Reap the Whirlwind (39 page)

As Seamus turned back to the north, the Sioux and Cheyenne flung themselves down the grassy slope against the Crow and Shoshone, throwing all their strength against the overwhelming numbers. In a swirl of dust, the allies met the hostiles face to face, pony to pony, even hand to hand. With clang of weapons, grunts of men and muscle, the snorts and cries of horses, red man fought red man for those terror-filled moments. Out of the growing clouds of dust loped ponies without riders, some animals crippled, others with only blood-laced pad saddles slung from their bellies as they clattered in frightened retreat down toward the boggy bottomland by the creek.

But in that desperate twenty minutes, the allies had turned the enemy.

Although outnumbered two, three, even four to one, the Crow and Shoshone courageously hurled themselves into the breech, pouring into that suicidal no-man’s-land
between the oncoming red waves and the unprepared blue line. Only they blunted the hostiles’ charge, falling back, countercharging, but never buckling as they absorbed assault after assault just long enough to allow Crook’s soldiers to re-form, resaddle, hurry into position.

Twenty to thirty long, numbing, bloody minutes before the cavalry and infantry began to have any real effect in the battle.

Had it not been for these garishly painted Crow and Shoshone scouts, Seamus brooded as he chambered another round into the Henry repeater and took aim at another warrior wearing a buffalo-horn headdress—we’d be wolf-bait by now.

Crook’s allies damned well saved our hash!

17 June 1876

D
ear God—see to Nannie and the little ones! Care for
them every one if I don’t ever make it back home to their arms,” Anson Mills whispered, his prayer lost in the crushing clamor of that battalion of five companies he led across the Rosebud.

For some unexplained and mystical reason that Mills had long ago come to accept, the captain’s Negro servant had heard the enemy coming, far away—even before the Crow scouts had raced back over the hills with their shrill warning. Anson trusted old black Henry with his life. Knew in his heart that the former slave had better ears than he ever would.

Racing toward the heights south of where his battalion had been relaxing, Mills saw them. At least the black, swirling, onrushing masses of them less than a mile away. Rushing back down the hill, Anson had been intent on reaching Crook for orders. But he had never reached the general.

Crook had already hurried off to make an observation from the heights somewhere up there to Mills’s left when the order came from Royall. Not much of an order, carried by that lieutenant from North Carolina, regimental adjutant Henry R. Lemly.

Just simply, “The general’s compliments—your battalion will charge those bluffs on the center.”

Mills sensed the flush of instant exasperation. “Beg pardon, Lieutenant?”

Lemly licked his lips. “Sir, you are to mount, cross the stream, charge, and drive the Indians from the opposite hills.”

To Captain Anson Mills of the Third U.S. Cavalry, who now hammered a saddle as he raced across the shallow creekbed of the Rosebud, that order translated to nothing more complicated than “Take the high ground. Hold it. Turn them back and
hold
the high ground.”

It remained for Mills to choose the route for his own four companies, and two more temporarily assigned him from Guy Henry’s command, B and L. Raking his eyes over the ground quickly, the captain instantly decided: sweeping to the far-right flank seemed like the best, perhaps the only, way for him to take them into the breech.

“Right front into line!” Mills bellowed as the troopers behind splashed up and onto the north bank of the creek to re-form. “Left front—oblique!”

It was a beautiful thing, watching the companies and their like-colored mounts flow left, others right, going four deep, lieutenants and sergeants taking their outfits across a wide three-hundred-yard front. Something to stir the horse soldier’s heart seeing the last of them urge their protesting mounts into position here on ground a bit more suited to his charge.

In a matter of seconds he would lead these two hundred cavalrymen into the maw at the end of the ridge where the enemy was pouring through—with guidons snapping and iron-shod hooves clattering across the uneven ground, their mounts charging up the slope toward the high ground above the gap, where they plainly saw a frightening cavalcade of horsemen streaming from the north.

“Move out on me—center guide!” the captain hollered, rising in the stirrups. “Bugler! Sound the charge!”

Captains, lieutenants, and sergeants prodded the last of their men into formation. All but a few of the troopers hurriedly slid their short-barreled Springfield carbines behind
them on the black leather slings, yanking up the mule-ears on their holsters and drawing out the preferred weapon of choice in a charge: the .45-caliber Colt’s revolver. An easier weapon to handle on horseback … at least until he ordered them back to their feet.

Trumpeter Elmer A. Snow brought his shiny horn to his lips and stuttered those stirring, brassy notes into the summer sky, and a hundred voices were raised as the big horses shot away from the Rosebud in the first massed charge of the battle.

In a matter of heartbeats and a few leaps of their mounts, that wide blue front was a spare eight hundred yards from the enemy, and closing. Already the acrid gunsmoke stung his nostrils in that warming air, the morning breeze beginning to whip Anson’s black mustache, to water his eyes as he led these proud men of the Third Cavalry into history.

The air rang with gunfire and the snarling orders barked back and forth among the six companies just as the hostiles closed on five hundred yards, beginning to break to left and right as they poured from the gap like dried beans spilling from a coarse sack all over Nannie’s floor back at D. A. Russell.

How much she does with so little, he thought as his blood pounded at his temples.

How Anson Mills prayed he would see his sweet Nannie again—when this day was done. How desperately he prayed, leading his battalion toward the first of the two ridges north of the creek. Behind him his men began to cheer ever louder, to scream back in answer to the horn’s brassy blare. Working themselves into a blood-lather as they came ever closer to the painted enemy.

Of a sudden he realized the buckskin troop was missing.

Captain Andrews’s I Company!

Turning in his saddle for an instant, Mills couldn’t find them anywhere on the slope below him.

Where they had gone in moving up from the creek bottom to begin his charge on the first ridge, he didn’t know. All that was certain was that he was now left with
only five of his original troops of cavalry … as well as those hundreds of yards of broken ground to cover.

They were out of the bottom now and into the open to do it—only man against man and animal against animal—surging forward on horseback and making some damned fine targets of themselves, having to lean far forward in their saddles in dashing up the steep ascent.

Worrying about Andrew’s company, Anson’s attention was brutally yanked back to their front.

On that rugged, broken ground the first of the horses were stumbling, falling, going down and spilling their riders. Toppling over on some of the men, crying out almost like wounded children. Over and over they tumbled backward.

In the space of taking another ragged breath, Mills suddenly found the Sioux and Cheyenne were there among their disordered charge, sweeping onto the troopers, rushing up and over the low rise from the north—pouring through that wide bottleneck between the terminus of two ridges. At less than fifty yards both forces surprised one another, the warriors and the cavalry all reaching that rocky terrain unsuited to fighting from horseback at the same time.

“Charge! Don’t falter, men! Pitch into them!”

Seizing that moment of shock, Mills led his cavalry right in among those astonished hostiles. The gunfire, the surprise of that massed front, the clamor of that noisy charge of dusty blue horse soldiers immediately turned the enemy back onto themselves just south of the gap.

They fell back, farther and farther back, firing as they went, back even more as they retreated up the slope toward a second ridge rising to the northwest another half mile off.

Between the two forces now lay some rugged, uneven, broken ground pocked with boulders and turkey-tracked by shallow coulees carved by torrential spring rains. Terrible ground, where their horses would stumble and pitch their riders. Here too was the last cover Mills’s men could take if the tide of battle turned—here were the last big boulders.

And here their mounts became almost too much to handle for those frightening moments. How close they
were to the retreating enemy. What with the screeching and gunfire, the flapping of the blankets and rawhide strips—all around Mills the mounts fought their riders. Every bit as frightened and confused as his troopers.

Reining about suddenly, Mills shouted, “Battalion dismount! Horse-holders to the rear!”

Raggedly they began to obey, going afoot and clumsily handing off their mounts.

Screaming above the ear-numbing war cries, Anson Mills commanded, “Throw out skirmish lines! Back there—protect the mounts behind those rocks!”

Every fourth man now dropped to the rear, struggling with the frightened horses, clinging with all his strength to the long link-straps buckling four horses together as the animals clattered to the rear, toward what little cover the battlefield provided.

When the companies had their skirmish lines thrown out, it was time to order, “Forward on my command. Watch that near ground for stragglers!”

As a body the troopers surged forward in a crouch, making themselves as small as possible as even more of the horsemen swirled out of the gap toward the broadening front of dismounted soldiers. The hostiles came in swarms at Mills’s battalion, not massing in their entirety as they burst out of the bottleneck—but clotting in swarms of twenty and thirty or more—coagulating in one wave after another that washed toward the ragged soldier line … then raced noisily west, past the left flank of the blue wall. In drawing away, some of the horsemen even rose from the backs of their ponies just enough to pull their breechclouts aside and slap their copper bottoms.

Such impudence from the enemy only served to anger Mills all the more—that, and his missing company. “Where the hell did Andrews go?” he growled under his breath.

At the top of that first ridge, their gallant charge ground to a halt as the soldiers broke up, taking position among the smaller boulders, each one just enough cover for one man, perhaps two at most, to fight behind. From there all the way to the bottom of the second and higher
ridge, Anson Mills saw the heaving ground strewn with the sandstone boulders.

Eight hundred … perhaps as much as a thousand yards to go across that deadly no-man’s-land. Where the men would be out in the open as they charged forward. But at a crawl. Taking that ground yard by yard, foot by foot. Inch by precious inch.

Mills hollered out his orders, hearing them echoed back down both flanks as he began to crab forward for a better look at the battlefield, a better look at his enemy. On they came, those red horsemen who poured through the gap and threatened to roll over Anson Mills’s Third Cavalry.

Surprising his battalion for heart-stopping minutes, they rolled forward, screeching and firing their guns, raising clouds of dust as they plunged as little as fifty paces from the blue line of soldiers scattered irregularly beneath that bright summer sun. Close enough for Mills to make out individual designs painted on the screeching faces, see the small totems tied in the black hair or lashed around an upper arm, or beneath the jaw of the ponies. Close enough for the captain to tell the difference between a feather fluttering stiffly on the morning breeze and the brown, red, or blond-haired scalplocks these warriors boasted from every rifle muzzle, war club, and shield as they dropped to the far side of their little ponies, every single one of those daring horsemen making as small a target as possible as they rumbled down on the boulderfield.

Their advance ground to a halt under some sporadic and ineffective fire from those first warriors taking up position along the ridge to the west. Without stop, wave after wave continued to charge through the gap where they swept to the left, clattering up the broken ground to that ridgetop where most of the brown horsemen dismounted and began firing down on not only the infantry and Noyes’s cavalry, but Mills as well.

Nonetheless his battalion held, taking the brunt of every charge and turning it back as the warriors closed in. Mills’s men yelled out to one another, cheering when they forced aside the fevered knots of ten or twenty or more warriors preferring to stay out of range of the soldier guns.

“Shoot the goddamned ponies!” someone shouted off to the captain’s right.

“Drop the ponies!” another voice raised the call.

As if they had heard the soldier talk, the warriors swerved en masse to the left of the cavalry line like a great, tumbling tide of hellish noise careening down upon them….