Action at Beecher Island: A Novel

by Dee Brown

  “Ah, we’ll get you in the scouts yet, Slinger. They wouldn’t take me the first time I tried, either. We’ll ask Major Forsyth. You heard him tell the doctor he couldn’t find enough men in Fort Hays to fill up his company. He’ll want you.”

  Major Forsyth, however, took one look at Schlesinger’s slender figure, asked him a few questions about his experiences, and shook his head negatively. When Jack promised to teach his young friend how to read Indian signs and other tricks of scouting, the major replied brusquely that there would be no time for that. At the civilian mess tent, Jack refused to leave until he had exacted a promise from Schlesinger to meet him there early the next morning. “I’ll be here,” Schlesinger said. “And whether they take me or not, I’ve learned one thing about scouts. You never quit trying. I’ll remember that, Jack.”

  Next morning, Schlesinger arrived an hour earlier than usual at the fort. He delivered his newspapers and was pleased to find his friend waiting for him at the mess tent.

  “Skip breakfast for now, Slinger,” Jack said hurriedly. “When I left the barracks, Sergeant McCall told me they still needed three good men. You’ll be one of them if we get moving.”

  Schlesinger slung his saddlebag over his shoulder, and they started in a jog trot across the drillfield. As they entered the recruiting barracks the first man they met was Lieutenant Beecher. “We don’t need any more boys,” he said firmly. “We want tough old buffalo men.”

  Politely, Schlesinger pleaded for a fair trial. “I want to be a scout,” he added. “How can I learn if I don’t start sometime?”

  “You have a point, boy,” Beecher conceded. “And you’ve got pluck. Ask the major what he thinks. He just walked in behind you.”

  At first, Major Forsyth was reluctant, but he also was impressed with Schlesinger’s sincerity and persistence. “Sergeant McCall, how many are now on our muster roll?”

  “Forty-nine, sir. We just recruited a couple of sidebinders who wanted to sign on as ‘Georgia’ and ‘Alabama,’ and though I persuaded them to give me more presentable names I sincerely doubt if they are genuine.”

  “Galvanized Yankees?”

  “I would guess so, sir.”

  “I hope those pure Confederate veterans we recruited don’t kick up a ruckus with their galvanized brethren.” Forsyth took out his pipe and tobacco. “Lieutenant Beecher, if you have no objection, we’ll close our quota by adding to our truly cosmopolitan company a young Jewish lad from the city of New York by name of Sigmund Schlesinger.”

  “I waive all objections,” Beecher replied.

  At two o’clock that afternoon, Forsyth’s Scouts, fifty strong, marched northwestward out of Fort Hays, with Lieutenant Beecher on the point as guide. The column was strung out loosely by twos, with the company’s youngest members, Stilwell and Schlesinger, assigned to the rear to keep the four pack mules from straggling. Late in the day, Major Forsyth called a 30-minute halt to rest mounts, re-set saddles, and allow time for a cold lunch from the pack of cooked rations that each man had been warned must last him for seven days.

  All afternoon, ridges of gray clouds obscured the sun and shortly after dark a drizzling rain began to fall. As neither Schlesinger nor Jack carried ponchos, they had to use their blankets for protection. Not until eleven o’clock that night did an order come down the column to make camp, and by that time both boys were thoroughly soaked.

  Up ahead somebody was swinging a lantern. Sergeant McCall’s deep voice sounded out of the dark night: “Dismount and form up by tens on me.”

  Schlesinger slid out of his saddle, stumbling in his weariness. Jack handed him the bridles of the first pair of mules. “Catch hold, Slinger. These ornery mules might take a notion to wander off.”

  After a great deal of confusion in the drizzle and darkness, the scouts arranged themselves in a ragged formation. McCall strode down the ranks, holding his lantern high, calling off names as he recognized faces. “Hurst, Murphy, Whitney, Gantt, Schlesinger. You men will take first guard, Gantt acting as sergeant. At 1:30 A.M. you will be relieved. Reveille at 4 A.M.”

  “Too bad,” Jack whispered, “you drawing guard first night, Slinger.”

  With the drizzle blowing into his face, Schlesinger unsaddled and picketed his horse, and then reported to the circle of lantern light which served as headquarters. “You must be Schlesinger,” a Southern voice drawled. A lean sun-bronzed face appeared in the dim light. “I’m Dick Gantt. We’re going out now to set up our posts.”

  How Gantt could find his way in the blackness was a mystery to Schlesinger, but he kept close at his heels, the other guards following. “You take this spot,” Gantt ordered softly. “Set yourself back under that old tree and keep your eyes along the creek. If you hear anything suspicious, holler. I’ll be around.”

  In a few moments, the others were gone, treading softly through wet undergrowth. Schlesinger could hear nothing but the constant drip of moisture from the trees. After a while his eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness, and he could see the shape of the creek running silently below him. He found a place between two root outcroppings where he could brace his back. Then he placed his Spencer across his knees, drew his wet blankets over his head and shoulders and stared into the blackness, listening.

  Soon the drizzle turned to rain, big drops pelting hard against the leaves above him. Gantt surprised him, appearing suddenly from nowhere. “Nasty night,” he commented. “Not likely to be Indians about here, and even if they was they’d likely be holed up trying to keep dry like us.”

  “You were a soldier in the war, weren’t you?” Schlesinger asked.

  “Sure was. All four years of it. Then we lost.”

  “You were a Rebel, then.”

  “Yessirree. Seven of us in this company was Confederates.” He hunkered down beside the boy, angling his hat forward so the rain would run off the wide brim.

  “What’s a Galvanized Yankee, Sergeant Gantt?”

  “Call me Dick. We’re not ranking in this outfit. A Galvanized Yankee? I reckon you mean old Georgia and Alabama. That pair was in a Union prison and took the oath to get out by joining the Union Army.” He laughed quietly. “They suspect the rest of us Southerners look on them as traitors, but that’s all in the past. If we’d been in their place we might’ve done the same—after all, they didn’t fight us—they were sent out West here to fight hostile Indians.” Gantt stood up, shaking the water off his leather coat. “Better be making my rounds.”

  The rain fell steadily, penetrating the sheltering tree, and Schlesinger’s blankets clung clammily to his shoulders. Weariness from the long ride combined with the rhythm of the rain made him sleepy, but every time he was about to drowse off, Gantt appeared to give him a friendly word. Once he did close his eyes, and he was never certain whether he actually fell asleep. This time a rich Irish brogue startled him wide awake: “Relief guard!” A lantern dropped before his face. “You asleep?” the voice demanded hoarsely. Beyond the lantern was a ruddy face with a tremendous mustache that seemed to extend from ear to ear. “If you was in the Queen’s Army, laddy boy, they’d be hanging you by the thumbs come morning.”

  “I was not asleep,” Schlesinger replied.

  “Then get along into your blankets. I was only giving you the gab.” He held the lantern higher. “You’re only a kid. What’s your name?”

  “Sigmund Schlesinger.”

  “Mine’s Martin Burke.”

  6

  Martin Burke

  August 29-September 5

  WHEN HE HEARD SERGEANT McCall’s whistle, Martin Burke circled the camp site and gathered in his guard detail. He was glad the rain had stopped, although judging from the gray dawnlight he doubted if there would be any morning sun to dry his soggy jeans. By the time he reached the camp, all the men were out of their wet blankets, as bedraggled a crew of human beings as he had ever seen.

  Glancing once more at the heavy sky, Burke strode over to the picket line where his horse was standing with head down,
its mane and tail beaded with raindrops. He dug his saddlebag out from under a heap of brush and found it almost dry. From it he took a folded saddle blanket and a muslin cloth. With a few quick strokes of the cloth he wiped most of the moisture from his horse’s back, and then flung up the dry blanket. As he was fastening the saddle girth he noticed Schlesinger nearby, changing his wet shirt for a dry one.

  “Well, now,” Burke called to him, “I think I shall do the same.”

  He stripped quickly, shivering in the morning chill, and pulled on his only set of dry clothing—a sailor’s blue uniform with bell-bottomed breeches. Several of the scouts coming up to saddle their mounts stared at him in wonderment. He grinned back at them. “I might as well give you chappies the whole show,” he remarked cheerfully, and drew a pancake sailor hat out of his bag, clapped it upon his head, and danced a step or two of a hornpipe.

  “Great day in the morning!” The comment was from Major Forsyth, who was standing with hands on hips, his head thrown back in mock amazement. “A sailor on the plains of Kansas! Burke, you told us you were in the British Army, not the Navy!”

  Burke quickly stood to attention, saluting before he remembered that such military forms were not required of Forsyth’s Scouts. “Sir, I won these blues in what you might call a game of chance at St. Louis. They’re the only dry rigging I have.”

  Forsyth shook his head slowly. “I may rue the day I promised you scouts that you could wear what you pleased. Sergeant McCall!”

  McCall came up, leading his horse. “Yes, sir?”

  “Lieutenant Beecher wants two men to ride as forward flankers this morning. He suggested Trudeau and that youngster, Stilwell.”

  “I’ll pass the order along to them, sir.” McCall repressed a smile when he looked at Burke’s sailor uniform. “Burke, you take Stilwell’s place with the pack mules. Schlesinger’s bringing them in now.”

  After a hasty breakfast without coffee, the scouts marched out along a trail that followed the winding creek. Burke fell back in the rear, riding alongside Schlesinger. For the first hour the mules refused to keep a steady pace, but after the stubborn animals learned that they must move along to avoid proddings, they fell into the rhythm of the column.

  “You still sleepy, lad?” Burke asked.

  Schlesinger confessed that he could have spent another hour or more in his blankets. “I was just wondering,” he added, “if that boy who took my newspaper deliveries has made his rounds yet.”

  “Sure, now, that’s where I’ve seen your face before. Bringing papers into the Hays City hotel. I’ve been working out of there with Ben Holladay’s teamsters. Maybe should’ve stayed, but this sort of life seemed more exciting.”

  Admitting that he had joined for the same reason, Schlesinger said that he would not mind his aching bones, his chafed skin, the hot sun, and cold rain if he could only learn something about scouting.

  “My sentiments exactly, Slinger,” Burke replied. “True enough I’ve seen service in India with a fine Staffordshire regiment. And I’ve soldiered with the New York Volunteers. But out here on the plains I’m as much a greenhorn as if I’d never suited myself in a uniform.” He tugged thoughtfully at his long mustache. “It occurs to me that at first opportunity we should ask Lieutenant Beecher if he would mind our riding in advance tomorrow so that we may learn something about tracking and reading Indian signs.”

  That evening after the column had made an early camp on Saline River, Burke approached Beecher with his proposal, and to the Irishman’s delight, the lieutenant readily agreed.

  Next morning Burke and Schlesinger were relieved of duty with the pack mules and assigned as observers with Lieutenant Beecher. They rode out proudly under a clear sky, the air crisp and invigorating. Before noon Burke sighted the first buffalo herd, far off to the north. Beecher sent him back at a gallop to inform Major Forsyth that buffalo meat was available, and the major immediately dispatched a small hunting party with orders to kill only enough animals to supply fresh meat for the company.

  Early that same afternoon, Beecher picked up the trail of an Indian party—the faint rain-washed marks of travois poles. “Not a war party because their women were along,” he pointed out to Burke and Schlesinger. “And because the rain has fallen on them we know that the tracks are at least two days old.”

  Ordering his observers to remain where they were, Beecher rode back to confer with Major Forsyth. In half an hour he returned with two scouts, who were ordered forward at a trot to follow the Indian trail northward. Beecher turned his horse in the same direction, motioning for Burke and Schlesinger to fall in behind him.

  The land soon became more broken, with dry gullies, and low ridges covered with scrubby brush. Occasionally Burke sighted the flankers, Stilwell and Trudeau, off to the right and left. Once he had to detour around a large prairie dog village, and was amused by the chirping barks of the animals as they plunged headlong into their holes. A band of antelope took shape suddenly out of a creek bottom, circled the advance riders and then vanished as if blown away over a rise in the plain.

  “Personally I prefer antelope steak to buffalo,” Beecher commented, “but Major Forsyth has ordered us not to fire any more weapons. Just in case there may be an Indian camp nearby, which I doubt.”

  “Why do you think there is no camp?” Burke asked politely.

  “If there were a tepee village in ten miles of here, hunters would have been out among those buffalo and antelope herds. It takes a lot of meat to keep an Indian village fed.” A sudden drumming of hoofbeats caused Beecher to pull his mount up short. Moments later a horseman appeared on a ridge just ahead, halting and waving his hat above his head. “It’s Joe Lane,” Beecher said. “He thinks he sees Indians.”

  The three urged their horses up the rise. “Signs of a big camp on the Solomon,” Lane said matter-of-factly. “They may be leaving. Alderdice sighted animals moving off in the distance.”

  A mile ahead they found the other scout, Tom Alderdice, waiting in a patch of scrub oaks. He pointed toward a narrow ribbon of green and gray that was the Solomon River, and Beecher fixed his field glass on the spot. “They’re animals all right,” he said. “Antelope.”

  Alderdice grunted. “Don’t tell me that’s not a camp site down there.”

  “It’s a camp site and a big one,” the lieutenant replied. “And fairly recent I should say. Let’s have a look at it.”

  As they rode down the slope in a slow trot, Beecher signaled the flankers, Trudeau and Stilwell, to come in and join them.

  During the following half hour, Burke and Schlesinger were interested observers as five experienced scouts read what was written on the site of the abandoned Cheyenne camp. After examining dead cooking fires, the condition of the grass and horse droppings, the scouts agreed that the Indians had been gone about a week. By counting the brown rings on the grass where tepees had stood they estimated that at least a thousand Cheyennes had been there, perhaps three hundred warriors. The horseshoe shape of the camp, with its opening toward the east indicated that they had gathered for a ceremony, probably a sun dance. Across a shallow ford in the river, they found a smaller camp, and then Pete Trudeau discovered a broken arrow shaft with Arapaho markings. “No women in the Arapaho camp,” Trudeau declared. “All warriors.” He also found something else, moccasin tracks with the toes pointed outward. “White man’s feet,” Trudeau insisted.

  “There’ve been rumors of white renegades traveling with a band of raiding Arapahos,” Beecher said.

  By this time Major Forsyth had arrived with the column, and he listened carefully while Beecher told him what they had found. “Cheyenne and Arapaho,” the lieutenant added. “They’ve been working themselves up to something. They moved westward, following game herds along the creek.”

  Forsyth was consulting his map. “Solomon River meanders out into dry forks somewhere north of Fort Wallace. Even though they’ve a week’s start on us, we’ll follow their tail.”

  For the first four
days of September, Forsyth’s Scouts moved steadily westward along the Solomon. Each morning, Martin Burke and his young friend, Schlesinger, rode out early with Lieutenant Beecher. Their saddle weariness vanished, their chafed skin healed, their sore muscles hardened. More important, by keeping their eyes and ears alert, they were absorbing a considerable store of scouting lore.

  On September 4 rations began to run low, and Forsyth ordered hunters out to search for game. Grass was sparse on the upper Solomon, however, and the Indians moving ahead of them had taken what animals may have been there. For breakfast that day, Burke ate his last scrap of bacon, and during the noon rest stop he finished his last piece of hard bread. When the column went into camp that night, Major Forsyth announced that they were forty miles from Fort Wallace and would try to reach that post on the morrow. He added that Jack Stilwell had managed to bag an antelope, and that volunteers were needed to prepare stew for the company.

  Next morning Burke swallowed a cup of weak coffee, and joined Beecher and Schlesinger. Half an hour later, the Indian trail they had been following turned abruptly northward. “We’ll wait here,” the lieutenant said. When Forsyth arrived with the column, they held a hurried conference, and the general agreement was that the Indians were heading for the Republican River. “More grass up there,” Trudeau said. “Plenty buffalo now.”

  “And a good base for raiding from,” Forsyth added. “How many days are they ahead of us?”

  Some of the scouts guessed three days, others four. Forsyth shook his head. “If we were not out of rations, if we had fresh horses—”

  “They’ll stay put a while,” Beecher said, “when they make camp.”

  Trudeau agreed. “They stay through Drying Grass Moon, I think.”

  Forsyth stared for a minute at the Indian trail, and then said as if thinking aloud: “We’ll make a forced march to Fort Wallace for rations and fresh mounts. Let’s move out.”