“General?”
“Yes, Myles?” Custer smiled at Captain Myles Moylan. He had always liked the dark Irishman. Moylan was genuine, early on coming to enjoy Custer’s respect during his time as adjutant during their Fort Hays duty. Following his years as adjutant, Custer had rewarded Moylan’s loyalty with a captaincy at the head of A Company.
“I was wondering, sir, that with two thousand rounds of carbine ammo and extra forage you’re suggesting—all that on the backs of just twelve mules—won’t that break ’em down before too long?”
Custer studied the flames before he answered. “I trust in each and every one of you men to do what you feel right for your commands. If you think you should carry extra forage, then by all means do so. Carry what you damn well please.”
With that singular word Tom realized his brother still smoldered with Benteen’s insult. Custer rarely if ever swore. And this use of profanity did not go unwasted on these men who knew him best.
“The idea was only a suggestion of mine, Myles. You need not hold to it. But, best that each of you tattoo this on your minds. You’ll be held accountable for your companies—both men and animals. Understand once more that we will be following the hostiles’ trail … no matter how far it takes us. No matter how long it takes us. Understand, gentlemen—we may never see the Far West again. We cannot rely on it or its supplies from this point on. If my guess is right, we may not see the other units for some time either. Once we march over those ridges to the south, following the Rosebud in the morning … we’ll be entirely on our own.”
Custer turned toward Calhoun, testy as a sage cock, when he heard his brother-in-law mutter something under his breath to Keogh. “What was that, Jim?”
“I just said it was better that way, General,” Calhoun replied self-consciously. “Better that we don’t have the rest of those other units bogging us down.”
“Bloody right, General!” Keogh growled. “We’re a fighting unit. Not like these other shoneens what never seen a fight or scrap before … much less a battle with the bloody savages!”
“You can count on Company A, sir!” Moylan joined in.
“In that case,” Custer said quietly as he stepped near Moylan, “you all might suggest to your men to bring along a little extra salt.”
“Salt, sir?” Lieutenant Edward S. Godfrey asked.
“Yes, Lieutenant. We may have to live on horse meat before this campaign is out. Most certainly mule meat unless some troopers are put afoot … or there are some saddles emptied.”
“Saddles emptied?” Lieutenant George D. Wallace croaked.
“Casualties.”
“Salt certainly makes horse meat taste better to my discriminating palate!” young Tom joked to raise everyone’s sudden gloom. “Had it before down to the Indian Territories chasing old Medicine Arrow himself. Not bad, if the horse isn’t a friend … and you’re hungry enough!”
Custer himself had turned on his heel and taken a couple steps toward his tent when he suddenly turned back again. “I’m sorry, but I forgot to mention something to you men before we break up. General Terry has given his permission to tap the whiskey kegs aboard the steamboat this evening.”
He had to wait while wild cheering erupted from the group. “If any of you have the inclination, you might avail yourselves of the army’s generosity. I’m aware many of you, like Tom here, make a habit of taking along an extra dram or two in your canteens—just for what Tom calls that ‘extra-tired time.’”
“From the sounds of it,” Tom stepped beside his brother to face the rest, “looks like my brother here is set on pushing us extra-hard and making us extra-tired!”
The officers laughed along with the younger Custer, wiping the backs of their hands across dry lips or rubbing their bellies to show what they thought of his idea of getting enough whiskey to wet down a month-long thirst. A long, dry trip out from Fort Abraham Lincoln.
“When I have General Terry’s written orders in hand come morning, I’ll have Cooke come round. Otherwise, have your sergeants pay heed to the bugle calls. We’ll strike camp as soon as the regiment is prepared to move out. That’ll be all. Good night, gentlemen.”
CHAPTER 6
AS Custer slipped back through the open flaps of his Sibley tent where striker John Burkman had three oil lamps glowing, their chimneys lightly smoking, Burkman rose anxiously. The three tufts of oily smudge were carried off on a strong, cool breeze as the general washed in, anxious. John watched the officers move off in pairs and small groups, crunching across what patches remained of the icy hail.
Custer sank on a canvas stool, studying the sounds of the camp whirling about him for the moment. The heer-haws of the mules. The whinnies and snorts of the horses. Among the tents there arose the sudden peal of some man’s high laughter followed by the loud blast of another soldier’s guttural guffaw. Above it all, here and there, Custer listened to the sweet sound of soft-sung melodies raised from one side of camp, while from the other direction came the faint strains of a banjo or some fiddle, perhaps even a squeezebox keening out a song popular to that particular breed of man who served his nation on the western plains.
“Doesn’t much sound like a camp of men marching out on campaign against the Sioux, does it, Mr. Burkman?”
John’s eyes darted to Custer, finding the general staring out the tent flaps into the night, apparently hypnotized by those night fires stretching endlessly west across the Yellowstone prairie.
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
“Of course,” Custer replied softly. He rose, turned to Burkman. “You’ve never been on campaign before, have you?”
“No, sir. This is my first time against … the enemy, sir.”
“Enemy,” Custer repeated, stepping to the tent flaps, mesmerized still by the twinkling of so many camp fires, together like so many stars dusted across the indigo velvet of the summer prairie. “The enemy, John. Tomorrow we’ll tramp down the trail of those Sioux that Reno let slip by.”
He turned, a strange and haunting look in those wintercold eyes of his. Eyes gone tired, like rumpled, worn baggage to Burkman. John glanced down at Custer’s hands, held out before him as if clutching something, gripping it for all it was worth. As if he would never let it go. Burkman’s eyes crawled back to Custer’s face, to those sapphire eyes, which now seemed to peer right through the striker.
“We’ll find them, John,” he whispered. “Once I find them, I’ll have myself a place in history.”
Burkman swallowed hard, trembling as he clutched the cream-colored hat he had been brushing clean of dust for Custer’s outfit in the morning. “Yes, General. A place in history—”
“Autie!”
With the sound of Tom’s voice hailing him from beyond the fire, Custer whirled on his heel. Three forms loomed into the light, all arm in arm, the trio eating ground in huge strides as they marched up to Custer’s tent.
“We’re headed over to take ol’ Terry up on that whiskey!” Tom held up one hand carrying five canteens.
“Those all yours, Tom?”
“Not all,” he answered with a snort. “One of ’em belongs to Lieutenant Harrington!”
“Four for you, brother?”
“’At’s right, General!” Keogh blared, holding aloft his own four canteens. “Thomas here’s a good lad—stout drinking bunkie, if ever there was one. He is, he is. We’d made good bunkies of it, in the old days of the war of rebellion, that is!”
“James,” Custer said as he stepped from the tent flaps, looking squarely at Calhoun, “you’ll see these two don’t get themselves into any serious trouble tonight, will you?”
“Aye, sir!” He saluted. “We don’t plan on drinking all that much tonight anyway.”
“Glad to hear that, fellas. Save it to drink a little at a time on the march.”
“Little at a time?” Tom snorted. “Autie, you’ve just never learned how to live. You’ll be dying a wretched old man—wondering what it was to have lived!”
; “I’ve had my bout with whiskey, Tom—back to Monroe. Sworn off it completely.”
“How well we know of that. I’d be the last to blame a man for not holding his liquor!” Tom chuckled along with Keogh and Calhoun. His smile faded as he studied his brother’s face. “But you’ve not truly enjoyed yourself ever since … sixty-nine, wasn’t it? Sixty-nine when you had to send that Cheyenne gal away. I don’t remember her name, Autie.”
Keogh found Custer’s eyes on him, as if seeking confirmation. “That be the gospel, ’tis, General. You ain’t the same man since that Cheyenne girl. Whatever she done to you, it made you a happy soul.”
Burkman saw Custer swallow. “Well,” he said selfconsciously, “you boys take care this evening.” He worried a palm over the stubby bristles of his thinning hair a few times, as if he wanted out of a fix but didn’t reckon on getting his bearings. “Don’t get drunk and scalped while over there round Gibbon’s boys. I’ll need you three this time out, you know.”
“That barber Sipes isn’t getting anywhere near us!” Tom roared, slapping Calhoun on the back.
The scene was happy once more. Every bit as happy as it had been somber a brief moment ago. No more talk of the past. Only talk of a future borne up the Rosebud.
“Let’s be walking, laddies!” Keogh howled, prodding the other two from Custer’s tent. “That bleeming shoneen of a trader’s got whiskey … and Myles Keogh’s got him a thirst to match!”
“See you to the morning, General!” Tom’s voice came back from the thickening darkness swallowing the trio.
That stopped Custer dead in his tracks. He turned to stare after the men, certain it was Tom’s voice he had heard. Dead certain. But brother Tom had never addressed him by rank before. Tom had never called him General.…
As he and his friends were rowed over to the Far West, moored snugly against the north bank of the Yellowstone, Tom Custer studied the brightly lit steamboat gently rocking atop the river like a glittering tree ornament. From the sounds of the hurrahs and laughter, coupled with the sights of shadowy forms darting across the yellow splash of lights on deck, Tom figured Coleman’s whiskey kegs would do a hard business of it tonight.
Not all that unusual, he thought to himself as Keogh laughed with Calhoun.
There had been whiskey sellers dogging the trail of the Dakota Column once it marched away from Fort Abraham Lincoln. Seemed that out in this lonely part of the world, once anyone who had a way to transport cheap whiskey heard of an army unit marching into the field, a whiskey trader of one color or another would be attending each night’s stop. Tonight beneath an overcast Yellowstone moon, it appeared the government-licensed trader aboard the Far West would make himself a small fortune from army coffers at Terry’s behest, as well as taking out of each soldier’s pockets whatever the man had left in the way of loose pay after all this time on the trail.
True enough, Tom realized that trader James Coleman had made out quite well along the column’s way west.
Coleman and his partner Sipes stayed busy tonight minding their whiskey kegs. For all but the most hardened of drinkers, the traders’ whiskey seemed the best bargain offered beneath that canvas awning. The troopers believed they could get more mileage out of a dollar pint of cheap grain alcohol than they could out of damned near anything else Coleman had for sale. The trader rightfully worried of running out of whiskey this last night at the mouth of the Rosebud, what with so many men from the Seventh filling their canteens with his cheap corn mash.
Growling, Coleman constantly reminded that rowdy, shoving crowd beneath his awning that they had to leave him with something in his whiskey kegs for the party he’d throw after the regiment marched back down the Bighorn—the victorious Seventh Calvary once more.
“The men what bring me Crazy Horse’s scalp along with Sitting Bull’s … I’ll let those men finish a keg all on their own!” Coleman promised down at the end of the crude plank bar Tom leaned against.
The tent rang with exuberant voices of hundreds of shoving, sweaty soldiers, each one cursed of an undying thirst yet to be quenched. Coleman’s was a promise that made every dry recruit think hard on searching out those two infamous chieftains all on one’s own.
“Shit!” a soldier near Tom joked among his friends in a fevered, drunken knot, “how the hell is this trader gonna know if a scalp I raise come from the head of Crazy Horse himself anyway?”
“Hell!” another soldier shouted to the trader pouring his cup full of amber liquid. “Maybe this whiskey of yours’ll even stop my damned knees from rattling like nails in a hollow keg!”
Very few Seventh Calvary officers ended up playing poker or monte that night aboard the Far West. Most of the gamblers turned out to be members of Gibbon’s or Terry’s staffs. Custer’s officers chose better things to do with their time.
This inky night that had slithered over the mouth of the Rosebud found most of the young men, and old alike penning a last letter home. Their officers had informed them some Rees were heading east in the morning with some of the last mail to be dispatched for a week or more, suggesting the men use the time wisely. Those who couldn’t write had those who could pen still more letters. And for a few hours, most minds and hearts were on home. Even those old files who didn’t have any other home but the army now still possessed some dim, foggy memory of that warm, secure place where a man’s mind will go before he’s pushed to think of nothing more basic than staying alive.
Letters to family back in the States. Long, rambling, promising letters to sweethearts … pretty faces that stared out at a young, frightened man in blue from a little tintype he guarded in his hand as he scribbled some last words to that special someone back in Ohio or Michigan, New York or South Carolina. A tintype he would eventually slip inside his blouse and wear against his skin over the next few days as they stalked the mighty Lakota bands.
It would never change, no matter what war a man found himself marching off to. There was always someone he could write and tell of the secret fears he didn’t dare share with his fellow soldiers. Private words of longing and loneliness scratched across endless pages of foolscap that last night at the Yellowstone beneath a flickering of oil lamps and torches and firelight.
Small clusters of officers huddled in those late hours to pen their wills, then have those solemn testaments witnessed by friends. Grim instructions given, agreed to, and sworn over for the dispersal of personal effects to family members back east should the unthinkable happen in the coming days as they followed Custer up the Rosebud in search of Sioux. What to be done with the few trinkets each man had accumulated during his time in the army—whether he carried his possessions on his back or in his pockets, or they simply lay waiting back at Fort Abraham Lincoln at the bottom of a near-empty trunk.
On the eve of battle every man wanted to know he would have something that could go back to his family to show that he had indeed been of some worth during his short time on this earth … each man wanting to pass something on to show for his brief service in the army of the west.
Like some cold fingers slipping around a tin cup at Coleman’s tent on that north bank of the Yellowstone, the mood in camp slowly changed as more and more of those men of the Seventh left the whiskey and returned to a somber camp to scratch at their letters, write their wills, swear death pacts with bunkies to see that an old watch made it back to Cape Girardeau, Missouri … or a special wedding band made it back to a little cabin near Cold Springs, Arkansas … or that neck chain he wore was delivered to a widowed mother somewhere down a holler outside Cross Plains, Tennessee.
As the clock crept into the wee hours, fewer men stood drinking at the trader’s kegs. This late only the old, fire-hardened veterans still drank, staring up the Rosebud, wondering what awaited them as they rode in Custer’s wake come morning.
Custer scratched a metal nib across sheets of foolscap at his field desk, while striker Burkman polished bridle and crupper, saddle, holsters, and belt, with a nervous energy. With a peculiar f
lair for understatement, the general was penning his last, long letter to Libbie, though he promised her he would dash off a few lines in the morning before departure.
Terry appears to retain the highest of confidence in me, holding up to others to emulate my zeal, energy, and ability. Yes, Dear Heart—Alfred knows all too well he is an administrator and that I am the Indian Fighter. He used his abilities as an administrator to assure that I will do what I do best … nay, better than any man in the army.
For the longest time after he had laid his pen aside and stepped to the tent flaps, Custer stared out at the cloudy, starless night, soaking in that somber mood cloaking the camp. It was no stranger to him, this blackness. Veteran of all but one of those battles of the Army of the Potomac. Veteran of campaigns along the Platte River Road and successful strikes into the heart of Indian Territory itself. Campaigns along the Yellowstone and an exploration of the Black Hills—that most sacred place of the northern plains tribes.
He sighed deeply and turned back to his desk, where he took pen in hand.
If I were an Indian, he wrote, I often think I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people adhered to the free, open plains rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation—there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with its vices thrown in without stint or measure.
“There!” he whispered to himself. He had admitted it to himself and to Libbie at last.
If by a twist of fate he found himself cast as one of the hostile chiefs he would be hunting down come morning, Custer admitted he would have to elect to go on living the free, unfettered nomadic life of old rather than suffer the stifling stagnation of the squalid reservations. To live as wild and free warriors always had, or to die a warrior.
There were times, Rosebud, when I so desperately hoped to find you aboard one of the steamboats plying the waters of the Yellowstone. To hold not only one of your sweet letters, but to once again hold you close. When the Josephine brought us the mail at the Tongue, I prayed you had stolen aboard to surprise me. You might just as well be here as not.…
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