Trumpet on the Land (43 page)

C
HEYENNE
, July 26—Advised from General Crook's command in camp on South Fork of Tongue river, July 23, via Fort Fetterman, July 26, are of importance. The main body of Sioux are believed to have taken to the Big Horn mountains where game is more plenty and grass fresher. The Indian efforts to burn the grass of the valley make it almost imperative on Crook to follow them up at once. His force musters about 1,200 regular soldiers and citizen volunteers, besides 200 Snake allies, and he feels he can at least hold his own on any ground that emergency may select. It is expected that the wagons will be parted with on the main Tongue river, near the mountains, and with a pack-train loaded with from fifteen to twenty days rations, a vigorous but careful advance will immediately follow. It is not deemed advisable for Crook's force and Terry's force to join previous to a move under one or other of the commanders. It is thought that the Indians would make a stand against one of the columns, and that by engaging them and having the other column reserved to either fight or follow up with, something decisive may be expected during the summer campaign. The enemy is believed to be on the headwaters of Ash creek and Little Big Horn, not far from the Montana and Wyoming line, and from thirty to forty miles from Crook's present camp. General Merritt left Fetterman this morning with eight companies of the Fifth cavalry. Two
more on the way to Fetterman will take a hundred and fifty recruits and follow in a few days.

On the seventh of August, Crook's Wyoming column crossed from the Tongue westward to the Rosebud on a wearying march of twenty-two miles over rough and broken country, every yard of it beneath a merciless sun. In that valley the Shoshone scouts came upon an immense trail, the earth scarred by thousands of unshod pony hooves and hundreds upon hundreds of travois poles.

That day Seamus saw the first of the scaffolds bearing the Sioux dead killed in the Rosebud or Little Bighorn fights. It brought the Ute and Snake guides no end of delight to haul down the burial platforms, tear open the buffalo robes and blankets, robbing the graves of their bows and quivers, even a nickel-plated revolver or perhaps a Winchester “Yellow-Boy.” But the superstitious allies gave wide berth to one particular scaffold, believing it was surrounded by “bad medicine.” Only Ute John, one of the so-called Montana Volunteers, was brave enough to profane the platform in hopes of a splendid reward—finding it of such a vintage that instead of riches upon slashing open the burial robes, he was greeted with a nest of field mice.

The Shoshone also delighted in halting wherever they found a rattler along the column's march. Several of the allies would dismount and tease the snake into coiling, hollering the only English they had picked up from the troops: “Got tamme you! Got tamme you!”

After having enough of this sport a warrior chosen from among their number would lance the snake before they remounted and continued down the Rosebud.

Sunset found the column a few miles downstream from where Crook fought his frustrating duel with Crazy Horse eight days before Custer was destroyed. Just below the site of their bivouac that seventh day of August, Grouard and the Crow discovered where the enemy had recently encamped, tepee rings covering a mile-wide strip of bottomland that stretched for more than four miles
along the Rosebud. Grouard reported that the Crow allies judged the site to be no more than ten or twelve days old. Although that estimate of age was grossly mistaken, this discovery of the seven massive camp circles convinced every one of the command's officers that the extensive site had indeed been the camp of the great village they had fought that long, bloody day seven weeks before.

Instead of having been the place where Sitting Bull's village stood when the Sioux fought Three Stars on the seventeenth of June, it was in fact where the hostiles had camped on the tenth of July as they were turning back around, meandering to the north and east at a leisurely pace. A succession of war parties that had been harassing Crook's Goose Creek camps, and setting the rear-guard grass fires, had crossed over that trail, making it all but impossible for any of the Shoshone, Üte, or Crow trackers to judge accurately the age of the site.

Little grass remained to feed the column's animals after the enemy's twenty thousand ponies cropped the valley bare. Two days into Crook's chase of the Sioux, the slow and gradual destruction of the cavalry command had begun to tell already. While the enemy did not stand and fight the soldiers who followed them, the Sioux nonetheless had already begun to strike at Crook's vulnerable Achilles' heel: horses gone more than two months without their accustomed forage, now forced to subsist on that scorched prairie, could not possibly do what the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition would soon require of them.

Mile by mile the toll would add up, and fifty days from now the destruction would be all but complete.

The sun rose sluggishly on the morning of the eighth, emerging an opaque orange behind murky skies smudged with the thick haze of nearby prairie fires that choked man and animal alike. After crawling at a snail's pace for some five miles, Crook called a halt for his column and ordered his scouts to probe the ground ahead while his troops took advantage of some patches of grass the enemy had failed to burn off. During their wait the bony horses and mules were
put out to graze. With the sun high in that endless blue dome, scout Jack Crawford rode in from the south with another civilian. Widely known on the frontier as the “poet scout,” John Wallace Crawford had set out from Fetterman on the twenty-eighth of July with his dispatches for Crook. He had reached Furey's wagon train four days later, only to learn that the expedition was somewhere to the north.

The general glowered as he read a letter of rebuke from Sheridan.

“I brought something of interest for you too, Buffalo Bill,” Crawford declared as he turned to his erstwhile theatrical partner and reached into a saddlebag to pull forth a bundle wrapped in wide-wale corduroy. Peeling back the cloth, he brought forth a bottle of amber liquid to the envious gasps of those nearby.

Cody took the bottle from Crawford, and Donegan hovered at his shoulder to get a read on the label.

Bill asked, “Who's this from?”

“Colonel Jones.”

“Proprietor of the Jones House?” Cody asked.

Crawford nodded. “None other.”

“You mean to tell me you brought this all the way up from Cheyenne for me?”

“He give it to me a while back, weeks as a matter of fact. Said to run you down when I had a chance.”

Donegan wagged his head in amazement and asked, “And you haven't thought once in all those weeks, all those long, thirsty days and cold nights riding north to Sioux
country, not once did you consider pulling that cork and having yourself a taste of that beautiful whiskey?”

Cody turned to Seamus with a look of amused consternation on his face and pointed the neck of the bottle at Crawford, saying, “You're a dense one, Irishman. This here Captain Crawford is about the only scout who could pull off that journey without draining the bottle Colonel Jones sent for me.”

“Hard to believe, it is, it is,” Seamus said wistfully, staring at the lovely hue of that whiskey.

“Not hard to believe at all, Irishman,” Cody replied. “You see, Crawford's just the man for such a job—he's got to be the only teetotaling scout I ever met!”

Late that afternoon the Shoshone returned with news of more Sioux trails coming in from the west to join the main route. Crook had the command remount at six and during that night's march many of the cavalrymen sang Negro melodies learned during the recent war, as well as some popular Irish songs. They did not camp at the bend of the Rosebud until long after the moon had set at 2
A.M.
and the wind had quartered around, heaving right out of the north.

On the following day's cold march into the teeth of a wind-driven drizzle that steadily became a slashing, galedriven rain by midmorning, the column passed several old camps littered with the bones of dogs and ponies: more ample evidence that the warrior bands clearly were no longer living off the fat of the land as they moseyed toward the northeast. Throughout the twenty miles made that morning and into the afternoon, the age of the trail freshened. What had at first been a trail some two weeks old became ten days old, then shortened to a week, and by the time the column made bivouac on the Rosebud below Lame Deer Creek, it was believed they had compressed the enemy's lead to no more than four days.

“The goddamned heat and dust and breathing all that ash was bad enough,” Donegan grumbled at the smoky little fire he and some of the other scouts somehow kept
burning in the fury of the storm that visited itself upon them that night. “But rain and mud and wet wool blankets can take the starch right out of a strong man.”

With only one thin gray army blanket in addition to his saddle blanket, Seamus shuddered with the cold that pierced a man to his marrow. He was not alone, for that August night in the valley of the Rosebud, Surgeon Bennett's thermometer fell far below freezing by dawn on the tenth.

Captain Emil Adams strode through the bivouac of his C Troop, Fifth Cavalry, rousting his men from the hard, cold ground by telling them exactly what they did not want to hear in that thick Prussian accent of his.

“Vake up, boys! Surgeon tol't me his termometer says it was
zero
few minutes ago.”

“What thermometer?” asked Second Lieutenant Edward L. Keyes.

For no more than a moment that question confounded the old German. Then he smiled wryly and replied in that colicky bullfrog accent of his, “Veil—any tammed termometer t'at vas tammed fool to get here! Und'stan't?”

The laughter that greeted Adams's declaration served to warm many of the men as they rolled from their frost-covered blankets and stomped about on frozen limbs to greet the sunrise and to water their horses at the banks of the Rosebud, where they discovered a thick rime of ice crusted along the creek.

After marching a few miles north that Thursday morning beneath a most welcome sun, with all those hooves and boots kicking up great columns of dust and stifling ash, Washakie's scouts discovered a recent campsite, its sun-dance lodge as well as some buffalo-hide lodges still standing. Naw at last they were getting close enough that the scent of their prey was strong in their nostrils.

At noon Crook ordered a brief halt at the mouth of Greenleaf Creek, right where Grouard's detail of scouts found the hostiles' trail turning due east—headed for the Tongue. The half-breed stood with Donegan, Cody, and
many of the others while Crook, Merritt, and Carr debated their next move. A murmur of no little excitement came rippling through their midday bivouac from the north.

“Indians!”

“By the devil!” Crook growled, slapping his gauntlet against his leg, whirling on his battalion commanders. “Form up! Form up!”

No one really needed to shout orders—the infantry was already coming into line and the cavalry were already catching up their horses. Panic and fear, the jingle of harness, and the slap of carbine against McClellan thundered through that valley as noncoms barked and screamed and formed up the commands, making them ready to receive the enemy's charge.

Behind that racket rose the screeches and war cries, the drone of war songs and the beating of hand-held drums, as the allies quickly made their medicine before they would ride off to fight their ancient enemies. Washakie's scouts and the Ute were leaping atop their ponies, whipping the animals in a merciless gallop to the north hoping to catch a glimpse of the Sioux who had stymied the Three Stars Crook, then killed the Long Hair named Custer.

Bile clogged the back of Donegan's throat. God-and-bloody-damn, he thought. This was just as things had been that morning Crook's command had made their halt along the banks of the Rosebud back on the seventeenth of June.

Here we are again: not just caught flat-footed with our pants down again—but caught completely napping!

Chapter 27
10 August 1876