Trumpet on the Land (4 page)

“What of those columns off to the north of us?”

Grouard shrugged. “Lots of Injuns between us and them. Like I told you last night: there's a hundred miles stuffed right up to the bunghole with badass Lakota and Shahiyena warriors all wanting white scalps.”

“And especially your hair—for you leading sojurs down on them twice now.” Donegan brooded a moment, then asked, “What all do you think the Lakota are up to, if them camps really are out to hunt like you say?”

“Figure they have scouts keeping an eye on them other columns too.”

“How is it Gibbon's Montana sojurs, or Terry's Dakota column from over at Fort Lincoln, haven't run onto a village that size yet?”

“You asking about Terry's column—that bunch what Crook says is pushing this way with Custer's cavalry riding right out front?”

“Yeah, them. Why hasn't Terry's sojurs run up against that big camp what jumped us three days back?”

Grouard shrugged. “Just lucky, I suppose.”

“Naw. It ain't just luck, Frank. Way I see it—them warriors will keep right on doing their best to keep their women and children out of the army's way. Reason they rode south to jump us was they didn't want Crook's army getting anywhere near their village. They'll go and do the
same thing with that bunch up north: keep well out of the way of Gibbon and Terry.”

He studied Donegan a moment. “Don't think so, Irishman. Way it lays out to me is this: a village that big won't be worried about a damned thing but finding enough grass to feed all their ponies.”

“So—what about them sojurs up north of us? You're saying that war camp hit us on the Rosebud just don't give a damn about the three columns closing in on 'em?”

His face a mask of disgust, Grouard slowly brought his two hands together. “Only two columns still closing in now, Irishman.”

“So either of them other two expeditions. Why you figure neither of them bumped into that goddamned big village themselves yet?”

With a slow wag of his head Grouard said, “Can't say, Seamus. Only … I know one thing's certain as rain: it's just a matter of time before Custer and his men run smack up against more'n they can handle.”

Chapter 1
21 June 1876

J
ohn Bourke finished the second of two copies he had made that morning of Crook's letter to General Philip Sheridan. While one would remain in Bourke's records, as
Crook's longtime aide-de-camp, the original and the second copy would go with two civilian couriers who would ride south separately to Fort Fetterman on the North Platte. There this first report of the Battle of the Rosebud would soon be telegraphed by leapfrog down that string of tiny key stations connected by a thin strand of wire, southeast all the way to Fort Laramie.

From there the electrifying news of Crook's decision to wait at Goose Creek would cause the keys to click and the wires to hum all the way to department headquarters in Omaha, and beyond. Within hours of the letter's arrival at Fetterman, Sheridan would be reading the scrawl of some private's handwriting on the pages of yellow flimsy at Division HQ in Chicago. It wouldn't take that much longer for William Tecumseh Sherman to be studying every one of Crook's carefully chosen words at the War Department in Washington City.

An Irishman himself like Sheridan, Bourke pictured how the bandy-legged hero of the Shenandoah campaign would flush and roar when he read that Crook was electing to sit tight. He would be angry. Nay, furious! After all, no less than Sheridan and Sherman themselves had developed the concept of “total war” waged against an enemy population in those final months of the Civil War.

John had to agree with them. In what he had seen of man's bloodiest sport, war was serious business. If the West was to be won, then he found himself in sympathy with Sherman's views: “Let's be about finishing this matter of the Indians.”

While the Confederate officers had practiced a genteel combat against the Union armies, pitting only soldier against soldier, Sherman and Sheridan—as U. S. Grant's right and left arms—refined the concept that mandated an army make war on the entire enemy population, women and children and noncombatants alike. Depriving the enemy of livestock, burning fields and destroying forage, laying waste not only to the enemy's lines of supply, but by making total war on those loved ones the Confederate armies
left behind at home, the Union could wreak great spiritual damage to the fighting men of the rebellious South.

“This is taking too long,” Bourke said, agreeing with Sherman's impatience over the progress of things out west.

But, then again, that's what this whole Sioux campaign was about, wasn't it? To get the matter settled once and for all?

But instead of clear victories, the army had instead two major engagements that were certainly less than defeats for the enemy. Reynolds had retreated from the Powder River, his men freezing, tormented by empty bellies. And now Crook and the rest had to content themselves with a hollow victory once Crazy Horse retreated with his warriors at the end of that long summer's day of bloody and fierce hand-to-hand fighting across four miles of rolling, rocky hills bordering Rosebud Creek.
^*

Crook's army held the field at sunset. And buried its dead in the creek bottom that night under cover of darkness. Then started to limp back to Goose Creek the following morning. If the Battle of the Rosebud was ever to live on to Crook's credit, John figured, then either the general would have to follow up with a more stunning victory somewhere in the weeks to come … or one of the other columns would have to suffer a more stunning defeat in this summer of the Sioux.

Either way, it would serve to take the dim sheen off what was clearly a dubious victory for Crook's Wyoming column.

Already the newsmen were creating their own slant to that day-long battle. John knew each one of them wrote from his own narrow view of a horrendously complex battle that had raged along a four-mile front. For two days after the fight they had scratched out their stories, the rich ante climbing almost hourly as the reporters bartered for the services of any courier who would dare to carry word of
the Rosebud Battle to the nearest telegraph, eventually to end up in the hands of expectant readers both east and west of this Wyoming wilderness.

Along with the wounded loaded in wagons, and an infantry escort Crook was sending south to Fetterman tomorrow morning, would also go T. B. MacMillan, reporter for Chicago's
Inter-Ocean
, a cross-town rival of John Finerty's
Tribune.
Day by day, for weeks now, MacMillan's health had slipped away beneath the onslaught of cold and heat, rain and privation, until even Surgeon Albert Hartsuff had ordered him out of Indian country. Try as the newsman might, valiantly dipping into what reserves the bravest could muster, MacMillan simply did not have what it took to stand up beneath the rigors of the campaign trail. Though he was taking his leave of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition, not one man dared make light of the reporter's pluck and courage during the hottest of the fighting at the Rosebud. Bourke was one of those who had finally convinced “Mac” that he had no business staying on.

“After all,” John Finerty said at this morning's fire, “you heard Crook himself say he's planning on sitting pretty right here till he gets him his reinforcements of infantry and cavalry.”

“Finerty's right,” Robert Strahorn of Denver's
Rocky Mountain News
agreed. “We're going to sit things out until we get more bullets and bacon before we can go chasing after Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull again.”

“The summer's going to be all but gone before we move again, Mac,” Bourke tried cheering the sickly reporter over strong coffee.

“I'll envy you, I will,” Finerty replied with an impish grin. “Knowing you're back in Chicago well ahead of me. While I'm still out here, sitting on my thumbs with nothing to do but fish these creeks, hunt the groves of timber, and eat my fill from the fruit of the land every day. Pretty boring stuff.”

“The best place a man could be—Chicago,” Bourke
chimed in to help nudge the newsman to relent and head home. “The Indian camps are surely breaking up after the whipping we gave them, so this campaign is all but over, Mac. Only thing left for us to do is eat, sleep, and chase some nonexistent warriors.”

“You heard it from the mouth of the general's aide,” Finerty said. “The war's over: nothing to do but eat and sleep. Seriously, Mac—I doubt we'll have any more chances to chase warriors.”

It would take until the end of summer, but by then all that Bourke and Finerty and the rest of Crook's crippled Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition would have to eat would be their broken-down, played-out horses as the animals dropped one by one by one into the mud of the northern plains.

That, and Crook's men could always eat their words.

They had a great victory on their shoulders.

So it was that Miniconjou war chief American Horse danced with all the rest in this Moon of Ripening Berries, Wipazuka Waste Wi. At times the Lakota called this the Moon of Making Fat.

Truly, this was a time of great feasting, of living off the fat of the land for the people of American Horse.

“Now the soldiers will stay away!” Dog Necklace growled every bit as tremulously as any grizzly boar as they gathered near one of the many leaping bonfires fed throughout that second night following the great battle against the soldiers, Snake, and Sparrowhawk People. “Surely they know we will never again wait for them to attack our camps of little ones and women.”

Red Horse echoed, “They now know we will hunt them down!”

“Yet—what of the great mystic's vision?” asked Iron Thunder.

“Yes,” agreed Antelope Tail, worry cracking his voice. “What of Sitting Bull's talk with Wakan Tanka?”

American Horse smiled. He had fought these white
men many, many summers. Even winters too. In fact, thirty winters before his own father, Smoke, had met the famous white man Francis Parkman there beside the white man's Holy Road that paralleled the Buffalo Dung River.
^*

“The soldiers will return,” he told them confidently.

Dog Necklace disagreed, still sour as gall. “The soldiers would not dare try themselves against our strength! As powerful as the mystic's dream was, I nonetheless still find it very hard to believe soldiers will come to fall into our camps now.”

“But his vision was so vivid, in such detail,” American Horse protested. “The Hunkpatila warrior called He Dog has told me Sitting Bull says we should expect another fight.”

“Let us savor this victory first, old one,” Red Horse chided the aging war chief.

“Yes,” agreed Dog Necklace as he chuckled with disdain. “Even as stupid as the white man is, none of our people can seriously believe the soldiers would still be marching on our villages. Chasing us after the beating we gave them.”

“It will be a long, long time before we have to worry about any soldiers marching on us now,” Red Horse said.

“Yes. I think they have learned their lesson well and are running away far to the south, never to fight us again this summer,” Dog Necklace boasted. “The Great Mystery has taught the soldiers a painful truth: never again come to attack a village of women and children. If they ever try, only death and destruction await them.”