Red Cloud's Revenge

by Terry C. Johnston

  “You have ten minutes,” Burrowes gushed suddenly. “Ten minutes and no more.”

  While Burnett and Al Stevenson directed the loading of two wagons, Donegan and George Duncan saw to the mules. They found enough with wounds that would allow them to travel back to the fort, making for two wagon teams. Duncan hitched one team to a wagon Burnett’s men were loading with Leighton’s goods. The other team Donegan hitched to a hay wagon that would carry the wounded back to the fort.

  When the loading was under way, the Colvin brothers led a double handful of Burrowes’s soldiers down to the creekbank, where Al Colvin scalped the body of the Miniconjou war-chief he had sworn would not be carried off by rescuers. The bloody trophy held high at the end of his arm, he and brother Zeke watched the troopers hack the warrior’s head from his body. They jabbed a spear up through the war-chief’s neck and brandished it aloft, promising to display the head in the center of Fort C.F. Smith’s dusty parade.

  “We’ll leave the bastard’s body to the wolves,” one soldier said to his comrades as the head rose above them.

  “Or his friends … whichever ones comes back to fetch it first!” another chimed in, followed by the laughter of all.

  “Wolves or Injuns, all the—”

  “Sergeant! Order: ‘Prepare to mount’!” Burrowes hollered as he slipped a foot into the stirrup of his McClellan saddle.

  “Prepare to mount!” the sergeant bellowed as soldiers scurried to their horses.

  Burnett and the rest hurried to reach the captain’s side. “We ain’t half done, Captain!” Finn snarled. “We leave without Leighton’s gear … the Sioux come in here and burn what they don’t take! And our wounded—you can’t leave us!”

  “MOUNT!” Burrowes shouted to his command.

  “Mount!” the sergeant echoed.

  Al and Zeke Colvin joined the rest at Burrowes’s side. Burnett was not the only man trembling with rage. Seamus saw Captain Colvin’s eyes search his a moment before Al stepped forward and seized Burrowes’s reins.

  “Cap’n,” the ex-Confederate drawled slowly, but without a hint of meekness. It was the kind of hissing, guarded snarl a yard dog would make giving a man fair warning. “If’n you’re so damned skeered to stay here with us long enough for Burnett to get-up his bossman’s belongings … then I s’pose you better take your yeller-bellied outfit on outta here and get on without us.”

  “How dare you speak to me—”

  Colvin yanked on the reins, shutting the captain up as quickly as a splash of cold water in the face would wake up a hangover.

  “These boys … we all been fighting the redskins all day long awready. So, I s’pose this handful of brave men can fight our way back to the fort alone, if’n we have to.”

  The air appeared to hiss out of Burrowes as his eyes searched first the determined look of the civilians, then measured the sinking of the sun behind the hills, and finally glanced at young Houg. The lieutenant sat slightly slumped on his saddle, smiling at the captain’s predicament.

  “Suggestions, Mr. Houg?”

  He straightened, the grin growing like a slash on his face. “Yes, Captain. I say we stay till these men are ready to move their property and the wounded.”

  “The sun is falling, gentlemen,” Burrowes finally gushed, exasperated. “I will appreciate you finishing your labors with all dispatch.”

  Colvin winked at Seamus. “We’ll hurry, Cap’n.”

  Seamus nodded, looking up at the officer on horseback. “That’s right—we’ll hurry, Cap’n Burrowes. Far be it from any of us to keep you and your boys from their evening mess—just because of some dirty, little daylong scrap the rest of us had ourselves here.”

  * * *

  During the first week of July, civilian J. R. Porter had established his base of operations for woodcutting a short distance east of Pine Island on Big Piney Creek, close to the dense woods where his teamsters, cutters, and herders harvested timber for Fort Phil Kearny’s winter needs. On the high plains where summer came late and left about as quickly, the short cutting season meant long days of grueling labor. But men were paid well for the use of their muscles, and for the possibility of losing their scalps to the hostiles who constantly showed themselves on the ridges and hills overlooking the woodcutters’ camps.

  On the last day of July, Company C, 27th Infantry under Capt. James W. Powell and his lieutenant, John C. Jenness, relieved Company A on guard duty at the wagon corral contractor Porter’s men had established along the wood road skirting the Sullivant Hills, where the road progressed eastward toward the fort stockade. With nineteen years experience under his belt, Powell was not an excitable sort. Already he had distinguished himself for cool, thoughtful action on the morning of December 19, 1866, during a running skirmish with Sioux decoys. He had followed Colonel Carrington’s orders not to pursue any parties over Lodge Trail Ridge.

  Two days later Capt. William Judd Fetterman had ignored that order. And led another eighty men to their deaths.

  Enlisting in 1848, Powell had risen to the brevet rank of major during the Civil War, serving with distinction and honor. Already known for his cool bravery, the captain was soon to find himself at the center of Red Cloud’s fiercest attack yet on the white soldiers’ fort at Pine Woods.

  Capt. James W. Powell and thirty-one other men were about to suffer the brunt of Red Cloud’s revenge.

  When he arrived at the woodcutters’ camp, the captain found that contractor Porter had split his men into two groups. The first group was involved in cutting timber on the slope above and on Pine Island itself. In order to remain close to the cutting sites, this small group of civilians camped in the thick woods on the island at the foot of the mountains, across the Big Piney from the main camp. Here Powell stationed a noncommissioned officer and twelve enlisted men to guard the civilian operation.

  The second and larger group made its camp on the bare and relatively level plain stretching some thousand yards across about a mile southeast of the woodcutters’ camp. This treeless plain, surrounded by low hills, was a good place to graze mules and organize the wagon loads of timber bound for the fort each day. Instead of placing the corral in the middle of the open field, Porter’s civilians had set up camp near its northern border so that the level ground stretched away only on the other three compass points. In this ideal location, those in the main camp could keep watch over both the woodcutting operations and the wood road itself.

  Here in this main camp the civilian workers had removed the wooden wagon-boxes from their running gears so that the long logs harvested by the woodcutters could be laid atop those running gears and hauled to Fort Phil Kearny each day. These fourteen wagon-boxes, the ordinary wood wagon beds in use by the Army Quartermaster Corps, stood only four feet tall when laid on the ground in a large oval. They were not lined with iron plate. In addition, the iron bows and canvas tops had been removed before the men augured two-inch holes in the sides of some of the boxes. Loopholes the men would use in firing the rifles issued to the soldiers of Fort Phil Kearny back on the tenth of July.

  At either end of the crude oval stood two full wagon-boxes still atop their running gears. At the east entrance stood the wagon containing rations for the woodcutters, while that on the west serviced Powell’s troops. These two wagons were eased out of the way during the day, and could be quickly rolled back in place to complete the fortification at night when the stock was driven inside the oval. Or in the event of attack.

  Sacks of grain and corn, ox yokes, cordwood, bails of wool blankets, and kegs, along with a few bags of dry beans, filled the spaces between the wagons and were placed inside the outer walls of the boxes for more protection than the thin wood sides could offer the defenders. Blankets lay close at hand, to be thrown over the boxes during attack, so that enemy horsemen charging down upon the corral could not easily spot the defenders.

  Outside this oval the men had pitched tents where both soldier and civilian alike slept. In the event of attack, no matter his a
ssigned task or where he might find himself, every man was ordered to hasten to the corral, where extra weapons would be found, along with seven thousand rounds of ammunition for the new Allin-modified Springfields sent up from Fort Laramie. Only in the wagon-box corral, it was supposed, the defenders could hold off an attack by a small force indefinitely, and an attack by a large force for a short period of time while awaiting relief from Fort Phil Kearny.

  With the rising of tomorrow’s sun, Captain Powell’s men and four civilians would find out what it meant to fight for their lives against an overwhelming onslaught of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors intent upon sweeping the white man from their hunting grounds once and for all.

  The Milky Way stretched like sugar dusted across the blackening heavens that first night of August as the men in the wagon-box corral finished supper and lit their pipes or cut a fresh quid from their plug tobacco. Out beyond the firelight, Sgt. Patrick McQuiery had stationed his first watch for the evening.

  While the fires sank low and the night deepened, McQuiery stepped into the darkening gloom of the summer night. At the sergeant’s heels tagged Pvt. Jack McDonough’s dog Jess.

  “You seen any Injuns, Doyle?” McQuiery sang out in his harsh whisper.

  “No, Sarge,” Pvt. Tommy C. Doyle answered, scratching the dog’s ears when Jess laid her head against his knee. “But, I can smell ’em!”

  “Keep your eyes and your nose awake tonight, Tommy-boy. We ain’t seen the red niggers for several days now … then they up and show this afternoon.”

  “Run off a few head from the pasture near the fort, I hear.”

  McQuiery wagged his head. “They’re back to devilment. Been too quiet to suit me, it has.” He turned to go.

  “G’night, Sergeant.”

  “G’night, Tommy. Looks like Jess will stay out on watch with you. Keep those eyes skinned … and you got my orders to shoot anything that don’t answer you.”

  “Yessir.”

  As McQuiery reached the tent camp, Pvt. Henry Haggerty turned round on his keg stool.

  “Ah, Sergeant—we’re all in the mood for a rousing ditty, sir. You sing so well, and you’re right on time.”

  He eased himself down on the hard-tack box and accepted a cup of steaming coffee, red coals glowing at his feet. “What’ll be fellas? You wanna hear ’bout old One-Eyed Riley?”

  “Sure as you’re born, Sarge!”

  When Patrick began to sing, it did not take long before the others joined in, every man enjoying the ribald tune popular among the soldiers marching west at the end of the Civil War. McQuiery bellowed out the first verse:

  “As I was strolling round and round,

  A-huntin’ fun in every quarter,

  I stopped meself at the little Dutch inn

  And ordered me up Gin and Warter.”

  Then the rest joined him in the rollicking chorus:

  “One-Eye Riley, Two-Eye Riley,

  Ho! for the land with one eye, Riley!”

  Chapter 35

  As drummer boy and company bugler, Private Hines chose his snare to beat reveille on that morning of the second of August down in the wagon-box corral, bringing the men from their bedrolls before the sun had even considered creeping over the low hills to the east.

  Sam Gibson, private in Powell’s C Company, wiped the gummy sleep from his eyes and scurried to inspection. Lieutenant Jenness finished his roll-call just as cook Hezekiah Brown hollered out.

  “Chuck! Get your chuck while it’s hot, boys!”

  Fifty-three soldiers scampered to lay their rifles away and jostled into line. Everyone but the two pickets who squatted among the tents to eat their pan bread and fried pork, their eyes raking the perimeter of the meadow.

  With breakfast out of the way, Powell issued orders for the division of his command for the day. The first train under Lt. Francis McCarthy and Cpl. Paddy Conley leading an escort of twenty men would proceed to Fort Phil Kearny with its load of logs brought down from the Pinery the day before. With McCarthy on his way east, Powell dispatched a second train in the opposite direction, this one to the woodcutting camp in the pine woods under a corporal with a dozen enlisted men. The captain and Jenness themselves stayed behind at the corral with the remaining twenty-six men to guard the contractor’s property and livestock.

  Lieutenant Jenness’s watch showed it was a few minutes prior to seven o’clock.

  “Gibson,” Jenness called out.

  “Yessir?”

  “Take Deming and Garrett with you. Get up there and relieve Grady.”

  “Will do, sir.” Gibson swept up his new, unfired Springfield conversion. “C’mon, boys. You heard the man.”

  “You and me was on guard duty most of the night, Gibby,” Pvt. Nelson Deming grumbled.

  “It’ll be all right. We’ll get Garrett to stand first watch while we make us a piece of shade,” Gibson explained, slapping his friend on the back.

  With a gum-rubber poncho stretched over some willow branches, the two soldiers had their shade from the climbing sun, and Private Garrett standing guard as well. Here on the hillside above the Little Piney, the morning wasn’t shaping up badly at all, as Sam Gibson saw things.

  * * *

  R. J. Smyth had come as a teamster to the Big Horn country with Henry Carrington’s “Overland Circus,” driving an ambulance bound for what eventually was named Fort Phil Kearny. As a proven mule whacker, Smyth had made several trips down to Laramie and up to C.F. Smith, but by and large had kept himself busy and on the payroll driving a mowing outfit in the hayfields surrounding the post and down in the bottoms near Lake DeSmet.

  He had joined other volunteers who rode with Tenedore Ten Eyck that bitterly cold December day when the captain had marched off to relieve Fetterman’s command. Since that time, R. J. Smyth awoke many a night, cold fear running down his spine like a leaky keg spigot, recalling the sight of those butchered bodies scattered across Lodge Trail Ridge.

  Earlier this August morning in the predawn darkness, even before reveille had been bugled across the stockade, Smyth and a hunting partner had slipped from the fort to track some deer in the nearby hills above the woodcutting operations along the Big Piney. Having climbed their horses for better than an hour through the dense woods, R.J. called a breather for the animals. As their mounts blew frosty halos into the warming dawn air, the sun just beginning to creep over the eastern lip of the prairie, both men stretched out upon the damp ground. While Smyth dozed, Billy Lott stared vacantly over the valley below.

  “R.J.?”

  “Yeah?” he answered, his face hidden beneath his floppy-brimmed hat.

  “You seen Injun smoke signals afore?”

  “’Course, I have, Billy.”

  “You read ’em?”

  “God, are you a stupid child! ’Course I can’t read Injun.”

  “Damn.”

  “Damn, what?” Smyth asked, disgusted at the interruption of his nap.

  “Thinking you might tell me what that smoke was saying.”

  Smyth bolted upright, ripping the hat from his face. “Jesus!” He leaped to his feet. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner, Billy?”

  Terrified, Lott looked down at both fists gripping the front of his flannel shirt. “They just started a few minutes ago, R.J. Honest. Them there. There. There. And them over there too.”

  “Jesus…” Smyth muttered his oath once more. “Something’s afoot, Billy Lott. And we best be getting our sweet asses outta these hills.”

  “Cain’t agree with you more, R.J. Lookee up there.”

  Smyth followed Lott’s arm, pointing uphill from where they stood at that very moment. White smoke, puffing into the breathless morning air of sunrise, signals turned pink with the rising of a bloody sun. As he watched for a few heartbeats, numb and slack-jawed, bright pinpoints of light flashed from the hills bordering the Big Piney.

  “You get that animal of your’n downhill and quick, Billy Lott. You’re on your own now. I’m gonna try for that wood train he
ading for the fort—yonder!”

  “Don’t leave me, R.J.!” Lott hollered out, leaping atop his horse and scampering down through the timber behind Smyth.

  The last thing R.J. saw before he headed into what he hoped was the safety of the dark forest was the terrifying sight of hundreds of feathered, mounted warriors just then bristling atop the hills to the west. And pouring down into the valley—fast.

  He figured if he didn’t have time to reach the security of those twenty-odd soldiers escorting the load of timber bound for the fort, then surely he and Lott could reach the corral in time.

  Praying that he could reach the wagon-boxes and those two-dozen soldiers in blue under Powell and Jenness.

  Dear God … I know I ain’t one to get down on my prayer bones enough and taffy up to you one helluva alot. But … I wan’tcha listen to me close now, God …

  * * *

  “Promise me you’ll keep to the high places, Seamus,” Finn Burnett implored, sticking his hand up to the Irishman, who had just climbed atop the horse he was borrowing from contractor Leighton for this ride south to Fort Phil Kearny.

  He nodded, smiling. “Bet them Injins is licking their wounds this morning.” He gazed over the stockade wall at the growing gray light that foretold the coming of a new day.

  “Bet they’re madder’n wet hornets, you ask me. Licking wounds or no.”

  “You just take care of yourself, Finn. Sorry I ain’t gonna be here to bury Hollister today. He was a good man—hung on long as he could.”

  “Things could’ve been worse for the lot of us.”

  Seamus snorted, passing it off. “You laugh hard enough and loud enough at death, Finn—that bleeming sonuvabitch’ll turn tail and run. Mark my words.”

  Burnett stepped back a pace, staring up into the reflected torchlight at his friend. “You, Seamus Donegan—you keep laughing all the way to Kearny for me.”

  He pulled his hat brim down, eyeing the growing gray line along the east wall of the stockade. “Since I come west to this Injin country, I ain’t never stopped laughing, Finn. Godspeed, me friend.”