Wolf Mountain Moon (67 page)

“It will be a Christmas to remember,” he whispered at the side of the wool shawl she had wrapped over her head. “I have me a good deal of money to pick up from post commander Evans for my recent services to the army.”

“Back pay?”

“You might say that, Sam,” he answered, so relieved that no soldier, officer, or chaplain had come to call on her, bearing the terrible news along with that princely ransom paid for carrying Crook's message all the way up to Nelson A. Miles, alone through the heart of Crazy Horse country.

She laid her head into the crook of his shoulder and closed her eyes, holding the boy tightly in the cradle of her left arm. “Oh, Seamus,” she whispered in a puff of frost, “I've feared more in the last three months than I think I've ever feared in my whole life.”

He looked down at her, love filling his heart all over again. “Feared what, Samantha? Feared that I would not return?”

She blinked, clearing her eyes as she smiled with those beautiful teeth of hers. “No, you silly goose—I feared most that if you did not come back to us, your son would go through life without a name of his own!”

“You wouldn't have named him on your own … if I hadn't come back to you both?”

“Yes,” she admitted, finally. “I suppose I would have—eventually. When I could at last pull all the pieces of my shattered soul back together … I would have named this boy after his father.”

“His … h-his father?”

Samantha stopped him, gazing up into her husband's face. “Yes, named our son after the bravest, most gentle and selfless father a child could ever have.”

Afterword

A
h, the very stuff of history oft makes for some interesting speculation!

Crook and Miles did not enjoy a mutual respect during their years serving the Army of the West. Simmering animosities begun during this year of war on the northern plains would later boil to the surface during the final Apache campaigns in the southwest when Crook (who had experienced much success during the earlier Apache wars) was eventually “nudged” aside and Miles assigned to replace him.

At the time of this Great Sioux War there was clearly no affection shared between these two great military figures. If they communicated at all, they would have done so through normal military channels, which would have taken an excruciatingly long time. Today we realize just how little one column knew of the disposition of another column back then: their whereabouts, their contact with the roaming warrior bands, the status of their logistical lines of supply.

Back in 1876-77 great distances across the trackless and “wireless” wilderness dictated that Crook operate from the south not knowing what Miles was doing along the Yellowstone. And it meant that Miles continued to operate as he always had: wary of superiors Crook and Terry; seeking to
better his own position with Sheridan and Sherman by accomplishing against the Sioux and Cheyenne what Crook had consistently failed to do; and in the end putting all his energies into earning his general's star.

From my reading of the two men, from giving so much thought to who they were down under their uniforms, and ultimately from trying to walk around in their boots as much as I can on the ground where these professional soldiers plied their deadly trade … if any overture had been attempted between the two armies, I'd put money on its having been Crook trying to get word to Miles.

Completely out of touch on the Belle Fourche in the Black Hills country, knowing that the Crazy Horse camps lay not all that far to the northwest, realizing that just beyond that dangerous country lay the Yellowstone and the mouth of the Tongue, where Miles might well be doing all he could to keep Sitting Bull from joining back up with Crazy Horse—it's simply not that great a leap of imagination to conceive of George Crook attempting to courier some dispatches to Colonel Miles.

After all, you have to consider what the alternative would have been: sending a rider south to Reno Cantonment, beyond to Fetterman; from there the message could be wired to Laramie, then along the Platte until the electronic impulses in that simple wire reached a point back east, where George Crook's questions could start north toward Chicago; from there they would travel across Phil Sheridan's desk, on to Minneapolis, where Alfred Terry would have his look at them prior to forwarding Crook's dispatches through a few more miles of telegraph to Fort Abraham Lincoln, and from there they would all rely on a network of overland, horse-mounted couriers because there was simply no paddle-wheel traffic on the upper rivers at that season!

Racing across the upper tier of territories just below the Canadian border, the army couriers might—and I emphasize
might
—reach Tongue River Cantonment with their leather envelope, barring attack by roving hostiles, a horse breaking a leg and putting a courier afoot, countless flooded or ice-bound rivers, or any of a dozen other reasons that would delay or prevent a rider from reaching the theater of operations against the Northern Sioux.

If any such attempt was made, I believe the smart money would have been on a rider making it from the Belle Fourche region across the Powder River country to the mouth of the Tongue. Look at your regional map in the front of the book. Trace a finger across the route I've just described. Then look at a map of the U.S. and trace another route from Minneapolis to Bismarck, on across Dakota Territory to Tongue River Cantonment. If Crook had wanted to find out what campaign Miles was pursuing in those weeks prior to Christmas when he was being forced to disband his own campaign due to supply problems, wouldn't Crook have gotten himself a volunteer?

Was Miles the sort who would have sent a courier off to communicate with Crook? I don't think so—not as jealous and thin-skinned as he was.

From the military record we know for a fact that Crook and Mackenzie sent out Lakota scouts (who had been invaluable during the Dull Knife campaign) from the Belle Fourche to the Little Powder, from there down to the Powder to look for any sign of the Crazy Horse village that continued to elude Crook in this most frustrating year of fight-and-chase-and-wait-for-resupply. From that point it wouldn't take a horseman much more than a week to complete the trip across that frozen winter wilderness. Just how much of a frozen wilderness it is in the winter … well, you'll have to come up here and see for yourself. That is, if you truly want to experience what these plainsmen, soldiers, and roaming villages endured that winter of record.

If I had to speculate, I'll say it happened just as I wrote it: Crook to Miles, Belle Fourche to the Yellowstone, a single rider traveling as fast as he dared across an icy landscape, suffering terribly from the cold and hunger and fear, but enduring not only because he had a job to do, but because he had others who were counting on him to provide for them.

Of course, as far as we know, Crook did not send a scout (civilian or otherwise) to Miles that winter, so we've taken a wee bit of license to get Seamus shipped off to this next battlefront of the Great Sioux War.

If you've found some fault with my line of reasoning, be sure to drop me a line. After all, one of my most important tasks in writing each of these twenty novels is to have everything plausible, probable, if not entirely possible. Much, much
different from what I too often see on television, more different still from what Hollywood spends millions on to show us in the movie theaters.

Remember: you have my promise that I'll continue to do my best to make every one of Seamus Donegan's adventures so real that you will say, “If it didn't really happen that way, then—by God—Terry sure makes it seem like
it could have!”

And while we're on the subject of speculation, can you imagine the lively debates, and what might have easily turned into fistfights, between the Democrats and Republicans counted among the officers of the Fifth Infantry as they argued over the controversy of just who would eventually be elected president back east? Those weeks dragging into months during that winter were very much akin to those weeks and months just before the Civil War broke out. In 1876 Reconstruction Republicans were aligned against the growing strength of the Democratic party in the defeated South. If, as President Grant was prepared to do to protect the Union, he had dispatched troops across the Mason-Dixon—many of those states threatened to secede a second time.

In such a scenario soldiers on the frontier again would have started to journey home to either north or south: saying farewell to friends and brothers in arms for perhaps the last time before they met on the field of battle … just as soldiers had done in 1861. History was indeed poised to repeat itself.

In this case, by the time the spring of 1877 arrived, Congress itself had reached a compromise that kept the nation from tearing itself apart. The Republicans would retain the White House, while the southern Democrats won the end of the much-hated Reconstruction.

Back on the northern plains Nelson A. Miles himself left little in the record for us to know fully what he promised the Sioux during his conferences with them in the autumn of 1876. It took the diligent research of author George E. Hyde
(Spotted Tail's Folk)
to unearth new material on Miles's offer of an agency in the Powder River country if the warrior bands would only surrender. In addition, Hyde located archival materials that testified to the fact that Crazy Horse bullied those families wanting to leave for the agencies during that autumn and winter of 1876-77.

It's unfortunate that Miles's faith and belief in those Sioux chiefs went unreciprocated for the most part. After his parleys with the leaders on Cedar Creek and a few days later on the Yellowstone
(A Cold Day in Hell),
at the end of which the colonel took five chiefs prisoner as security against their people keeping their promises, very few of the Sioux ever went in to their reservations until the mass influx of the following summer. And those few who did drift back to the agencies that fall did not feel compelled to stay on their reservations for very long. They were soon lured out a second time to live in the old way … at least until Miles finally convinced them that there was no hope in wandering the old road.

Some of those Sioux chiefs and war leaders would eagerly sign up when Miles came asking for scouts during the Nez Perce War of 1877 … but that will be a two-part story I have yet to tell in the years ahead.

I hope that all of you had to pull on a sweater or at least toss another log onto the fire while reading of these two winter campaigns. If I've given you a shiver or two, then I've done my job to transport you back into that brutal time when men marched and slept, ate and fought, outdoors. And for those few of you who still need a little help in sensing the cold all the way to your marrow, gaze again at the three photographs we've reproduced from those days at the Tongue River Cantonment: look at the soldiers in their muskrat hats and buffalo coats; look at the gun crews around their artillery pieces; then carefully study the crude log barracks.

Believe me—those log huts were far preferable to taking the campaign trail when a man had little choice but to be out in the cold, day and night. For weeks on end the army surgeons' thermometers were unusable simply because the mercury froze in a tiny gray bulb at thirty-nine below zero. The following winter, when spirit thermometers were finally put into use by the army, at one point the temperature on those Montana plains registered sixty-six degrees below zero—and that was before the chill factor!

It was widely known that the country of the Powder and Tongue rivers was so inhospitable during the winter that it was “impossible for white men to winter there except in a well-prepared shelter.” In fact, when Miles wrote General Terry of his intentions to pursue the warrior bands without pause,
Terry replied that it was “impossible to campaign in the winter, as the troops could not contend against the elements.”

And for a time there it seemed everything was working against Nelson A. Miles getting his winter campaign under way. After his success at Cedar Creek, he wanted to follow and capture the “wounded and weakened” Sitting Bull. But first he had to prepare his troops against the elements. In those few days before they set off on the Fort Peck Expedition, the colonel learned just how desperate his situation was. There weren't enough horses and mules for the job at hand, and they didn't even have enough grain to feed what animals they did have. What's more, most of the regulation winter clothing he had ordered early in the fall still had not arrived from downriver, forcing his men to spend their skimpy salaries to purchase what they needed from the sutlers in the way of extra underwear, shirts and britches, caps and gloves. Most men wore layer upon layer, often pulling on at least five shirts and three pairs of trousers.