A Cold Day in Hell (69 page)

“A gift?”

Washakie brought his pony to a halt beside Crook, handing a ceremonial pipe down to the general who stood on foot.

Feathers fluttered from the long stem as Crook inspected it, then finally whispered, “This is … quite a gift, Captain.”

“And for Major Pollock,” Cosgrove said as a second Shoshone came forward bearing his gift, “a war shirt.”

Captain Edwin Pollock, commander of Reno Cantonment, stepped forward, his cheeks red with embarrassment as he took the buckskin shirt that had been painted black—the color of war—and decorated with scalp locks as well as yellow horsehair plumes. “Th-thank you. Thank all of these fine men,” Pollock stammered.

“And especially for Lieutenant Schuyler,” Cosgrove said, motioning a third warrior forward to lay his gift at the feet of the young officer who had commanded the Shoshone battalion atop the high ground the day of the battle, “this token of their regard for you as a war chief.”

For a long moment Walter S. Schuyler was speechless as he picked up the bow case and quiver filled with iron-tipped arrows, as well as a saddle cover of beaded buckskin, a pair of beaded moccasins, and a war shield ringed with eagle feathers.

“General Crook,” Cosgrove said with finality and a salute as his horse pranced backward of a sudden. “Till we meet on another war trail, on another battlefield.”

Crook, Schuyler, Pollock, and the rest saluted as the two old Confederates snapped their arms down, reined right in silence, and kicked their ponies into a lope. At the end of the long, colorful line of Shoshone they signaled with their arms only, and as one all the warriors heeled smartly into a column of twos, their unshod ponies kicking up clods of icy snow, feathers bristling and scalp locks flying on the cold breeze as they climbed the far slope, crested the top, and began to fade into the distance.

Donegan somberly watched the old friends slowly disappear in the cold, sunlit distance of that snow-caked land, those brave men hurrying southwest toward the Wind River Mountains, sensing the remorse at that parting of men who have together borne the terrifying weight of battle and utter hardship.

For the rest of the morning while the command was packing up, the Irishman found his throat all but clogged with a sour ball of sentiment, his eyes close to betraying him as he thought on all those years he had watched friends fall in battles, or perhaps just as painful, watched friends ride off—perhaps never again to gallop stirrup to stirrup into the jaws of death.

“I figure you ought to know what the general’s up to with this march, Johnny,” Seamus declared later that day as he brought his horse into line beside Lieutenant Bourke’s shortly after the column moved out up the Dry Fork of the Powder, headed south by east.

“Hell, this is as much a mystery to me as any man,” Bourke replied with a shrug.

“Crook ain’t said a thing to you where we’re going or for why?”

With a shake of his head the lieutenant answered, “Only thing I know is that the general conferred with Mackenzie about making this march.”

Seamus’s eyes narrowed. “Mackenzie?”

“That’s right. I was there when the two of them studied the general’s maps.”

“Looking for what?”

“Where best to make the crossing of that country between the Little Powder and the Belle Fourche.”

“By the saints! That’s back to that god-bleeming desert country we crossed last September!”

Nodding, Bourke replied, “About sixty miles worth of desert crossing, Seamus.”

“No wood, no graze, and damn well no water to speak of!”

“Sixty miles of it,” the lieutenant said. “But both Crook and Mackenzie figure the gamble is worth the test.”

“To save some days?”

“Exactly. About ten days by the looks of things on the maps.”

“Crook wants Crazy Horse even more’n I ever dreamed he could hunger to get his hands around that red savage’s throat.”

That day they put twenty miles under them before stopping for the night at Buffalo Springs on the Dry Fork. Then Crook kept them there—in camp and in the dark—for both the fourth and the fifth. As did many of the men during that interminable wait, Seamus wrote his loved ones.

Finally on the morning of the sixth Crook moved them out again, marching only seven miles in the wind-driven snow, where they found little water—what there was proved to be muddy and loaded with alkali salts—as well as finding they had no firewood. The command had all but emptied the wagons of forage for their animals, and there was little hope of any reaching Mackenzie’s men from the south anytime soon, what with the
severity of the recent storms likely blocking rail shipments to Medicine Bow Gap, the same horrid weather blocking wagon shipments from there north to Fort Fetterman on the North Platte.

The men huddled together as best they could through the night, suffering greatly, as did their horses, while winter continued to pummel the high plains. Just before dawn the surgeons reported that the mercury in their thermometers hovered at thirty below zero. Hundreds of men reported cases of frostbitten fingers, toes, noses, and ears at sick call upon awaking.

They packed up in light marching order in a severe snowstorm that morning of the seventh, ordered to make ready for the fifteen-mile march north by east that would take them to the Belle Fourche. Off in the shimmering, icy distance to the south stood the hulking monoliths of the Pumpkin Buttes, orange and ocher against the newly fallen snow. Only the leafless branches of cottonwood and willow marked each frozen water course winding its way down to the Belle Fourche. Few if any birds were seen roosting along the line of march, while far overhead the great longnecks honked, these last to hurry south in great undulating vees. For as far as the eye could see, the land lay beneath a solid sheet of white—more desolate, bare, and destitute of life than ever Seamus could have imagined it.

In camp late that night after the wagons had finally rolled in so the men could boil their coffee and prepare supper of what deer, elk, antelope, jackrabbits, and even a few porcupines they had managed to kill along the trail that day, a few soldiers grumbled their bitter recriminations about Crook, sharing their tales of how the general had punished another command and its horses three months earlier.

“Some say Crook figures to find Crazy Horse near Slim Buttes,” Billy Garnett explained.

“Now, that’s hard to believe,” Seamus said. “Surely the general’s smart enough to know those Lakota aren’t still in this country, that they’re gonna move on after all this time. That’s better’n four months now!”

With a shrug Garnett replied, “Can’t figure what Crook’s thinking. Only know what we all know: the general’s been wanting that red son of a bitch for the better part of a year now.

“Sweet Mither of God! Crook ain’t gonna find Crazy Horse anywhere near them Slim Buttes or the Black Hills country.”

“Shit!” Garnett scoffed with a grin. “So, mister know-it-all,
why don’t you tell me why in the hell Crook’s gonna take us off in this direction if he doesn’t expect to find Crazy Horse in this here country?”

But for the life of him … Donegan couldn’t come up with a single good answer.

W
hat or who George Crook was relying upon for his information about where he would find the Crazy Horse people was as much a mystery as anything in the world. Perhaps he was doing no more than grasping at straws in his hope of finding his archnemesis.

But for some reason the general clearly had grown satisfied that the Oglalla warrior bands had now abandoned the country of the Rosebud and Tongue River and were wandering east toward the country of the Little Missouri and the Moreau.

In explaining his intent to prolong the campaign, the general wrote Sheridan:

“You see, Mr. Donegan,” Crook explained in his tent that night of 8 December along the frozen banks of the Belle Fourche, “General Mackenzie and I have decided against pursuing the defeated and impoverished Northern Cheyenne.”

Mackenzie himself cleared his throat, then stated, “Instead we think better of marching the expedition down the Little Powder, where the general desires to establish a temporary base of operations.”

“Right in the heart of the country haunted by the Sioux and Cheyenne hostiles!” Crook exclaimed, slamming a fist down into his left palm. “Squarely in the country where our deadliest enemies clung tenaciously and have likely taken refuge from our two columns.”

“Two columns?” Donegan asked, perplexed.

“Ours to the south, and north of the enemy—General Miles and his Fifth Infantry.”

“But they’re all the way up yonder on the Yellowstone,” the Irishman replied.

“Exactly,” Crook said.

Mackenzie moved up to explain, “Don’t you see—our intelligence tells us that the Crazy Horse hostiles are somewhere between us.”

From the sound of things in that tent, Donegan decided Crook and Mackenzie had grown tired and frustrated of the past two weeks of teetering back and forth between bouts of sulking despair and fits of self-righteous exultation over the Red Fork fight. On the one hand, at times they brooded: with the escape of most of the Cheyenne, had it been no more than a hollow victory? But at other times the two commanders cheered themselves in thinking: by destroying all that meant wealth to that powerful warrior band, hadn’t they in fact delivered a solid thumping to a steadfast enemy?

Then yesterday a courier had arrived from Fetterman, giving Crook real cause to rejoice: receiving a telegram from Sheridan, forwarded on from William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the U.S. Army.

But in that same leather courier packet lay some less than happy news. In a short and apologetic dispatch from Major Caleb H. Carlton, commandant at Fetterman, Crook and Mackenzie learned that bureaucratic bungling had further delayed supplies in reaching the Sydney, Nebraska, depot, much less getting them to the Medicine Bow depot by rail where they were to be off-loaded into wagons and freighted up to Fetterman, on from there to the Powder River Expedition. Not only rations and ammunition for the men, but the desperately needed grain for all those horses and Tom Moore’s mules.