Frontier

by Salzer, S. K.

  “I’m not criticizing you, Carrington,” Hazen said around a mouthful of elk steak, a napkin tucked in his collar. He was pink-faced and healthy-looking with an air of supreme self-satisfaction. This was Hazen’s last night at Phil Kearny and he was eating dinner with Carrington’s family and a few select officers in Carrington’s quarters. In the morning Hazen and his group would head north for Fort C. F. Smith. “It’s not easy to command a remote post and your case here is especially difficult, I grant you that,” he said. “God knows how I’d have managed down in Texas if I’d had women and children along.”

  He raised his wineglass for George to refill. “No offense to you and the other ladies, Margaret, but Bill Sherman made a mistake when he allowed dependents to accompany the regiment. I thought so at the time. If it weren’t for your women and children, Carrington, and your understandable concern for their safety, you’d be much further along by now. You wouldn’t have spent so much time and manpower on a stockade that you don’t need. As it stands, you’ll be hard-pressed to get the men’s barracks done in time. Some of your officers will winter in huts.”

  Officers traditionally waited until the men were housed before building their own quarters but Carrington’s house was almost done. The regimental band was building the family a fine, two-story frame home with a shingled roof, two brick chimneys, and an attached kitchen. Though he did not mention it, Hazen had heard grumbling. The information would find its way into his report.

  “In short,” he said, “you overestimated the Indian threat and it’s caused you to make questionable decisions regarding your distribution of manpower.” He pulled the napkin from his collar, wiped his fleshy lips, and dropped it on his plate. “You have enough men to take on the Indians, Carrington, and you should do so. My report to Cooke will reflect this.”

  Carrington’s face reddened. Why would Hazen humiliate him like this in front of his family and top officers? His voice shook when he spoke. “Colonel Hazen, with all respect, I disagree. These northern tribes are hostile. True, they’ve been quiet during your stay, but I assure you their intentions are warlike. I need more men to take them on—trained cavalry especially—and I need them now. Escorting the mail, wood and supply trains, delivering messages to forts Reno and Smith, riding picket, outpost duty—all this is dangerous, taxing work. My officers are pulling double—even triple—duty and I am woefully undersupplied. I need munitions and grain for the animals. They can’t get by on hay alone.”

  Hazen looked at Carrington as if he were a whining child. “I believe you are selling your men short,” he said. Bisbee and Brown exchanged satisfied smiles. “Your officers are capable—take the upper hand. Be aggressive. This defensive posture you’ve taken, this eight-foot stockade, it’s the wrong way to deal with Indians, Carrington. Sends the wrong message. If there’s anything I learned fighting Comanches and Apaches in Texas it’s that you’ve got to show them you mean business. Get busy, man, show the red devils who you are.”

  “May I remind you that my orders are—”

  “Yes, yes, I know.” Hazen waved his hand dismissively. “Avoid all-out war, try to make allegiances, so forth and so on. Well, Bill Sherman is a hell of a soldier but he doesn’t know jack about fighting Indians and I’m not afraid to say it. Neither does Pope, Grant, none of them. It makes your job more difficult, Carrington, I know that, but you’ve got to make do with what you’ve got, dammit.”

  He banged his fist on the table, making the plates jump. “They respond to fear. Harass their villages, use your howitzers when they swarm on the hilltops. If they respond in a hostile manner, you’ve got every right to defend your people and your post. I’m sure Sherman would be the first to agree.” He settled back in his seat and reached for his pipe. “Now, about tomorrow. I’ll need a guide and an escort of at least twenty-six men. Horses too, of course.”

  Carrington’s mouth fell open. “You can’t be serious! That would reduce my mounted force by one-third. It would leave me with only forty horses. I can’t do it. I won’t do it.”

  Hazen appeared not to have heard. He stood, brushing crumbs from his trousers, and the other officers rose also. Only Carrington remained seated. “I don’t know why those cavalry companies didn’t meet me at Reno as planned,” Hazen said, “but they’ll be along any day with plenty of horses. You’ll see. Chin up, Carrington. Chin up!”

  After he and the others had gone Harry helped George clear the table where his father sat alone, his head in his hands.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  August gave way to September. The tall grass turned to gold and the cottonwood canopy shading the Pineys to lemon yellow, persimmon orange, blood red. Afternoons were still sunny and warm but mornings and nights grew bitter. Jack Stead told Harry he had never seen snow so low on the mountains this early in the season.

  “Is that bad?” Harry said.

  “It ain’t good.”

  Harry had grown two inches since they left Nebraska and Margaret had to make most of his clothes. Although his added height made him less sensitive about the size of his feet, he felt like a clown in his homemade trousers, which were too big in the waist and puckered under his belt like a girl’s dirndl skirt. He was grateful when Daniel Dixon gave him a pair of his denim jeans. They fit pretty well in the waist and hips and he cuffed the too-long legs.

  He worked alongside the men, a day that began before daylight and continued on till tattoo and sometimes longer if Quartermaster Brown ordered an all-night shingling bee. The officers were pushing hard to finish the barracks, storehouses, offices, and commissary buildings before the snows came. The work was backbreaking—blood, sweat, and tears work, Brown said—but made a little easier by the fine quality of the pine timber which grew tall and straight, without knot or blemish, making planks that fit together so snugly no chinking was needed. But lumber and water were their only abundant commodities. Food and medical supplies were low and getting lower. The physicians were beginning to worry about scurvy.

  “How will you know if it comes?” Harry asked.

  “We’ll know,” Dixon said grimly. “When men start showing up with stiff legs, bleeding gums, and breath that’ll strip paint, we’ll know.”

  By the second week of September traffic on the Bozeman Road had slowed to a trickle, so everyone got excited one gray afternoon when the sentries signaled wagons were approaching. But it was not a supply train or reinforcements but a group of civilian hay cutters, the last of the season, looking for work. Brown hired them to harvest the fields near Lake De Smet and Goose Creek. On their first day of work Sioux warriors attacked, killing three of the cutters and wounding five. When rescuers arrived they found the mowers and wagons burning and the Indians riding away with the mules that pulled them.

  Later that afternoon Indians stampeded buffalo through the post’s beef herd. When the dust cleared two hundred animals were gone, more than half the regiment’s winter meat supply. Another group of raiders stole dozens of horses and mules grazing outside the stockade, wounding two soldiers in the process. Ten Eyck pursued them but the soldiers’ grain-starved horses played out and they returned empty-handed.

  At the end of this long day, Dixon went to headquarters, where Carrington was finishing his weekly report to Cooke. The day’s events, the colonel knew, would not make him look good.

  “What is it, Dixon?” Carrington said, not looking up.

  “Sam Curry is dead, Colonel.”

  Carrington fell back in his chair. “Sam, dead? How can that be? I just saw him this morning! I know he’d been sick but he was recovering.... When did he die?”

  “About thirty minutes ago. It was very sudden. He had a seizure and then he was gone. Maybe his heart, or some sort of hemorrhage or aneurysm.”

  Carrington stared sightlessly at the canvas wall. “Sam was scoring new pieces,” he said. “‘Overture to Poet and Peasant’ and several waltzes. It was coming along well. I was looking forward to it.”

  This was the least of their problem
s, Dixon thought with annoyance. “Curry’s wife is distraught,” he said. “I thought Mrs. Carrington might sit with her tonight, maybe help with the youngsters.”

  Carrington did not respond. Dixon wondered if he’d heard him. Several moments passed.

  Finally the colonel looked up. “What? Oh, yes. I’ll just finish here. Please, go to the house and tell Margaret what’s happened. I’ll be along directly.”

  Dixon crossed the yard to Carrington’s quarters, where twin columns of white smoke rose from two brick chimneys. George answered the door and led him to the warm front room, where Rose Reynolds was reading aloud from Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities as Margaret sewed in a chair by the fire. Rose’s face flushed when Dixon walked in.

  “Ladies,” he said, removing his hat, “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this but Sam Curry died tonight. Mrs. Carrington, the colonel and I thought you might keep his wife company.”

  Margaret stood, letting her needlework fall to the floor. “Poor Elizabeth. Of course I’ll go to her. Just let me get my shawl.” She went upstairs to her room, leaving Rose and Dixon alone for the first time since their escape from the redoubt. Despite the sad news, she was happy to see him. She got to her feet and walked toward him.

  “What happened to Sam?” she said.

  “I can’t say. It was fast, he didn’t suffer.”

  “Poor Beth,” she said. “How will she manage with two babies?”

  “She’ll go back East,” Dixon said, “and you should go with her. You’ve got to get away from here, Rose. You, all the women and children have got to get out of here before it’s too late. I hope it’s not too late already.”

  “Does Sam’s death make you say this?”

  “No, it’s not that, it’s everything. We don’t have enough food. Winter’s coming and it won’t be like any winter we knew back in the States. We aren’t equipped for it. But most of all it’s the Indians. There are thousands of them out there in the hills, Rose, and they’re all bent on one thing: getting rid of us. You’ve got to get out of here.” He seemed to be pleading. She jumped when a log fell in the fireplace, creating a shower of sparks.

  “But I don’t want to leave,” she said. “I don’t want to go back to the States. I don’t want to go back to Missouri.” Not until she spoke them did she fully realize the truth of those words. She could not bear the thought of returning to St. Louis, with its crowded streets, dirty air, and tired people.

  “You don’t have to go back to Missouri,” he said, taking her hands. “Just go to Fort Reno, stay there until spring. You’ll be safe there.”

  They heard Margaret descending the stairs and Rose turned from him, taking her plaid shawl from a peg on the wall.

  “I’ll come with you,” she said to Margaret. “You’ll need help with the children.”

  The cold had deepened in the last hour. The frozen grass crunched beneath their feet as they crossed the parade ground to the bandmaster’s cabin. Rose did not look at Dixon again, not even when he said good night.

  That night wolves gathered in unusual numbers outside the stockade, drawn by the offal of the cattle slaughtered during the day. Their howls and growls grew in pitch and fury as they fought among themselves for some bloody bit. Rose listened to the violence from her bed and wondered if Daniel was right. Maybe the creatures, man and beast, who were here before them had finally decided to reclaim what was theirs, and to fight to the death for it.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Two days after Sam Curry’s funeral, Indians captured Private Peter Johnson alive. This was the worst fate imaginable, the thing every man, woman, and child at the post feared most. He was among those guarding the heavy hay wagons returning from Lake De Smet. A dim boy with his head in the clouds, Johnson let his horse get too far ahead of the others. His bunk mate, John Ryan, had just called him back when a warrior on horseback flew up out of a gully separating Johnson from the column.

  “He panicked,” Ryan said later. “He should’ve tried to get back to us—he might’ve made it—but when he saw that Injun gaining on him, he plumb lost his head. He jumped off his horse and made for a washout by the road and for some reason he threw his carbine down. That buck didn’t have no trouble taking him.”

  “Who was in charge of the hay detail?” Carrington said.

  “I was, sir.” Sergeant Garrett, the thick-necked Irishman, stepped forward.

  “Why was no effort made to save Private Johnson?”

  “Well, Colonel, it was him or us.” Garrett’s tone was matter-of-fact, as if explaining why there was no toast at breakfast. “First there was just the one, then there was Injuns everywhere. Lieutenant Brown knows what it’s like.” He did not have to say Carrington didn’t, his meaning was clear. “My boys had but three rounds of ammo to the man. We couldn’t fight ’em, we had to come back. If they’d got between us and the fort we’d all have been done for.”

  Ridgway Glover said, “You might have shot him. It would have been the merciful thing.”

  “Who asked you, Quaker?” Garrett said. “Who cares what you think? I hear Quakers sit down to piss. Is that right, Glover? Do you sit down to piss?”

  A few of the men snickered. Glover looked down at his feet.

  “No, he’s right,” Ryan said, his lower lip trembling. “I wish we had shot him. It was awful the way Pete was screaming. I keep hearing it in my head.”

  Garrett laughed. “Well, boyo,” he said, “you didn’t let that concern slow you down none, did you? You wasted no time gittin’ back to the fort.”

  Ryan volunteered to ride with a rescue detail, but they returned without seeing any sign of Johnson or the Indians.

  Rose did not know him but she could not stop thinking about what must be happening to the young soldier. Jim Bridger once told her of watching a group of Crows torture a Sioux warrior to death. “The squaws do most of the work,” he said. “First they stuff hot coals in his ears, then they start taking him apart, finger by finger, toe by toe, with their husbands and children cheerin’ ’em on. When he’s finally dead, they turn him over to their men. They drag the body behind their ponies till it falls to pieces.”

  Rose did not pray often, but that night she sent one up for Private Peter Johnson. The next morning, when Glover started out for a day of picture-taking, Rose tried to talk him out of it. “Don’t go, Ridgway. Please, it’s far too dangerous. Your editor will understand.”

  Glover shook his head as he tightened the surcingle under a pack mule’s belly. Besides his camera equipment, he carried a butcher knife, sketch pad, and pen but no firearm. “Frank Leslie’s didn’t send me all the way up here to make pictures of stockade walls,” he said. “Besides, I don’t fear the Indians. They understand I mean them no harm. Why, you should see how they marvel at my medicine every time I make their likeness with my shadow box. Soon they’ll be welcoming me into their lodges. I’ll be the first to photograph wild Indians in their natural, uncorrupted state. Think of that.”

  His eyes shone with excitement as he described two Indian men he had seen near the timber-cutters’ camp the week before. “I didn’t reveal myself because I didn’t have my camera but I sketched them. Here, take a look.” He took his sketchbook from his saddlebags and showed her a fine charcoal drawing of two Sioux on horseback. One was a giant whose feet nearly touched the ground. The other was slight in build with wavy, unbound hair.

  “I call them David and Goliath,” Glover said. “This one”—he placed a long finger on the giant—“must be seven feet tall with shoulders wide as a barn. The other was much smaller, as you can see, and unusually fair. His hair was lighter too. A white man, I thought, maybe taken as a child. Even though he’s smaller, I sensed he was in command. I shall ask them to sit for me. What a photograph that will be!”

  Rose looked at him and shook her head. “Ridgway, they will kill you. Think of poor Private Johnson.”

  Glover smiled. “I am not afraid, Mrs. Reynolds. I have faith in natural man’s inherent goodness,
no matter his skin color, and so should you.”

  She watched him walk down the wood road, leading his pack mule. Because Glover was a civilian and a journalist, Carrington let him come and go as he chose, though he told him he was foolish. Glover turned once to wave and Rose waved back, sensing it would be the last time she would see him alive.

  That afternoon five mounted warriors made a run on the Pilot Hill sentries. Carrington personally loaded and fired the howitzer. The exploding shell knocked one Indian off his horse and scattered the others. An hour later a larger group cut fifty animals from the post’s dwindling beef herd. Brown led a company in pursuit and Bisbee followed with extra ammunition and an ambulance.

  The day was cool and overcast with occasional rolls of thunder. To keep busy, Rose carried armloads of firewood from the quartermaster’s yard to her tent. The exercise felt good and she liked being in the yard. She found peace in the ring of the blacksmith’s hammer and the munching of mules in their corrals, and was refreshed by the clean smells of the hay and the hot soap billowing from the cabins of laundresses’ row.

  After this she tended to their dinner, salted venison and army beans that had been cooking since dawn over a low fire. Beans required twice the usual cooking time at this altitude, something she and the other wives had been slow to discover.

  There was great joy late that afternoon when the long-awaited commissary train finally arrived. Everyone stopped to cheer as the wagons rolled in with barrels of hams and bacon, lard, sacks of flour, sugar, coffee, corn, and oats for the grain-starved animals and sixty thousand rounds of Springfield rifle ammunition.

  While these were being unloaded, the Pilot Hill sentry signaled more visitors. The mail train was coming from the east and a lone vehicle, the ambulance that went with Bisbee, approached on the wood road. The ambulance entered first with Private Ryan driving.

  Carrington met him. “Where’s Bisbee?” he said. “Did you engage the Indians? Do you have wounded?”