A Cold Day in Hell (14 page)

From Berthold, Luther trekked upriver on foot, hungry for adventure. Along the way he bumped into a party of wandering Mandan, out to hunt buffalo. From them he learned how to prepare
boudins
, chopped meat and marrow fat cooked within a casing of a buffalo’s intestine. Later, when he found a little steady employment as a mail carrier between Forts Berthold and Stevenson—journeys on which he would take volumes of Poe, Shakespeare, Scott, and other classical authors into the wilderness for his own entertainment—Kelly met the noted Arikara tracker, Bloody Knife.

By the time Luther’s hair had grown to his shoulders and his mustache had become all the shaggier, he had killed his first Lakota: two warriors intent on lifting his white scalp and robbing him of his Henry. Around Fort Peck, indeed all along the Upper Missouri, the story of that fateful encounter was told and retold by his friend Bloody Knife and other Arikara scouts who found work from time to time for the army.

It was while Kelly made some occasional money as a woodhawk, supplying the few upriver steamboats with fuel, that he was asked to guide for Colonel George A. Forsyth, come to map and explore the Yellowstone as a member of General Sheridan’s Chicago staff on Captain Grant Marsh’s
Far West
From Fort Buford at the mouth of the Yellowstone, the party pushed past Glendive Creek and on to the mouth of the Powder before turning back. Back at Buford, Luther bid the soldiers farewell, then turned back into the country of the Milk, the Judith, and particularly the hunters’ paradise of the Musselshell River, where he cut wood, trapped occasionally, and hunted wolf pelts
until late this past spring when it seemed that wandering Sioux war parties became even more troublesome than normal.

In the Judith basin he had been following wolf sign among the tracks of a small migrating buffalo herd, for those winter-thick pelts brought five dollars American at the nearby posts. From there Luther moseyed farther south toward the Yellowstone that summer, picking the wild strawberries as they came into season until he reached the country near Pompey’s Pillar. Upon those spectacular heights he looked down into the far river valley and caught sight of the white tents of an army camp lining a green bottomland near a bend in the sparkling river. From there to the mouth of the Bighorn, Kelly was rarely ever out of sight of soldiers or supply trains as General Terry prepared to pursue Sitting Bull and General Crook made ready to pursue Crazy Horse into the Black Hills.

Too many folks, Luther had groaned. Seemed the army was destined to stir up more trouble for itself. Kelly turned away to make his way up the river when he soon ran onto some Montana miners who were easing down the Yellowstone, having heard of the army’s preparations to pursue the Indians who had massacred Custer. It was the following day when he was out hunting that he found himself confronted by a large cinnamon bear he dropped with his needle gun. Because the hide was very poor at that late-summer season, Kelly took only some back fat to use as gun oil, along with one of the big forepaws and all the claws.

On down the north bank of the Yellowstone, Kelly tramped with the mining party until they reached a sprawling military camp erected about a mile above the mouth of the Tongue River. There they crossed to the south side on a crude ferry the soldiers operated, finding the camp nearly deserted. Quartermaster Randall explained that most of the men were either out working the timber in the hills for their huts, or they were out on routine patrols of the nearby country.

“By the Land of Goshen!” Randall gushed as his eyes suddenly locked on that dark object suspended from the horn of Kelly’s saddle and stepped forward to have himself a better look. “What in God’s name is that?”

Luther untied the rawhide whangs from the saddle horn and handed it over to the captain. “Just the paw of a cinnamon I killed the other day.”

“Never have I seen anything so huge!” Randall said admiringly of the paw over a foot long without the claws. “You shot this by yourself?”

“I did,” Kelly replied. “But it wasn’t my first. I’ve been out here for nearly eight years already—”

Randall interrupted eagerly, “You know this country, do you?”

“A good deal of it, yes.”

The captain hefted the heavy bear’s paw and declared, “The general will want to see you.”

“The general?” Kelly asked. “Who’s the general?”

“Why, Nelson A. Miles. He’s curious to learn all that he can about this country.”

At that moment the mischievous thought had struck Luther. He instructed the quartermaster, “There, Captain—take that paw to General Miles for me. Tell him it is my calling card.”

In the next few moments Randall had the paw in the hands of his own orderly, on its way to the tent of Colonel Nelson A. Miles, commander of the Fifth U.S. Infantry, whose job it was to erect winter quarters there at the Tongue River, as well as patrol the Yellowstone and prevent Sitting Bull’s Sioux from crossing north of the river, fleeing on to Canada.

Late that afternoon and into the evening, the intrigued Miles questioned Kelly in great detail about the country north of the river, indeed, all the way to the British line; seeking knowledge of it for a field of operations against the hostiles. During their talk Kelly told the colonel about his three-year hitch in the regular army, having seen some of his service in the Dakota Territory.

“As much as I know about a lot of this country, the stretch of ground just north of the Tongue River here is known only to the Sioux and maybe some Cheyenne,” Luther explained. “Back in sixty-eight when I came to this country, it was already given over to the tribes by treaty. Not a man do I know who has come to this country and lived to tell his story.”

“As I suspected, Kelly,” Miles replied soberly. “But you know something of what’s downriver?”

“I was there three summers back, with Grant Marsh and General Forsyth.”

“You don’t say?” the colonel asked approvingly. “We’re here with orders to make a fall and winter campaign of it, Kelly.”

Luther watched Miles sip at his coffee, then said, “Captain Randall filled me in with all that he could, General.”

Miles rose from his canvas stool and got to his feet, one of the few men who stood as tall as Luther Kelly. “What say you to employment as a government scout?”

For a moment he hesitated. “When I’m not scouting for you, am I free to hunt for myself?”

Miles stroked the bear’s paw. “By all means!”

Luther saluted. “Then I suppose you’ve got yourself a scout, General.”

“You’re not regular army anymore, Kelly,” Miles replied, holding out his big hand. They shook. “Now you’re chief scout for the District of the Yellowstone.”

In those blackest hours just before dawn this cold autumn morning, with Miles and his soldiers coming along somewhere behind them, Luther and Billy Cross ran across a recent Indian camp. While the ashes in the many fire pits had grown cold, the ground beneath was nonetheless still warm.

“Perhaps no more than a day now,” Luther said quietly.

“Cheyenne camp here too,” the half-breed added, pointing to the small patch of ground cleared in an orderly circle. “Lakota always pitch lodges here and there, where they want. But this circle open to the east … it show some Cheyenne come with Sitting Bull too.”

Since the two of them were so far ahead of the column by that time, Luther decided they could rest for an hour back in the brush. After awaking, they were up and in the saddle again as the sun peeked over the bare horizon blanketed with nothing but brown and yellowed grasses. For all their hunting, Luther and Billy didn’t see a wagon or a war pony, either one, all that long, dusty day.

At sundown they made their own fireless camp and rolled up in their blankets as the temperature began to drop. Somewhere behind them the soldiers would be making their bivouac, Luther ruminated as he fell into a fitful, uneasy sleep.

At twilight that night, in fact, Miles finally halted the men so they could make coffee, their first real stop since leaving Tongue River that morning. After the choking dust kicked up by all those hooves and bootees, the quiet of the high plains night settled around them with a cold grip as the men huddled around a hundred tiny fires. But there would be little rest until he knew what had happened to Otis’s supply train. In half an hour the colonel had the regiment up and moving once more.

Miles was anxious, straining to know what lay out there in the unknown. Sensing perhaps his date with Sitting Bull, and destiny.

The Glendive Road led the regiment into the moonless black of that night, probing across the broken, rugged ground
until the colonel finally stopped them at one
A.M
. They had been at it over twenty hours already.

“The men can rest here for a few hours” Miles told his weary officers. “As soon as there’s enough light to march, we’ll be pushing on.”

The Fifth Infantry had just put thirty hard Montana miles behind them.

N
elson Miles did not roust his weary command until dawn and did not have them marching northeast out of their miserable bivouac until nine
A.M
. With what scouts he had along reporting no sighting of hostiles, the colonel dispatched some of his soldiers in small hunting parties, hoping to discover some of the numerous buffalo in that country.

Having already covered some sixteen miles that day, just past midafternoon the advance called out that the wagon train had been spotted in the distance. Within minutes Miles was eagerly shaking hands with Lieutenant Colonel Elwell S. Otis when they met on the east bank of Custer Creek, some five miles upstream from the Yellowstone.

Together they went into bivouac for the night on the banks of Cherry Creek, just as the sun fell late in the afternoon. While the combined columns raided the willow bogs for firewood or collected dried buffalo chips to heat up their coffee and supper, Miles held a conference with the weary commander of the Glendive Cantonment.

After Otis gave a full report on his running fight with Sitting Bull’s warriors, Miles ordered him to proceed on with the supply train to Tongue River the next morning, while the Fifth took up the pursuit of the Hunkpapa.

“We’re strong enough to punish them,” Nelson vowed before his officers. “By Jupiter, we’ll make them pay this time.”

Well after dark, Nelson trudged through camp to find the unit placed in charge of his single piece of artillery. Dismantled, the Rodman gun had covered the last two days strapped on the backs of a pair of mules. Those Napoleon guns assigned to the regiment he had simply deemed far too bulky and immobile for campaigning in rugged Indian country such as this.

He spent a few minutes visiting his nephew George and his company before deciding he would take a few minutes that evening to write more to Mary—perhaps to detail for her his frustrations in hearing so much about Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa, knowing they were somewhere close along the Yellowstone, but not yet having caught a single glimpse of that elusive chief of the winter roamers who had wiped out Custer’s five companies.