4
July, 1865
BLOOD WOULD FILL every boot track the white man made as he fled this sacred hunting ground of the Lakota and Shahiyena.
Crazy Horse lay in wait behind the low hills with the others gathered beneath the dark sky as the moon eased down into the west. And with the rising of the sun, the Horse would lead nineteen others to entice the soldiers from their fort walls, pulling them seductively into the trap set beyond the sand hills where the many others would spring from hiding to swallow the white men like nighthawks swooping down to gobble up moths on the wing.
They had been preparing for this attack for some time—ranging out in small parties and large, probing up and down the Holy Road. Once the Lakota had even lured out the soldiers from Fort Laramie under their soldier chief the Loafers called Moonlight. Instead of turning back with his horsemen when he failed to find any warriors to fight, Moonlight kept on marching west, right to the bank of Wind River—while the Lakota and Shahiyena joyously plundered the road behind the soldiers.
With twenty-four winters behind him now, Crazy Horse remained thin and sinewy, slightly below average height for a white man of the time and hardly 140 pounds in weight. So what was most remarkable about him was not only his lighter skin color, but a hair color much fairer than most Oglalla warriors. Behind his ear now he wore the pebble medicine made for him by a medicine man named Chips. The stone dreamer had made his young warrior friend a charm that had already proved itself potent, protecting the warrior through the many skirmishes of these past spring moons.
Crazy Horse shivered slightly beneath his blanket, wishing now for the warmth just the sight of Black Buffalo Woman gave his loins. The short summer nights in this high, flat country nonetheless grew cold when all heat seemed drawn from the land. Yet he shivered every bit as much from the remembrance of the horror suffered by the two Lakota men whose bodies still hung from chains lashed over a scaffold at the edge of Fort Laramie.
Early in the Moon of Horses Fattening, two minor Oglalla chiefs had purchased a white prisoner the Shahiyena had captured in their winter raids along the Holy Road. Although two of the woman’s older children had been taken from her, she was allowed to keep a suckling infant by her Cheyenne captor. In an attempt to win themselves some presents from the soldiers, the Lakota chiefs named Two Face and Blackfoot bought Mrs. Eubanks and her infant from the Shahiyena, and delivered their white prizes to the acting commander at Fort Laramie.
But instead of rewarding the two Lakota chiefs, the drunken soldier had ordered the pair shackled with heavy ball and chain, then strung up on a scaffold with more chain about their necks.
Even now the Horse winced at the horror—this terrible death for a warrior, chained and strangled, with no way for his spirit to escape through his mouth.
The bodies of the two chiefs had swung in the spring wind, guarded by a soldier with a knife on the end of his rifle, until the weight of the heavy balls pulled a leg from each of the rotting corpses. Legs too heavy for snarling, hungry dogs to drag off into the brush by the river.
With sad eyes, Spotted Tail’s Loafers at the fort related the story to the Oglalla who came and went among them until the army finally determined that no Indians should be camping next to the fort during an Indian war.
“Instead of making wolf-scouts of our warriors,” Spotted Tail had explained to the Oglalla, “the stupid white soldiers decided to send us east to the fort they call Kearney. Early in the Moon of Horses Fattening, the soldiers will make us begin that march.”
It was not long before word of the terrible journey spread among the bands living in freedom. Time and again small parties of Oglalla scouts dogged the trail of those two thousand Brule, guarded by more than one hundred soldiers led by a soldier chief named Fouts. With their own eyes, these scouts saw the soldiers tie up young boys to wagon wheels, where the children would be whipped for disobedience. Other, smaller children were thrown into the spring-swollen Platte River, where they would struggle and thrash in the water to make it back to shore while their parents screamed and cried out, held helpless at gunpoint on the bank.
Crawling near each night’s camp, the young warrior scouts with Crazy Horse could hear the cries and sobbing of young women repeatedly taken from their families and forced into the unspeakable by the arrogant soldiers of the Seventh Iowa Cavalry.
“You must help us,” Spotted Tail had begged at that camp near the mouth of Horse Creek, whispering to Crazy Horse and his warriors, who had crept into the Loafers’ camp after darkness had taken the land whole.
“There are many of us to help you now,” the Horse had replied there beside the Platte. “We are just across the river, on the north bank. Tonight we will mark the crossing place with tall sticks, for the women and children to follow. Make your run for freedom in the morning—leaving lodges and belongings behind.”
“It will be hard to leave everything behind,” Spotted Tail said sadly.
“What if the soldiers attacked our camps—you would leave everything.” Crazy Horse replied. “Better to have your lives and freedom than those lodges and blankets and iron kettles the white man sold you.”
The next morning when the Brule women failed to pack up quickly enough and instead moved slowly away toward a crossing of the Platte in a retreat that was covered by some of their warriors, the soldier chief rode up with a dozen men, cursing and shouting. The soldiers began shoving among the warriors with their knife-guns when Crazy Horse suddenly appeared from behind a lodge, leveled his old cap-and-ball revolver, and shot the soldier chief in the head.
Like snow gone before an August sun, the rest of the soldiers melted into the earth.
The Loafers escaped across the Platte, the last of them pulling up the tall sticks marking the shallow ford as they went. Crazy Horse and He Dog led their warriors in holding back the soldiers, preventing the white men from following the women and children and old ones in their frantic escape. On what old mares and sore-backed travois ponies they had, Spotted Tail’s people would soon swell the ranks of the Lakota bands free-roaming in the north. Yet many times did the women look behind them, wailing and keening in grief that first day of flight. Oily smoke smudged the summer sky. The soldiers were burning everything Spotted Tail’s people had.
Everything but their lives and their freedom.
Now they joined the Oglalla, Miniconjou, Sans Arc, along with the Arapaho and Shahiyena led by the powerful war chiefs Roman Nose and High-Back Wolf. It was a time few could remember: so many lodges, so many songs ringing of war medicine, so many feathers brought out and powerful medicine made for the coming fight along the Holy Road. Runners had even been sent to Sitting Bull far to the north, in hopes the bands could coordinate their attacks with the Hunkpapa’s attacks on Fort Rice beside the Missouri River. Perhaps the Lakota could cut off the soldiers’ far-flung posts and thereby drive the white man back from the western plains.
Now after three long days of march south from the Powder River country, the great warrior bands arrived at the North Platte just below the stockade the soldiers built themselves on the south bank to protect the bridge crossing the river. It was here that the white man’s Holy Road had to cross to the south side because of the crowding from the mountains along the north bank.
Moving off some distance from the fort, slowly so as not to raise a cloud of dust, the warrior bands went into camp as the summer sun set upon the cooling land. While some in that grand council held that night argued to attack the fort in force and overwhelm the soldiers, others argued for burning the bridge and killing soldiers as they came out to repair it.
Yet it was Crazy Horse and Young Man Afraid who gave voice to the battle plan that pleased most the warrior spirit of these fighting men.
“We will strike them in the open! Give these soldiers a chance to fight us like men!” Young Man Afraid had said only hours ago now at that council.
“Draw them out with our decoys and make them fight on open ground!” Crazy Horse had
added.
Trader Bent’s half-breed Shahiyena son George would be one of the decoys, joining Crazy Horse and eighteen others who would lure the soldiers across the bridge and into these hills north of the river.
Yet some doubt remained in the Oglalla war chief’s mind if the akicita, the camp police, could keep a tight fisted rein on the eager young men until the moment had come to spring their thousandfold trap.
As the sun stretched itself in a bloody line along the east, then blinked over the horizon, a bugle was blown inside the soldier stockade.
Young Man Afraid nodded to his nineteen. Crazy Horse and the others discarded their blankets and robes, shifting quivers of arrows over their shoulders in the chill dawn air. While others shook out war clothing and freed medicine bundles from hiding, the Horse stood in prayer for the moment, facing the east. In ritual this morning, as he had done before every battle, the Oglalla warrior scooped up a handful of dirt from a gopher hole and tossed it over his head. Some of the sprinkling of dust clung to the earth pigment and bear grease smeared in a jagged lightning bolt from brow to jawbone. Another handful of dust he now scattered over the back of his pony before leaping atop the animal.
Wearing no more than a breechclout and his moccasins, a single feather tied so that it pointed downward at the back of his unbound hair, the Oglalla warrior rode around the base of the hills with the rest. Encircling his sinewy chest was a thin strip of soft buckskin that secured another small pebble beneath the left arm of Crazy Horse. More powerful dream medicine from Chips for this day.
“Look at the American horses!” shouted one of the eager young ones, pointing for the others to see as they neared the bridge.
“They will soon be ours!” Young Man Afraid answered.
“Bring out your blankets!” Crazy Horse shouted.
The twenty unfurled wide strips of blanket or pieces of noisy rawhide to startle the soldier horses into stampeding—just as the gates of the wooden stockade burst open and out poured some soldiers in dusty blue uniforms. Before the decoys could reach the river, the soldiers raced across the bridge to the north bank with a clatter of iron-shod hooves across the cottonwood planks—then suddenly stopped.
As planned, the twenty whirled their ponies for the hills, holding their mounts with a secure rein, while furiously whipping the ponies as if to show they were retreating in panic. The soldiers had far-shooting rifles. Spouts of earth erupted at his pony’s hooves.
“Man Afraid!” Crazy Horse shouted, pointing to the rear. “The soldiers do not follow!”
“We must make them angry as the hornets to follow us!”
Several of the warriors dropped to the ground, aiming their rifles captured along the Holy Road at the soldiers.
With a sudden roar, the big-throated wagon-gun on wheels the soldiers had pulled across the bridge erupted in flame. A moment later the ground near Crazy Horse exploded, spewing dirt clods in all directions. A second round was loaded and fired—then a third roared among the stunned, confused decoys.
Those loud reports from the mountain howitzer were all it took for the hotbloods in hiding behind the hills to burst past the camp police attempting to restrain them. First a handful, then by the hundreds, the warriors tore down off the sand hills, spreading in growing numbers like puffballs that cover the prairie after a spring thunderstorm, charging toward the surprised and frightened soldiers at the end of the bridge.
The white men were turning in a confused, milling mass of rearing horses when Crazy Horse spotted a small separate party of mounted soldiers returning to the fort along the timber on the south bank.
He was angry—his stomach boiling now that the decoy and trap had been spoiled. Perhaps his warriors could still count some coup before the sun rose from the edge of the earth this day.
“Come! Let us make sport of these soldiers!” he shouted, pointing.
A dozen horsemen followed the Oglalla war chief plunging into the river, streaming up the south bank, yelling, screeching as the soldiers put heels to their mounts in a mad race to reach the walls of the post before they were cut off. At the same time, another group of cavalry bolted from the yawning gates, hurrying to the aid of those five soldiers about to be surrounded on the riverbank by the thirteen blood-eyed warriors.
In a matter of heartbeats, Crazy Horse, He Dog, and the others were among the frightened five horsemen, touching with bow and staff, striking with the flat of tomahawk blades, whipping the soldiers with their quirts—laughing at the great sport of this coup-counting while galloping right for the other soldiers riding to the rescue.
Ahead at the walls of the fort, several soldiers appeared. These knelt, shoving their long-barreled rifles against their shoulders. They were about to fire into the faces of the screeching red horsemen.
High-Back Wolf called out in his loudest voice for the rest to follow him to the wall. In that wild race he struck first one, then another of the soldiers with his quirt. Roaring in laughter, for he possessed a powerful medicine that made the white man’s guns shoot only air.
Bullets screamed among the warriors. Crazy Horse turned at the grunt from a nearby horseman.
High-Back Wolf, the powerful Cheyenne war chief, spun from his pony. Three others wheeled away from the skirmish in a spray of sand, a pair of them swooping low to try recovering the warrior’s body.
But the soldier bullets were barking and snapping too quickly now. Even for Crazy Horse. His mount spilled him as it went down, a leg seeping blood. As quickly, the war chief was out of the dirt and back atop the frightened animal shuddering on the riverbank. The Horse was much too close to the soldier stockade now.
With growing rage Crazy Horse and the rest of the decoys retreated and turned, watching the soldiers escape toward the wood walls of their fort, knowing his warriors could not attempt to rescue the body of High-Back Wolf without risking more deaths.
He reined up atop the hills on the north side of the river, quickly looking over the wound his pony had suffered along a foreleg. A grazing only—no doubt a painful wound, but one that would heal. Then he looked up, his attention captured by the eerie keening.
And found the Old Cheyenne chief, Blind Wolf, wailing for his dead son, left below near the walls of the soldier fort.
“I will go at darkness to help you, Blind Wolf,” Crazy Horse declared in sign as he led his pony to the old man’s side.
“You will help me regain my son’s body?”
“I will not ride from this place in shame—knowing High-Back Wolf lies in the shadow of that fort, knowing I did not bring his body out.”
For the rest of that day, the soldiers stayed hidden within their tree-trunk walls, not venturing out. At times the soldiers fired random shots at the warriors racing back and forth along the north bank of the Platte, without success. In return, the Shahiyena and Sioux shouted back at the soldiers, who were not brave enough to come out and fight on open ground.
“They stay burrowed like field mice, away from the claws of the badger!” Crazy Horse shouted in frustration to his friends.
“But even the badger will have his day,” promised Young Man Afraid.
Beneath the first streaks of gray presaging the very next dawn, Crazy Horse joined the old Cheyenne chief in slipping silently across the waters of the North Platte, padding quietly to within feet of the soldier walls, to reclaim the body of High-Back Wolf.
Platte Bridge Station did not appear in any danger of being overrun after one full day of fighting. At least from what Jonah Hook could see as Captain Lybe’s command arrived shortly after two A.M. on the morning of 26 July.
Surrounded by a pine-and-cottonwood stockade standing fourteen feet high, 120 soldiers of the Eleventh Kansas Cavalry were busy molding bullets or watchful at the walls when Lybe’s soldiers showed up out of the summer darkness.
“You’re damned lucky, Captain,” announced Major Martin Anderson, Platte Station commander, “running the gauntlet of those three thousand warriors roaming those hills.”
“Why the devil didn’t you bring them in with you, Captain?”
“Custard’s a cocky one. Said he knew best for his men, staying the night at Willow Spring.”
Anderson shook his head as Jonah led his weary horse toward one of the fires that tiny knots of soldiers ringed on what there was of a parade at Platte Bridge Station.
“Damned fool—always has been, that Custard,” growled Anderson. “He’s been a pain in my ass ever since we came out to this godforsaken land. He’ll be wolf bait by sunup … if he ain’t already.”
5
July 26, 1865
“GONNA BE SUNUP soon, Jonah.”
In the chill of predawn, Jonah Hook turned at the dry rustle of the old scout’s whispered words. “What you figure the Injuns will do—try to run us over?”
Shad Sweete shook his head. “They don’t fight that way. Not like what you was used to back east.”
“Drive a man crazy—this waiting.”
“You get any sleep, son?”
“None I can own up to.”
The old scout gazed over the walls at the graying along the east. “Don’t matter how long you’re out here in this country. Man never does get used to this.”
Sweete settled against the wall, his back to it as unconcerned as if he were waiting for one of the hot-tin louse races to begin back at Sweetwater Station. How Jonah admired the scout for it now, wishing he could be as unconcerned as Sweete.
Over the past few weeks of working along the Emigrant Road that climbed toward South Pass, Jonah had spent more and more stolen minutes with Shadrach Sweete. Not that there was any lack of things needing doing, but there were long gaps of boring idleness interspersed with moments of frantic activity or bone-grinding labor. Everything that made the young Confederate look forward more and more to those times spent with the old scout and his tales of a glorious bygone day.
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