by John Jakes
He trotted Satan toward the river again. The open ground held fallen Cheyennes, mostly men, nearly all dead. He spied one body in blue. The mouth was open, the eyes fixed on the trampled snow. Louis Hamilton—who’d begged not to be left with the wagons when there was glory waiting.
Satan jumped suddenly, sailing over some obstacle Charles hadn’t seen. He wrenched around and looked down. Custer’s Blucher lay there, an arrow through his throat.
When Charles reached the Washita, he guessed that about twenty minutes had passed since the attack began. Already the gunfire was diminishing. In the village, many of the tipis were down, and the dismounted troopers running to and fro no longer displayed caution; they had won and they knew it.
He dismounted and waded into the flowing cold water, up to his waist. About halfway across, where there was a sandbar, little threads of red spun off into the current. Black Kettle and Medicine Woman Later had fallen together, her body half resting on his. The back of her head protruded from the water. The peace chief’s face was submerged and turned up to the light, every wrinkle visible because of the water’s clarity.
Charles felt pain in his gut. For this he’d joined the Tenth, and then the Seventh? To perpetrate the murder of a man who’d done nothing but sue for peace, nothing but try to walk the white man’s road? In the clear winter morning on the Washita, the scales were falling from his eyes. He was sick with guilt and shame.
He lifted the body of Medicine Woman Later, which was heavy because of her soaked clothing. He carried her to the bank and there lay her on her back. He sloshed into the water again to get Black Kettle. He was now able to see the chief’s five bullet wounds, which the woman’s body had hidden before. Tears came to his eyes.
Somehow Black Kettle was lighter. Charles picked him up from the icy shallows and lay him across his forearms, heedless of the water cascading from the body and splashing his leggings and soaking his sleeves. He staggered toward the bank—straight into the shadow of a horse and rider.
Charles looked up. Captain Harry Venable extended his hand and aimed his side arm at Charles.” The gun was an 1860 Army Colt with some kind of ivory inlay in the butt.
“Leave those bodies where they fell or take their scalps.”
“I won’t do either one. These poor old people befriended me once.”
“You know them?”
“You’re damn right. This is Black Kettle, the peace chief. It’s his village. He tried to take the village to sanctuary at Fort Cobb and that damn fool Hazen turned him away. This is his reward.” The old Indian now felt heavy and sodden in his arms. “Black Kettle was my friend. I mean to bury him right.”
Venable smiled then. He had Charles cold for disobedience. He cocked the Colt. There was hardly another sound save the drip of water from Black Kettle’s garments and gray hair.
Then, suddenly, the morning air resounded with the assembly call. Venable turned and glanced toward the village. Mounted troopers and those on foot began to move quickly to answer. Charles stared into the Colt’s muzzle and figured he’d bought the farm this morning. He realized he could release Black Kettle, reach his pistol, and rid the world of Venable. He didn’t move.
The trumpeting delayed Venable’s shot by about fifteen seconds. In that interval a horseman galloped by. It was Griffenstein.
He wheeled and dashed between Charles and Harry Venable. “You drunk?” he yelled at Venable, knocking the officer’s Colt from his hand. “The ones we’re killin’ got red skins, not white.”
Another officer spurring for the trees shouted at Venable, telling him to haul his ass. Not fully understanding the confrontation, Dutch Henry recognized its seriousness. He kept an eye on the little Kentuckian as he dismounted, retrieved the Colt, and warily handed it back. Slowly, Charles lowered Black Kettle to the churned snow and mud. He laid him beside his wife.
Venable rammed the revolver in his holster, threw a look at Charles that promised it wasn’t over between them, and quirted his horse with his rein. He went speeding among the knolls and the bodies to the village.
“What’n shit was that all about?” Griffenstein wanted to know. He seemed himself now, his face no longer flushed as it had been when Charles saw him with the scalping knife. The scalp was knotted to the scout’s rawhide belt by a strand of bloody hair.
“Venable’s got an old grudge,” was all Charles would say.
“Well, he better hold his water. This is no place to settle scores.” For Charles, the words had a meaning the other scout couldn’t appreciate.
“I’m obliged to you, Henry,” he said.
“Nothing,” the other man said with a wave. “Can’t stand by and see a friend taken out by some snotty shoulder-straps.” By then, Charles had mounted, reluctantly leaving the chief and his wife where he’d put them. Dutch Henry was in high spirits as they turned their horses toward the assembly point. “Wasn’t this a hell of a fine git?”
Charles stared at him. Anger did away with gratitude.
“It was a massacre. Of the wrong people. It’s a goddamn disgrace. Look at this.” He showed the brass cross with the broken thong. “I took it off a young boy. His whole life ahead of him. I had to shoot him so he wouldn’t kill me.”
Griffenstein didn’t catch on to the depth of Charles’s feeling. He reached for the cross. “Got yourself a nice souvenir, anyway.”
Charles closed his fist. “Do you think that’s why I took it, you dumb ox? This isn’t war. It’s butchery. Sand Creek all over again.”
The burly scout’s surprise changed to resentment. “Grow up, Charlie. This here’s the way things are.”
“Fuck the way things are.”
Griffenstein’s face changed again. He regarded Charles with the same repugnance a man might show to a carrier of cholera. “I reckon this is where we split. By rights I oughta twist your head off for what you called me. I guess I won’t because I guess you’ve gone crazy. You ride with somebody else from now on.”
He moved away. Charles didn’t care. Something inside him was dead. Killed here on the Washita.
There was a lot of activity inside the village. A great many soldiers were still riding or bustling around on foot, snatching souvenirs before someone forbade it. Charles saw shirts and trousers stained by scalps hacked from the dead. One young private proudly showed two of them to his friends.
The pony herd, numbering several hundred, had been rounded up by Godfrey’s men near the trees on the far side of the village. About fifty women and children had been captured, along with a large quantity of goods. A number of fine saddles, including some Army ones; hatchets and buffalo robes; firearms, bullet molds, and lead; hundreds of pounds of tobacco and flour, and a large winter store of buffalo meat. As Charles jogged in, Custer was detailing Godfrey and his K Troop to gather and inventory the spoils.
Listening to the excited conversations around him, Charles heard claims that several hundred Indians were dead. He doubted it. If each tipi held its usual five or six, that figured to three hundred inhabitants of the village. There were plenty of Indian bodies scattered in the lanes and out on the open ground, but nothing like three hundred. Many of the braves must have escaped. Among the soldiers, only two were known dead: Louis Hamilton and Corporal Cuddy, of B Troop. But then there was Elliott’s detachment. No one could say what had become of it.
There was renewed wailing and shrieking. Three of the Osage trackers were gleefully whipping some captive women with switches. “They try to run,” an Osage explained. He and the others whipped the women harder, driving them toward a larger group already under guard. From his seasons with Black Kettle’s people, Charles thought he recognized more than one of the women. A squaw with thick braids and a bleeding cheek seemed to recognize him, but she was the only one. She said nothing, but her stare was enough to twist knives in his middle.
“General.” The sharp voice belonged to Romero, the interpreter. He pushed a bedraggled woman ahead of him. She clasped her hands and bowed her head in fr
ont of General Custer, who still looked fresh and energetic. Charles wondered how it was possible; he himself was spent and occasionally dizzy from tiredness and hunger.
“This woman, she say she Mahwissa, sister to Black Kettle,” Romero said. Possible, although Charles had never seen the woman before, or heard of a sister during that winter he spent with Jackson. “She say this is not only village on the Washita.”
“Where are the others?” Custer asked in the sudden stillness.
Romero found a broken lance shaft and, standing beside the general, drew an upside-down U in the mud. He flared both stems of the U outward, then poked a hole below the left-hand stem. “Here is the village of Black Kettle.” Up toward the bend of the U he poked again. “Arapahoes here.” Toward the bottom of the other stem of the U, another poke. “More Cheyennes here.” Two more pokes near the flared end of that stem. “And more—and Kiowas too. All winter camps. Downstream.”
General Custer’s ruddiness was gone. He looked pale as the snow on the trees up on the bluffs. Among those trees, Charles thought he detected movement.
“How many in the camps?” Custer asked.
Romero spoke to the woman in Cheyenne. Charles understood enough of her answer to feel a renewed chill.
To the number of five or six thousand.”
The hush befitted a tomb. Somewhere a dog howled. The listening soldiers, so boisterous a little while ago, nervously fingered their side arms.
Somehow the disagreeable news didn’t surprise Charles. Custer’s impetuous nature was a kind of lightning rod for trouble. He’s pushed the pursuit, and the attack, on the unfounded assumption that they were chasing one band of warriors to an isolated village in the valley of the Washita. The night’s forced march had left little time for reflection on related questions: Was there only one village? Had the war party actually returned there, or to another village? Even now, they didn’t know the answer to the second question. Charles supposed he couldn’t score Custer too harshly. He hadn’t thought of the questions himself, though they seemed embarrassingly obvious after Romero’s revelation.
To his credit, Custer showed no sign of dismay. “We have won a decisive victory over the enemy—” Charles grimaced. He noticed Keim for the first time. The reporter was scribbling in his phonographic notebook. “We will proceed with destruction of this base. We must go about our duties without the slightest indication that we know of the other villages, or care about them. If there are more Indians close by, they won’t know our strength.
Someone muttered, “They sure-God know we ain’t five thousand.”
“Let the coward who made that remark step forward.”
No one moved. The general’s face flushed again. Charles thought he was more agitated than he let on. Custer opened his mouth, probably to repeat his demand for a confession, but one of the Osages caught his attention with a sudden gesture toward the hoof-torn slopes beyond the river. Three braves with shields and lances rode out of the trees up there. They halted their ponies at the edge, watching. Nearby, other Indians slipped into sight.
Soon the bluffs were crowded with them, and more kept coming. Custer said this expedition was blessed, Charles thought. It’s cursed.
51
THE EASY VICTORY WASN’T turning out to be so easy. By eleven, the bluffs across the Washita held hundreds of armed Arapahoes and Cheyennes. Custer fretted while the work of collecting spoils continued. His colors were planted in an improvised hospital area near the center of the village. From there, he issued orders deploying men in a defense perimeter just inside the cotton woods in case the Indians attacked.
They did. A band of twenty Cheyennes came galloping in from the river bend two miles northeast. They dashed over the open ground between the low knolls and fired into the trees. Standing beside Romero, Charles returned the fire. Custer strode behind the defense line, bucking up the men.
“Don’t show yourselves. They’re trying to draw us into the open. Conserve your fire—we’re low on ammunition. Stand fast. They’ll never ride into these woods.”
The jingle of his little gold spurs seemed to linger after he went on. Romero gave Charles a disconsolate look; Custer was right about ammunition. If they remained pinned down for much longer, the Indians would be able to charge in without the danger of return fire.
Charles put his second-to-last magazine into the stock of the Spencer and wiped his eyes. They were smarting and watering from tiredness and the smoke. He felt someone watching him. Several paces to the right he saw Dutch Henry Griffenstein. With a contemptuous smile, Griffenstein said something to the soldier next to him. The trooper turned to stare at Charles, and Charles knew he had to find an opportunity to apologize for calling the scout a dumb ox.
After their last sweep the Cheyennes galloped away again, out of range. One brave knelt on his pony and thumbed the seat of his breeches. None of the men in the smoky wood thought it funny.
Charles held his place for two hours. During that time a half-dozen attack parties rode down from the heights, though none came close to the trees. Custer was right; the Indians wanted them in the open.
Behind the defense line, other troopers were busy ripping tipis apart and hacking up the poles with axes. California Joe slipped in from the other side of the wood to report that he’d found three to four hundred more Indian ponies. “Must be eight, nine hundred of ’em now, General,” Charles heard him say to Custer, who was again prowling the defense perimeter.
One of the Corbins came to relieve Charles. He stumbled away and stepped behind a bullet-scarred tree to relieve his painfully full bladder. It didn’t help much. He was in low spirits, remembering how lively and friendly a peaceful Cheyenne village could be, with music, and courting rituals, and storytelling by a fire after a sinfully big feast of buffalo meat. Black Kettle’s village was, by contrast, a graveyard, a plundered graveyard. Those troopers not on the defense line continued to pile up goods from the wrecked tipis; dozens of confiscated buffalo robes, painted arrows by the hundreds.
“Pull that one out,” Custer said to his orderly. He pointed to a demolished tipi. “If the cover’s undamaged, pack it for me. Then move all these separate heaps together and set them afire.” Charles listened despondently. What Custer was doing amounted to burning the homes of a civilian population. The owners of the tipis, if they managed to escape, would die of exposure unless they found shelter somewhere else. He thought that driving the Cheyennes out of the village temporarily should have been enough.
Custer thought otherwise. Soon, on open ground out behind the cottonwoods, flames shot up, leaping eight and ten feet in the air as they consumed the great mountain of torn-down tipis. The hide covers produced a bitter dark smoke that trailed across the winter sky like mourning streamers.
The general ordered up a detachment with Joe Corbin and Griffenstein leading it. As the detachment trotted away east, out of the woodland, Charles asked Milner, “Where are they going?”
California Joe eyed him in a suspicious way; maybe Griffenstein had been talking widely about Charles’s behavior. “Hunt for Elliott,” was all the chief scout said. His speech had a slur again; evidently he still had his supply of alcohol.
“About time the general started worrying about them,” Charles said.
California Joe scowled. “You better keep opinions like that to yourself, mister.” He walked away.
There was something fierce building inside Charles; something he was powerless to suppress. It was an anger, blind to subtleties, that encompassed every white man in the cottonwoods, including himself. Gnawing on some hardtack, his only food that day, he had an urge to take his Army Colt and shoot Custer. The foolish impulse passed, but not the anger. He hated what was happening here.
Antlike, a file of men moved toward the great fire carrying robes, quivers, bullet molds—every personal article the foragers could find. The flames shot high again, filling the woods with scarlet light and shifting shadow. If the survivors ever came back, they would also hav
e no food or household goods to sustain them through the winter, which was evidently what Sheridan intended.
As the burning continued, men on the defense line raised a shout. “Bell’s coming! Here comes Bell!” Charles and the others ran to the edge of the woods on the river side. Careening toward them from a ford somewhere upstream came their seven wagons. Cheyennes and Arapahoes galloped on either side, peppering them with arrows and bullets.
The teamsters returned the fire. One warrior dropped. Up on the bluffs, more war parties were assembling, probably to intercept the wagons. They didn’t move quickly enough. With Lieutenant Jim Bell whipping up the lead team, the wagons thundered into the grove. Sparks and flames spurted from overheated axle hubs. Bell’s wagon veered to avoid a tree, the mules tore the traces, and the wagon tipped and crashed on its side, dumping its load of ammunition chests. The troopers rushed to them and tore them open.
Sooty, a smoking pistol in his hand, Bell staggered to Custer. “Couldn’t wait for orders, General. Bunch of ’em surprised us and we had to dash for the ford upstream.”
“It’s good you did,” Custer said. “Now we have the ammunition we need.”
Indeed, the troopers seemed revitalized by the arrival of the wagons, which had reached the cottonwoods without serious injury to any of the drivers. The troopers climbed over the wagons and threw more ammunition chests to the ground. With the bonfire blazing and the mules braying and the teamsters shouting and the Cheyenne women wailing and the children crying and the angry Indians again sniping from horseback, Charles began to think he was in some grotto in hell reserved for the damned of the U.S. Cavalry.
More commotion then. The search detachment was riding in from the east. Pale frightened troopers dismounted and talked excitedly. Custer ran to them, shouting for silence. Charles’s eye raked the search party. No Griffenstein.
