Cry of the Hawk (7 page)

Like snow gone before an August sun, the rest of the soldiers melted into the earth.

The Loafers escaped across the Platte, the last of them pulling up the tall sticks marking the shallow ford as they went. Crazy Horse and He Dog led their warriors in holding back the soldiers, preventing the white men from following the women and children and old ones in their frantic escape. On what old mares and sore-backed travois ponies they had, Spotted Tail’s people would soon swell the ranks of the Lakota bands free-roaming in the north. Yet many times did the women look behind them, wailing and keening in grief that first day of flight. Oily smoke smudged the summer sky. The soldiers were burning everything Spotted Tail’s people had.

Everything but their lives and their freedom.

Now they joined the Oglalla, Miniconjou, Sans Arc, along with the Arapaho and Shahiyena led by the powerful war chiefs Roman Nose and High-Back Wolf. It was a time few could remember: so many lodges, so many songs ringing of war medicine, so many feathers brought out and powerful medicine made for the coming fight along the Holy Road. Runners had even been sent to Sitting Bull far to the north, in hopes the bands could coordinate their attacks with the Hunkpapa’s attacks on Fort Rice beside the Missouri River. Perhaps the Lakota could cut off the soldiers’ far-flung posts and thereby drive the white man back from the western plains.

Now after three long days of march south from the Powder River country, the great warrior bands arrived at the North Platte just below the stockade the soldiers built themselves on the south bank to protect the bridge crossing the river. It was here that the white man’s Holy Road had to cross to the south side because of the crowding from the mountains along the north bank.

Moving off some distance from the fort, slowly so as not to raise a cloud of dust, the warrior bands went into camp as the summer sun set upon the cooling land. While some in that grand council held that night argued to attack the fort in force and overwhelm the soldiers, others argued for burning the bridge and killing soldiers as they came out to repair it.

Yet it was Crazy Horse and Young Man Afraid who gave voice to the battle plan that pleased most the warrior spirit of these fighting men.

“We will strike them in the open! Give these soldiers a chance to fight us like men!” Young Man Afraid had said only hours ago now at that council.

“Draw them out with our decoys and make them fight on open ground!” Crazy Horse had added.

Trader Bent’s half-breed Shahiyena son George would be one of the decoys, joining Crazy Horse and eighteen others who would lure the soldiers across the bridge and into these hills north of the river.

Yet some doubt remained in the Oglalla war chief’s mind if the
akicita
, the camp police, could keep a tight fisted rein on the eager young men until the moment had come to spring their thousandfold trap.

As the sun stretched itself in a bloody line along the east, then blinked over the horizon, a bugle was blown inside the soldier stockade.

Young Man Afraid nodded to his nineteen. Crazy Horse and the others discarded their blankets and robes, shifting quivers of arrows over their shoulders in the chill dawn air. While others shook out war clothing and freed medicine bundles from hiding, the Horse stood in prayer for the moment, facing the east. In ritual this morning, as he had done before every battle, the Oglalla warrior scooped up a handful of dirt from a gopher hole and tossed it over his head. Some of the sprinkling of dust clung to the earth pigment and bear grease smeared in a jagged lightning bolt from brow to jawbone. Another handful of dust he now scattered over the back of his pony before leaping atop the animal.

Wearing no more than a breechclout and his moccasins, a single feather tied so that it pointed downward at the back of his unbound hair, the Oglalla warrior rode around the base of the hills with the rest. Encircling his sinewy chest was a thin strip of soft buckskin that secured another small pebble beneath the left arm of Crazy Horse. More powerful dream medicine from Chips for this day.

“Look at the American horses!” shouted one of the eager young ones, pointing for the others to see as they neared the bridge.

“They will soon be ours!” Young Man Afraid answered.

“Bring out your blankets!” Crazy Horse shouted.

The twenty unfurled wide strips of blanket or pieces of noisy rawhide to startle the soldier horses into stampeding—just as the gates of the wooden stockade burst open and out poured some soldiers in dusty blue uniforms. Before the decoys could reach the river, the soldiers raced across the bridge to the north bank with a clatter of iron-shod hooves across the cottonwood planks—then suddenly stopped.

As planned, the twenty whirled their ponies for the hills, holding their mounts with a secure rein, while furiously whipping the ponies as if to show they were retreating in panic. The soldiers had far-shooting rifles. Spouts of earth erupted at his pony’s hooves.

“Man Afraid!” Crazy Horse shouted, pointing to the rear. “The soldiers do not follow!”

“We must make them angry as the hornets to follow us!”

Several of the warriors dropped to the ground, aiming their rifles captured along the Holy Road at the soldiers.

With a sudden roar, the big-throated wagon-gun on wheels the soldiers had pulled across the bridge erupted in flame. A moment later the ground near Crazy Horse exploded, spewing dirt clods in all directions. A second round was loaded and fired—then a third roared among the stunned, confused decoys.

Those loud reports from the mountain howitzer were all it took for the hotbloods in hiding behind the hills to burst past the camp police attempting to restrain them. First a handful, then by the hundreds, the warriors tore down off the sand hills, spreading in growing numbers like puffballs that cover the prairie after a spring thunderstorm, charging toward the surprised and frightened soldiers at the end of the bridge.

The white men were turning in a confused, milling mass of rearing horses when Crazy Horse spotted a small separate party of mounted soldiers returning to the fort along the timber on the south bank.

He was angry—his stomach boiling now that the decoy and trap had been spoiled. Perhaps his warriors could still count some coup before the sun rose from the edge of the earth this day.

“Come! Let us make sport of these soldiers!” he shouted, pointing.

A dozen horsemen followed the Oglalla war chief plunging into the river, streaming up the south bank, yelling, screeching as the soldiers put heels to their mounts in a mad race to reach the walls of the post before they were cut off. At the same time, another group of cavalry bolted from the yawning gates, hurrying to the aid of those five soldiers about to be surrounded on the riverbank by the thirteen blood-eyed warriors.

In a matter of heartbeats, Crazy Horse, He Dog, and the others were among the frightened five horsemen, touching with bow and staff, striking with the flat of tomahawk blades, whipping the soldiers with their quirts—laughing at the great sport of this coup-counting while galloping right for the other soldiers riding to the rescue.

Ahead at the walls of the fort, several soldiers appeared. These knelt, shoving their long-barreled rifles against their shoulders. They were about to fire into the faces of the screeching red horsemen.

High-Back Wolf called out in his loudest voice for the rest to follow him to the wall. In that wild race he struck first one, then another of the soldiers with his quirt. Roaring in laughter, for he possessed a powerful medicine that made the white man’s guns shoot only air.

Bullets screamed among the warriors. Crazy Horse turned at the grunt from a nearby horseman.

High-Back Wolf, the powerful Cheyenne war chief, spun from his pony. Three others wheeled away from the skirmish in a spray of sand, a pair of them swooping low to try recovering the warrior’s body.

But the soldier bullets were barking and snapping too quickly now. Even for Crazy Horse. His mount spilled him as it went down, a leg seeping blood. As quickly, the war chief was out of the dirt and back atop the frightened animal shuddering on the riverbank. The Horse was much too close to the soldier stockade now.

With growing rage Crazy Horse and the rest of the decoys retreated and turned, watching the soldiers escape toward the wood walls of their fort, knowing his warriors could not attempt to rescue the body of High-Back Wolf without risking more deaths.

He reined up atop the hills on the north side of the river, quickly looking over the wound his pony had suffered along a foreleg. A grazing only—no doubt a painful wound, but one that would heal. Then he looked up, his attention captured by the eerie keening.

And found the Old Cheyenne chief, Blind Wolf, wailing for his dead son, left below near the walls of the soldier fort.

“I will go at darkness to help you, Blind Wolf,” Crazy Horse declared in sign as he led his pony to the old man’s side.

“You will help me regain my son’s body?”

“I will not ride from this place in shame—knowing High-Back Wolf lies in the shadow of that fort, knowing I did not bring his body out.”

For the rest of that day, the soldiers stayed hidden within their tree-trunk walls, not venturing out. At times the soldiers fired random shots at the warriors racing back and forth along the north bank of the Platte, without success. In return, the Shahiyena and Sioux shouted back at the soldiers, who were not brave enough to come out and fight on open ground.

“They stay burrowed like field mice, away from the claws of the badger!” Crazy Horse shouted in frustration to his friends.

“But even the badger will have his day,” promised Young Man Afraid.

Beneath the first streaks of gray presaging the very next dawn, Crazy Horse joined the old Cheyenne chief in slipping silently across the waters of the North Platte, padding quietly to within feet of the soldier walls, to reclaim the body of High-Back Wolf.

Platte Bridge Station
did not appear in any danger of being overrun after one full day of fighting. At least from what Jonah Hook could see as Captain Lybe’s command arrived shortly after two
A.M.
on the morning of 26 July.

Surrounded by a pine-and-cottonwood stockade standing fourteen feet high, 120 soldiers of the Eleventh Kansas Cavalry were busy molding bullets or watchful at the walls when Lybe’s soldiers showed up out of the summer darkness.

“You’re damned lucky, Captain,” announced Major Martin Anderson, Platte Station commander, “running the gauntlet of those three thousand warriors roaming those hills.”

“Didn’t see a sign of hostiles, Major. My scout, named Sweete, got us through in one piece. But there’s five wagons and a handful of soldiers under a Sergeant Custard still out there,” Lybe explained as he saluted the post commander.

“Why the devil didn’t you bring them in with you, Captain?”

“Custard’s a cocky one. Said he knew best for his men, staying the night at Willow Spring.”

Anderson shook his head as Jonah led his weary horse toward one of the fires that tiny knots of soldiers ringed on what there was of a parade at Platte Bridge Station.

“Damned fool—always has been, that Custard,” growled Anderson. “He’s been a pain in my ass ever since we came out to this godforsaken land. He’ll be wolf bait by sunup … if he ain’t already.”

5

July 26, 1865

“G
ONNA
BE SUNUP
soon, Jonah.”

In the chill of predawn, Jonah Hook turned at the dry rustle of the old scout’s whispered words. “What you figure the Injuns will do—try to run us over?”

Shad Sweete shook his head. “They don’t fight that way. Not like what you was used to back east.”

“Drive a man crazy—this waiting.”

“You get any sleep, son?”

“None I can own up to.”

The old scout gazed over the walls at the graying along the east. “Don’t matter how long you’re out here in this country. Man never does get used to this.”

Sweete settled against the wall, his back to it as unconcerned as if he were waiting for one of the hot-tin louse races to begin back at Sweetwater Station. How Jonah admired the scout for it now, wishing he could be as unconcerned as Sweete.

Over the past few weeks of working along the Emigrant Road that climbed toward South Pass, Jonah had spent more and more stolen minutes with Shadrach Sweete. Not that there was any lack of things needing doing, but there were long gaps of boring idleness interspersed with moments of frantic activity or bone-grinding labor. Everything that made the young Confederate look forward more and more to those times spent with the old scout and his tales of a glorious bygone day.

Back in the early 1850s, Sweete spent some months off and on working for an old friend, Jim Bridger. Shad’s old friend was at that moment helping the Plains Department Commander, General Patrick E. Connor, ready his troops and supplies for a major push into the Powder River country coming later in the summer. Sweete and Bridger went back to their younger, piss-and-vinegar days. And both were now much mellowed by their forty-some years in the far west.

Shad had been working for his old friend at Fort Bridger in southwestern Wyoming twelve years before when Mormon prophet Brigham Young had up and decided the mountains weren’t big enough for both him and the venerable mountain man. Young dispatched his Salt Lake City sheriff and 150 Avenging Angels to arrest Jim Bridger and to confiscate all the property in his fort and trading store.

“Never met no Mormons,” Hook had said when first told the story. “Don’t know if I’d know one if he walked up to me. Didn’t have much cause to know such things back in Missouri—or where I grew up in Virginia.”

“Pray you don’t ever have cause to run onto these henchmen Brigham Young sends out to do his dirty work. You’ll ne’er forget their passing, son.”

As Sweete had told it, a matter of hours before the Mormon posse came riding in, Jim and Shad got word the Angels were on a mission from their Prophet, and coming on hard. Together the pair escaped northeast into the mountains, hoping things would cool off.