Libbie

by Judy Alter

  He probably missed Eliza more than me, for he wrote that he wished her to bake him some rolls "instead of the solid shot our cook gives us." And Eliza missed Autie. She was as glad as I when we finally left for Leavenworth in early November.

  I was greeted gaily at Leavenworth by those who had missed us, and though I settled like a star boarder in the quarters of Lieutenant Major Thomas Brown and his wife Lucille, rather than in my own house, I was glad to be home among my army friends. They understood my anxieties and fears in a way that even good, kind Father Custer never could. We talked of Indians and soldiers, of generals and enlisted men, of the newness of a winter campaign.

  "Even Jim Bridger came from St. Louis to advise against it," said Lucille. "Said you can't hunt Indians on the plains in winter for fear of blizzards." A new hazard for us to think about.

  Such anxieties were heightened by the letter waiting for me when I arrived. "A white woman has just come into our camp deranged and can give no account of herself. She has been four days without food. Our cook is now giving her something to eat. I can only explain her coming by supposing her to have been captured by the Indians, and their barbarous treatment having rendered her insane. I send her tonight, by the mail party, to Fort Dodge." The story brought to my mind once again, with instant clarity, James Coker and the bullet he had been instructed to save for me.

  Autie's orders for moving toward the Indian village were issued on the evening of November 22, and so good were army communications—even the grapevine—that we at Leavenworth knew of it almost immediately. Our vigil began.

  From Autie's letters after the battle, I know that it started to snow that morning, and by breakfast the men stood in knee-deep drifts. Autie thought it all the better, for the army could move through the snow; the Indian villages could not. Still, the guides could see no landmarks, the men were soaked with cold and wet, and no halt was made for food through the long day. When at last they camped for the night, small fires could be built under the deep banks of the stream, so the men had coffee and the horses oats; but no bugle sounded, no voice was raised, no pipe lit for fear of a spark.

  By the ashes of a fire recently extinguished, then the barking of a dog, and finally the cry of a baby, the Indian camp was discovered. The night was spent in fitful sleep and long preparations, and before dawn a single shot and the sounds of "Garryowen" piped the 800 horsemen into battle. Magazine accounts, official reports, even Autie's personal letters chronicle the military details—half-clad Indians pouring out of tepees to run in all directions, cavalrymen blasting at them with six-shooters, slashing with sabers, even running their prey down with galloping horses. Indians plunged into the icy river, and a few escaped in ravines and clumps of bushes, but their defense was ragged, pitiful. Autie was in possession of the village within ten minutes. To this day I hear the cry of the Indian baby, see the captured white woman, feel the cold of winter and the frozen river. Autie, of course, reveled in the fighting:

  The entire village, numbering forty-seven lodges of Black Kettle's band of Cheyenne, two lodges of Arapaho, two lodges of Sioux—fifty-one lodges in all, under the command of their principal chief, Black Kettle—was conquered. The Indians left on the ground 103 warriors, including Black Kettle, whose scalp was taken by an Osage guide.

  Black Kettle. I had heard even Autie say that he was a peace chief, one who sought no war with the white man but who often could not control the young men of his tribe. Now he lay dead, scalped, on the battlefield. I shuddered as I continued to read Autie's official report.

  Eight hundred seventy-five horses and mules were captured, 241 saddles, 573 buffalo robes, 390 buffalo skins for lodges, 160 untanned robes, 210 axes, 140 hatchets, 4,000 arrows and arrowheads, 1,050 pounds of lead, 300 pounds of bullets...

  The list began to fog my brain, and I skipped over it to the next paragraph, which was no more comforting.

  Everything of value was destroyed. Fifty-three prisoners were taken, squaws and their children. Two white children, captives with the Indians, were taken. One white woman in their possession was murdered by her captors the moment the attack was made.

  Autie's report concluded with the information that two officers—Major Elliott and Captain Hamilton—and nineteen enlisted men were killed. Captain Barnitz—my old friend—was seriously wounded through the abdomen, though miraculously no vital organs were struck and he later recovered. Joel Elliott was not so lucky.

  Ah, Autie, there was the rub in your grand and glorious victory. The death of Major Joel Elliott almost robbed you of your glory. The stories that came back varied, depending on who was telling them, but to the best I could understand, Joel Elliott had taken a detachment and ridden off toward the river, pursuing some fleeing Indians. When one of the lieutenants suggested to Autie that the detachment might be under attack, Autie was scornful: Captain Myers, he said, had been fighting down there all morning and would have reported any unit in difficulty.

  But Elliott was under attack—and he and his men were all killed. When they didn't return, speculation ran through the camp where men were burning saddles, clothing, utensils, weapons, ammunition, and the winter supply of dried buffalo meat. Such appalling waste troubles me to this day, but Autie assured me that impoverishment was the only road to victory in the battle against the Indians. Nonetheless, I shook with sobs when told about the 900 ponies that were either shot or had their throats cut.

  A scout party went in search of the missing detachment, but returned reporting no sight of them within two miles of the camp. And Autie deemed it time to withdraw, for there were other large Indian camps nearby, and large groups of warriors had begun to gather on the bluffs, watching the soldiers in that silent, ominous way that Indians had. The soldiers then numbered 900 men, but they had no count of the Indians. As it later turned out, the Indians outnumbered them. But Autie judged at the time that being so far from a base of supplies, his men exhausted from a long fast, horses worn out with a difficult march through the snow, he could not risk the lives of the whole command in further search for Joel Elliott's unit. At Autie's command the company band struck up "Garryowen," boldly leading the troops on a march carefully designed to fool the watching Indians—first toward their tepees, then suddenly countermarching to head toward the supply train. Joel Elliott and his men were left behind.

  Autie believed, he told me later, that Elliott had become lost without a compass and would soon make his way to Camp Supply. Not until November 27 did they return to the Washita... and then they found the badly butchered bodies of Joel and his men.

  The news filtered to the newspapers back east. An anonymous letter, obviously written by an officer who'd been at Washita, published in the St. Louis paper, charged Autie with having callously left the battlefield without secure knowledge of all the men in his command. Back at Leavenworth, within my hearing, some defended Autie, saying that Joel was already dead and it would have done no good to endanger the remainder of the troops to search for him. Besides, they argued, Joel had taken off on an independent, unauthorized glory-seeking mission; his fate was not Autie's responsibility. Still, there was a public outcry that Elliott and his men had been abandoned... and Autie was the villain.

  Autie, so another officer later told me, demanded to know of his officers who had written the letter to the St. Louis paper. "I will horsewhip the culprit," he thundered.

  Shifting his pistol, James Coker stepped forward. "I wrote the letter," he said, "and I stand by what I wrote."

  Autie glared, for James Coker was now the one enemy he could not defeat. He could not horsewhip him again, nor could he court-martial him—though I know Autie tried to scheme a way to make that possible.

  I kept deliberately aloof when the Washita battle was discussed at Leavenworth, but I had always thought Joel Elliott a charming young man, and I grieved for him.

  * * *

  Autie did not join me for Christmas, for the Seventh continued out in the field. The holiday was a rather melancholy affair for me
, in spite of the efforts of those around me to be of good spirits. I had thought of going back to Monroe, but only briefly, for hadn't I just gratefully escaped from there? Eliza, once returned to the frontier, declared herself firmly planted there, to await the "ginnel's" return from campaign.

  Sighing, I agreed with her, and spent the holiday watching Lucille Brown fix makeshift holidays for her little ones.

  "We've oranges for their stockings," she told me on Christmas Eve, "and candy canes. But I can't help thinking how grand their surprises would be were they back home."

  Next morning it seemed to me those children were perfectly elated, and I could not imagine that their joy could have been any greater were they back in Ohio with doting grandparents.

  As I watched them—a towheaded boy of six and a sister, slightly darker, no more than four—I felt a pang again, for now it was clear to me that I would never give Autie the son he now denied wanting. Sometimes the idea of our barrenness made me angry at Autie, in a kind of perverse reasoning that I could never explain.

  His letters over that holiday were warm and loving, full of references to his "darling girl" and of declarations of loneliness and love. In some letters he wrote in a stilted manner in the third person. "She has been to him more than his fondest hopes ever pictured a wife could be. And he owes her a life of devotion, of pure unbounded and undivided affection for the pure love she bears him, for her unselfish devotion to him and to his interests, and for the perfect type of a true, pure, and loving wife she is and ever has been to him." Autie, with selective memory, had wiped out the differences that had simmered all the past year and come to a boil in Monroe over the last summer.

  Forgetfulness was not so easy for me, in spite of my strange and frantic anxiety about his safety. Once I was back in the world of the army, among those who shared my daily fears but among whom a stiff upper lip was the required code, I worried less about Autie's safety... and fretted more about our relationship. Loving letters did not flow as easily from my pen.

  Autie, nobody's fool, responded to the distant tone of my letters. "While I am absent, you may perhaps think kindly of me and remember much that is good of me, but when I return, that spark of distrust, which I alone am responsible for first placing in your mind but which others have fanned into a flame, will be rekindled, and little burning words will be the result.... You are and ever will be the one single object of my love."

  Those little flames, though, whispered to me of past indiscretions and of present doubts: Was Autie a ruthless killer of innocent women and children at Washita or was he, as all around me thought, a heroic Indian fighter, the man destined to bring peace to the frontier? Was he a faithful husband or, as rumors hinted, a habitue of ladies of the night, a ladies' man who charmed the youngest and the oldest, and bedded whom he could? At least, I told myself more than once, I needn't worry about indiscretions when he was off on campaign.

  Washita was the high point of Autie's year. The rest of the winter was unmarked by any battle and spent instead in parleyings, ruses, subterfuges, councils, and promises of peace on the part of the Indians. In December, slopping through mud, the Seventh forced a group of Kiowa into Fort Cobb, and in January they moved south to the Wichita Mountains, where Phil Sheridan ordered the construction of Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Both Indians and soldiers were hungry and cold, and Autie's troops were able to round up several bands of the hostiles and move them toward the reservation.

  "The arrogance and pride is whipped out of the Indians," he wrote in February. "Yesterday we made peace with the Kiowa and released their two head chiefs, Satanta and Lone Wolf.... We will set out in a westerly direction, intending to treat with the Cheyenne."

  By the first of March, the Seventh was living on quarter rations of bread. "I wish," Autie wrote, "that some of those who are responsible for this state of affairs and who are living in luxury and comfort could be made to share at least the discomforts and privations of troops serving in the field."

  The column returned by late March to the Washita battlefield, from where Autie wrote that he had been successful against the Cheyenne. "I outmarched them, outwitted them at their own game, proved to them they were in my power, and could and would have annihilated the entire village." What prevented that annihilation—I breathed a sigh of relief as I read—was the presence of two captive white women, who were eventually released. After a few days' rest Autie's troops moved toward Fort Hays for their summer encampment.

  * * *

  I was in the throng that edged the parade ground at Hays when the Seventh rode in, the band playing "Garryowen" and the men riding as smartly as possible. But they were a sad lot, ragged and tired, their horses thin. Only Autie looked unscathed by the winter of hardship. I caught my breath when I saw him.

  Gone were the army blues. Instead he wore a fine, fringed suit of buckskin, topped with his trademark red scarf. Momentarily, I almost did not recognize him, for in addition to changing his outfit, he wore a full beard... and his curls had been cut short. He looked to me an entirely different man, and I wasn't sure if that was good or bad.

  There was much shouting and hugging once the men were dismissed to greet their families. Autie strode purposefully to where I waited and then stood in front of me, perhaps a foot away.

  "Libbie?" He sounded the little boy again.

  "You look wonderful, Autie," I said, throwing myself into his arms.

  "I... I wasn't even sure you'd be here," he muttered into my hair. "I was afraid..."

  "Where else would I be, Autie? I belong wherever you are."

  "Please God we'll have no more of these long separations," he said fervently.

  In spite of his obvious desperation—I use the word advisedly—to be with me again, Autie was not as ardent as I'd expected. After previous, briefer separations in our marriage, Autie had sometimes been so impatient a lover as to be rough and inconsiderate. This night, when we finally retired to our tent alone, he was slow, deliberate, stroking and teasing rather than rushing headlong into passion. There was none of the loud and almost violent passion that sometimes made me worry about the ears of the sentry. This night Autie seemed to have less immediate need of his own pleasure.

  At the time, I thought perhaps he was growing up, that somehow a new and stronger man had come back to me from the Indian Wars. I was only partly right... and partly wrong.

  * * *

  We camped again on Big Creek that summer, though my mind still swam with memories of the flood two years earlier. I was one of three women in camp, most of the others being prevented from joining the unit by the need to care for small children. But General Miles had' his bride, Katherine, with him, and my cousin from New York, Rebecca Richmond, was with us. We three braved it among all those men.

  "See?" Autie triumphed. "If we had children, you'd be back in Monroe, and I'd dutifully have to go visit you. At the very least, you'd be in those awful quarters at Hays, and we'd have to retire to the parade ground to have our battles, lest everyone on officers' row know our every secret. Either way, we'd miss all this." He waved his arm expansively to take in our tent home, the cottonwood trees that ringed it, and beyond, the endless plains, naked and glaring in the sunlight.

  Our home for the summer was a generous-sized hospital tent, which served as a sitting room, and an adjoining wall tent, which made our bedroom. Since we were camped on the slope of the riverbank, the tent had been shored up at the rear until it was almost to the level of the trees. Autie had the carpenter continue the floor right on out around one tree, and we had a gallery for sitting. A huge tarpaulin, spread over the larger tent, extended enough to create a porch, where we spent many hours. Our tent was discreetly away from the others—General and Mrs. Miles had pitched their tents farther on in the bend of the river, Rebecca's was between theirs and ours, and the rows of tents for the soldiers were beyond the Mileses' tent.

  Fort Hays was not far at all and often afforded us wagonloads of visitors. But the post itself was dreary beyond measure—
plain, bare officers' quarters that resembled barracks; a dull-brown parade ground with only sparse, stunted grass; nary a tree on the whole place. And Hays City, the town that grew up around the fort, was no better. It was mostly built of crude frames covered with canvas. Shanties had been made of slabs, bits of driftwood, and logs, and sometimes the roofs were covered with tin that had once been fruit or vegetable cans, now flattened out.

  Pistol shots were heard so often in Hays City that it was like a perpetual Fourth of July. The graveyard had been begun with the interment of men who had died violent deaths, and thirty-six new graves were added in the summer we were there. In all the times we went to town, I asked to avoid the railroad track, for I was never sure if we would come upon a body swinging from the beams that supported the bridge. And Autie cautioned me severely about casual looking—on trips to the railroad station to greet visitors, I was not to look out of the ambulance, for fear of attracting the wrong kind of attention. I was grateful beyond words that I could camp with Autie and live far away from both the post and the town.

  I wish I could say it was a blissful summer. Autie and I did agree, without ever speaking of it, to let bygones be bygones. There was no mention of Monroe, nor St. Louis, nor James Coker—he was now stationed with another unit of the Seventh at Harker, and so he and Autie were mercifully separated. I heard, however, here and there, that he was still loudly critical of Autie, and not just for the deaths of Joel Elliott and his men. He now accused Autie publicly of having an affair with a married woman at Fort Hays—I wracked my brain but could come up with no suitable candidate—and of habituating demimonde dives in Leavenworth. The latter rumor cut through me like knives, because it reinforced my own suspicions.