Reap the Whirlwind (51 page)

To reach this, his second position of the morning, Royall had been forced to squeeze his remaining troops of cavalry through the one portal left open to them—turning their faces almost due south to retire to the crest of a lengthy ridge jutting out toward the Rosebud itself, just southwest of that head of the Kollmar. In their harried, frightening retreat that covered more than a half mile across the gently sloping and open ground, the horse soldiers followed the horse-holders, turning on command as squad leaders ordered fire by volleys into the warriors who swarmed at them from nearly every direction at once.

To Donegan it was nothing short of a sainted miracle they had retreated without suffering a single casualty in all that fighting.

To finally reach the end of the ridge. Here was the end of the line.

Royall could go no farther: they had come to the far western edge of the crest where the bluff fell sharply to a deep, wide canyon. Here the only cover for the retreating soldiers was a low strata of brownish-red sandstone boulders where the men bunched up and again turned their fire at the enemy.

Royall ordered Captains Vroom and Andrews to hold the ground along the north slope—which meant the troopers now faced the position from which they had just retreated. Didn’t seem to be many soldiers in those four remaining companies who were immune to the growing despair brought by looking back to see that the ground they had just abandoned only moments before was now overrun and swarming with an army of red ants.

With Captain Henry’s two remaining companies, D and F, Seamus fought his way to the south slope where the battalion struggled in a hot fire-fight until they were eventually able to take refuge among the few rocks at the precipitous ledge falling abruptly into the deep chasm. They had slashed and shot their way to the boulders not a moment too soon. Had Henry’s men tarried any longer in
securing their position—the Crazy Horse warriors would have been there to greet the soldiers at the edge of the chasm.

Hunkered here, Donegan grew thankful for what breezes stirred among the rocks and tall grass along this southern slope of the ridge. Any wisp of air on the move hurried the clouds of gunsmoke and stinging red and yellow dust on its way. Just to the east of them milled their frightened, chivvied mounts—more than a handful for the horse-holders. Not long ago Royall had called forward half of those men so that the holders who remained in the ravine with the mounts now had responsibility for eight animals latched together with the swivels on their link-straps. Pushing and bumping against one another, whinnying, jostling with eyes wide as runny egg whites in a cold cast-iron skillet bottom, the horses stuck their nostrils high into the wind to snatch any scent of the Indian ponies and grease-smeared naked bodies painted with frightening, mystical symbols.

Seamus brooded: if our horses just don’t bolt completely … damn! But Royall has to make a decision soon or—

“I’m sending the horses away first—again!” Royall shouted above the clamor of the noisy mounts, the rattle of gunfire, and the screeching of the warriors who paraded back and forth along the ridgetop just out of range while others crept in closer, ever closer through the grass, from rock to rock and tree to tree. Some of the copper-skinned horsemen even dared to make courage runs along the entire stretch of Royall’s shrinking front. Blowing their eagle wing-bone whistles, yip-yip-yipping like a damned coyote, taunting, luring, almost seductive in a primal way.

More than a handful of the young soldiers had growled in exasperation, standing to try a shot at those distant riders. When they did, such frustration, daring, and anger only earned them a renewed rain of gunfire from the warriors sidling ever closer from the north and west, as well as the southwest along the base of the ridge.

“Are you sure we’re ready, Colonel? As soon as they see us falling back, they’ll rush us again,” declared Captain
Guy Henry. Bug-eyed, he glanced at the Irishman as if for confirmation.

Royall followed his subaltern’s eyes, looking at the civilian himself. “The captain’s right, isn’t he, Mr. Donegan? Why wouldn’t they rush us? They’d like to separate us from our horses, wouldn’t those bastards? To keep us from joining with Crook’s left.”

“Our only chance is to go now, Colonel Henry,” Donegan pleaded. “We wait—it ain’t about to get any better.”

“I disagree, Colonel,” Henry argued. “We’ve learned that Crook has sent for Mills’s battalion. I say we sit tight and wait for them to fall on the enemy’s rear, which will take some of the heat off us.”

Donegan shook his head when Royall looked back at him. “This is it, Colonel.” He swallowed: just saying it would be hard. “You’ll likely take some casualties retiring across that last defile—to make that far ridge yonder where there’s infantry and the Crow. But what men we lose is for the sake of the rest.”

“You’re saying if we don’t get out now—this entire battalion is lost?”

“Look for yourself. All of you. The Sioux are wrapping us in a tighter and tighter corner until there’ll be nowhere to go. I ain’t one of your officers—but I do know a hard scrape when I see it. No better choice but to tighten our cinches and get while the getting is good.”

Royall bristled. “I’d prefer this to be thought of as a charge rather than another retreat—”

“This ain’t nothing like Summit Springs, where you and Carr was able to get the jump on those Dog Soldiers.”

The colonel’s face went gray with concern, his cheeks sallow with the weight of command and the gravity of their predicament, perhaps realizing not all of these men would make it to the end of that far ridgeline where Chambers’s infantry was spread in ragged skirmish lines with the Crow and Shoshone.

Eventually Royall sighed in a quiet gush. “Here we are, gentlemen—without a prayer of taking the offensive. All right. I suppose the best I can hope for now is nothing more than to retreat with our wounded … and our lives.”

Moon of Ripening Berries

H
is gut burned with hate, boiled with rage.

Crazy Horse watched as the young Hunkpatila boy of fourteen winters spun off the bare back of his pony, landing with a spray of dust where he lay dazed, easy prey to their old enemies. This sort of bravery run was something for an older, more accomplished warrior.

But those Raven People and Snake scouts!

Crazy Horse ground his teeth in anger. As much as he hated the white man and all the misery he had caused the Lakota people, the Horse hated the white man’s Indians just that much more.

In making their daring ride, two youngsters had charged too close to the enemy’s lines. Too far east along the top of the ridge.

As the pair of horsemen had broken over the crest of the hill in harassing the retreating soldiers, they had strayed too close to the walk-a-heap soldiers, as well as those Indians who fought alongside the white men. Spotting the two riders, the scouts for the soldiers opened up a deadly fire, finally knocking one of the boys from his pony. Turning on his heel, the other youngster galloped out of range, down the north side of the ridge, frightened right out of the fight.

As the unfortunate youth slowly rose to his hands and knees, shaking the confusion from his head and touching the bloody bullet wound along his side, the soldier scouts descended on him.

Crazy Horse had watched the enemy strike in a flurry of clubs and knives, the muzzles and butts of their rifles, falling upon him like starving ants converging on a juicy morsel dropped from a steaming kettle in a lodge.

The Horse knew there would be little left of the body to take home to his family. Only the words he could say to the boy’s mother, to the father—that their son had died fighting for his people, as bravely as any full-grown warrior. Died not only in a struggle with the white man but against ancient enemies as well.

A noble death.

No matter how noble, it did little to stop a mother’s tears, or a father’s rage.

He himself knew of a father’s rage. His only child—a young, beautiful daughter—died of the white man’s terrible spotted disease. That’s what came of knowing the white man. That’s what came of hanging about the soldier forts and the trading posts. Better to keep the white man as far away from the villages as the warriors could.

That’s why they had decided to attack the soldiers, rather than chance letting them draw any closer to their camp.

Because of that he kept reminding himself all morning long that this could not be the great battle Sitting Bull had envisioned. No soldiers were anywhere close to their villages. No soldiers were falling headfirst into their great gathering of lodge circles.

Although they had the soldiers in the middle of the battle fought to a standstill; although many of the pony soldiers had inexplicably disappeared down the Rosebud; and although he now had most of his warriors closing in on the white men they had surrounded far to the west end of the ridge—although this was indisputably a great victory for the Lakota and Shahiyena … this fight on Rosebud Creek was nonetheless not the greatest of victories Wakan Tanka had promised to give His people.

No soldiers were falling into camp here.

Instead, the white men had huddled up against the steep slopes of the ridge with nowhere else to go. For so long they did nothing but fight back like cornered mice. There was no manhood in cowering as they did.

But now—with a sudden flurry of movement, some of the white men they had surrounded were breaking off from the rest, leaving their horses and companions behind, hurrying toward the crest of the ridge.

“Hopo!” Crazy Horse cried, wheeling his pony in a circle, raising his repeater to get every man’s attention. “We could want nothing better!”

“We fought to cut the soldiers into little bites so that we could chew them up,” He Dog shouted. “Let us now go grind their bones in our teeth!”

“Hoka hey!” Crazy Horse called as the hundreds rushed in for the kill. “Go after them! Remember your families! Cut them off! Remember your children! Kill these soldiers—kill them all!”

“
I
judge there to be more than five hundred warriors closing in on Royall now, General!” Alexander Chambers declared without taking the field glasses from his eyes.

George Crook ground his hands together, murmuring, “Dear God in heaven.”

“If they succeed,” Chambers continued, finally tearing the field glasses from his face, “the colonel’s men will be cut off from us, perhaps cut off from all chance of our support.”

Crook wagged his head, looking over his infantry and the allies, knowing how suicidal it would be for him to order an attempt to go relieve Royall’s battalion. He had to fight the grip of despair, hold off the melancholia. “What can be keeping Mills?”

As if prompted by this sudden shaking in the general’s self-assurance, Major Chambers turned to train his field glasses a little east of north.

It gave Crook pause to realize he now was something less than confident of winning this battle with Crazy Horse. Ammunition had to be running low after nearly half a day of fighting. The hillsides were littered with the dark carcasses of dead and dying cavalry mounts and the mules
that had carried his infantry to the Rosebud. After some four hours of fighting, his expeditionary force was not only strung out along more than three miles of ridge, but more than a third of his cavalry was nowhere to be found among the hills to the north. He simply could not allow this trembling in his own self-confidence to shake the optimism of his officer corps.

“You see anything, Colonel?” he asked of Chambers.

Continuing to adjust the focus, the major studied the ridgetops, the crests of the hills, the open meadows stretching between the stands of emerald green pines. Without a word he worked his field of view slowly down the slopes toward the flats in the valley to their immediate north.

“No, General. I don’t see a thing of the Mills battalion.”

Crook drew himself up and sighed, turning back to listen to renewed, heavy firing from Royall’s position. It seemed some men were breaking off from that spur to the south, ascending the ridge. It seemed like the perfect act of suicide.

“Then I have no choice but to conclude that Mills is beyond giving us any support, Colonel Chambers,” Crook admitted, turning away from that skirmish to the west. “Much too far away to get here in time to support Royall’s rear guard.”

“Burrowes and Burt are extended thin enough as it is, General.”

Nodding, the general turned to Chambers, leaning close, confidentially, asking in a low voice, “Would Mills possibly disobey the orders I sent with Nickerson? Would he find some reason to continue on to attack the village?”

The major’s eyes darted about, like those of a man put on the spot and not sure if there was any right answer to such a question. Finally he answered the older man before him. “From what I know of Colonel Mills—what I’ve heard of his gallantry in the war and on the Powder River—I don’t think disobeying is in the man’s constitution, General. I’ve heard others testify that he’s as fine a soldier as they come.”

With a wave of his hand, and a brave attempt at a grin, Crook replied, “A little on the excitable side of things, the
colonel is. But I agree. I don’t think Mills is the kind who could ever justify disobeying a direct order.”