A Cold Day in Hell (15 page)

“Where are you, you red bastard?” he whispered as he
turned back toward his bivouac, really nothing more than a gum poncho tied over some willow branches where his bedroll had been thrown out. “I know you’re out there, you wily son of a bitch. My Kelly will find you, then I’ll snare you once and for all. And trust me: when I do catch up to you, I won’t make the same mistakes Custer did, not by a long shot.”

Nelson held strong opinions on everything, especially this Army of the West. To him it seemed that no other commander had taken the trouble to analyze their situation out there on the frontier when it came to fighting horse-mounted warriors. Most commanders truthfully didn’t have the spirit it would take to defeat the hostiles. And those few who might have the gumption to make a fight of it simply lacked one or more of the other necessary traits to pull off the victory they were needing so very badly.

“Alfred Terry,” he murmured as he settled atop his blankets and his dog-robber brought over a steaming cup of coffee.

“Sir?”

“Oh … nothing,” Miles replied. “Just thinking to myself.”

Indeed. General Alfred Terry, commanding the Department of the Dakotas, seemed the best of the lot for all intents and purposes. Yet even he had no experience in fighting Indians. Besides, he was the sort of man who time and again fell under the sway of subordinates with stronger personalities—too much influenced by the likes of the brash George Armstrong Custer and that dullard John Gibbon.

He took out paper and fitted his pen with a new nib, hoping it would not be so cold that the ink would freeze. He much preferred to write Mary with a pen instead of pencil. This night he again told his wife of his frustrations with her uncle at the War Department. Why William Tecumseh Sherman refused to turn the whole matter over to him was beyond Nelson. Then he realized he was starting to seethe more and more these days—like a dog snarling at the end of a long chain. So he wrote Mary that perhaps he should resign from the army, just as he had considered doing last summer—that, rather than endure another long, tedious, and poorly executed circus like the fiasco Terry and Crook had made of the summer’s campaign.

He fell asleep over his writing tablet that night, his pen in one hand, that small cabinet photo of his wife in the other.

The cold that Friday morning, the twentieth, was even more brutal than it had been. As he stomped circulation back into his
feet and legs, Nelson took all the more satisfaction with his foresight in equipping the men for what this country could dish out in the way of weather.

“Both officers and men profited by the experience they had been through in the winter campaigns in the Indian Territory,” he had written in his journal weeks ago, “and applied themselves zealously to their equipment in every possible way.”

In addition to the army-issue woolen clothing every man wore, Miles’s soldiers cut up their woolen blankets to craft themselves heavy underclothing, as well as fashioning masks that covered the entire head, leaving three openings for the eyes and mouth. With those masks on, it was all but impossible to tell one man from the other, to tell private from colonel.

Since coming to the Tongue in early September, Nelson had seen to it that every steamboat shipment included what the men would wear once the weather changed: the thick buffalo-hide shoes commonly called arctics, as well as the thick horsehide gloves with long gauntlets made to slip over the wide cuffs on their buffalo-hide coats. Many of the men also cut up grain sacks they used to wrap around their stockings for an extra layer of thick warmth.

After a breakfast of coffee and tack, the Fifth moved out, marching north by east beneath an overcast and threatening sky. It wasn’t long before those officers at the van of the march spotted the first warriors as the Sioux horsemen bristled along the skyline of a distant hill. Mile after mile, hour by hour, more warriors appeared in advance of the march as Miles kept his regiment moving, the men murmuring, wary, and watchful.

“Great Jupiter!” he exclaimed to those in his headquarters group. “Those must be from Sitting Bull’s village.”

By the time the colonel called a brief halt near midmorning, there were hundreds of warriors on horseback and on foot, arrayed atop the bare hills and windswept ridges directly in the regiment’s front.

“Gentlemen,” Miles told his officers, “let’s deploy the Fifth.”

“Battle front, General?” asked Wyllys Lyman.

“By all means, Captain. Battle front … and move out—ready to skirmish.”

Again the Fifth Infantry moved out, this time arrayed in battle formation: making a wide front, company by company, with reserves immediately in their rear, yard by yard advancing toward the enemy, who slowly fell back, the Sioux maintaining
the same respectful distance from those far-reaching Springfield rifles.

It was just past eleven when Nelson sighted two riders bearing a white flag leave a large body of horsemen on a nearby bluff and move toward the soldier column. They halted a hundred yards out, their grimy towel tied to a long willow branch snapping in the gusts of raw, cruel wind that kicked up dust from every hoof and boot.

With four of his officers Miles rode out to meet the pair with interpreter and scout Joe Culbertson, half-breed son of fur trader Alexander Culbertson.

“Their names are Long Feather and Bear’s Face,” the scout declared after some conversation with the two emissaries. “They come from Standing Rock, sent by the soldier chief there. The two of ’em say they’ve already talked to the soldier chief in charge of the wagons that headed this way.”

“I’m glad we’ve got Otis behind us now and on his way to the Tongue,” Miles grumbled. “If these two aren’t part of that bunch that attacked the supply train—what the hell are they doing here in this piece of country?”

“Say they come to tell Sitting Bull’s people to come in to the agency.”

Miles waved an arm slowly in an arc across the hills and bluffs. “Then these are Sitting Bull’s warriors? The same men who defeated Custer?”

Culbertson nodded. “S’pose that’s the make on it. These two say Sitting Bull wants to talk to the soldier chief.”

“Wants to talk, does he?”

“Bear’s Face says Sitting Bull wants to talk to you about surrendering his Hunkpapa.”

That sudden bit of surprising news jerked Nelson Miles up in the saddle as surely as a rope around his shoulders would have. “Wait just a minute—you sure you’ve got all their sign talk right, Culbertson?”

The half-breed’s dark eyes flared with resentment. “Maybe you trust one of your soldiers better than me, eh?”

Miles watched the scout rein his horse around, kick it in the flanks, and lope back to the soldier lines. Then he turned to his aide-de-camp. “Mr. Bailey, I want you to go with these two.”

“Yes, sir,” responded Second Lieutenant Hobart K. Bailey. “I’ll find out what I can about the status of Sitting Bull’s surrender, General.”

It was the better part of the next hour before Bailey finally returned.

“There’s a half-blood with ’em, General,” the lieutenant disclosed with no small excitement. “Named Brug-gair”

“He’s the one you talked with?” Miles inquired.

“Bruguier was our interpreter for the little chat we had.”

“What’d you find out?”

“Sitting Bull wants to meet the bear-coat leader.”

“Bear coat?” Then Nelson glanced down at his own appearance. As tall as he was, draped within the buffalo coat, with its bear-fur trim at both collar and cuffs, along with his tall stovepipe boots and fur cap, perhaps he did look somewhat like a bear.

He dispatched Bailey back with his demands as to the number of warriors Sitting Bull would bring with him into that no-man’s land where Miles agreed to meet the enigmatic Hunkpapa leader.

Before he advanced from the south, the colonel gave his staff orders for the deployment of the regiment along the crests of the nearby hills, positioning the Fifth to face the hundreds of mounted warriors, intending that they guard against treachery. All too well he remembered the tragic fate of General E.R.S. Canby out in the Modocs’ Lava Beds five years before.
*
At the same time he placed Captain Wyllys Lyman’s I Company to support the Rodman ordinance rifle Miles wanted positioned on a ridge north of the line of march where it could be trained on the hostiles. Then he moved First Lieutenant Mason Carter’s K Company into position on the high ground to the south and threw out a strong line of skirmishers directly to the rear of the open ground where he would hold his council with Sitting Bull.

Accompanied by Lieutenant Bailey, three mounted enlisted men, and two mounted color bearers, as well as scout Robert Jackson, the colonel advanced some four hundred yards toward the designated site, then halted, waiting while Bailey and the rest of the party covered the last hundred windswept yards. It took the better part of another hour as Bailey and Johnny Bruguier held more protracted talks before a dozen unarmed Sioux finally dismounted and moved forward on foot from the north. They were followed at a prudent distance by more than twenty warriors who stayed atop their ponies, tails and manes tossing in the
cold breeze. Thirty yards out, the dozen Hunkpapa on foot stopped in the brilliant but brutally frigid sunshine streaming through the dispersing clouds.

“They want us to dismount, General,” Bailey explained after he and the half-breed flung their voices back and forth across the distance.

As Nelson was considering whether or not to accept that request, five warriors moved away from the others, crossing half the distance to the soldiers before they spread buffalo robes and blankets upon the autumn-dried grass. They promptly sat, ready to parley.

“Which one is the chief?”

Bailey pointed to the one seated in the middle of the others as the more than two dozen Sioux horsemen milled anxiously some thirty yards farther away. Nelson suspiciously regarded those mounted Hunkpapa—every one of them armed with a Springfield carbine, Henry or Winchester repeater, a few with older model Spencer carbines. After a moment his eyes were drawn back to study his long-sought adversary. Sitting Bull wore only buckskin leggings, breechclout, and fur-lined moccasins. He wore no feathers, much less any sort of headdress, to signify his high office or his standing among the Hunkpapa people. Impassive, he sat clutching only a buffalo robe tightly around his shoulders.

Miles swallowed quickly with some growing excitement, then looked over his own entourage, saying, “Let’s go see what Sitting Bull has to say about his surrender.”

As the soldiers approached, the Hunkpapa chief waved an arm, signaling one of the horsemen forward. The rider came up, dropped a buffalo robe to the ground in front of his tribesmen, then reined about and returned to the rear with the others still mounted on their ponies. When two of the warriors with Sitting Bull quickly spread the robe on the prairie, the chief gestured to have Miles take a seat there before him.

Miles shook his head. “Bailey, tell them I think it better that we don’t get quite so close.”

But before the lieutenant could translate, the dark-skinned warrior seated at the chief’s left hand was already whispering in Sitting Bull’s ear.

“Who’s that?”

“The one I told you about. Half-breed. Name’s Brug-gair, something like that.”

“He speaks their tongue well, eh?” Miles asked.

“Does a good job with ours too,” Bailey replied.

“All right, if you fellas have your pistols ready under your coats,” the colonel finally said as he trudged forward again, “let’s see what these unsavory characters have to say for themselves.”