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

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Bingham’s a fighter, by jove!” Grummond wore a wild smile across his mouth normally hidden beneath a bushy mustache. “Carrington can rot in his goddamned post—and leave the fighting to real soldiers!”

  Donegan turned in his saddle, fretting what to do. The long, brittle slope of Lodge Trail had disappeared behind another knuckle of scarred landscape. Carrington and the rest were back there. Somewhere. A damn poor choice … but at least he knew where he could find other men. Straight ahead. Ride with Grummond. Join Bingham. Chase the Sioux. Shoot some warriors while hoping the blood lust cooled in these mad officers.

  Get back to the post before the Sioux backtrailed and surrounded them.

  By the time he and Grummond overtook Bingham, only one Indian remained in sight. On foot. Tantalizingly dashing from thicket to bramble. Luring the hot-blooded soldiers. Seductively.

  “Can’t you see it’s a trap?” Seamus hollered into the wind.

  Both Bingham and Grummond smiled mechanically at him. As if they don’t bloody care that they’re leading these men to their deaths!

  “It’s a bleeming decoy!” Donegan shrieked.

  Angry beyond words, the Irishman turned in his saddle, reining up for a heartbeat, haunch-sliding the big gray to a stop. And felt the hair along the back of his neck rise. Dozens of warriors sprang from the bushes on either side of the backtrail.

  They’re closing the bleeming trap on us!

  “LIEUTENANT BINGHAM!” he bellowed like a wounded bull.

  It didn’t matter. Bingham and Grummond already had their hands full at the moment. As soon as the warriors behind Donegan sprang from hiding, even more Sioux leaped from the brush up ahead. Eight soldiers and one angry civilian trapped.

  Donegan raked his heels along the gray’s flanks. He’d stand a better chance joining the soldiers than fighting off the screaming savages hot on his tail.

  Too late for … Bingham flung his arms in the air, the side of his head a red blossom sprayed in the frosty air. He tumbled from his horse into the trampled snow.

  “Sergeant!” Grummond hollered at the soldier with bright chevrons. “Form up the men!”

  “Form up?” Bowers asked. He was infantry. “Damn well know how to fight on foot,” he yelled back, struggling with his unruly mount as the warriors closed in. “Gimme a chance to——”

  Three warriors using a rawhide lariat yanked Bowers from his saddle. More loops whistled through the air as the Sioux worked at pulling the soldiers from their horses. Not risking a gun battle that might kill the valuable soldier mounts.

  Donegan flung aside a lariat sailing toward him. Watched another loop tighten about a soldier ten feet ahead. In a spray of snow and icy slush, the trooper slapped the ground, rolling over, hollering for help as a warrior leaped over him, pinning him down, a gleaming tomahawk held high. The pitiful screech——

  As the soldier’s face disappeared beneath the Indian’s bloody weapon, Seamus recognized those sensitive eyes of a musician. The terror-filled eyes of Frank Noone.

  “By damn—follow me!” Grummond yelled.

  “Where, sir?” Pvt. John Guthrie shouted.

  “Out, goddammit! OUT!”

  Donegan saw the lieutenant rip his saber from its scabbard. Flinging his empty pistol away, Grummond swung the saber from side to side like a scythe lopping wheat.

  Seamus yanked the Henry to his shoulder. Swung the front blade about. And peered down the frosty, blued barrel at a white man dressed in buckskins and capote. Hollering orders at the warriors. Directing them. Commanding the h’athens!

  He blinked his eyes to be certain of what he saw, then watched the white leader turn his way, arrogantly staring for a long moment as Donegan eased back on the trigger. Looking down the barrel at that white man watching in disbelief as the mounted Irishman shot him in the belly.

  Gawddamned renegade!

  “Arggggghhh!”

  He wheeled, seeing Grummond slashing on all sides as he urged his rigid horse back, back up the hill.

  Seamus and the four soldiers still left in the saddle swung their rifles like clubs. Muzzle-loading Springfields emptied and useless now. Warriors breathing too close for Donegan to use his Henry.

  Bleeming hand to hand——

  A rigid shock thundered through his shoulders as the Henry’s stock cracked against a copper head or smashed a ribcage. At his side rang the familiar crick each time Grummond’s saber cleaved skull or bone.

  Their retreat splattered with sinew, brain, and blood. A savage, slashing dash back through the gaping maw of hell.

  * * *

  “If you’d supported Bingham—”

  “Captain Fetterman!” Carrington roared. “I’ll not be badgered nor lectured——”

  “A cowardly act of a post commander,” he shouted, his voice crackling like a quirt on still air. “Abandoning your officers——”

  “I didn’t——”

  “Withholding your support!”

  From the moment Fetterman and Brown had led their troopers after the fleeing warriors and bumped instead into Carrington’s squad, the young captain had been jabbing an accusing finger at the colonel. Brown sat silent, his lips a thin line of undisguised hatred. He could tell from the look on Carrington’s face that the colonel well understood his post quartermaster had disobeyed orders to join Fetterman. Fred Brown seethed to join the argument. He dared not. Not, just yet.

  “By god, you’re a spineless bastard!” Fetterman exploded. “I vowed as an officer that within sixty days of my arrival that I’d regain the honor of this regiment … an honor you’ve done your bloody best to destroy!”

  “That’s quite enough!” Carrington snapped.

  A distant clatter of iron-shod hoofs coupled with the frantic yells of men interrupted their heated debate. Over a bare knob raced a soldier jabbing his horse in the flank with a saber. On his trail charged another soldier whipping his mount into a lather. At the rear galloped a big gray horse, its rider wearing a plaid mackinaw coat.

  “Lieutenant Grummond!” Carrington hollered as the trio skidded to a stop on trampled snow.

  “George!” Brown cheered. “Your horse—bleeding——”

  “Spurs weren’t enough!” Grummond growled. “I stuck him to make the bastard move!”

  “More than once from the looks of it, mister,” the colonel accused.

  “If you’d supported your men, Colonel Carrington!” Grummond wheeled on his commanding officer, his eyes aflame. “You left it to me to support Lieutenant Bingham—while the rest of your command gets chopped to pieces.”

  “Exactly what I told him!” Fetterman agreed, nodding at Grummond. “You’ve acted like either a prissy fool, Colonel, or the damned coward every man says you are.”

  “You’ll not bully-rag me, Captain!” Carrington barked.

  “I’ll grant you this Indian war’s quickly become a hand-to-hand fight—requiring the utmost caution,” Fetterman allowed.

  Carrington appraised the captain suspiciously. “Thank you, Captain Fetter——”

  “But that caution’s no excuse for abandoning your troops.”

  “Gentleman,” Carrington soothed, trying to calm his own anger, “have you forgotten about Bingham?”

  “Wasn’t he with you, Grummond?” Brown inquired stridently.

  “He was,” George stuttered. “Or, I was with him——”

  “Lieutenant’s dead.”

  Their heads turned to look at the red-cheeked Irishman.

  “Last I saw of him—the side of his head blowed off.” Donegan pointed.

  Brown watched the Irishman’s eyes settle on him.

  “We slashed our way out,” Grummond explained.

  “Mr. Donegan.” Carrington threw a hand up to silence any more conversation. “Take us.”

  “Aye, Colonel.” He sawed the big gray around, pounding heels.

  “Troops at a gallop!” Fetterman hollered. “Center—HO!”

  Minutes later they found Bingham’s body
flung over an old stump. More than fifty Sioux arrows bristled from his naked corpse. The scalp ripped from his skull. His scrotum obscenely jammed into his mouth.

  In a nearby clump of bullberry Donegan found Frank Noone, split wide open from crotch to chin. Most of his organs lay on either side of the body. It reminded him of a Christmas goose his mother would stuff. The neck and giblets and heart …

  Not far away they located Sgt. G. R. Bowers lying in the trampled dust of a game-trail. His coat, shirt and trousers stripped from his body, along with his boots. Brown vaulted from the calico at a run. Kneeling beside the sergeant, he gently took Bowers’s bloody head in his lap. The sergeant’s eyelids fluttered against a glittering dance of frost crystals afloat in the bright December sun.

  “Don’t try to talk, Greg,” Brown said, wiping dirt from lips trembling to speak.

  The side of the sergeant’s head was missing where a warrior had split it with a tomahawk. Bowers’s blood and tissue soaked into the captain’s blue britches like a splatter of dark molasses as Brown cradled his Civil War comrade.

  “I’ll walk the last few steps beside you, Greg,” Brown whispered. “You’ve not far to go now. I’m at your shoulder—here till you no longer need a friend.”

  * * *

  “Bowers said he got three of the devils before … before they got him, Frances,” George Grummond whispered to his wife huddled at his side.

  Even his remark could not take her eyes from the young widow dressed in black, her face hidden from time to time by the veil that the wind refused to honor. Her baby clutched to her breast, wrapped in a dark scrap of bunting. Perhaps no older than Frances herself.

  The poor … poor Abigail …

  A cold scut of wind knifed along the bare ground without remorse, rustling her black crinoline dress and petticoats. Frances wondered if she’d ever be warm again. What a lonely, forsaken place the colonel chose, she brooded to herself, and leaned against George.

  For the post cemetery Carrington had selected this high rib of ground jutting off Pilot Hill, overlooking the valley where the Pineys began their march across the plains. Overhead the low-running clouds made Frances Grummond’s little world look like the bottom of a slate-colored pool.

  Nearby waited the hundreds come to watch three more boxes lowered into the frozen earth. Other red-eyed women and fellow soldiers.

  Too many funerals, she thought, eyes wet behind her black veil. Then Frances recalled how three days ago she and Margaret Carrington had stood frozen in terror when the picket rushed up shouting that the wood train had been attacked and all killed. Remembering now that look on Eleanor Bisbee’s face. Her husband rode escort that Thursday.

  Ironic that Bingham, not Bisbee, had been ripped from this earthly veil, Frances brooded.

  Now Bisbee and poor Eleanor leave for Omaha. Soon as we commit these poor soldiers to the ground. God bless her—he’s been reassigned, and Eleanor’s getting him out of this … this hell that will swallow us all.

  A pale December sun had spread milky light while it fell atop the Big Horns that Thursday the sixth. As quickly the temperature had fallen. While women waited, watching from the sentry platform headquarters. Waiting until weary horses brought the soldiers home.

  Sergeant Bowers had died before Fred Brown allowed his friend moved. Besides Bingham, Bowers and Noone, a sergeant and four privates had been wounded. For all their trouble, the Indians had gotten their hands on but two horses. The soldiers had abandoned eight wounded animals in the bushes as they escaped the ambush. Carrington ordered five of them destroyed before he turned his angry, wound-licking command back to the post.

  A civilian and Pvt. John Donovan were the only men who rode into the ambush with Bingham and rode back out unscathed. Again and again George had tried to soothe his wife’s fears, laughing lightheartedly for Frances these past three days.

  “Dear girl,” he had said smiling at his brown-eyed daughter of the old South, “were it not that the Sioux wanted horseflesh more than scalps, your George would not be standing here in your arms!”

  In hushed whispers she had overheard how close her George had come to joining Bowers and Bingham on this horrid hilltop. She had listened to bitter talk of blunders and mistakes, disobedience, cowardice and recklessness that marked the skirmish with the Sioux on December 6. Almost every man held Carrington accountable. Yet somehow even Frances realized no one man had to shoulder the guilt alone. Wands had joined Fetterman’s squad though ordered to ride with Carrington. Bingham dashed ahead of his frightened, confused squad of raw recruits—racing to his death. Even her beloved George had ignored Carrington’s order, galloping off alone—for some reason escaping the ambush that took the lives of three soldiers they buried today.

  Every day it seemed to her that the men grew more desperate here to end their isolated struggles against the land, against the winter, the calendar, and the Indians themselves. And that unrelenting strain, Francis realized, was showing in those cracks ever widening between Carrington and his officers. At times some of the women even whispered in private that the staff command at Fort Phil Kearny fought among themselves with more tenacity and zest than they fought the Sioux.

  When George had returned that cold afternoon, snow lancing out of a ground-hugging, gray sky, Frances found it impossible to speak at first. Instead, they sat arm in arm for the longest time as darkness swallowed their little cabin. Sharing tears at his deliverance.

  From that first brutal moment of uncertainty, Frances had been unable to shake the presence of dread that made sleep a fitful, nightmarish torture. Haunted by a recurring dream where she helplessly watched her George galloping frantically away from her, a score of Indians hot on his tail. Awaking each night as she heard him scream out for help. For his life.

  There had been other deaths. Soldiers. Noncommissioned officers. But never a widow left behind. Never before … an orphan like Abigail Noone’s baby girl.

  “Ten-shun!”

  The shout of the old line sergeant brought Frances back to the hill. And the cold seeping through her coat. To her marrow.

  She watched the seven troopers slap their carbines against their legs as the procession of wagons and mourners topped the rise, drawing to a halt near the three mounds of frozen spoil wrenched from this hard ground. Twelve troopers slid the tin-lined pine coffins from their wagons, lowering the boxes beside the dark holes as the wind swept skiffs of icy flakes along the ground. Nudging dresses and coats, mufflers and hats they struggled to hold.

  It’s as if the sky itself … this very land, were in mourning for Abigail … alone now. Frances bit down on her lower lip till it hurt.

  Afraid to pay too much attention to Reverend White’s religious service, she watched her husband instead. That hard line clenched along his jaw. The press of his thin lips beneath the bushy mustache. Realizing she really didn’t know the man all that well. But sensing George fought back his own tears of anger. Fought down the knot of fear at his own deliverance.

  Thank you, God, she prayed. Thank you for sparing him. Frances felt the baby move. For the first time. She placed a hand on her belly. A hard kick beneath her ribs, then it slept.

  “… as were our fathers, and their fathers, lo—we are wayfarers and strangers before Thee. Our days are but shadows on this bitter earth. None will abide but Thee.”

  She listened to Reverend White drone on. Nothing wrong him being a Methodist, she thought.

  “… yea, the prairie sea of this earth grips the moldering dust of our fallen heroes. So oft unsung. So oft unhonored. But where a rare stone is placed to honor the name and deed in their passing…”

  Better funerals conducted by Baptist preachers.

  When White completed his simple service, he nodded to George Grummond. Solemnly the lieutenant stepped to the precipice of the middle hole, pulling a white handkerchief from his pocket which he hung from his coat belt for want of a Masonic apron. As six fellow Masons joined him at the graves, Grummond opened his ritual book
, choking through the last rites to be read over fallen comrades.

  “Captain Brown?” he asked, finished at last. Turning, he stuffed the book and handkerchief into the pockets of his overcoat.

  Fred Brown stepped to the middle coffin, raised its lid. On Sergeant Bowers’s breast the captain laid his own medal for bravery awarded during the Civil War. From Stone’s River to Fredericksburg and on to the siege at Atlanta, Brown and Bowers had forged a fast friendship. Now Brown’s “Army of the Cumberland” badge would rest for all time on the breast of his old friend.

  Frances watched Brown swipe angrily at his drippy nose, touch Bowers’s gray hand a last time before he lowered the coffin lid and stood.

  “Port arms!”

  The 18th’s old funeral sergeant droned into his commands.

  “Ready!”

  Frances steeled herself for the coming roar, cradling the muffler over her belly to shield her unborn child.

  “Aim!”

  She watched the seven step back on their right feet, the dirty-gray barrels pointed forty-five degrees into the heavy sky.

  “FIRE!”

  She shuddered. Through all those years of war round her home in Tennessee …

  “FIRE!”

  … she had never grown accustomed to the cruel and obscene …

  “FIRE!”

  … thumping clatter of gunfire.

  “Present arms!”

  On the brow of the hill some thirty yards away, Metzger brought the bugle to his frozen lips. Taps. Slow and measured—a much-practiced death march.

  It’s over. She finally took a breath, afraid now to look at the woman in black.

  As the gunsmoke scudded along the frozen ground, a sad chorus sang over the graves. Six of Curry’s German bandsmen, Catholics all—their quiet, Teutonic dirge reverberating around the mourners who filed past the coffins, dropping hard clods of spoil atop each pine box.

  “Come, Frances,” George whispered as he swept back to her side. “Let’s get you in where it’s warm … the baby.”

  She nodded, then gazed up at him in the pewter half light of early afternoon. A strange glow surrounded George Grummond’s head, reminding her of the halos she had seen atop the heads of angels in those childhood Bible storybooks.