“Nonetheless it was a successful battle,” Merritt argued.
Eugene Carr shook his head. “With your permission, General—it wasn’t a battle. More of a minor skirmish.”
For a moment Merritt appeared shocked by the stinging criticism. Finally he said with even iciness, “I will extend you the courtesy of reading my report before I submit it. Be that as it may, you can write your own subreport exactly as you see it, General Carr.”
The lieutenant colonel replied with a forced, stony civility, “Thank you. I will.”
After the troopers made camp that night, several brazen Cheyenne warriors cautiously visited the fringes of the Fifth Cavalry bivouac, contrite and far from belligerent while they actively sought out the tall scout dressed in the black velvet costume decked with scarlet braid—that warrior with the long brown curls who had conquered their war chief called Yellow Hair.
While the fight was still fresh in every man’s mind that Monday evening and on into the morning of the eighteenth, Merritt set his officers to penning their separate reports. That duty done, many of the company commanders, as well as the enlisted personnel, took this first opportunity in many days to write home—telling loved ones and friends of their grueling forced march, of the daring surprise they laid for the fleeing Cheyenne, and of Cody’s shoot-out with the warrior whose name Little Bat incorrectly translated as “Yellow Hand.” With every new rendition told around their mess fires or expanded in writing home, the skirmish became a battle, and Cody’s fight with Yellow Hair became Buffalo Bill’s glorious and deadly duel with Yellow Hand, the most fearsome Cheyenne chief on the plains.
On Tuesday morning Merritt marched his column on to Camp Robinson, where he and the rest of his command expected to enjoy as much as two days of layover while they waited for their wagon train to catch up before having to resume their journey to Fort Laramie. Captain Emil Adams’s Company C rejoined the regiment at Red Cloud Agency after Merritt had detached them on 14 July to watch over the crossing of the Running Water. The colonel used his time that night of the eighteenth to compose a report of the fight of the Warbonnet he would telegraph the following morning to Major Townsend, commander at Laramie. From there Townsend wired the news to headquarters in Omaha, the report flying on to Chicago and points east where everyone waited impatiently for any crumb of news about a victory—no matter how small—something good to come from all the disappointment and disaster that so far had greeted the nation that Centennial summer.
It was there at Red Cloud that the Fifth’s famed scout penned his own letter to wife Louisa, back at home with their children in Rochester, New York.
We have come in here for rations. We have had a fight. I killed Yellow Hand a Cheyenne Chief in a single-handed fight. You will no doubt hear of it through the paper. I am going as soon as I can reach Fort Laramie the place we are headed for now. Sent the war bonnet, bridle, whip, arms and his scalp to Kernwood to put up in his window.
… We are now ordered to join Gen. Crook and will be there in two weeks.
Merritt was indeed still under Sheridan’s explicit orders to reinforce Crook’s expedition languishing in the lee of the Big Horn Mountains. Every one of those troopers figured the wait at Camp Robinson for their supply wagons would give the regiment a welcome chance to recoup themselves. Instead, the surprising Lieutenant Hall hoved into sight at noon that Tuesday, leading his short column of his white-topped company wagons, a scant few hours behind the hard-marching cavalry.
Their reports complete, Merritt gave his company commanders no more than two hours to reoutfit, draw rations and ammunition from Hall’s train, then at two-thirty P.M. put the Fifth back on the trail to Fort Laramie. After a march of ten miles on the eighteenth, making another twenty-five miles on the nineteenth, they pushed a tiresome twenty-eight miles on the twentieth. Putting the last thirty miles behind them, the regiment marched into Fort Laramie just after three o’clock on the afternoon of the twenty-first.
That Friday evening Bill Cody found King at his mess fire, enjoying a cup of coffee and relishing some of the sutler’s tobacco in his battered pipe.
“Ho, Bill!” King called out cheerily. “Come join us!”
“You’re just the man I was hoping to find,” Cody replied, settling on a cottonwood stump at the fire.
The lieutenant said, “The fellas here would like you to tell us again of your fight with Yellow Hand.”
Cody leaned back, rubbing his palms across his thighs, and nodded. “All right—but with one guarantee from you, Lieutenant.”
“What’s that?” King asked.
“You write down what I tell you—since it happened to me and I’m the one ought to know.”
“Write it down?” the lieutenant inquired.
“Yes. That’s why I came to find you: wanted to ask you if you’d write a newspaper story.”
“A newspaper story?”
Cody nodded, again rubbing his hands expectantly on his buckskin britches. “There’s others—these correspondents and such—they’re going to write their own stories their own versions of what happened … but I want to be sure there’s one story written just the way it really happened, Lieutenant.”
“Why, sure!” King answered enthusiastically. “I can do that, Bill. I’d be honored to do that for you, in fact. Have you got a paper in mind you want me to see gets your own story?”
“The Herald.”
“New York?”
“That’s right.”
King got to his feet, anxious. “I’ll get some paper from my tent and be right back.”
After that first night the lieutenant, that famed scout, and the Fifth Cavalry did not have long to tarry at Fort Laramie. Sheridan was ordering up the rest of the regiment to join in the march to reinforce Crook. Dispatches awaiting Merritt with post commander Townsend stated that Captain George F. Price’s E Company was already on its way from Fort Hays by rail. F Company under Captain J. Scott Payne was to join Price along the Smoky Hill line so that both companies would ride to Cheyenne together.
But after Sheridan had Company H coming from Fort Wallace, Kansas, and L Troop on its way from Fort Lyon in Colorado, the lieutenant general changed his mind. Instead of sending them on north with Merritt to reinforce Crook, Sheridan decided that once they arrived at Laramie, both companies were ordered east to bolster the defenses at Camp Robinson in the wake of the Cheyenne’s attempt to flee the reservation.
After resting no more than twelve hours at Fort Laramie, Merritt and Carr had the men up at first light on the twenty-second, intending to use only one day to take on supplies from the post quartermaster for Hall’s wagon train, as well as force the fort’s and regimental blacksmiths to work overtime at their fires, anvils, and hammers, reshoeing every animal that needed work before heading north to the Big Horn country.
Before the Fighting Fifth would again march into harm’s way.
This time against Crazy Horse and that Hunkpapa visionary known as Sitting Bull.
It wasn’t women.
But the supply train those seven companies of Chambers’s infantry escorted up to Camp Cloud Peak from Fort Fetterman had brought with it the most seductive lure just shy of rounded breasts and full thighs.
Whiskey.
A civilian peddler had lived up to his reputation and become a bummer, talking Major Alexander Chambers into allowing him to bring his own wagon and two teamsters along for the trip north with the army’s supply wagons. Having learned that Major Arthur, the district’s temporary paymaster, would accompany Chambers north to pay Crook’s men in the field, this wily civilian realized he’d have a captive market all to himself: soldiers with nowhere to spend what little money they might have in their pockets after seeing to it some of their pay was sent back east, home to loved ones. No matter what army scrip those soldiers would have left, that whiskey trader was bound and determined to relieve them of every last farthing.
And for his special customers—those who had a bit more money jangling down in
the pockets of their wool britches—the peddler even let the grapevine know that he had a couple of women who wouldn’t mind servicing the inhabitants of Crook’s cavalry camp—for a small fee, of course.
That pair who came all the way north from Fetterman disguised as teamsters went right to work lying down on the job to earn their wages the very next day, the fourteenth of July. Problem was, there didn’t seem to be that many soldiers who could afford the trader’s pricey whiskey, much less his more seductive wares.
At Camp Cloud Peak was one soldier who did have just enough money to get himself into a fine mess—Captain Alexander Sutorious.
A good man he was, Seamus believed, thinking back now to that Monday, the seventeenth, when Crook finally discovered what had been going on behind his back all the while the general was coming and going, in and out of camp on his hunting trips into the hills. When Crook got wind of the shenanigans—his pale, mottled face turned a pure crimson.
Having ordered the peddler arrested, as well as seizing the civilian’s whiskey barrels and taking the two working girls into custody, Crook had no more than settled down to a cup of coffee that afternoon when Lieutenant Bourke had shown up with news of the most unsettling kind.
Faced with the undeniable evidence, the general had no other choice but to place Captain Sutorious under arrest—charged with being drunk on duty. He had failed to place his pickets correctly for that evening’s watch. The following day court was held, and Sutorious was found guilty in the field and relieved of his command. The captain, as well as the three civilians, would remain with the expedition until he could be sent south to Fetterman, then on to Fort Laramie for incarceration until Sutorious would be separated from the service.
“I think the sentence was too damned severe,” John Finerty complained to Donegan that night after the trial.
Seamus wagged his head. “Can’t agree with you more, Johnny. But that was the decision of the man’s fellow officers.”
“But if they thought they could get away with getting drunk and poking one of those ugly wenches—the rest of ’em would’ve done the same damned thing!”
Donegan had to agree. Sutorious was just the unlucky one to get caught. Or the one who suffered a lapse in good sense that compelled him to drink just before he had to go on picket duty.
“I just don’t understand those officers punishing one of their own that way,” Seamus continued. “The captain’s sergeants ain’t no shavetails. So what’s the rub when Sutorious got a little too much barleycorn under the gills? His sergeants know how to post and rotate the guard.”
“Seeing what damage that whiskey peddler’s caused,” Finerty replied, “I wish the field court had the jurisdiction over that civilian.”
Seamus asked, “If it did—what do you think should happen?”
“Understand that I really liked Sutorious,” the newsman answered. “I think he’s a damned fine soldier. So I’d like to see the son of a bitch flogged before the whole camp, whipped within an inch of his goddamned life!”
After the disgraced Sutorious was shipped south with the next escort and Crook impounded the whiskey, putting it under the control of the surgeons for the rest of the campaign, the momentary excitement was over, and things settled back into the same dull routine.
Waiting for the Fifth Cavalry to arrive. Fishing. And waiting. Hunting. And more waiting. Reading again and again the old newspapers that told them that five commissioners had been appointed to negotiate with the Sioux for the Black Hills; news that Rutherford B. Hayes, who had commanded a brigade under Crook in West Virginia during the Civil War, had been nominated by the Republicans for President.
And still more waiting.
On the nineteenth four Crow warriors rode into camp with dispatches for Crook from the Limping Chief—Colonel John Gibbon—on the Yellowstone. However, there proved to be nothing new in those messages: after waiting for many days for the return of the three white couriers General Terry had sent south, Gibbon had feared the worst and merely copied Terry’s letter to Crook before sending it off with a quartet of his own Montana-column scouts.
The success of those Crow couriers encouraged Crook to urge civilian packer Richard Kelly to give it one more try pushing north with letters destined for Terry. In just the past week Kelly had made two attempts, so just before dawn on the twentieth, the mule skinner slipped out of camp, hoping this third journey would be the charm.
That day, as they did early every morning, Washakie dispatched his warriors into the surrounding hills to gather what information they could on the movements of the Sioux. It wasn’t long before the savvy old chief was able to advise Three Stars that his soldiers were facing as many as three Lakota warriors to every one of Crook’s men. And to add the insult of salt rubbed in Crook’s brooding wound, nearly every night brought another of those frightening, lightning-fast, but ineffective raids on the herds that succeeded in accomplishing nothing but raising the gorge of every man who wanted to be done with the endless waiting so they could march north to find Sitting Bull and his savages.
With every raid one thing was becoming abundantly clear: the enemy sure wasn’t abandoning the country, and they sure weren’t acting at all intimidated by Crook’s army.
One scouting party led by Washakie’s son discovered that the great camp was breaking up slowly—many of the smaller bands moseying unhurried and unpressed to the northeast, in the direction of the Powder. But, reported another party of the Shoshone who had just returned from the headwaters of the Little Bighorn, perhaps the Sioux camps were breaking up because they were apparently growing hungry. In one abandoned village Washakie’s scouts found hundreds of dog and pony bones.
Before this campaign was out, the Indians wouldn’t be the only ones to survive by eating their animals.
“Washakie says that time will take its toll on the Lakota,” John Bourke explained one evening at a fire.
“Yeah, time will have to!” Finerty grumbled. “This army’s growing fat and lazy with nothing to do.”
“I remember when Crook had this bunch lean and trail hardened,” Seamus agreed. “Back in March, and again when we headed for the Rosebud too.”
“You fellas have to look at things the way the general is,” Bourke said. “The commander who finally goes into battle against Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and all their hellions will be studied in the decades to come at the Academy. And greater still, the nation will grant that general every reward, even the presidency.”
“Like Washington?” Finerty replied. “Like Jackson and Taylor and Sam Grant himself?”
“Exactly,” Bourke said. “Because the spoils are so rich this summer—it seems to me that it’s now every general for himself.”
Finerty asked, “So why is Crook relying so much on that Washakie?”
“Hold on there, John. Don’t you think we should give that Shoshone chief credit?” Bourke responded. “He’s recommending that the general just sit tight until all the problems of quarrels between petty chiefs, of feeding so many people, of grazing so many ponies—all those problems will mean the breakup of that huge village Custer’s regiment bumped into.”
Unbeknownst to Crook, his soldiers, and his Shoshone scouts, that village had already fragmented and the splinters were wandering off to the four winds. Only the summer roamers, those warriors who fled the reservations each spring and hurried back to the agencies every autumn, remained behind to harass the soldier camp every night and set new fires in the grass each day.
The toughest of their lot, the hostile winter roamers under such chiefs as Crazy Horse, Crow King, Sitting Bull, and Gall, had abandoned the Tongue River country not long after the Sibley skirmish. Already they were heading toward the hunting grounds around the Owl River, what the white man called the Moreau. From there they would wander over to the Thick Timber River, shown on the army’s maps as the Little Missouri—there to spend the rest of the long, lazy summer days hunting buffalo in peace.
Twice they had defeated the sol
diers sent against them. Again and again they had stymied the soldiers sitting on their thumbs beside the Elk River.* And they had realized that Three Stars Crook was clearly in no rush to leave the security of his camp in the shadows of the Big Horn Mountains.
“It will be a good summer,” the Sioux were likely telling one another.
They had yet to hear Little Phil Sheridan’s trumpet on the land.
*General Alfred Terry’s Montana and Dakota columns at the Rosebud Landing on the Yellowstone River.
Chapter 23
23 July-2 August 1876
Another Courier Gobbled Up—The Utes on the War Path
OMAHA, July 20—A message received this morning from the commanding officer at Fort Fetterman, says a private courier has just arrived from the command on the field, who left the night of the 17th. The day previous a courier was started with the mail and official matter, but has not yet arrived. All quiet and well in camp.
Captain Nickerson, aid de camp to General Crook, returned last evening from Rawlins, Wyoming, whither he went on business connected with securing the Ute Indians of the White river and Bear river regions in Colorado, to unite with General Crook in his campaign against the Sioux. Although there was a delay of about twenty days, occasioned by the obstinacy of the employed scout or agent, the Utes will nevertheless be able to reach General Crook in a few days, to take a hand in the war against the Sioux, who are their inveterateenemies, and who have fought and plundered them for years at every available chance.
Sitting Bull Said to be Dead, Sure Enough
ST. PAUL, July 20—APioneer Press and Tribune special from Bismarck says the statement that Sitting Bull was killed in the fight with Custer is confirmed from Indian sources. Crazy Horse and Black Moon were also killed. The statement that Sitting Bull’s band of Uncpapas lost one hundred and sixty killed, and that the total loss of Indians will reach nearly four hundred, is renewed.
“You can entrust your letter with me, Mrs. Donegan.”
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