by Clay Fisher
The Irish scout’s long gamble against beating Gall back to the Big Horn was on.
If he could short-cut the distance to the goal—any major troop concentration moving on the Little Horn would most likely be coming up the Big Horn—he might yet have time to turn in his warning about the trap on the Greasy Grass. In any event, one thing was as sure as the fact that every stride the little stud took was grinding his rider’s teeth with back-pain: if it cracked every vertebra in his ailing spine and broke every blood vessel in Spotted Eagle’s stout heart, he and that little Appaloosa studhorse were going to give Gall a run for his red money.
They left Yellowstone behind with twilight of that first day. The trail, going east by north across the high country of Mirror Plateau, was a good one. Crossing the Lamar River at its Soda Butte Creek fork, it followed the latter stream up Ice Box Canyon and out the northeast corner of the Park between Mineral and Amphitheater Mountains. But after that, time became meaningless, the trail murderous.
Day and night were as one. Rest was taken when it had to be, without regard to darkness or daylight. Water and grass for the Nez Percé pony came in the same harsh category. Of food for his broad-jawed rider, there was none. When the horse was fed and rested, the man went on, that was all.
By the third night, Kelly was becoming confused.
The Hunkpapa trail began to fade on hardening ground, and in the darkness and drainage of a hard thundershower, he lost it altogether.
After sunup the fourth morning, he traveled by the snow-crowned compass of the Big Horns’ ragged peaks. Weak from hunger and heat fatigue, half-crazed by the pain in his grating spine, he was talking to himself by the fifth night. But it showered again shortly after dark, turning the night cool and returning reason to his tiring mind.
The following morning fortunately continued cool. Kelly drove the Appaloosa on without mercy, carried forward now by that last bright burst of clearheaded strength which immediately precedes final collapse.
As midday approached he began to pick out familiar landmarks—a patriarchal tree here, a bizarre rock there, a particular rising climb of prairie, a certain lay of high tableland, a fall-off of drainage slope to valley below, and the like. In another hour he knew where he was and an hour after that he rode the staggering Spotted Eagle squarely into an advancing scout patrol of General Alfred H. “Star” Terry’s command coming up the lower valley of the Little Horn from its previous night’s bivouac on the banks of the Big Horn twenty-five miles above its junction with the Yellowstone.
The startled patrol sergeant sent the heavy-bearded, staring-eyed apparition back down valley with a mounted trooper on either side to hold him on his wind-broken horse. Half an hour later, Kelly was confronting Terry and his unshaven staff, his cracked lips forcing out the story of Sitting Bull’s big-medicine dream of a great wikmunke of mila hanskas along the Greasy Grass.
The weary officers heard him through in stony-eyed silence. When he was done, they bit their lips and turned away.
It was two p.m., June 26, 1876.
Twenty-four hours earlier on the barren treeless slopes above the Miniconjou Ford of the Little Big Horn River, the last of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s gallant Seventh Cavalry had been martyred to the dashing “boy general’s” incredible military ignorance and political ambition.
The next two months were the hardest, most dangerous in Luther Kelly’s life, calling for the expenditure of every last ounce of physical endurance, tracking skill, hunting prowess, and Indian scouting ability at his command. Yet in the end, he had to admit the wily Sioux had dealt him a defeat as crushing and total, if not as fatal, as Custer’s.
For sixty-one days he followed Gall and the Hunkpapa of Sitting Bull. In a classic of plains scouting not surpassed by Bridger, Carson, Meeker, Smith, or any of the earlier mountain immortals, he hung on the trail of the moving Sioux from the first mile of their flight from the Seventh Cavalry’s tragedy toward the Big Horn Mountains to the last somber days of that 1876 summer when Sitting Bull knew beyond final doubt that the hour of his people grew short.
For nearly the whole of that time, Gall knew he was being followed and strove constantly to ambush his white shadow. Yet so wary was Kelly and so determined that this time he would not be denied Crow Girl short of death, that in the entire eight weeks of his herculean hunt, not one hostile Sioux came within rifle shot of him. More than that, he went the whole time without seeing or speaking to a fellow white man, making all his few contacts for food and information with the chance bands of friendlies who were in part trying to emulate his own course—avoiding the post-Custer hostiles with which the tributary valleys of the Yellowstone were literally acrawl through these desperate days of July and August.
Still, at the end of that time, Kelly was no nearer Crow Girl than he had been at its beginning.
No chance had developed for him to even get close enough to the Hunkpapa camp to so much as see her, so watchfully had Gall kept his flankers out along the backtrail of the retreating band.
Thus, it was that the most the Irish scout received for his perilous sixty days in the Sioux wilderness was a detailed addition to his former knowledge of the unexplored lands north of the Yellowstone. These were the same lands which history, even at that moment, was leading George Crook’s erudite adjutant, John Bourke, to label terra incognita. And they were the same lands whose blankness on the existing military maps was at that identical August hour causing Colonel Nelson A. Miles to dispatch up and down the river his historic summons for Luther Kelly to join him in his camp on the banks of the Yellowstone at the mouth of Tongue River.
Thus it was, also, that on the murky hot morning of August 25, the latter, coming back down the Big Dry Creek Range from below Fort Peck on the Missouri, having lost the village trail of Sitting Bull’s and Gall’s band twenty-four hours before in the charred ash and clotting smoke of an Indian-lit prairie backfire, rode his little Appaloosa stud up out of a blind draw to collide, dead on, with a disreputable old friend from his Fort Buford days.
“Liver-eating” Johnson was in that era and place as celebrated a sobriquet as “Yellowstone” Kelly. And it was so largely for the same reasons of its owner having successfully kept his long hair from being shortened while poaching the sacred game preserves of the Hunkpapa and Oglala Sioux. Thereafter, however, all resemblance between the two delighted white scouts ceased. While they “howdied and shook” and slapped one another thunderously on the back, a hidden observer would have found it difficult to believe they followed the same profession.
To match the Irish scout’s clean-shaven chin, carefully trimmed mustache, and respectable buckskins (albeit they were torn, faded, and alkali-stained now), Johnson presented a picture from another day and time.
Ragged leather shirt and leggins unbeaded and black with the grease and soot of a thousand cook fires, wild hair frizzled and sun-faded, unkempt beard dirtied by chaw spittle, tobacco-ruined teeth rotted to the gum-line, illiterate, unwashed, profane, roving-eyed, raucous; he was the remaining classic chromo of the last of the Big Horn beaver trappers.
But it was not the way his friend looked, nor his raw language, nor even his gamy odor downwind, which unhinged Kelly’s jaw. It was what he had to say. And what he had to say brought to Kelly a suddenly leaping new hope to replace the waning one which had just died out in the ashes of the Hunkpapa grass fire.
But Liver-eating made him wait.
First off, knowing the hunger of a lone white man long weeks away from the river for news of his fellows, he brought him up to date on the general situation.
The army had just sent Crook a new commander from clean down to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, Johnson began. This latter was only a full colonel, but he had hell’s own reputation as an Indian fighter. Kelly would likely recall having heard of him. Fellow named Miles. Nelson A. Miles. Same Miles that had knocked the liver and lights out of the Comanc
hes down south in ’74.
Well, anyways, Liver-eating went on, this Miles’ orders were to “set on” the hostiles that had “done for” idiot-child Custer over on the Greasy Grass. He had been campaigning with Crook and Terry the past weeks getting the “feel of things,” mostly down around the Rosebud, Tongue, and Powder. Then Crook had been sent on southeast into the Black Hills, virtually out of the Sioux campaign, and a couple of important things had happened. Just before old “Three Stars” pulled out, General Wesley Merritt had broken up a big Cheyenne column moving out from Camp Robinson to hook up with Sitting Bull, weakening the Hunkpapa plans aplenty. Then that young heller Anson Mills had caught poor old American Horse trying to join his Oglala up with Crazy Horse’s and had completely routed them, killing American Horse and cutting the Oglala strength in half before the big fight ever got started.
Miles and Terry had then marched north to the Big Dry and right back south to Glendive Creek on the Yellowstone. Here Terry had loaded his boys on the Far West and four other steamers and “gone south for good,” leaving Miles’ Fifth Infantry with orders to “build a cantonment on the Yellowstone and occupy the country during the coming winter.”
But it looked as though “Bear Coat,” as the Sioux called Miles, had other ideas than just “occupying” the country.
He wanted to go after the Indians and reckoned he had a ring-tailed good chance to catch up with them and give them a little northern dose of Palo Duro and Adobe Walls. There was just the one little hitch. None of his scout staff knew the Yellowstone country well enough to shag hostiles through it with the snow up to a tall horse’s belly and the mercury stuck in the bulb at sixty below.
At that point, Liver-eating claimed proudly, he himself had thought of “Old Yellowstone.”
It was what came then that dropped Kelly’s jaw.
Miles wanted him to come in and talk about taking over his scouts and guiding the command after Custer’s killers in a full-dress winter campaign the likes of which had never before been planned or put on by white troops in Montana or Dakota Territories.
It developed, via Liver-eating’s excited insistence, that this was not a mere suggestion. It was a concrete offer. With no strings whatever tied onto it.
All Kelly had to do, apparently, was go see Miles.
After that it would be squarely up to him whether he kept on chasing the Hunkpapa all by his lonesome, or gave in and let the US Army back him up with somewhere around six hundred Comanche-trained troops of the Fifth and the Twenty-Second Infantry.
Having delivered himself of the Colonel’s “gelded edge” invitation, Johnson eased back in his saddle to await his companion’s reaction. He did not get eased very far back. The Irish scout took less than ten seconds to reach his decision. After that, they both “got down and sat a spell,” risking a fire to boil up a fresh can of coffee and bake a hasty batch of frying-pan bread, the first of either civilized delicacy Kelly had tasted since leaving Terry’s column two months before. They then shook hands again and went their careful, separate ways.
It was well within the hour of his chance meeting with Liver-eating Johnson on the Big Dry Creek Fork of the Missouri that Yellowstone Kelly started south to keep his date with destiny and Colonel Nelson A. Miles on the south bank of the Yellowstone at the mouth of Tongue River in Montana Territory.
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In his ride south, Kelly saw no Indians. He struck the Yellowstone in good time and without incident. Crossing over, he turned east for the few remaining miles to the Tongue cantonment.
A short while later, he heard several shots downstream.
Slowing Spotted Eagle, he went ahead with considerable caution. It was a favorite tactic of the Sioux to harass military construction crews. The gunfire could well mean the hostiles had some of Miles’ wood or hay-cutting details pinned down and cut off from the main camp. This did not prove to be the case. However, the wary scout had good reason to be glad of his precautionary alertness.
Had he not been keyed up by the shots, it is very likely he would not have seen the bear in time. Even so, it was one of the closest scrapes a man would want to make light of in his memoirs.
He came around a sharp bend of dense bottom growth—in those days the Valley of the Yellowstone carried much cottonwood timber and willow brush along its rich alluvial meadowlands—the battered Winchester he had acquired from one of Terry’s teamsters in trade for his famous fifty-dollar beaver hat poked out in front of him on full cock.
The bear, a tremendous cinnamon, the largest bear Kelly ever saw, including silvertips, came out of the blind brush not twenty feet ahead of him. He reared upright as he came, squealing in desperate hurt and anger. It was at once clear to Kelly he had been hit by the shots heard downstream. This deduction was blended by an act of natural fright on the part of Spotted Eagle, which very nearly killed the helpless scout before the bear could even attempt to do so.
At the first sight and sound of the cinnamon-colored monster, the little Appaloosa simply blew up. He went sideways, backwards, and up into the air all in the same moment of squalling terror.
Kelly came unglued from him about midway in the wild three-way pitch. He hit the soft dirt of the trail without injury and still something like ten feet away from the swaying cinnamon. The bear at once dropped back to all fours and came for him.
He had only one shot—a very bad one—skull-on and trying to center the little shoe-button eyes.
Kelly pressed the trigger, and the god who had not seemed to be much with him of late obliged by opening the monster’s mouth as he did. The .44 slug plowed upward through the back of the exposed throat, blew away the base of the pale-colored brute’s skull, dropped him stone-dead with his great outstretched right paw crashing like a felled pine across Kelly’s chest.
He was still lying there, pinned down by the animal’s enormous arm, when the two hunters who had wounded the bear (a pair of packers from Miles’ camp) came thrashing up through the willows.
They at once rushed to Kelly’s side and began pouring shot after shot into the dead beast.
Only faintly amused and fearing one of the bullets would find a livelier mark than listless bruin, the scout hastened to pour a little Irish oil on the brave nimrods’ enthusiasm by assuring them that he was prepared to issue an affidavit over his legal signature of Luther S. Kelly that the poor animal was long since done for and that, furthermore, if they did not at once abate their violent attentions to same, he would be forced to fire back in self-defense.
The packers of course ceased their excited fire in the face of this fey objection and were hence able to clearly hear and understand Kelly’s laconic self-identification.
“Yellowstone Kelly?” they gasped in unison. Then they answered their own query before he could accommodate in kind: “By God! It’s him!”
Kelly agreed that it was and, the formalities dispensed with, allowed them to pry him out from under the bear and guide him triumphantly toward the nearby cantonment. Before departing, however, and in the lackadaisical act securing another whimsical bit of Kelliana for interested posterity, he cut off the bear’s right paw and slung it to the recaptured Spotted Eagle’s saddle. Twenty minutes later he was shaking hands with Miles’ quartermaster, Captain Randall.
It developed that the “General” himself was off in the timber supervising logging operations for the camp’s ambitious construction program. (Though he was a colonel not made brigadier until 1880, Miles’ officers and men invariably deferred to his Civil War brevet rank in addressing or referring to him. The same courtesy was afforded him by his civilian employees; packers, stock handlers, scouts. In fact the only one to call him consistently by his regular rank was old Liver-eating Johnson, who would not knowingly defer to the Devil or “grant one inch of undue credit to Jesus Christ himself,” as his leather-clad companions put it.) It further developed that Captain Randall did not expect Miles back for some
time.
“He doesn’t ordinarily return until late afternoon,” the quartermaster advised Kelly. “However, I’m sure he will want to see you before then. We had best send up, right off, and let him know you are here.”
“I suppose you had,” agreed the scout, “but wait a bit now—”
He broke off to finger his jaw and stare contemplatively at the outsized bear paw dangling from his saddle horn.
Randall’s eyes widened as he noticed the huge appendage for the first time.
“Good Lord, Kelly, I do believe that’s the biggest bear paw I ever saw. Do they come much bigger?”
“Not a great deal,” agreed the other laconically. “This one will measure over twelve inches without the claws and the unfortunate brute who furnished it will, in my opinion, scale close to as many hundred pounds. Here—” He waved the paw to the courier who was starting off to notify Miles of his arrival. The man came up, and he handed him the grisly trophy. “My card,” he grinned. “Please present it to the General with my compliments.”
When Miles got the bear paw, nothing would do but that its sender should come up at once to see him at the wood-cutting site. He had been quietly despairing of hearing from Kelly, and the celebrated scout’s “calling card with claws” struck just the right note of rough frontier humor, as well as realistic military relief. Miles, too, as Kelly was soon enough to learn, had a gift for prompt action not shared by most of his more famous fellow Indian fighters of the regular army. Completely without Custer’s headlong, suicidal haste, he possessed at the same time an eagerness to get on with the job which was all too apparently lacking in Crook, Terry, and Gibbon.
He had, also, that rare gift for spot decision and full commitment which distinguishes the competent field commander.
Five minutes after he entered the General’s tent at the cutting site, Luther S. Kelly emerged with the official appointment which guaranteed him his unique place in the dangerous history of US army scouting.
