That Prussian’s got the heart of a lion, Gibson marveled to himself as he slid round the wagon at the west entrance to the corral. Look at him, standing there, dirt kicking up ’round him like raindrops on a pond … spilling ’em off their ponies like there’s no tomorrow.
Then Private Gibson shuddered with the thought. Looking over the prairie. Watching Sam Marr riding closer and closer. Seeing Max Littman empty another Indian pony of its rider.
There may be no tomorrow for any … any of us.
When Sam Marr galloped past the German sergeant, Littman finally retreated, coolly walking backward as the warriors pressed down upon him, firing and loading. Blowing powder smoke from the rifle. His weapon already hot to the touch.
Nearing the wall, Marr hugged the stallion’s neck as the blue roan leaped into the air, clearing a wagon-box and skidding into the center of the corral with a dusty cloud. He dropped to the ground, heart pounding.
After their frantic run, the young soldiers still huffed for air as they squatted between the wagons. All of them close to done in from their terrifying retreat to the corral.
Gibson helped Littman and two others push the covered wagon across the west entrance to the enclosure. No more white men would make it to the corral this day. They were alone in that meadow now. Captain Powell and his second-in-command, Lieutenant Jenness. Twenty-six soldiers ringing the wagon-box wall. And now with the addition of Sam Marr as the last man to make it across the prairie, there were four civilians.
Thirty-two grim-eyed white men in all. Each man staring death in the face below a new day’s sun inching over the prairie.
Gibson turned from the wagon’s single-tree and found Powell nearby.
“Reporting for duty, Captain.”
“Gibby! Damn, but that was a pretty run you boys made!”
“Sorry ’bout leaving our post—”
“No apologies needed,” Powell replied with the hint of a smile.
“Couldn’t hold it against the odds.”
“You’ve done nobly, my boy! No one could’ve done better,” Powell praised, laying a hand on the young private’s shoulder. “You four … find a place in the boxes. We’ll all be fighting for our lives today!”
While Garrett, Deming and Marr all headed to a different wall, Gibson dashed to the north side, where he joined the Irish sergeant Patrick McQuiery and Pvt. John Grady in a box.
“Powell’s right,” Grady cheered the new arrival. “We all have to fight like hell today, kid—if you expect to come out of this scrap alive!”
Gibson made himself a home down among the sacks of oats, moving one sack aside so that he could push the muzzle of his rifle out the two-inch auger hole drilled in the side of the box.
“That old man must be some shot,” McQuiery marveled, then spit a stream of tobacco over the top of the sidewall.
Gibson looked over his shoulder. Powell was busy near Sam Marr, motioning three of the younger soldiers to gather behind the old civilian. Bringing their rifles and making them available to Marr when the fight got hot.
“Why’s Powell having them give their rifles to Marr?”
McQuiery grinned crookedly, the brown quid almost creeping out of his mouth. “Them’s the ones don’t shoot worth a hiccup, Gibby. They’ll reload them guns for the old sharpshooter. Hear it told that man can knock flies off a post-whore’s nose at fifty paces.”
“Shit! Hope he shoots as good today!” Gibson laughed, turning back to the prairie.
He saw the blankets stacked in the box behind the three of them. Figuring there were at least five. Good covering to shield the riflemen from the view of the horsemen bearing down on the corral. Good enough to keep some of the rapidly rising sun off their backs.
It’s gonna be a long day, Sam Gibson. And then again … maybe it won’t. So, the best you can pray for is to hold your water … and ask God for it to be one helluva a long day for you … whatever name you call yourself.
Already the valley was swarming with more than a thousand mounted Sioux. Adding some two hundred who had been harassing small groups of white men on foot to the rest of the Sioux and Cheyenne streaming down the Peno Head and across the Lodge Trail Ridge, there were more than fifteen hundred of them in full view of the lonely, fourteen-wagon corral.
Not good odds at all, Sam told himself, praying he would hold his water and not wet his pants. He never had. But the old soldiers said it was no shame, said it could always happen to a man come a battle that would test his mettle. Sam Gibson figured his time had come.
Dear God, he prayed. Don’t let me die with soiled pants …
Thirty-two of them huddled in those wagon-boxes now. Under a rising sun that second day of August of ’sixty-seven. A Friday morning. And no man among them seriously thinking he would ever last to see that sun go down this day.
Out there on that prairie pranced and screeched, cavorted and screamed, more than two thousand of Red Cloud’s finest. Led by Crazy Horse, Red Leaf, and High Back-Bone. The pride of the Bad Faces. In their copper breasts beat unrequited hatred for white men.
Braver, more daring, more resolute Indians had never been whelped on these high plains.
All come here under the watchful eye of Red Cloud himself: Brules, Sans Arcs, Oglallas, Miniconjous, Hunkpapas and a large contingent of Northern Cheyenne who had chosen to follow Red Cloud rather than attack Fort C.F. Smith with their war-chief Roman Nose.
The pride of the Lakota nation was about to pit itself against the pride of C Company, 27th U.S. Infantry.
And four unlucky civilians.
Chapter 37
Sam Marr watched the wiry private Tommy Doyle pile up some ox yokes between two wagon-boxes for his shelter. Nearby, Jim Condon had taken his spot behind a squat barrel of dried white beans.
As he appraised the young soldiers Powell had ordered to stay right behind him, Marr realized the other men in the corral had plenty of weapons as well. Some gripped their seven-shot Spencer carbines proven in service during the war. Others waited patiently at the thin walls of their wagon-boxes, holding their Allin-modified Springfields. That soldier over there beside R. J. Smyth even had a needle-gun. And every one of them had at least a pair of service revolvers at hand. Some of those pistols, even the new Colts he had heard reports of before leaving Kansas with Seamus Donegan, were bound for the goldfields of Alder Gulch, Montana Territory.
Sam wondered now about Seamus. And thought about how crazy men would get for the want of some yellow rocks. Crazy enough to lay their lives on the line. If not crazy enough to leave their blood soaking into the thirsty soil of this prairie.
Damn, if they didn’t bring their women and pups along.
Marr gazed cautiously over the sidewall as some of the squaws and children and old ones gathered across the hills to watch their menfolk wipe out this little corral before journeying on to overwhelm the Pine Woods fort itself.
Bet they wanna see their men rub us out now … since they didn’t get the chance to see Fetterman’s boys butchered.
This astonishing force of warriors and spectators had not reached the valley of the Piney creeks all at the same time. Instead, more and more warriors and three times their number in women and children appeared along the hills throughout the early morning.
For the most part, the mounted warriors still carried bow, warclub and lance. The preferred weapons still. While some did have the newest in repeating Winchesters or Henrys, others brought along the weapons taken from the Fetterman dead. They would be stingy with the use of those rifles and pistols. Lead and powder would surely be needed once they reached the fort itself.
After all, to overrun this corral of wagons the white men huddled behind would take only a simple charge of horsemen firing down into the defenders with their sinew-backed bows. Hardly a fight worthy of precious gunpowder and lead ball.
“Men!” Powell hollered, standing erect and daring at the center of the corral, a pistol wagging in each hand. “This will be a long day for most of us.
What you see out there on that field is something that would make any man’s innards dry up and shrivel. Last winter not far from this ground, a little more than twice our own number were massacred by but a portion of what faces us now! But we are soldiers, by God—and we will hold these red bastards off until help arrives!”
Powell waited a moment as a nervous, self-conscious cheer erupted from his men. The captain drew himself up, swelling his chest slightly. Already the sweat glistened in tiny pearls across his forehead and down the sides of his muttonchops.
“And, my friends—you all know what to do should we be overwhelmed before relief arrives. Let no man be taken alive by these savages!”
A wilder cheer rose from the oval, crackling into the hot sky overhead which appeared vacant and ran on forever in its vastness without a cloud to smudge its blue.
“Captain Powell,” Jenness said, nudging his superior. “Look there on that hill.” He pointed to a slope some three quarters of a mile off to the east. “I believe Red Cloud himself is on the top of that hill.”
“Him and the rest of his bloodthirsty cronies too,” Powell agreed.
Marr turned back, for a moment watching some of the older soldiers slipping the laces from their clumsy brogans. One of the young troopers behind Sam asked what the veterans were doing. Dryly, Marr explained why both shoestrings were tied together before a loop at one end was lashed round a foot. A smaller loop then secured in the other end.
His explanation seemed to sober the youngsters some, all but silencing them. If the hostiles ever breached the corral walls, every soldier understood he was to take his own life. The small loop in those shoelaces would be hooked over the trigger of their Springfield. Each man would stand, putting the rifle muzzle under their chins or stuffed in their open mouths before the foot at the other end of the shoestring would twitch.
Leaving no live prisoners for the redmen to torture. Enough stories already had been told and retold around campfires and barracks for even the young troopers to realize that fighting Indians here in this wilderness meant every man looked out for himself in those last moments. Always keeping a last bullet for himself.
“They’re coming now, boys,” Sam Marr whispered to the three youngsters huddled behind him holding their rifles and supplied with two boxes of cartridges.
None of them spoke. They didn’t have to, Marr decided. “Quiet is better at a time like this, soldiers. Quiet is fine.”
Across the prairie more than five hundred horsemen had begun an orderly, slow march toward the corral. Sam figured these were special warriors—for some reason allowed the honor of overrunning the corral. Five hundred, while the rest watched.
“Like swatting at a hornet,” Sam murmured to himself. Reassuring. “Swat and be done with it.”
Max Littman now moved to his chosen location between two wagons and behind a squatty barrel of salt. Most of the soldiers hunkered down even farther into the wagon-boxes, making themselves as small as possible, laying their rifles atop sacks of grain, muzzles poking out the auger holes. Other bags of forage provided protection from Sioux bullets. The inch-thick wagon sidewalls would not.
Five hundred ponies were nudged into an easy lope.
Now Sam began to make out the humming, discordant chant from the horsemen bearing down on the corral. Like an eerie nightmare, the off-key warsong throbbed above the pounding of the pony hoofs.
He watched Powell and Jenness shake hands. Perhaps never to speak to one another again. Never to share that camaraderie only men under fire would ever know. The captain headed toward one end of the oval. Jenness stationed himself by the wagon at the other.
“How many guns we got us, boys?” Marr whispered, trying to smile at the three young faces behind him. Two of them dippled with the fuzz of a Georgia peach. One face already damp with silent tears.
“G-Got us seven guns, sir,” answered one of the peach-fuzz faces after he had swallowed a hot stone in his throat.
Marr nodded, glancing once again at the warriors nearing, their hoofbeats and chant growing like a climbing, rumbling crescendo of prairie thunder. He smiled wider, his old teeth yellowed like pinewood chips flying from a woodsman’s axe.
“We have eight.” He patted his Henry. “I’ll take seventeen of the bastards with this gun. Then we’ll go to work on them Springfields of yours. Just be sure you keep two guns loaded for me at all times, fellas.”
Sam Marr turned back to the prairie. The horsemen had moved into a gallop. More and more of them were stringing out into a wider and wider crescent. Their warsongs and soul-chilling chants were echoed by the hundreds and hundreds on the hillsides, watching. The whole valley rumbled with their promise of death to the white soldiers in the corral. The pounding of those two thousand hooves thundered up through the center of the enclosure like an earthquake threatening to swallow the defenders.
“No man fires his weapon until I give the order!” Powell shouted, running the length of the corral once. He turned around without stopping and ran back to his post repeating his order several times so that every man understood. His muttonchop whiskers drooped with sweat. A dark vee of dampness soaked his shirt between the shoulder blades.
“Sir?”
Sam turned around to the damp-faced one. Marr had seen that look enough times during the war down in Mexico. General Zack leading them to glory over the sun-grinners. Enough times down South, when white man killed white man over black men and for what private reasons they thought important enough to die.
Marr bit his lip, feeling the sting of hot moisture at his own eyes, stroking the brass-mounted Henry. And thinking on Abigail.
“I ever tell you young’uns how me and that drunken Irishman Seamus Donegan held off these same Sioux for a whole day down at the Crazy Woman Fork back to last summer? It was some show, let me tell you. You’ll like the story. Well, now…”
* * *
As Sam Gibson watched the five hundred furiously kick their ponies into a full gallop, Captain Powell darted once more across the enclosure, shouting his orders.
“Men, here the bastards come! Wait for a target. Fire low! Fire low, goddammit! Take your places and … shoot to kill!”
And may God have mercy on our souls, Sam prayed, his cheek nuzzling the stock of his Springfield.
He had seen Indians before. A few at a time. Never anything like this. And he wondered if he would ever tell his grandchildren about this day.
You stupid sonofabitch! You aren’t even married yet …
Then Private Gibson, 27th Infantry, U.S. Army, squeezed the thought out of his mind as he squeezed the trigger of his new rifle, figuring one day every man had to fight for his life. Perhaps even fight for those yet unborn.
“Shoot to kill, men!” Powell hollered again as he recrossed the compound. The warriors were about on top of the corral now. Those final four words would be the last the captain would utter for the duration of this fight in the wagon-box corral.
On both sides of Gibson sporadic rifle fire broke out. He wasn’t sure that his own bullet had hit a thing. But he opened the breech and slammed another cartridge home. Remembering the words of the chaplain who had presided over so many wartime funerals for this battered regiment.
A different chaplain had spoken over the graves of so many of Gibson’s friends last winter. Gray-haired, wild-eyed Reverend White.
“Each soldier joins his brethren in concert. Laying his very life in the hands of his fellows. Trusting completely to the heroism and skill and steadfastness of his friends. Each a soldier—risking without hesitation for the man at his side. Each a soldier—taking the action of his brethren for granted … trusting to the heroism of all. Each among them soldiers before God almighty Himself. Expecting no gratitude. For the laying down of one’s life for his brothers is thanks enough. Giving a soldier wings through the gates of heaven itself…”
It was amazing to even a veteran of the war like Gibson to watch the rest of these thirty men in the corral, coolly waiting as the red hord
e rode down upon them. Warriors fully expecting the soldiers to withdraw their weapons from the loopholes to reload with the clumsy ramrods. Expecting at this moment to overrun the white men in one concerted rush.
By now the bullets were smashing into the vanguard of the warrior flanks. Dropping a pony here and there. Knocking one naked body after another into the yellow grass and ocher dust. Still the chants hovered over the valley from the thousands watching the charge.
Bullet after bullet smacked into copper bodies. Many of those flattened lead spheres driven with such force through one body that it pierced a nearby rider.
Gibson blinked his eyes, praying it was only sweat clouding his vision. And fired again. With so many riding down on him, his kid sister back home could have killed a warrior with every shot now.
“I can’t keep the cap on the—”
He heard Tom Garrett whining in a nearby box. Then the growl of Sergeant Hoover.
“If the cap falls off, Garrett—lick the sonuvabitch first … then jam it down on the nipple! Spit on it first, boy!”
Then their voices were drowned out in an almost concerted volley as the wave of warriors swooped right, bearing along the east side of the corral, screaming, screeching, blowing eagle-wingbone whistles, waving shields and lances, some firing bows and rifles, hanging off the sides of their wide-eyed ponies, feathers streaming from black hair and manes alike, feathers and stuffed birds knotted and colored mud smeared in the tied-up tails of the war ponies. Every one of those two thousand hooves kicking up clods and a streaming cascade of dust until there hung a fine, yellow gauze filtering the harsh white light streaming out of the pale sky overhead.
Because an eroded coulee made a sharp drop-off not far from the north side of the corral, the warriors circled sharply about, riding back upon themselves along both the east and west sides of the enclosure. Upon reaching the southern wall of wagon-boxes, the warriors again turned back on themselves and made another sally along the flame-spitting walls of the white man’s corral.
Red Cloud's Revenge Page 34