Reap the Whirlwind (2 page)

Raising children? Sure, and it was a fact that if ever there was a man born to be a father, Ian was truly that man. Dependable he was, rock solid and responsible—that one of the O’Roarke boys. Seamus could almost see him still, standing there with the moist dirt of that farm country splattered on the man’s boots, forever caked beneath Ian’s nails, forever darkening every wrinkle and crack and crevice worn into the farmer’s hands. Such permanent tattooing
bothered Ian not, Seamus knew. For Ian possessed the earthy, heady scent of that land buried deep within his nostrils—like the musky perfume of a willing woman stretching herself below him, beckoning, reaching out to pull him to her bosom, to bury him in her moist richness.

But for this big, square-jawed Irishman who stood some three fingers over six feet, it was almost too frightening: him, to settle down with one woman, with a child coming … in one place? Begora! Faith, but did such a trembling thought as that give a man like him real pause. More pause than he had felt when facing down the barrels or staring back at the howling maw of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers.
^*
But pass up Samantha Pike he could not. To live without the smell of her rising to him, the way her fingers licked traces of fire along his skin, and how the very feel of her had crept well below his hide. His passion for her was something he could not deny.

Truly, it hadn’t been until somewhere on that trail north from the Panhandle country of Texas that Seamus had finally admitted that marrying a fertile woman like Sam would one day mean the coming of children. Still, the reality of hearing the news of it come from those lips, finding himself speechless as she gently drew his head down to her swelling belly, told to listen to his child growing deep within her. It was there that he first stroked that rounding tummy of the full-bodied Samantha Donegan—not as if caressing a woman he was about to mount and mate, but instead as if it were truly the face of his own child he could feel beneath the callused fingers of a man more comfortable in the company of other horsemen and their animals on the distant prairie.

Since that first night listening intently to the unknown, Seamus had returned again and again to lay his ear against that smooth, taut skin just below the generous curves of Sam’s flowering breasts. Watching his wife, studying her changing shape, straining to hear something each time she did and murmuring to their child deep in the womb, Seamus had come to believe in the reality that this child
was every bit as tangible and real as the hand he could hold before his face. Though he would have to wait to clumsily hold that wee one in arms unaccustomed to cradling babes, Seamus believed and truly accepted that he was already a father.

So he had taken to him a wife, vowing before friends and Goda’mighty Himself to settle down with that one woman until death did them part this earthly plane. And now in these last few weeks Seamus had come to experience the terror of those newfound emotions of fatherhood. Paternity still scared the bejasus out of this man of bone and sinew and whipcord muscle. But with each new day he was coming to terms with his misgivings, even his outright fears after these precious hours they spent walking down to the rain-swollen river below the log-and-stone buildings of Fort Laramie, those long nights alone with Sam, holding her budding body against him as she fell to sleep.

No, it wasn’t the fact of cleaving to a woman, nor even the reality of the child coming that still gave the Irishman pause. It was this thing of settling down. What Ian had done so easily, nephew Seamus struggled with most. It was there with putting down roots that the heart of Liam O’Roarke in Donegan grew faint.

Seamus was having himself a struggle with something he could not see, something he could not test his muscles against, some
thing
he could not bring into the buckhorn and blade sights down that worn, blued barrel of his trailweary seventeen-shot 1866 Henry repeater. As much as he hated to, Seamus had finally come to admit he was again wrestling with some
thing
in himself. This dread of settling down. Taking a wife along with him as he moved from one river valley on over the verdant crests to the next swell of hill and prairie sky was one thing. Trudging along with a babe, a child, a youngster … was something entirely different.

To have to put down roots now?

Why, it shook Seamus to his marrow.

His was a struggle to grapple with the true meaning of the news Samantha gave him upon his return from Fort Fetterman. Upon his escape out of the frozen wilderness of the Tongue and the Powder rivers.

In the end it had been enough just to emerge whole in mind and body from that winter wasteland—the power of Crook’s cavalry squandered by Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds in his aborted attack on a sleepy Powder River village every military man in the entire Department had chosen to believe was the camp of none other than the feared war chief Crazy Horse.
^*

It had been a campaign that made Seamus wonder on this life of wandering, this profession of leading the soldiers against the hostile warrior bands, this trail of blood and war he had chosen as far back as sixty-one when first he became a horse soldier for Lincoln’s Union Army. Those early weeks and months of the great war had been much like the first days of Crook’s Powder River Expedition: rich in zeal and rife in the promise to end the conflict early—exactly as the army had believed that one swift strike against the wild northern bands would drive them all back to the reservations and peace would descend like a long-awaited benediction upon the frontier. The Northern Pacific Railroad would push west, the Black Hills would at last revert back to the white man, and settlers would pour in to bring Christian industry and virtue to the wilderness. Such was the thing of hopes, of fond dreams.

What else but tragedy does a man call it when his dreams are shattered? What less than tragedy itself?

Following the disastrous war against Red Cloud’s Bad Faces in 1866-67,
^†
the army abandoned its three northernmost posts along the Bozeman Road into Montana Territory and ceded to the wild tribes all rights to the Black Hills as well as their beloved hunting grounds along the Tongue, the Powder, and the Rosebud.

But two years ago gold had been discovered among those streams and pine-draped hills the Lakota called their Paha Sapa—the white man’s precious yellow rocks found dangerously near the sacred Bear Butte where the Northern Cheyenne for generations had come to seek the wisdom taught their grandfathers in vision quests. Crazed prospectors
who would rather take the chance of being scalped than live poor flooded into the Hills where the gulches of the Spearfish and Deadwood and Rapid creeks bustled with the profane placer camps like Deadwood City itself, each new tent and clapboard settlement filled with gamblers and the gaudy, painted women, gold camps overflowing in whiskey and blood, camps deafening with the sound of pistols fired in anger and avarice. Gold dust was the currency, whiskey the lifeblood. Quartz and placer claims were worshiped as most precious above all. And life was cheap.

This was a fever the government would not be able to deny.

That discovery meant that the populist administration of Sam Grant found itself perched precariously on the sharp horns of an uncomfortable dilemma: to take the Hills away from the Indians, which action would break the law of the land; or, find some way to force the wild tribes themselves to break the treaty they had been living under since 1868.

In midwinter when the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent runners out from the agencies to inform the warrior bands that they had to be in to the reservations and accounted for, only a select handful of government and military leaders knew the true course already plotted for events yet to come. Secret plans were laid in Washington City that when the hostile bands did not uproot themselves and plod obediently back to the agencies in the dead of winter’s worst, the Indian Bureau would then turn over the disposition of those refractory bands to the War Department. William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan would then have the war for which they had been waiting a decade, the war they knew would end the struggle on the Plains for all time. Their armies would drive the hostile bands back to the reservations, where the warriors would become farmers and God-fearing wards of the government at long last.

While any who would not go back in peace would be exterminated.

With the 31 January deadline come and gone, the obedient Indian Bureau informed the War Department that the hostiles were now in the army’s lap. Sherman and Sheridan set about putting the cogs of their Sioux Campaign in
motion, whereby they would snare the villages between three prongs, three armies, any one of which was surely strong enough to crush the few warriors the Indian agents claimed were off the reservation for that winter. But back in February, General Alfred Terry’s army was winter-locked at Fort Lincoln, and Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was to become a political prisoner held hostage back in President Grant’s Washington City, while Colonel John Gibbon’s troops were struggling to move out of Forts Ellis and Shaw in a Montana Territory racked with the snow and subzero cold of a hundred-year winter come to visit its fury on the northern plains.

This left Phil Sheridan with one and only one army capable of moving against the hostiles, capable of probing and penetrating the last great hunting ground of the wild tribes. As Sheridan’s hammer, General George C. Crook hurriedly forged the spearhead of his assault from the Second and Third cavalries and pushed them north from Fort Fetterman that first day of March, pointing their noses toward the land of the Tongue and the Powder, dead on into the brutal, icy torture of an arctic winter visited once in a lifetime on the high plains. Theirs would be the lance the army would use to prod the hostiles loose, to push the hostiles back to the agencies, to deliver the death-strike straight to the heart of those wild tribes. Once and for all time.

It was a chance few military men would ever be given to accomplish alone—this war to end all wars. This expedition right into the heart of that last great hunting ground. This campaign so filled with the promise of glory and honor.

On the Powder River, Seamus and Crook’s half-breed scouts found the village the army was hoping to corner. While the general ordered Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds to make an all-night march and pitch into the hostile camp, Crook promised to rendezvous later with the attacking battalions upstream. But some of Reynolds’s companies cowered out of the fight beneath the shelter of a protective mesa while other troopers unsaddled and boiled coffee, eating hard-bread while their fellow soldiers found themselves pinned down under a hot and deadly fire from angry
warriors flushed from their lodges and now dug in along the bluffs above the village they had just abandoned with their families moments before.

After putting everything in the camp to the torch, even burning the meat that would have filled the bellies of his army and destroying the buffalo robes and blankets that would keep his troopers from freezing, Reynolds pulled back his companies in such a precipitous retreat that he even abandoned the bodies of his dead. That withdrawal from the field was but the beginning of the second battle of Powder River: officer against officer, soldier against soldier.

Up at Fort Fetterman, down at Fort Douglas near Cheyenne City, and even here at Laramie, the morale sank among those troopers who had marched with the Second or Third cavalries on that cold day in hell attacking that hostile village on the Powder. There was renewed grumbling in the barracks and stables, in the company messes and on the sun-warmed parades—renewed talk of desertion.

“I’d sooner go over the hill than fight for a goddamned officer what’d leave his dead behind for them bloody savages to get their hands on!” claimed more than a scattering of those horse soldiers who had been under fire on the Powder River Campaign.

While only one civilian newsman had accompanied the expedition, once Crook’s troops returned to Fetterman, the press made hay of the campaign’s failure to accomplish its professed goal of dislodging the hostiles from “gold country.” Major Thaddeus Stanton of Crook’s Omaha headquarters, officially along to the Powder as chief of scouts as well as acting as a correspondent for the New York
Tribune
, blamed in print the actions of Reynolds and Captain Alexander Moore during the battle. The Omaha
Daily Herald
echoed the same sentiments when it proclaimed the “Imbecility of Gen. Reynolds and Flagrant Cowardice of Capt. Alexander Moore of the Third Cavalry.” Even the Cheyenne
Daily Leader
proudly declared in a banner headline to its many eager readers that incompetent cavalry officers had led to the ruin of “The Brave General’s Well-Laid Plans.”

Furious at finding himself with anything less than complete
victory over the hostiles, upon his return to Fetterman, Crook chose to prefer charges against Reynolds and two more officers who had served in the attacking column, before the general quickly fled back to his Omaha headquarters with his adjutant, Lieutenant John Bourke.

With the regiment’s colonel now under arrest and unable to lead the Third Cavalry into Crook’s forthcoming summer campaign, Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall was now given command to prepare his troops for their march north. As good a soldier as ever rode a horse on the Plains, Royall did as he was ordered—but not without a deep and long-smoldering resentment for what he saw as not only an attack on his regimental commander, Joseph J. Reynolds, but as nothing short of a slur against the good name of the Third Cavalry itself.

As the posts across southern Wyoming Territory began to reoutfit and resupply for the coming summer campaign, word was in these last days of April that Royall was already anxiously chomping at the bit to be given free rein to pitch right into the hostile Sioux and Cheyenne with his horse soldiers so that he might wipe clean the sullied reputation of his regiment.

Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall was soon to learn that harshest of lessons taught in Plains warfare: be careful of what you ask for, because you just might get it.