Reap the Whirlwind (43 page)

While Wooden Leg held his breath, the brave warrior shook his head—then calmly strode back to his fallen pony and began removing the bridle from its jaws.

Instantly a great cry went up among the Shahiyena, so great that it echoed from the red bluffs hemming in the gap. That echo had not died before there came a noisy rush behind Wooden Leg. He turned in time to see the sister of Chief Comes in Sight flying past him, urging her pony onto the open battlefield, riding low along the animal’s neck as she raced under the muzzles of the soldier guns—heading straight for a trio of Raven People scouts who were galloping out from the soldier lines to count coup on the unhorsed enemy.

Buffalo Calf Road Woman shot by her fallen brother like the wind, reining her pony about in a savage turn, then dashed back to Chief Comes in Sight as the white man’s bullets fell about them both. Her pony pranced around the solitary warrior. Pranced around him again, shying each time she tried to urge the animal close to her brother. Now they could hear the yelps and cries of the Raven People warriors. Without fully coming to a halt, the young woman held out her arm as she went past a fourth time. Her brother grabbed hold and pulled himself up on the pony’s rump just as Buffalo Calf Road Woman kicked the animal into furious motion, lumbering with its heavy load for the warrior lines.

In a matter of heartbeats the pair was among their cheering friends, who pulled them both from the wide-eyed, weary pony. It was again a good day for brother and sister, for those Shahiyena and Lakota who had watched one of their own snatched from certain death by an incredible act of bravery.

“These soldiers are angry now that they cannot kill us,” Little Wolf declared to some of those around him.

“See—some soldiers are going west,” Contrary Belly said at the edge of that group. He pointed at the distant slope.

No more than half-a-hundred soldiers were mounted up and moving west along the front of the bluff away from the creek bottom.

“Let’s go stop them,” Little Wolf suggested.

“Yes,” Wooden Leg agreed with the war chief. “If we don’t stop them, they will circle back around on the Lakota at the top of the ridge.”

“These few will be easy to stop!” Young Black Bird cheered, rallying many of the Shahiyena.

“Besides,” Little Wolf added, “I want to fight soldiers who stay on their horses—to fight like warriors. These white men who hide behind the rocks like gophers are not worthy adversaries.”

“Let’s go fight the horse soldiers!” Contrary Belly shouted as more than six-times-ten of the Shahiyena turned their ponies west.

“Let’s go count coup on the pony soldiers!” Wooden
Leg cried as he followed Little Wolf up the back side of the bluff.

The war chief nodded. “We can have a lot of fun surprising the white men!”

“Yes,” Wooden Leg replied. “To pop up where they don’t expect us to be!”

17 June 1876

I
t was as if they were sprouting right out of the ground.
From behind every bush and boulder. Materializing magically out of the bottom of every shallow coulee.

On foot or horseback.

Like an overwhelming red wave, they hurtled toward Guy Henry’s two companies of the Third.

Minutes ago Colonel Royall’s charge at the center of the battle line had taken some of the pressure off the desperately thin left flank of Major Chambers’s infantry, where the packers and miners had been skirmishing under growing pressure for some frightening moments until the cavalry arrived.

But to Seamus Donegan and those men riding with the Henry battalion, it seemed all Royall had accomplished was to plop a huge boulder down in the middle of a spring torrent: the hostiles didn’t back off; instead, they merely rallied all the more fiercely as they flowed to the left and right of the colonel’s impediment.

And now Royall was forced to ride back to the creek-bottom camp, leaving his battalion on a knoll to hold the line with those foot soldiers and civilians the best they could. He went personally to order up the remaining troops of the Third to fill the breech suddenly left open
when the Crow and Shoshone began withdrawing from the fray with their wounded.

“Look at them red bastards, will you!” grumbled a young soldier near Donegan. “Running back for cover when things get hot.”

“When things get hot?” the Irishman snapped. “Those Injins likely saved your hide, sojur!”

The corporal whirled at the voice, finding the civilian nearby. “Looks to me they’re running scared as jackrabbits, I say.”

“Taking their wounded and dead to the rear, you loudmouthed greenhorn. Crook owes his life to them. You as well.”

“Owe my life to a bunch of yellow-bellied redskins backing out of the fight?”

When the soldier began to belly laugh, an old sergeant swung the butt of his carbine squarely into the younger man’s middle.

Crumpling in half, pain graying his face, Corporal William Blair demanded in a raspy squeak, “What’d you do that for?”

“Get you to shuttup, Blair.” Sergeant Patrick Flood flicked a glance at Donegan, then went back to growling at the young soldier. “Listen to the man—and be thankful our Injuns was there to fight Crazy Horse when we wasn’t ready to do it ourselves.”

“Halt!”

The order came from the front of the column where Henry threw up an arm. Off to the right and down the slope came Colonel William B. Royall with his three companies of the Third: Meinhold’s B, Andrews’s I, and L Company under Captain Peter D. Vroom. He halted his battalion near Henry, who saluted the regimental commander.

“Colonel,” Royall addressed Henry by his brevet rank, tension and anxiety in his breathless voice, “you’ll join your battalion with mine.”

“Colonel, yes, sir. Our objective?”

Royall pointed. “We’ve been ordered to charge the flank of those hostiles, making things hot on Crook’s center.”

Henry nodded. “Very good, Colonel. We’ll fall in behind.”

Rising slightly in his stirrups, Royall turned, spotting the far guidon whipping in the breeze, flinging his voice over the entire battalion to order, “I Company—take the left flank! Center guide on me—forward!”

Sending Captain William H. Andrews’s troops to the far western end of their line of march, Royall led a total of 225 officers and men, five mounted troops of cavalry, on their ascent of that rugged slope at a fast canter, north by east until he reached a high point only a half mile from where Crook was marshaling his own infantry and civilian forces against the hostiles, who were themselves concentrated on the brow of that conical hill to their rear and the series of boulder-strewn ridges to their immediate front.

As Royall’s men broke the skyline, many of the hundreds of hostiles now turned their attention to the south and west.

Firing intermittently, the colonel’s troops were suddenly finding their advance grinding slower and slower as they crossed to the last fifty yards at the top of that rugged ridge. There they suddenly reached a wide, craggy ravine that separated them from the hostiles firmly in control of the far heights. Rushing to a palisade of sandstone that resembled the ramparts of an ancient Celtic castle on the far side of the ravine, many of the hostile riflemen began to pour fire across the canyon at the cavalry.

Ordering his battalion to dismount into skirmish formation, Royall was determined to prevent the Sioux from sweeping their left flank and gaining the rear as they scurried in black masses along the far heights.

On his own volition Captain Andrews had already detached Lieutenant James Foster with eighteen men from I Company during the last few hundred yards of their march to reach the precipice of that deep ravine.

“Take a platoon and ride to that point, Lieutenant,” Andrews had ordered. “Clear away the enemy from those heights on the left.”

Foster led his platoon away from the battalion, reining west to begin his wide sweep to the left. The nineteen horse soldiers watched in growing frustration as the warriors
dropped back, from ridgetop to ridgetop, as the lieutenant pushed the hostiles farther and farther, decoying the small group of soldiers … until Foster’s little command was more than a mile from Royall’s column. Far out of the reach of any aid.

Just about the time Royall reached the high ground near the rugged ravine with the rest of his two hundred, the enemy realized it had a small force cut off from the main body of soldiers.

As the battalion clattered to a halt, Donegan’s eye was caught by the dark movement of distant platoon against the new grass and the pale summer sky. More probably he sensed the spidery movement of the warriors moving in on them of a sudden—more than a hundred horsemen hurrying to cross that far slope to the southwest, scrambling up out of each one of the rugged fingers splaying off the deep ravine, working quickly to encircle the lost platoon.

“Cap’n Andrews!” Seamus bellowed in alarm as he brought his horse to a skidding halt near the officer charged with protecting the left flank.

“What is it?” the soldier replied brusquely, looking the civilian over.

“Yonder,” and he pointed. “You’re about to get those men swallowed up!”

Andrews shaded his eyes, whispered in a gush, “Dear God in heaven!”

Rising in his stirrups as the rest of Royall’s column was getting the order to dismount, Captain Andrews looked over his company, then shouted at the horseman he knew could make the ride.

“Private Weaver!”

“You’re going to send that boy to alert Foster?”

Andrews glared at Donegan. “I am. That
boy
can ride!”

Donegan wagged his head dolefully. “No. The boy stays—I’ll go.”

With a sharp wag of his head, Andrews said, “No. I’ll not have the blood of a civilian on my hands.”

Seamus replied, “But you’ll have this man’s?”

Andrews’s face went gray with worry. “I don’t know a damned thing about how good a horseman you are. But I
do know Weaver. The man’s the best we have in this regiment—”

“Captain?” Herbert W. Weaver saluted his company commander.

“Weaver—Lieutenant Foster is on the far heights.” Andrews pointed to the southwest.

“I see him, sir.”

“Can you reach him and order him to return—to fall back immediately?”

Private Weaver tugged the dirty kepi down on his forehead and nodded once with a grim smile. “I’ll get through, sir.” Without a look back, he reined about sharply and spurred away, his mount kicking up clods of dirt and grass.

“But will they get back?” Donegan grumbled.

By the time Weaver reached the platoon, having to race across a long route that took him around the head of the deep ravine, Lieutenant Foster was already painfully aware of his gloomy predicament. The hostiles were closing in from two directions. And one of them was the way Weaver had made it to the small platoon. Their planned escape route had been shut tight.

Reacting quickly, Foster ordered, “Stay together at all costs and ride like the wind, boys! This doesn’t have to be a pretty retreat—just save your hair!”

The lieutenant’s brash countercharge right into the teeth of that closing noose surprised the converging warriors, who fell away from the suddenness of the troopers’ attack, firing their pistols and shouting to beat the devil. Only by putting their mounts into a full gallop did Foster’s lost platoon make it back to Royall’s command intact and with only two men wounded.

But as those twenty riders reached the main body, more than a hundred warriors rushed into the wake, gaining possession of that ground to the southwest of Royall, which effectively began the all-but-complete encirclement of the colonel’s battalion.

In the meantime William B. Royall had other fish to fry—matters most grave as the enemy he confronted across the ravine began to grow in numbers, shifting from east to west as Royall’s men dismounted, making their appearance
and taking up positions among the boulders on the high ground.

“Horse-holders to the rear!” Royall ordered. “Company commanders will remain mounted. See to it your men are rallied and reinforced when needed.”

As every fourth trooper brought out the fifteen-inch leather link-straps and led his horses back to the rear, two straps clutched in each hand, it stirred Donegan’s old soldier’s heart to see those six officers—Royall and his five company captains—exhibiting such conspicuous bravery before their troops, staying the saddle, moving back and forth among their men.

In a matter of moments the enemy responded to the arrival of the horse soldiers. The flow of warriors began to seep like spring runoff down from the slopes of the conical hill toward this new adversary, hurrying almost due west toward a high point of ground, streaming into the protective cover of the numerous coulees at the head of what is today known as Kollmar Creek. Clearly, they intended not only to conduct a long-distance shooting match with these new arrivals—but Seamus Donegan believed the Sioux plainly intended to flank Royall’s command.

This sort of broken terrain might well let the enemy do just that.

Digging in at the eastern end of a series of rocky sandstone outcrops and ledges, the colonel’s battalion could go no farther on horseback, could do no more in driving the enemy off. Here they were stopped, blocked by the deep ravine from mounting any further charges. But here just as well, they would have to sit while the enemy had the luxury of both time and the terrain, to work slowly but persistently around the far heights, ever closing their red noose all the tighter.