A Cold Day in Hell (7 page)

They both sat on horseback at the head of a jagged column of ninety-four wagons that fall morning as the horizon to the east was only then beginning to pale. Light enough to make out the rutted road to Tongue River.

“Very good, Lieutenant,” Charles W. Miner replied to the battalion adjutant. “Let’s be off.”

First Lieutenant Oskaloosa M. Smith reined about and raised an arm in the air, shouting out his order. “For-rad …
harch!”

In a pair of long columns of twos and stretched down either side of the wagon train, four companies of foot soldiers set off under the bellowed echoes of their noncoms. Civilian teamsters slapped long lengths of well-soaped leather down onto the backs of those six-mule teams harnessed to these wagons filled to the gunnels with freight bound away for the army’s cantonment at the mouth of the Tongue River. It was there Colonel Nelson A. Miles’s Fifth Infantry had been throwing up log huts against the coming of what boded to be a very severe and hoary high plains winter.

Ever since August, in fact … when General Alfred H. Terry had turned Miles back to the Yellowstone with his regiment—there to build a winter cantonment under the orders specified by
Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan. There to prevent the hostiles of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse from crossing the Yellowstone, from there having a straight shot of it into Canada. Very plainly the colonel chomped at the bit to be the one who would turn back the Sioux, perhaps even to capture the very chiefs who had mauled and butchered Custer’s regiment.

“Here we will be a stone rolled squarely into the hostiles’ garden,” Miles was fond of saying as summer waned and slid headlong into autumn.

The days gradually shortened as Terry and Crook lumbered about in search of the Sioux. And then the soldier chief called the Red Beard found a band of them camped beside the Slim Buttes. Yet in the end, Crook’s men—infantry and cavalry alike—had barely survived getting the hell out of Sioux country, down to eating their horses.

Somewhere out there Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse still wandered about with their war camps filled with souvenirs from the fight along the Little Bighorn.

“It won’t be Crook who gets a crack at them now,” Miles had told his officers. “Terry’s scampered back to Lincoln for the winter. And Crook’s gone lame with that horsemeat march. He’s headed back to Laramie with his tail stuck between his legs.”

By autumn the free-flowing creeks were down to a trickle, no longer carrying a rush of water through this fickle country to the Yellowstone. And with the great river growing more shallow with every day, the steamer captains could no longer urge their paddle wheels clear up to the mouth of the Tongue, where Miles was building his base of operations for the winter. Instead, the pilots could navigate no farther than the mouth of Glendive Creek, a full 110 miles downstream from the Tongue. It was there that Miles had six companies of the Twenty-second Infantry go into camp, guarding the supplies off-loaded from the steamers, soldiers to act as escort for those wagon trains bound up the Yellowstone Valley before winter closed its fist upon this high land.

In the last few weeks two companies of the Seventeenth Infantry had also arrived on a supply steamer. But they were both small companies—no more than thirty-five men each, which made for long days of weary tedium in their escort duties, what with at least three trips to the Tongue River and back each month. As well as keeping an eye out for the Indians rumor hinted were headed for the Yellowstone.

But since August, Smith and the rest hadn’t seen so much
as a feather, not so much as a warrior along the skyline. Except for the cold and their boring rations, and that grueling work offloading the steamers and loading the wagons … it was pretty tame duty. Then a few days back they had received intelligence from their scouts that some six hundred lodges of hostiles were south of the Yellowstone and moving north. With any luck the Sioux would be more interested in hunting buffalo than in making a nuisance of themselves.

They had pulled those ninety-four freight wagons and an ambulance away from the Glendive Cantonment just past ten-thirty
A.M
. yesterday. It hadn’t been long before Smith had noticed the first of the columns of white smoke far in their front beyond the hills. Instantly he recalled how Captain Miner had told his small cadre of officers about his uneasiness, at their breakfast fire when others complained that things had been too quiet.

“Those Sioux might even intend to intercept us.”

By the time Smith had reined about and rode back that two hundred yards to the front of the column with his sergeant, most of the soldiers and civilians had already sighted the shafts of signal smoke. Refusing to halt for no reason, Miner kept them moving for the time being as the men grumbled among themselves and the wagons creaked with the cold trace chains jangling in sharp bursts of metallic chatter in the dry air.

Beneath a brilliant autumn sun things remained quiet throughout the afternoon, despite those ominous signal fires ahead of their line of march. Near five o’clock yesterday the column went into camp at Spring Creek,
*
at a place the soldiers and teamsters had come to call Fourteen-mile Camp. By firelight Captain Miner wrote in his official journal for the day:

“With all that smoke, them savages surely must be telling someone about us coming,” First Lieutenant Benjamin C. Lockwood had said as night had come down on the 160 men of Miner’s command.

“Then that means they’re not strong enough to chance hitting us,” First Lieutenant William Conway replied confidently.

“Those fires just means they’re calling for more warriors,” Second Lieutenant William H. Kell advised. “We best cover some ground tomorrow.”

Just past eleven o’clock last night the entire camp was put on alert by a single rifle shot. Smith joined other officers rushing into the dark toward the ring of pickets Miner had thrown out around the wagon camp and the grazing mules.

“I’s the one fired that shot, sir!” a soldier admitted from the inky blackness of that night.

“What for, soldier?” Miner prodded as the man stepped closer.

“Saw a figure—took it to be a Injun, sir. Give him the challenge word, and he skedaddled off like I’d painted his ass with turpentine. I give a shot to either drop ’im, or speed ’im on his way.

Miner rotated the pickets an hour later at midnight and the men had settled back in their bedrolls.

Near three-thirty a brief rattle of gunfire brought Smith and the rest out of their blankets. Shot after shot was fired into camp from a distant bluff. As the rounds whistled overhead or smacked into the earth around him, the lieutenant could make out the bright, flaring muzzle flashes of the enemy guns as all the men were formed up, put on alert, ready for action. Here and there in camp a spent bullet whacked against the side of a wagon or clanged against a cast-iron kettle. Because of the distance, Miner declined to engage the warriors in a long-range duel. Instead, he kept his men ready for any try the warriors might make for the herd. It wasn’t long before Smith realized the warriors did indeed have the herd in mind: most of the shots were landing in and among the corral, wounding some of the mules, scattering many others that pulled up their picket pins and broke their sidelines.

After no more than an hour the firing died off—without the soldiers firing a shot. Orders were passed along that a cold
breakfast was scheduled for later that morning: no fires to be kindled that would backlight the soldiers and thereby provide easy targets for any of the skulking redskins. Only water from their canteens and hardtack. Nothing more than that as the men struck their tents and reloaded their wagons.

And with the first graying of the horizon that Wednesday morning, the wagon master brought the worst news.

“How many did you say?” Miner squealed in dismay.

“Fifty-seven mules, Cap’n,” the civilian repeated. “Likely run off by the Injuns when they went to shooting into camp last night.”

The nervous teamsters anxiously hitched up what mules they had left to pull the freight, down to five-mule hitches on more than half the wagons. The sun hadn’t yet put in its debut when Miner ordered the march, assigning Captain Malcom McArthur’s C Company of the Seventeenth Infantry to act as rearguard. Their column had no more than strung itself out, jangling little more than a mile, when McArthur’s men came under attack by a war party concealed in a ravine no more than two hundred yards to their left. From there, concealed by thick brush and stunted cedar, the warriors laid down a galling fire on the soldiers as the column ground to an immediate halt.

Within moments more than two hundred warriors broke over the brow of the nearby foothills rising between last night’s campsite and the Yellowstone River east of that bivouac.

McArthur and Second Lieutenant James D. Nickerson immediately formed up their little company and led them out bravely, making a countercharge on the attackers. Smith watched those foot soldiers go, all bellow and bluster, shouting their lungs out as they dashed across the uneven ground toward the hillside where the firing died off as the warriors scampered up the far slope, pursuing the enemy across a rising piece of ground until the Indians eventually disappeared over a nearby bluff.

“That should cool their heels!” Miner cheered, setting the column back to its march as Company H of the Twenty-second went up to support McArthur’s men in their countercharge.

But the wagons moved no more than eighty rods when the front of the column came under attack, this time from a brushy ravine on the right flank. Miner ordered another brief halt and across the next half hour the officers ordered out a squad here, or a squad there, engaging the enemy in long-range firing with their own infantry’s “Long Toms.” Yet Miner got the skittish civilian teamsters to move the train through it all—despite the fact
that a gaggle of warriors swarmed in behind the column and darted back and forth over the campsite the soldiers had just abandoned.

“Looking for anything of value,” Miner surmised as they kept on pushing west toward the Tongue River.

By the time an hour had passed, those warriors on their backtrail were inching closer to put increasing pressure on their rear guard. All the while, more knots of warriors were making themselves known along both flanks of the march, firing at the wagons, the mules, and the long columns of infantry strung out on either side of the rutted trail. Here and there a mule was hit, calling out in its dying with an ear-splitting bray. The team was immediately ordered out of column as other wagons moved around and the procession continued while the teamsters and soldiers descended on the wagon to cut the dead and dying mules out of harness, then urged the remaining members of the team back into line during this slow-moving, deadly game of leapfrog. Despite the losses and their snail’s pace, as the morning waned and became afternoon, Miner refused to stop.

“That would mean us having to square the wagons and fort up, just for the sake of a short stop,” he grumbled. “No—we’ll keep pushing for Clear Creek, something on the order of eight miles. Go pass the word that the men have permission to eat while we’re on the march.”

The autumn sun hadn’t fallen far from midsky when three of the lieutenants loped to the head of the column and presented their case to an increasingly anxious Captain Miner.

“There’s more of ’em than we can handle come dark, Captain,” Lieutenant Nickerson said.

Miner growled, “How many do you figure we’re facing?”

After glancing at the others, Lieutenant William Conway replied, “Five, maybe as many as six hundred warriors, sir.”

The captain seemed to shudder at that, then stoically said, “Their numbers won’t make much difference come dark. I’m certain they’ll break off their attack by dusk.”

“Even so, Captain—we may not have enough of the mules left by morning to push on for Tongue River,” Smith observed.

“Then what?” Miner growled, turning on the lieutenant.

“I figure we’ll be forced to fort up and take ’em on till General Miles figures out we aren’t coming.”

“How long could that be, gentlemen?” Miner asked. “Worst case, that is.”

They muttered and chewed on it. Then Smith broke the stalemate.

“Longer than we have ammunition, sir.”

Miner was nettled, the crow’s-feet at his eyes deeper than normal. “What are you proposing, then?”

“Turn about and countermarch, sir,” Lieutenant Kell suggested.

“Back for Glendive?”

“Yes, Captain,” Smith agreed. “I suggest we do it while we’ve got ammunition to make that countermarch. We get bogged down by forting up—they’ll keep us holed up till we run out of ammunition. I say let’s get back to Glendive while we can.”

“But we’re expected at Tongue River with these supplies,” Miner grumbled within his five-day-old beard. “Those supplies don’t get there—”

“Sir, begging your pardon for the interruption,” Smith pressed on. “We fort up, run out of ammunition, and get overrun, we lose these supplies to them Sioux … meaning they’ll never get to the Tongue River troops anyway. But if we break off here and skedaddle back to our cantonment, I figure we can convince Colonel Otis to beef up our escort and make another go of it.”

“How much of the stock have we lost?” the captain demanded gruffly.

Benjamin Lockwood answered, “They’ve run off with more than sixty-some mules already … and wounded that many more, sir.”

Miner cogitated on that for some time as his officers stood in silence. All around them the noncoms kept the men firing by squads—for the most part able to keep the swarming warriors at a safe distance from the column. The Sioux were clearly showing a healthy respect for those Long Toms, darting in here and there, but scampering out of range just in time as a squad came forward, dropped to a knee to aim, and fired. On one side then the other, at their front then at their rear, the enemy horsemen were making things more than ticklish for Miner’s escort. The situation was growing downright scary.