Reap the Whirlwind (28 page)

Lone Star would now have his Crow allies at his shoulder when at long last he stared Crazy Horse in the eye.

“That’s a damned fine animal you have there, Captain,” John Finerty declared the evening of the ninth.

Infantry officer Andrew Burt curried his fine-blooded gelding, one of the few possessions he had allowed himself during his long career with the army on the plains.

“Did he make you any money today, Mr. Finerty?” Burt asked, stroking the neck of the pale charger. “Or cost you some?”

John smiled. “I’m happy to report I made a little. But most of the men had no money to bet, though I did win a can of corn off one fella, and a can of tomatoes from an
officer who bet against you. I—on the other hand—had the good sense to put my money on this magnificent horse of yours.”

To combat the boredom in their bivouac along the Tongue River that Friday, Crook’s soldiers had taken to amusing themselves with all sorts of diversions: foot races for the men, cold swims in the flooded river, as well as some heavy betting on a series of horse races. Burt had won the two races in which the captain had entered his gelding, which meant a lot of paper IOUs changed hands that evening around the mess fires.

“I’d love to give him the chance to really run for it,” Burt explained as he curried the animal, “on a long, long race. Something cross-country, like a steeple-chase. Something—”

Bullets slammed into camp, whirring through the canvas tents, splintering tent poles behind Finerty, ringing off stove chimneys and ricocheting off cast-iron cookware. In a heartbeat all was pandemonium.

“Sheol!”
Burt shouted as he whirled to find his men of H Company, Ninth Infantry, scattering across their bivouac.

“What the hell does
Sheol
mean?” Finerty inquired, drawing his head into his collar as he crouched behind some brush with the infantry captain.

“Just that, Mr. Finerty! The Old Testament term for
hell!
It seems all
Sheol
has broken out—”

Finerty recognized the unmistakable and sickening smack of lead slamming into flesh, followed by an aborted, painful whinny. A second slap, like a hand on wet putty, accompanied by a crunch of bone.

“Goddamn—”

Beside his wounded horse, Burt was slowly going down. Rushing to his side, Finerty found the captain unhurt. In disbelief Andrew Burt sat there, cradling the gelding’s head in his lap, stroking the big blond animal’s jaw as the eyes began to glaze, its legs quivering in the final throes of death. Blood seeped from a wound behind a foreleg, a faint trickle issuing from the bullet hole in its head, near that eye that stared up at its master.

“Captain?”

Finerty whirled, the hail of lead raining down from the hills across the river on the camp without letup, to find Lieutenant Edgar B. Robertson hurrying toward his company commander.

“Get the men formed up and behind cover, Mr. Robertson!” Burt hollered. “Seems we’ve got visitors!”

It was an ideal spot the hostiles had chosen for their attack. Only thing was, Crook had chosen it for them—down here in the bottoms with the steep hillsides rising above his extensive bivouac, those heights providing a commanding field of fire as the hostiles of unknown number continued to cause confusion and panic.

But Crook quickly had his aides and staff officers out of headquarters camp, with his orders sending all three companies of the Ninth Infantry off to support the pickets on the surrounding hills before they were overrun. Most of those camp guards had spotted some movement in the twilight just prior to the 6:30 P.M. attack. Two had even seen a force of warriors moving toward the bluffs en masse and on foot. Only moments before the first bullets announced the attack, those two had begun to circle their horses atop the ridges, a signal of impending danger that for the most part went unheeded in the camp.

Samuel Munson’s Company C led out the infantry’s advance, with Burt’s H Company moving up to guard the right flank as they made their ascent. Company G, commanded by Thomas B. Burrowes, was forced to string itself out over the rugged terrain, consigned not only to guarding the rear of Company C but assigned as well to watch over the left flank of the counterattack. But whoever the attackers were, they had too much respect for the infantry’s Long Toms and just what those “walk-a-heaps” could do with their Springfields. The warriors melted back beyond that nearest ridge, others scurrying upstream to hunt for a softer spot on the camp’s underbelly.

From his cover in the brush willows along the Tongue, Finerty watched the action and occasionally got in a shot from his sidearm. Then he turned at the familiar nearby growl of the Third Cavalryman.

“It’s about time!” Anson Mills shouted at the young staff officer running up to him out of breath.

“The general’s compli—”

“Just tell me what the hell Crook wants of M Company!” Mills snapped.

“Mount your men, cross the river—and clear the bluffs,” the lieutenant huffed breathlessly.

“Now you’re talking!

“Sergeant Ballard!” Mills bawled as he sprinted toward the men of his horse troop. “Mount and follow!”

“M Company!” Alexander B. Ballard roared in kind as he reached his horse. “Prepare to mount …
mount!
”

“Move out in column of fours and cross as you can,” Mills instructed them. “Re-form on the far bank at my command.”

Crossing to the far side of the river amid a hail of bullets whining overhead, M Company coolly spurred their horses out of the swollen Tongue, through the thick brush, and to the foot of the barren slope.

“Dismount! Horse-holders to the rear!” Mills bellowed, watching the forty-seven shuffle through the drill as every fourth man strung his assigned mounts together by their link-straps, a fifteen-inch length of leather, snapped into the throat-latches, those rings on the bridles, leading his horses back down to the water’s edge.

Under Captain Thomas B. Dewees, A Company of the Second Cavalry appeared out of the growing darkness to cross the river, dismounting on M Company’s left about the time Mills ordered his remaining fighting men forward. “Skirmish lines! Form up, form up in skirmish lines. Bring them ahead, Sergeants—Ballard, Kaminski, Robinson, Erhard! All platoons on my lead:
charge!
”

As the dismounted horse soldiers scrambled up through the brush and over the rocks, scaling the slippery bluffs toward the unknown enemy hidden somewhere beyond, two more companies of the Third Cavalry crossed, dismounted, and began to follow up on M Company’s right flank. Captain Sutorious’s E Company, as well as I Troop under the command of William H. Andrews, all struggled up the bluffs as the hostiles began to fall back and back still, firing unsteadily at the advancing soldiers.

Finerty was struck in admiration, whistling low with approval as he himself finally waded into the freezing waters
of the Tongue. The entire crossing of the turbid river by Anson Mills’s M Company, its dismounting and rapid reforming for the attack, all had taken scarcely more time than it had for that young staff officer to deliver his orders from General Crook. If this was Injun fighting, Finerty thought, by God—then Crazy Horse won’t stand a chance!

As the newspaperman reached the far bank, the warriors were dropping back farther still, to a second ridge up from the river, putting them another thousand yards from the soldiers. From there the long-range battle rumbled for the next twenty minutes, with no harm inflicted on either side, while Finerty crawled up and took a position with Burt’s infantry, the better to cover this duel at twilight. With his field glasses, the Chicago correspondent did his best to count the enemy as they appeared here, then there, on the distant crests. All he counted at one time, however, was an even dozen.

When Mills finally ordered an all-out assault on the Indian position, the warriors picked up and retreated once more. Just as M Company’s captain decided he was not destined to bring his enemy to battle this day, the sudden sound of gunfire to his rear suggested that the hostiles might have made a flank attack on the camp.

Mills shouted his order to “About face!”

By the time M Company made it across the Tongue, Finerty was back in camp to tell the captain that a large party of warriors had circled the bivouac, evidently in hopes of driving off some of the horses and mules. Instead, they had been duly driven off by a stoic defense from the pickets thrown out by the Second Cavalry.

In less than an hour, from first shot to the last fading echo, the skirmish on the Tongue was over and night was sinking fast.

Crook’s army had indeed reached the Tongue.

Already Crazy Horse appeared to be putting teeth into his warning that the soldiers must not go one step farther.

10-14 June 1876

“C
razy Horse made good on his word,” the Irishman
reminded them that night following the attack as camp settled back into as much routine as possible. “A promise made is a promise delivered on.”

“How’s that?” Bob Strahorn asked.

“Don’t you remember?” John Finerty growled, furiously scribbling away at the notepad he held on his knee. “Crazy Horse warned General Crook not to cross the Tongue.”

Strahorn nodded. “Yeah—I remember Bourke told me.”

“‘At your peril, George Crook,’” Seamus added. “‘Cross the Tongue at your peril.’”

“Do the rest of you remember what the Irishman here said when he heard of Crazy Horse’s warning?” Bourke asked solemnly, looking around that group of newspapermen. “Seamus told us, ‘What you have sown on the wind, so will you reap on the whirlwind.’”

The casualties from the fight on the Tongue had been minimal. Two soldiers had been wounded, neither one seriously, by spent bullets. Besides Captain Burt’s horse, two other cavalry mounts had been killed in the spray of lead from the far bank, as well as one of Tom Moore’s mules.
Word had it that soldiers had seen two warriors go down during the fight, but the bodies had been dragged off by their fellow horsemen, so there was no way to know for sure. Estimates put the enemy force as high as nine hundred. But the Irishman warned John to be skeptical, not to trust the inflated numbers guessed at by officers who attempted to judge such things in the heat of battle.

“We’re lucky that most of our horses were in among company rows for grooming, General,” Bourke told Crook later that evening at headquarters. “If the mounts had been out to graze, the savages likely would have run off a good number of them.”

“Doesn’t it just go to prove what I’ve said all along, John?” Crook asked.

“What’s that, sir?”

“The hostiles simply won’t stand and face us, John,” Azor Nickerson said as he elbowed his way into the conversation.

The general was nodding. “Exactly, Captain. The red bastards always scat from us. I can’t for the life of me make them stand and fight!”

In the wake of the attack, Crook sent Lieutenant William B. Rawolle’s B Company, Second Cavalry, across the Tongue to the high bluffs overlooking the camp, on the same slopes where the hostiles had opened fire. They were to protect the bivouac from an encore performance for the rest of the night. Just before midnight Rawolle’s men discovered they had drawn the most miserable duty of all when the sky clouded up, blotting out both the stars and a pale rind of a moon. Less than two hours later it began to rain—a cold early summer soaker.

Having finished his work on the reports of the attack, Bourke hurried over to the packers’ camp to look for Closter and Donegan. The lieutenant found them at a cheery fire, huddled beneath a shelter rigged with willow boughs and gummed ponchos, having themselves a rousing game of checkers on a crude muslin checkerboard. Both were having the best of time, their noses and cheeks radiating a rosy warmth that came from the inner man.

“Johnny! Get on in here with us!” Closter hollered.

“You come for some of Uncle Dick’s brandy?” Seamus asked.

“Don’t mind if I have a taste myself,” Bourke replied. “Did you hear of our fight with the tin Injun?” the old packer asked.

“The tin Injun?”

Closter nodded, but it was Donegan who went on to explain expansively. “Seemed from the looks of things—at least to those of us here in the civilian end of this camp—that you sojurs had everything well in hand.”

“Very well in hand!” Closter echoed, slapping his knee and chuckling.

“Fine indeed, because as things turned out, me and some of the boys here had us a private duel of sorts with the famed tin Injin.”

“So tell me about this fabled, mythical creature,” Bourke demanded, taking Closter’s tin brandy flask and tilting back his head, allowing the fiery liquid to slither down his throat.

“Over yonder,” Donegan continued, pointing off across the Tongue, “where the infantry was throwing lead at the hostiles—Uncle Dick here spots one of the war chiefs riding back and forth on top of the near ridge.”

“Back and forth just as smart as you please!” Closter added with a rosy smile.

“Up jumps one of the boys,” Seamus said, “shouting to tell us that the Injin chief is wearing a tin hat!”

“A big tin hat!” Closter slurred, pantomiming a hat sitting squarely atop his own white hair.