Reap the Whirlwind (61 page)

While the Lakota and Shahiyena had attacked soldier
posts from the country along the New Cherry River
^*
to the Buffalo Dung River,
^†
even killed the Hundred in the Hand near the Piney Woods Fort nine winters before, nonetheless this long day’s fight with Three Stars was perhaps the greatest of all battles simply because that soldier chief was as smart as a fox of an enemy.

But even still, as great as was the Fight Where the Young Girl Saved Her Brother, Wooden Leg drifted off to sleep that morning dreaming on greater things. Behind his eyes swam that vision they all still shared with the Hunkpapa shaman, Sitting Bull.

As the sun came up in the east. Wooden Leg dreamed of many, many soldiers falling into camp.

Seamus doubted how any of them could have slept last night, what with the way those Shoshone caterwauled until just before dawn when they finally buried the dead pony boy who was killed and scalped to the nape of the neck during the battle. All the while the warriors wailed and keened, thumping on their drums as they stomped and pranced around the grave, over which they ultimately built a fire to burn away all scent from savvy predator noses.

Such celebration of the dark arts was enough to turn a somber camp downright gloomy.

As weary as the troops were, Crook had the buglers blow reveille to roll his men out of their blankets at three A.M. while the east was only beginning to become a thin gray line on the horizon. A thick frost coated Donegan’s wool blanket, grown shiny with the coming of first light. It rattled icily as he sat up, grinding knuckles into his gritty eyes. To his surprise he found the old packer already stoking life into a small cookfire.

“Morning, Irishman!” Richard Closter cried cheerfully.

“There any coffee ready?”

“Not yet.”

Putting his nose into the breeze and gazing this way
and that along the slope where other fires and men were coming to life, Seamus asked, “You need water?”

“Yes. If you want coffee—we sure as hell need water.”

“I’ll get it,” the Irishman replied, kicking free of his frost-stiffened blanket and sweeping up the bail to the blackened coffeepot as he rose. “Got to head down to the bushes anyway.”

As the expedition finished a breakfast of their dwindling rations of hardtack and fried bacon, washing it down with steaming coffee, the sun made its appearance in a clear, cloudless sky. It promised to be a beautiful day for man as well as beast. The horses and mules appeared well recuperated after both the march and battle of the last two days.

Fortunate, Donegan thought as he saddled his gelding, that we had such good bottomland to graze the animals.

“Seamus!” Reuben Davenport called out as he walked by with his horse in tow, having taken the animal down to water at the creek. “Keep yours eyes peeled, as the old plainsmen always say. It may be we’re still surrounded and the red bastards might give us another try while we’re strung out on the trail.”

“What makes you so sure this outfit is surrounded?”

Davenport stopped to reply. “Last night I commissioned one of Moore’s civilians to carry my first dispatch down to Fetterman for me. Would have paid him good too—had I been first to get out word of the fight.”

“But the fella didn’t make it, did he?”

“Oh, he was gone about two hours or more,” the correspondent explained. “Then showed back up after midnight, saying he was pursued back to our lines by some of the hostiles. Got so close to their village that he even heard the squaws wailing for their dead.”

“He sure he headed south? That’s where Fetterman is, while we all know the enemy camp is north of us, Davenport.”

With a shrug Davenport said, “I suppose so, unless he headed out to make a wide circuit.”

“So it sounds like you won’t be the first one to get out any news of the battle after all, will you?”

The newsman wagged his head. “Couldn’t talk that man into trying again, no matter what price I offered.”

Over among the mule brigade the infantry were readying the travois Chambers’s walk-a-heaps had constructed yesterday and into the long summer evening, using cottonwood limbs interwoven with willow branches, lashed together with rawhide strips and rope. On these crude litters the five surgeons placed their wards. For each one of the wounded, six volunteers were assigned to travel beside the litter, attending to the smallest of needs by those who were destined to suffer through every excruciating yard of the coming march. Experienced in such things, Sergeant John Warfield, F Company of the Third Cavalry, a veteran of much service with Crook’s Apache campaigns down in Arizona, had been placed in charge of constructing the litters, as well as being designated superintendent overseeing the welfare of the wounded during their retreat to Goose Creek.

When the order came to mount up and move out, Crook put most of the Third Cavalry out in the van while two battalions of the Third covered both flanks. The remainder of his horse soldiers in the Second Cavalry were to bring up the rear and watch the backtrail against any surprises. Between the van and rearguard were stationed the litters bearing the wounded, followed by the mule brigade and civilians.

The general himself led out the procession so that every horse and mule passed over the mass grave of the fallen soldiers. With a fire kept burning over the trench throughout the night, and now the hooves of more than twelve hundred animals crossing that spot, Donegan was positive the site would be all but obliterated from discovery by the time he passed over it at the tail end of the column.

Now as he looked back at that unmarked plot of trampled ground, his attention was rudely snagged by the sudden whooping and joyful cries from some of the Crow scouts on the slope off to the west. They were gathering along the side of the nearby hill, dismounting. Several shots rang out, then more laughter. Finally Donegan caught the glint of early sunlight flashing from several
tomahawks the scouts swung into the air about the time John Finerty galloped up to the scene.

A while later Seamus gave his mount the heel and loped ahead to find Baptiste Pourier.

“Found one of the Lakota, up in the rocks,” Big Bat explained when the Irishman asked what all the joyous activity was about.

“A live one?”

Pourier nodded. “Probably crawled that far last night. He looked blind. Maybe shot in the face. One of our scouts already scalped him yesterday. Head was stripped clean—from brow to the back of his neck, covered with flies.”

“And you said he was still alive?” Seamus felt the quiver course through his belly.

“Made it through the night anyway. Still alive when I got up to that band of Crow making sport with him. His skull was even cracked a bit, some of the brain coming out where the bone was caved in from a stone club.” Now Pourier chuckled, almost regretful. “Likely the poor bastard heard our horses and figured us for Lakota because he started calling out for water in the wrong tongue: ‘
Mini! Mini!
’”

With the sound of hammering hooves, Seamus turned to watch a gleeful warrior gallop past, racing along the right flank of the slower-moving column. Behind him he dragged an object bouncing at the end of a long rawhide rope. The shapeless thing only faintly resembled the bloodied torso of a copper-skinned man. Two other young horsemen came traipsing along behind the first, each of them dragging a trophy through the dirt and rocks and hoof-cut grass: the hapless Sioux’s legs.

With an involuntary shudder, the Irishman looked away, remembering what fiendish glee and butchery this same tribe had committed on a Sioux warrior they had captured back in the early spring of ’67 when Donegan was exiled to Fort C. F. Smith, the northernmost post along the Bozeman Road.
^*

“Them Crow ain’t the only ones, Irishman,” Pourier
went on to explain. “Snakes were worked up in burying that pony boy, so some of ’em went out from camp last night. Ran across a couple more Lakota bodies they didn’t find before.”

“Cut ’em up pretty good, I’d wager.”

“A real pretty thing, how these Injuns work with a knife,” Bat replied.

“Maybe they’re due, just to even things up,” Seamus admitted. “Seeing how the hostiles cut that poor soldier into pieces so he was buried in a feed sack.”

“Look there.” Pourier had turned in the saddle, pointing back to one of the grassy crests north of the Rosebud.

“Figure they’re Lakota?” Donegan asked.

“I suppose. Maybe Shahiyena.”

“They ain’t acting like they’re scouts for a bunch come to devil our backtrail, Bat.”

“Nope,” Pourier replied. “Maybe they just come to look over the battlefield.”

“See if they could rescue any more of their dead they couldn’t drag off yesterday.”

“There’s fourteen they didn’t get away with,” the half-breed replied. “Look now. They’re getting down off their ponies. You was right—ain’t no scouting party.”

“Just curious about things, I suppose,” Donegan said as he watched the dozen or more distant horsemen slide to the ground. “A ghosty, superstitious people, they are.”

Off to the extreme east near the gap, another small party of horsemen appeared along the skyline. Then a third, and larger, group dappled the morning blue near the crest of Crook’s hill. Strangely eerie it felt to the Irishman now, watching those horsemen sitting bareback there, others choosing to stand motionless beside their war ponies as they watched the soldier column march away up the South Fork of the Rosebud.

Suddenly one of the Crow scouts came galloping past, chattering wildly, dangling something from one hand as he passed by Pourier, a great smile on his yellow-painted face.

“What’d he have to say?” Donegan asked.

With a wag of his head, Pourier replied, “Just bragging.”

“Bragging about what?”

“About how all the Sioux squaws was going to be so sad now when they hear about that buck getting killed in the fight.”

“Why the squaws?”

“He said the squaws gonna miss that buck something terrible.”

“Why him? He some big chief?”

“No, Irishman. Because what the Crow warrior had hanging from his hand was that Lakota’s cock and balls.”

Seamus Donegan was as happy as any of them to be getting out of the valley of the Rosebud. Each step a little closer to Samantha, and the shelter of her arms.

Sane was how he felt when he was with her. No matter where it was, he felt sane with her—able to shut out the cruelty, the barbarity, the outright insanity of this war between an unstoppable force set in motion against an immovable enemy.

Oh, Sam—how I want to come home.

18 June 1876

I
n leading Crook’s army away from the big bend of the
Rosebud on that Sunday morning, Grouard, Pourier, and Reshaw had taken the same trail they used in bringing the soldiers there. While the north fork of the creek continued west from the battle site itself, the Bighorn and Yellowstone Expedition instead turned south, hauling their wounded and backtracking up the South Fork of the Rosebud.

As the morning wore on, it grew more and more apparent that the route followed by their inbound march of the seventeenth was becoming steeper, less than ideal for the wounded on the litters and travois. The command followed the rugged terrain, climbing ever upward with those tiny tributaries flowing east to feed the Tongue River. Just after midmorning Crook asked the half-breed scouts to select a better route in consideration of his wounded, a different trail that might not prove so hard on those who stoically bore their discomfort and pain.

Grouard turned the command west by south toward the Wolf Mountains. But Crook’s best intentions bore bitter fruit.

Time and again through the waning hours of the morning and into the afternoon their march was slowed, or
even stopped altogether, as the six-man squads detailed to assist each wounded soldier had to hoist the travois poles to keep the wounded men level as they struggled down the slope of a ravine or scrambled up the loosened side of a coulee. It wasn’t long before Crook found out he had made a crucial mistake taking them through this new piece of country.

Across the hours of jostling and bumping over the uneven ground, some of the rawhide and rope lashes tying Guy Henry’s litter between the fore and aft mules loosened enough that on starting the descent of a steep-sided ravine some twenty feet deep, the end of one pole struck a boulder and was knocked completely loose. The wounded officer spilled, tumbling past the churning, sliding hooves of the front mule, down the loose dirt and grass of the slope, right onto the boulders and rocks at the bottom.

The captain’s steward scurried down the slope, yelling for help, as the column came to an immediate halt, everything in an instant uproar. Nearby at the bottom of the coulee, the two hapless mules clattered to a halt, dragging the flopping litter pole.