Reap the Whirlwind (21 page)

At dusk they rode out again. But near dawn the next morning as they were crossing Clear Creek, the scouts surprised a grizzly bear at its breakfast in the willows. The great bear rose up on its hind legs, spooked and roaring fiercely before it dropped to all fours and charged their horses. As fast as a grizzly could move, there was no sense in trying to outrun the beast. Instead, there was one choice left the half-breeds. Only after more than twenty shots from their carbines did they drop the big silvertip.

With hearts hammering the half-breeds kicked their horses into motion, knowing full well they had to clear that stretch of country before they might be discovered. Minutes later as they climbed the north slope of the Clear Creek valley, they spotted a smudge of smoke against the sunrise. From the top of the ridge they looked down into the next narrow valley. There to the north, in the middle of the path they were taking, stood a cluster of lodges. What
tribe, none of them knew for sure. But they could hazard an educated guess.

“This close to the old Piney Fort—I’ll bet it’s Lakota,” Bat whispered.

Reshaw nodded.

“Let’s make tracks,” Grouard told them, agreeing.

He took them hard to the west, straight up Clear Creek into the foothills of the Big Horns. Turning north to push through the dark, cool shadows of the timbered slopes, they rode down the sun, reaching the waters of Piney Creek just as twilight deepened. They figured they could afford to ride down onto the prairie a few miles, perhaps make camp and get some rest after staying their saddles for more than a day.

But as they left the timbered slopes, they bumped right into a second hunting village and were forced to push on, riding the moon up and down again before reaching Little Goose Creek as the sky brightened the next morning. Here they finally took a chance on resting the horses, and while two men grabbed a short nap, one of their number kept his ears and eyes awake until all had slept a little in turn. By late morning the three moved out once more.

That day they ran across two more small hunting camps, each with a good number of lodges erected against the sky. It ate up a lot of valuable time dodging and backtracking all that day and into the night. By moonrise the three reached Twin Creek and decided to rest until false dawn, when there would be enough light to move on safely.

“I’ll take first watch,” Frank told the others.

“All right, you wake me in three hours. I’ll take second watch,” Bat said quietly as he lay down on the warmth of the horse blanket his animal had worn for all those many miles. Then he pulled a thick Indian blanket over his head.

Both Pourier and Reshaw were snoring before Frank had dragged out his small canteen and pulled some of the jerky from a bag he kept lashed to the back of his saddle. Like that he sat, eating and listening to the night, watching the moon rise amid the slow, galvanic whirl of stars overhead. While the water eventually cut the dust and fear that
coated his throat, the jerky landed like horse droppings in his belly gone too long without food.

But they were getting closer. Drawing near to the land of the Crow. And once there in the Apsaalooke villages, Frank promised himself a big steak, cooked just enough to braise the outside, with its middle a juicy pink. It was a promise to himself he meant to keep.

“Here they sleep, far from home. Far from civilization,” John Finerty said morosely.

Seamus turned where he stood, watching the newsman come up in the dim, predawn light of that early morning. Finerty took the hat from his head and scratched his scalp, almost self-consciously, like a former altar boy finding himself back in church.

Donegan only nodded.

“You know any of them?” asked the correspondent.

“No. Up at Phil Kearny—I knew some of those men,” he answered quietly, his voice prayerful here among the markers and headstones he had labored over in the predawn chill, setting them aright, figuring he could come here before anyone else would notice he was gone from the breakfast fires. First, coffee with the general, then, as the camp came to life, the Irishman had come here to listen to the ghosts before he led Crook’s column into enemy country.

“Bourke said I might find you here,” Finerty explained. “This isn’t a walk a man should make in the dark, Seamus.” And he flung an arm back to indicate the two hundred yards of dark prairie to the ruins of old Fort Reno.

“Sun’s coming up soon. We’ll be riding out, John.”

One by one Donegan had counted them when he reached the cemetery earlier, moving slowly among their resting places: a single officer, and thirty-five soldiers, here beneath the thin topsoil that was the blanket of this unforgiving land, these fighting men left behind to take their final slumber. In the middle of this hallowed ground a memorial had been raised by their fellow soldiers serving at this post on the Powder River, but, like the individual headstone and markers, it had been torn down by the
Sioux as well. Seamus had done what he could to stack some of the cairn’s stones back in place, then leaned against the broken slab, where some of the few words were still clearly etched:

E
RECTED AS A
M
EMORIAL
OF
R
ESPECT TO
O
UR
C
OMRADES
IN
A
RMS
, K
ILLED IN
D
EFENSE

But the rest of it lay shattered, the remaining words returning to dust, as were the mortal remains of those who had fought to open this road to the Montana gold fields.

“Privates Murphy, Holt, Clure, Riley, Morner, and Lag-gin, killed May twenty-seventh, 1867,” Finerty read from a wooden slab he pieced together. “C. Slagle, Twenty-Seventh Infantry, killed thirty May, 1867.”

Donegan commented quietly, “The Sioux and Cheyenne had been making things hot all along the road north.”

“I heard you was up here ten years ago. Here at Reno?”

He wagged his head. “No. The northern post—C. F. Smith.”

“Where they had the Hayfield Fight?”
^*

“Where
we
had
our
fight in the hayfield. Lasted most of the day, John.” Seamus turned away, dusting his hands off on his canvas britches. “We’d better be getting back to camp. This column got nearly thirty miles to march today since Crook intends to make Crazy Woman crossing by nightfall.”

“Thirty miles? That’s pushing this outfit.”

“The general will do just that from here on out,” Donegan said. “He will force every last ounce of effort from the animals and his men. To get them into fighting trim by the time the cavalry strikes out on its own to go in search of the fight Crook so desperately wants with Crazy Horse.”

3-4 June 1876

C
rook needed those Crow warriors the half-breeds had
gone to fetch. Needed them in the worst way now that it looked as if the Shoshone weren’t coming to join in this war against their old enemies.

As Donegan had led them away from the north bank of the Powder River, he heard the order echo back down the long, long column of infantry, on down the ranks of cavalry plodding in advance of the wagon and mule trains.

“Uncover!”

As they approached the frost-covered ruins of that little cemetery, the soldiers obediently took their hats from their heads. Two by two by two they passed that toppled monument crimson-tinted to a blood glow in the sun’s first light.

“Eyes …
right!
”

In unison entire companies turned to gaze at the ravaged graves where their own had fallen almost a decade gone. Every one of Crook’s soldiers got a good look now at how the enemy had desecrated this final resting place of those left behind when Reno was abandoned.

This is a good thing, Donegan had thought. Just what Crook wants them to see. Needs them to feel. To kindle some smoldering hatred for the Sioux and Cheyenne and
what the enemy’s done to the graves, maybe even to the bodies.

Seamus gazed over that country awakening with spring, lulled into a reverie most of that first day as they pushed away from Fort Reno, moving the column along at a good pace just the way Crook wanted him to. The general was going to whip his expedition into shape come hell or high water. And it was up to the Irishman to set the grueling pace for this march all the way to the crossing at the Crazy Woman. They needed to reach that creek. It was there he knew they would find the best grass all the stock required. There too was likely to be the first water they could count on finding after leaving Reno behind. Something more than those muddy, scummy buffalo wallows they had been passing throughout that long day.

For most of that Saturday the great, the granite bulk of Cloud Peak beckoned them onward, ever on to the northwest with its lofty white mantle seeping downward into the seductive, purple coolness of the Big Horn Range. More and more tracks of the nomadic buffalo herds crossed and recrossed the old Montana Road, as well as more frequent sign of unshod pony hooves. Warriors on the prowl: either to make meat, or to keep an eye on the soldiers advancing ever farther into this jealously guarded hunting ground.

At midday a few columns of smoke were sighted off to the northeast. Crook dispatched a company of cavalry to investigate each one. Each time the soldiers returned not having discovered any evidence of hostiles. Nonetheless, the general changed the order of the march and put Royall’s second in command, Major Andrew W. Evans, out in the van with Lieutenant Reynolds’s F Company of the Third Cavalry. Major Henry Noyes was sent to protect the rear with his I Company of the Second Cavalry. From here on out, Crook understood, the enemy could afford to be most unpredictable. That evening the general ordered the posting of extra pickets as the sun sank on their camp beside the cold, clear-flowing creek called the Crazy Woman Fork. As weary as the men were from their long, dry, and dusty march, Crook had no desire to be surprised at this legendary crossing.

“Damn near the whole day as I’ve heard others tell the
story, Donegan,”
^*
Crook declared that night as they were discussing the trail the general would take on the morrow.

“And on past sundown into the night. Black as pitch when Jim Bridger and that cavalry patrol he was leading came onto us in the dark.”

The general held out his coffee cup, and an orderly immediately moved forward to refill it as he said, “And scared away the Sioux waiting to finish you off with the next sunrise.”

“Then, you heard the story.”

“Most complete: with Reverend White’s daring escape to carry word of the fight all the way back to Reno,” Crook said with no little wonder. “Thirty goddamned miles to ride—alone—through God only knew how many warriors. Now that’s bravery.”

“And a fine-blooded racehorse under him too. Sometimes, General—bravery is nothing more than living to tell the tale.”

There were no bugles blaring reveille in the chill darkness that next morning. Instead, Crook had ordered all trumpets put away now that they were inching deeper and deeper into enemy country. All orders were to be passed along through the chain of command.

After that long stretch of the day before, theirs was a short march this Sunday, something on the order of twenty miles. Along the translucent waters of Clear Creek the soldiers pitched their camp, and many tried their hand at hooking some brook trout from the wide, shallow flow of snow-melt gurgling over its rocky bed. It didn’t take long before a few of the soldiers devised an even easier way to catch their limit: a pistol was fired into the thick of the wary trout, the concussion stunning several fish, which would float to the surface where the men scooped them up by hand and flung their wriggling catch to the bank.

After exploring the country for a few miles to the north, Donegan returned to camp and was dragging the saddle from the back of his gelding as John Finerty hurried up, excitedly pointing to a bluff across the stream.

“Ho, Irishman! You’re an experienced plainsman—by God, you ought to be able to tell me just what in the name of the Virgin Mary is that?”

Seamus glanced at the hillside, answered with a shrug, then strode away to drop the saddle beside his bedroll beneath the overhanging branches of the cottonwood.

“Well?” Finerty demanded.

“A burial scaffold.”

“Sioux?”

Donegan shrugged again. “Who knows? But in this country it likely is Sioux.”

“Bloody fantastic!” Finerty gushed. “Let’s go have us a look, what say?”

They reached the top of the low bluff accompanied by a dozen soldiers who apparently spotted the scaffold about the time Finerty and Seamus crossed the stream.

“Well, Sam—what the hell is that?” one of the infantrymen asked.

“That? Oh, that’s the layout of some damned dead Injun,” his companion answered.

“Let’s pull it down!” cried another.

“Tear the son of a bitch out by its roots!” was the unanimous echo.

As the soldiers of the Ninth Infantry put their shoulders to the task against the four supporting poles, Donegan explained the construction of the burial scaffold to the wide-eyed newspaperman. It didn’t take much muscle before an empty buffalo robe lashed with strips of green rawhide tumbled from its six-foot-high perch to the raucous cheers of the soldiers, who quickly grew disappointed when they kicked open the dusty hide and discovered it empty.