Reap the Whirlwind (41 page)

He ran like a young jackrabbit.

In a matter of heartbeats the four Apsaalooke riders overtook the Lakota and began whipping him one at a time in turn with their rawhide quirts. As Plenty Coups sprinted up, one of the riders reached in and ripped that beautiful bonnet from the warrior’s head.

“It is mine now!” the happy man shouted to his companions. “See how great a prize it is!”

Only then did Plenty Coups see this was not an older warrior, proven in battle. With the bonnet taken from the man’s head … this was no man—why, this was no more than a youngster! No more than twenty winters could this young one count in his life!

The little jackrabbit cowered from the Apsaalooke horsemen who swirled about him, holding both hands over his head as if he expected the enemy to club him.

“You are only a boy!” growled another of the laughing horsemen as he wrenched the rifle from one of those hands held over the Lakota’s head.

How Plenty Coups had wanted that bonnet, coveted that rifle. And mostly the scalp of a great Lakota warrior.
But now they could all see the enemy was nothing more than a boy.

“Go! Run, boy!” Plenty Coups taunted the youth, parting some of his fellow warriors as he raced up to join in the humiliation.

“A child like you has no business wearing so great a bonnet as this!” another Crow snarled.

Although the Lakota youth did not know this foreign tongue, he nonetheless understood the shame heaped upon him by his enemy. Before their eyes he collapsed to his knees, his eyes filling with tears as he stammered, stuttered some unintelligible words, gazing up at his tormentors as he beseeched them, hands outstretched, pleading for mercy.

“We must go!” shouted one of those near Plenty Coups.

As one man all the warriors looked up—saw the wide front of Lakota horsemen racing down on them.

“They think we have killed this little gopher!” roared Plenty Coups.

He looked down at the youngster, yanking him off his knees with one hand and shoving him away, toward the onrushing horsemen.

“Go, my scared little jackrabbit. Tell Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull we spared your life. Remember we kill only great Lakota warriors. We Apsaalooke will never kill children. Go now! Back to the safety of your friends!”

“Come—Plenty Coups! Now!”

He turned to an old friend reining up behind him. The man’s nervous pony danced beside Plenty Coups, its rear flank knocking him backward.

Bull Snake hollered, “Get up behind me! We must race back to our side!”

With a smooth vault Plenty Coups pulled himself up behind Bull Snake as they burst away like teal-headed ducks spooked from the slick surface of a winter pond. Back toward Randall and Cosgrove, the Snakes and the thin line of their own tribesmen.

One of the riders ahead of Bull Snake had that beautiful bonnet out at the end of his arm, laughing and holding up his trophy for all to see.

Another shook that shiny repeating rifle overhead in triumph.

Now Plenty Coups felt a twinge of regret, some sadness at not having taken the enemy’s scalp.

He looked back over his shoulder at the youngster lunging away on foot, racing for the Lakota horsemen. Only then did Plenty Coups realize that he had won something perhaps even better than a man’s scalp.

He had robbed the young warrior of his pride, his manhood, his warrior spirit by letting him live, forced to awaken each day to his humiliation at the hands of the Apsaalooke.

Those three companies left to Anson Mills blunted every assault and charge by the enemy horsemen, turning them one by one by one. With every wave the hostiles flowed past the left flank as his cavalry plodded toward the second ridge. It was there the warriors turned to the west, melting into those rugged slopes that eventually rose to a conical hill.

But now there were no warriors east of the gap. Mills’s troopers had swept the country clear.

Dismounting his men at the second ridge, the captain gave orders to pursue the enemy fleeing west, his intention being to join with those three companies of infantry under Chambers and Noyes’s three troops of the Second Cavalry, who were spread out along the middle of the battleground now a half hour or more into the fight.

About an hour had come and gone since the Sioux and Cheyenne first made their frightening appearance at the top of the far hills where the allies held the enemy in check for that desperate thirty minutes until Mills got away and Van Vliet could charge south—so Crook’s men would not be completely surrounded.

In forcing the warriors into motion along the ridgetops, Mills’s charges had allowed those six companies of infantry and dismounted cavalry at the center to advance once more, taking some of the pressure off the center of the fight.

With the red horsemen pushed and harried on their own left flank by Mills’s battalion rushing in from the east,
as well as being harassed by Mills’s galling fire as his men drove the warriors back, back toward the ever-higher ground, the hostiles ultimately had to relinquish their withering fire on the troops pinned down in the middle of the battlefield. Noyes was the first to get his cavalrymen up and moving out on foot, although the fire from their carbines proved ineffective against the warriors from so great a range. Even with their Long Toms, Major Alexander Chambers’s infantry didn’t have much of an effect against the enemy.

“Keep pushing, boys! Keep pushing them!” Mills bellowed, urging his three companies forward as the enemy fell back.

That ineffectiveness of the infantry’s long-range weapons must have made the warriors turn in their retreat once they reached the highest ground below the sweeping slopes of the conical hill a mile west of the gap they had just fled. What bullets the soldiers were firing—for there was a deafening racket from the ridge below the Sioux and Cheyenne there atop the slopes—were falling harmlessly to the rear of the enemy warriors. Natural that the red men turned, taunted, and dug in as best they could at this new vantage point, returning fire on Noyes’s dismounted troopers, Chambers’s infantry, and Mills’s daring unhorsed horse soldiers.

Then for the moment that enemy gunfire slackened. The bullets landing in front of his battalion’s position appeared to wither away. If Captain Anson Mills didn’t know any better, it looked as if many of the hostiles were turning their attention to the west now.

Through the gunsmoke and the dust, he peered down the slope, straining to see back toward the bottomland near the creek. Now he caught sight of those three missing companies.

At the moment Mills had turned to lead away his six companies from the creek bottom to began his assault on the first ridge, Colonel William B. Royall had evidently commandeered Andrews’s I Company. There was no other explanation, for there was I Troop—down there with Royall.

“Damn him!” Mills grumbled under his breath, cursing his regimental commander. Without informing me!

Anson wondered if Crook knew….

Then he realized that Royall must have returned to the rear of his formation as Mills was pressing up the slope to that first ridge, come back to steal the other two companies—B and L.

Down by the Rosebud, Royall had all his cavalry troops mounted up, forming for their charge, four deep. Anson thought he recognized the colonel’s bay as it pranced smartly along that front, side-stepping as it jumped from time to time while bullets sang down the slope from the warrior positions.

As Royall ordered his battalion out, it appeared that the colonel was taking them far along the left flank now, off toward the west where Mills had seen Guy Henry already go, pushing far to the left and west rather than charging due north, directly into the face of the enemy. Perhaps Henry and Royall were going to attempt circling behind those warriors falling back to mass on the heights around that conical hill.

As much as he detested Royall for robbing his battalion of those three companies, Mills nonetheless had to admire the colonel grudgingly for what the man evidently had in mind. By taking his strike force west behind Guy Henry, Royall could support the thin line of the Crow and Shoshone spread out there on the immediate left of the packers and miners who were hunkered down just to the left of Chambers’s infantry, who for now were pinned down at the middle of the battlefield with Noyes’s dismounted Second Cavalry. And having themselves a very hot scrape of it.

What had every appearance of a stalemate could now be broken, Mills figured as he rose to a crouch and waved his men forward. If Guy Henry and William Royall succeeded. If …

And for the time being, Anson Mills would do what he could here on the east.

“C’mon, boys! Let’s show these red bastards they can’t pin us down here!”

Yes, the stalemate along more than a mile of battle-front
could indeed be broken—if the right push was made with that cavalry moving out behind Royall and Henry.

If—and only if—they didn’t get themselves swallowed, chewed up, and spit out first.

“
Y
ou don’t mind, I’ll ride with you, Major,” Seamus shouted into the bedlam at Captain Guy V. Henry.

The soldier looked the Irishman down, then up. “If you’re any good with the repeater and you’ll take orders—you’re welcome to ride along … Mr.—?”

“Donegan.”

“All right,” Henry said, his voice filled with exasperation as he surveyed what he had left of a battalion. “Now that Colonel Evans ordered those two companies of mine to go with Mills—I’ll gladly take any gun I can, Mr. Donegan. Crook wants me on the left, five hundred yards over there. To prevent the enemy from turning on our flank.”

As second in command of the Third Cavalry behind Royall, Major Andrew W. Evans had relayed the commanding general’s hurried orders in those first moments of the battle, carrying the bad news to Captain Henry: Evans was reassigning Companies B and L to Anson Mills’s charge that Crook had ordered on the eastern flank of the ridge.

Here on the west Seamus cheered as he struggled to control the nervous gelding beneath him. “Colonel Henry, we get these boys of yours to lay down enough fire, we can damned well turn these red bastirds!”

“Lieutenant Reynolds!” Henry called out to the officer in charge of F Company. “Left into front on me, oblique to that far point at the end of the ridge!”

As Henry wheeled about, he found his bugler, Frank Ropetsky, and gave the order to blow the charge. Then the captain put the brass spurs to his mount, both companies bursting into motion behind him—yelling, cheering, shouting for no better reason than it served to work a man up into battle readiness, got his blood running hot, and just might give pause to some of those warriors who were clotting on the heights off to their right. The ones pinning down Chambers and Noyes.

Still farther to the east there arose a louder rattle of gunfire. Seamus could only assume it came from the fight
Anson Mills was making of it with his battalion and those two companies Evans had commandeered from Henry.

It took little enough time to cover that rolling ground sweeping up from the creek bottom toward the far western extent of the ridge, at least what they could see of it as they galloped in a wide circle to the left. Throwing up his arm, Henry ordered a halt.

“Looks like we’ve come west far enough,” Donegan said to Henry and Reynolds. “You want, Colonel—I’ll have a look top of that hill just to be sure we got around their flank.”

The captain nodded, squinting into the bright light. “Permission granted, Mr. Donegan.”

Tapping the brim of his slouch hat with his fingers, Donegan reined about and spurred his snorting piebald up the gentle rise. Atop that heaving ridge, he saw the blackened mass of gathering, swarming warriors off to the east on the slopes of the conical hill.

Without waiting for any of them to find him silhouetted against the skyline, Donegan whirled about and raced down to the horse soldiers.

“The Injins still to the east, by that tall point. Looks to be Crook is holding ’em at bay in the center.”

“Then we have come far enough,” Henry declared with little satisfaction, looking again at the strength of his diminished command with harsh criticism in those slightly bugging eyes.

“May I suggest we push back east and take up positions that will put some pressure on the hostiles?” asked Lieutenant Bainbridge Reynolds.

“Suggestion noted,” Henry replied with a bit of a grin. “We will do just that—as long as we can be sure the hostiles won’t flank us, won’t come up behind us or the other battalions.”

“I’ll volunteer to close the file on your march east,” Donegan offered.

“You’re a civilian,” Henry flared, eyes narrowing. “I can’t order you to do anything you don’t want to do, Mr. Donegan.”

“I just offered, Colonel. Every column must have a rear-guard.”

With approval Henry replied, “Very well, sir. You will ride with me.”

The captain turned to his lieutenant. “Mr. Reynolds, your F Company will take the point. D Company will bring up the rear—with Mr. Donegan and me closing the file … together.”

17 June 1876

“G
oddamn!” John Bourke growled in that knot of harried
officers arguing, snapping, formulating battle plans on the north bank of the Rosebud. “This officer corps is caught flat-footed like a bunch of shave-tails!”