Back in the early 1850s, Sweete spent some months off and on working for an old friend, Jim Bridger. Shad’s old friend was at that moment helping the Plains Department Commander, General Patrick E. Connor, ready his troops and supplies for a major push into the Powder River country coming later in the summer. Sweete and Bridger went back to their younger, piss-and-vinegar days. And both were now much mellowed by their forty-some years in the far west.
Shad had been working for his old friend at Fort Bridger in southwestern Wyoming twelve years before when Mormon prophet Brigham Young had up and decided the mountains weren’t big enough for both him and the venerable mountain man. Young dispatched his Salt Lake City sheriff and 150 Avenging Angels to arrest Jim Bridger and to confiscate all the property in his fort and trading store.
“Never met no Mormons,” Hook had said when first told the story. “Don’t know if I’d know one if he walked up to me. Didn’t have much cause to know such things back in Missouri—or where I grew up in Virginia.”
“Pray you don’t ever have cause to run onto these henchmen Brigham Young sends out to do his dirty work. You’ll ne’er forget their passing, son.”
As Sweete had told it, a matter of hours before the Mormon posse came riding in, Jim and Shad got word the Angels were on a mission from their Prophet, and coming on hard. Together the pair escaped northeast into the mountains, hoping things would cool off.
But Young’s Angels burned half of Bridger’s fort and rustled off all his stock the old mountain man had acquired over the years of trade with emigrants along the road west. Then the Angels pushed on east to the well-known ford of the Green River. It was there the Mormons killed Bridger’s employees and Shad’s co-workers before burning the ferry buildings to the ground. Their work complete, the Angels turned about and rode back home to Brigham Young’s Deseret.
Late that fall of fifty-three, when the Prophet ordered his Angels back to the half-burned Fort Bridger, intending to occupy it and to intermarry with the neighboring bands of Shoshoni, Jim and Shad were ready. They had gathered ten other former trappers and frontiersmen, hard cases all, and though they were outnumbered more than twelve to one, the hardy plainsmen cowed Brigham Young’s Saints and sent them fleeing through the snow.
As the decade of the fifties grew old, Shad Sweete watched the white man rub more and more against the plains tribes. If it wasn’t emigrants moving west along the Holy Road, it was miners punching into the Colorado Rockies for the new gold strikes. The new decade of the sixties thundered open with war in the East, while tensions increased in the mountain West.
“By last summer,” Shad told Jonah, “I knew enough to read the sign, plain as paint.”
“Writing was on the wall, eh?”
“Manner of speaking. What with the way the Territorial government in Colorado was going at things. They ordered a fella named Chivington to raise a volunteer army to quell what all the loudmouthed white settlers and businessmen was calling the Indian problem.”
“Was there a problem?”
“Damn right there was. But neither me nor the old chiefs could convince the young hotbloods to stay at home in their camps—or go off and hunt what few buffalo was left instead of going on the war path.”
“The young bucks left—and raised hell, didn’t they? Like they’re doing now. The reason we soldiers’re here.”
“Them warriors really let the wolf out last year—off stealing, raping, killing, and looting … only to ride back to their villages where the old ones, the women and children could be caught sleeping by the white man and his army.”
“That the way you’re supposed to fight the Indian—catch him in his villages?”
“Some think so, Jonah. But not for me. Early last winter, I left family with Black Kettle’s village down south in Colorado Territory. I come north to Denver to find work with General Connor. Learned he’d moved his headquarters—was up at Laramie, so I rode north a ways farther. When I got to Laramie, Connor told me it was up to Jim Bridger to hire me or not. So while I waited for Bridger to come in last winter, I got word that some Colorado volunteers had nearly wiped out Black Kettle’s camp on the Little Dried River.” He hung his head as he told it, snorting back the sour taste in his throat.
“I rode south fast as my mare could carry me, Jonah. Found what was left of Black Kettle’s band camped on Cherry Creek—along with a bunch of Arapaho and Sioux. They was all itchy for making war, even on me. But that old man Black Kettle come up, with Toote at his side. Wasn’t a happier man than I was right then. Once Black Kettle decided not to have a hand in the fighting the other bands wanted to do, and started off for the south to the Territories with my family along—I turned back to skedaddle north to Laramie. A week later I was passing through Denver City and stopped at a opera house in the town. Hate towns, I do, Jonah. And in that opera house, I watched the crowd cheer some of the proud heroes of that Sand Creek fight as they showed off their battle trophies.”
“Cheyenne scalps.”
“No. Hair cut from the privates of the squaws they had raped and butchered.”
“From what we been told—the Cheyenne and Sioux been doing their share of raping and butchering as well.”
“That’s the shame of it. There damned well ain’t no end to it once the wolf is let out to howl.”
“We gonna put an end to it this summer, ain’t we, Shad?”
“No, Jonah. What’s set fire to this country out here is gonna take many, many a winter to put out.”
There came some renewed activity among the soldiers as gray light spread across the small open compound of Platte Bridge Station, enough noise to yank Hook from his brooding reverie.
“Lieutenant Collins!” a voice called out across the way.
“Here. Who wants me?”
“Major Anderson, Lieutenant.”
The slightly built young officer strode into the dark shadows of the station commander’s office, lit only by smudges of yellow lamplight.
For the first time since arriving in darkness at two A.M., Jonah could look about and see the makeup of this Platte Bridge Station with the coming of dawn’s light. The telegraph station itself stood flanked by warehouses on one side, troop quarters on the other. In addition, there were rooms for the few officers, a modest stable, a blacksmith shop, and a small mess hall behind the fourteen-foot-high pine walls and iron-mounted gates.
“Look at that, will you?” a fellow soldier asked as he nudged Hook. “Something, ain’t it?”
The morning mist was steaming off the river as the air began to warm, showing for the first time the full thousand-foot span of the magnificent bridge crossing the North Platte. Huge peeled cottonwood stanchions sat atop monstrous handmade cribs of stone.
“I hear there’s nothing like it this side of the Mississippi River.”
“Wish we was on that old muddy river now,” Jonah said. “And not out here waiting for Injuns to cut our nuts off.”
What early light there was showed a few hundred warriors bristling the tops of the far hills across the Platte, some on foot, others mounted. None moving. All of them waiting.
Less than a half hour later, the twenty-year-old Caspar Collins reappeared. He started to put the cap back on his head, then stopped at the edge of the open compound. For a moment he stared down at the hat. Collins turned and handed it to a friend of his serving with the Eleventh Ohio.
“Came up here with a mail escort. And now I don’t like what I’ve been ordered to do, Captain Lybe,” Collins explained to the fellow officer.
“Can’t Captain Bretney countermand the order? You’re not part of Major Anderson’s command here.”
“Bretney tried, sir. Anderson won’t hear of it—wants me to go bring that wagon train in. Something says I won’t be coming back. So there’s no need for those warriors out there to get this new hat I just bought at Laramie.”
“You’ll be coming back, Lieutenant. Just going out to bring that wagon train of Custard’s in, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Collins sighed.
“Keep the hat, Caspar. They won’t get it from you,” Lybe said.
“Something’s out there—got a bad feeling. You keep the hat for me, Captain. Bretney gave me his pistols.” Collins pointed to the two weapons he had stuffed into the tops of his boots.
Lybe shuddered. “Gives me the creeps, Caspar—you doing this.”
“Keep it.”
Collins turned away, resplendent in his new full-dress uniform recently purchased at Laramie. He strode over to his platoon, where he quietly ordered the twenty-five men to saddle up for their ride.
“I don’t like the idea of that boy riding out into them warriors on that skittish gelding the lieutenant’s got him,” Shad said quietly.
“Spooky gray animal, ain’t it?”
Shouts came from a handful of the pickets along the walls, announcing that a dozen or more warriors on ponies had splashed across the river downstream from the bridge.
Hook immediately joined Sweete at the banquette along the top of the wall, watching the warriors lope up the south bank no more than a mile from the fort, where they threw several lariats over the telegraph wire, turned their stout ponies about, and succeeded in pulling down the link to Fort Laramie.
“We’re cut off from all reinforcements now,” moaned Major Martin Anderson.
“God bless us,” whispered Lieutenant Caspar Collins as he turned away toward his waiting platoon.
“Major Anderson, sir!”
“Yes, Captain Lybe?”
“Respectfully request permission to cover Lieutenant Collins’s rear, Major.”
Anderson regarded the officer dressed in dusty blue a moment. “Your men got in here in the middle of the night, Captain. How many do you have to take with you?”
Lybe blinked. “Fourteen, sir.”
“I understand they’re all volunteers—galvanized Rebs, aren’t they?”
Lybe stared straight ahead without blinking this time. “They are, sir. And fighters too—every one.”
The major cleared his throat and scratched his chin. “Permission granted. Cover the lieutenant’s rear.”
“Thank you, sir.” Lybe turned and galloped off to gather his Confederates at the wall.
“C’mon boys! We’ve got us some skirmishing to do.”
“We going to fight those Injuns?” one of the Southerners asked as the fourteen formed up into two columns of dusty, bearded men dressed in blue wool.
“Men, we’re going to protect the rear of that troop leaving with Lieutenant Collins.”
In the predawn light, most of the warriors had crept out of the hills down to the riverbanks, where they hid themselves in the brush and timber. The Lakota upstream from the white man’s bridge. The Shahiyena down.
They did not have long to wait.
With a rustle of movement, tongues buzzing up and down the riverbank, attention was drawn to the noisy yawning of the fort gates. Counting almost three times all the fingers on both of the Oglalla war chief’s hands—the soldiers galloped free of the wooden stockade in two columns. Without slowing, the soldier horses approached the south end of the long bridge, then clattered across, iron shoes thundering over the cottonwood planks, echoing loudly up and down the valley.
The soldier chief leading the horsemen turned left coming off the bridge, heading upstream.
As the last bluecoat thundered off the north end of the cottonwood planks, Roman Nose stood within the brush and raised a lance to which he had tied a colorful pennon, signaling his Shahiyena warriors, who were now downstream of the soldiers. With a loud cheering shriek, the Shahiyena rose as one, as if sprouting from the ground itself, exploding from the brush and timber in a mighty phalanx that sealed off the bridge as an escape route for those white men trapped on the north bank.
The soldier chief waved his arm—ordering his men forward sternly. For a beat of his heart, Crazy Horse admired this soldier who courageously led his men away from the bridge and safety.
A moment later, as the soldiers turned in their saddles, shouting among themselves with a clanging of hardware and weapons, Hump and Red Cloud gave their own signal. The Oglalla burst from the riverbank, adding their voices to the war songs reverberating from the nearby bluffs.
Crazy Horse kept his eye on the soldier chief leading his men. Long ago he had learned that the white man fought very differently from a warrior. While Lakota and Shahiyena went into battle as individuals, taking orders from no man once the fighting began—the white soldiers took their commands from one or two of their number, acting in concert.
The Oglalla warrior was not disappointed this morning. The soldier chief signaled, shouting into the noisy confusion of his own men while the warriors shrieked up and down the riverbanks on both sides of the bridge. Waving with one arm that held a pistol, the soldier struggled with his horse—a tall, beautiful gray animal that pranced, spun, and reared repeatedly.
It is good, Crazy Horse thought. The soldier’s horse is wide-eyed and frightened, smelling death come so near.
With no real form to their charge, the soldiers bolted into a gallop, heading up the road, toward the hills and away from the Lakota breaking from riverbank.
But more Sioux warriors appeared at their front. The horsemen skidded to a ragged halt, then began firing their guns.
The Lakota swept forward, shouting, “Coup! Coup!” and shooting what few rifles they had, no more than one for every hundred warriors. Most released arrows in a short arc toward the cluster of white soldiers.
There came a momentary lull in the flight of the arrows as the Lakota surged closer still, more warriors sweeping down the slope on horseback. The soldiers seized that break in the assault, whirling their mounts and surging back toward the bridge in ragtag fashion.
A soldier grabbed the rein of a warrior who drew close enough, pounding the Lakota in the face with the barrel of his pistol as they struggled, racing along beside one another in a rising dust cloud.
Lakota warrior, White Bull, drove his pony into the fray, waving a soldier saber captured in a recent battle. With it he took off the top of a white man’s head as they neared the north end of the bridge. The spray of bright crimson in the dawn light drove him blood crazy.
And for a moment, a gust of wind dissipated the swirling dust, parting the horsemen so Crazy Horse could catch a glimpse of that brave soldier chief who had reached the bridge, just as the Shahiyena came up to swallow the soldiers whole.
The soldier wavered in the saddle—an arrow fluttering just above his eyes, deeply embedded in his skull.
He was shouting at the warriors in Lakota—saying he was a friend.
Like a cold stone, the shrill sound of that voice struck the heart of Crazy Horse. He knew that soldier. Caspar. His friend.
Already many of the Lakota were drawing back as the soldier hollered at them atop his frightened mount.
“Go back, Cas-Par! Go back now!”
“It is our friend—Cas-Par!” hollered an Oglalla.
“Let him pass! Let the soldier chief onto the bridge!” yelled another.
Hump and Crazy Horse and several other war chiefs were shouting now, ordering their warriors back once they recognized their friend. Through that widening gauntlet, even as the Shahiyena bore down on the soldiers, the white horsemen began to retreat in panic, clattering across the bridge.
Seven white men lay dead or dying on the north bank, each one surrounded by a growing knot of enraged Shahiyena warriors, each warrior with blood hot at yesterday’s killing of High-Back Wolf.
The fighting with the rest of the soldiers grew so close that few of the Shahiyena used the guns they had captured in the southern country. Instead, they were like a pack of water moccasins, in among the soldiers with their long lances: jabbing, pulling the weapon free, bright with blood in the growing sunlight, then plunging the weapon into horse and soldier alike in a screaming, screeching nightmare of dust and death.
“Don’t leave me!” shrieked a
soldier as he fell to the ground. “Oh, God—”
Around and around in a tightened circle the big gray horse pranced while the soldier chief tried to shoot at the strangling noose of Shahiyena—then the hard-mouthed animal suddenly bolted off with its wounded rider, heading not across the bridge with the other fleeing soldiers—but galloping off toward the ridge, into the nearby hills, directly for the Shahiyena who were pouring down into the valley.
With a loud, throaty roar, a wagon-gun sent its load of canister shot across the river. The charge exploded just above the ground, raising a huge spout of dirt clods and dust, shredding the willow and alder on the north bank as the warriors scurried back. A second wagon-gun roared on the heels of the first. Its charge landed farther from the river, against the bluffs.
Crazy Horse joined the rest as the warriors slowly flowed back from the riverbank. Nowhere was his soldier friend in sight. Out of the mass of Shahiyena one warrior emerged, leading the nervous gray horse by a rawhide lariat, struggling with the frightened animal. The cold stone inside his belly grew taut, and never more cold.
He had little time to study the riverbank, wondering which body might be Cas-Par’s, for the soldiers at the fort walls set up a barrage with their far-shooting guns. Each time those rifles roared, brownskinned horsemen dropped from the backs of their ponies, then slid back atop them to jeer and call out, slapping their bare backsides at the soldiers so far across the river for missing them.
“Your mothers are bitch dogs!”
Crazy Horse stared along the hillside, finding George Bent, the old fur trader’s half-breed son. He was shouting in English at the white men in the fort.
“Shoot that loud-mouthed son of a bitch!” a soldier cried out.
Again and again the soldiers fired, trying to hit the bare-chested Bent, who kept on cursing the soldiers in every vile English word he had learned in his years among them. From time to time he rose from the back of his pony, pulling aside his breechclout, exposing his genitals to the white men.
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