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

by Terry C. Johnston

“Hush for once, Margaret. And listen to me. I’ve decided to lead the rescue myself.”

  She nodded, her eyes misting. “I … heard, Henry. I’m so … so very proud of you.”

  Margaret watched him swallow a knot in his throat before he turned to Frances. “Mrs. Grummond, I shall go in person. On my word as an officer and a gentleman, I promise to return the remains of your husband to you.”

  “Colonel——”

  “Say nothing,” Carrington silenced her.

  In the next breath his cheeks flushed as Frances stood on her toes to kiss his cheek.

  He turned to his wife. “To know I’ve done right is reward enough, Margaret.”

  “God bless and keep you.” She embraced him, feeling for Henry more than she had felt for such a long, long time. “Come back, Henry. Come back to me.”

  Without another word, Carrington turned, closed the door, and stepped into the arctic cold pounding life from the Big Horn country like a icy hammer on a frozen anvil.

  * * *

  Donegan watched Carrington climb atop a broken-down sorrel with a bad case of wind-galls. Not much left in the way of good horseflesh at Fort Phil Kearny, he brooded.

  Yet it comforted a battle-scarred veteran like Seamus to know that every last man at the post had volunteered to march with Carrington, to rescue the bodies of comrades and friends. The colonel chose eighty of those most fit to march.

  “Captain Powell?” Carrington called out. Powell stepped up. “You understand your orders?”

  “I’m to fire the sunset gun as usual, running up a white lamp to the mast head on the flagstaff. If the Indians appear near the fort, I’m to fire three shots from the twelve-pounder, at minute intervals. Then hang a red lantern from the flagstaff instead of the white.”

  “Very good, Captain. You remember as well the orders you are to keep secret from the rest of the men … women and children?”

  Powell barely whispered this time. “If the hostiles attack in overwhelming numbers, I’m to put the women and children in the magazine with food and water. When all is lost, strike a match to the powder. Let no man, woman, or child be captured alive.”

  Carrington nodded. Saluted. “God’s speed, Captain.”

  Powell swallowed. “Good luck, Colonel.”

  The colonel waited until the last man in his rescue party had cleared the gate, then listened while sentries inside drove the bolt home.

  Donegan rode with Carrington to the head of the columns. At both sides of the road marched a cordon of mounted cavalry. Most of the remaining infantrymen bounced along the frozen road in mule-drawn wagons. Bridger saw to it that pickets were stationed on the high ground along the ridges. A pair of soldiers left at every station, within sight of two other stations, so that a continuous line of communication would link the rescue column to the fort.

  A day wine-clear and as still as a buzzard’s shadow hung over high-meat. Growing colder by the hour. Silently, Carrington’s column climbed the long, frozen ridge, now laying bare, silent. Everlasting.

  Past sage and yucca. Through bunch-grass and wild-rose. Down into thickets of allthorn, following the crooked trail like some dark, bloodied scar beneath the brooding sky. To the very end of the naked ridge itself.

  Ten Eyck and Donegan pointed to the boulder field below, then began their descent into hell once more. On their way down the snowy, trampled slope, they crossed that narrow rib of ground where most of the cavalry had died. Horses strewn over the bare ground in a space barely forty feet wide. The head of every one pointed toward the fort.

  Donegan pointed to the boulders. There, he explained, they would find most of Fetterman’s dead. Arrows sprung like sunflower stalks from the frozen ground, pointing every which way. Soldiers completely surrounded.

  The dreary, stomach-churning work began. A man had to hold the head of every mule frightened at the smell of so much frozen blood as others stacked the remains and body parts into the wagons like cordwood. When the first freight wagon had been half loaded, the mules kicked and lunged, throwing their handlers aside, strewing the bodies across the frozen ground and darting off. Only six of all the bodies showed bullet wounds. The rest had been killed by arrow, with lance, club, knife, or axe.

  “Close and dirty work. Hard way for any sojur to die.” Donegan stopped beside Carrington. “There’re more, Colonel.”

  “We’ve loaded every man here.” Carrington turned and climbed into the saddle. “The Eighteenth endured snow and ice before Shiloh. It marched through a brutal plains winter to its new post in Nebraska just last year. These men lived on parched corn before Kennesaw Mountain, and moldy pork here at the foot of the Big Horns.” He swiped a hand beneath his nose, knowing he should brood on it no longer. “Ten Eyck, I’ll follow Mr. Donegan. Bring the wagons down the road.”

  Over the next mile they located four more bodies. Then came across Lieutenant Grummond and Sgt. Augustus Lang. Carrington stared at Grummond’s body for the longest time before he slid from his horse to kneel over the remains. The lieutenant’s head had been nearly severed from the neck, and his naked body bristled with arrows. Placing something in the pocket of his greatcoat, Carrington rose and returned to his horse.

  Near the bank of Peno Creek they found Jimmy Carrington’s little calico pony, its head butchered.

  “Injins ever scalp a pony, Jim?” Seamus inquired.

  “Wouldn’t put it past the sonsabitches, Irishman,” Bridger growled. “Way of showing how they hated the man what rode the animal.”

  “Brown,” Carrington replied. “Fred Brown.”

  “Injuns!”

  Seamus jerked around with the first shout. More soldiers took up the alarm, pointing up the ridges.

  “The bastards come to get us!”

  “Run for it!”

  Soldiers and civilians alike lunged for their horses and wagons. Forgetting the bodies. Ignoring the dead.

  “The Sioux come back to finish us!”

  Donegan gazed up the ridge where the soldiers pointed.

  “Colonel!” Seamus grabbed Carrington. “Your soldiers think the pickets Jim left on the hills are Injins!”

  Bridger nodded. “Best you get your boys under control now. Gonna have a full-scale ruckus here.”

  Carrington dove into the center of the pandemonium, quieting the men enough to speak. He pointed out that they had seen their fellow soldiers. “Like being scared of your own shadow, men.” Then he wagged his mittened hand. “Any man among you too afraid to stay long enough to finish this work, let him leave now!”

  He listened to angry grumbling before continuing. “Go on back to the fort best you can if you’re afraid. But understand, those of you who go will leave your guns and ammunition behind. I’ll not allow one armed man to leave until the last body’s rescued.”

  With the disturbance quelled, a hundred yards away Donegan brought Carrington to the desperate stand of Wheatley, Fisher, Garrett and the cavalry veterans.

  “From the looks of it, they put up one devil of a defense here,” Carrington offered as he viewed the dead carcasses of horses and ponies alike.

  “Look at them black patches on the ground,” Bridger pointed out. “A warrior knocked outta his saddle for every one. These boys made a fine account for themselves while they lasted. Injuns hated ’em something fierce. More’n a hundred arrows in every man’s body here. Sioux didn’t take kindly to the toll these fellas took.”

  “Even young Private Burke,” Seamus added. “Company C.”

  Carrington inched closer to another body, pointing. “Isn’t that … the cavalry sergeant——”

  “Eli Garrett, Colonel.”

  “Appears he acquitted himself honorably,” Carrington said.

  “Eli always was a good soldier,” Donegan answered. “Sometimes, he just forgot what being a good soldier means.”

  By the time the wagons were loaded along the frozen Peno Creek, the low rumble of the sunset gun echoed over the ridge. A cold, desolate feeling like nothing he had
felt before seeped to Donegan’s marrow while the columns climbed the bare, scarred finger onto Lodge Trail Ridge.

  “Praise God,” Carrington sighed, gazing south as twilight settled over the fort, “from whom all blessings flow.”

  “Your white lantern hangs high on the flagpole, Colonel,” Bridger added.

  “Yes,” Carrington sniffled. “Like a welcome star of blessing. A homing beacon, calling the wanderers home. Praise God—our people are safe.”

  Chapter 39

  “Your husband lays in the guardhouse, Mrs. Grummond. With his comrades,” Carrington explained, squeezing her hand. It was just past ten o’clock when his rescue party crawled back through the fort gates.

  Beside her sat Margaret, clutching her other pale hand. “Can I——” Frances choked on the sob.

  “No,” he whispered. “I think it best that——”

  “I … understand, Colonel Carrington,” she whimpered, dabbing at the end of her nose with a damp kerchief.

  “I’m deeply sorry,” he continued, stuffing a hand into his pocket. “I only wish I could express the sorrow I feel at this moment. For you … for your child, Mrs. Grummond.”

  He held before her a small, sealed envelope. “I … brought something from your husband’s last field of battle. I knew you’d want to have it—as a memento of George.”

  “George?” she squeaked.

  “Yes,” he answered. “God knows you’ve suffered the worst loss imaginable. No one can ever say you’ll get over it, Mrs. Grummond. I’m not saying you should ever get over it. Just that, the best thing is to make a place for that hurt, that loss in your life … and walk on. Make a place for that pain, and let it give meaning to your life.”

  As Frances took the envelope into her trembling fingers, Henry turned to Margaret. “Come, dear—we must excuse ourselves. Give Mrs. Grummond time to herself.”

  She watched the Carringtons close the door, then all was silence once more. With quaking fingers she tore at the sealed envelope, finding inside a lock of George’s hair. Frances held it to her breast, tears welling from eyes she had believed all cried out.

  “George. Dear, dear George,” she whispered with a sob. Then remembered.

  The locket I gave you our first Christmas together—only a year ago. The miniature portrait I had done of me so you’d have your Frances to look upon … wherever the army took you.

  The tears came easily, sobs welling up from deep in the marrow of her.

  Who carries that portrait now, George? Dear God, what dark-skinned savage wears my locket now?

  * * *

  As if held in abeyance by some divine hand, the blizzard that had threatened the land waited until Carrington returned with his grisly cargo. Temperatures plummeted to thirty below as brutal winds drove icy snow across the land. That night the colonel ordered pickets rotated every half hour.

  By morning of the twenty-third the snow had drifted so high along the west stockade wall that a soldier could march out of his company barracks, up the icy drift and over the stockade timbers. Starting at first light, soldiers struggled in relays to dig a ten-foot-wide trench outside the wall to make it harder for the hostiles to breech the stockade. As hard as the work became, they made little progress through the day. The keening winds never died, sweeping still more snow into the trench as Carrington’s troopers labored on through the endless hours.

  Throughout that day and into Christmas Eve, the men prepared the bodies of their comrades for burial in the guardhouse and Horton’s hospital. Grim work, assembling mutilated fragments. Identifying the butchered remains. Wrenching what arrows they could from the frozen corpses, cutting off the rest. Cleaning the waxlike flesh, then draping each body in a dress uniform donated by a friend or bunkie.

  Half of the headquarters building had been turned over to the carpenters, who sawed and hammered pine planks into coffins. All too quickly they ran out of sheet-tin to line the simple boxes, working day and night. Not until after dark on Christmas Eve did those coopers finish nailing the lid over the last of the Fetterman coffins.

  By mid-morning the day after Christmas, two pits it had taken the men three solid days to dig yawned like ugly black scars in the middle of the graveled street along officers’ row. One small grave for the three officers killed, each placed in a separate coffin. Along the gaping maw of a nearby fifty-foot hole dug seven feet deep out of the frozen soil, the enlisted dead lay boxed, paired in thirty-nine coffins carefully numbered for future identification.

  The sun hung low in the east like smudged, gray ash as Donegan watched solemn troopers lay the pale boxes beside the ugly trenches dug from soil hard as iron plate. His eyes smarted with a biting wind, his face hidden behind the muffler wrapped round his face. Staring at the soldiers, women, children and civilians who trundled up in tiny knots to the edge of the gaping holes.

  “… the severity of the weather,” Carrington droned over the mourners, many of his words swept away as quickly as they were spoken in the swift-footed wind, “… brief ceremony … saddened, without benefit of military honors.”

  The colonel nodded to Reverend White, who shuffled forward, a gray wool muffler tied beneath his chin, protecting both old ears and white head.

  “Here me, O children of the chosen land! Our Republic lives because there have always been men who loved Her more than life itself. Trust in Him who has forced into the nostrils of the living the very breath of life! Trust! For the mighty God of our fathers’ fathers will not desert thee! The Lord who led his people from Pharaoh’s bondage will not abandon those who march into battle beneath his banner. The God of Hosts will not forget those who have shed their blood in His name’s sake.”

  White coughed, his dry throat straining to last his prayer through. “Our Grand and Fair Republic likewise will not forget those who are committed to the bosom of this land today. Dust to dust … ash to ash—the flame of freedom burns on! The blood of these now mingle with blood shed by patriots ninety years gone. In this, our cause, no less shining than those who stood at Concord Bridge … waited atop Bunker Hill, or froze in the snows of Valley Forge. My solemn oath to these brave patriots we commit to the soil this day—they’ll not be forgotten!”

  The reverend opened his eyes, lifting his speckled chin. White gazed a heartbeat longer at the Irishman, then finished, “A-men!”

  “Amen,” echoed a hundred other voices, drowning out the embittered sniffle of man or the quiet whimper of woman.

  Carrington edged beside White, waving the burial crews to the edge of the pits, where they began lowering the first coffins.

  Alone or in small, black knots, the mourners dispersed across the snow like humpbacked beetles scurrying for warmth to one raw-boarded building or another.

  “Seamus?”

  Donegan turned, finding Sam Marr before him, a woman and two small boys huddled against him. “Cap’n,” and he nodded to the woman. His eyes flicked over the two youngsters who clung like burrs to their mother’s dark greatcoat. Seamus recognized it as a man’s—oversized, swallowing the woman’s small frame as it slurred the ground with every insistent gust of cruel wind.

  “Mrs. Wheatley,” Marr began, instantly snagging the Irishman’s full attention. “I introduce Seamus Donegan. A Union soldier, like your late husband.”

  He yanked his floppy hat from his head and took a step closer, for the first time straining to get a good look at the face hidden in shadow beneath the hooded cowl.

  “We … we’ve met before, Sam,” Seamus said quietly into the cruel wind that flung itself against them all. Another young widow …

  As she tilted her head back to look up at the tall man before her, Jennifer’s red-rimmed eyes met his for the first time since that midsummer day on the banks of the Little Piney. Though ravaged by countless tears, those green eyes still held an unspeakable magic for him. This close, almost feeling the heat she gave off. Those full lips, rouged by the wind. Somehow, he imagined her imploring him in some unspoken way.

&nbs
p; Seamus cleared his throat self-consciously. “I knew James, ma’am. Mightily sorry…” He gazed down at the youngsters. “Sorry he’s took from you and the boys. My … deepest condolence.”

  Only then did the cowl fall back, taking the face from shadow, allowing Seamus to fully study the dark, liquid, almond-shaped eyes so red and swollen.

  Her pale, ivory cheeks rouged with bitter cold quivered a moment longer as her teeth rattled in the wind. Those full, trembling lips stammered, “T-Thank you, Mr. Donegan.”

  Glory, but she’s even more a beauty up close.

  “There’s anything I can do,” Seamus found himself saying, “to help you—the cap’n. You call me.”

  She extracted a mittened hand from one of the boys, presenting it to the tall Irishman. “I won’t forget your kindness, Mr. Donegan.”

  He looked down at the mitten, remembering how she had clasped both hands over herself to hide those perfect, freckled breasts that summer day as the sunlight and water teased him every bit as much as she had from afar.

  In that moment he touched her hand through the coarse wool now, Seamus sensed a warmth … a warmth the likes of which he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

  “Mrs. Wheatley,” he nodded, bowing slightly, seeing her yank at the hooded cowl, once more hiding her face from view.

  Marr lead the young widow away.

  For several minutes Seamus found himself gazing after her, until they disappeared into the quartermaster’s yard. A gust of wind nudged at him insistently, reminding him of the gaping, open wound along officers’ row. Seamus Donegan stuffed his hat atop his dark curls, tugged his collar round his neck, then grabbed a shovel to lend his shoulders to the task at hand.

  Frozen clods of spoil clattered atop the pine boxes like a hollow thump of an insistent hammer. Seamus dug into the pile of dark earth, again and again and again. Remembering the warmth her touch had bestowed upon him.

  * * *

  “You’re a fool to push onto Laramie!” John Friend declared, rising from his warm telegraph key at Horseshoe Station. He had just finished condensing and transmitting the dispatches of Col. Henry B. Carrington to Fort Laramie some forty-five miles to the south.