Reap the Whirlwind (33 page)

U
nlike most of the other tribes on the Plains and in the
Rocky Mountains, there were no moons among Luishaw’s Shoshone. Only the cycle of the four seasons. Now in spring as the snow slowly began to disappear from the high peaks of the Wind River range, he realized why the old ones lost back in time had given this season its mystical name.

Which made him remember the season yet to come. A season made for fighting.

It had been two years this summer since he had last gone into battle against an enemy village. While he had gone to fight a skirmish now and then, it had been a long time since Luishaw had enjoyed the danger, the thrill, of fighting old enemies.

Back to the year called Seventy-Four by the white man, Luishaw’s Wind River Shoshone had tired of the frequent raids on their pony herds and outlying villages by the Arapaho, who repeatedly slipped over the Big Horn Mountains from the east to do their evil. Through that spring and into the early summer, the enemy had come boldly into the Basin to strike, but always fled quickly before the soldiers from Camp Brown could catch them, even to bring the enemy to fight.

But then in the summer of Seventy-Four two of Washakie’s sons discovered where the Arapaho had camped in the foothills of the Big Horns. They returned to the reservation to tell Agent James Irwin and the commanding officer at Camp Brown, Captain A. E. Bates, of their discovery. Without delay the white men agreed to crush the arrogant Arapaho raiders once and for all.

To this day Luishaw was still very proud of the part his Shoshone played in the fight that followed. For all those winters left him, the war chief would repeat again and again the story of the time they had the Arapaho in their grip, the time the army allowed the enemy to escape.

Riding out at the head of 125 warriors who wanted to join Bates’s soldiers as well as the agency surgeon, Thomas Magee, Luishaw shared joint command of the warriors with the squaw man named Cosgrove. As they neared the foothills, the forward scouts spotted a column of dust rising some fourteen miles distant. The scouts put their ponies to the gallop only to discover that the Arapaho were fleeing. In returning to the column, the scouts brought with them articles of clothing the enemy had abandoned in their hasty retreat. Hungry for this long-awaited victory, the Shoshone prodded the soldiers to hurry their march.

Instead, Bates held a council with his officers while Luishaw and Cosgrove fumed. The enemy would be far, far away by the time the soldiers were ready to resume their march.

Then the scouts had returned a second time, their weary ponies in a lather, reporting that the Arapaho village was taking refuge in a narrow gorge a short distance away. Plans were laid, Bates stating he would take his soldiers on a frontal assault on the village while the Shoshone were to go over the nearby hill and down the bluff to cut off the enemy’s route of escape.

But Norkuk, the tribe’s best interpreter, did not fully understand the excitable captain’s anxious, Gatling-gun manner of speech.

Instead of going ahead to take up a position that would seal off the enemy’s escape, the Shoshone followed the soldiers into the village.

While 112 lodges were eventually captured, the soldiers
did not easily drive the enemy from the gorge. One of the Shoshone, Peaquite, slashed his way into the hottest part of the battle, where he received a fatal belly wound. With what little time he knew he had left, the warrior drove his coup stick in the ground, then lashed his ankle to it as he repeatedly sang his death song.

Another courageous warrior, Aguina, was shot through the lower arm, the ball exiting from his palm to cut off his middle finger. Ever since that day, he showed that missing finger to one and all, always talking about what total victory the Bates Battle should have been for his people.

As the fight raged on, the Arapaho who had been driven from their lodges eventually gained the slopes of the gorge above the village, where they began raining fire down on the soldiers and Shoshone alike. Atop the high bluffs some were even lighting signal fires to alert the Lakota and Shahiyena believed to be somewhere in the nearby country, come in kind to raid the Wind River Reservation.

Under such intense resistance, Bates ordered a retreat, afraid of defeat as their ammunition ran perilously low. For the soldiers, this had not been a battle to be proud of.

It was natural that Luishaw now hungered for the coming fight with Sitting Bull’s warriors. This was destined to be a fight of which legends were made.

For over fifty winters the Shoshone war chief had lived, and had survived many fights with these old enemies. Understandable was it that his prayer this morning as the Lone Star got his column underway to the Rosebud was that on this march the white men would not give up and retreat when victory was within their reach.

Luishaw prayed that this time the white men would stay in the fight until their battle was won, and their enemy beaten.

“I’m afraid Crook and the rest of his officers still don’t have idea one what hellcats these Sioux and Cheyenne can be when it comes to having their backs forced up against the wall,” Baptiste Pourier said to Seamus Donegan that morning of 16 June as the expedition began its march away from Goose Creek.

The Irishman nodded. “Even John Bourke. Seems every
last one of these sojurs figure the wild northern tribes will buckle under quick. They’re bragging that the Sioux and Cheyenne won’t be able to take a steady drubbing like the army had to give Cochise’s Apache before they gave up down in Arizona Territory.”

Bat smiled grimly. “The Sioux and their friends up here will give back ever’ bit that’s throwed their way. Stupid shame the army figures it handed Crazy Horse a bad blow last winter, enough a blow to weaken ’em.”

“But you see things through a different keyhole, don’t you, Bat?”

“Damned right I do, Seamus. The Crow tell me that the Sioux and their friends are as many as the blades of grass. So the way it lays out to me—these tribes we’re hunting never been stronger. We’re marching into a hornets’ nest.”

“These Crow and Shoshone see it the same way?”

Pourier shrugged. “I suppose. Maybe they’re coming along hoping the army will make good on all its promises to ’em. About like me. But we’ll just have to wait and see.” He shrugged, then continued. “They told Crook about the two dead horses they found up north.”

Seamus asked, “Dead horses?”

“Buzzards was circling over ’em. South of the Yellowstone. Old Crow said both had iron on their hooves. Been shot.”

“Anything of the riders?”

Bat shook his head. “Old Crow figures the horses was rode by a couple of couriers sent from the soldier chief on the Yellowstone to Crook with some message.”

“And that’s why the old chief’s warriors figure Crook ain’t heard from Gibbon or Terry.”

“Superstitious balder-shit, boys!” John Finerty swore in a gush as he brought his horse in alongside Donegan’s gelding. “Crow or Shoshone, Sioux or Cheyenne or even Apache—it don’t make a goddamn bit of difference! An Injun’s an Injun. Nothing’s changed in two hundred years, fellas. He’s still the same mysterious, untamable, barbaric, unreasonable, childish, superstitious, treacherous, thievish, murderous creature he’s been since Columbus first set eyes on him at San Salvador!”

“Damn you, Finerty!” Seamus growled, having watched
Pourier turn his horse aside and kick it into a lope without a word of farewell.

“To hell with that damned half-breed, then, Irishman. You’re a white man, and there’s nothing gonna change the fact that Big Bat won’t ever be as white as you and me. Doesn’t matter, Seamus. Whether friendly or hostile, the Indian is still a plunderer. He will first steal from his enemy. But if he can’t get enough of what he wants that way, he’ll steal from his friends.”

“You been lallygagging around with that Davenport fella too much,” Donegan grumbled, speaking of the correspondent for the New York
Herald.
“A born coward and redskin hater, both. Together that’s a bad combination.”

“Shit, Donegan. Wake up and admit there’s a new world on its way here to the frontier. The day of the noble redskin is over. Not even you can tell me that the Sioux aren’t the full-fledged descendants of Cain himself. They’re the veritable children of the devil!”

“I’ve heard enough of you myself. Think I’ll find some more suitable company.”

“Suit yourself, Irishman!” Finerty shouted at Donegan’s back. “Mark my words: goddamned Indians are all alike. No matter the tribe. Most of ’em greedy, greasy, gassy, lazy, and knavish!”

Seamus hurled his voice back over his shoulder, “Gonna find me a little better class of company, I might add!”

If he seemed grumpy that Friday morning, Seamus Donegan had more justification than the ignorant ramblings of the inebriated journalist from Chicago. What with the drumming and dancing, singing and chanting coming from both the Crow and Shoshone camps the night before, he had found it next to impossible to fall asleep.

When the scalp dances quieted just before first light, Donegan was belatedly discovering a bit of peace for himself as there arose a new assault on his senses. Groans and yelps, cries and wails of lamentation brought the Irishman upright as better than a dozen old shamans began their ride of the entire length of the camp, all but naked and garishly painted, waving their rattles and beating hand-drums,
shaking feathered wands decked with scalps, all calling at the top of their lungs for the Almighty to grant them victory, to award them many scalps and enemy ponies.

Stirred from their war lodges by the medicine men, both tribes began to eat their fill of army rations before they went about any final ministrations to their chosen war ponies, rolled up their blankets, and freshened their face paint.

Without benefit of bugle calls, the entire command was fully awake at four A.M. and in the darkness worked like an oiled machine to break camp for the trail. Tents were struck and packed away in Quartermaster Furey’s wagon corral. Those hundred or so foot soldiers who were staying behind were left the responsibility of putting out the mess fires where the cavalry and infantry, packers and miners, had guzzled swallows of scalding coffee and bolted down the choking dryness of their hard-bread before the order was sent up and down the company rows just past five A.M.

“Prepare to mount!”

As the sun peeked like a blood-red rose at the horizon far to the east across the rolling prairie, they heard that singular word that would carry them to the hostile villages.

“Mount!”

Atop his own black charger Crook instructed Grouard to lead the cavalry out in the van, fording Big Goose Creek,
^*
rain-swollen and muddy, then marching the column of fours just west of north for some six miles before fording the Tongue River, the Deje-agie of the Crow. As Cloud Peak and the other granite spires of the Big Horns slowly fell away behind them, the thirteen hundred ascended a ridge that paralleled the river, moving through a region where the waving buffalo grass brushed the bellies of the horses. Behind the ranks of cavalry plodded two mules: one laden with crates containing Surgeon Albert Hartsuff’s hospital supplies, the other packing pioneer tools. On their heels came Tom Moore’s packers and mule-train, among them the sixty-five civilians on their way to
the Montana gold fields. Bringing up the rear were the hapless but daring infantrymen turned mule-whackers. On the left flank rode the Shoshone battalion, half of them under the leadership of Tom Cosgrove, the others following Luishaw, each one carrying some sort of long wand replete with windblown streamers. Along the right of the column pranced the war ponies of the Crow, the tails and manes of each fine animal daubed with red or orange paint. The headmen and shamans of both tribes led them all, wailing and singing, continuing to beat their hand-drums to invoke total victory in the coming fight.

As the grass thinned and the country became less verdant on the divide that took them up from the Tongue and west over to the headwaters of the Rosebud, Crook had his command disperse across a much wider line of march so they would not raise so much dust, possibly alerting the hostiles they believed would be camped but a few miles to the north. Word had it that the general hoped to take his force within twenty miles of the village, then press upon it with a forced night march so that he could attack with full surprise at dawn.

On that march from Goose Creek the expedition’s engineering officer, Captain William Stanton, not only kept a written record of the compass readings of their line of march, but in addition had rigged an odometer to be drawn by one of Tom Moore’s mules. Because his two-wheeled gig had more the appearance of a peddlar’s wagon, loaded as it was with some of Stanton’s personal creature comforts, the soldiers who passed by the captain from time to time throughout the day’s march called out in great humor, making sport of the “drummer’s wares.”

“Mother’s pies! Get your mother’s pies!” one would bawl, eliciting laughter from every man in the immediate area.

Later another soldier would cry out, “A bottle of horse liniment! My kingdom for some horse liniment!”

Their spirits still high, the soldiers and civilians fully believed themselves to be invincible as they marched ever closer to the headwaters of the Rosebud. Even the air rising to their nostrils that morning came scented with the delicate perfume of prairie flowers like the blue aster and owl-clover,
as well as the purple gayfeather and yellow ladyslipper, in addition to the profusion of pale, pink rosebuds dotting the verdant meadows and slopes fed by the torrents of snow-melt.

Just past noon Crook ordered a halt on the divide of Spring Creek. Dispersing somewhat, the command sought to relax in what shade they could make themselves beneath the increasing warmth of the summer sun. Seamus watched Frank Grouard ride past, waving in greeting to the Irishman as the half-breed led out a dozen of the Crow auxiliaries, moving north by west with orders to scout a few miles into the distance, where the allies had spotted a small herd of buffalo blackening the narrow valley.

Donegan dragged his wide-brimmed hat down over his eyes and laced his fingers across his chest as he stretched out in the grass, hoping that evening Grouard would share some hump-ribs of any buffalo the half-breed brought down on his hunt.