Trumpet on the Land (20 page)

Special Dispatch to the New York Times

WASHINGTON
, July 6—The news of the fatal charge of Gen. Custer and his command against the Sioux Indians has caused great excitement in Washington, particularly among Army people and about the Capitol. The first impulse was to doubt the report, or set it down as some heartless hoax or at least a greatly exaggerated story by some frightened fugitive.

The confirmatory dispatches from
Sheridan's headquarters in Chicago—
feeling among Custer's friends.

WASHINGTON
, July 6—Not until late this afternoon did the War Department receive confirmatory reports of the news published this morning of the terrible disaster in Indian country.

A list of officers killed—feeling over the disaster—a regiment of frontiersmen offered from Utah.

SALT LAKE
, July 6—The citizens here are very much excited over the Custer Massacre, and several offers have been made to the Secretary of War to raise a regiment of frontiersmen in ten days for Indian service.

SAN FRANCISCO
, July 6—A dispatch from Virginia City reports great excitement at Custer's death.
A
meeting has been called to organize a company.

TOLEDO
, July 6—A special to the
Blade
from Monroe, Mich., the home of Gen. Custer, says the startling news of the massacre of the General and his party by Indians created the most intense feeling of sorrow among all classes … The town is draped in mourning, and a meeting of the Common Council and citizens was held this evening to take measures for an appropriate tribute to the gallant dead.

E
scorted by Captain James Egan's hard-bitten K Company of the Second Cavalry, Bill Cody had accompanied the youthful, baby-faced Colonel Wesley Merritt on that ride north to take over field command of the Fifth Cavalry on the first day of July. Besides being an act of utter humiliation to Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Carr, Bill figured Merritt
had no business taking over what had long been regarded as “Carr's regiment” in the field.

Why, the “Old War Eagle” had led the Fighting Fifth since sixty-eight, for God's sake!

No two ways about it—Merritt had been in the right place at the right time: already out west as lieutenant colonel of the Ninth Cavalry, and perhaps even more important, in the field acting as inspecting cavalry quartermaster for Sheridan's Division of the Missouri when the lieutenant general decided to use the Fifth to block reinforcements to Sitting Bull's hostiles.

Upon graduation from the U.S. Military Academy in 1860, Merritt was first assigned to the Second Dragoons. But as soon as Fort Sumter was fired upon less than a year later, his career began to parallel Custer's closely: both had become brigadier generals at the same time, just prior to the Battle of Gettysburg, and both had commanded victorious cavalry divisions under Sheridan during the Shenandoah campaign in the final weeks of the Civil War.

Everybody wanted to have a crack at the Indians who had defeated the Seventh Cavalry, Cody figured. Even Wesley Merritt.

When the terrible news from Montana Territory caught up with Sheridan, he was visiting Camp Robinson, planning to do what his department could to stop the flow of warriors off the reservations at Red Cloud and Spotted Tail. Almost immediately the lieutenant general hurried back to Fort Laramie—where for days on end he remained angry, hurt, confused, and stunned as all get-out by the Custer disaster.

Still, Bill had learned one thing was certain about that little Irish general: he wasn't going to sit around licking his wounds. Sheridan was the sort who would strike back— and strike back with everything he had.

“By God—those red sons of bitches will hear a trumpet's clarion call on the land!” Sheridan vowed, slamming a fist down on Major E. F. Townsend's desk at Laramie hard enough to stun every other officer into utter silence. “If it
takes every man in my department, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse will pay dearly—and I'll make sure they keep on paying until I think they've been brought to utter ruin!”

Cody had no doubt that Sheridan would make good on his word.

Accompanying Merritt from Laramie was another correspondent hurried into the field by an editor eager to beat the competition, another reporter chomping at the bit to snatch some new angle on the Sioux War suddenly exploding across the nation's papers with banner headlines: Cuthbert Mills, who was sending copy back east to the New York
Times.

Cody recognized Mills as a tenderfoot from way off, but he did not join in “laying for” the reporters the way the rest of the entourage did, both soldiers and civilians. Nevertheless, Bill did have himself a few laughs at Mills's expense, what with the way the others “stuffed the greenhorn.” What a caution that slicker from the East had turned out to be!

But it was not the prose of those tenderfooted reporters Bill figured he would long remember. Instead, the most lasting impression was made by the verse composed by his friend, the amiable John Wallace Crawford, widely known as the “poet scout” of the prairies. More of a nimble rhymester than a poet in the truest sense of the word, Crawford nonetheless entertained one and all every evening with his offhand recitations and impromptu circumlocutions involving the day's march and the personalities along for the campaign.

Born in 1847 in County Donegal, Ireland, Crawford's parents emigrated to America while Jack was still a boy. Almost immediately the youth went to work in the Pennsylvania coal mines. Bereft of any learning, totally illiterate, Jack was only fifteen when he enlisted in the Forty-eighth Pennsylvania Volunteers with his father. After young Crawford was wounded at the Battle of Spotsylvania, he convalesced at the Saterlee Hospital in West Philadelphia, where he was taught to read and write by a Sister of Charity.

A few years after the end of the war, both his parents died—causing Jack to decide he would start life anew out west. With the discovery of gold by Custer's expedition in 1874, Crawford headed for the Black Hills, then the following year worked a mail contract between Red Cloud and the rail depot at Sidney, Nebraska. As one of the founders of Custer City in the Hills, he was selected to serve as chief of scouts for their volunteers with the outbreak of the Sioux War—a group called the Black Hills Rangers. It was at this time that Crawford acquired the title of “Captain Jack,” as well serving as the region's correspondent for the Omaha
Bee.

Time had come for the Fifth to get over its outward suspicion of its new colonel commanding and get back to business. On the second of July, Merritt marched his troops four miles to the east, so they could bivouac on better grass that much closer to the well-beaten Indian trail Little Bat had discovered. The men remained confident and their mounts well fed—not only on the grasses of those Central Plains, but on seventy-five thousand pounds of grain that had arrived from Laramie nine days earlier.

Then on the morning of 3 July a small war party was sighted by outlying pickets no more than a mile from the regiment's South Cheyenne base camp. Captain Julius W. Mason's veteran K Company was ordered in pursuit as they were beginning their breakfast.

“Saddle up, men! Lively, now!” was the shout from the company's lieutenant, Charles King, as Cody leaped into the saddle with Jack Crawford at his side.

“Lead into line!” King ordered. “Count off by fours!”

“By fours, right!” Mason gave the command while Cody and Crawford galloped away, hoping to eat away at what lead the warriors already had.

The day before, Mason had been informed that he'd been promoted to the rank of major, with a transfer to the Third Cavalry, which was presently serving with Crook's Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition. Yet Mason had told Colonel Merritt that he intended to stay with the Fifth until
such a time as the present campaign was brought to a completion.

Down into the trees at creekside the two scouts led K Troop, through the deep sand, then finally a climb back up onto the grassy hillsides where the race could begin in earnest.

“Here comes Kellogg's I Company, fellers!”

Cody heard a soldier from K make the announcement behind him as they tore after the distant horsemen. Merritt had ordered out a second troop for what was hoped would be the first action of the campaign.

But after a frustrating and circuitous chase of some thirty miles lasting several hours, all of it spent following nothing more tangible than a trail of unshod ponies, and then finding the war party splitting off onto diverse trails, all leading in the general direction of the Powder River country, Mason ordered Lieutenant King to take their company and return to camp at four o'clock, empty-handed. However, because Bill and Jack Crawford, riding far in advance of K Company, had managed to fire some shots at the fleeing horsemen in the early stages of the chase, the affair went down in the official record of the Fifth Cavalry as “the fight near the south branch of the Cheyenne River, Wyo.”

If the soldiers hadn't killed any of the enemy or taken any prisoners, at least the Fifth was credited with forcing those fleeing Cheyenne warriors to abandon their slower pack-animals burdened beneath agency supplies plainly being carried to the hostiles in the north.

Still, by the time the troopers returned to Merritt's camp, there were casualties to be tallied from the thirty-mile chase. A dozen horses were so badly used up that Carr decided it best to have them returned to Laramie. Worse yet, the mounts carrying two heavy troopers did not even make it back to camp, having dropped dead under their weighty burdens during the Fifth Cavalry's first pursuit of the enemy that season.

Those two horses would not be the last animals to
drop in their tracks before the summer's Sioux campaign was out.

On the following cloudy, dismal morning, that of the Centennial Fourth, Merritt ordered the regiment to strike camp, begin a countermarch, and scout back to the south, in the direction of Fort Laramie. The colonel realized that the Indians now knew of the presence of his troops and that further patrolling along the Mini Pusa would prove fruitless. Two companies with worn-out horses accompanied Merritt and the supply wagons due south along the valley of the Old Woman's Fork, with the colonel's intentions to rendezvous all battalions forty-eight hours later at the army's stockade erected at the head of Sage Creek. Meanwhile the regiment's commander dispatched Major John J. Upham with three companies to march to the northwest, up the Mini Pusa for one last scout of the Cheyennes' possible crossing. At the same time, Carr was sent off east to the Black Hills with another three companies, again to look for recent signs of activity.

By the sixth of July, the Fifth Cavalry had reassembled, establishing their camp no more than seventy-five miles north of Fort Laramie on Sage Creek at the stockade guarded by a single company of infantry who were assigned to watch over a section of the Cheyenne-Black Hills stage road. Merritt promptly sent a courier south with reports for Sheridan. The rider was back by ten o'clock the next morning while most were having a leisurely breakfast and some officers were enjoying a cool bath in one of the creek's shallow pools.

Cody himself escorted Major Townsend's courier to Merritt's tent, then watched the colonel open the flap on the thin leather dispatch envelope as the scout poured himself another cup of coffee … about the time he heard the colonel quietly exclaim, “Good Lord!”

He looked at Merritt's hands shaking, how the officer's youthful face suddenly went gray with age and utter shock, carved with deep concern. It frightened Bill. “Colonel?”

“They … the Seventh … Custer too …”

“What about Custer and the Seventh?”

Merritt wagged his head, choking as if on something sour, unable to speak. All he could manage to do was hand the dispatches over to Cody.

Once he had read them, and reread them a second time, Bill gave the pages back and turned away, pushing himself through a cadre of officers all hurrying like ants atop an anthill to hear for themselves the unbelievable news.

Bill had known Custer. Why, he had even ridden stirrup to stirrup with the golden-haired cavalry officer, hunting buffalo together on the plains of Kansas. Custer was the sort so vital, so alive! Hero in war. Conqueror of Black Kettle's Cheyenne. Custer the Invincible!

Charles King came bounding up, his hair still wet from his morning swim. He stopped Cody. “Bill! Bill—is what I hear true? Dear God—say it isn't true!”

Cody could only nod as more anxious men gathered around them in a knot of fierce disbelief.

Silence fell over that camp beside Sage Creek like a suffocating blanket of doom. This was a gallant, romantic era when the officers of one cavalry unit had friends among other regiments. Most of those men serving with the Fifth lost comrades or classmates, soldiers who fell with the Seventh at the Little Bighorn.

So in the awful stillness of that summer morning, Bill quietly confirmed the worst for those who pressed in close, “Custer and five companies of the Seventh are wiped out of existence. It's no rumor—General Merritt's got the official dispatch.”

“Where?”

“North of here—Little Bighorn.”

“Official?”

“Sheridan himself.”

“Custer? Dead?”

“Confirmed. Twelve days ago. On the twenty-fifth of June.”

King grabbed Cody by the arm. “You'll be all right, Bill?”

“Yes,” the scout eventually answered, throwing his shoulders back somewhat, his long hair brushing his collar. “There can be no doubt now, Lieutenant, that before a fortnight has passed, we'll march north to reinforce Crook.”