Trumpet on the Land (55 page)

About that same time the fleeing Stanton had decided to turn about and find out for himself where the three scouts had disappeared. Upon reaching the trio, he ordered that the whole group pursue the retreating war party.

“If you wanna go,” Big Bat had snarled, “go ahead. I'm not.”

When his scouts eventually reached camp that evening, a sour-faced Stanton reported the incident to Crook, ridiculing Pourier for what he claimed was cowardice.

Crook asked, “What have you got to say about it, Bat?”

“That son of a bitch over there deserted me,” Big Bat snarled, pointing at Stanton. “My horse was down and done for. And I was all but done for. I rode in here this evening on the back of Russell's horse. So if anyone's the coward—it's that lying bastard there!”

The general turned to the officer, asking, “Major—did you leave Big Bat behind?”

“I didn't know he was in trouble,” Stanton replied with a shrug.

“You knew he was soon as I did, because I told you myself,” Garnier protested. “You knew when I told you me and Russell was heading back to help him.”

Crook glared at Stanton. “Major?”

Stanton could only say, “Yes, sir. I'll grant you that it looks that way—”

“Very well, then,” Crook interrupted. “We'll hear no more about Bat's cowardice, Major—unless we want to have fingers pointed all around. What I'm most angry about is that I wasn't immediately informed of the presence of a body of hostiles.”

“They slipped off in the fog,” Stanton explained.

“Yes, well,” Crook said, stroking one tail of his braided beard, “from now on I want to know immediately when any of my command makes any contact with the enemy.”

Twilight came, and without the cheery warmth of fires the men gathered in angry knots to argue their wretched lot. Only those officers and enlisted alike who hadn't served very long with Crook expressed some self-satisfied wagering that come morning the command would be turning about and making for the Missouri River posts.

“No,” with conviction said those who had fought under Crook in Arizona or Sioux country. “The general won't cash it in until he's made a fight out of this. Not yet he won't turn tail.”

Even those old veterans who were the sort to grumble and complain in times of peace and boredom, were now the ones who remained steadfast in the worst of times.

“We oughtn't to give up yet,” they reminded those younger, those weaker, those whose mettle had not yet been thrust into the crucible. “None of us can give up on account of a little roughing it, boys. After all, the general's sure as hell not the man to give up himself.”

That night at a brief officers' meeting Crook finally did admit that the great enemy gathering had in all likelihood already broken up. And—as if expressing his greatest suspicion and long-held fear—he was certain the Sioux were already making for the Black Hills. Because of that, he told them, they would not be heading for Fort Abraham Lincoln, no more than a hundred miles away and his closest source of supply—a march that would take four days, five at the most.

Nor would he be pointing them north to the Glendive depot Terry had promised to provision on the Yellowstone, a little over a hundred miles off.

“We would lose two weeks' time in both maneuvers,” he explained. “A week getting there, and a week getting back to where we are standing right here. Between getting there and coming back, I fear we would lose half our horses.”

Instead Crook informed that silent throng they would be turning south for Deadwood—nothing less than seven days and 180 miles away across a piece of ground totally unknown to any of the scouts still with the expedition.

After all, he told them, the fact remained that the freshest Indian trails pointed south.

As Seamus stood at the fringe of those sullen, hungry, and cold men gathered in a steady downpour, he couldn't help but wonder if Crook would get his Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition out of the wilderness this time. And if he did, at what cost?

If Crook had intended all along to march so far, why had he begun with only fifteen days' rations? Why had he allowed his column to move so slowly? And why had Crook allowed his men so many long halts, which did nothing but whittle away at what dwindling supplies they did have left?

And then it came down to asking the most painful questions of all for a man who had served George Crook since the bloody Sioux campaign begun back in the March snows of the sore-eye moon: Did the general know what he was doing? Did he have a plan? Or was he only floundering, thrashing about—hoping Lady Luck would smile on him?

That Tuesday night Crook wrote Sheridan his first report in a full month, summarizing the expedition's movements to date. Once again the general wrote things as he saw them, or at least as he wanted Sheridan to see them— claiming he had been hot on the trail of the hostile village that had remained intact until very recently:

Camp at head of Heart River, Dak., Ty., September 5, 1876

Lieutenant General Sheridan, Chicago, Ill. … My Column followed the trail down Beaver Creek … where the Indians scattered … the separation taking place apparently about twelve days ago.

I have every reason to believe that all the hostile Indians left the Big Horn, Tongue, and Powder River country in the village, the trail of which we followed … With the exception of a few lodges that had stolen off toward the agencies, there was no change in the size or arrangement of the village until it disintegrated. All indications show that the hostile Indians were much straitened for food and that they are now traveling in small bands, scouring the country for small game.

In concluding his message Crook asked Sheridan to speed to Custer City twenty days' rations for his men and two hundred thousand pounds of grain for his stock, stating he intended to use the settlement as the seat of his winter operations.

After midnight early on the sixth the Ree scouts rode out under cover of darkness from that miserable, muddy bivouac, heading east for Fort Lincoln with their dispatches. Once again Crook was left without Indian guides. He would have to rely on half-breeds Grouard, Pourier, and Garnier, along with the white scouts still among them.

Just past six
A.M.
the infantry sergeants had their men formed up and shambling off, marching due south for the nearby Heart River after a breakfast at half rations. No sugar and salt were left—every last vestige of them had been washed from the packsaddles by the relendess rains. Only two days of the sodden hard bread and bacon was left them. Four days remained of their coffee supply. And that
morning the surgeons put in their plea with the scouts to shoot what game they could for the sake of the sick being hauled along on the bouncing travois in the midst of Moore's mule train. Just as Moore was about to move out his packers, Lieutenant Bubb led some of his men over to Dr. Bennett A. Clements with the last of the quartermaster's luxuries.

“What have you here?” the surgeon asked.

“The last of what I have to offer for your casualties,” Bubb explained heroically. “Two cans of jelly, seventy pounds of these white beans, and a half-dozen tins of vegetables.”

First thing that morning the men had to cross the rain-swollen Heart River, forced to construct a bridge using the wooden boxes of their ammunition taken from the back of their pack-animals. A torrent of thunderstorm runoff rushed down every wide coulee and narrow ravine as the prairie soil, already soaked from recent days of nonstop rain, flooded beneath them. Even the bright, cheering orb of the sun itself was soon lost behind a thick bank of clouds gathering in that gray, overcast sky. Yet there was enough light that many of the weary men noticed the flashes of. signal mirrors from nearby ridges and hilltops. However slow the column moved, however painful their progress, the enemy was watching the soldiers.

Horses plodded, some weaving out of column, refusing or unable to obey their riders any longer. Infantry soldiers dropped out constantly as the screws that attached the soles of their brogans wore into the mushy inner layers and gashed the bottoms of their miserably cold feet. Throughout that long, terrible day the men began to straggle farther and farther out on both flanks, some lagging far to the rear in despair and exhaustion. More than a few horses gave out that Wednesday, and most of the laggards butchered strips of lean red meat from the flanks of the bony animals that had fallen and could not be made to get back onto their legs. For the first time at the rear of that march, men began to chew on the tough, stringy, raw meat,
sucking out what nourishment they could. Occasionally a man might dig up a wild onion or an Indian turnip, perhaps even find a few miserable berries clinging to the patchy brush that hugged the narrow water courses. But it made little difference now. The horse-meat march had begun.

After trudging thirty miles over that sodden country in a cold, rainy fog so thick it was difficult to maintain the column's bearing, after crossing both branches of the Cannonball River and stumbling across a cactus-infested desert terrain, the men limped into bivouac at a cluster of small alkaline water holes some six miles south of Rainy Buttes, where they could find no wood to boil their coffee. Those who could get some of the damp grass ignited held twists of it under their tun cups, though most of the soldiers choked down their miserable ration, of bacon and hardtack that night with only the milky water in their canteens.

Any man who had been lucky enough to shoot one of the prairie dogs in the many villages the column marched through that day ravenously tore the raw flesh from the tiny bones. Two of Tom Moore's packers had brought down a hawk that afternoon and attempted to cook the meat they hacked from its breast in a tin cup, but the damp grass only smoldered and smoked and turned the water so black they abandoned the soggy meat altogether. Whenever an unlucky jackrabbit wandered close to the bivouac, the soldiers descended on it with lariats, nose bags, and saddle blankets, chasing the creature from all sides until it was run to death.

In the end as twilight fell, every man huddled beneath his thin blanket and turned to cutting the thick gumbo from his boots or shoes with his folding knife, helplessly shuddering in the rain as the wind came up.

As the sun fell out of the low-hanging clouds, creating those few intoxicating moments of light before the orb was lost behind the western horizon, the scouts returned to report having a short skirmish with the Sioux, who apparendy were still moving south just ahead of the soldiers.

Near dark Quartermaster Bubb's men issued rations
for the next day. With no bacon left, it was a quarter ration of coffee and bread. Barely enough to cover the palm of a soldier's hand, much less fill his belly.

“I just hope we overtake the hostiles in the next day or so,” John Bourke opined in the darkness and misery of that night. “Have ourselves a fight that would partially compensate us for our privations and sufferings.”

“It's the poor creatures of burden that I'm worried most about, Johnny,” Donegan replied. “Gone weeks without good feed, forced to scrounge for grass where the Sioux haven't burned it off—these animals are starving to death. One by one, by one.”

For the past few days Seamus had remained committed to his horse, although more and more of the men knew they would likely all be reduced to eating horse meat just to survive. Like Tom Moore's packers, the Irishman religiously rubbed bacon grease on the horse's open sores and wounds, situating the saddle blanket just so in hopes it would not aggravate the oozy wounds suffered by the bone-bare creature.

At reveille the next morning word came down from command headquarters: abandoned horses were to be shot and butchered for food.

This was nothing short of unthinkable for a horse soldier!

Beneath clearing skies the column stumbled out that seventh day of September, and in less than an hour all but a dozen of the cavalrymen had dismounted and were pulling their reluctant horses along, cajoling, begging, pleading with the animals to keep moving—just so the troopers would not find themselves forced to shoot their animals, the companions they had relied upon for many months.

By afternoon many of the men were collapsing with the animals beside the trail as rain clouds rumbled back over the land and released their torrent. At one point the expedition was stretched out for more than twenty miles. Every now and then Seamus heard the sodden report of some soldier's weapon.

He flinched with every gunshot, turning every time to look over his shoulder at the horse plodding on his heels, its hooves caked with gumbo plastered clear to its hocks. On and on Seamus trudged, every fifth step forced to yank on the reins to keep his horse stumbling behind him. Each one of those echoing gunshots killed a little piece of the horse soldier that was Donegan, each bullet ripping through the heart of a horseman.

Along both sides of that march the skeletal soldiers jumped on the animals just shot, skinning back the hide and carving away the warm, juicy meat even before the heart of horse or mule had ceased its beating.

Here and there every few yards sat another man, trooper or foot soldier, his rifle lying in the mud beside him, his head slung disconsolately between his hunched soldiers as the heavens rained down upon them all. Some of the men openly cried as they rolled over onto their sides and curled up into fetal balls, giving in until others, those a bit stronger, came along and hauled their weaker comrades out of the mud. Once pulled up, the most weary and desperate among them dragged their feet through the endless mud, often supported between a pair of comrades, unable to go on without help.

Late that afternoon an Arikara courier rode in to give Crook a dispatch from Terry, reporting that supplies awaited the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition at the Glendive cantonment.

The news was too late to do them any good. They had long ago passed the point of no return.

As the head of the column went into camp that afternoon of the seventh, Crook stood guard over a half-dozen wild rosebushes, the hips of which he would allow only Surgeon Clements's sick to use. Lieutenant Bubb had several of the hard-bread boxes broken up and the thin wood distributed through the command to start their pitiful fires.