Sioux Dawn, The Fetterman Massacre, 1866 (12 page)

“Sweet Jesus,” he murmured in English, his favorite swearing language. “Sweet, sweet goddamn Jesus.”

Chapter 8

He'd done something idiotic.

A Civil War veteran with his experience should have known better. But he found himself in the middle of it with no way out. His only hope now was to make it back with his scalp. He was a novice at this type of fighting. Hell, all of them out here were wet behind the ears when it came to battling the Sioux.

Every man among them was used to fighting an enemy that stood up to you. Like those Johnny Rebs.

These redskins swept in on their little ponies, running off what stock they wanted, and never gave a man a target worth a damned shot. Only when those same bloody warriors found that they outnumbered a soldier detail or a civilian party along the Montana Road did they stand and give a fight of it.

Shit! This kind of fighting is new to every last soldier sent out here to this godforsaken wilderness!

Capt. Henry Haymond, commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry, had rushed from his tent at the first shouts of soldiers and the first yelps of attacking Sioux. Pulling suspenders over his shoulders and yanking on his dusty boots, Haymond dashed to his horse in trousers and gray wool undershirt. Hollering for his adjutant to join him, and leaving orders for his mounted men to follow when they caught up their horses, the captain galloped across the Big Piney. First on the trail after the horse-stealing Sioux.

Following Carrington's farewell to the Cheyennes the previous afternoon, Haymond had camped his four companies of soldiers in the valley below the fort. Then turned the battalion stock out to graze in the lush grasses for which they hungered after their brutal march north from Laramie.

Was it just luck? Or, had the savages known to slip into the herd to capture the bell-mare first? Certain the rest of the herd would follow. Haymond urged his mount onto the slope leading up Lodge Trail Ridge. Only once did he dare glance behind him. His orderly was close on his tail. A rag-tag band of half-dressed soldiers scrambled down to the crossing atop what horses the command had left.

The Sioux didn't waste time making good their threat to Carrington. God damn their black souls, anyway! The nerve! Just like the guerilla Johnnies. Hit and run! Lord, do these savages scamper on their little ponies.

At the top of the ridge Haymond wheeled round and brought his heaving mount to a halt. Five minutes later he had sixty men to follow him off the ridge toward Peno Creek. Another five minutes found Captain Haymond's command surrounded by more than two hundred screaming warriors at the bottom of the ridge.

By the time he had turned his command, formed skirmish lines and fought his way back to the base of the Lodge Trail, Haymond felt like a sucker. Drawn into the oldest Indian trap known, like a green lieutenant fresh out of the academy. Carrying Haymond's plea for relief, the adjutant galloped off toward the post.

When two companies of infantry and fifty mounted men stormed down the slope of the ridge to relieve Haymond, the Sioux redoubled their efforts. In their wake, the captain found two of his men dead. Three more wounded. With the arrival of reinforcements, the soldiers could make an orderly retreat over the Lodge Trail, back to the safety of the fort. As they fell back to the base of the trail leading over the ridge, with skirmishers out lest the Sioux attempt another ambush, an Indian woman and her five children burst from the willows beside Peno Creek. The captain drew his soldiers into a defensive perimeter and drove the noisy attackers off for good.

As the last Sioux warrior had disappeared beyond Peno Head, Haymond gave his attention to the woman and her half-breed children. She gestured wildly, wanting the soldiers to follow her.

Not far from the graveled crossing of the Peno, Haymond's men found French Pete's campsite. Gazzous was dead. His five teamsters slaughtered. From the looks of the camp, they had put up a fight of it while they could. A half-dozen men against twenty times their number.

“Looks to be that horse-stealing party we was chasing come on the trader while they was setting up their ambush for us,” Lieutenant Nisley suggested.

“Lord only knows how the woman and her children escaped into the bushes before they were butchered too. Or why the savages didn't run off with the stock and these wagons full of trade goods.”

“Us, Captain,” the lieutenant offered. “Goddamned redskins didn't have the time 'cause of us.”

Haymond wagged his head. This was the first he would witness of Sioux handiwork on white victims. Certain it would not be the last. “Lieutenant, have the men load what's left of the bodies into those two wagons and assign drivers to follow us to the fort. We'll give these civilians a decent burial.”

He wheeled at the cries of the trader's children, the wails of the woman as they bent over Gazzous's remains. Back and forth she rocked the naked, mutilated body in her arms, keening in her Sioux tongue. Knowing she and her children had been spared because of their blood.

Knowing Man-Afraid had kept his promise to French Pete.

*   *   *

The baby squirmed in her arms. Too warm, Abigail figured. Too hot for any of us. She pulled the blanket from her daughter and wiped a corner of the flannel across her own brow, moist beneath the poke bonnet. This had to be the worst part of the trip so far. Frank had just said it wasn't too far to the Crazy Woman Fork now. A half a mile. Maybe a mile at the most. Not far to that promise of cool, wet water.

Her husband Frank wasn't really a soldier. His gentle, sensitive spirit would have been better suited to another occupation, something less martial. A member of Samuel Curry's regimental band, Frank Noone had been left behind with his wife back in Colorado Territory at Fort Sedgwick while Abigail delivered the couple's first child some seven weeks ago. By late June, her strength renewed, Abigail and Frank jolted north to Laramie by army ambulance, accompanied by Lt. George Templeton's detail bound for Fort Carrington.

Abigail had been relieved to find two more women on the journey. The wife of Lt. Alexander H. Wands and the Wands's colored servant, Laura. The lieutenant's young son Bobby had proven himself quite a handful already. The army families traveled in ambulances, boxed-wagon affairs often equipped with seats and high, wooden sides, a leather pucker-hole one could button closed at the rear.

Added to the party of high-walled army freighters and canvas-topped Conestogas were five civilians. Captain Samuel Marr, along with Seamus Donegan and an odd, leering man named Simpkins, all three bound for the Montana diggings. The trio had kept to themselves for the most part, occasionally bringing fresh game into camp for evening mess. Two more men had joined up at Laramie, men Abigail felt certain no more belonged out here than she. Reverend David White, a Methodist minister, announced he had been called to tend his flock among the soldiers of the new Fort Carrington. The last member of their group was Ridgeway Glover of Philadelphia, the famous photographer for
Frank Leslie's Weekly.

The talkative reverend had plopped down beside Glover one evening by the fire. “So,” he said, “why don't you share with these good folks what truly brings a man of your peculiar talents to this dangerous end of the world?”

Abigail smiled. White was the sort to squeeze a few words out of anyone. A faraway look had swept over Ridgeway Glover's face as he had contemplated the minister's question.

“I've come,” he had begun, so quietly Abigail found herself leaning forward to better hear him, “eager to capture the grandeur of this magnificent western landscape. And I plan to take some cameos of the noble redman who inhabits this vanishing frontier.”

Earlier in the evening at that same camp, the group's first since departing Fort Laramie, a number of Sioux had paid an uneasy visit. Abigail remembered how friendly the Indians had been, talking in a mix of Pidgin English and sign language, until she and Katie Wands figured out what they were after. The old squaws laid out a dirty blanket, heaped with beads and furs, knives and an axe—wanting to barter for her baby!

Frank and Lieutenant Wands had the soldiers scatter the old squaws out of camp, knowing the warriors were likely somewhere out in the dark. Abigail had found it hard to sleep much for many nights to come, remembering what the squaws had vowed.

If the white women will not sell their children, the Sioux promise to steal them soon enough.

Disturbing, too, was the unsettling memory of how one of the civilians watched her throughout each day's travel. Not the leer of that strange, weasel-looking Simpkins. No. The Irishman Donegan's gray eyes showed admiration for her instead. Donegan remained a cipher to Abigail for much of their journey north. While the other civilians readily sought company round the soldier bivouac each evening, the wide-shouldered Irishman kept much too much to himself.

Perhaps more disturbing still was the warning of Reno's commanding officer. Capt. Joshua L. Proctor had watched Templeton's party pull away from Fort Reno yesterday morning, after begging the lieutenant for the last time to remain at the post until a larger detachment made it down from Fort Carrington as escort for the undermanned detail. Five civilians didn't add much strength to a compliment of four lieutenants and fourteen enlisted men. Twenty-three riflemen in all, marching off into that country Red Cloud guarded so jealously.

“Better to wait for a larger convoy,” Proctor had pleaded. “With those women and children—”

“We'll go on.” Templeton had stood by his orders to report with all due haste. He and the four other lieutenants were badly needed at the new post, Templeton argued. “Besides, we haven't seen sign of a feather one since that first night out of Laramie. And those were only some harmless old squaws. Bartering for white children, like common beggars of the plains.”

“Your orders compel you to push ahead at any cost?” Proctor had inquired.

“Orders issued by Omaha, sir.”

“I see.” Proctor grew grave. “Omaha has no idea yet that Sioux are marauding up and down the Road.”

Templeton shook his head, his young face bright with confidence. “You must be mistaken, sir. Why, the treaty commissioners we met at Laramie told us themselves that this road is safe for all travel. I'm sure Frank Noone and Alex Wands wouldn't be caught bringing their families along if it wasn't safe, Captain. Tell me, who would know the situation better than the treaty commissioners?”

A disturbing nonchalance displayed by the young lieutenant, for not far from that adobe fort built by the Powder River, Templeton's party had run across the first of the buffalo skulls. No longer merely some glaring white, wide-eyed reminders that they had entered buffalo country. Instead, a few of the men had even murmured over the meaning of the skulls placed in neat formation in the middle of the trail itself. And each skull graphically painted in red with pagan symbols.

“I don't know what they mean, Abby,” her husband had admitted, trying out an uneasy smile on her. The memory of those skulls stayed on long after the wagons left them far behind.

So Abigail had clutched more tightly at the tiny cross hung round her neck, and prayed a little longer that night before falling off to sleep. To push away the cold feeling knotting her belly like buttermilk left too long in the stone spring-house back home.

That night, their first since leaving Fort Reno, Abigail had been up and down with the baby. Every bit as thirsty as the grown-ups, constantly wanting to suckle. Perhaps it was her colic flaring once more. Poor thing, Abigail had murmured. She enjoyed the feel of the baby's mouth at her breast there in the darkness. Listening to low voices near the edge of the firelight—Lt. Napoleon Daniels keeping company with Pvt. Stanley Peters throughout the early-morning hours.

Not long after he had retired to his blankets earlier that evening, Daniels had awakened, drenched in sweat. Shivering in mortal fear of the nightmare that had jarred his safe, little world. Afraid to attempt sleep again for fear of the nightmare, Daniels wandered out to the picket line, where he located one of the guards on watch. There he had talked with the young Private Peters as if they were fast friends. Cloaked by the darkness, she overheard a lonely man's premonition of his own death confided in a young enlisted soldier.

As the baby suckled in her arms, Abigail listened to Daniels tell of …

“… buffalo sprouting into wildly-painted savages who leaped at me in the nightmare. When I wheeled my horse to flee, they were right there, nipping at my heels. The faster I urged my mount, the closer the screeching savages drew until … their hot, hot breath—until I felt the sharp pounding of the arrows pierce my back. Next, I looked up into their hideous faces as they gleefully ripped the scalp from my head…”

Perhaps the lieutenant's imagination had gotten the better of him, she reasoned. All of them were on edge, after all, following a grotesque discovery yesterday afternoon. Back along the trail they had come across a man's naked, mutilated body at the Dry Fork of the Powder. It was the first any of them had seen of Indian warfare.

“From the looks of things,” Frank told her later, “it appears the young man hadn't been there more than a day at the most.”

Lying facedown. Hair ripped off down to the nape of his neck. His sunburned back bristling with arrows. A leather pouch tossed nearby. Letters blowing across the dry sand of the creek bottom like cottonwood fluff.

“A courier?” Wands had wondered out loud.

“No way to tell for certain now.” Templeton had tried to shrug off the horrifying discovery while watching the four men he had detailed to dig the man's grave. “Can't tell if he was coming down from Carrington. Or heading north from Reno. God rest his tortured soul.”

There by the Dry Fork, Abigail recalled that Lieutenant Daniels said nothing as the others talked of death and the Sioux. Instead, the young lieutenant had stared transfixed at the butchered remains wrapped in a canvas shelter-half. It remained something she couldn't put her finger on, something that had changed in Daniels from that hour they discovered the disfigured body.