Cry of the Hawk (16 page)

By the time they reached the mouth of Wolf Creek where the rest of the general’s men were mopping up the defenders, the Arapaho held back from pushing their attack. Instead of pursuing into the village, the warriors fought from long-distance, and when they didn’t fire at the soldiers, they flung their curses and rage at the white men preparing to put the village to the torch.

“Burn it—all!” Connor ordered.

Lodges, blankets, buffalo robes, clothing, abandoned weapons, kitchen goods, and a winter’s supply of dried meat—all of it sputtered into fitful flames, eventually rising twenty feet and more into the sky, puffs of oily black smoke climbing heavily into the hot summer haze.

“I s’pose we all have to admit it when we’re wrong, Gabe,” Shad said as Bridger wagged his head beside him. “You had no way of knowing this bunch was Arapaho—or that they’d been raiding down on the Platte with the Sioux.”

“Come out on the lucky end of the deal of these cards, didn’t we, Shad?”

“Since these soldiers found some greenbacks and other plunder stole off the ranches and the Holy Road—I’d have to say this bunch of Black Bear’s needs taught a lesson.”

“Lucky for me, nigger,” Bridger growled. “I don’t like killing Injuns just for the sake of killing Injuns. Gawd-damned, Shad—you and me is married to Injuns!” The old trapper turned and shuffled off, muttering to himself.

“The Pawnee having themselves a grand time of it over there, Jonah,” Shad explained, pointing to the far side of the camp. “The Arapaho warriors know they haven’t a chance of getting anything from the village now—but, by damn, they sure do want their ponies back.”

“The Pawnee good fighters?”

He squinted in thought. “I never had much use for ’em. Neither did Gabe. Pawnee didn’t turn friendly toward white men till they saw the writing on the wall. Besides, I think they figured out they could get more plunder by raiding enemy camps with the soldiers behind ’em instead of fighting the Sioux and Cheyenne in the old way—on their own.”

By middle of the afternoon, Connor’s officers had convinced the general it was time to cash in their chips and make good their escape. As for casualties, the general’s own orderly and bugler had been seriously wounded in the first charge on the village. A lieutenant and a sergeant with one company had been wounded in the thick of it. A young soldier had been hollering at his comrades, goading them on into the village when an arrow had entered his open mouth and pierced the back of his tongue. For the longest time his friends debated cutting the soldier’s tongue off to free it, until an old-line sergeant came along and held the tongue down, slowly slicing away at the red meat until the glistening iron arrow tip was freed.

“General’s given orders to pull out, Shad!” hollered Bridger as he came hobbling up, snagging the reins Sweete handed him. “He’s got some wounded … and he’s taken prisoners. We best get too.”

“Let’s ride, Gabe. This place’s getting a mite too warm for my way of thinking.”

As Connor pulled his forces off, the Arapaho became bolder. Not only had they watched the destruction of their village and seen sixty of their fellow warriors killed by the soldiers, but they were now forced to watch as eight women and thirteen children were herded into the wagons and driven off, surrounded by soldier columns. Using what few ponies they had taken with them at the time of the first charge to flee the village, or what they had recaptured during the soldier retreat, the warriors now dogged both sides of the army’s backtrail down the Tongue River.

At the head of the march rode a hundred Pawnee, driving before them a herd of more than seven hundred rangy Indian ponies they claimed as the spoils of battle.

“Don’t fire your weapons at the hostiles!” shouted a lieutenant riding down the long columns. “General’s orders: preserve your ammunition!”

“Don’t shoot? How the hell does Connor expect us to keep ’em off of us if we don’t shoot?” Jonah asked.

“You heard the man, Jonah. Keep your weapon ready—but don’t use it.”

“I don’t use it—what good is it to me?”

“Right now the Arapaho don’t know we’re desperate short on ammunition,” Bridger explained.

“If they stay afraid of what they
think
we can do to them—they won’t get too bold,” Sweete added.

For the next five hours of march northeast along the Tongue, the Arapaho warriors harassed, dogged, and deviled the retreating column. But as soon as the sun sank behind both the Big Horns and Connor’s soldiers, the warriors trickled off and disappeared. In a matter of minutes, all that could be heard above the squeak of leather and the jangle of bit chain was the distant howl of wolf and cousin coyote floating in from the nearby hills.

Connor rode ahead to catch up with his advance scouts near twilight as the warriors drifted away into the evening.

“Bridger, what do you think of my volunteers now?”

He unloaded a stream of tobacco juice and smiled.

“General, your boys done good today. Riding hard the way they did, on no food for so long—and fighting near six hours steady was something too. They didn’t buckle like I was afeared they would. Rest assured, your soldiers acted like men today.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment, Mr. Bridger,” Connor replied.

“Well, ain’t you gonna compliment me and Shad here on finding that camp for you, General?”

Connor chuckled mysteriously. “You can’t be serious, can you, Mr. Bridger? You don’t expect me to swallow that you two actually saw smoke from this camp from fifty miles away, do you?”

Sweete and Bridger glanced at one another, both growing angry.

“We spotted that smoke and told you where to send North’s trackers,” Sweete growled.

“A lucky hunch. Why don’t you two old trackers just admit it and stop trying to pull the wool over my eyes?” Connor reined back to his place in the column, riding with his staff.

“If that don’t beat all,” Bridger hissed.

“Careful, Gabe.”

“Yeah—if that don’t beat all,” Jonah echoed. “Goddamned stupid paper-collar soldiers.”

Bridger’s expression slowly changed as he gazed at the Confederate. “Yeah—couldn’t say it better myself, Jonah.”

Connor’s trail-weary, battle-ragged command did not reach its wagon camp until about two
A.M.

Every man had been in the saddle riding and fighting for the past thirty hours.

Two days later, Connor ordered a pony given to each of the Arapaho prisoners and set his captives free with gifts of hardtack and a little tobacco. Along with Bridger’s sign-language instructions that should the Arapaho chiefs now be interested in making peace with the white man, they should come to Fort Laramie in the Moon of Leaves Falling for a big parley with the soldier chiefs.

For the next week, the general’s massive column inched down the Tongue, hoping each day to make the scheduled rendezvous with his other two wings. Then on the morning of 1 September, as the troops were preparing to break camp, the advance guard heard the distant boom of a howitzer. Because of the confusing and broken texture of the land, no two men could agree on the origin of the sound.

Yet the boom of that distant cannon was enough to remind the general that today was the date he himself had chosen for the planned rendezvous with both the Missouri cavalry under Cole and the Kansas cavalry riding under Walker. The general ordered Major North and a detail of twenty Pawnee to ride out with an escort from Captain Marshall’s E Company, scouting to the northeast for the missing columns.

By the sixth of September, growing concerned about the fate of both Cole and Walker, Connor received the discouraging news from North and his Pawnee scouts. No sign of the missing troops.

Disgusted, Connor finally gave the order to turn about and begin a march back up the Tongue to find a place with sufficient graze for his sizable herd. On the morning of the eighth, the general again ordered North’s Pawnee out toward the Powder River, while Captain J. L. Humfreville would take his K Company to scout toward the Rosebud under Shad Sweete.

Four hours out, a light rain began to fall. Two hours after that the wind shifted, shouldering out of the north and bringing with it a taste of winter. Within another hour, a wet snow was plastering man and mount alike with a thick coating of ice. They pushed on into the mouth of that storm quickly becoming an early plains blizzard and reached the Rosebud late on the afternoon of the ninth.

After four days of struggling through the blinding,
swirling snow
, Shad led Captain Humfreville’s men back to Connor’s camp on the eleventh. He reported to a dejected general they had found no sign of the other two wings of the Powder River Expedition.

Yet not more than a handful of hours later North’s Pawnee scouts rode in with news not in the least welcomed by any of Connor’s command. The trackers had run across a large recent encampment of white men. The ground was littered with hundreds of dead horses, some of which had been shot. Most, however, had evidently frozen to death on their picket lines, their carcasses lying as orderly as they were.

North gravely informed Connor, “General, each of those dead horses looked like it had been damned near starved to death before that blizzard came in to finish them off. Animals run hard and not given time to graze or forage. When that norther hit—wasn’t a owl hoot of a chance any one of those mounts had enough fat on its ribs to keep from freezing.”

12

Fall, 1865

“S
OME OF THOSE
men offered me five dollars for a single tack,” Jonah Hook said in wonder to Shad Sweete. “Even up at Rock Island where most of us was rotting away—never saw a man in that bad a shape.”

“More’n just hunger, Jonah. That bunch of raggedy beggars was lucky to get out of Injun country with their hair.”

“All had to walk out—some of ’em in boots falling apart.”

“Never knew a boot anywhere as good as a Cheyenne moccasin, son.”

For days before the Pawnee scouts had finally discovered the location of the desperate columns, the Walker and Cole battalions had been under a constant state of siege, able to move very little on foot, able to do nothing more than hold back the thousands of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors by judicious use of their mountain howitzers.

“Injuns hate those big wagon-guns,” Shad had explained. “They call them the guns that shoot twice: once when they are fired and a second time when the shell explodes.”

Once he had the demoralized, ragged remnants of the two lost wings rejoined with his own command, General Patrick Connor had turned his force south and returned to Fort Connor on the Powder River to recuperate the men, arriving the last week of September. But the second day of that much-needed recuperation brought an early end to the Powder River Expedition.

“Connor’s madder’n a wet hornet.” Bridger settled in the riverbank shade where Sweete and Hook had been watching the lazy ripples of the murky river.

“Why’s that redheaded Irishman mad now?”

“Got dispatches up from Laramie, Shad.” Bridger sighed. “You remember hearing that wolf-howl days back.”

Hook watched the two old mountain men exchange a mysterious, knowing look.

“Howl like that always means some bad medicine coming, Gabe. Sure didn’t think it’d hit this soon.”

“What’s this you two are saying about a wolf-howl means bad medicine?” Jonah asked.

Sweete looked at Bridger. “We aren’t exactly talking about a real wolf-howl, Jonah.”

“Go ’head and tell the lad,” Bridger prodded.

“It’s downright ghosty, Jonah. A cry of a wolf like what me and Gabe heard few nights back—means only one thing. Spirits. Bad medicine. And a man in his right mind best be getting clear of these parts. Something fearsome always happens after a man hears that ghosty howl. Always has. Always will.”

“Whoa, Shad. You saying that wolf call you two heard some time back meant to tell you those soldiers were starving?”

Sweete shook his head. “I can’t say. Just that as long as we been out here in these mountains and plains, both Gabe and me learned to trust to what the critters tell us. Animal spirits can smell a lot more’n what any of us can.”

“That wolf smelled something bad coming?”

“Like death on the wind,” Sweete replied matter-of-factly. He turned back to Bridger to ask, “What’s doing with Connor?”

The old trapper sighed. “The stiff-necks back in Washington City putting an end to all Injun fighting for a while.”

They both sat upright, but Sweete spoke first. “The devil, you say? What’s the army supposed to do—sit on its thumbs? Dumb idjits, expecting they can talk peace to these war-loving, free-roaming bucks.”

“None of them back east understands the one simple rul—that the only thing a warrior understands is blood and brute force.” Bridger shrugged. “Connor says that bunch of politicians back east is cutting the army down to size now that the war back east is done with.”

“’Bout time, it is too,” grumbled Hook. “Cut it down far enough for this boy to go on back home to his family and farm.”

“Shame of it is, Connor’s been relieved of command and this expedition is done,” Bridger confided. “General’s heading back to Utah.”

“Utah?” Hook asked. “Ain’t that where all the Mormons went to settle?”

Sweete nodded. “Some of these boys marching with Connor been serving out to Camp Douglas in Utah. Hell, the general himself served as military commander out there till the army called him up for this expedition.”

That enviable western post, Camp Douglas, stood on a bluff above the City of the Saints in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. A paradise duty is what the soldiers called the place, for well-groomed plots of grass and flower beds surrounded the huge parade of packed, stream-washed gravel taken from the mountain stream diverted for irrigating the post’s own fields. Connor himself had seen the post raised as his first duty upon arriving in the land of Brigham Young back in October 1862.

While the general publicly told Young and his elders that the post was being built to protect the Overland Stage route and the Pacific Telegraph line from Indian depredations, the Mormon suspicion was that the army had been sent into the heart of their State of Deseret to keep an eye on them. Because most Mormons rankled at the recent bevy of laws Congress had been passing to outlaw polygamy in the states and its territories, Utah declared itself neutral once hostilities broke out between North and South in 1861.