Reap the Whirlwind (24 page)

Grouard rubbed his aching hands, one in the other, as he quietly complained, “I ain’t ever shaked so many hands in one place at one time.”

“Crow always been a tribe enjoys to shake hands,” Pourier replied.

“I’ll say! For the three goddamned hours it took me to shake hands with all six hundred of them,” Frank grumped. “Why—soon as we get back, we’ll just have to tell Crook all about our great American handshaking tournament!”

From their camp on Clear Creek, it was a short sixteen-mile march past Lake DeSmet to the forks of Piney Creek, where ten summers before Colonel Henry B. Carrington began construction on his fabled post. Just past midday on 5 June, Crook’s Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition made camp on the extensive bottomland just east of the
plateau where stood the ruins of Fort Phil Kearny. Soldiers and civilians moved out in hunting parties to make meat for supper. As the afternoon wore on, the hunters returned, bringing not only buffalo and elk back for the mess fires, but also beaver and antelope, pintailed grouse and sickle-billed curlew. Hundreds of fires winked into life, and the men gladly celebrated the bountiful harvest here in the land of ghosts. Not to be outdone, Crook himself brought down a cow elk.

That Monday became one of bittersweet remembrance for Seamus Donegan.

As the shadows lengthened, stretching down from Cloud Peak, the Irishman walked alone among the charred stumps of what had been the tall stockade, kicking at the fractured remnants in what remained of the brickyard, then followed what had once been the neat, graveled walks, now overgrown and nearly lost among the tall grass, coming at last to that scarred ground where the frozen, distorted, and mutilated bodies of the Fetterman dead had been consigned dust to dust once more.

Ten years of miles and faces swam once more before him that evening as his brimming eyes looked yonder to the firm height of Pilot Knob, where the infantry pickets would signal the approach of a supply train, reinforcements, or the attack on a wood train. It was there on the Knob, the place Carrington selected for the post cemetery, they had buried those who gave their lives in twos and threes from that July of ’66 into the fall and early winter.

But it was here, right where Seamus now stood, in a fifty-foot-long trench below his dusty boots, that Carrington had buried the eighty who had fallen with Fetterman’s fateful march over Lodge Trail Ridge. After all, Fort Phil Kearny was under siege. They had little choice but to bury their dead among those still living.

Turning, Seamus found the grassy slope of the far ridge turning a deep purple in the fading light. So different now in the first days of summer than it had been a decade ago, deep in the jaws of winter come to visit the northern plains. That brutal ride over Lodge Trail Ridge, to reach the battle site with the emotionally crippled soldier Ten Eyck. Discovering Jennifer Wheatley’s husband in that tiny knot
of fighting men he found at the bottom of massacre hill, those few who had done the greatest damage: sixty or more puddles of frozen blood he had counted around that small cluster of low rocks where the white men, civilian and a few old files, had gathered at the last, determined to sell their lives at a very high cost to the screeching red enemy.

“The Lakota talk proudly about that fight,” Frank Grouard had told Seamus while they scouted together during Crook’s March campaign to the Powder River. “In their winter count they call it the ‘Winter of the Hundred in the Hand.’”

“A great battle they say, eh?”

“Yes. But not an easy victory,” Grouard had replied. “In my time with the Lakota, I have heard them admit just how bad they were hurt in the fight. Many deaths.”

“How many?”

“More’n a hundred all told. Not all killed time of the fight. Most of the wounded didn’t make it through the cold. There was times they would talk about just how many of the Sioux and Cheyenne were killed by other Sioux and Cheyenne in the rain of arrows they were firing at the soldiers from both sides of the ridge.”

“Caught in their own cross fire, eh?”

“Bound to be a lot in a close, dirty fight like that.”

“Was their spirit worked up good?”

“They had blood in their eyes, Seamus.”

Ah, sweet Jennifer Wheatley—Donegan thought now as he turned back to look over the ruins of the fort.

A road not taken …

Seamus squeezed off the painful reverie, just as he squeezed against the stinging mist threatening his eyes, scuffing off across the grass and gravel, cinders and charred earth, down the short slope to the east and onto the level tongue of bottomland between the Big and Little Pineys. He needed to find a friend, a smiling face, and a hot cup of coffee.

“The general sent Johnny Bourke to fetch you up. Wants to see you,” Dick Closter announced as the Irishman strode into the packers’ camp. “Right away.”

“Crook?”

Closter looked at the others gathered around the fire. “Now ain’t that just like a dense-headed mick for you?” He gazed back at Donegan, grinning. “What other general you think we brought along with us, Seamus?”

6-7 June 1876

“I
t’s as simple as following a creek down to its forks,
Mr. Donegan,” George Crook told the Irishman.

“Sounds to me you’ve made your mind up, General.”

It was clear as summer sun the general had indeed set his mind on it the evening before, even prior to Seamus showing up to discuss the matter at his headquarters tent. Crook informed Donegan of his plans to send the Irishman on ahead of the column in the morning, on to the forks of Goose Creek with Captain Henry Noyes and ten troopers from I Company, Second Cavalry. Once there, Seamus was to help Noyes in scouting the immediate countryside for the most ideal location, where Crook would establish his base camp. The general declared he could be assured of plenty of water at the forks—no doubt of that. But Noyes and Donegan had to think of hard and extended use of pasture. And there would be the necessity of adequate firewood across the weeks Crook’s campaign might take. All the while, Russell’s wagon train and some of the infantry had to stay put, as the cavalry went in search of enemy villages.

“So you’re the man I’ve picked to guide Captain Noyes in selecting that site for my base camp,” Crook was reminding him again the next morning at sunup over coffee
and some last-minute instructions for their rendezvous. “Now, you go do that. I think I can lead this column to meet you myself.”

“Ain’t far—just a little over eight miles, General,” Seamus repeated, then glanced at Noyes, who appeared a little anxious to depart at the head of his ten-man detail.

“We’ll be there shortly past noon. So, off with you. Good hunting, Major!” Crook sang out, addressing Noyes by his brevet rank.

With the thick broom bristle of a mustache upturned at the corners of his mouth, the captain called back, “You mean—good fishing, sir!”

Touching the brim of his hat with his fingers, Donegan tossed his empty cup to John Bourke and took up the reins to the piebald gelding. Settling the Henry over his thighs in front of him, Donegan led the eleven soldiers out, pointing his nose north by east, crossing the Piney and climbing the first slope out of Carrington’s valley, moving along the rutted remnants of John Bozeman’s Road to Montana Territory.

“This where Fetterman made his stand?” Noyes asked a few minutes later as they reached the far crest of Lodge Trail Ridge, completely out of sight of the old fort ruins as well as Crook’s expedition column.

Seamus nodded, fighting down the stinging gall of the remembrance of this snow-blown ridge, bodies stripped and hacked, bloodied and dismembered, disemboweled and desecrated. Frozen. What few eyeballs remained in the hammered skulls staring at the gray unforgiving sky overhead. He had never seen anything like it before that cold December day. But in the nine and a half years since, Seamus Donegan had seen so much, much more.

“Where was Grummond’s cavalry when they were jumped?”

Pointing down the slope, Seamus led them on. “Most of ’em were swallowed up about halfway down the hill, Cap’n.”

“And the two civilians you mentioned at Crook’s fire last night?”

“They were in the van—with a handful of some steady-handed veterans,” he said, pointing to the grouping of low
rocks near the bottom of the slope. “They never turned and tried to flee.”

“Short work of them, I imagine.”

The cut of his mouth and how the officer formed his words made it plain to Donegan that Noyes was a man much too taken with himself.

“No, Cap’n,” Seamus answered. “I’d bet that little bunch was the first to be attacked … but likely the last to be overrun.”

Noyes nodded and swallowed as he squinted back up the extent of the infamous ridge, this day drenched in bright summer light. “God bless ’em. Every one.”

Donegan thought of crossing himself, knowing it would make the spirit of his mother proud. Here in this hard land, cast among the sort of dark-skinned peoples he thought pagan, the white man was more than ready to bring his own superstitions to bear on these primitives. So he did not make the sign as he once would have, and hoped his mother would understand a firstborn son who long ago had ceased to practice his catechism.

“Hold on, Irishman,” Noyes called out minutes later as the scout urged his horse up the long slope to the west.

Seamus reined about and came back, again struck by the paleness of the soldier’s skin, almost like a quality-folk bed sheet, fresh washed and line dried. “Cap’n?”

The West Point graduate pointed off to the north. Commissioned as part of the class of ’61, Noyes fought with gallantry through the Civil War, breveted for meritorious service at Brandy Station, Virginia, and again at the capture of Selma, Alabama. “Aren’t you taking us off in the wrong direction, Donegan?”

Down where Noyes was pointing, the creek drainage stood out plain as a green-bottle horsefly caught in liniment, with its leafy cottonwoods bordering the wandering path taken by the water course. Easy for most men to make just that sort of mistake.

“No, Cap’n. I ain’t taking you off wrong. I’ve been in this country since ’66. That’s why Crook asked me to guide you, wasn’t it?”

His pale skin flared red with anger. “What’s that—if not what we should follow to the forks of Goose Creek?”

“Prairie Dog Creek, Cap’n Noyes.”

“And the forks?”

“Got to go west a bit here. We’ll reach Little Goose other side of this ridge. That’s the one we follow right down to the forks.”

“Then we’ll be the first to find the best fishing holes, men—before the rest of the column comes up!” Noyes called back to his column of twos.

The ten cheered, some of them slapping their bedrolls where they carried their fishing equipment.

These sojurs are out on a lark, Donegan brooded to himself. Here we are, ready to stick our foot right into Crazy Horse’s bear trap—and all they’re thinking of is going on a fishing trip!

John Bourke had watched the clouds roll in off the peaks to the west. Now they were descending, roiling, turning blacker overhead as the wind picked up. Pretty clear the sky had them in for a hammering.

But that wasn’t their only worry. The general had been adamant about taking what he believed to be the Bozeman Trail to descend Lodge Trail Ridge. But in following the meandering green path bordered by leafy cottonwoods and willow, Crook instead had mistakenly led his column all of eighteen miles, down Prairie Dog Creek right into some torturous country of scraggy, wildly crimson hills, pocked with thousands of prairie-dog towns, where the noisy animals chirked their protests at the passing soldiers and civilians.

And when the freezing, wind-driven rain finally tumbled over them, the expedition was much closer to the Tongue River than it was to the forks of Goose Creek.

“Lieutenant!”

“General?” Bourke replied as he brought his mount to a halt beside Crook’s, rain sluicing down the brims of their hats.

Both braids of his red beard hung soppy in their twine against his old wool overcoat. He growled his order. “Pass the command we’ll bivouac here.”

With a quick, disapproving glance at the boggy bottomland here along the Prairie Dog, Bourke figured the
general was as disgusted as any of them. The lieutenant swatted at a mosquito. There were a hell of a lot of the annoying bastards out for as hard as it was raining. “Yes, sir.”

“We’ll sort out what I did wrong in the morning, John,” Crook said quickly, softly. Almost apologetically.

“It’s all right, sir.”

Crook shook his head, flinging rain from mustache, beard, and hat. “No. It isn’t. But I’ll find out what I did wrong when this blasted storm no longer has us tied down. Get the men under shelter and pass along my orders to put out double pickets and a running guard.”

“Good idea, General. This is precisely the kind of weather the enemy likes when it comes horse raiding.”

“Just be sure the company commanders understand their men are to be doubly watchful tonight.”

“Understood, sir.”

“And John—this march has started telling on some of the men,” Crook said, the despair creasing all the more deeply those lines etching the flesh at the corners of his eyes. “Tell the company commanders to put their sick in the wagons if there’s no more room in the ambulances. Tell them I plan to make for the Tongue River in the morning.”