He nodded, not meeting her eyes.
“Good. Now go help Jimmy gather more chips. We’ll need them in the morning.”
Harry’s black mood only deepened that evening as he watched his father at his camp desk, reading the Bible in Hebrew by the light of a coal oil lamp. He was an intelligent, well-educated man, Harry knew, but a regimental commander should be tall and broad-shouldered, a man like Mark Reynolds. His father was frail and undersized with pale skin and the large, mournful eyes of a spaniel. Even his hands were wrong, small and ink-stained, not the strong, scarred hands of a warrior.
In bed, Harry read by candlelight. His book was Biddle’s The Expedition of Lewis and Clark, a battered, dog-eared text drawn from the explorers’ journals. Because it contained the only written description of their destination lands, all Carrington’s officers had been ordered to read it. Now it was Harry’s turn. Tonight’s action was William Clark’s confrontation with the Teton Sioux on Bad River, early in the journey. Harry fell asleep wondering what would have happened if Colonel Henry Beebe Carrington, and not captains Lewis and Clark, had been in charge of President Jefferson’s enterprise. Would he have finessed the standoff with the Partisan and his scheming Sioux as Clark had done? Or would the Corps of Discovery have ended its journey there and then, ingloriously, on the banks of Bad River?
Chapter Five
The following night the regiment stopped four miles east of Laramie next to a creek full of mountain pike. Mark Reynolds showed Harry and Jimmy how to make a net from stitched-together gunnysacks. The fish they caught were strong and slippery and cold as living ice.
They were close enough to Laramie to hear the boom of the evening gun. Some of the men wanted to visit the post but Carrington would not allow it. He called his officers to his tent for a council.
“As you know, peace talks are under way at the fort,” he said. “Commissioners are negotiating rights to the Bozeman Road, trying to get the chiefs’ assurance that emigrants will not be harmed on their way to Montana Territory. Hundreds—maybe thousands—of Indians are in the area. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the situation is delicate.” He paused to look each officer in the eyes. “We must not disturb the balance. This is important, and some silly incident could be disastrous. The men are to have no contact with the Indians—none whatsoever. If an Indian approaches camp, for any reason, bring him directly to me. Understood?”
Just then a breathless orderly ran into the tent to say two of the regiment’s most experienced sergeants were missing. “They went for a swim and they ain’t been seen since!” he said. “Their clothes is still on the bank.”
Carrington sent Reynolds out with a search party, and Harry took advantage of the commotion to saddle Calico and tag along. They found the two naked bodies in a rocky shallows a few miles downstream. Harry’s heart thumped in his chest as Reynolds rolled the first one over. The gray face was bruised and bloated but otherwise undamaged. The second man was the same.
“Doesn’t look like Indian business,” Reynolds said. “They’ve still got their hair on.”
They wrapped the bodies in blue army blankets, draped them over a horse, and returned to camp. After a brief examination, Surgeon Horton said the men indeed had drowned, apparently swept away by the stream’s strong current. The deaths were the first since the regiment left Fort Stephen Kearney thirty-three days before and they cast a pall over the previously picnic-like atmosphere.
That evening, as the sergeants were being buried, a lone Indian rode into camp. With Bridger interpreting, he identified himself as Standing Elk, a chief of the Brule Sioux and participant in the Laramie talks. Carrington invited him to sit and smoke.
Harry could not take his eyes off the Indian sitting cross-legged before the fire. Standing Elk looked very different from the Pawnees he had seen at Fort Kearney or the short, squat Winnebagos who hung around Fort Sedgwick. This man was tall and sinewy with good features. His black hair hung loose to his shoulders and he wore a single feather at the crown.
“Where is the Little White Chief going?” he asked.
Carrington frowned. “My name is Carrington. We are headed across the Powder River to the Bighorn Mountain country.”
“Why do you go there?”
Carrington hesitated. “To protect emigrants on the Bozeman Road. We will build three forts.”
Bridger paused before translating. “You sure you want to tell him all that, Colonel?”
“Why not? Surely it won’t come as a surprise. Surely our mission has been discussed at the Laramie talks.”
Bridger laughed. “Colonel, if them Injuns know anything about your so-called mission I’ll eat this.” He raised his sweat-stained hat above his head. “The only reason they’re here in the first place is for the presents the army gives ’em just for showin’ up. When a chief touches the pen, his people get even more. That’s how it works. Them peace commissioners don’t care if the Injuns understand, they just want ’em to sign so they can go back to Washington and talk up their big success. You can be sure no one’s said, ‘Oh, and by the way, our man Carrington’s comin’ through with his soldiers any day now to build a road and three forts right through your best huntin’ grounds.’”
Bridger replaced his hat. “No, sir, and the Injuns won’t be real happy when they find it out.”
Carrington considered, stroking his silky beard. “Please proceed with the translation.”
Standing Elk listened closely. “The Lakota people of Red Cloud and Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses who live up in the north country will not sell their hunting ground to the white man for his road and forts,” he said. “You bluecoats will have to fight them for it.”
Carrington smiled. “Red Cloud,” he said. “Yes, I’ve heard of him. And what of you, Standing Elk? Will your people fight us too?”
The Indian shook his head. “The Brules want no war with the bluecoats. It is the fighting men of the north you should fear. Red Cloud and his Bad Face warriors will show you no mercy.”
“We fear no one,” Carrington said.
Standing Elk looked around the camp. “Is this all the soldiers you have?”
“The White Father in Washington has given me all the soldiers I will need,” Carrington said.
Standing Elk smiled. “Then the White Father and the Little White Chief are fools.”
Chapter Six
Rose did not like riding in the stuffy ambulance and spent afternoons on horseback, despite Clara Anderson’s warning.
“Lieutenant Reynolds won’t be happy to find you brown as a squaw,” she said, “and with your lovely hair all chopped off too. You’d be wise to think about such things, dear. A man’s heart is a wayward thing.”
Rose laughed as if this did not concern her. In fact, although she liked her boyish haircut and the freedom it gave her, she was a bit worried about Mark’s reaction. “He would love me if I was bald and black as midnight.”
She was careful to wear gloves and a wide-brimmed bonnet though she would have preferred to ride bareheaded and bareback and dressed in the loose white shirt and Turkish trousers she had worn as a girl exploring the Missouri countryside with her brothers. But even in those carefree, prewar days someone had been around to scold her. Then it was tall, unsmiling Grandmother Alice who complained her only granddaughter was becoming “a wild heathen who would not be welcome in the stone mansions of St. Louis’s North Garrison Street.” But this put no fear in Rose as she had no interest in stone mansions or the people who lived in them.
On these hot summer afternoons Rose rode an old cavalry horse, a claybank gelding named General Rosecrans but that the men called Carl. Though her leg and stomach muscles protested painfully at first, soon she was comfortable as ever in the saddle and the sweet prairie air was invigorating.
Often she rode beside Dixon, with Spicer close behind whistling songs of glory. Although he was from Lexington, Kentucky, he had split with his slave-owning family—a rupture that pained him but, as he said, “
no human being has the right to own another”—and fought with the Fifty-fifth Illinois at the battle of Shiloh, where he formed a low opinion of generals Grant and Sherman. Later in the war he was posted to Smallpox Island, a prison hospital in the Mississippi River outside of Alton and a place Rose knew well. St. Louis residents walking on the levees held their breath when the wind blew from that direction. Beyond this, Dixon offered no more information and Rose, despite her curiosity, did not press.
To celebrate the Fourth of July, Jerusha made an apple cake from molasses, raisins, flour, eggs, spices, and dried apples soaked all day in whiskey water. She served it warm from the cook-all with a drizzle of simple syrup. After dinner, Rose sat with Dixon and the Andersons at the fire drinking coffee and listening to the Mexican teamsters play guitars and sing corridos. Gregory, just back from scouting the next day’s route, joined them.
“The mules had a hard pull today,” Anderson said. “Will tomorrow be more of the same?”
Gregory shook his head as he poured a mug of coffee. “No, the road is easier from here on. You’ll make Mud Springs by noon. There’s a telegraph there and a blacksmith’s shop. Might be good to stop a day or so, rest the mules. That’s the only good water you’ll find till Pumpkin Creek, and from there the going gets hard sure enough.”
They sat in silence, anticipating the road, listening to the pop of the fire and the Mexican guitars. After a time, Gregory spoke again.
“I came across a trench and breastworks on Rush Creek,” he said. “Cartridge shells all over the ground. I’m guessing that’s where Collins and his boys tangled with the Cheyenne last winter.”
Anderson made a sound of disgust. “We wouldn’t be having all this Indian trouble if it weren’t for John Chivington and his Colorado yahoos,” he said. “That’s the problem with irregulars. They muck things up for the rest of us.”
“Muck things up?” Dixon said. “Is that what you call it when women and children are slaughtered in their sleep?”
Anderson threw the contents of his cup into the fire, sending up a line of white smoke. “I grant you, that wasn’t a pretty business,” he said, “but—”
A shot rang out. Rose turned and saw a soldier’s cap spinning in the air like something tossed at a wedding. Dixon jumped to his feet and ran toward the sound. She and the others followed to find a man lying facedown on the ground beside a supply wagon, his head a wet mush of blood and brains.
“I seen it happen, Doc,” a white-faced soldier said to Dixon, kneeling beside the body. “He was climbin’ up with his shotgun in his hand and it discharged on accident. Blew the top of his head clean off!”
Rose saw a tear in the dead man’s jacket, separating shoulder and sleeve. Dixon rolled the body over and she looked down on the dead face of Royal Spicer, his features bloody but undamaged. She covered her mouth with her hands and ran to the nearest bushes, where her stomach emptied of all its contents.
“Well,” Gregory said, “he’s the first.”
Chapter Seven
The air smelled of animals, dust, and the sugar-loaf cactus now fully in bloom. Harry Carrington filled his lungs as he and Calico crested a hill. Laramie lay below. At last he would see the West’s most famous fort.
He was disappointed. Sprawled across the plain, it looked more like a prairie village than a fortified garrison. There was no stockade with massive blockhouses at its corners, no armed sentries or wheeled artillery at the gates. Instead it was a collection of simple buildings, some frame but mostly of stone and adobe, squatting on a flat, treeless plateau at the confluence of the North Platte and Laramie rivers. Only Laramie Peak, six miles distant and snow-covered even in mid-June, gave the scene any grandeur.
But the closer he got, the more Fort Laramie came alive. The people were unlike any Harry had seen before. There was the usual collection of soldiers and scouts, Mexican teamsters and civilian freighters, but even these were made of different stuff, leaner and tough-looking. Along the riverbanks hard-faced emigrant women with long wooden paddles stirred kettles of boiling laundry while barefoot children with dirty faces hung on to their skirts. Their men sweated over charcoal pits, heating iron tires to glowing red to refit them over wooden wheel rims shrunken by the sun.
Indians on horseback tended herds of spotted ponies scratching for forage on the overgrazed land while others relaxed on blankets before their lodges, puffing on long clay pipes that added to the smoky haze. Blanketed squaws moved up and down the rows of painted teepees, bracelets of tin or brass shining on their stout copper arms. Naked children chased dogs from scaffolds hung with drying meat. The colors were a feast to Harry’s starved eyes, from the vermillion-painted faces of the young girls to the striped trade blankets and bits of calico the women wore as shawls to the streamers of bright flannel cloth the men and women tied in their hair. The colors seemed unnaturally brilliant and beautiful after the prolonged sameness of brown prairie and blue sky.
“It ain’t nothing like it was back in the thirties,” Jim Bridger said, trotting his big mule at Harry’s side, “back when me and the boys owned it, me and Broken Hand Fitzpatrick and Milt Sublette. Called it Fort William. Back then it weren’t so full of trail trash.”
The post commander, Colonel Henry Maynadier, invited Carrington’s party to his headquarters, where an orderly served lemonade and gingersnaps still warm from the oven.
“So, how go the talks, Colonel?” Carrington said. “I’ve had no news.”
Maynadier sat at the head of the table, tamping tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. “Well, Carrington, if you’d asked me a week ago I’d have said things were going well. Now I’m not so sure. We’ll have no trouble with the Brule Sioux—Spotted Tail, Red Leaf, Standing Elk—those chiefs will sign the treaty. But the Oglala, well, that’s a different story.”
He lit his pipe, taking several deep draws before continuing. “Last Friday Red Cloud and another Oglala chief—Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses—took off in the night and all their people with them. I don’t expect them back.”
Carrington frowned. “This Red Cloud, is he head chief of the Sioux? Does he speak for all of them?”
Maynadier shook his head. “The Sioux don’t have a head chief,” he said. “None of the tribes do and that’s part of the problem. They negotiate like they fight, on their own hook, every tribe for itself. Even so, Red Cloud would be a good man to have on our side. The Oglalas listen to him. Can’t trust him, though. You can’t trust any of them. Remember that, Carrington.”
He drew on his pipe. “Do you remember that business at Platte Bridge Station last July?” he said. “When young Caspar Collins was killed? You ever meet him, Carrington? Bill Collins’s boy? No? Well, he was a fine young man and a promising officer. Damnedest thing! He went out of his way to be friendly with the Indians, used to visit their camps, learned their language and hand signs and all that twaddle but they killed him anyhow. Even after he went to all that trouble. No, it just goes to show you, those red devils will turn on you like that.”
He snapped his fingers in the air. “So there you have it. Red Cloud and Man-Afraid left but talks are continuing with lesser chiefs. Your arrival at this particular time presents a bit of a problem, Carrington, but we’ll finesse it somehow.”
Carrington and Bridger exchanged glances. “Do the Indians know of my mission?” Carrington said.
Maynadier shifted in his chair. “Well, not just yet. Didn’t seem a good time to mention it, what with Red Cloud and Man-Afraid in high feather.”
Carrington pulled on his beard. “We might have a problem,” he said. “Earlier you mentioned an Indian by the name of Standing Elk.”
“Yes, a Brule chief. Why?”
“He visited our camp last night. He asked our business and I told him we were on our way to make a road through the Powder River country. I said we would build three forts along the road to protect emigrants.”
“And how did Mr. Standing Elk respond?”
“He suggested Red Cloud’s
people would put up a fight.”
Maynadier took this in, then shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, well. What’s done is done. Our commissioners would have preferred to reveal that later, after the treaty was signed, but never mind. Join us when the talks resume tomorrow. We’ll smooth things over.” Maynadier consulted his pocket watch, signaling an end to the discussion.
Carrington said, “When can I pick up the horses and ammunition I requisitioned? General Cooke said they’d be waiting here at Laramie.”
Maynadier cleared his throat. “Yes, well, I’ve got twenty-six wagons of supplies loaded and ready for you. I can give you mules to pull them, but no drivers. Those you’ll have to furnish yourself. As for ammunition, you can have one thousand rounds. No horses. I’m sorry, I can’t do it.”
“What!” Carrington’s face went red. “Cooke promised one hundred thousand rounds of rifle ammunition and horses for all my mounted infantrymen!”
Maynadier shook his head. “I’m sorry, Carrington, but I can’t give what I don’t have. Things are different now, not like during the war. The frontier army is the redheaded stepchild, a woods colt. You’ll learn. A good officer makes do with what he can get. Now, let’s go to dinner.” Maynadier got to his feet. “I’ve invited the commissioners to join us. You’ll want to meet them before tomorrow.”
The next day wives and children accompanied the officers to the fort. Margaret and Sallie Horton shopped at the store of Messrs. Bullock and Ward while Jimmy and Harry waited outside. Jimmy played with a set of tin soldiers in Revolutionary uniform while Harry listened to the treaty talks under way across the parade. Despite the distance he could hear the speakers clearly. A few Indians sat on the pine benches set up for the occasion but most squatted on their heels or stood.
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