Reap the Whirlwind (45 page)

If it was not Three Stars himself … then just who was this daring soldier who had driven his warriors from this part of the battlefield?

As the air began to hum with the nasty snarl of bullets, Crazy Horse calmly reined about, knowing his life would never be forfeit to a white man’s gun. The dream had told him. The dream of dying at the hand of his own people.

So now he had to find another fight for his warriors. Perhaps the struggle going on far to the west—at the broken, scarred country cut with deep, sharp-sided ravines. There another battle raged. The Shahiyena had started that fight by attempting to surround the pony soldiers and their big American horses. The Miniconjou and Sans Arc had gladly joined in.

Perhaps now … yes! Now it was time for his mighty Hunkpatila to come to the aid of the rest, to throw the weight of the great numbers Crazy Horse could bring to bear on that distant fight.

Now it was time to swallow up those pony soldiers, chew them good. Then spit out their battered, bloodied bodies one … by one … by one.

The Season When Things Grow

L
uishaw’s most fervent prayer had been answered.

The enemy was retreating.

The soldiers were fighting back, throwing everything they could at the Lakota and their Shahiyena friends.

In and out of the raging battle the Shoshone war chief slashed his way, firing his weapons, singing his war song, cheering those of his warriors who grew tired, perhaps grew doubtful that this would be a day of great victory for not only Lone Star’s soldiers, but for the Wind River Shoshone as well.

“The Lakota are falling back, Luishaw!”

He turned to find Aguina, a brave warrior brother, hurrying toward him. As he always did, Luishaw’s eyes fell to Aguina’s hand clutching the soldier rifle, the middle finger gone. Two years now—a wound he carried in proud remembrance of the Bates Battle against the Lakota. When the soldiers had quit the fight too soon.

“I am glad, my friend,” Luishaw replied, watching the enemy as they were pushed back, and back still farther by the pony soldiers’ charge. Retreating to the west, toward that conical hill.

“You were afraid, I know it,” Aguina said quietly as the battle rumbled along the slope above them. “Afraid these
soldiers might give up and go back home as they did before.”

“Like our last fight against these enemies.” He reached out and laid his hand over Aguina’s.

The warrior glanced down, and a look crossed his face as if he understood what his war chief was telling him. “We lost some of our own pride that day, Luishaw. Forced to run away with the soldiers.”

“Not today, my friend. There will be no running for the soldiers—and none for the Shoshone this day!”

“Your eyes are always searching the enemy,” Aguina commented a few moments later as the Lakota continued their retreat far to the west. “You are looking for Sitting Bull?”

Luishaw smiled grimly. “I would be proud to meet him in battle.”

“And Crazy Horse.”

He smiled and nodded. “Especially Crazy Horse. While Sitting Bull is a powerful magician, it is the other one … this war chief who has killed many Shoshone—the one I want most to meet in battle.”

“If you do not mind, my friend—I want to watch your fight with Crazy Horse. It would be something to see.”

The grim smile grew on Luishaw’s broad face. “Indeed it would, Aguina. It would be a fight our people spoke of for many generations to come.”

For much of the two hours the fighting had seesawed back and forth between the soldiers and the hostiles. There had even been those terrifying moments when it seemed Crazy Horse’s warriors were reinforced and the overwhelming weight of the hostiles drove Crook’s infantry back to the willows along Rosebud Creek. For some of the soldiers, all had seemed lost—until Mills began his timely second charge from the far east end of the battle line and Royall began his circling push far to the west along the left flank. That seemed to divert enough of the Sioux and Cheyenne just long enough to allow the general to rally his infantry at the middle.

They had countercharged, eventually regaining the slopes of the bluffs. Then the top of the ridge itself. And
finally the highest hill
^*
east of the conical knob, that tall promontory where the enemy horsemen were driven by Mills and Crook together. From that high ground they had turned, beginning to harass Royall’s cavalry.

Something of a breathing spell settled over the rest of the battlefield.

John Bourke watched Captain Samuel Munson approach, crabbing across the open ground at a half crouch, as if he were about to pitch forward on his chin at any moment.

“General, we need the mules,” the captain declared when he came huffing to a stop in that knot of officers.

“Very well,” Crook replied after a moment of thought. “I was thinking the same thing. Perhaps we can use them to make a mounted charge on the center of their line. At least on part of it—drive them back. To keep the savages off balance. Yes, Captain. Permission granted: bring up the mules.”

Munson saluted and was gone, waving an arm toward his C Company of the Ninth Infantry as he headed downhill. They moved out behind him in ragged order across the slope.

Not that many minutes later the warriors evidently noticed the activity among the mules grazing in the bottomland. Not only had Munson gone to fetch his own company’s animals, but John Bourke saw that Captains Burt and Burrowes had shown up on a similar mission. All three officers ended up evacuating their wounded from the morning’s campsite, loading everything they could to bring with them as they reclimbed the slopes to Crook’s headquarters. They returned with not a moment to spare as the Sioux rushed Crook’s position from not only the west, but the north as well.

There along the western flank Tom Moore’s packers and those sixty-five Montana miners put their powerful rifles to work as never before, firing from their redoubts among the red rock interlacing the ridgetop. Earlier that morning upon reaching the heights, these civilians had
hurriedly built their own ramparts and lunettes, piling up what stones they could, using any deadfall that could be safely dragged to the scene. Now their big civilian weapons—from Civil War Spencers to the latest lever-action repeaters, from Remington rolling-blocks and Sharps sporting or buffalo rifles to the latest in needle guns—all laid down a deadly fire the hostiles were unable to match with their old muzzleloaders and light repeating carbines, much less with bow and arrow. Their sort of warfare dictated that they move in close enough to the enemy to overwhelm; and not accomplishing that, then at least draw close enough that they could loose their rain of iron-tipped arrows that would arc down from the sky in a hail of terror.

But the Sioux were able to do neither that morning as they tried rushing the civilians hunkered down among their rocks on the north rim of the bluff. Nor could they get close enough for their bows.

Crazy Horse was forced to rally his horsemen to the western end of the ridge.

John Bourke saw them in the distance. He didn’t have to explain to any what was happening, much less George Crook. It grew plain enough when the gunfire along the north of the ridge dissipated and slacked off quickly as more and more of the hostiles left that central theater and rode far to the end of Crook’s flank. Now, but for the rapidly growing gunfire heard coming from perhaps as much as two miles or more away, where Royall had taken his mounted companies to junction with Guy Henry’s battalion—this battlefield had become suddenly and eerily quiet.

“If those savages mass on Royall now,” Crook grumbled dolefully, “he’s done for.”

It was there on the flats just below the eastern slopes of the conical hill that Crazy Horse gathered his hundreds, formed them up, ready to make their charge.

Seems he had still one more surprise in store for Three Stars that day.

Ten-times-ten Shahiyena, no more than that. But now more and more of Crazy Horse’s Lakota had come to join
the fight against the mounted soldiers on the far western end of the long ridge.

In the distance Wooden Leg heard the gunfire all but die away. The soldiers had made their charge up from the gap, had dug in like badgers protecting their burrows. Nothing much was going to change that, thought the young warrior.

As things quieted to the east, the bloodiest action began to shift to the fighting around the pony soldiers who had taken up their positions across the deep ravine from Wooden Leg and his friends. The war cries of the arriving Lakota became a constant and growing thunder as the horsemen rode up from the north and northwest slopes, rallying, come to try these soldiers.

It was just as Crazy Horse had guaranteed it: they were dividing Three Stars’s soldiers into smaller bands so that they might be more easily overwhelmed and swallowed up. What they had failed to do near the gap because of the pony soldiers’ tenacious charges was nonetheless beginning to work its magic here along the western end of the slopes, more than a mile away from the gap.

Just moments ago two small bands of soldiers had returned to the main group. Both bands had attempted to clear Lakota sharpshooters from some nearby hilltops, only to come close to being surrounded and chewed up. As heavy as the fighting was, only two soldiers were hit, dragged back to the main group that was beginning to come together at the end of the line: the terminus of the ridge where they were forced to halt like a frightened herd of the white man’s cattle. Wooden Leg knew enough that when the enemy began to bunch up and mill around like that, much of the warrior spirit had gone out of the pony soldiers.

By working from rock to rock, the warriors in the advance had closed to within effective range of their rifles and were beginning to pour some deadly fire down on the soldiers—from the southwest, the west, and now the north as well. Swarming in ever-greater numbers, they nearly had their enemy surrounded. Every small crevice in the rocks, every outcrop, every tall tuft of grass hid more than one
rifleman as they poured their bullets down on the blue-coats.

Overhead the sun relentlessly climbed in the sky. From time to time Wooden Leg could hear renewed fighting from far east. Sometimes he could hear the echo of gunfire from the tallest heights in the entire valley, those slopes south of the Rosebud where some of the Lakota fought half-a-hundred pony soldiers. But those sounds never lasted very long.

As the morning grew old, the real fighting proved to be here in the west.

Where the Shahiyena and Lakota were slowly tightening their red noose around the pony soldiers, ever tightening until these white men would have no way out.

“
F
ancy finding you here where there’s no chance for whiskey, Irishman.”

Seamus turned to find Reuben Davenport crawling up behind him to his small shelter of low sandstone rocks.

“No flat-backed New York City chippies here for you, Davenport!” Donegan cheered. “Get your arse in here afore some bleeming Injin shoots you where you sit.”

“When’d you get here, Donegan?”

“I been here from the start. Rode in with Colonel Henry.”

The reporter wagged his head, peering over the top of the boulders. A bullet sang overhead, another ricocheted off the rock, sending lead and chips and sandstone dust over them both.

Davenport swiped at his eyes. “I came with Royall to join up with Henry’s bunch.”

A grim smile crossed Donegan’s face. “Not the place to be right now, I’m afraid. We’re having the hottest time of it.”

“I can see.”

“Face it—you’re not a fighting man, Davenport. For God’s sake get back to a horse and go rejoin Crook’s command.”

The correspondent looked about, mostly to the south and east, where the only avenue of escape was closing—then sighed, slightly nodding. “Wish I could, Donegan. But
it looks like it would be sure suicide for any man to try riding back through that for now.”

“Gonna get worse before it gets better. You’re a reporter. Not a man has to lay his life down like these sojurs.”

“I can handle a rifle as good as many of these!”

He realized he had pricked the man’s pride. “I’m sorry. I just meant … you got no business sticking your neck out like this.”

“Listen, Irishman,” Davenport began, swiping the back of his hand across his lips and reaching into the back pocket of his britches. “I volunteered to come on this expedition for the New York
Herald.
And the position of a newspaper correspondent on an Indian campaign is to go in with the rest: Royall, Henry, whoever. I’ve learned one thing so far today, found it out for myself: that there is no such thing as a rear, unless with some reserves Crook would hold back. But, you see, Irishman—Crook’s thrown everything he’s got against Crazy Horse, hasn’t he?”

Seamus had to agree and nodded once. “If he hadn’t, we’d been overrun—caught with our britches down the way we was.” Then he peered over the top of the rock for a moment.

“Besides, Donegan—if a journalist does not share the toil and the danger with the soldiers he followed on the march, his mouth is all but shut, isn’t it? If I stayed behind where it was safe, what could I possibly say to an officer who challenged me by asking: ‘What the deuce have you got to say about it? You were skulking in the rear, Davenport—and got everything by hearsay. We don’t give a bloody damn what you think!’”