by Will Henry
He knew, from Stark’s telling him, that the river was a scant ten miles from the outlet of Four-Mile Canyon. Normally, it would have meant about a three or four o’clock drive, but the plan that was turning in the big Texan’s mind demanded that they bring the herd into Stark’s “funnel” just at sunset.
The Indians had two favorite times of day for working on white men: early morning, late afternoon.
Their morning schedule had already been frustrated by Ben’s unprecedented, twenty-four-mile night drive. Now a man wanted to give them all the time they might feel they needed to get ahead of the herd and into their last chance positions behind the converging lines of the funnel ridges. At the same time, he wanted to hold his thirst-driven herd as long on the trail as he could. The plan also called for that, and in capital letters.
At two o’clock they sighted the winding, dark line of naked cottonwoods watermarking the distant Yellowstone. At the same time the wind, dead and waiting all day long, began to stir the two-inch curl of the buffalo grass—from the west, and from the river.
Feeling it fresh and clean on his sweating face, Ben shouted to the swing riders, stood in his stirrups and waved frantically to those following the drag.
With his signal, the cowboys swung their ponies wide of the staggering cattle, raced them forward. They could feel that river wind as quick as Ben, and read its meaning without his yell and wave. Even as they spurred their mounts to head the herd, the first steers were flinging up their heads, beginning to break into a stumbling trot.
In as many seconds as there were desperate riders ringing them, all the cattle were getting their caked noses up and following the leaders. Another two or three minutes and the whole herd would have been running, but Ben had moved in scant time. With all twenty-five fulltime riders in front of them, racing their mounts across the point and the forward shoulders of the swing, the run for the river was forestalled.
By four o’clock, with the Yellowstone but three miles ahead and the spreading wings of Stark’s funnel beginning in less than a mile, even Saleratus, his Mexican campboys, the night wrangler and Nathan Stark, himself, were cowboying with the best of them. And needing to. It was all, and maybe more than all, that they or any other thirty men could do to hold the bellowing cattle back.
Everything now depended on their ability to do so for the next forty-five minutes, or until they had every head deep into the funnel.
There was a thirty-first rider in that yelling, cursing, wild riding point those last endless minutes before the river. But she was not on the company payroll and didn’t count—except to Ben Allison and her other twenty-five big-hatted Texas worshippers.
If Ben and the men had thought the girl was something through the Red River rains, or the Platte Valley heat, or the six hundred miles of cowboy toil up the Sioux-ridden Bozeman, they hadn’t yet begun to know Nella Torneau.
“Goddam it, Ben!” yelled old Chickasaw, “git thet crazy gal back in the wagons ’fore she kills herse’f! She’s runnin’ in on them steers like she was out to bust a rodeo record or suthin’. Lookee there! Lookit thet, by Gawd! You see her run thet goddam paint mare of hers square inter thet dun steer was beginnin’ to run yonder? Jesus Christ! She knocked him plumb on his goddam butt. Git her out’n here!”
“He needed knockin’,” yelled Ben. “Leave her be. She’s wuth a roundup crew. Goddamit, she’s got all the boys ridin’ clean over their fool heads tryin’ to keep up with her and look good. Christ! You ever in yer life see sech a girl, Chickasaw!”
“Not in mine, nor nobody else’s!” bellowed the old cowboy. “Watch it on yer right, boy!” he shouted suddenly “Thet roan bull, yonder!”
Ben spun the black, couldn’t head the big six-year-old herdbull that had broken past Waco and was running for the river. He flashed the .44, threw two shots from the hip into him, quartering away. The bull bawled piteously buck-jumped sideways, crashed into the dirt of the wagon road, his broken neck doubled under him. The point of steers following him out of the herd broke their starting run, split around his sprawling carcass, hesitated to sniff curiously at it. Waco and Hogjaw Bivins were in front of them then, their cutting horses moving like eight-hundred-pound cats. They got them bunched, hammered them back. The herd rumbled ahead, unbroken.
A short four hundred yards west now, the funnel narrowed for its slightly north-twisting exit into the Yellowstone bottoms. The bottoms themselves were hidden by the turn, though less than half a mile distant.
It was now or never.
Ben waved up Chickasaw and Waco. With the three lathered ponies held down to an excited, sidedancing lope, the incessantly bellowing cattle crowding up on their nervous rumps, the conversation of their tightjawed riders was necessarily succinct.
“You all clear on it now, boys?” said Ben.
“You ride ahead, up yonder ridge,” barked Waco. “If the Sioux are set and waitin’ like you reckon them to be, you wave three times. If they ain’t, you wave onct.”
“If we git the three waves,” growled Chickasaw, “meanin’ they’re out there ’twixt us and the river, ev’rybody pulls out from in front of the herd and toilers you up the ridge.”
“That’s it,” said Ben. “All set?”
“Cain’t wait,” shrugged Waco caustically. “I only hope yer second guess is better’n yer fust. Dammit, Ben! We ain’t seen hide nor hair on them Sioux you figgered would bottle our butts onct we had the hull outfit inter the funnel.”
“I reckon Waco’s got suthin’ there, boy,” old Chickasaw scowled. “She ain’t pannin out square on yer leetle skedjool so fur.”
Ben stood in his stirrups, looking quickly back across the herd. They saw his pale eyes narrow just ahead of the wolf-spread of the grin.
“Ain’t it?” he rasped, dropping back into the saddle. “Grab another look, boys. Tell me whut you see sproutin’ them ridge-tops back yonder.”
Waco and Chickasaw twisted around. They did not need to stand in their stirrups. The late sunlight was fresh and clean along the ridges behind them, and it was to their backs, not bothering the widening squint of their eyes in the least.
“They ain’t turkey feathers,” was the laconic way Waco chose to put it.
“Nor yet barnyard chicken,” agreed Chickasaw with equal prairie savoir faire. “I’d hazard they was mainly eagle,” if there was such a thing as a hurried Texas drawl, Chickasaw was hurrying one, “with mebbe a small hatch of hawk th’owed in fer the pure hell of it.”
For a “hazard,” the weathered Texan’s opinion was a pure-good guess.
Lining both ridgetops, motionless as so many red cameos against the slant of the late sun, were no less than three hundred mounted Sioux. And even as the three cowboys saw them and Ben was shouting the warning back to Hogjaw and Charley Stringer, the hostile horsemen were sweeping down the ridges onto the level track of the Bozeman Road below.
The herd was sealed off. Right on schedule.
“I will see you boys in Sunday school,” said Ben Allison, and sent the black gelding in a cat-scramble up the ridge.
Minutes later he was atop the hills, seeing beyond him the sparkling, snow water sweep the Yellowstone. And seeing, on this side of it, what thirty-one Texas lives depended on. And on the long-odds chance of which he had gambled those lives.
As Chickasaw was wont to say in his moments of rare sentiment for his jockey-sized friend, Waco Fentriss, “There could be a leetle more of it, but it couldn’t be put together no better.”
Crazy Horse could not have lined his braves up any more perfectly if he had consulted Ben beforehand.
There were maybe six hundred of them between the tunneling outlet of the Bozeman Road and the river. The Sioux chief had them spread in a quarter-mile semicircle, his center based on the road, his flanks cupping toward the ridge upon which Ben sat the gelding. And had Ben been able to understand Sioux, and Crazy Horse’s voice been equal to spanning the distance between them, the Sioux leader could not have shouted his intentions any
more clearly.
Tashunka Witko knew he had all the red power in that part of Montana either mounted up behind him or presently closing off the herd’s rear. He knew the Ride-A-Heaps had no chance at all this time. And that he could afford the luxury of hitting them head-on, to finish it once and for all in real north plains style. He knew why he had trailed them four hundred miles, and he knew why it wasn’t going to be necessary to trail them another four hundred yards.
When the army had started its string of forts across the Powder River Treaty Land, Crazy Horse had known what it meant to him and to his people: the coming of the settler, the killing off of the buffalo, the end of the Indian. He had known then, as he knew now, what he had to do about that and what he would do about it. The Sioux had to close the Bozeman Road for all time. He knew that they had had it closed, too, until these cursed Ride-A-Heaps and their badsmelling spotted buffalo had dared what the entire United States Army had not—to break it wide open again, Sioux or no Sioux.
He knew, finally, when word came to him in the war-camp on the Tongue, that the Texas cowboys had pushed their great herd past Fort Kearney in the dead of night, that Wakan Tonka, the Sioux Great Spirit, had touched him, Tashunka Witko, upon the shoulder.
And he knew that Crazy Horse was chosen from among all his people to strike these invaders into the bloody dirt of the Bozeman, to show their craven white brothers what the Dakota People meant when they made their sacred mark on a treaty paper, and to close the Thieves Road forever.
Indeed, Tashunka Witko knew many things. In all his lonely, skyswept empire there were perhaps but two small things he did not know.
Ben Allison for one.
And the way of three thousand thirst-crazed Texas longhorns with whatever might stand between them and their first water in seventy-two hours, for another.
In the last minute, Crazy Horse saw Ben on the ridge. The Sioux chief’s eyes were as good as any cowboy’s. His memory maybe even better.
He knew Ben at once.
He jumped his piebald roan stallion out into the open road, fifty yards ahead of his warriors. He slid him on his hocks, reared him up in a forehoof-lashing stand. He held his rifle high above his head in both hands, shaking it at Ben. His deep-throated Oglala shout rolled across the open ground and up the ridge. “Tshaoh! Tshaoh!” Then, up-ending the rifle, he fired four shots into the air, spun the wiry little stallion back towards his waiting braves.
Ben’s mouth twisted.
The rifle, held up in both hands, meant the chief was letting him know he had Big War on his mind. The four shots meant he was enlisting, after his devout fashion, Wakan Tonka’s blessing in the bloody matter. Four, Pawnee Perez had told Ben at Fort Kearney, was the Sioux Good Medicine number. When they used it on you, you were to look out right sharp, for it meant they figured they had you where your hair was short and you couldn’t get loose without leaving your scalp.
Perez had also told him another number. One the Sioux hated. Five. A very big number. Very bad medicine number. By a heap the worst they knew how to count to.
Ben flung up his Henry, both hands high with it. Then he dropped its buttplate to his hip, levered the five shots into the clouding sunset overhead.
With that, he was standing in his stirrups, black hat in hand, checking for the last time the bawling mill of the vast herd below and behind him.
The cattle were crazy now. They were piling and jamming into the thin line of riders fronting them, their swollen tongues lolling, their alkali-crusted eyes rolling wildly. They were riding the rumps of the steers fronting them, goring right and left with their four-foot horns, crushing down their weaker fellows, driving them underfoot, bellowing in a cracked and hideous bawl their wildness for the water they could smell but not see.
“Let ’em go I” screamed Ben. And flagged the black hat three times across the cloud-red stain of the five o’clock sky.
A Texas longhorn can run like a deer, rage like a lion, and fears a man on horseback no more than does a Spanish fighting bull. Three thousand of them, broken out of a two hundred-yard-wide unloading chute in wildeyed, full stampede, insane for water and with nothing between them and that water but a few hundred mounted Indians, is a sight no man forgets.
To Ben and his cheering, rebel yelling cowboys crowding the ridgetop above, it was the finest sight Texas eyes ever beheld.
For certain of the stunned Sioux, to an exact number never really determined, it was the last, worst sight the human eye can hold—the sudden fearful exposure on widened retina, of the skull-grinning picture of coming death.
The distance from the funnel mouth to the river, was no more than four hundred yards. The Sioux had their ambush line set midway. They had only time to look down the hoarsely-lowing throats of the maddened lead steers, and to jam their ponies into a milling tangle of attempted escape, when the following main wave of the stampede struck them.
The Indian ponies, unbroken to the strange smell of the white man’s cattle and to the foreign thunder of their harsh bellowing, went crazy.
As usual, the horsemanship of their red masters was superb. Time and again the awestricken cowboys saw its incredible evidence. A feathered brave, off his pony and down and helpless on the ground: a companion riding full gallop under the nose of certain, crushing death, scooping him up to safety and somehow getting the double-mounted pony out of the herd and away. A bonneted chief, knocked or horn-hooked from his pony, bounding up and swingvaulting to another riderless and loose-galloping mount on the dead, wild run. The bravery and skill of the Sioux were literally unbelievable, and the spellbound cowboys sat and stared in simple, speechless amazement.
But in the end the herd began to thin, and Crazy Horse to gather his battered forces about him in the slowing dust of its drag.
This was the moment for men from Texas and rifles from Illion Forge, New York.
Ben led the charge down the ridge squarely into them, his riders fanning into a spread line as they bore down on the dismayed Sioux. At a hundred yards they opened with the Rolling Blocks, the effect of the volley instant and deadly at the range and into such close packed ranks. Then the hard-running cowponies were at seventy-five and at fifty yards, and the Remingtons were being jammed back into their saddle scabbards and Colonel Colt was out and speaking extemporaneously on the informal subject of “Longhorn Stampedes for Water and Hip-shooting Sioux at Forty Feet.”
It was more than red flesh and blood could bear—or intended to.
The Sioux broke it off as short as a buffalo lance in a dead bull’s bottom. They streamed away north and south by the tens, the scores, the hundreds. And as they went, Ben’s cowboys slipped the Rolling Blocks back out, legged off their horses, hit the ground in bowlegged, offhand stances and continued to pour it on until the last buck was luckily beyond the extreme range of the Remingtons.
Which was something like four hundred yards and five minutes later.
The Battle of the Bozeman Grossing of the Yellowstone was over as of 5:25 P.M., October 23, 1866.
And the only scratch Ben Allison’s Texans took in it from start to finish was the one Waco gave himself while celebrating the event by shaving with Chickasaw’s straightedge the following morning.
Chapter Twenty-three
On the third day west of the Yellowstone the snows, threatening since October and Fort Kearney, began. The morning of the fourth day there was six inches on the ground and the heavy promise of more to come in the sullen clouds to the north.
But the clouds held back. They continued to crouch in respectful place along the horizon of the Three Forks country and the high sourcelands of the Big Muddy, bade, as it were, by old Ka-dih himself, to stand and cry “Halt! enough!” and to let his quarter-bred Comanche grandson finish his mighty journey in peace.
Whether it was the will of the venerable Kwahadi god, or the work of a simple, squaw-winter vagary of Montana weather, the 1500-mile hegira of Nathan Stark’s great herd ended peacefully.
It was twilight
of December 3 when Ben ordered the leaders thrown into a halting mill and the herd bedded on the Emigrant Gulch headlands. Shortly after 10:00 A.M. the following day, the 4th, the point steers ambled out of the gulch’s western terminus, led their motley-colored, high-withered followers down upon history and the little settlement of Bozeman, Montana.
Here Stark left the wagons, pushing on with the Texans and the herd around the hills north of Virginia City and so, at last, into the trails-end grasslands of the Gallatin. On his orders, the cattle were moved out across the great valley’s floor, to the river. There they were turned loose and scattered, ten miles north and south, along the reaching shelter of the Gallatin’s timbered brakes. It was December 8, 1866.
By nightfall of the 9th, Nathan Stark was seated at his desk beyond Esau Lazarus’s little green door in the Black Nugget Saloon, paying off his twenty-five hired Texas hands.
To each man he gave, in addition to his regular wages, a $100 bonus, the Remington Rolling Block rifle he had been issued below Fort Kearney, a house-tab for all the whiskey he could personally carry out of the Black Nugget before he himself was carried out of it, and stage fare from the nearest linepoint station in Montana Territory to Fort Worth, Texas. To each, as well, he gave a firm clasp of his tough hand, a steady blue-eyed statement of his personal thanks and obligations, and the expressed hope they would one and all think well of Nathan Stark along any trail the future might see them riding.
It was an impressive thing, this slow passing of awkward, highbooted Texas riders through Esau Lazarus’s banking room, seeing them take the big Montanan’s hand, not quite knowing what to do with it, stammering, blushing, trying in their rough ways to pass it off as though it was the regular thing to get cash bonuses, gift guns, free whiskey and first-class fare home from just any old cattle drive.
