Cry of the Hawk (34 page)

Yet at Fort Hays there was one officer not about to let pass the slightest infraction of rules, much less insubordination and mutiny. Not to mention out-and-out desertion. Custer vowed he would deal with every infraction swiftly, and harshly.

Without trial, soldiers who had been accused of an infraction of some military regulation or another were confined during the day to a large hole dug in the Kansas prairie, climbing down on ladders that were as quickly pulled up until sunset. It was then those soldiers still conscious from the excruciating heat were allowed to climb onto the cool prairie once more.

Drunks were quickly dealt with: given a stirring ride at the end of a dunking stool that repeatedly plunged them into the Smoky Hill River.

At first deserters were “skinned”—half their heads shaved by the regimental barber. When that did not prove enough of a deterrent, deserters were stripped to the waist and horsewhipped. Yet even then, each morning saw a few more failing to report at reveille. That’s when Custer ordered sentries thrown around the entire regimental bivouac, given instructions to shoot first and ask questions later if a soldier was found outside of camp.

But as hard as he was on his regiment, Custer also gave some relief to the sickening chow his men were forced to eat. He organized hunting parties to push into the surrounding country, killing deer, elk, antelope, and bison. Along with relieving the monotony of the moldy salt pork and weevil-infested hardtack, the hunting parties Custer ordered out gave the Seventh Cavalry a chance to fire their weapons from horseback, improve their aim, and become more familiar with the countryside so different from what most had grown up with back east.

Then on 18 May, Mrs. Elizabeth Custer herself had rolled into Fort Hays, been swept up into her husband’s arms, and spirited off to the privacy of his canvas-and-log shelter.

“Makes a man ache for his own family,” Sweete said quietly as he watched Jonah turn grimly away from the happy reunion.

“Makes a man wanna find those who stole my family.”

Hook shuffled off to find himself a piece of shade.

“When we’re ready—we’ll see what we can do to find hide or hair of that bunch took your kin,” Sweete said as he came to the younger man’s side.

“I’m ready now!” He stopped and wheeled on the mountain man. “We’ll get saddled and pull out right now.”

“Whoa, Jonah! Ain’t as easy as all that. We signed on—”

“You signed on to stay. As for me, I can be gone as easy as I signed my name. Had me enough, Shad. You coming with me?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. Not taking off like this neither. Time comes … we’ll track. Go clear back down into the Territories if’n we have to. Don’t you ever doubt we’ll come up with something.”

Jonah felt the gall rising to his throat. The sudden flare of anticipation and hope warming him once more, so long buried—and now so quickly doused with the cold water of Sweete’s reason.

“Damn you, Shad Sweete!” He captured a fistful of the old man’s greasy calico shirt. “I’ll do it alone, I have to.”

“You go now—hell, you go alone anytime—them roving bands of warriors make a prickly pear of you in no uncertain way.”

“I learned how to take care of myself,” he snapped, turning away.

Shad snagged him by the arm just as quickly. “You watch your temper—”

“Take your hand off my arm!” he snarled at the older man who towered over him.

“Watch your temper … and you’ll keep your hair, Jonah.”

“You saying you’re the one who’s gonna take my hair?”

Sweete released the sinew-tough, rail-thin arm. “No. I don’t figure that mangy scalp of your’n worth the trouble of cutting on, Jonah Hook. I’m just trying to make sense—”

“You coming?” He shook his arm, rubbing it where the big man had held him.

“No.”

“Then I’m going with Artus.” His lips formed a thin line of determination.

“He won’t go.”

Jonah stopped and turned on his heel slowly, hands balled on his hips. “How you so sure?”

“’Cause it’s plain to me that his side of the family got all the common sense.”

It flooded over Jonah, all the rage and disappointment tumbling together into one acid knot eating a hole in the soul of him, plain as the hot Kansas sun overhead.

“When?” Hook finally asked as the tears simmered in his eyes, tears he refused to release.

“When our job’s done with Custer. I gave my word when I signed on. That’s a bond. We’ll go only when the job’s done.”

28

June, 1867

S
HAD SWEETE WAS
every bit as anxious to get out of Fort Hays as was Jonah Hook or Artus Moser.

Trouble was, Custer wasn’t ready to march his ill-fed, poorly equipped command out from Fort Hays until the first of June.

And by that time, the roving bands of marauding warriors had moved north from the Smoky Hill, Saline, and Solomon rivers—north all the way to the Platte River country.

With Department Commander Philip H. Sheridan’s blessing, General Hancock was to have the Seventh Cavalry push north toward the Emigrant Road, that heavily used wagon route that brought settlers and miners west to Colorado or on to California. As well, the rails then being laid by the Union Pacific followed the same valley of the Platte. It was nothing short of vital that Custer’s cavalry march toward Fort McPherson on the Platte, and from there begin their sweep to clear the plains of hostiles between that river and the Republican.

Colonel Andrew Jackson Smith’s orders to Custer read:

The Brev. Maj.-Gen’l Comdg. directs that you proceed with your Command … to Ft. McPherson, at which point you will find a large supply of rations & forage …. From Ft. McPherson you will proceed up the South Fork of the Platte to Ft. Sedgwick …. If every thing is found to be quiet & your presence not required … you may come South to Ft. Wallace, at which point you will find further instructions. The object of the Expedition is to hunt out & chastise the Cheyennes, and that portion of the Sioux who are their allies, between the Smoky Hill & the Platte. It is reported that all friendly Sioux have gone South of the Platte, and may be in the vicinity of Fts. McPherson or Sedgwick. You will (as soon as possible) inform yourself as to the whereabouts of these friendly bands, and avoid a collision with them.

On that first day of June, Shad Sweete watched the long-haired cavalry commander stuff those orders inside the dark blue blouse with gold piping Mrs. Custer had herself sewn for her dashing husband, then give the word to his adjutant, Myles Moylan, to move out.

Three hundred fifty sweating, anxious, and hungry horse soldiers pointed their noses north by west at distant Fort McPherson, some 175 miles away across the shimmering, summer-seared prairie.

“We get up there close to that Platte Road, we’ll find us a place to jump off and disappear,” whispered a soldier to the rider beside him as they passed by Sweete and the rest of the scouts.

“That fella sounds like he’s got the right idea, Shad,” Hook said.

Shad didn’t even look at Jonah. “You like wearing your hair—you’ll give no thought to deserting this bunch. Even up there on the Holy Road, where a man might find more folks to join up with. Ain’t likely any of these soldiers know what’s waiting for ’em they decide to take off on their own hook.”

None of them knew what was in store over the next few days of grueling march beneath the prairie sun, drinking alkali water grown warm in their canteens, breathing the stinging alkali dust that coated every nostril and caked the insides of their mouths in a gauzy swirl that rose like an ache of despair from every plodding hoof along that strung-out, head-drooping column led forever northwest by Custer and his officers.

“You ever dream of whiskey?” Hook asked as he squatted wearily with Sweete at a smoky fire one evening a week later. “Don’t even have to be good whiskey. Just … whiskey.”

“Sure,” Shad answered, honestly. “Dream about the taste of it on my tongue a lot. ’Specially when I’m drinking this warm water that stings my mouth the same way whiskey does.”

“Water does have a sour tang to it—”

A single shot rang out.

They both looked at one another, drawing pistols and slowly standing as the echo of that lone shot faded over the prairie.

“Pistol?” Hook asked.

“Sounded to be,” Sweete answered as the camp quieted once more and men went back to preparing the supper they would force down here at the end of a long day’s march. “Likely some idjit cleaning his sidearm and it went off.”

More than an hour later that eighth day of June, Hickok came to their fire, passing on the story to the rest of the scouts.

“Cooper’s second in command this trip out, ain’t he?” asked Sweete.

Hickok nodded. “Seems the major had a problem with drinking.”

“That what Custer says?” Sweete asked.

“What the rest of the officers say,” Hickok answered.

“I saw the man in a bad way myself,” Hook told them. “Last winter. He wasn’t a drinker like a normal man. Cooper looked like he drank till it made him mad enough at himself.”

“He was in a fit—not acting like himself so the talk goes,” said Hickok. “But he was at times a real gentleman. With a quiet sort of normal.”

“Something made him put that pistol in his mouth and blow out the back of his head,” Jonah said.

Hickok regarded him. “The ride. The damn heat. Nothing else to do but ride and drink his whiskey—this campaign is getting to a lot of us, Hook.”

“Man don’t just go and give up like that,” Hook muttered, still staring at the flames. “He leave any family?”

Hickok glanced at Sweete before answering. “Major had a young wife. I understand from Tom Custer that the woman was … is expecting soon.”

“Damn shame.” Hook rose and strode off into the twilight.

“What you figure’s eating at him?” Hickok asked.

Shad pulled a shaft of dried grass from his lips and tossed it onto the small fire at his feet. “Family, Bill. He’s got one—but he don’t know where. And everywhere around him, Jonah’s watching folks go killing off what they do have. The man’s just touchy right now.”

Hickok shook his head. “Jonah’s always touchy.”

Much more of
the sad tale had become general knowledge by the time Custer led his command into Fort McPherson two days later, on the afternoon of 10 June.

Kentucky-born Major Wycliffe Cooper had served the Union with honor during the recent rebellion before his manic depression began to take its toll on his career. For months he had attempted control over his life by drinking himself into oblivion. Teetotaler Custer had eventually confiscated Cooper’s supply of whiskey and ordered the major to straighten himself out or suffer court-martial.

“So Cooper put a bullet through his brain instead?”

“They’re burying him tomorrow,” Sweete replied. “Quiet as possible. Custer won’t give him military honors. Says suicide is a coward’s way out.”

Hook glared at the old trapper. “You never thought about it?”

“What, Jonah?”

He stopped whittling on the stick with his folding knife. “Giving up. Just putting a end to it.”

“You ain’t thinking like that?”

He tossed the peeled twig into the dust of Fort McPherson’s parade as the late afternoon shadows lengthened. “Man loses just about all he cares for in life—natural for him to figure there ain’t nothing for him to go on living for.”

“You ain’t lost them, Jonah.” Sweete inched closer, talking softer. “They’re out there. Long as you got hope in your heart of finding ’em—they’re out there.”

He squinted into the far distance darkly veined with shallow, tree-lined rivers, studded and dippled with the flesh-colored, rolling, grass-covered hills.

“Why’s this damned ground so all-fired important that these Injuns ready to kill to keep it? This army of Custer’s ready to kill to tear it from ’em? Where’d it ever say that a chunk of ground got that important—and a numan life was something you just stomped into the dust under your heel?”

“Lots of folks is coming west—”

“Damn them, Shad!” he snapped. “Don’t you think I hate that about people? I was off fighting for someone else’s goddamned land when I was captured by the Yankees. I was out in Sioux hell on the North Platte or the Sweetwater or the Powder River or the Tongue, fighting Injuns for a piece of ground when that bunch come in and took my family from me, dammit! What made ground more important than people anyway, old man? Tell me that!”

Sweete was a long time before answering. “Never owned me a piece of land, Jonah. What I tried out to Oregon, I never bought, never filed on. Didn’t set right with me, son. So take your spurs off when you’re fixing to ride me.”

“By God, it’s you out here leading me on this little journey of yours.”

“This ain’t got nothing to do with land!” Sweete snapped back. “I got me a family. Same as you. Doing the best I can for ’em. You ain’t the only man ever lost loved ones.”

Hook studied the old trapper a moment, finding Sweete would not hold his eyes. “You understand, don’t you? I mean—you’re really trying to understand.”

Sweete shook his head, a sad grin growing there in the midst of his shaggy beard. “You can be a bit slow of times, Jonah Hook. Of course I been trying to understand about how it must be for a man to have his kin took from him—”

“No,” Jonah interrupted. “This is something different. You lost family, Shad.”

“It don’t matter now.”

“Tell me. It makes a difference to me.”

“Sometime, Jonah. Sometime I will tell you.”

Major Wycliffe Cooper
was laid to rest at Fort McPherson on the eleventh, the same day General Philip H. Sheridan arrived.

Custer was able to report on his meeting with Pawnee Killer, whose village was camped a few miles from the fort, when the department commander arrived.

“While they protested most strongly in favor of maintaining peaceful relations with the white man,” Custer explained, “the actions of their chiefs only served to confirm for me that they had arranged their parley with me for one purpose: to spy on my intentions and strength.”

“You’re learning that the word of an Indian is like shoveling fleas in a barnyard, Armstrong,” Sheridan replied. “Their promises aren’t worth the time it took to speak them.”