Trumpet on the Land

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Dammit—how am I ever going to compete with the memory of a dead man? How can I, a mere mortal, Armstrong—ever hope to compete with you again—now that you’ve become a legend on that bloody hillside somewhere in Montana? Now that you’ve become a symbol of our national honor that must be avenged? Now that you’ve become a myth? Bigger than you ever were until that day you fell, bigger than you’d ever been in life?”

  Chapter 10

  6 July 1876

  THE LITTLE HORN MASSACRE

  Confirmation of the Disaster.

  Special Dispatch to the New York Times

  CHICAGO, July 6—At the headquarters of Lieut. Gen. Sheridan this morning all was bustle and confusion over the reported massacre of Custer’s command. Telegrams were being constantly received, but most of them were of a confidential nature and were withheld from publication.

  DETAILS OF THE BATTLE

  Graphic description of the fighting—

  Major Reno’s command under fire

  for two days—every man of Custer’s

  detachment killed except one

  scout—affecting scenes when

  relief arrived.

  Special Dispatch to the New York Times

  CHICAGO, July 6—A special to the Times to-night from Bismarck, recounts most graphically the late encounter with the Indians on the Little Big Horn.

  “All? All of them?” Samantha asked, her voice barely audible.

  Nettie Meinhold gripped the newspaper, her elbows outflung to keep from getting herself crushed by the press of female bodies all wanting to read the story for themselves. The stocky, German workhorse of a woman bellowed above the clamor, “Quiet!”

  Some of the women backed away somewhat, and Third Cavalry Captain Charles Meinhold’s wife shook the paper indignantly. “This is my newspaper, and I’ll read the stories to you again if you’ll be kind enough to listen. I’m just as worried as any of you.”

  “Custer’s really dead,” murmured a full-bodied woman beside Sam who reminded Samantha of her mother. “Hard to believe.”

  Nettie Meinhold reminded, “It says so right here.”

  “But n-not all of them?” Samantha asked again.

  “No,” one of the other women growled with that aggression born of great fear, her eyes brimming with worry, glistening with tears. Her lower lip trembled as she turned away.

  That was just the way Sam felt. Trying to control herself, to keep from crying like all those who had hid their faces at the first reading of the newspaper’s banner headlines. Some just weren’t able to bear up under the bloody truth.

  “Those are savages!” one of them cried out in anguish, sobbing in her hands.

  Another groaned, “They say you won’t find a better unit in this army than Custer’s Seventh!”

  “Listen to you!” Emma Van Vliet snapped angrily, her arms flying like a big bird’s wings. “Here we are—wives of the Second and the Third—every last one of us … and you’re knuckling under saying Custer and his Seventh were the best?”

  “To fall … all of them—”

  Someone whined, “It wasn’t all of them!”

  “Only half the regiment!”

  Mrs. Van Vliet growled at them, “They weren’t the best. Not to be crushed like they were—”

  “Still, dear God! Half a regiment!”

  Nettie Meinhold tried calming them a moment. “Listen, Custer and his Seventh couldn’t be the best. Look what happened to them. Why, to be defeated by a bunch of godless savages?”

  Mrs. Dorothea Andrews inched forward, saying, “Don’t you all realize they’re the same Indians our men are marching against?”

  Somewhere in that knot of fearful wives one of the women went weak-kneed, crying out, “Dear Father in heaven!”

  Two others caught the woman as she began to crumple there on the porch to Old Bedlam, and struggled through the crowd with their burden, heading for the door.

  Over and over Sam hypnotically rubbed her hand across her belly, feeling faint, hearing the women moaning, wailing, sobbing, and crying for those wives who had lost their men far to the north on a dusty summer hillside. Army wives understood loss.

  And the shocking news that was that day careening across the nation like a black cloud of evil portent brought worse than worry to the women waiting at Fort Laramie.

  They had husbands with Crook. Men like those who had marched off to war with Custer.

  Putting out a hand, Sam kept from falling, lightheaded, bracing herself against a pole supporting the porch awning.

  Oh, Seamus!

  A few women sobbed into their aprons or hands, but a few cursed as saltily as any veteran teamster, reviling against the Indians who had butchered the Seventh. Against the Indians who might be closing in on Crook at that very moment.

  Oh, Seamus, my love! God, watch over him!

  She leaned her head against the post and closed her eyes, attempting to conjure an image of Seamus … so far away.

  Will Crook’s men be the next to march into the maw of death?

  “I suppose you’re here to plead your case too, Mr. Donegan,” George Crook said with a wry grin inside his strawberry beard tied up with red braid that Thursday morning, 6 July.

  “Yes, I am, General.” For a moment Seamus flicked his eyes at the newspaperman from Chicago.

  “Well—I’ve just approved of Mr. Finerty here going along with Lieutenant Sibley’s escort.”

  Donegan replied, “He’s the sort does like adventure, sir.”

  With that Finerty snorted. “Adventure’s much better than dry-rotting around camp, Seamus.”

  John Bourke stepped over to slap the newsman on the back, saying cheerfully, “What sort of epitaph do you want me to have put on your gravestone, John?”

  Crook nodded, his lips pursing briefly. “I’m not sure Mr. Finerty realizes he may get more adventure than he bargained for. Haven’t you told him what happened to you and Frank on your scout north?”

  “He told me, General,” Finerty answered. “But I’ve made up my mind that I’m going to get out of camp every chance I can. What better way to inform my readers on just what an army campaign is but by sharing in every facet of an army campaign?”

  “All right,” Crook replied, turning to the commander of E Company, Second Cavalry. “Captain Wells, you’ll see that our correspondent here is provisioned from your stores.”

  “Very well, General,” said Elijah R. Wells, Second Cavalry, turning to his company’s lieutenant. “Mr. Sibley— you’ll see that you bring Mr. Finerty a hundred rounds of Troop E ammunition?”

  At the same time, Crook turned again to his Irish scout, scratching that red-hued beard flecked with the iron of his many winters, and of all his many campaigns. “Very well, Mr. Donegan. You’ll accompany the escort and pack-mules I’m sending with Frank and Big Bat. I have no fear you’ll make yourself more than useful.”

  “Good to have you along, Irishman,” Grouard said, stepping forward to stand within that circle. “But I’ll say it again, General—I don’t need no soldiers along. I’ll take the Irishman here—but you can keep your escort. They’ll just make for trouble. Me and the other two can move quicker, keep out of sight better than a whole bunch of your soldiers can.”

  “Request denied, Grouard,” Crook responded gruffly. “Lieutenant Sibley and his men will accompany you—and that’s the last I want to hear of it. When can you be ready to depart, Lieutenant?”

  Sibley stiffened, saying, “We’ll pull out at noon, General.”

  So it was that Seamus volunteered to probe north with two of the army’s most experienced scouts, the three of them to be escorted by Lieutenant Frederick W. Sibley, E Troop, Second Cavalry, who went on to handpick twentyfive men and mounts from the regiment for Crook’s reconnaissance.

  After Grouard and Donegan escaped from the Lakota camps somewhere to the north of Goose Creek and returned from their journey north, the expedition’s commander wanted to know not only exactly where that enem
y village was but some idea where it might be headed. In addition, Crook was hoping Grouard and Pourier could slip around the Sioux once again to make contact with the Crow and, as the pair of half-breeds had done before the Battle of the Rosebud, convince the tribe to send a good number of their warriors to fight alongside the soldiers when the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition resumed its campaign against the Lakota and Cheyenne.

  With four days’ rations Sibley’s patrol got away just past noon, crossing Big Goose Creek to head northwest along the stream’s bank for more than a dozen miles before Grouard told the lieutenant they were going into camp.

  “Why are we stopping here?” Sibley asked as the scouts slid from their horses, his soldiers obediently remaining in their saddles.

  “This is about as far as we’re gonna go before dark,” Frank explained, tossing up a stirrup so he could loosen the cinch.

  “We’ll go on after the sun goes down,” Big Bat added from the far side of his mount.

  Sibley clearly was not understanding. “But the general wants us to push north with all possible speed.”

  Donegan was slipping the curb bit from his horse’s mouth after loosening the cinch. “And we will push on,” Seamus confided. “But we won’t go anywhere but to hell itself if we get spotted by one of those wandering war parties Bat and Frank saw a couple days back. Better for us to move on after dark.”

  While the soldiers had celebrated the Centennial Fourth of July, Grouard and Pourier had ventured north on the line of march Crook intended to take when he resumed the campaign. For the better part of two days they had probed north, angling over along the Tongue to the country where the enemy village appeared to be heading that last week in June when Frank and Seamus had made their miraculous escape. In the space of twenty miles the half-breeds had spotted several wandering war parties daringly close to the Goose Creek camp, intent on keeping an eye trained on whatever Three Stars would have up his sleeve.

  It didn’t take much more convincing than Donegan’s reminder of just how the Sioux were running all over the territory for Sibley to grudgingly agree to wait out the sun’s falling behind the Big Horns before they pushed on.

  After boiling themselves some coffee while they sat out the coming of darkness, the thirty-one riders were preparing to move out in dusk’s dim light when Pourier cried out, “Look, Grouard!”

  In the deepening shadows Seamus made out the murky form of a lone horseman lurking at the mouth of a nearby ravine. Without hesitation he and Grouard flung themselves into the saddle and kicked their horses into a furious pursuit. At the same instant the mysterious rider turned tail and disappeared over the crest of a hill. For the better part of a half hour they searched for the horseman without success in the deepening gloom. Back at the mouth of the ravine where the rider was first spotted, Grouard dropped to the ground beside Donegan.

  Handing his reins to the half-breed, Seamus pulled a wooden lucifer from his vest pocket. With a scratch of his thumbnail the yellow flame leaped into the darkness with a flash. Kneeling, Donegan spotted what he had suspected. Tracks that confirmed his fear.

  “Look’s like they’re gonna know we’re coming.”

  “Damn,” muttered Grouard. He glared across the hillside at the Sibley escort. “Damn them soldiers. Should’ve been just us three.”

  “Chances are, that red son of a bitch would have seen just us, Frank. Whether there was three or thirty of us—we would’ve still been spotted.” He wagged the match out as soon as it scorched his fingers. Donegan pulled on his glove again.

  “Think we ought to go back?” Grouard asked.

  “If it were up to me—I’d say we try,” Seamus admitted. “We could turn back now. Or we could turn back tomorrow, or the next day. I’m for making a try of it: seeing what we can find out, for as long as we can.”

  The half-breed smiled. “But just as long as I don’t run us onto that village again, right?” Grouard asked as he rose to his feet with Donegan.

  “Damn right. Just as long as you don’t go down to talk with any of them red h’athens and tell ’em your bleeming name!”

  He wagged his dark head. “No more talking to them Lakota.”

  “Frank,” Seamus said confidentially, grabbing the half-breed’s arm, “let’s don’t tell what we saw here.”

  “Why?”

  He said in hushed tones, “Let’s just tell ’em what we saw was an elk.”

  “Why not level with Sibley?”

  “You want to be escorted by a bunch of sojurs any more edgy than that bunch with the lieutenant already is?”

  “You got a point, Irishman. All right—a elk it was.”

  Donegan watched the half-breed raise his left leg painfully, almost like a man suffering an attack of severe rheumatism. “Something wrong, Frank?”

  Grouard struggled twice before he got his boot stuffed into the stirrup, then raised himself slowly, settling into his saddle very gently. “Got me the white man’s sleeping sickness.”

  “Sleeping sickness?”

  “What a white man gets from sleeping with the wrong woman.”

  “You mean your pecker’s weeping.”

  “Sore as anything I ever had,” Grouard complained. “Can’t even walk right … and sitting in this saddle’s about to kill me.”

  “Maybe we get back to Crook’s camp, you’ll get one of those army surgeons to see what he can do for you.”

  “I know what they can do for me,” Grouard grumbled with a shudder as Donegan climbed into the saddle. “They can cut my pecker off here and now. I don’t ever plan on using it again.”

  “Leastways not with one of Kid Slaymaker’s girls at the Hog Ranch.”

  The half-breed wagged his head dolefully. “Way I feel, I ever get well—this is one fella ain’t never going in Slay-maker’s doorway again.”

  That night the patrol made another twenty-five miles, marching northwest along the base of the Big Horns, moving through the tall grass and startling one covey of sage hens after another into sudden flight.

  “We’re riding part of the old Fort Smith trail,” Seamus said to Finerty just past eight o’clock when the moon rose.

  “Fort C. F. Smith? On the Big Horn?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How you know about that?”

  “I spent a cold winter and a wet spring there—many a year ago now. Hoping a friend down at Fort Phil Kearny would join me and we’d make it on to the Montana goldfields over to Bannack and Alder Gulch.”

  “Jesus and Mary, Seamus!” Finerty gushed in the silvery light of that moonrise. “I’ll bet you knew some of them fellas who got trapped in the hayfield that August.”

  “Knew ’em, Johnny boy? I was with ’em.”

  “At … you were at the Hayfield Fight?”

  “I was a civilian hay cutter.” He shook his head with the remembrance. “Aye, that summer’s day we cut down a lot more’n hay, John. Them red h’athens threw the best they had at us nigh onto that whole day—before they give up when the sojurs finally come marching out to relieve the siege.”

  Sibley’s voice came down the column, “Quiet in the ranks!”

  Finerty leaned over to whisper, “You’ll tell me more tomorrow? All about that fight?”

  Seamus only nodded as they rode on, the moon continuing its rise behind them, illuminating the ground ahead of the Sibley patrol. For the next few hours the only sound was an occasional snort of a horse, the squeak of a McClellan saddle, or the click of iron shoes on streamside pebbles, heady silence broken only by the occasional whispers of the half-breed scouts as they conferred on the best trail to take.

  Just past three A.M. as the first gray line of the sun’s rising leaked along the horizon to the east, Grouard turned in his saddle to say, “Lieutenant—we oughtta think about finding a place to camp.”

  “Daylight coming. Yes. By all means, Grouard.”

  “We’ll rest here for a few hours before we see about going on,” the half-breed said. “Pick some me
n to watch the horses, and wake us come sunup.”

  “Where you think we are now, Irishman?” Finerty asked after they had loosened cinches and picketed their animals in a sheltered ravine back among the foothills above the upper waters of the Tongue River.

  “Not far from the Greasy Grass … the Little Bighorn.”

  The packer known as “Trailer Jack” Becker slid down into the grass nearby, dusting his britches off.

  Donegan asked, “How’s your mules, Jack?”

  “They’ll hold up better’n these’r army horses, that’s for certain.”

  Donegan pulled his hat down over his face and laid his head back into the thick pillow of tall grass. “I don’t doubt you’re right about that at all.”

  It seemed as if he had no more than closed his eyes when Grouard was kicking the worn sole of Seamus’s boot. He squinted and blinked, rubbing the grit from his eyes as he hacked up some night-gather and spit. The sun was making its daily debut out there on the plains.

  “Come with me, Irishman.”

  They picked up Pourier on their way through the crowded bivouac. All three mounted and led out as the soldiers jostled into a column of twos, coming behind while Sibley himself clung to the scouts. After riding no more than a half mile, they were confronted with a tall, steepsided bluff squarely on the trail they were taking.

  “Lieutenant,” Grouard declared, “take Bat and the Irishman with you into that ravine, yonder. I’ll go up top on foot and glass what’s below.”

  Sibley nodded and said, “Very well.”

  Grouard next turned to Bat and Donegan. “If you see me take my hat off, you boys come on up, pronto.”

  Seamus watched the half-breed move off less than a hundred yards before he dismounted and led his horse into the ravine with the rest of the party. From there he watched Grouard slip down on his belly just shy of the crest of the ridge, pull his field glasses from the pocket of his canvas mackinaw, and peer over. It wasn’t but a heartbeat before Grouard tore off his floppy sombrero and waved it.