Sioux Dawn: The Fetterman Massacre, 1866 (The Plainsmen Series)

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Can’t make no sense of that tongue.”

  “And you, Jack?” Carrington turned to Stead. “What do you make of it?”

  The dark-skinned scout stepped out of the shadows of twilight and spoke a few guttural words, amplifying them with his hands flying before him. A sense of guarded calm washed over the Frenchman. He wiped his dry lips nervously, his wide eyes never leaving Jack Stead’s hands.

  “Man ain’t a spy, Colonel.” The scout turned to Carrington when the Frenchman had completed his long story.

  “Damn you!” Adair edged forward. “I’ve arrested the man for sneaking past our lines. I’ll bet my life he came to look us over. Determine our strength. Before the Sioux make a go at us—just like they warned us they would at Laramie!”

  “Calm yourself, Lieutenant.” Carrington placed his palm against Adair’s chest.

  Stead shook his head. “Ain’t that at all. Fella works for French Pete.”

  “French Pete?” Carrington inquired.

  “Name’s Louis Gazzous. A trader known in these parts. Beads for buffalo robes. Got him a Sioux wife, too, I hear. Been ’round for some winters, far as I can remember. Trades into the Sioux and Cheyenne villages. This man drives a wagon for him.”

  “One of French Pete’s teamsters?” The colonel watched Stead nod. “What the devil would he be doing coming to our camp? And alone at that?”

  “Seems French Pete’s been trading up on the Tongue. Making the rounds since the Sioux come back from the treaty-talks at Laramie. But most of the bands ain’t had time to work their hides into trading shape yet. Besides, most of the Sioux don’t exactly need nothing from French Pete yet, anyway. Came away from Laramie with some handsome plunder.”

  “That doesn’t explain a thing to me,” Carrington said.

  “Pete wandered down to Black Horse’s band of Northern Cheyenne, Colonel. Black Horse didn’t go to Laramie, so Pete thought he’d do better with the Cheyenne. Got to the village just about the time word came in from scouts that white soldiers set up camp here in the shadow of the Big Horns. Right where the Sioux had told the Cheyenne no white men would ever come … nor be allowed to stay.”

  “The Cheyennes are siding with the Sioux?” Concern crackled in Carrington’s voice.

  Stead shook his head. “Not all. I got the feeling that’s for you to decide.”

  Carrington studied the dark scout’s eyes for a moment, sensing the importance of what he had just been told. “So, tell us why one of French Pete’s men came here. To spy for his friends, the Cheyennes?”

  “Nawww. Black Horse and French Pete wanted this one to come here … with a message for the soldier chief.”

  “A message?”

  With Carrington’s question, Stead motioned for the frightened Frenchman to hand over his note. From inside his greasy shirt he pulled a wrinkled piece of yellowed newsprint. Along the margin of the torn and tattered remnant of year-old newspaper, a message had been scrawled with an unsure hand. The colonel read the words formed from deliberate, painstakingly-formed letters:

  We want to know does white chief want peace or war? Tell him come with the black white man.

  Carrington’s eyes rose from the yellowed scrap. “Black white man?”

  Bridger chuckled. “They must mean you, Jack.”

  “I don’t understand.” Carrington sounded confused.

  “Just look at him, Colonel,” Bridger chided. “Hair and eyes dark as any Injun’s. Out here in this country under the sun, his skin’s tanned like smoked elk-hide. Ain’t no wonder to me the Cheyenne figure Jack’s a black white man.”

  Stead grinned. “If my mother back in England heard her youngest called a black man, she’d tear a man’s eyes out, most like.”

  “You’re … you’re English?” Adair asked with a squeak.

  “Runaway, at the tender age of fourteen years. Worked the schooners and packets until my ship went down on the rocks at the mouth of the Columbia. Made my way inland. Crossed the Rockies many a time.”

  “He was the first to carry word east that the goddamn Mormons were fixing to turn again’ the government,” Bridger added.

  “Jim and me share no love for Mormons, do we, Jim?”

  “Not when that bastard Brigham Young put a price out on our heads. Sonuvabitch with all his wives and a hand-picked band of cut-throats he calls his ‘angels.’”

  “I took a Cheyenne wife some time back,” Stead answered.

  “That explains a lot,” Carrington admitted. “Tell me what you think about Black Horse’s invitation.”

  “Don’t know how to figure it, Colonel.”

  “You suspect treachery?”

  “Nawww, not really. I ’spect I’m the only one they’re bound to trust. Married to a Sioux and all.”

  “Good!” Carrington clapped his hands together, startling the scouts and the French teamster. “That settles it. You’ll carry my message to Black Horse.”

  “If that’s the way you want it, Colonel. I’ll be ready to go at first light.”

  “No, Jack. I want you to leave immediately. I’m afraid this can’t wait. Lieutenant Phisterer, fetch me some writing materials quickly.”

  As Carrington turned away he did not notice the look exchanged between his two scouts.

  Twilight had deepened into summer’s darkness, with a host of stars sprinkled overhead by the time the colonel finished the message Jack Stead would carry to the Northern Cheyenne.

  To Black Horse, Greatest of Cheyenne Chiefs: Friend:

  A young Frenchman has come to tell me you want to talk with me. This is good, to talk I would be happy to have you come talk with me and tell me what is in your heart. Come when the sun is overhead in the sky after two sleeps.

  The Great Father in Washington is not alone in wanting peace with his red children. All the soldiers who come with me want peace. I speak for peace above all things.

  I will allow no soldier to steal from the Indians who want peace. I will allow no soldier to kill the Indians who want peace. The white men who march on the road will not steal nor kill the Indians who want peace.

  Be assured when you come to talk with me, no one will harm you. And when you have spoken to me and told me what rests in your heart, you may go and be assured no harm will come to you or the chiefs you bring with you to talk with me. I will tell my chiefs and my soldiers that Black Horse and his warriors are my friends. No harm will come to you.

  Come talk with me when the sun stands in the sky, two sleeps from now.

  A soldier and your friend,

  Henry B. Carrington

  Colonel,

  Eighteenth U.S. Infantry

  Commander, Mountain District

  Shadows quickly swallowed Jack Stead and the French teamster as their army mounts carried them down the side of the plateau, riding north into the night and the land of the hostiles.

  Chapter 5

  “I see by the stripe on your gray britches and that side-arm you’re packing that you were in the cavalry during the recent rebellion in the south, Mr. Donegan.”

  With his bony cheeks heaving like a blacksmith’s bellows, the Right Reverend David White sucked the flame from a twig into his pipebowl with a succession of loud hisses, waiting for the Irishman to answer.

  “Never meant to hide a thing, Reverend.”

  White tossed the twig into the fire. “No offense meant, sir. Just getting to know one another.” Acknowledging the Irishman’s friendly gesture, the reverend smiled at the two others seated round the smoky fire. A gray haze rose from the twigs and was caught in the yellow streamers of sunlight that poured through the cottonwood branches overhead. “Myself, I served with Stephen Watts Kearney down in the Mexican Provinces twenty years ago. I can well understand any man’s reluctance to talk about the recent war, Mr. Donegan. I grew too old far too fast following Kearny across that brick-oven of a desert, chasing greasers and watching good men die for it.”

  “Never been a good war, sir.” Donegan tossed down the
last of the coffee in his cup. “Only men who put their good lives on the line for someone else’s idea of a cause.”

  “Well put, Mr. Donegan.” White leaned back against a saddle. “To my way of thinking, we’re fortunate that we travel as civilians now. None of us here as a part of an army chasing Indians across these trackless wastes. Ex-soldiers all,” he cheered, offering a toast with his coffee cup.

  “You fought in the rebellion, too, Mr. Glover?” Sam Marr gazed through smoky fingers of light at the young photographer.

  Glover bobbed his head of short-cropped wheat-straw hair self-consciously before answering. “Yes. Fourth Pennsylvania Volunteers.” His wide, expressive eyes jumped from man to man as if ready to tell more. Then they hugged the ground, refusing to rise, like small, scared things in search of safe haven.

  “Then you saw action at Gettysburg?” Marr asked.

  Glover kept his eyes long on the flames at his feet before answering. “It was my first real … fight. Everything before that’d been just a skirmish. Gettysburg … changed everything for me—changed my whole life.”

  “Wasn’t a man who walked away from that fight not changed,” Seamus Donegan said quietly. “God help the generals who would lead armies into something like that hell ever again.”

  “You enjoyed cavalry, I take it,” White asked, pointing with the stem of his pipe at the yellow stripe along Donegan’s gray trousers.

  “Always loved the feel of a good horse beneath me.”

  “You’re quite a chunk of it,” White said with a smile. The skin on his face shifted merrily, like a linen sheet rumpled across old bedsprings. “It’d take a good horse to stay beneath you, Irishman!”

  Seamus chuckled lightly, eyes on the fire and his mind back East. “Had several good horses shot out from under me, Reverend. Each one I missed worst than the last. Most cavalry sojurs worth their salt know part of being a horse-sojur means a horse ofttimes will take a bullet meant for the rider. Lay down its life for its rider—like few friends I’ve known in my short time on this sweet earth. Can’t say there’s many men would trade places with Seamus Donegan when it came to facing the muzzles of Confederate artillery.”

  “You were injured in the war?” White leaned forward, the bald spot atop his head gleaming in a hazy streamer of sunlight.

  “Horses, Reverend.” the Irishman didn’t rise to the bait. “Horses is how the cap’n here and me come to know one another. One trail after another I took when peace came and me being mustered out last winter. Found myself in Missouri. The idea of heading west struck me as the best devilment I could get myself into. Wandering as a man alone is apt to do. The cap’n was buying horses for the army in Kansas. He spotted mine and made an offer right there on the streets of Jefferson City.”

  “Top dollar too!” Marr added with a smile.

  “This old man knows good horseflesh when he sees it.”

  “But Donegan wouldn’t sell me his mount. Truth be, if I’d bought that horse from him, the animal never would’ve seen the inside of any army stable. Butchers, the army can be with their mounts. Ah, Donegan had himself a prize there.” Marr scratched at his short-cropped salt-and-pepper whiskers before he swept his long, shoulder-length gray hair from his collar.

  “You bought the horse after the war, Seamus?” White inquired.

  “No.” Donegan shook his head and glanced round at them all. “I won it—shall we say.”

  “A game of chance, perhaps. A race—winner take all?”

  “Aye, Reverend. A game of chance. And the winner did take all,” Donegan spoke barely above a hoarse whisper, kneading his big hands on the greasy knees of his gray britches. He swallowed, not wanting to tell. Knowing he would. “A Confederate cavalry officer once rode that big gray of mine.”

  “The spoils of war,” White offered, his hand waving expansively in the air, the long, thick-knuckled fingers working like ill-fitting sausages at the end of his hand. “Perfectly sensible. He turned over his sword and thoroughbred to the victor of the engagement.”

  Donegan shook his head. “Not as clean and tidy as all that, Reverend. But then, war never is, is it? No, sir. That fine Johnnie officer was a true swordsman. He drew first blood. I’ll wear his saber scar across my back for the rest of me days.”

  White slowly pulled the pipe from his thin lips, then raked a hand back through one side of his gray hair. His bald head reminded Seamus of the walk leading up from the road to his mother’s house in County Kilkenny. Worn smooth between the thick growth of stubborn grass. “And he’ll mourn the loss of that horse for the rest of his?”

  “I took more than the big gray from him that day,” Donegan admitted in whisper. “Never have I wanted to kill a man as badly as I did him that day in the Shenandoah.”

  “You rode under Sheridan, then?”

  “Aye.”

  “Does your wound trouble you still?”

  Donegan studied the inquisitive minister a moment longer. He found the old man forthright in his nosiness. Besides, every man of the cloth Seamus Donegan had ever run across made a lifelong practice of getting down inside another man’s britches and learning all that was hidden beneath.

  “A’times, Reverend. The weather changes, I feel it in this knee. Took both a saber slash there and a ball in the meaty part of the leg above the knee here. But my back doesn’t nag at me when it’s coming cold. That ugly scar nags at me only when there’s trouble on my backside. Like a set of eyes, i’tis. The one time I wasn’t looking out for my backside in battle—a poltroon of a Confederate officer carved me up pretty good. Seems now that this scar o’ mine is going to make sure no one ever sneaks up on Seamus Donegan again.”

  The men round the smoky fire fell silent as Donegan’s eyes refused to budge from the mesmerizing flames. Long moments later Reverend White finally picked up his battered, blackened pot from the edge of the fire and poured more of the steaming brew into each man’s waiting cup. Finished, he shoved more unruly gray hair back along the sides of his head, proposing a toast.

  “To good friends and companions, gentlemen. They make any journey worth the wait … worth any effort. May our Lord God Jehovah bless us all, everyone—as we poor wayfarers travel in the good company of one another … each in search of his own private dream.”

  All four civilians drank in silence for a moment, until Marr licked at the droplets of coffee hung from his thick mustache and asked, “Reverend, what dream possesses a man like you?”

  White smiled, both rows of wide teeth stained from too much coffee and tobacco smoke. “Captain Marr, my dream is to make this trip north to my new flock without serious hardship or mishap … and without losing what I have left of the hair on my poor head!”

  White began to chuckle, running his bony fingers through the long gray strands. Though they were hands most accustomed to holding a bible or wagging a warning finger at a congregation, White’s hands nonetheless showed they were no stranger to hard work. With thick-knuckled fingers he patted the baby-pink scalp taut across the full length of his head.

  Captain Marr laughed even louder. He pulled his wide-brimmed hat from his own silver head, showing White that he too had a patch of valuable, pink scalp to lose. The Missourian’s long, silver curls spilled well past his collar, where his sagging neck skin had begun to wrinkle.

  “No Sioux warrior gonna want our two hoary old scalps, Reverend!”

  White guffawed loudly, his laughter merry and genuine. Pointing a skinny twig of a finger at Seamus, the minister roared, “Let’s just pray the sight of Mr. Donegan’s fine head of long, curly hair will not lead the Sioux nation into temptation!”

  Chapter 6

  “Colonel. Sergeant of the guard reports his sentries signaling the approach of Indians.”

  Carrington looked up from his detailed drawings and plans of the fort. He let only his eyes touch each officer gathered round the long table he had readied in the huge hospital tent for this very occasion. Bridger found the colonel gazing at him.

&n
bsp; “Jim, I’ll want you and Jack by my side.”

  “Best you bring Jack along,” the old scout replied. “He talks Cheyenne better’n I do.”

  “But, Jim Bridger knows Indians better than any man alive,” Carrington replied, straightening his shoulders, smoothing the bright red sash at his waist. He had ordered his officers into full-dress uniform at morning assembly. This would be the day—he had told them—the day the Cheyennes would come to call. “I’ll want you both at my side. Have Jack ride out to escort Black Horse into camp. He must reassure the chief that he’s welcome here. Among friends.”

  Bridger nodded, glancing at the sentry atop Pilot Hill waving his bright semaphore in the wind and riding in a circle, the signal to alert the fort of the approach of Indians. A moment later Jim recognized the bright pennons of Cheyenne warriors marching up an ages-old path crossing Lodge Trail Ridge, bright fragments of color fluttering against the brilliant blue of the midsummer sky.

  This’s gonna be something to see, Jim thought, knocking the dead ash from his old pipe.

  Standing with the hundreds of soldiers and civilians, including officers’ wives clutching bright parasols and children scampering in and out of the waiting throng, Bridger felt the warm sun high overhead beating on the leathery skin at the back of his neck.

  Old Black Horse done it right. Coming here when the sun rides high.

  Something down in that private place Bridger hid from other men tugged at him as he watched the grand procession work its way into the valley, heading for the white soldiers’ camp on the plateau. Try as he might, Bridger still found himself a man who often felt things deeper and with more hurt than most. Right from his very first year in the mountains. A boy barely seventeen who got bamboozled into leaving Hugh Glass behind. Left behind without his rifle or so much as a knife. And old Hugh chewed up bad by that sow grizz. Abandoned by him and Fitzgerald beside a shallow grave scratched in the sand along that nameless creek.

  A salty sting of moisture tapped Jim’s eyes. He blinked. Thinking on all those winters since 1822.