Wolf Mountain Moon (28 page)

A
fter a miserably cold night suffered down in the snowy bottomland of Ash Creek, Lieutenant Frank Baldwin had the men of his battalion awakened for their breakfast of quarter
rations. That meant they ate not much more than a corner of one of their hardtack biscuits and a bite or two of frozen salt pork the soldiers could let thaw inside the warmth of their mouths, savoring the taste of the animal fat and grease.

As the last of his lieutenants came up to form a tight knot around Baldwin, each man huffing a thick cloud of hoarfrost, Frank quickly looked at the half-breed who had walked his horse up to the pickets in the subfreezing darkness some two hours before dawn. Johnny Bruguier had just covered a lot of country in a very short time.

After taking Baldwin's message to Miles, whom he found in the country north of the cantonment, the scout turned back around with a dispatch from the colonel. He found Baldwin's battalion already gone on its chase across the Missouri when he reached Fort Peck. By that time scout Billy Cross was all but done in and elected to stay behind at the agency while the half-breed mounted up to follow the soldier trail east, slipping south across the frozen river, then cross-country to the Redwater, traveling fast, and damn near nonstop.

“Bruguier here comes with word from the general,” Baldwin announced to his officers now, once they were gathered close. “Miles confirmed our orders to track Sitting Bull and pitch into his camp. The general reports that he'll bring the rest of our regiment up to support. So I'm sending Bruguier back to Tongue River, where the general was taking his battalion.”

“When do you suppose we'll find the Sioux?” asked Lieutenant Hinkle with an edge of impatience.

“Smith and our other scouts tell me chances are good we'll run onto the village sometime in the next two or three days,” Frank said in a way calculated to buoy the flagging spirits of those men who had spent long days of marching and long nights of cold, all in an attempt to catch up to the warriors who had nearly wiped them out ten days before.

Looking at their faces for a moment that gray dawn of the eighteenth while the battalion stomped around to work up circulation in their feet and legs, Baldwin added, “And that village should be somewhere this side of the Yellowstone if we're lucky.”

“I want to have a crack at them myself, sir,” said Lieutenant
Rousseau. “Sooner us than the companies with General Miles.”

The rest of the officers echoed that sentiment.

Ever since they had crossed the Missouri near the mouth of Bark Creek, those three companies of foot soldiers had been slogging through the snow and frozen mud in the wake of Sitting Bull's Hunkpapa village. For all that they had endured in silence, Baldwin prayed it would be theirs to capture the greatest of the Sioux chiefs and drive the rest of his people back to the reservation.

His men deserved it for all they had suffered, for all they had gone without, for the way they had stood off the Hunkpapa back on the seventh.

Just past seven
A.M
. he watched Bruguier climb back into the saddle and point his nose south by west, toward the Tongue River Cantonment, carrying word to Miles of Baldwin's present location, his direction of travel, the battalion's condition, and their disposition to fight any and all Sioux encountered. With the half-breed on his way, Frank ordered the men out, on Sitting Bull's trail once more.

Through that morning they first marched east, then eventually south, keeping to the bottoms of the tiny tributaries feeding Ash Creek, doing all that they could to stay hidden from any enemy rear guard. Despite all their efforts after some five hours, close to one
P.M
. a solitary horseman appeared on the brow of a hill ahead of the column, watched the soldiers for a few moments, then disappeared.

Frank was certain they had been discovered.

“Keep up the pace now, men!” he cheered them. “This is the time to show the enemy what we're made of!”

Within minutes a flight of ring-necked doves burst from the leafless branches of a nearby grove of cottonwood saplings, causing Baldwin to notice the sky beyond the hilltops. “Look there.”

“I see it, Lieutenant,” replied Lieutenant Whitten.

A few columns of smoke poked wispy fingers into the air.

His throat constricting, Frank held up his arm and gave the command to halt the column. “Perhaps it's not too much to hope for,” he told the officers at the head of the march.

Hinkle asked, “What's that, sir?”

“I'm praying that smoke means they haven't broken camp and fled when they learned we were coming.”

“If that scout of theirs spied us,” Rousseau warned, “and the village isn't running … that can only mean they're lying in wait for us.”

“And have an ambush ready,” agreed Whitten.

Baldwin nodded. “What say I go have a look for myself?”

Taking only Whitten with him, Frank crept ahead on foot a quarter of a mile, a half mile, then reached the brow of a ridge close to a mile from the head of his battalion. At that point the two officers were less than two miles north of the divide that separated the drainages of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers.

Here above the frozen, sandy bottom of Ash Creek the two officers lay on their bellies—surprised to look down at Sitting Bull's village.

A few horsemen moved in and out of the cluster of 122 lodges situated beneath a bluff on the east side of the creek, women going about their work and children staying close to the camp circle that midday. None of the canvas or hide lodges and tents were coming down in a panic to flee. Indeed, Baldwin was shocked to find that there did not seem to be any great anxiety or alarm in the village.

Perhaps they're not afraid, Baldwin thought as he looked over his enemy. They figure they beat us once, so they can do it again.

“It's no wonder the Sioux would feel like they could whip us on a rematch,” Frank whispered to Whitten at his side. “When we last heard of Sitting Bull's strength after Cedar Creek, all he had was thirty lodges.”

“And look at them now,” Whitten said. “Enough warriors in there to make this a good scrap for us, sir.”

“I'll wager every last one of those warriors is loaded for bear.”

Baldwin and Whitten hurried back to the column, where the lieutenant quickly issued his orders for the attack, then had young Joe Culbertson and Lambert lead the battalion around to the left, where he could approach the camp from the more favorable ground northwest of the village. He deployed his three companies much as he'd prepared for his attack against Gray Beard's Southern Cheyenne at McClellan
Creek: with one company attacking as skirmishers in front of his wagons advancing four abreast, his other two companies deployed along either side of the train, with a small rear guard to protect his supplies and ammunition from a flanking maneuver by the Sioux.

Culbertson and Lambert rode at the point of attack with Baldwin, all three of them growing even more astounded to confirm they had crept up on the village—so certain had they been that the lone horseman had galloped off to raise the alarm.

“Bring that caisson and limber up!” Frank ordered the moment the tops of the lodges came into view.

Beyond the trees the village began to bustle now.

They must surely know we're coming, know we're at their door, he thought as the artillery crew dragged the Fort Peck howitzer around the wagons, right up to the head of the columns, where some of the crew unhitched the pair of mules while others scurried to wheel the cannon about in a half circle.

“Gauge elevation the best you can, men,” Baldwin ordered as his gun squad went through its paces, loading the cannon's throat with a satchel of black powder and a solid ball weighing twelve pounds.

“Ready, Lieutenant!”

Frank glanced at the nearby lodges. “Fire!”

Punk was laid against the touchhole, where it fizzed; then the howitzer suddenly belched spears of bright-orange flame from its muzzle, heaving itself backward off its makeshift carriage.

“Help me get that back up there, dammit!” the gunnery sergeant growled at his crew.

In less than a heartbeat a half-dozen men were scooping the howitzer tube out of the snow, shuffling forward to perch it atop its wobbly carriage once more.

Frank cried, “Fire two more, Sergeant!”

The old file cheered, “That oughtta soften the red bastards up, sir!”

“Damn right!” Baldwin replied, turning to the commander of his front line. “Mr. Hinkle! Prepare to pitch in when the third salvo is fired!”

“Very good, Lieutenant!” answered H Company's lieutenant.

Then the second shot belched from that cannon, which again pitched itself backward off its wooden carriage with a great, spewing, tumbling velocity. Suddenly small arms cracked to their left and right upstream. Not that far away. Enemy guns.

Frank whirled to look in that direction, finding a trio of warriors on horseback cresting the top of a hill to his left. He snapped off a shot with his pistol as the three bolted out of sight, just as the yelling and screeching exploded from the camp upstream.

The last of those three howitzer shells whined in over the snowy brush, crashing in among the village, sending up a spray of ice, water, and creek-bottom sand.

Women and children were screaming as the cannon's roar faded from the nearby bluff.

“Come on, men!” Hinkle yelled to his company.

At long last Baldwin felt at the marrow of him that it truly was to be their day. Time for him to pitch into the enemy. Seize the day, once and for all. Just as he had at Gray Beard's camp on McClellan Creek.

“C'mon, men!” Frank hollered at the rest as Hinkle's men started away. “Remember the seventh of December!” He waved his pistol overhead. “Now we can pay our respects to Sitting Bull himself for that terrible day!”

As the first warriors appeared in their front, Hinkle's skirmishers slowed their advance until Rousseau's G Company came up. Then they noticed how the horsemen began to fall back under the pressure.

In the village beyond, pandemonium reigned. Screaming women and crying children scattered like dung beetles from beneath an overturned buffalo chip on the prairie, all of them beginning to scurry upstream through the waist-deep snowdrifts toward the far end of the elongated camp.

Less than fifty yards out from the first of the Hunkpapa tents, Baldwin ordered his wagons to halt. Leaving a small force of Whitten's I Company behind for the protection of their dwindling supplies and that precious ammunition, Frank quickly moved the bulk of G and I companies forward in
support of Hinkle's H. Back, back, slowly back the warriors fell.

All too easily, Frank feared.

Trying his best to fight down his suspicion of an ambush that might well immobilize his advance, cut him off from his wagon train and ammunition at a crucial moment, Baldwin worried that he could see far too few warriors attempting to hold back his troops. Where were the others?

His skin prickled with apprehension as Hinkle's men continued into the village.

Looking about, he decided there were simply too many lodges and tents and wickiups covered with blankets and green hides for these few warriors. Perhaps no more than a hundred making a valiant but feeble stand against his soldiers when there had been at least five times that number just days ago. As the seconds crawled by, Frank grew more convinced it simply had to be a ruse to pull his battalion into the village, where the Sioux would snap the jaws shut on their trap.

Swallowing down his doubt, he hollered out encouragement to his men again and again—shouting down his private fears each time his threatened instincts began to whisper in his ear.

There among the wagons he saw the first of them from the corner of his eye: a pair of soldiers lifting themselves from their places in the wagon beds assigned to bear the sick, the frostbitten, the severely fatigued—any of those men so done in they could no longer move about on their own. But there those two were, lumbering over the rear gate of one of those wagons, calling out to their comrades to join them.

Then a handful of others in three more wagons shoved aside their blankets, fighting to get to their knees, clutching their rifles to spill over the back gate onto the snowy, trampled ground. They cheered one another, waving the rest of those forty ailing soldiers out of the wagons.

“C'mon, boys!” cried one of them. “You won't have another chance like this'un!”

“I'm a'comin',” shouted a soldier who wobbled shakily on leaden legs, righting himself against a wagon bed. “To hell with my frozen feet—I'm gonna shoot Sitting Bull in the ass for myself.”

One by one the others rose from the wagon beds now to
rejoin their units, bringing a sour ball of pride to the back of Baldwin's throat as he watched those sick, injured, hurting men tumble out to join the attack. Frank turned away, knowing at that moment they had won the day. No matter what the Sioux might throw at them—if these men refused to give up, if these men fought so selflessly, then Sitting Bull had better be on the run.

He turned back to the village to find Culbertson and Lambert loping toward the column driving at least a dozen ponies and mules before them.

“The rest of the men must be out hunting!” Culbertson announced with boyish enthusiasm as he came skidding to a halt in the icy sand near Baldwin.

“Out hunting?”

“Best time of a winter day,” the youngster replied. “Your soldiers attacked at dawn, or late in the winter afternoon—this village be crawling with fighters.” Culbertson grinned widely. “You're one lucky man, Lieutenant Baldwin!”

In less than a half hour after the first cannon salvo, the village was deserted. Sitting Bull's people had squirted out of the south end of camp, then crossed to the west bank of Ash Creek, fighting the deep snow every step of the way, floundering and falling down in the crusty drifts, scrambling back to their feet again as they clambered into the icy bluffs beyond. Now that the women and children had escaped, the few warriors were falling back. And back. Crossing the creek themselves. Following their families—none of the Hunkpapa carrying very much, no more than what they had on their backs and what little they could snatch into their arms when that first shot was fired.