“I don’t plan to do no more Injin fighting, General,” Seamus declared as they shook hands, then he stepped back. “I want to find me a nice little vein of gold up there in the Montana hills, stake my claim, then take care of my family with my labors. Maybe have some more children, if God’s willing.”
“No more fighting, eh?”
“Not if I can help it,” Donegan vowed. “I’m fixing to take my wife and boy up where we’re nowhere close to Injin troubles.”
“God speed, Irishman.” Miles’s voice cracked slightly again. Then he took a step back and saluted. “I trust you’ll watch your back-trail, Sergeant Donegan.”
He felt the sour ball rising in his chest as he blinked away the sting of hot moisture. He saluted. “General, it’s been an honor—”
Seamus immediately turned on his heel and stomped away before the two of them betrayed any more of that strong sentiment that since the beginning of time had bonded fighting men who shared the same battlefields, shared the danger, shared the nearness of death.
Men with that same sense of duty to country and to family. Men dutybound to honor above all.
Epilogue
Late May
1877
THE TOWN OF “MILES.”
General Miles has sent a communication to Governor Potts, of this Territory, advising his action upon Miles’ proposition, some time since submitted to the War Department (but not yet acted upon) in favor of the permanent establishment of the town of Miles upon the Tongue River [military] reservation. The town is growing; stocks of goods are there, and the citizens now have a representative here who visits the Governor asking the organization of Custer County, in which the town is located. That a large population will this season locate upon the Tongue and Big Horn cannot be doubted, and with such settlement the construction and occupation of the posts and offensive movements against the Sioux, we cannot question that the end of the Sioux war is at hand. The new posts will be built of hewn logs, matched and lined with building paper, for the construction of which 600 carpenters are now on the way up the Yellowstone.
Army and Navy Journal
12 May 1877
After saddling up the claybank, Seamus had walked the mare over to present himself to Lieutenant Samuel R. Douglass, quartermaster for the campaign, packing up fifteen days’ rations of coffee, hard-bread, and some salted beef in case he might run through a stretch of country bare of game, or might just have to avoid firing his rifle for fear of attracting attention. If he was lucky, he’d only have to aim his rifle at a mulie buck, maybe a curious antelope.
Shaking hands and slapping the backs of the officers and line soldiers who had been his comrades-in-arms for two cold, wet campaigns, the Irishman snorted back the dribble at the end of his nose and rose to the saddle. He yanked aside the reins and gave the claybank the business end of those spurs strapped around the heels of his stovepipe boots.
Half-a-hundred yards away he slowed to a halt, dismounting beside the ashy scars of what had been five fresh mounds the burial detail had scratched among the ruins of the Sioux village, there beside the banks of Big Muddy Creek. To protect the bodies from predators, and to prevent the camp’s survivors from returning to dig up the bodies after Miles had pulled off to the north, late last night Jerome’s detail had torched a large pile of blankets, robes, and dried meat over the graves.
Tensely gripping the reins in his left hand, Seamus dismounted to stare at the blackened ground, then brought his right hand up to the curled brim of his big hat, saluting those soldiers fallen in the line of duty in a stinking little war too often forgotten by the folks back east, ignored by their own government, overlooked even by those army leaders who sent the faceless ones off to fight an unknown enemy in a distant land.
As he stood there, his heart weeping, Donegan watched the ghostly faces of so many old friends parade past his memory in grand review—men fallen in battle, gone to their eternal reward having earned a hero’s sleep.
These were men who had borne the ultimate price as their nation entered its second century. Men who would never again return to hearth and home, return to the kindred spirits of family, the kiss of a sweetheart, the warm embrace of wife and children. Men who would forever sleep beneath the green shroud of this great land they had come to fight over.
By nightfall, he knew these five graves would lie alone in this valley as a mournful silence swallowed the land. A land abandoned by both the army and the Sioux. Those unmarked graves would be left to the ages and the endless wind that came to whisper with the turn of the seasons.
Recrossing the creek Seamus started away south by west toward the far side of the valley where Jerome’s burial detail was lowering the last of the fourteen Indian dead into a long mass grave dug there against the bottom of the ridge some two hundred yards southwest of the streambank. Here, on another part of yesterday’s battlefield, the soldiers had lashed the bodies in blankets then laid them side by side in that shallow hole where Donegan stopped and peered down.
“You here to get you a scalp,” one of the cavalrymen said, “them Cheyenne took ’em all.”
Wagging his head, Seamus looked at the corporal who had his sleeves rolled up, reddish dirt caked all the way up his sweat-stained forearms and replied, “No. I’m not here for no scalps.”
He waited as two young soldiers looped the ropes beneath the last faceless, blanket-wrapped shroud and dragged the body over the yawning hole, lowering it inch by inch to join the rest.
“Which one of ’em was Lame Deer?” he asked the soldiers as the ropes were pulled up and three more cavalrymen started to rise from their perches on the rocks, dragging their shovels behind them.
“Don’t rightly remember,” the corporal answered.
“It don’t really matter anyway,” Seamus said, reaching down inside the deep pocket of his canvas mackinaw. As one of the men stabbed his shovel into the fresh dirt beside the grave, the Irishman asked, “If you fellas don’t mind, gimme a minute here before you throw that dirt back in.”
Not a one of them spoke, curious were they all, as he pulled out his small waxed pouch of army tobacco. From the corner of the plug he bit off a large chunk and with his fingertips began to grind the tobacco into flakes. Just as he would do if he were lighting his pipe. Maybe the way a warrior might fill his own pipe and offer a prayer over a fallen comrade.
Slowly, as he inched down the long side of that mass grave, Seamus Donegan sprinkled the tobacco over the blanket shrouds. Then he bit off a second hunk and sprinkled it too as he moved back along the other long side of the grave.
“Now what you do that for?” one of the young soldiers asked as Seamus stuffed the rest of his tobacco away in a pocket.
“Yeah,” said another. “I figured the general was crazy to ask us to bury these goddamned bodies—but you gone and wasted good tobacca in that buryin’ hole!”
A third man snorted, “Should’a just left ’em for the coyotes, what we should’a done!”
Then they all fell silent, expectant, as the tall man with the long hair tormented by the chill breeze now touched each one of them with his gaze.
“I just figured these folks don’t have ’em no one to say some words over their graves, like folks said when you buried your friends back there in the village.”
The corporal swiped his forearm across the bottom of his face, smearing the red dirt over his mouth and chin. “Never thought ’bout it that way, mister.”
“Man what fought and died for what he loved most,” Seamus explained, “he ought to have folks say a simple prayer over his resting place. Man died protecting his land, his family—should have someone say a prayer.”
The soldiers stood motionless as Donegan swept up the reins to the horse and climbed up to the saddle.
The corporal loped over and came to a stop beside the horse. His brow knitted in consternation, the soldier asked, “Wasn’t you gonna say a prayer before we throwed the dirt in on them bodies?”
“I already
did say the prayer, Cawpril.”
“You-you did?”
“With that tobacco,” Seamus said, tapped heels against ribs, and turned the animal, moving off at a lope.
Putting the battlefield at Big Muddy Creek behind him.
Putting the Sioux War behind him too.
Pointing the mare up the valley, south by west for the Tongue, then the Powder. Heading home to loved ones waiting back at Laramie.
Now the three of them could set out immediately for the gold diggings of Montana Territory, for Last Chance Gulch where the future beckoned him, where after a delay of more than ten years an old soldier could at last get on with his interrupted life.
Praying that he would die an old man. That he would die in bed. That as he closed his eyes for the last time, he would be holding Samantha’s hand while he took that final breath and crossed over.
Prayed there would be someone to sprinkle some tobacco on his grave, someone to say a prayer over his resting place, maybe even sing a hymn, perhaps a drinking song or two. But mostly he prayed he would never again have to die on such a lonely, forgotten patch of ground as he was leaving behind. And then he prayed he would never again have to point his weapons at another Indian.
Begging God above that he would find himself a little peace for his family in this wild, unsettled, and tortured land.
Afterword
It had to gall Nelson A. Miles something fierce as the seasons turned to discover how the Lakota and Cheyenne were detouring away from him and choosing instead to surrender into the arms of George C. Crook.
The lion’s share of those Ohmeseheso bands, not to mention the Lakota who Spotted Tail found in the Little Missouri country, and especially that camp of the famed “Crazy Horse people,” had all rebuffed Miles’s straight-talk. While he refused to play Crook’s game of promising what he could not guarantee, the end result of coming out second-best in that undeclared war of nerves with his gray-bearded nemesis must have irked Miles no end, as winter whimpered to a close on the high plains and spring began to flourish.
Compared to what numbers were surrendering almost daily down at the Red Cloud Agency, very few put their trust in the unvarnished truth the colonel spoke at the Tongue River Cantonment. He could promise them only one thing for certain: if they did not go in to surrender, he would continue to make war on them.
As events turned out by late spring, all of Miles’s direct, eye-to-eye negotiations with both the Cheyenne and Lakota delegates at his post—in addition to his unheralded efforts at second-party peace feelers by sending Johnny Bruguier and Old Wool Woman to the combined Ohmeseheso/Crazy Horse village—essentially reaped little reward when compared to Crook’s expert sleight-of-hand. Not only did Crook poise his handpicked subordinate, William Philo Clark, at center stage that crucial spring, but with even greater effect the gray-bearded general played the strongest ace in his deck: Spotted Tail.
Miles didn’t stand a chance.
There was no way he was going to convince the village that Crook could not guarantee all that he was promising if the bands surrendered to him in the south, especially when Crook’s pitch was made by the revered Spotted Tail. While Miles told the bands the truth rather than what they wanted to hear, Crook’s political posturing through Spotted Tail meant that Miles lost the honor of bringing in the hostiles, while Crook’s dishonest duplicity won the day.
You have to give old gray beard credit for coming up with his highly successful initiative to send Crazy Horse’s uncle to deliver that package of pie-in-the-sky promises. By the fourteenth of April, those Mnikowoju and Sans Arc bands Spotted Tail had visited in the Little Missouri country, before marching west in search of the Crazy Horse village on the Powder, were already straggling into both the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies. Some two weeks later the Little Wolf contingent of the Northern Cheyenne appeared at the White Rock Agency. In short order Morning Star’s and Spotted Elk’s camps trickled in to Camp Robinson.
To his credit, Miles doggedly forged on with his plans for the campaign against those bitter-enders who refused all entreaties from north and south. Perhaps it was his grizzly-sized ego, if not his all-consuming desire to salvage something out of those herculean efforts he had made to induce the hostiles’ surrender, which compelled the colonel to push on in the face of such a humiliating personal and professional defeat at the hands of the double-dealing Crook.
Miles is to be admired, while Crook should be despised for joining the ranks of those “peace-makers” who lied to the warrior bands down through history. Crook’s actions in the spring of 1877 become all the more despicable when one takes into account the admirable efforts he had made in recent years to get to know his enemy, the lengths he went to in dealing honestly with his foes.
Another great source of aggravation for Miles had to be the fact that the eastern press—savvily kept by Crook in his hip pocket—was busy that spring reporting how Crook’s successes were eclipsing those of Miles. Back east journalists were reporting and re-reporting that the reason for that spring’s success in securing the surrender of so many of the Cheyenne, not to mention the impending surrender of Crazy Horse himself, was no less than Crook’s defeat of the Dull Knife Cheyenne. Nearly all of the eastern papers failed to factually report that the Dull Knife defeat was due to the field commander who actually made the attack on the Red Fork village: Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie of the Fourth U.S. Cavalry.
This extremely politicized and slanted coverage had to put the intemperate Miles at a slow burn since he already regarded the press as conspirators who refused to put the credit for the surrenders where the credit was due—the tenacious war efforts of the Fifth U.S. Infantry and its commander.
It must be remembered that Crook did nothing but bring in the camps that had been recently defeated by the Fifth at Battle Butte (see Wolf Mountain Moon—vol. 12, The Plainsmen Series). It was Miles’s relentless winter campaign that had given a rebirth to the peace faction in the villages, convincing tribal leaders that their best route lay in suing for the best possible terms of surrender. In my estimation, it was Miles’s promise that he would continue to bring war to their doorstep that eventually convinced the headmen that they should negotiate with the Bear Coat rather than continue their fight-and-run tradition.
To counter all the good that Miles had accomplished in the field that bitter winter, it would take what this writer considers was no less than underhanded chicanery on the part of Crook and his subordinates.
What Miles had worked long and hard to accomplish, it took no time for Crook to undo. The Indians Crook brought in were in actuality seduced away from the lower Tongue, where they had been poised to give themselves over to the Bear Coat. Even with his success in stealing most of the hostiles away from Miles, Crook would not wait patiently for history to take its course with the rest of the warrior bands. Anxious, undoubtedly worried that something with his nefarious plan might yet go awry to turn Crazy Horse back into the arms of Colonel Miles, Crook sent none other than Red Cloud himself to smooth over any last minute hitches that might deter the Oglalla war chief from completing his sad journey to Camp Robinson.
The final miles of that surrender march, especially the final months of Crazy Horse’s life, once he turned himself over to “White Hat” Clark and began to suffer the jealousy and indignities of the other Lakota chiefs, I will tell in a forthcoming volume in this Plainsmen Series: The Broken Hoop.
In the end, history would wait close to a decade before it took its retribution on George Crook, before history finally rewarded Nelson Miles for what he accomplished not only with the last of the warrior bands in that spring of 1877, but with the surrender of Geronimo’s Chiricahua Apache in Arizona. But that too is a story I will leave for another time, another adventure for Seamus Donegan.
While the commander of the Fifth Cavalry was consumed with pressuring the Northern Cheyenne and the Crazy Horse Lakota to surrender to him on the Yellowstone as spring began to flower on the northern prairies, Miles
did not neglect his other arch-rival, Sitting Bull. Throughout the waning of that long winter he continued to do his best to gather intelligence on the mood and movements of the Hunkpapa leader’s hostiles clinging to the Missouri River country.
Late in April, in fact, when resupply from downriver made renewed campaigning possible, just prior to departing for the Rosebud, Miles dispatched two companies of the Fifth Infantry under Second Lieutenant Hobart K. Bailey to scout north of the cantonment from the Sunday Creek area to the headwaters of the Big Porcupine (east of Fort Peck), circling back to the Yellowstone opposite the mouth of the Rosebud. Unable to locate any sign of the Sitting Bull village, Bailey’s battalion returned to their post on the sixth of May.
That same day, Crazy Horse led his people in to Camp Robinson.
The following morning Miles had his fight with the last of the holdouts under Lame Deer.
And sometime in that first week of May 1877, Sitting Bull took his people across the chanku wakan—the medicine line—into the Land of the Grandmother.
There was good reason Bailey’s battalion was unable to find recent sign of the Hunkpapa village in that last sweep of the Missouri River badlands. Sitting Bull had abandoned the fight and fled the United States.
The Great Sioux War was all but over.
In constructing our map of the May seventh fight to accompany this book, like historian Jerry Greene, I have consulted an invaluable resource in the map drawn the morning after the battle by Sergeant Charles Grillon. A member of H Company, Second Cavalry, Grillon served as battalion topographer, performing various cartographic duties while on campaign. The sergeant’s map is astounding in its detail, including the night route of the advance down Muddy Creek to begin their attack at dawn; the locations where two of the cavalry soldiers were killed; the point where the pony herd was located near camp and the point across the river where that herd was finally halted and corralled by Lieutenant Casey’s men; as well as the exact dispositions of the individual cavalry companies as they went in pursuit of the fleeing Lakota in their chase that lasted some eight miles, all the way to the Rosebud.
Ashes of Heaven (The Plainsmen Series) Page 40