THE INDIANS
More Murders by “Good” Indians Near
Red Cloud.
CHEYENNE, December 30.—A courier into Fort Laramie, from Red Cloud agency, reports that two couriers, a mail-carrier and a wood-chopper, left Sage creek early Christmas morning, and two hours before sundown they were struck by a party of thirty friendly Indians within sixteen miles of Red Cloud, who killed the two couriers, named Dillon and Reddy; also mortally wounded the mail-carrier, Tate, who had two sacks of matter, and likewise severely wounded the wood-chopper. The wounded men arrived at Red Cloud day before yesterday, and being exposed during the interval to intense cold, they were severely frozen. They report hearing more firing in their rear an hour after being attacked and it is supposed that other parties not yet reported were attacked. A party has gone out from the agency to search for the bodies.
They were gradually gaining in altitude the farther they marched up the valley of the Tongue. And for much of the time the wagons did not have too bad a time of it, what with the way the large Indian village had itself followed the trail made by some buffalo along the river. So many hooves, so many travois poles, so many moccasin prints in that snow gradually pounded down and hardened into a highway pointing south—toward the Wolf Mountains.
Just before dawn on Thursday morning, the fourth of January, Luther Kelly returned from his reconnaissance over to the valley of the Rosebud.
Seamus held out a cup of coffee in the gray light as Kelly stomped up to seize it eagerly. “You see anything worth making mention of?”
“Not a sign,” Kelly admitted, then blew on his coffee and drank. “No trails, no tracks, no sign of buffalo over there either.”
“What that tells me is that we’re gonna stare the lot of them in the face here real soon, Luther.”
He looked up at Donegan and nodded once before going back to his coffee and staring at the fire. “They’re all together, aren’t they? All those warrior bands.”
“Used to be a man could figure they’d split up come winter.”
“Not this bunch,” Kelly said. “If it really is Crazy Horse, he’ll hold ’em together because they know we’re coming. Won’t be any going this way or going that. They’ll all be waiting for us.”
“By gor,” Seamus whispered harshly as he started kicking snow into the fire the moment the first orders were shouted around them to prepare to mount. “Looks plain as sun that Miles is going to get himself exactly what Crook his own self has been wanting for the better part of a year.”
“What’s that?”
“To get a crack at Crazy Horse—and have the bastard stand and fight.”
“Just like he did at the Rosebud … right?” Kelly asked, then swilled down the last of the coffee in the tin.
“And nearly overran us three times, the bleeming bastard.”
“Yeah,” Kelly commented quietly. “Miles will get his own crack at them Sioux … just like Custer prayed Crazy Horse would stand and fight.”
“This could be it, Kelly,” Seamus said, dragging the reins off the ground and stabbing a buffalo moccasin into the stirrup.
“Could be what?”
“Maybe this will be the last battle Crazy Horse will ever fight.”
Just about the time the scouts pushed out of the bivouac to probe the valley ahead of the soldier column, a fine mist began to fall. Within the hour that chilling mist became a continuous and galling rain that tended to soak man and animal to the bone, turning the wide trail to a mucky slush, hard going for the foot soldiers and wagons both.
From time to time that day Donegan and the other scouts came across recent sign of the retreating bands. Here and there among the cottonwood groves they found the crude frames for wickiups and the cold, lifeless black rings of dead fires. Clearly, all indications showed how bands of warriors were staying behind the villages, between their people and the soldiers, monitoring the Bear Coat’s advance up the Tongue, falling back slowly, ever so slowly.
It was enough to worry any battle veteran. By any calculation Crazy Horse had more than enough warriors to take on Miles’s infantry. So why didn’t the Sioux stand and fight?
And another thing was just as galling: the soldier column was being watched, constantly. The two recent attacks had proved that. That could only mean that Crazy Horse was falling back for a specific purpose.
It made Seamus shudder. Maybe, after all, this was like what John Buford had done when he’d been the first to arrive on the outskirts of that tiny Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg. Buford knew Lee’s Army of Virginia was coming—perhaps no more than hours away. So while he could, Buford chose the ground.
If a man could seize one advantage above all others, he must choose the ground where he would engage the enemy.
Crazy Horse was falling back, falling back … and when he stopped—that would be the ground where he would stake himself and go no farther. There Colonel Nelson A. Miles and his Fifth U.S. Infantry would have their hands full.
During the incessant rain throughout that day most of the snow melted. Only patches remained beneath the scrub cedar and stunted pine. Out where the army marched, the ground had become a quagmire. Late that afternoon the halt was called on the west side of the Tongue across from the mouth of Otter Creek.* After Miles set up his rotation of pickets, the weary men did their best to scratch around to find some dry wood for their smoky fires, then curled up in their wet blankets and fell fast asleep.
By first light on the fifth the column was off and marching again, plodding through a steady, driving rain that gusted at their backs and turned the trail into a sticky gumbo yearning to pull a man’s boots off his frozen feet if he wasn’t careful. Back and forth they were forced to cross the softening ice of the Tongue as the sandstone bluffs crowded in first on one side, then on the other, narrowing the valley once more as the river snaked and twisted much more than it did farther north. Animals and wagons became mired in the mud or broke through the spongy ice, requiring the men to plunge in themselves to yank, and haul, and tow everything free.
From time to time men fell out of line to drag off their soaked and shapeless bootees and socks, scooping up a handful of snow and rubbing it on the stark-white foot—hoping to startle circulation back into their frozen, plodding extremities. Lips turned blue and teeth chattered, that dull gray day as the rain continued to fall. There was no drying off; there could be no changes of clothes, no stopping for fires. Only more miles of march, more rain, more watching the horizon for mounted warriors, more waiting.
Off to the southwest beneath the low-slung gray drizzle the men began to make out the gradually ascending heights of the Wolf Mountains. Back along the column more and more men began to talk quietly among themselves, wondering if the Sioux were drawing them farther and farther downriver, eventually to draw the army into the rugged fastness of those mountains in the distance. There finally to make their play—finally to stand and fight among the heights.
Seamus brooded on it too. With all the sign they were beginning to run across, it was of a sudden causing the Irishman to recall the dogs he had so often noticed around the forts and outposts and frontier towns in the last ten years he had been in this western country. Crazy Horse’s village of winter roamers was the bitch in heat luring Crook’s, or Terry’s, or Miles’s armies to follow … follow, as the softheaded, hard-dicked town dogs would always follow, fighting among themselves for the chance to be the first to crawl atop and hump the seductive, alluring bitch.
The farther they pushed that Friday, the more such a devilish plot on the part of Crazy Horse made sense to him. It seemed that with every hour, if not with every mile, they were marching past more and more recent Indian sign. More of the abandoned wickiups and war lodges. Here and there the trampled earth of lodge circles and fire rings. Meat-drying racks. Scattered and half-used piles of cottonwood bark stripped and peeled for their war ponies. More carcasses of cattle and oxen slaughtered in those migrating camps. Even a few live cattle contentedly gr
azing among the mud and boggy, grassy bottoms alongside the river, animals abandoned by the retreating village. A very large village that by necessity had spread itself for some distance along the riverbank.
Very late in the afternoon, after a grinding march of some fifteen miles at the mercy of a drenching rain, the column went into bivouac about the time the wind began to quarter around, for the first few hours of that night blowing out of the west. But just before dawn on the sixth the wind pounded at their backs, howling directly out of the north again, with the steely tang of snow in its bite.
*Site of present-day Ashland, Montana.
Chapter 24
Hoop and Stick Moon 1877
Telegraphic Briefs
DAKOTA
Wild Bill’s Murderer.
YANKTON, January 3.—In the United States Court to-day, John McCall, convicted of the murder of Wild Bill, was sentenced by Chief Justice Sponnon to be hanged March 1. He will carry the case to the supreme court. The only ground of defense is that he was intoxicated, so as to be unconscious of the act.
Wooden Leg watched the soldier column through those first fat flakes of snow as dry as alder leaves became in late autumn. The wind caught them, spun each one in a whorl, then scutted them along the ground. At times there was no sense in trying to shade one’s eyes to peer into the downriver distance. But for a moment, perhaps no more than a heartbeat or two, the wind dance of the snow stopped as if the sky suddenly held its breath … while the young Shahiyela warrior could see clear enough to make out the shapes of the soldier scouts, walk-a-heaps, and wagons plodding out of the first pale light this stormy dawn.
“They won’t give up,” Yellow Weasel said dolefully.
Wooden Leg wanted to turn to the older warrior and tell him just how much of a fool he was for ever thinking the white man would give up.
But instead of angering Yellow Weasel, Wooden Leg swallowed down his youthful impulse and said quietly, “With my own eyes I have seen what the soldiers did to Old Bear’s village on the Powder last winter. Understand that there is something that does not let these ve-ho-e soldiers give up their chase of our villages. No matter the distance. No matter the cold.”
Wooden Leg would know. Born in the Black Hills near the Sacred Mountain, this was his nineteenth winter—having matured in many ways over the last three seasons of fighting the white man. Now a member of the Hemo-eoxeso, the Elk-horn Scrapers warrior society, he cast a long shadow upon the ground: there were only two Ohmeseheso warriors who stood taller than Wooden Leg.
How he would have loved to ask Yellow Weasel why any man could think the ve-ho-e would ever give up following the villages … but instead Wooden Leg bit down on his tongue. Sometimes it was more honorable not to say something than to show the foolishness of another.
“Go on now—vo-ve-he,”* Sits in the Night ordered Beaver Claws, one of the younger scouts in his pack of wolves. “Ride back to our village to tell Crazy Horse, to tell the chiefs. The soldiers come on this morning!”
They all watched the youngster leap onto the bare back of the spotted pony, then pull his blanket about him. Beaver Claws kicked the animal in the flanks and leaned far forward as it spurted off into the snowstorm. Wooden Leg breathed deep of the sharp air. He hadn’t been able to sleep all that well last night wrapped in his one blanket and buffalo robe, cold as it was. They made themselves no fire, even after the whole long day of rain. Instead, the wolves had huddled in a cottonwood grove through the night as the winds shifted and the rain changed to an icy snow.
As soon as it grew light enough to see the far bank of the river, they moved out—quietly on the soggy, sodden, snow-covered ground. Watching the veil of snow and foggy mist until they saw signs of the ve-ho-e fires, listening until they heard the white men laughing, grunting, talking in their camp before they would continue their pursuit of the village for the day.
The weather this morning would slow the soldiers down even more, Wooden Leg thought. It was good, because the chiefs had calculated that the Bear Coat’s men should be within attacking distance of the village by that very afternoon. But while the ponies and travois could disappear quickly over broken ground, up the mouth of a coulee and into the far reaches of a distant canyon, the ve-ho-e soldiers were invariably held back by their slow animals, by the sheer bulk of those wagons hidden beneath the dirty, oily canvas stretched tight over iron bows.
All the wolves had to do today was stay just out of sight, but right in front of the army in its worming march. Close enough to keep track of the Bear Coat’s progress, but far enough away that they would not be discovered again as they had been a few days before. Those were their orders from Crazy Horse. In fact, Sits in the Night’s wolves were instructed to build the fires in those campsites the soldiers had come across the last two days: let the scouts find the fire pits still warm; leave behind a few old ponies ready to die anyway … all those sorts of enticements that would draw the Bear Coat farther and farther into their trap.
The white man always went for the bait.
Wolf Tooth, another leader of their scouting party, threw up his arm just ahead of them. They all halted. Listening, straining their eyes into the snowy middistance. A thin layer of wispy fog clung to the leafless willow, surrounding the copse of cottonwood. They waited. Then suddenly Wolf Tooth pointed. And Wooden Leg saw.
There, not very far away, came the three, no four … now five horsemen—their animals with their heads bowed, plodding slowly into the fog and surging snowstorm.
“Go back,” Sits in the Night ordered sharply.
The others turned their ponies quickly at the command. But Wooden Leg was the last. He wanted to get himself a little better look. After all, he hadn’t seen such creatures since last winter on the Powder River.
Out of the swirling, wind-whipped gloom they appeared again. Just as they had on the southern edge of Old Bear’s camp that morning only heartbeats before the soldiers had charged in with their pistols drawn.
Army scouts.
“Hotoma!” Wooden Leg whispered into the wind, calling upon the mysterious bravery medicine of a Tse-Tsehese warrior.
Oh, how he yearned for the trap to close!
Wooden Leg hoped that this time the ones who led the soldiers to the villages would be the first to die.
By the time it was light enough to see on that sixth day of January, it was plain there was a prairie snowstorm in the process of working itself into a lather up and down the Tongue River Valley.
Snow whirled in this direction and that—up, down, and sideways on a cutting wind that made it all but impossible to keep the fires lit. Men stood about in their blankets at breakfast fires—grumbling, stomping cold feet back into frozen boots that had never fully dried out, never come close to warming, snowflakes readily clinging to the damp weave of their wool coats or matting on the wet, stringy buffalo hair of their winter overcoats and those heavy leggings lashed to their belts. At least it warmed the blood to curse a man’s officers, his commander, and perhaps even the unseen, taunting enemy who kept on disappearing farther and farther up the valley.
An enemy who was always just out of sight. Just beyond reach. Nothing more than a wisp of smoke—like that smoke needling off the puny fires they had eventually abandoned early that Saturday morning.
From time to time just below the hulking clouds Seamus got himself a glimpse of those distant gray-and-purple-shaded Wolf Mountains once more being dappled in white with the approaching storm. Throughout that morning and into the afternoon the column was again forced to cross the Tongue several times as the sandstone buttes closed in on one side; then a mile or so farther they shoved themselves close to the other bank. Hours were consumed with excruciating physical labor as relays of men were ordered up to join Lieutenant Oscar F. Long’s engineering crew in chopping away at the frozen mud of the banks, to lay down as much deadfall as they could find to corduroy the approach, and to hack away at the creaking, splintering ice before the mule and ox teams were able to trudge t
hrough the shallow water of the Tongue with each crossing.
First one, then a second, and finally a third Indian camp they passed through. That dreary afternoon in the midst of the icy snowstorm, the scouts came across some gaunt, wolfish, half-starved Indian ponies the village had evidently abandoned. Nearby in the midst of some lodge rings a half-dozen small fires still smoldered in the driving snow.
Late in the day Donegan halted and stared south into the dance of white against the ever-changing background of leafless bush and striated sandstone butte. He watched the Crow trackers and Buffalo Horn disappear ahead of them in the white smear.
“Luther, there’s a reason they’re letting us get this close.”
Kelly stopped beside him, for a long moment staring into the swirl of snow as he raked the hoarfrost from his mustache. “We’re catching up with ’em, that’s all. And they surely know we’re on their tails.”
Wagging his head, Seamus continued, “The ground … what Crazy Horse has chose to make his stand—it can’t be all that far now—”
The sharp crack of carbines shattered the snowy stillness of the air, answered by a half-dozen yelps, cries, and squeals of surprise.
No more had Donegan and Kelly kicked their mounts into motion and yanked pistols from their holsters than two horsemen appeared in front of them, heading straight for the white scouts. Both the Irishman and Kelly raked back the hammers on the pistols as the two warriors started screaming while they kept on coming.
“Hold it!” Seamus hollered. “It’s Leforge’s boys!”
“Damn if it ain’t,” Kelly growled.
The pair shot past, crying out in their tongue, their long hair flapping out from beneath the wool hoods of the blanket coats.
Kelly shook his head, asking, “Where the hell’s—”
Another shot, this time a pistol … then a second.
“Where’s Buffalo Horn?” Donegan asked.
Wolf Mountain Moon Page 25