Series.
†Dying Thunder, vol. 7, The Plainsmen Series.
*A Cold Day in Hell, vol. 11, The Plainsmen Series,
†Dying Thunder, vol. 7, The Plainsmen Series.
#Adelaide and Julia German (Dying Thunder, vol. 7).
Chapter 2
4-17 November 1876
I congratulate you and all concerned on the prospect of closing this Sioux
war…. Genl Miles has displayed his usual earnestness & energy and I hope he will crown his success by capturing or killing Sitting Bull and his remnant of outlaws.
—General William T. Sherman,
telegram to General Philip H. Sheridan
If army command thought they had their war all but won, they would soon learn just how overoptimistic they could be.
Dismissing their earlier plans to remove all the Sioux hostiles to Indian Territory as impractical, Sherman and Sheridan were now at work planning to corral the defeated warrior bands on a tiny tract of land between Standing Rock Agency and Fort Randall along the west bank of the Missouri River. There they believed the army could keep an eye on the dismounted and disarmed Sioux as they were turned into Christian farmers.
But first the army had to catch the winter roamers.
During the two days following his arrival at Tongue River Cantonment, Frank Baldwin, Miles’s newly appointed adjutant for the campaign, joined the other officers readying their command to take to the field. Miles purchased a small herd of cattle from a private contractor upriver—enough beef to supply ten thousand rations for his troops on the coming march. Two civilian wranglers were hired to watch over the herd. In the meantime a supply train of Bozeman vegetables arrived from the mouth of the Bighorn, escorted by elements of Lieutenant Colonel Elwell S. Otis’s Twenty-second Infantry.
Otis himself was on his way downriver, replaced back on the twenty-eighth of October by Major Alfred L. Hough as commander of the Glendive Cantonment, charged with protecting the wagon trains that supplied Tongue River. An old war veteran himself, Hough was galled to find the horrid conditions his men suffered at their outpost as the season turned cold. The paltry number of crude huts Otis expected to protect the soldiers from the coming winter were woefully inadequate. With no cots nor mattresses at Glendive, the Seventeenth were forced to sleep on a corduroy of poles and sagebrush to keep their bodies off the cold ground. In those last few days of October, Hough’s men immediately began to construct more dugouts while others labored to lay in more firewood once they learned from army command that they would not be abandoning the upper river for the approaching winter.
Miles wanted the Seventeenth to remain active and alert, guarding the country along the Yellowstone east of the Tongue while he himself went in search of Sitting Bull.
On the fourth of November the quartermaster at Tongue River issued the Fifth Infantry some of that special clothing Miles had ordered sent upriver so that his regiment could conduct their continued campaign.
“I am satisfied that if the Indians can live here on the northern plains in the winter,” Miles told his officer corps, “white men can also—if properly equipped with all the advantages we can give our troops, which are certainly superior to those obtainable by the Indians.”
Baldwin and many of the others agreed. They and their men had suffered during the winter campaign against the Southern Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche during the Buffalo Wars. Still, as cold as the weather had been in the panhandle of Texas, it in no way prepared the Fifth Infantry for what they were about to be asked to endure on the plains of Montana Territory.
Even Sherman himself had written to Miles, “Winter on the Yellowstone is another matter from winter on the Red River.”
While General Terry did not actually expect Miles to conduct a campaign under the frigid conditions known to batter the northern prairie, the colonel had never been the sort to sit on his hands. North of the Yellowstone, where Miles planned to pursue the hostiles of Sitting Bull, the capricious weather could one day be pleasant and sunny, whereas the next could find a man fighting a blizzard as temperatures plummeted far enough to freeze the mercury at the bottom of a surgeon’s thermometer. And then there was the much-feared factor of windchill. An ambient temperature of ten degrees below zero—which was the daily high documented time and again by the written record of the Fifth Infantry over the next month—would with any sort of wind behind it have the brutal effect of anywhere between fifty-eight to sixty-eight below.
As the Fifth had already learned about being stationed in Montana Territory, the wind is a constant companion.
Already the colonel had requested the Quartermaster Corps to ship him arctic clothing from the closest supply depot, as well as asking that buffalo coats and leggings be constructed for his men. But that equipment, along with the Sibley tents he had begged for, had yet to arrive. Miles remained undeterred—his regiment would march in the best they could muster for the moment: layers of army wool draped them from head to toe, as well as some burlap feed sacks the men wrapped around their feet to do what they could to prevent frostbite.
At dawn on Sunday, 5 November, the Fifth Infantry began muscling the ropes lashed to their crude ferries, cordelling those ungainly craft across the Yellowstone to the north bank. Back and forth the ferries plied the frothy current, every trip burdened with two of the campaign’s thirty-eight supply wagons all loaded with a month’s rations, each wagon to be pulled by a six-mule hitch. Already the river’s surface was beginning to slake with ice and the wind was blustering down the valley. It was destined to be an early, and long, winter on the northern plains.
Plowing through three additional inches of new snow the following morning, the entire command eventually marched away from the north bank to begin their search for Sitting Bull. While two companies of Hough’s Twenty-second Infantry stayed behind to garrison the post, Miles rode at the head of 15 officers and more than 430 foot soldiers. Joining the infantry were 10 civilians and 2 Indian scouts. With them came the twelve-pound Napoleon gun and three-inch Rodman ordnance rifle, both of which had proved so successful in putting the Sioux village to flight at Cedar Creek. In addition to his wagon train—which carried 250 rounds of rifle ammunition for each man—Miles brought along two ambulances, an assortment of pack mules, and that small beef herd.
After reaching Sunday Creek the scouts led the command roughly north across a rugged piece of country, where many times the men were required to construct crude bridges or corduroy the sides of ravines for their wagons. After making no more than nine grueling miles, the Fifth went into camp late that first afternoon as the sun began to set.
“It’s election day, General,” Baldwin cheered the morning of the seventh as Miles stomped up to the fire in the gray light of dawn.
“Let’s hope the folks back east get us a president who won’t let the army shrink any more than Congress has done to us already.”
The sun came out, eventually warming the air and turning the snow to slush beneath every hoof, wagon wheel, and waterlogged boot. Through a countryside dotted with greasewood and cactus the men trudged and shivered, forced to cross and recross Sunday Creek more than a dozen times in less than five hours. At twilight many of the weary men gathered around hasty fires, wolfed down their rations, and curled into their two blankets with a bunkie.
Setting off before dawn beneath a bright moon, they made nineteen miles that eighth day of November, following the tributaries of Sunday Creek as the command climbed the barren divide that would eventually drop them into the drainage of the alkali-laced Little Dry Creek. Here they began to see more in the way of buffalo and antelope along their route.
Frank Baldwin spotted the long-haired civilian scout appear on the hilltop ahead, loping back to rejoin Miles at the head of the column.
“The Jackson brothers agree with me, General.”
“How’s that, Kelly?”
“This country east of the Musselshell and south of the Missouri just happens to be some of the prime feeding grounds for buffalo at this season of the year.”
“Oh?” Miles replied. “Have these buffalo migrated up from the south?”
“Out of the north, General,” Kelly explained. “They find shelter in the lee of the Bear’s Paw Mountains and the valley of the Milk River. For many a generation traders and half-breeds have been coming down from the Canadian side to hunt and make robes, or trade them for some Red River rum.”
> Miles shivered as the wind gusted. “A little rum right now would sure as hell warm the inner man in me, gentlemen!”
Without finding much in the way of timber, the men at sunset hunkered around their smoldering buffalo-chip fires to boil coffee and warm frozen hands and feet.
Under a clear and starry sky the following morning, the Fifth moved out behind Miles, his staff, and the scouts, who all rode some two to three miles ahead of the column, watching from the high ground for any sign of warriors. Early that afternoon of the ninth they reached a branch of Big Dry Creek, where they made camp after putting another twenty miles behind them.
On Friday afternoon just past two P.M., as the command was going into camp among the cottonwoods along the Big Dry, Yellowstone Kelly and William “Billy” Cross arrived to report that they had discovered a fresh Indian trail ahead. It was clear the village was on its way north to the Missouri.
The following morning the men awoke to a keen north wind whistling down the valley, driving an icy snow at their backs as they moved out for the day. It wasn’t long before they crossed the lodgepole trail Kelly had discovered the day before. An hour later they came across some butchered buffalo carcasses. But by late morning the drifting, blowing snow had completely masked all sign of the enemy. On down the creek bottom the soldiers pressed despite the dropping temperatures. At times the wagons broke through the thickening ice as they rumbled along the dry bed of the Big Dry, no more than some twenty feet wide. Courageously managing to plod some fourteen miles in the teeth of that storm, the Fifth settled in for the night at the site of a camp used by the northbound Sioux only days before. The surgeon reported that the temperature stood at ten below, continuing to drop.
“Kelly’s scouts tell me we’re following Iron Dog’s village,” Miles explained to a hastily convened officers’ meeting that night after sundown.
Wolf Mountain Moon Page 3