Reap the Whirlwind (22 page)

“Now, who you suppose robbed us of the red bastard’s body?” asked one of the soldiers.

“The Injuns?”

As a group, they turned to gaze at Donegan. He shrugged. “Sioux wouldn’t do it.”

“Don’t make no matter,” another soldier commented. “We was sent after firewood—and firewood we got right here. C’mon, boys. Let’s take these timbers down for our mess fire.”

As the soldiers slashed the rawhide thongs binding the
scaffold legs to the cross-members, Finerty went to examine the dried buffalo hide. Spilling from it were two blue blankets with red edging. Inside, the correspondent found a vest trimmed in beadwork, a single moccasin, a colorful shawl along with a quantity of bound horsehair.

“What you make of this, Irishman?” Finerty asked as he carefully picked up the edge of a piece of colorful cloth, its pattern still bright.

“Looks to be a plaid to me,” Donegan replied, using the Celtic pronunciation:
played.

“Why would one of these red bastards have a piece of a Scottish highland tartan in his burial robes?”

“Perhaps he took a shine to it, so bought it off some trader. Makes a pretty breechcloth, don’t it?”

“Likely the bastard stole it from some settler, some traveler waylaid on his way west far from the protection of civilization.”

Seamus turned away to watch the soldiers descend the bluff, dragging their kindling behind them. Finerty came up and stopped beside the scout.

“Don’t give it another thought, Seamus,” he said. “You saw how the damned savages desecrated the graves of our dead back at Reno, didn’t you? Seems right and fitting that those soldiers returned the honor here.”

“There wasn’t no body left for them to tear down,” Donegan reminded, then moved away, heading down the slope toward the camp on Clear Creek.

That evening Dick Closter boiled a delicious soup from three hapless tortoises he had captured along the streambank. It proved to be something Seamus had never before tasted, but found quite delicious.

“Not quite as tasty as my Maryland terrapin back to home,” Closter said as they poured themselves some coffee after supper, stars winking into view one by one against the darkening canopy overhead.

“Seamus!”

“That sounds like Johnny Bourke,” Closter declared.

The lieutenant scooted into the firelight. “General wants you come and talk to some fellas who wandered into camp just now.”

“The pickets snagged some hostiles sneaking up on camp?”

Bourke shook his head. “These are white men.”

At the headquarters fire sat two bearded, middle-aged men in trail-worn clothing. Nearby a pair of soldiers held the reins of their two weary horses.

“Donegan! Good,” Crook called out as Bourke and the Irishman approached. “Here, come sit and talk with these fellas about the country hereabouts.”

As Seamus settled at the headquarters fire, he introduced himself and set about talking with the two strangers, learning they were miners come down from Montana with a party of sixty-five gold-seekers that had made their way to the Black Hills before they deemed it prudent to return to the diggings in the Big Sky country.

“Things getting a mite too hot up there in the Hills,” one of the miners complained.

“Not a week goes by but the Sioux don’t rub out more’n one miner,” the second added.

“The Injuns up by Last Chance are damned sight more sociable,” the first declared.

The rest of the Montana party was a day behind, using this trail-hardened pair as advance scouts to blaze a road and locate campsites on their trek back to Montana.

He gleaned what he could of the precautions the miners’ party was taking as they pressed toward Montana: rifle pits dug at each night’s camp, a military rotation of the guard, as well as putting out some flankers for each day’s march to prevent against surprise or ambush by any of the wandering war parties. With more and more frequency, the two said, they were coming across unshod pony tracks crisscrossing the country they ventured through with understandable caution. Most of the miners were veterans, Seamus had learned—men accustomed to what it took to move through an enemy’s territory.

Eventually Seamus’s curiosity could last no longer, and he asked, “Either of you know a fella by the name of Marr? Colonel Sam Marr?”

“You serve with him in the war?” asked one of the two miners.

“So you do know him?”

The pair looked at one another quickly. Then both shook their heads.

“No,” said the one who had asked the question. “Just figured it was someone you served with, since you called him colonel.”

That first flush of excitement that had momentarily filled Seamus rushed out of him now the way a fall from a horse would knock the wind out of a man.

“You might say we served together, but not in the war,” Donegan explained. “Spent time fighting Injins up north on the Bozeman Road.”

“You lived to tell your stories of it?” the second miner asked. “But you’re back tempting your fortune and these goddamned savages to lift your hair again?”

Donegan laughed, then said, “It does sound like I’ve got some of the sense of a fool, don’t it?”

A pair of the mounted vedettes moved slowly past on the edge of camp a few yards off. They were hailed in passing by the stationary pickets posted around the entire perimeter of Crook’s army. The general was not about to allow any hostile raiding party to come in and run off the beef herd or any of his mules and horses as the enemy had done back in March.

“Well, fellas—we best be pushing on,” one of the miners said as he stood.

They made their farewells to Crook and his staff, then shook hands with the Irishman.

“Maybe we’ll run onto you up at Last Chance Gulch some time soon,” the second miner said as he gripped Donegan’s hand.

“I plan on getting there as soon as I can.”

“Why not throw in with us now?” asked the first. “We could use a good trail guide like you. Besides, you go with us, you won’t have to go looking for Injuns to fight like these soldiers always do.”

“I’d like to, but I can’t. Got a wife to get north with me when I do. She’s down at Laramie for now.”

“A passel of women in Deadwood,” declared the first. “Not all of ’em whores either. Maybe you ought to take your wife there for the time being if you want to look for
gold. Shell have more woman company in Deadwood than she would up to Montana.”

With a shake of his head Seamus answered, “I’ll finish what I started, and keep my word to the general over there. That comes first before I go digging for my fortune.”

The two took up the reins to their weary horses and slipped back into the darkness, heading north by east.

A while later Colonel William B. Royall audibly growled and slammed his tin cup down on the stump where he roosted. “Dammit! Why in the devil didn’t I think of it sooner, General?”

Crook asked, “Think of what?”

“Those two!” Royall leapt to his feet. “That pair masquerading as miners—why, they’re no more than squaw men!”

“Squaw men?” asked Azor Nickerson.

“White men who live with Injun wives, in the Injun camps,” Captain Guy V. Henry explained.

“You think those two were squaw men, Colonel?” Donegan asked in disbelief.

Royall nodded emphatically. “Damn right I do, Irishman.”

“I had a funny feeling about them myself,” agreed infantry captain Andrew Burt.

“They’re probably on their way back to one of their camps right now,” said Captain William H. Andrews of the Third Cavalry, “taking news of our troop strength and readiness with them.”

“Shit,” Seamus mumbled, wagging his head in baffled wonder. “You sojurs need some rest. Every one of you is seeing bogeymen everywhere you look.”

“Mark my words, Irishman,” Royall declared, “those two aren’t miners at all.”

“And if they aren’t?”

“If I’m proved wrong, then I’ll buy the brandy for you when we get back to Fetterman, Mr. Donegan.”

“You make it whiskey—and you’ve got a wager.”

“Of course! Anything at all,” Royall cheered. “But just remember—you’ll be filling my cup again and again with brandy, because there’s not a doubt those two were sneaking,
no-good squaw men. The lowest life form on the Indian frontier.”

The soldiers were coming.

It was only a matter of time before they would try to attack the villages. Once more the white man would be a fool.

For over twenty suns the Crazy Horse people had been migrating away from Tongue River, following the Shahiyena, who led the growing procession ever closer to the Elk River, where scouts had spotted soldiers coming out of the land of the Crow. Crazy Horse and the war chiefs from the other bands kept their wolves coming and going every day now. Even when the camp had stopped for three suns to shoot the herd of buffalo found on the divide after crossing over to the west, into the valley of Rosebud Creek.

Three days later the encampment sent small war parties to harass the soldiers marching east along the Elk River—just to try the white man’s resolve and strength. The Horse was reassured when the soldiers did not attempt to follow any of these small raiding parties.
^*

As a consequence of those forays, the great encampment lazily wandered a little farther up the Rosebud, not in any hurry. For three more suns they stayed put until the grass was eaten and the immense pony herds demanded another move.

“The soldiers are using People of the Raven for their eyes and ears, Crazy Horse,” said White Cow Bull as he came up and took a seat in the sun.

Back in the shade of White Bull’s lodge, Crazy Horse nodded in greeting to his warrior friend.

“The Raven People saw our encampment this morning,” announced He Dog. “Some of them, along with a few white men.”

“All were dressed in soldier coats,” added White Cow Bull. “But we knew the Raven People from the way they wore their hair and their leggings. The moccasins they had
on with long, trailing fringes. Only a handful were white men.”

“And the army hasn’t come to attack us?” Crazy Horse asked with a smile. “My friends, if those scouts did indeed look over all these hillsides where our pony herds graze, if they did see how long it would take to ride down this riverbank from the Shahiyena camp on the south to where Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa pitch their lodges on the north—then surely the soldiers will not even begin to consider charging down on us.”

Unafraid, even unconcerned for the great encampment’s safety, the Council of Seven Fires elected two days later to move a little farther up the Rosebud to Teat Butte—a place the Lakota bands and Shahiyena had been coming to camp for many generations. A place that always reminded Crazy Horse of Black Shawl’s breast. How he had so enjoyed coupling with her.

But it had not always been so. Days gone in the past Crazy Horse had caused much pain among his people by stealing Black Buffalo Woman from No Water, her husband. Much, much bad blood among the Oglalla. Those were days of long ago, gone like spring snow-melt flowing away and never again to be cupped in his palms. Better to forget those days, those feelings and that passion. Better to forget that woman. Far better now for him to gaze at the snow gathered on the distant mountains, and know there would be more cold, clear snow-melt in the many summers yet left him.

After only one night spent at Teat Butte, the encampment moved the following morning another short march to Green Leaf Creek. Two days later the sky turned a sickly blue-and-purplish gray, like an ugly bruise lying over the land. It snowed, the wind whipping across the prairie and down through the narrow coulees as everyone withdrew to the warmth of their lodges and the scouts hurried back from watching the soldiers on Elk River.

That morning after the sudden snowfall, the Shahiyena sent out a few small scouting parties to the south, with the idea that they would ascend Rosebud Creek and probe toward the country where the soldiers had appeared in the Snow-Blind Moon to attack Two Moon’s and Old Bear’s
camp on the Powder. Never again, the Shahiyena had vowed, would they be surprised by soldiers marching out of the south.

Then in the first days of Wipazuka Waste Wi, the Moon of Ripening Berries, Sitting Bull and some of the other headmen of the Hunkpapa had come to Crazy Horse’s camp to tell the Hunkpatila leader that they had selected a special site one more day’s march up the Rosebud.

“Tomorrow we will take this great encampment to the place where we will hold our annual dance to the sun, there to give worship to the Life-Giver,” Sitting Bull explained to Crazy Horse.

“Each year you dance. Will you again this summer?” he asked the Hunkpapa medicine man.

“No,” Sitting Bull answered. “But I plan to sacrifice my flesh at the bottom of the sacred pole. It is what I have been instructed by my vision helpers I must do. Tomorrow, when we arrive, I begin to prepare for my dream.”

The Horse asked, “You have been told you would have another dream?”

“Yes,” Sitting Bull answered solemnly. “I was instructed to have the sun dance at this special place. There I am told to take the fifty pieces of flesh from each arm as I sit beneath the sacred pole. Then I will sleep and be given my dream.”

“And this dream of yours?” White Bull inquired.

Sitting Bull gazed at the other Lakota leaders gathered in the shade of the blanket bower where a summer breeze rustled the leafy cottonwood branches. Then he answered, as his eyes came to rest on the greatest Lakota war chief of all—Crazy Horse.

“My spirit helpers have told me this will be the most sacred dream of my life. They tell me … this is to be the most important dream of all time for all my people.”

5-6 June 1876