A Cold Day in Hell (10 page)

About the same time that ammunition was reaching K Company, the last of the wagons began pulling farther and farther away across the stream. For a few minutes it appeared Kell’s men would be cut off and surrounded by the hostiles—sure to be overwhelmed. Time and again the horsemen surged forward, sweeping past and dropping to the far side of their ponies, firing beneath the animals’ necks before clattering away, hooves churning up clods of prairie. Charge after charge after charge—

“Major Sanger!” Otis screamed above the noise of wagons and men, mules and Sioux. “Take your men and break through to K Company. Bring them up to rejoin the column!”

Answering with only a salute, Sanger got his G Company off at a lope to reinforce Kell’s besieged troops barely holding up the rear of the column. By now the Sioux had fired the tall dried grass on both flanks of the column on the west bank and to the rear, where they began to withdraw with Sanger’s reinforcement of Kell’s soldiers.

The air burned their lungs as they struggled to close up with the wagons. Men coughed, dropped to their knees as they were robbed of breath, sucking desperately at the air as black
flecks of smoldering grass littered the sky all around them like July fireflies.

“Keep those goddamned wagons moving!” Otis yelled far to the front, prodding his drivers. “We stop here—we’re all done for!”

Inch by inch, foot by foot, the mules and wagons formed up by fours once more having reached that high ground. Together with what was left of the escort not fighting in their front or to their rear, they ground their way along the rutted Tongue River Road.

They came to a jangling halt, men bellowing and the mules noisily fighting their harness—for out of the north and east swarmed a reinforced party of yelping horsemen.

“Keep those goddamned wagons moving!” Otis hollered, weaving in and among the leaders atop one of the five horses left for his men at Glendive Cantonment.

When things appeared their worst, the warriors on the right flank suddenly broke off their attack and boiled to the front of the column, where some of the horsemen crossed and reinforced their numbers, suddenly putting extreme pressure on the left side while the rest remained to stubbornly harass the front of the train. It was there the first wagons slowed even more until the entire line was all but stopped.

In heartbeats Otis lumbered up to his advance guard, ordering, “Mr. Sharpe—detach Mr. Conway with a squad of ten men and keep the way cleared!”

With Lieutenant Conway and his soldiers off to punch their way against the warriors at their front, Sharpe remained with the rest of his H Company as well as G Company to hold back the extreme pressure of those warriors reinforced on their left flank. It took the better part of an hour before the wagons were once more able to move down the road. By that time the smoke became even more suffocating from the grass fires that raged around them on all sides—some of the wagons and mule teams forced to frantically dash through the leaping flames, men hollering in panic and mules braying in fear … when within moments the winds shifted around from the west and for the most part raised that thick, choking pall—preventing the gray, stinging blanket from completely swallowing the movement of the soldier column.

Someone cried out on Sharpe’s far right. He whirled to watch a soldier from G Company spin to the ground, clutching his knee. The man’s bunkie was on him in an instant, ripping off
his belt and tightening it above the wound. It wasn’t but a minute before Surgeon Charles T. Gibson was there to lend a hand.

At that very moment Sharpe realized just how cut off they were: on all sides the rolling prairie lay blackened, smoldering, a great gray shroud blotting out the midafternoon sun hung like a red ball above them in the autumn sky. It reminded the lieutenant of the waste Napoleon had laid to the steppes of Russia in his disastrous retreat more than half a century before. Then he chided himself—to think that his little struggle was of any consequence compared to the great European campaigns he had studied at the Academy.

Then almost immediately he decided theirs was a worthy struggle. While Napoleon battled against a civilized enemy—Otis’s column found itself surrounded by a fiendish enemy who fought not only with bullets, but with smoke and fire and devilish noise. In addition, they each struggled privately against the twin demons of a soldier’s nightmare: hunger and thirst.

From this high ground they had struggled so hard to reach and to hold against terrible odds, the lieutenant now dared look back at the narrow valley where the Indians swarmed against the rear guard. Now the Sioux held the valley behind them. The enemy had possession of water and wood while the soldiers had only what they hurriedly had taken on in crossing the creek. To attempt to run that gauntlet back to the creek for water would be nothing short of sheer suicide.

Up here on the high ground there was little to no firewood. What there had been was now all but burned to ash as every footstep and every hoof raised the stifling black dust into the air. As a biting wind came up, the sun continued its rapid fall, closing on the far horizon.

Out there to the west … where Miles and his Fifth Infantry knew nothing of their predicament.

“W
e are not done yet, brother,” William Jackson said as he sat down beside Robert at the small fire they had dug into the prairie so that its low flames would not show.

There wasn’t much wood to speak of in that cold bivouac the soldier column made on a broad depression that dominated the high ground that night. But at least they had plenty of food to eat—if a man could call hard bread and pig meat real food. And water. At least they had taken on enough water to see to the mules, enough for each man to refill his canteen for the night.

William’s stomach rumbled. He stared at the tiny fire and remembered the meals his mother had set before them when they had been boys on the high Missouri: the boiled buffalo boss ribs, pemmican sweetened with chokecherries, stewed
pommes blanche
, and his favorite—dried camas. It made his mouth water, made his stomach feel all the more pinched to think on such feasting. Here at least, he told himself, they were warm.

The Jackson brothers and Bear Plume had scoured the scorched campground, pulling up the twisted branches and limbs of the scrub oak and cedar with their hands, gathering the charred wood within the flaps of their coats while the nameless Ree scout used his belt knife to dig a fire hole in the blackened earth. Now the four of them sat huddled around the low flames, talking in whispers.

From the best estimation of the soldiers, Otis’s column had made all of fifteen miles during their day-long running fight before
making camp at five o’clock, close to sundown. The Lakota continued to flit around on all sides of the soldiers as the wagons were formed into a large corral, and shots were exchanged between pickets and the daring horsemen until darkness fell just past seven
P.M
. From time to time one of the infantrymen made his shot count, so that by the time night sank over that bivouac, Otis’s men could claim to have knocked at least half a dozen warriors from their ponies.

No soldiers had been killed during the day’s skirmishing, but three men had been slightly wounded by spent bullets—the infantry’s Long Toms had simply held the Lakota too far out of range to make effective use of their charges and whirling attacks. These foot-sloggers had, by and large, kept the maddening dash of those hundreds of horsemen at bay, holding them back at least a thousand yards, just beyond the range of their Springfield rifles. Otis had begun this journey with ten thousand rounds for his rifles. This evening his men reported they were down to less than half of that. Many miles yet to go, and surrounded by the enemy who outnumbered them as many as four to one.

“Tomorrow come,” Robert agreed. “That will be a new day for Sitting Bull.”

“Sitting Bull?” Bear Plume asked, recognizing the sound of the Lakota shaman’s name in English.

“Yes,” William answered as he held his hands over the glowing fire pit to warm them with the other men. “These are Sitting Bull’s warriors. They cross the Yellowstone. Come to hunt all these buffalo we see after leaving Tongue River. Good hunting—always means lots of Lakota around.”

Bear Plume grunted and fell silent.

Occasionally they would hear the clink of a tin cup against a rifle barrel, or the bray of a mule, a gust of muffled laughter, or the sneeze of some man down with a cold. It was that season of the year on the high plains. Even for men who spent most of their lives outdoors. With warm, sunny days and the sort of nights that could chill a man to his narrow—most folks out here simply put up with a seasonal cough or sniffle.

Tonight Otis’s men were all on alert, out there in the rifle pits the soldiers had hastily dug on a perimeter five hundred yards out from the corral where they huddled, quiet and sleepless, watchful through the cold autumn night.

As the high plains awaited the coming of another winter.

William Jackson had seen twenty-one winters since his Blackfoot mother had given birth to him at Fort Benton, far, far
up the Missouri River at the head of navigation, just downstream from the Great Falls. At that time the American Fur Company was in the buffalo-robe trade with the western tribes. He had to do no more than close his eyes these days to remember the great adobe and picket walls, the two-story buildings enclosed within—a great place to be a child.

His grandfather, Hugh Monroe, had been an employee of the great Hudson’s Bay Company, first coming to its Mountain Fort on the Saskatchewan in 1816, where he married Fox Woman, daughter of a Blackfoot chief. He held the position of post hunter, and together they had two sons and two daughters. One of them, Amelia, would marry Thomas Jackson, the member of an old Virginia family who had joined American Fur in 1835. Unlike the rest of the company employees who followed the custom of marrying Pikuni women, a tribe of the Blackfoot Confederacy, Thomas had fallen in love with Amelia.

Robert was their firstborn. Two years later William came along. They were inseparable. What a life they shared! As children they learned the three languages spoken at the fort: English, French Creole, and Pikuni. The Blackfoot tongue dominated most trade talk. By the time the boys were six or seven, they could speak all three languages with equal ease. In addition, on those long winter nights huddled before their fires in the fort’s quarters, father Thomas had taken pains to teach his two sons to read and write.

“You will learn never to shame the noble blood that runs in your veins,” he instructed his boys. “Your mother comes from Pikuni royalty. And my own family goes back a long, long way in the Old Dominion.”

Every year with the summer steamer their father made sure he brought up toys and games and storybooks from the company’s offices in St. Louis. As boyhood slowly passed away, the boys learned to ride and shoot, use a knife and tomahawk from their mother’s people. Such training was vital, for any man who carried Indian blood in his veins, the northern Rockies meant he would have friends, and he would suffer enemies. In their youth William and Robert narrowly escaped an Assiniboine war party. Not long afterward the first settlers came and threw up their log huts in the shadow of Fort Benton.

“That marks the beginning of the end for us!” grandfather cried, shaking a fist at the newcomers.

“What does this mean?” young William had asked, frightened.

“It means the whites are invading our country,” the old white-head explained angrily. “They will build a town, right here! They will begin to swarm all over our plains and along the foot of our mountains. They will kill off our meat animals, trap out our fur animals. My young ones—they are the kind that will desolate our country with their cattle and make beggars of us!”

Occasionally the boys would go out for days and camp with “woodhawks”—those men who, at great risk to their lives, would cut the immense cords of wood they sold to river steamboats plying the northern rivers each summer. During those seasons of their lives, not a year went by without raids by the Northern Cheyenne or Lakota—taking the lives of many of these daring, hearty woodhawks who would move their camp every day, eat supper around a fire, then always float downstream a mile or so before making a fireless camp for the night.