A Cold Day in Hell (71 page)

*
Just above the site of present-day Ashland, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation.

†
Present-day Beaver Creek.

A
s promised in the afterword of
Trumpet on the Land
, at the very beginning of
A Cold Day in Hell
I’ve taken the luxury of moseying back in time a bit toward the story we covered at the end of that earlier novel, by having Frank Grouard relate his little-known private horse race with the poet scout, “Captain” Jack Crawford who had likewise accompanied George Crook’s army through Wyoming, Montana, and Dakota Territory.

I was able to draw this exciting and ofttimes silly tale not only from the memoirs left by Frank Grouard and Jack Crawford themselves, but from Captain Andrew S. Burt as well. From his account we learn that James Gordon Bennett, wealthy publisher of the New York
Herald
, not only paid Crawford the $500 promised him by the grouchy news correspondent Reuben Davenport, but another $225—in payment for “horses killed and expenses.”

After speaking to General Sheridan at Laramie, Crawford returned to Custer City in the Black Hills, where he learned he had been discharged as a scout for slipping away without notice at Crook City. Quartermaster records, in fact, show that he was relieved of duty on 15 September. He may well have spent the month of October among his old haunts, enjoying his notoriety among the prospectors and merchants of the Black Hills.

But by the second week of November he was in Omaha, on his way to Philadelphia, where he joined up with Buffalo Bill’s newly reinstated production of a western melodrama. In the next few months Crawford “discovered that his talents for entertaining extended beyond the glow of an evening campfire.” After the successful spring season of 1877, he broke with Cody and formed his own theatrical company.

In the years to come we will find the Irish-born “poet scout” relating many of his exploits in the form of rhyme and verse before Chautauqua audiences and upon many other lecture platforms. But he will reemerge in the future, for he served as a scout during the Apache warfare in the Southwest, at the conclusion of which he established a ranch on the Rio Grande where Crawford would live until his death in 1917, living each day according to the personal philosophy he oft times recited:

Lieutenant Colonel Elwell S. Otis’s encounters with the Hunkpapa of Sitting Bull and Gall are little known, as contemporary accounts of the Spring Creek skirmishes are extremely rare. I owe a great debt of thanks to historian Jerome Greene for the landmark work done in two of his books, for digging up what scant information does exist in what was left by three of the participants. For the military story of the “Spring Creek encounters” I relied upon the writings of Oskaloosa M. Smith and Alfred C. Sharpe. The lone Indian account was recorded by Stanley Vestal from the mouth of Lazy White Bull (Joseph White Bull).

We have more to rely upon when it comes to the Cedar Creek councils between Miles and Sitting Bull, and their Battle of Cedar Creek—although it is far from being a “wealth of information.” Not only did Miles leave an admirable record of his momentous talks with the Hunkpapa leader, but we again have White Bull’s remembrances, along with those of Long Feather, Bear’s Face, and Spotted Elk to give us an idea of what was going on in the Lakota camp during those crucial hours and heated deliberations.

Extremely critical, don’t you see, for this was the first time a representative of the white man’s government had met with a leader (if not
the
leader) of the Indian coalition that had for months checkmated, then trounced, the Army of the West. While Cyrus Townsend Brady’s account erroneously has both parties
meeting for the protracted councils on horseback, the importance of the meetings rests in the fact that such a face-to-face confrontation allowed Miles to see for himself “the condition and temperament” of the bellicose Lakotas after months of fighting, months of being chased and harried by the soldiers.

In addition, and by no means less important, these dramatic conferences exhibited to the war chiefs the readiness of Miles and his soldiers to bring the nomadic warrior bands to bay, and eventually in to their reservations. Because they could plainly see the Bear Coat’s resolve, on 27 October over four hundred lodges of Miniconjou and Sans Arc surrendered—some two thousand people. Since Miles had no way to feed that many additional mouths at the Tongue River, he took five of their chiefs as hostages for the good performance of the rest of their people, who promised to move in to their agency at Cheyenne River.

As it turned out, only some forty lodges ended up turning themselves in at the reservation. The rest hightailed it up the valley of the Powder to join what would become a large winter village of the Crazy Horse people and the Northern Cheyenne—an imposing gathering by any standard!

In the end that confrontation between Nelson Miles and the warrior bands in the valley of Cedar Creek in Montana Territory would set the stage for the colonel doggedly pursuing his winter campaign against the enemy, a story we will tell in the next volume of the Plainsmen Series,
Wolf Mountain Moon
.

In late October at the same time Miles was chasing Sitting Bull to the banks of the Yellowstone, and Crook sent Mackenzie to capture the Red Cloud and Red Leaf camps, Colonel Samuel L. Sturgis and his wounded Seventh Cavalry had marched away from Fort Lincoln to impose Phil Sheridan’s sanctions at the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River agencies. Sturgis and his troopers seized more than two thousand ponies and assorted weapons.

Few today know little of those military seizures on the reservations, wherein we see the army commanders once again persisting in their pattern of marching against those they can punish in a misguided belief that those agency bands were in fact supplying the nomadic hostiles with ponies, weapons, and warriors. In his autumn offensive, Sheridan used more than five thousand troops, those either directly involved or those who stood in reserve at the frontier posts should they be needed … a full fifth of the U.S. Army at that time!

Sheridan was proud to boast that, “For the first time, all the
agencies ceased to be points of supply and re-enforcement for the hostile Indians; and henceforth the troops will have only to contend with the Indians hereditarily and persistently hostile.”

The pony and weapon seizures went on into the following year as one small warrior band after another limped in to their agencies to surrender, even after both Crook and Terry were reassigned.

But perhaps the real shame is that of all those ponies seized, the animals drew an average of only six dollars each in auction. Worse still was the fact that of the auction’s receipts, not a dollar was ever used to purchase cattle for the agencies, as had been promised. In military archives those thousands of dollars have never been accounted for.

It was surprising to me to learn that Mackenzie’s 1876 journey to that section of the Big Horn Mountains was not the first. Two years earlier in 1874 Captain Anson Mills of the Third Cavalry marched his Big Horn Expedition almost due north from Rawlins Station on the Union Pacific line, instead of starting out from Fort Fetterman to the southeast. In the fall of that year they had gone as far north as practicable before turning east, eventually reaching the rim of what is today called Fraker Mountain, which overlooks the valley where the Dull Knife Battle would take place. Because there was no way down for their horses and pack mules, Mills’s men were compelled to backtrack several miles until they could find a better way into the valley of the Red Fork. The expedition eventually did pass directly over the site in making their way downstream, exiting the canyon to the east through the same gap Mackenzie’s troops would use in approaching the Cheyenne village.

To better impress upon the reader just how steep and forbidding is the terrain at the upper end of the valley where Morning Star’s people took refuge, built breastworks, and eventually struggled in their nighttime winter climb out of the valley through what is today called Fraker Pass, let me quote that observer who accompanied Captain Mills in 1874:

I am particularly indebted to the labors of historian Sherry L. Smith in recounting the journal of her relative, William
Earl Smith—a private who served as one of Mackenzie’s orderlies during this critical campaign. Through him we have one of those rare firsthand glimpses into not only the day-to-day weather and human interest of the campaign trail, but a very microscopic look at the relations between soldier and officer in the frontier army.

I am most grateful that William Earl Smith left us another of those terribly personal records we chance upon from time to time, for history is not a dull recitation of historical facts. Instead, history is the record of
human
events. Not merely the when and where of conflict, but more so the
how
and
why
of those clashes. If for no other reason, I want my novels to stand apart from all others for bringing the breath of life and the pain of a human soul to this crucial period in American history. How unfortunate that all too few of us were ever taught a
biographical
history.

So I am in Sherry Smith’s debt, for she did in her
Sagebrush Soldier
what more historians should be doing for the reading public, what I attempt to do as I knit together many different accounts of every campaign, every battle, in hopes that through those different points of view we will more closely arrive at what really took place. Unlike what most of the academic historians do in their work—striving to support and defend one point of view—Smith herself says:

I’m grateful too for the brief, terse diary left us by Sergeant James McClellan, from whose words I have gleaned some rare nuggets of daily life for the cavalry trooper serving in Crook’s cavalry. He served out his five-year enlistment, receiving his discharge in June of 1877—the back of his certificate noting that he was credited with killing the warrior known as Bull Head.

Over half a century later
Motor Travel
magazine (published by the American Automobile Club) began running a two-year series of articles on the Powder River Campaign of 1876. Survivors of the battle were contacted to participate, and McClellan himself wrote seven of the articles. Perhaps most interesting to me was that during those two years of renewed interest in the campaign, an era when the motion picture was flickering into its golden age, McClellan publicly stated the time had come to produce a film of the attack on the village. He believed it should be done sooner than later as there were still a few survivors left who could serve as consultants “about the essential details.”

Needless to say, nothing ever came of his personal campaign, and he died soon thereafter in 1936. An interesting footnote to those of you who have been reading the Plainsmen Series from its beginning six years ago is that McClellan served in H Troop, Third Cavalry, under Captain Henry W. Wessels, son of the Henry W. Wessels who marched north to Fort Phil Kearny to relieve Colonel Henry B. Carrington following the disastrous Fetterman Massacre almost a decade before the army defeated the Cheyenne in the valley of the Red Fork.