“Jack?”
Bill and Omohundro both turned to find a slim, weasel-faced officer climbing the ladder to the upper deck. Jack leaned and whispered from the side of his mouth, “That’s Whistler.”
“Jack!” the officer exclaimed. “I was hoping I’d track you down. I can’t find anyone onboard any of the steamers who will act as courier for me.”
Omohundro explained to Cody. “Colonel Whistler here has been begging for a rider to take messages ahead to General Terry.”
“Important?” Cody asked.
“Yes, sir.” Then Whistler peered at the long-haired stranger. “Do I know you?”
Bill took off his hat and performed a little bow from the waist. “William F. Cody, at your service.”
“Colonel Cody?”
“Yes.”
Whistler presented his hand while tearing his hat from his head. “A pleasure to meet a true American hero, sir! Why, the story of you and that war party that had you surrounded at Warbonnet Creek—and how you handily did in their chief … why, it’s an inspiration to us all!”
Cody cleared his throat, nervous at so much effusive praise. “These messages—you say you can’t find anyone to carry them?”
“Why, no, Colonel Cody.”
With a shrug Bill offered, “I will.”
Omohundro immediately turned and seized Cody’s arm. “Are you sure about this, Bill? No reason you should take such a dangerous chance.”
Cody did not even look at Jack, preferring instead to say to the officer, “I have my horse onboard. When can you have the dispatches ready?”
“Why … they’re ready right now. But I must insist that you take advantage of my own horse.”
“Yours?” Cody asked.
“Yes. A blooded thoroughbred. Onboard the Josephine.”
Bill pulled on his gloves and gestured to the door of the wheelhouse. “Splendid! I suggest you present yourself to the pilot and have him put us in at the next clear channel along the south bank.”
The officer bobbed his head happily, replying, “Of … of course!”
Cody watched Whistler turn on his heel and barge right on through the wheelhouse door.
Omohundro asked quietly, “Just where were you going when we bumped into you, Bill?”
“Home, Jack.”
“Christ, Cody—I was coming out here to grab some of the adventure and fun for myself, and here you’re booking it in.”
Bill smiled. “Doesn’t appear I’m done for … not just yet.”
“That’s got to be a dangerous route—right through the country Sitting Bull’s warriors are swarming over. If you already decided to head back home—why would you want to take this chance?”
“Jack,” Cody said quietly, slapping an arm over Omohundro’s shoulder, “if you’re giving me the choice of riding back upriver on a slow-moving steamboat, or forked in the saddle carrying dispatches and having myself an adventure of it … now, just what the hell did you think I was going to choose?”
Those reports of the raids on the Glendive stockade and war parties firing on the steamboats, news that Cody carried to Terry, was exactly the sort of intelligence calculated to arouse the general’s worst fears that Sitting Bull’s minions were indeed preparing to flood across the Yellowstone.
As soon as Cody reached the mouth of the Powder with his dispatches, an anxious Terry decided he must first consult with Crook. Taking Cody as a guide for his small escort of staff and leaving the rest of his command to come on as quickly as they could, the general hurried up the Powder until they ran onto Crook’s miserable camp late on the rainy afternoon of 25 August.
“Excuse me, General Crook,” Cody said as the two commanders were about to duck under a canvas awning to begin their conference. “Could you tell me where I could find one of your civilian scouts—Donegan?”
“The Irishman? Why, last I knew he rode on ahead with Grouard and White to scout the countryside and see how the trails were scattering. Why?”
“Just wanted to say good-bye to him. For a second time. That’s all.”
Unable to talk with Donegan or White, either of his old friends, Cody settled nearby as the two generals had their courteous, if strained, consultation. Now firmly convinced that all recent evidence pointed to the hostiles converging and massing on the Yellowstone prior to making their race for Canada, Terry suggested a twist on Sheridan’s joint maneuver to capture the hostiles between them: his Dakota and Montana columns to work along the north bank of the Yellowstone while Crook’s men would come up from the south—hammering the Sioux against Terry’s anvil
Despite Terry’s enthusiasm, Crook steadfastly refused to believe that the Crazy Horse Sioux would turn toward the Yellowstone, much less cross to the north.
“If they turn in any direction now,” Crook argued, “they’ll go south—right for the settlements I’m sworn to protect.”
In his conference with Terry, Crook learned that sufficient rations and ammunition lay in storage at Fort Abraham Lincoln on the Missouri River, should the trail of the wandering hostiles extend that far to the east. Assured of that northeastern supply line, Crook stated that the following morning he planned to dispatch a courier to Major Furey in command of his wagons on Goose Creek, with orders to proceed by prudent marches for Custer City in the southern Black Hills, where the supply train was to await Crook’s arrival with the rest of the expedition in the weeks to come.
Not once in their discussions, apparently, did Terry confront Crook with the fact that he had up and left without letting his superior know. Never did Terry press his position as senior officer in the campaign, but instead decided to let Crook pursue the trail of the fleeing Sioux they had run across while marching down the Powder a week before.
In all likelihood Terry understood Crook was not about to be moved to pursue a course other than the one he had already selected for himself. While at the Yellowstone Crook had received a telegram from Major Jordan at Camp Robinson that stated eight warriors had come in to surrender at Red Cloud Agency, reporting to the agent that the main body of hostiles was about to turn south.
Not north to the Yellowstone, and on to Canada, where Terry feared Sitting Bull’s people would then be free to raid into the Montana settlements.
Instead—here was proof enough that the Sioux were about to heel south for the Black Hills. Straight for Crook’s own department.
Terry bid Crook farewell and good luck, having decided he would go back to his column’s camp on the Powder that night. On the morning of the twenty-sixth he planned to turn his Montana and Dakota troops around and point them north, back to the Yellowstone—giving George Crook free rein to follow the hostiles’ road.
In the end the two hammered out a compromise of sorts. Terry would keep his men active on the river, as well as moving supplies to the Glendive stockade for Crook’s use, should the fleeing Sioux lead Crook in that direction. Meanwhile, Crook remained free to follow the hostiles’ trail, wherever it might take his Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition.
“Bill, I know this is asking a lot, but I need you to make another ride for me,” Terry said late that evening of the twenty-fifth following his conference with Crook, and long after his command went into bivouac just below Crook’s camp on the muddy banks of the Powder.
Cody settled atop one of the canvas stools under the canvas fly outside Terry’s spacious tent. “Where to now, General?”
“Back to Whistler,” the officer explained as the sky went on drizzling and the wind came up. “Tell him not to let the steamers go downriver. He must retain them all for my use to patrol the Yellowstone. And I want clarification on the reports of Indian activity along the river as well. But probably most important—I want Whistler to take his two companies back to the mouth of the Tongue, where he can commence building huts for the winter.”
Captain Edward W. Smith, Terry’s adjutant, graciously offered, “Mr. Cody, you can have my horse for the return trip down the Yellowstone. Appears you might have u
sed up Colonel Whistler’s thoroughbred in bringing those messages to the general.”
“Why, thank you, Captain,” Cody replied, turning to study Smith’s horse. “Looks like a sturdy animal. Yes—I’ll take you up on that offer.”
It wasn’t until sometime after midnight that Bill made out the dim glow of the lamps on the bow and stern of the three steamboats, each one gently bobbing atop the Yellowstone’s current in the patter of unending drizzle. Finding a suitable place to make a crossing, Bill presented himself to Whistler and handed over Terry’s messages.
The lieutenant colonel read over the dispatches written by Captain Smith, then looked up at the civilian with worry lining his face. “Terry wants clarification that the Sioux are making a show of it along the river? Why, the hostiles have been a damned nuisance ever since you left, and it’s been getting worse. I’m afraid things are about to fall out of the frying pan and into the fire.”
“Seems like I missed all the fun you fellas been having.”
“Cody,” Whistler continued, his brow furrowed in worry, “I’ve got to send information to the general concerning the Indians who have been skirmishing around here all day. All evening long I’ve been trying to induce someone to carry my dispatches to Terry, but no one seems willing to undertake the trip. So I must fall back on you. It is asking a great deal, I know, as you’ve just covered over eighty miles on horseback; but it is a case of extreme necessity. And if you go, Cody—I’ll see that you are well paid for it.”
“Naw. Never mind about the extra pay, Colonel,” Bill said, taking his wet buckskin coat from the back of the chair and shaking more moisture from it. “But get your dispatches ready. I’ll start as soon as I swap my saddle over to my own horse.”
“Won’t you at least have another cup of coffee?” Omohundro suggested, stepping forward to hand his friend the steaming tin.
“All right, I will, Jack. While the colonel here gets his dispatches ready and you go saddle the buckskin.”
Even though he had just come in from a long day’s journey; even though the hostiles had been skirmishing with the soldiers on the steamers from first light until dusk; even though he was about to ride his own favorite horse on that perilous return trip—Bill Cody tucked those letters inside his shirt and dashed down the gangplank to take up the reins from Omohundro and leap once more into the saddle.
As the steamer’s crew was swinging in the gangplank, Omohundro called out from the rail, “You watch your hair, Buffalo Bill!”
“I sure as hell will, Texas Jack—at least until Lulu can run her fingers through it!”
As Cody had left to ride back to Whistler through the badlands in the rain and the darkness of that night before, an anxious Terry wrote Crook an afterthought, seeking to persuade Crook one last time to join him in his concentration of troops along the Yellowstone.
There is one thing which I forgot to say and that is that it appears to me that the band which has gone north, if any have gone there, is the heart and soul of the Indian mutiny. It is the nucleus around which the whole body of disaffected Indians gathers. If it were destroyed, this thing would be over, and it is for that reason that I so strongly feel that even if a larger trail is found leading south, we should make a united effort to settle these particular people.
Crook would not be deterred. He would not be turned. He would have his victory. And he was determined to share it with no one.
Six hours after leaving Whistler on the Josephine, Cody reached the muddy outskirts of Terry’s camp along the Powder, just as the column was about to undertake its march back to the Yellowstone. Bill had just covered over 120 miles in less than twenty-two hours, pushing through some of the roughest country on the high plains, across badlands clearly infested with warriors still bristling and brazen following their victory over Custer’s Seventh.
That dawn Terry cheered, “Never thought I’d see you back here so soon, Mr. Cody!”
“Didn’t really count on it myself, General. Whistler needed a courier—and it appears I was the only one who wanted a breath of fresh air!”
Chapter 32
26-29 August 1876
What Forsythe Says.
ST. PAUL, August 10—General Forsythe, of General Sheridan’s staff, passed through the city yesterday, having left Terry’s camp at South Rosebud a week ago last Tuesday. In conversation with army officers while here General Forsyth corrected many erroneous statements recently telegraphed from Bismarck … It was stated that General Terry had fallen back eighty miles, which is mere nonsense, and gives a false impression to the public … The evening before General Forsythe left General Terry, a scout from General Crook’s command had reached General Terry. General Crook was then somewhere near the head waters of the Rosebud river, or between that and Tongue river. Now, at this time General Terry was at the mouth of the Big Horn river, and in order to make communication between himself and General Crook easier, he dropped down the river to the mouth of the Rosebud …
The scout alluded to furnished the news that Indian trails had been found leading to the east between Gen. Crook and the Yellowstone. A junction of Gens. Terry and Crook at a point further east than the Big Horn was likely to prevent the escape of the Indians to the east and north of the present scene of operations. Another misstatement is to the effect that the troops under General Terry are disheartened at the prospect before them … On the contrary, Gen. Terry and his men are in the best possible spirits, and are only too anxious to meet the horde of savages in a square fight. There is no fear as to the result.
The Indians, he learned, were still supposed to be massed somewhere between the Rosebud river and the Big Horn. The impression prevailed that one of two alternatives was left them—either to scatter to the eastward and toward British America, or southward to the Big Horn mountains. Though they were in front or in close proximity to Gen. Crook’s command, it is not believed that they would show fight or allow Gen. Crook or Gen. Terry to get a chance at them in a body.
In a predawn mist that twenty-sixth day of August, with Terry’s latest appeal in hand, George Crook once more sought to make his point as diplomatically as possible, without expressing that he did not want to chase Terry’s Sioux. He wanted to chase his own. Taking pen in hand, he wrote:
My understanding has always been that Crazy Horse, who is an Oglala and represents the disaffected people belonging to the Southern Agencies, is about equal in strength to Sitting Bull, who similarly represents the Northern Sioux; besides, it is known that at least 1500 additional warriors left Red Cloud Agency and joined Crazy Horse this spring and summer and are supposed to be with him here.
Should any considerable part of the main trail lead in the direction of the Southern Agencies, I take it for granted that it must be his, which will not only increase the embarrassment of protecting the settlements in my department, but will make me apprehensive for the safety of my wagon train.
Should I not find any decided trail going southward, but on the contrary find it scattering in this country, or crossing to the north of the Yellowstone, you can calculate on my remaining with you until the unpleasantness ends, or we are ordered to the contrary.
We march this morning. Good bye.
As the infantry slogged into the lead through the mud, sergeants bawled orders for the cavalry to form up for inspection. Chewing on a little of that tobacco he could beg off Lieutenant Bubb’s commissary, Seamus Donegan sat with half-breed Frank Grouard, both of them sullenly waiting, watching Terry’s far-off column inch its own way toward the Yellowstone.
One trooper nearby began to grump, “I’ll sooner desert than come on another one of Crook’s Injun campaigns!”
“Och!” swore his Irish companion. “It was the devil’s own whiskey that brought me to ruin—with no place to go but enlist!”
“Whiskey!” hollered a third. “Ah, sweet whiskey! Now, George—wouldn’t you just wish you had a little drop of whiskey to mix with all this water here’bouts?”
“Mix?” t
he second soldier replied with a snort of objection. “No fear of you mixing any water with your whiskey, Tim! You always take it straight!”
Tim spat in disgust, saying, “Bad luck to the ship that brought me over, then. If I had taken my old mother’s advice and remained in Cashel, it isn’t a drowned rat I’d be this morning.”
“Och! Be-jaysus!” grouched George. “If this isn’t the most god-damnblest outfit I ever struck in my twenty-five years of sarvice!”
“Aye,” agreed Tim as the sergeants ordered the units into a column of fours. “Devil shoot the generals and the shoulder straps all around! Sure and they have no more compassion on a poor crayture of a soldier than a hungry wolf has on a helpless little lamb!”
The horse soldier behind Tim hollered out, “A tough old lamb you’d be, Timmy! A wolf would have to hold his head a long way from the wall afore he could eat you.”
“No coffee till night,” Tim continued to complain. “And we’ll likely eat our bacon raw again come supper— for the sagebrush won’t burn worth a lick, even if the rain would let up!”
The Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition put its nose down to the trail, on the hunt once more.
But while Crook, Bourke, Finerty, and many of the other soldiers and civilians who would chronicle this leg of the expedition all wrote that they took up the “Indian trail” that dreary, sodden morning of 26 August—the column was instead following the heavy wagon trail that General Terry’s engineers had graded and bridged on their westbound march back in May.
Grouard, Donegan, and Charlie White all had their own suspicions early on, but it was a pair of Ree Terry had loaned the expedition who weren’t long in confirming Crook’s mistake. After all, those Arikara trackers should know: they had been part of that great forty-plus force who had marched out of Fort Abraham Lincoln with a hopeful Terry and an ebullient Custer on the seventeenth of May.
Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876 tp-10 Page 35
