Ashes of Heaven (The Plainsmen Series)

by Terry C. Johnston

“My people call it the Little Sheep River.”

  “Perhaps we will see the place where Sitting Bull’s Lakota and your Shahiyela killed all the soldiers last summer,” the half-breed said as he bent forward and filled his cup with more coffee.

  She stared at the fire for a while, then wagged her head, and replied, “That is north some distance from where we will reach the valley. Those soldiers were killed downstream from where the trail of this village will cross the Little Sheep River.”

  He sipped at his coffee, then said, “I am sorry to hear that. I was looking forward to seeing this place where the warrior bands saw their greatest victory.”

  Looking directly at the half-breed, Old Wool Woman said sadly, “It was a victory we did not learn from.”

  “What did your people fail to understand?” He wiped droplets of coffee from his upper lip, the firelight dancing on his dark face.

  “We should have learned that the end was already coming,” she sighed. “We should have been brave enough to learn how to make a strong peace … the way we had made a strong war for as long as we could.”

  * * *

  “Looks to be this is the place where we turn back.”

  Johnny Bruguier warily flicked his eyes at the soldier who had just spoken, the soldier who was in charge of the escort Bear Coat Miles sent south with him to find the hostile camp. Staring back down at the valley below, the half-breed’s eyes narrowed in concern. Swallowing, he said, “Don’t wanna stick around? Maybe to see if we make it, or if I get shot riding in there?”

  The soldier shook his head. “General Miles give us our orders to turn back once we got you in sight of the village,” replied the soldier with two stripes on the thick woolen shirt he wore beneath his buffalo coat. “You and the woman gonna make it the rest of the way down there on your own.”

  Johnny watched the man turn to the others, quietly ordering them to check the cinches on all six of the mules before dividing off two of the pack animals for their return march to the mouth of the Tongue River. On that pair the soldiers lashed their own blankets and bedrolls, along with their rations and extra ammunition for their long rifles.

  Right about then Johnny wished he still had the Winchester carbine he had given Sitting Bull the previous year when the Hunkpapa chief presented him with the fine horse that had seen the half-breed through hundreds of miles of campaigning.

  He dropped from the saddle and flung the stirrup fender over it, tugging on the cinch. His heart thumped just the way it had the day he rode boldly into the Hunkpapa camp.

  Johnny remembered how he loped right past the first warriors who dashed out to confront him, pounding his heels into the ribs of that horse he stole in Whitewood, urging more and more speed out of it until he dismounted on the run and dashed into the first lodge he could reach. It turned out to belong to White Bull, Sitting Bull’s nephew.

  Would that fickle whore called Lady Luck chance to smile on him again today?

  Bruguier dropped the stirrup back in place and turned to the old woman, still seated bareback atop her soldier horse. He couldn’t blame her for preferring it to sitting atop one of the army’s god-awful saddles. “Are these your people?” he asked in his methodical Lakota, using a little sign.

  Turning to him, the woman said, “Perhaps. That is a big camp, so maybe it is my people, traveling and hunting with the Little Star People.”

  “Perhaps?” he asked, sensing the claw of cold apprehension rise in him, like a prairie wind shoving a thunderstorm at him out of the west.

  With a shrug, the woman explained, “It has been a long time for me to be in that village. Maybe some lodges have gone for the agencies after the fight with the Bear Coat’s soldiers. Maybe more Lakota lodges have come from the hills to join with Crazy Horse. It has been more than two moons since I was in that camp.”

  “I remember you telling me of this one night at the fire,” he said as a means of apology. He drew in a deep breath to steel himself for what lay ahead below. “You said you were coming back from a visit to friends in another village when the Bear Coat’s scouts captured you.”

  Johnny watched her dab a dirty soldier mitten at her eyes.

  “Yes,” the woman answered with a croak, “I have not seen my relations in a long, long time.”

  Suddenly a soldier’s hand was on Johnny’s shoulder. The half-breed wheeled around with a jerk.

  “You don’t need anything else,” the soldier began, stepping back the moment Bruguier jumped. “We’re turning back for the post now.”

  “You tell Miles I done what he asked?”

  “You bet I will, mister. I’ll tell the general you and the woman took your presents into that village. Just be sure you get their chiefs to ride back to the Yellowstone with you to surrender.”

  For a moment that confused him. Then he remembered the white man called Elk River by a different name: the Yellowstone. “Yeah, I bring the chiefs back with me to talk peace.”

  “Surrender is what the general wants from ’em,” the soldier repeated as he crawled back atop his horse, the wind picking up among the sage and snow. “They don’t wanna come in to give up, you be sure to tell ’em Miles is gonna keep whipping ’em until there ain’t no more hostiles left in this country—buck, squaw, or papoose. You make sure they know they got the choice: they can surrender to the general, or we can rub ’em all out—one camp at a time.”

  All Johnny could do was nod as the soldier reined his horse about and started away. The others fell into a ragged column of twos behind him, the last pair tugging at the two mules they were taking north with them. He watched the soldiers cross the top of the low ridge and quickly drop out of sight as they pushed east for the Tongue. It suddenly grew very cold up there on the west side of the slope where the wind could get at a man and work its way through the flaps of his clothing. Johnny had been cold before, and he figured he’d been just about as lonely too.

  Then he glanced at the woman, still hunkered on her horse. Her red-rimmed eyes momentarily flicked at the village down in the snowy valley, then back to him.

  She asked, “We go take these gifts to my people now?”

  “Yeah,” he answered with something less than complete enthusiasm, swinging up into the saddle and tapping his horse into motion. “Let’s go before I freeze my manhood off up here on top of this hill.”

  Chapter 7

  7 February 1877

  BY TELEGRAPH

  GENERAL MILES STILL PURSUING CRAZY HORSE.

  THE INDIANS.

  A Brush with Crazy Horse on Tongue River.

  CHICAGO, February 6.—A St. Paul dispatch, received to-day officially at military headquarters here, says: The following was just received via Bozeman and Helena:

  HEADQUARTERS COMMAND ON THE YELLOWSTONE, January 20, 1877.—I that the command fought the hostiles tribes of Cheyenne and Ogallalla Sioux under Crazy Horse, in skirmishes, on the 1st, 3d and 7th of January, and in a five hour engagement on the 8th instant. Their camp, some six hundred lodges, extended three miles along the valley of Tongue river, below Hanging Woman’s creek. They were driven through the canyons of the Wolf or Panther mountains, in the direction of the Big Horn mountains. Their fighting strength outnumbered mine two or three to one, but by taking advantage of the ground we had them at a disadvantage and their loss is known to be very severe.

  Our loss is three killed and eight wounded. They fought entirely dismounted, and charged on foot to within fifty yards of Capt. Casey’s line, but were taken in front and flank by Capt. Butler’s and Lieut. McDonald’s companies. They were whipped at every point and driven from the field, and pursued as far as my limited supplies and worn down animals would carry my command. The indians appear to have plenty of arms and ammunition, but otherwise are in a destitute condition. Some of the prisoners now in our hands were captured with frozen limbs, and were living on horse meat. The weather has been very severe, and the snow is from one to three feet deep. The command is in good condition.

  Signed
, Nelson A. Miles, commanding.

  As the wind rattled the newsprint where he stood gripping it outside the sutler’s store, Seamus quickly reread the short article emblazoned across the front page of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News.

  This time he had beaten the latest war news home.

  His heart pounded faster as he began to pour over the short article a third time. Here were the names of officers he had fought beside. They and their men were the real heroes of the Battle of the Butte.

  Shivering in that February wind, Donegan remembered how Captain Butler held his shaky command together in the face of a howling blizzard as their thin blue line drew close enough to the enemy to see the colors of the face paint on those warriors bristling atop the low ridge. Soldiers down to their last one or two cartridges, frightened men preparing to make that terrifying assault. Undaunted, Butler gave the order for his men to mount bayonets. Without bullets, those gallant soldiers were about to scale the icy heights and engage the enemy eye-to-eye, close enough to smell what your enemy had eaten for breakfast. No hunkering behind breastworks or a downed tree. No firing from a distance now.

  Butler had them moving through the deep snow, rallying them from the back of his horse, urging them on, cheering them even to the base of the slopes. Preparing them for the meanest work of a fighting man.

  Toe-to-toe with your enemy, war became more than bloody, more than dirty. War became very, very personal.

  Seamus disagreed with only one conclusion in Miles’s brief report. From what he had seen and experienced in those cold, snowy hours of battle far up the Tongue, the Irishman wasn’t all that sure the Indians had plenty of ammunition. What they had taken off the Custer dead, added to what they had managed to trade at their agencies, along with what little they might have plundered from miners and teamsters in and around the Black Hills in recent months … the hostile bands had to be running low. They might well still possess those weapons—Springfield carbines, Winchester and Henry repeaters, perhaps a few high-powered needle guns ripped from the hands of a buffalo hunter—but, ammunition was another matter. There simply was no constant supply of that.

  And with every extended engagement fought against the army, the warriors used up more and more of their dwindling stores of those precious bullets without any way to reload their brass.

  How much longer could they fight the outfits that came searching for them in the winter snows? he wondered. How long would their resolve compel them to struggle on? How long until the buffalo were gone and the warrior bands had eaten all their horses?

  How long before this goddamned war was over?

  Seamus suddenly glanced up at officers’ quarters nearby, then stared back down at the newspaper. Finally, he looked over at the door to the sutler’s store. Should he go in and buy every copy of this issue, toss them into the heavy iron stove in the corner of Collins’s saloon just so Samantha wouldn’t have a chance to read about the fight?

  Then Seamus realized just what a bone-headed idea that was. For a full year now she had been reading those brief newspaper accounts of the army’s campaigns, just like the officers’ wives who stayed behind each time their men went off to fight with Crook or Mackenzie or Miles. A year ago now he had marched off to the Powder, and the Rosebud after that. Then Donegan traipsed all the way to Slim Buttes, and back to Camp Robinson, before trudging his way north again to the Red Fork of the Powder where the Fourth Cavalry jumped the Cheyenne. Donegan had rounded out this last year in hostile country when he marched up the Tongue, only to run into Crazy Horse again.

  Looking down at the newsprint rattling in his cold hands, Seamus realized this wouldn’t be the first story his dear Samantha would read on this war with the Sioux and Cheyenne. He swallowed hard, knowing it wouldn’t be the last story she would read about this dirty conflict either.

  He straightened his back, dragging the back of his hand beneath his nose, and started for officers’ quarters and that room where Samantha always waited for him to return from his campaigns, the room where she and their son held on and … waited.

  From the big pocket on his blanket-lined canvas mackinaw, the Irishman drew out the small, tin, penny whistle. Laying his big fingers over the holes as he neared the snow-covered porch, Seamus gave the fife a tentative blow. Slowly dancing his fingertips off and on the holes, he surprised himself by making sounds with the thing.

  He smiled and stomped onto the porch, kicking snow from his tall boots. He happily carried the newspaper and some hoarhound candy for Samantha this morning. And the penny whistle to play for Colin Teig while he bounced the boy on his knee.

  What child wouldn’t be fascinated by the sound of that tiny tin flute? Why, maybe with a couple of months’ practice, Seamus could pipe a few songs for his son before riding north again to rejoin Miles and his Fifth Infantry for their spring campaign.

  For this farewell, Colin Teig might just be old enough to have some limited understanding that his father would be away for some time, that his father was riding north into enemy country to finish a long and bloody war.

  Finish it at last.

  * * *

  Esevone* sat protected in a newly constructed lodge of buffalo hides that stood at its prescribed place, here at the center of the great, curving crescent of the camp circle.

  While it was not as grand a lodge as the one destroyed by Three Finger Kenzie’s troops on the Red Fork, this was nonetheless the finest place the Sacred Buffalo Hat had resided in the two moons since Coal Bear had escaped that doomed village and fled into the mountains with the powerful religious object.

  Coal Bear laid another limb on the fire and sighed in satisfaction. He watched the thin tendrils of smoke climb toward that place where the newly peeled lodgepoles were joined with the tight wraps of rope. The buffalo hides the women used to sew together the lodgecover were so new, so white, they hadn’t begun to darken with countless fires, as had the old Sacred Hat Lodge the soldier destroyed.

  The frost-stiffened doorflap was pulled back and his wife ducked inside, carrying a small armload of firewood she had gathered along the banks of a nearby creek the Lakota called the Rotten Grass.† She dropped her wood to the left of the door, bent briefly to lay her hand on his shoulder, then left the lodge to continue her search for wood. Coal Bear scooted the small iron kettle closer to the burning limbs, then dropped some chunks of red meat into the steaming water.

  Days ago they had stumbled across some buffalo. Thanks be to the Everywhere Spirit! They had found enough of the beasts to feed the village.

  But not before some of the Lakota had decided to part company with the Ohmeseheso. Four Horns and his small band of Hunkpapa departed for the Elk River, hoping to find Buffalo Bull Sitting Down before the great chief crossed the Medicine Line into the Land of the Grandmother. All the Sans Arc and the Mnikowoju under Lame Deer had started away to the northeast, intending to wait out the rest of the winter in that country around the Antelope Pit River.*

  People said even Crazy Horse was thinking of having his Little Star People tear down their lodges and strike out for the Little Powder River.

  “Maybe the buffalo have returned,” Crazy Horse had declared. He was trying to explain to the headmen of both the Lakota and the Ohmeseheso why he was considering a return to his beloved Powder River country.

  For Coal Bear, any country where there wasn’t a white man, where the army did not march, that was good country.

  Hunting had grown better the closer the camp drew to the foothills of the White Mountains. But the village was large, with far more than a hundred lodges, many mouths to feed, and all those ponies to graze. The headmen had begun to consider that perhaps it was time to part company now that it appeared the soldiers were no longer dogging their trail. Perhaps now there would be some security for the villages for the rest of the winter.

  They had killed far too many of their ponies before they ever stumbled across the buffalo herds. Poor, gaunt, starving ponies butchered at every camp as the Ohmeseheso march
ed south, then west after their fight with the Bear Coat. For a long time they camped at the mouth of the Prairie Dog where it flowed into the Buffalo Tongue River. But with each new day the hunting grew more and more disappointing.

  Now that the other Lakota bands had dispersed to the four winds, Crazy Horse’s Little Star People and Coal Bear’s Shahiyela had finally stumbled onto a few buffalo. Not in the numbers the old priest remembered from his youth, but enough bulls and cows that his hungry people would no longer worry about starving that winter. Perhaps there might be enough hides for the women to scrape and tan to replace those lodgeskins left behind, burned and destroyed by the soldiers.

  In the days that had followed, the Lakota-Shahiyela camp traipsed after the herds from the mouth of Rotten Grass Creek, upstream from the Sheep River,† as the buffalo slowly migrated toward the Little Sheep River. There in that protected valley, the shaggy beasts appeared content to stay as winter continued. The Ohmeseheso were content to stay with the buffalo on the Rotten Grass, buffalo that were a sign that Esevone Herself was continuing to bless Her people. Day after day, the women raised a few more new lodges against the sky, their whiteness like brilliant cones flung against the pale, winter blue.

  Besides Coal Bear and Box Elder—that old, venerable, blind prophet who had foreseen the attack by Three Finger Kenzie—all four of the Old Man Chiefs gathered here in this village that formed a great crescent: Little Wolf, Morning Star,* Old Bear,† and Black Moccasin. This north country was land the Ohmeseheso believed was their hunting ground, granted them from the time of the Great Treaty at Horse Creek.# Here they were not disturbing any white people. Perhaps, just perhaps, the fighting was over.

  But, Coal Bear scolded himself: only a stupid man would believe that the soldiers wouldn’t be marching come the spring grass. If the Bear Coat marched when the winter winds howled, then he would surely have his soldiers marching once the ice in these rivers and streams began to groan and creak, breaking up as the weather warmed.

  But for now Coal Bear’s heart was strong. His people were exactly where Esevone had led them—to the buffalo that would sustain them until spring.