Cry of the Hawk (33 page)

“Looks like everything west of Hays been hit, General,” Hickok explained when he and Hook dismounted before Custer that third week of April, after they had returned from their far-ranging scout.

“All the same story?” Custer asked, his blue eyes narrowing.

“Every station … burned out. All the stock run off. Workers what didn’t make it out, we found butchered,” Hook answered.

At that moment they stood among the ruins of Lookout Station, only fifteen miles west of Fort Hays. The burned bodies of three men had just been found near the smoldering debris.

“They don’t even look like something once human,” Custer muttered in something close to a curse.

“Likely, they were tortured by the red bastards,” growled a handsome soldier standing at Custer’s elbow.

“Little doubt of that, Tom,” Custer said to his younger brother. Then he suddenly turned to his adjutant, animated once more. “Mr. Moylan, pass along the order for our command to move off two miles and make camp.”

Jonah stood dumbfounded as the long-haired lieutenant colonel and his staff strode off, their shadows lengthening beneath the all but gone western sun. How many could look at this scene and not have his stomach turned? And not grow angry? Not be changed?

For three days
after Custer had marched off to continue the hunt, General Winfield Scott Hancock debated with himself on just what to do with the captured, empty Indian village on Pawnee Fork.

Agents for both the Cheyenne and the Brule Sioux gave it their best to convince Hancock to be a gracious victor.

“The bands fled only because of their fear of your amassed might, General,” declared Edward W. Wynkoop. “They’re mortally afraid of another Sand Creek massacre.” Shad Sweete had watched as Hancock’s eyes grew steely. “I am a professional soldier, Major Wynkoop. In no way similar to that minister-turned-butcher named Chivington!”

Colonel Jesse W. Leavenworth attempted his own appeal. “General, to put that village to the torch as you have been suggesting would only add to the flames already scorching the central plains. You will make war certain by not staying your hand and showing the tribes your benevolence.”

Hancock smiled, calling out to the old scout. “Mr. Sweete—that is a good one, isn’t it? Benevolence for these warrior bands?”

Shad watched both the agents turn to look in his direction in the steamy shade provided by the canvas awning strung from the top of Hancock’s ambulance. He cleared his throat. “Truth of it is, General—these bands understand only one thing. War.”

Wynkoop bolted up. “I protest, General—”

“Give my scout a chance to finish, Major Wynkoop!” growled Hancock.

“And,” Sweete continued, “the warrior bands fear only one thing. Death.”

“There,” Hancock sighed, sinking back into his canvas campaign chair. “This man’s spent his entire adult life out here in these far western regions. No one understands these Indians the way Mr. Sweete does, gentlemen.” He tapped a finger against his fleshy lower lip, then stroked it down his chin whiskers.

“Gentlemen, I’ve decided. Satisfied that this village acted in bad faith by fleeing before we had a chance to talk of peace has proved they were a nest of conspirators. This command will burn the village before we move off toward Fort Dodge.”

The next morning, 19 April, as the bulk of his troops marched south, Hancock’s selected tarried behind to set fire to the village on Pawnee Fork: 111 Cheyenne and 140 Brule Sioux lodges, along with robes, blankets, meat, utensils, parfleches filled with clothing, and abandoned travois.

Less than a week later, the general met with a delegation of Arapaho and Kiowa chiefs who had already learned of the destruction of the villages, though their bands roamed country far south of the Arkansas River. The moccasin telegraph rapidly spread the word.

A buoyant Hancock at last delivered his war-or-peace message he had intended on delivering to the Cheyenne and Sioux.

“I don’t know if you can trust the word of that one, General,” Sweete whispered in Hancock’s ear as he and the general looked over the assembled chiefs, seated on blankets and robes before Hancock’s table.

“What’s his name?”

“Satanta.”

“Which means?”

“White Bear. He’s the slipperiest of the Kiowa headmen.”

“But you yourself just translated his most moving and eloquent speech, claiming his people would forever abandon the road to war against the white man.”

“General, you’ll come off the fool if you go believing in the word of Satanta,” Sweete said quietly as Hancock passed by him.

The general took a full-dress uniform, replete with gold braid and tassels, from the arms of his adjutant and strode over to Satanta. There, in a grand presentation, he handed the Kiowa chief that freshly brushed uniform as a symbol of the peace just made between the army and White Bear’s Kiowa.

“You see, Mr. Sweete—how he smiles. How this grand gift makes the rest of his headmen smile. We have just forged a lasting relationship with Satanta’s people.”

“General, you ain’t done nothing but give another war chief something to wear when he rides down on white settlements to burn, rape, and kill.”

27

Moon of Fattening

N
EVER BEFORE HAD
Pawnee Killer been so proud of his warriors.

Stripped of almost everything his people owned, his angry warriors were making a wreck of the Smoky Hill Route: burning, killing, looting, running off all stock from the road-ranches. With every new day, Pawnee Killer’s people were regaining what they had been forced to abandon in the valley of Pawnee Fork to the soldiers who had put the villages to the torch.

For the rising of six suns now, the warriors had brought fear to the white men who laid the heavy iron tracks that carried the smoking horses. They had killed many of the workers and run off the rest who fled on their tiny machines that never strayed from the iron tracks. Then the young warriors set to work, bending rails and burning cross ties.

The real fun began two days later when a column of dark smoke appeared on the far horizon. The smoke kept shifting. Never staying in the same place on that bleak meeting of earth brown and sky blue.

Pawnee Killer stepped from the cross ties to the rail bed, and in so doing his moccasin brushed the great, heavy iron rail. It trembled, ever so slightly, but nonetheless trembled beneath his foot.

Cautiously, as one would approach a deadly snake, the Brule chief went to his knees, bending over the iron rail. Then gingerly laid his ear to it, as he would lay his ear on the ground to learn of the approach of enemies or buffalo. Many of the rest had halted their destruction, watching him in curious fascination.

“It hums!” he declared, grinning, raising his head.

Others now fell to their knees along both of the long rails, yelling for quiet, bickering, shoving for a place along the cross ties. Every one of them bent over, an ear on the rails.

They laughed and shouted their joy.

“The white man comes. It is his smoking horse that brings him!” shouted Pawnee Killer. “Let us welcome him!”

There were several white men on that train comprising a belching locomotive, wood tender, and a flatcar filled with armed white men. With a screech of brakes, a peculiar and new sound to Pawnee Killer’s ears, the hissing, smoking engine slowed atop its iron rails as the white men hollered out warning to one another, craning their necks from window holes in the smoking monster, spotting the torn-up tracks.

The great, heavy, belching iron horse did not slow soon enough.

It eased off its tracks like a huge, old herd bull, derailing into the burned cross timbers, striking the heated, bent rails with a loud, shrill scraping that raised the hairs on the back of Pawnee Killer’s neck. Then slowly, like that herd bull settling in a buffalo wallow, the engine sank off the edge of the roadbed and eased over as the white men scrambled off the flatbed car.

Pawnee Killer’s warriors swept into motion, and their own keening war cries rose to the hot, pale sky overhead.

The monstrous bulk of the engine lay on its side, hissing, spitting steam like winter’s gauze over a prairie river come the Moon of Seven Cold Nights. Inside the belly of the huge monster, a gurgling, roiling, spitting rumble belched and blew while the white men dug in behind the wreckage and made it known they had come to fight.

For better than two hours, Pawnee Killer’s warriors charged past the white men, burrowed like frightened field mice where the red-tailed hawks cannot get at them. A few of the warriors were winged, hit with a lucky shot when they did not drop on the far side of their ponies in time.

And when he called off the attack late that afternoon, Pawnee Killer did not even know if they had killed any of the white men who rode the iron monster now lying mute and motionless. As the war chief drew up and halted on a nearby hill, looking back this one last time, that steam engine now reminded him of some gelded stallion. Impotent and powerless.

“
Hopo!
” he yelled to the others, who swirled around him, flush with victory, three carrying the scalps of the white men who did not make it to cover quickly enough at the beginning of the attack.

“
H’gun! H’gun!
” they cheered him with the Lakota courage-word.

“It has been a good day—watching the smoking monster die!” he cried, shaking his bow at the end of his arm. “A good day for the white man to be reminded what will happen next time he follows the tracks of our people!”

The rains of
April had come and gone as the central plains slipped into the warm days and cool nights of May.

And with them, Custer had led his eight companies into Fort Hays to resupply before he could even begin to consider resuming the chase of those hostile Cheyenne and Sioux who had so far successfully eluded him.

Upon their arrival at Hays, the word on every lip was talk of the destruction being made of the entire Smoky Hill Route. Stages attacked, a train derailed, and workers killed. Track crews had abandoned their roadbeds and were fleeing east to safety, demanding action from the army. The entire freight road to Denver City had been shut down. Nothing was moving, except the warrior bands who continued to harass the outlying forts.

Fort Wallace, far to the west along the Federal Road had been under daily attack. And even the nearby Fort Dodge down on the Arkansas was far from immune. Only now, reports had it, Kiowa chief Satanta himself had led a massed raid on Fort Dodge and had driven off more than a hundred head of stock, all while dressed in that pretty blue uniform, resplendent with braid and brass buttons—a gift from the head of the department, one General Winfield Scott Hancock.

“Gonna take some time to get these animals ready to go back out on the trail of those war bands.”

Jonah Hook turned at the sound of the voice. Shad Sweete strode up in the falling light. The ex-Confederate stooped to snatch up another handful of grass, using it to curry his horse.

“I hear some of them soldiers give Custer a new name few days back,” he said to Sweete. “Horse-Killer.”

The big man snorted a quick, light chuckle. “He drove the animals hard, eh?”

Jonah’s gut tightened. “He drove us and his men even harder. No graze or forage for the animals. Little water from camp to camp. A real sin, Shad. Treating stock the way he done—and all the time, coddling up to his hounds the way he does. Takes better care of those dogs than he does his own men.”

The surprising cold of spring coupled with the sudden and early heat of an approaching summer had taken about all there was in the way of strength from the regiment’s mounts. Yet worse still was to find upon their arrival at Fort Hays no feed and forage waiting. Traders and government sutlers had been there before the Seventh Cavalry rode in—weeks ago bartering and selling it off to the tribes.

Hundreds of horses and mules were led onto the prairie to graze as best they could on the new grass.

“Injun ponies live on the stuff,” Hook said as his horse snapped off some more of the growing stalks with a crackling crunch.

“But these horses of ours never meant to live wild and free on the prairie like Injun ponies, Jonah,” said Sweete. “Injun pony bred to eat grass all night and run all day. These horses of Custer’s—they don’t have a snowball’s chance in the hand of the devil hisself.”

Off in the distance, a prairie wolf set up a brief howl. Then another in the pack answered.

“There are critters live off this hard land. And some what can’t, so you’re telling me,” Jonah said as the eerie howls faded.

“Just like the warrior bands, Jonah. They’ll live off the land, running and fighting, and running again. But Custer’s cavalry—these young soldiers—they ain’t fit to run and fight on what the land gives ’em. They need their bacon and hardtack and beans.”

“You see what they had for supper tonight?”

Sweete nodded. “Moldy salt pork. And the hardtack so full of weevils, I swear mine walked right off the plate from me!”

Jonah laughed along easily with the old scout.

“Listen, son—these traders been selling the army what a sutler calls surplus.”

“Goods from the war?”

“The crates is marked with the dates it was packed—years ago, during your war back east.”

“Damn. Didn’t know a man could stoop so low as to send soldiers such food to eat.”

“Some of the bastards back east even sending crates filled with rocks.”

“Can they make ’em pay, Shad?” he asked, stuffing the last handful of grass beneath his horse’s muzzle.

“Government contracts, boy. Never anything be done about it.”

“So we starve along with Custer’s soldiers, that it?”

“Pray you don’t come down with scurvy like some already has. Cholera spreading through some of the other stations, Jonah. Pray you keep your health.”

“Injuns don’t get sick like that, do they?”

He wagged his head. “Not less’n they get too close, rubbing up against the white man, they don’t.”

For all the serious illness, for the lack of food and, worst of all, for all the lack of hope—there was one sure-fire remedy: desertion. And over the next few weeks of despair and waiting for supplies in the growing heat, a growing number of the Seventh U.S. Cavalry tried the remedy.