Summer of the Sioux Page 5

  There were so many of them miffing around that I couldn't pick out Wiley Jenkins for about ten minutes. But I finally spotted him. He and another man were on either side of a mule. Each packer had one foot braced against the animal's sides, cinching up a huge pack. The mule was braying his protest at being nearly squeezed in two. In fact, the whole camp echoed to the racket of braying, swearing, whips cracking, and mules kicking and jumping as this scene was repeated nearly a thousand times, since that was the approximate number of pack mules we now had in the command, in addition to the six-mule teams pulling each of the wagons.

  To my eyes, there appeared to be enough wagons and pack animals to carry ammunition and supplies for half the city of Chicago. Since Jenkins had his hands full and then some, I didn't attempt to get his attention.

  We marched that day to our next bivouac on the South Fork of the Cheyenne River. Because we were getting deeper into Indian country, the command was kept well closed up on the march, or as well closed up as possible for a command that stretched out four miles.

  The terrain looked a little better than what we'd seen before, but the whole country generally had a half-starved look about it, even in spring. There was a little green here and there and usually some decent grass and trees along the watercourses. But I hadn't seen twenty acres in more than three-hundred miles of marching that would compare with any land in Iowa or Illinois.

  The Wyoming Territory was certainly rich, though, in rocks, hills, ants, snakes, weeds, and alkali, it was also full of coal, or lignite, which lay in seams near the surface and, where the soil was worn away, accounted for a lot of fine, black dust. The seams were exposed in giant layers where streams had sliced down through the bluffs. In fact, there was such a seam exposed in the face of the bluff across from our camp that night. It was apparently due to this lignite, alkali, or some deposits, that the water was so bad in this muddy rivulet called the South Fork of the Cheyenne.

  Just after supper, I went down to this poor excuse for a stream to fill my canteen. As I passed the surgeon's tent, I saw a group of men standing around outside. From snatches of conversation I gleaned as I went by, they were all suffering from stomach cramps brought on by drinking the water. Our side of the stream bank was thickly covered with undergrowth beneath some large cottonwood trees. I filled my two-quart canteen from the clearest of the milky-colored water. When I got back to our campfire I strained the water through a clean handkerchief into a pot and boiled it over a fire.

  "That's not going to help a whole lot," Wilder said, coming up as I was pouring the cooled water back into my canteen. "This stuff is full of alkali, just like the soil around here. Best thing you can do until we get to good water is drink as little as possible." He pulled off his gauntlets and sat down cross-legged on a blanket by the fire. "Might try putting a little vinegar in it. Not only improves the taste, but it's also easier on your stomach. Balances some of that alkali with a little acid." He grinned. "You'll notice the coffee tasting a little peculiar for a while, though."

  I dug into the stores we had bought for our mess, pulled out the vinegar, and followed his suggestion. "Curt, General Buck told me in Omaha that he was going to recruit some Crows and Shoshones to go with us as scouts and allies. What's the latest on them?" I knew he had just returned from a briefing in the headquarters tent.

  "General's sending out a detachment under Major Zimmer tomorrow to see if they can intercept the friendlies somewhere north of here. They're supposed to meet us somewhere in the general area of old, ruined Fort Reno. He's eager to get them in camp before we strike the hostiles."

  "Are they really that indispensable to this campaign?"

  "Sure are," Lieutenant Shanahan interrupted, coming up and dropping the cleaned cooking utensils with a crash. When it was his turn to cook, he also did all the washing of the pots and pans, rather than delegating this to some orderly. I had found him to be a quiet, somewhat stuffy, compulsively neat man, devoted to literature, who was incidentally a good cook.

  "What makes them so valuable?" I urged when he didn't continue immediately.

  "General Buck is convinced that one Indian can smell out another better than any white man. Why do you think we have these half-breed scouts?"

  "For interpreters?" I suggested.

  "That's only part of it. Most of them are at least half-Indian and even if they weren't brought up in the savage's lore, they've inherited that way of thinking, the instincts, if you will, and can anticipate for us what the savage mind is liable to conjure up. Poor bastards don't really belong anywhere. Whites who don't know them, don't trust them. And, to the Indians, they're only second-class tribal members, at best.

  "But, getting back to the friendlies, the Crows are the traditional enemy of the Sioux. So they were glad to have the whites to help them even up an old score with their stronger enemies. They've been killing each other off in raids for centuries. The Crow figure if they can't whip the Sioux, they have no chance of standing against the whites, who are, as they say, 'as many as leaves on the trees.' The Snakes, or Shoshones, and the Crows are pretty rough customers themselves, but General Buck believes in fighting fire with fire. Claims to have worked this strategy to perfection against the Apaches in Arizona.”

  “Says using an Indian against one of his own race demoralizes the enemy as well,” Wilder added. "It's even better if you can get some from the same tribe."

  Lieutenant Von Bramer and McPherson had joined the group during this exchange. Von Bramer sat down on a log that had been dragged up near the fire in front of our tent and began packing the ever-present curved pipe. Wilder apparently took the cue and pulled out his own stubby briar for a smoke.

  The blue sky was streaking with a rosy hue over the cottonwoods and dusk was settling into darkness in the shallow valley. During a lull in the conversation, I became aware of the quiet background noises of a large camp settling in for the night—a murmuring of voices, a faint explosion of laughter, the tinkling of a bell mare among the mules, and an occasional braying, the stamping and snorting of horses being put on the picket line, the thunking of an ax into wood, the lowing of some of our beef cattle grazing just south of camp, the nostalgic strains of "Shenandoah" drifting to us from a mouth organ. The smell of wood smoke permeated and hung like a flat, bluish cloud at treetop level in the still air.

  "As I understand it," McPherson broke the silence, "the purpose of this expedition is to catch the hostile Sioux and Cheyenne between us and General Gibbon's command coming down the Yellowstone from the north and General Terry's column coming from Fort Abe Lincoln to the east. Is that about right?"

  "You've got it," Wilder replied.

  "Is the army supposed to try to kill as many of them as possible, per General Sherman's extermination policy, or just herd them all back onto the reservation?" McPherson inquired.

  "A state of war exists," Shanahan replied patiently and, I thought, a little condescendingly. "They've ignored persuasion, deadlines, and ultimatums to return to their reservations peacefully. They've as much as said, 'come and get us, if you want us.' They're thumbing their noses at us. That's why the Indian Bureau has finally come to its senses and turned this whole problem over to the army, where it should have been all along.

  "Crazy Horse is probably their most able leader and warrior. He'll never surrender to white domination. And there are many other chiefs who feel the same—Sitting Bull, Gall, Dull Knife of the Cheyenne, American Horse and others. The Indian agents report that hundreds of young bucks are slipping away from the agencies to join them. They're well armed, well fed, and rested from a winter on the reservations at taxpayer expense. The Indian Bureau has supplied them with Lancaster rifles and .50 caliber Springfields for hunting. And the Indians have also stolen or traded for many repeating rifles—better than the ones we're supplied with. Our scouts report them massing in unusually large numbers somewhere south of the Yellowstone, north of the Tongue and west of the Black Hills.

  "We'll entrap them between our thr
ee forces and we'll drive them back onto the reservations. If they resist, well . . . we'll have no choice but to kill as many of them as we have to. If it happens, they'll be the ones who'll start it."

  It was the longest speech I'd heard Shanahan deliver at one time I since I'd known him. He'd started quietly enough, but the longer he talked, the more emotional his voice grew, and I could tell, without even seeing his eyes in the darkness, that this was a subject about which he had formed a strong opinion. I couldn't believe I was hearing the normally quiet, intelligent Shanahan oversimplifying such a complex problem as this. But I kept quiet, thinking it was maybe for McPherson's benefit. In fact, I was grateful to Mac for voicing some of the questions that were in my mind.

  "Do you actually think a force this large, bogged down with all these wagons, can really do battle with the natives on their own ground?" Mac persisted, poking at the embers of the dying fire and not looking up. Sorta reminds me of the Redcoats against the Colonists a hundred years ago, except in reverse."

  In the darkness all eyes shifted to Shanahan for his reply. But I knew the discussion was over when Shanahan begged the question by replying, "Apparently you don't know much about Indian warfare and tactics."

  "Apparently not," Mac replied a little sharply, as he rose from a squatting position and slapped a mosquito. Either the smoke or his lung ailment brought on a sudden fit of coughing. "Bugs are getting to me, gentlemen," he said when he had recovered his breath. "Good night." With that he stepped over me, ducked under the tent flap and disappeared inside.

  A somewhat strained silence fell over the rest of us for a few minutes. Finally, Von Bramer yawned mightily, stood up and stretched. "Vell, I tink I'll turn in. Ve have to roust out too early to suit me." He struck a match to relight his pipe for his customary last-minute smoke.

  The crash of gunfire and the most inhuman screeches rye ever heard shattered the quiet.

  The match went out, and we all dove for cover and our guns at the same time. As I scrambled in the dark toward the gun belt I'd left on our canvas mess cover, I could hear the bullets thudding into the trees and popping through the tent. The camp was in an uproar instantly. I finally found my pistol and crouched, waiting. But I suddenly realized that I had only the vaguest idea where the firing was coming from. The shots slackened up for a few seconds and then started again, along with those unearthly yells that made chills run up my back.

  Without a word, Wilder had sprung away in the dark and I could hear his voice, among others, calling the men of his company together.

  "Matt?"

  "Over here, Mac."

  "Sounds like the Indians didn't wait 'til we crossed the Tongue." His voice sounded matter-of-fact. The attack was so totally unexpected and sudden, it didn't seem quite real to me. But my pounding heart was real enough.

  "Can you see any muzzle flashes?"

  "No. Must be coming from the bluffs on the other side of these trees."

  In the darkness to our left I could hear the commands and the sounds of the well-drilled troops falling into ranks. The shots and the yelling tapered off and ceased quickly as some of the infantry swarmed across the tiny stream and another mounted company rode out toward our beef herd.

  There were scattered shouts from our own men and some firing.

  I moved toward Mac's voice around the dull glow of a few remaining embers. And suddenly I tripped over a prone figure. Tense as I was, I must have jumped about six feet and collided with McPherson, and we both went down.

  "What the hell's wrong with you, Matt?"

  "Fell over somebody on the ground. Strike a match."

  "Liable to get our heads blown off if we show a light."

  "Hell, they're gone now. Strike a match."

  Instead, he leaned down, blew on the fire and lifted out a stick that flared up.

  "Hold it over here."

  "Oh, God!" McPherson groaned.

  The flickering glare showed Lieutenant Von Bramer flat on his back, arms outspread and stone dead. A trickle of blood oozed from a bluish hole in the center of his forehead. -

  "He must have caught a chance bullet from that first volley."

  His jaw was slack under the bushy blond mustache, and the curved pipe he had been in the act of lighting lay beside his head on the ground. His eyes were closed as if in peaceful slumber.

  "Poor guy never knew what hit him," I managed to say through a tight throat, as the fire on the stick flickered out, plunging us into darkness again.

  "A fate most of us will not be able to share, I’m afraid," Mac said, coughing with the deadly consumption we both knew would eventually claim him.

  I felt clammy and shaky and half sick as I holstered my Colt. It wasn't as if I'd never seen violent death be fore. I had served through the last year of the war. But this was different. We had thought ourselves secure—had no idea there was an Indian within miles. To be talking calmly to a man one second and to have him hurled into eternity the next . . . It was evident my thinking would have to undergo an abrupt change to cope with Indian warfare.

  We threw some wood on the fire, covered the corpse, and sat down to await the return of the soldiers.

  Chapter Six

  "'Man does not know his hour; like fish caught in the treacherous net, like birds taken in the snare, so is man overtaken by misfortune suddenly falling on him.'"

  As General Buck's deep voice paused in his reading and he sought another passage, the cold wind fluttered the pages as if to rip the leather-bound book from his hands. It tore at the hair and forked beard of his Moses-like figure, bringing tears to his eyes. He blinked a couple of times and went on.

  "'There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens. A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot the plant. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to tear down and a time to build. A time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time . .

  I ceased to hear the familiar words as I glanced around at the grim faces of the command, who stood, bareheaded, company by company, around the two freshly dug graves. The bodies of the men killed in the attack, Lieutenant Von Bramer and Oswald Sprague, a herder, lay wrapped in blankets beside each opening in the earth. We stood in calf-deep grass on the flat bench land just above last night's camp on the floodplain of the river. The weather had turned appropriately cold and windy for the somber occasion. In fact, it felt as if we’d been plunged back into the month of March in the space of a few hours. The temperature had dropped to below freezing and a vicious north wind was swirling around us, raising clouds of alkali dust out of the valley to sear our eyes and to make everything, at a distance look hazy.

  "Do not grieve as those who have no hope. . . ." General Walsh was intoning.

  I shivered in spite of the army overcoat I had borrowed. Mac, standing beside me, was huddled down in his coat collar, coughing softly and looking as gray as the low morning overcast.

  The commander snapped the Bible shut. "We commit the bodies of our-comrades to the earth in the hopes of their rising again on the last day. They were both good men. May the Lord have mercy on them. May they rest in peace."

  He signaled and the four soldiers by each body lifted it by ropes and lowered the corpses into the graves. A bugler blew taps. It was the most mournful sound I'd ever heard, the notes rising and falling on the wind. The last, lingering note died away and the troops were dismissed.

  "Helluva start for this campaign," Curt Wilder remarked, tight-lipped, as he fell in beside me on the way back to camp. "We really got caught with our pants down. Lollygagging around camp as though we're on a summer outing while a flying war party infiltrates the sentries, shoots up the camp, kills two men, wounds another, and kills a couple of horses besides running off all our cattle."

  "Any chance of getting the herd back?" I asked.

  "None. The scouts who went out with Company H at daybreak reported the trail of the herd leading back toward Fetterman. But it's my guess they'l
l never get there. The Indians have probably already rounded 'em up and herded 'em toward the nearest village. The horses would've been stampeded too, if they hadn't been picketed. The Indians were just trying to hit us quick, create some confusion, and run off all our stock they could get. Probably just happened on our camp by accident." "I guess that's the end of the steaks, roasts, and beef tongue."

  "Sure is. Mostly bacon and beans from here on, with possibly a little embalmed beef thrown in for variety. Hopefully, we'll get some fresh game."

  We walked into camp, where some orderlies were striking our tent and preparing for the trail. Lieutenant Shanahan was packing some personal gear into his saddlebags. Apparently, he was in the middle of a bitter discourse with himself, because he turned to us and, with no preliminaries whatever, said, "I just wish some of those almighty, pious, Indian-loving members of the Peace Commission could've been here for this. Do you reckon those Quakers in the Indian Bureau would've been so damn quick to turn the other cheek to those savages? Huh!" He went back to his packing as though he had vomited and rid himself of some bile.

  Shortly, we were on the march again. We didn't look as motley now since the men were all wearing overcoats and appeared a little more uniform. The whole command marched in gloomy silence all morning.

  About noon, we topped a divide. The clouds tore apart for a few minutes—long enough for a fitful sun to give us a few of its last rays for the month. From this high swell in the prairie, we could make out the snowcapped Big Horn Mountains to the north and west of us, probably a hundred miles away. With field glasses we could see the edge of the Black Hills of Dakota to the east. And to the northeast in front were Pumpkin Buttes—four long, irregular bulges of mountain aligned north and south that jumped up abruptly from the prairie to a height of several hundred feet.

  Then the sun went out and the norther blasted us again. We marched only twenty miles that day before going into camp at a place that went by the appropriate name of Wind Creek. The wood was scarce, the water terrible, and the ground covered with various kinds of spiny cacti. The storm increased in fury as the night wore on. By order of General Buck, our stoves had been left at Fort Fetterman to reduce weight, and I'd never spent a more miserable night trying to get warm enough to get to sleep. Several tents were blown down, and toward morning it actually began to snow heavily. June 1 dawned looking like January 1 in Chicago. But, as we hit the trail, the sun relented and came out to begin melting the white stuff that covered the ground.