The sun was high when he was suddenly awakened by the thundering of the ground beneath him. Crawling to the mouth of the ravine, he saw a herd of buffalo charging past on the prairie just beyond where he lay, the lumbering animals raising clods from the wet prairie—pursued by at least thirty warriors armed with rifles.
Quickly he turned back into the ravine and hurried to his horse, throwing blanket and saddle onto its back, prepared to take flight should he be discovered—but as luck would have it, the hunters were too involved with their buffalo and hadn’t paid any notice to Cody’s trail crossing the prairie. In less than ten minutes they circled back, dismounting not far from the mouth of the coulee where he sat in hiding to claim their animals and begin butchering for meat, tongues, and hides. With these loaded onto some extra horses Bill swore had to be cavalry mounts, the Sioux rode off to the southeast.
Damn. Just the direction he had been taking to reach the mouth of Glendive Creek.
With the coming of that night, and not having seen another sign of the hunters, Bill felt secure enough to slip out of the ravine. This night he pushed due east, making as wide a detour as he felt he could to avoid a brush with the warriors or their village, wherever it might be to the southeast. The sun was coming up as Cody rode up to the stockade and hollered out that he had dispatches for Rice.
Over a cup of coffee and some fried beef, Bill told the soldiers all about the happenings upriver. Then Rice told Cody he wanted to get a message to Terry as well—to in form the general that his stockade was suffering daily attacks and harassment from the Sioux in the immediate area. On his third cup of coffee Cody volunteered to follow his backtrail to Terry’s command, which he expected to have returned to the Yellowstone from its foray to the north.
Without incident Bill headed west, running into the column east of the Powder, when he turned around to guide Terry’s entire command back to Glendive. Three days later a steamboat put in at the stockade. Cody realized it was high time to go.
“One hundred eighty … and two hundred dollars,” said Captain H. J. Nowlan of the Seventh Cavalry, acting assistant quartermaster for General Terry. “That should be all your pay, Mr. Cody.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
The officer saluted, then held out his hand. “Believe me, the pleasure is all mine, Colonel Cody! General Terry is awaiting you at the gangplank.”
Sure enough, Terry stood waiting with most of his staff and that gaggle of reporters in the midst of a great crowd of onlookers as Cody prepared to shove off downriver, this time for good.
After a round of shaking hands and good wishes, Bill finally climbed the cleated gangplank to the lower deck of the Far West and shook hands with Captain Grant Marsh. Overhead pilot Dave Campbell hung from the window of his wheelhouse surrounded by iron plate and hollered down.
“Good to have you aboard again, Mr. Cody!”
“Good to be onboard, Mr. Campbell!” Bill replied, taking his hat from his head and waving it at the pilot. “How bout this time we really do get me down the Yellowstone?”
“Let’s cast off!” Campbell roared, pulling on his steam whistle three times.
The stevedores on deck hollered at the soldiers on shore to heave them the weighty hawsers while the pilot hollered down the pipe to his engine room, then stuck his head out the window once again.
“You’re headed home now, Mr. Cody! Ain’t a thing going to turn us around again!”
Along the bank that sixth day of September the soldiers whipped themselves into a frenzy, bidding the scout and showman farewell from the Indian wars.
For the last two weeks serving with General Terry’s command, Bill had earned two hundred dollars—the most he had ever been paid for scouting. Not that he didn’t deserve it, mind you. Why, he had been in the saddle almost constantly, pushing through foreign country filled with hostiles day in and day out. But as good as it was, it still wasn’t the sort of pay he figured he could make once he got back east again.
Cody watched the bluffs of the Yellowstone fall away behind him. Ahead lay Lulu and the children. And a future of his own making.
William F. Cody had made his last ride as an army scout.
Indian Matters.
CHEYENNE, August 31—A courier who left the camp of Crook and Terry on the 20th, at the mouth of Powder river, arrived at Fort Fetterman to-night. The command was then on the trail which was estimated at 10,000 ponies. The camp fires indicate seven distinct bands. There is reason to believe that the Indians are almost destitute of food, and traces left in the deserted camps indicate that they are reduced to the extremity of using raw hides for food. All the Snake allies have gone home, the Crows remaining. General Crook fully expects to strike Sitting Bull in a few days.
Despite the condition of his horse, Donegan knew he had to go with Mills. He had to do something more than march along in that column of half-dead men and all-but-dead animals another day.
Late in the afternoon of the seventh of September, Crook had halted them on the banks of the Palanata Wakpa, the white man’s Grand River. At dusk the general called an officers’ meeting and told the men what he had decided.
In the hearing of all, Lieutenant John Bourke read the general’s concise orders to the Third Cavalry’s Anson Mills: “The brigadier general commanding directs you to proceed without delay to Deadwood City and such other points in the Black Hills as may be necessary and purchase such supplies as may be needed for the use of this command, paying for the same at the lowest market rates. You are also authorized to purchase two ounces of quinine, for use of the sick.”
“I discussed my plan with General Merritt and Colonel Royall before calling Colonel Mills in to inform him,” Crook explained. “Immediately following this conference Mills will come among the commands and select the fifteen healthiest men from each of the ten troops of the Third Cavalry. Every company commander is to make available to the colonel his fifteen strongest horses as well. Make no mistake on this, gentlemen. Mills’s relief column must be mounted on the best we have left us.”
“What’s to be done with the rest of us, General?” arose a question.
“We will remain in bivouac tomorrow, and the following day we will take the command on Mills’s trail as he hurries south with Quartermaster Bubb.”
A captain asked, “We’re going to continue marching after only one day of rest, General?”
Ànd a lieutenant chimed in, “Why not sit it out until Mills returns, sir?”
“We could do that: just sit down here and wait,”Crook replied. “But if we keep moving south, our men will be that much closer to relief when Mills brings supplies back from the Deadwood merchants.”
“How’s Mr. Bubb going to bring the provisions back?”
“Good question,” Crook answered. “I’ve already told Tom Moore he’s to select fifty of what he has left of his mules, along with fifteen packers, to accompany Colonel Mills to the south.”
Crook went on to explain the command structure of the relief expedition: with scouts Grouard, Crawford, and Donegan he was sending along Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka, who would act as Mills’s adjutant, as well as Lieutenants George F. Chase, Emmet Crawford, and Adolphus H. Von Leuttwitz, with assistant surgeon Charles R. Stephens. In addition, both Robert Strahorn and Reuben Davenport volunteered to go along. Mills’s relief patrol was to depart that evening as soon as the men and horses were selected.
As far as Seamus Donegan was concerned, Crook had to be given credit. Unlike most of those armchair generals who had commanded the Union’s armies during the early years of the war, George C. Crook had always suffered no less than the greenest recruit in his command.
As much as other, lesser men might snipe and find fault in the general’s decisions, for the most part the Irishman believed Crook had done what he thought best. The general had marched and countermarched his expeditionary force on just about every trail he came across after the fleeing hostiles.
He had put his men on half rations, then relu
ctantly approved of butchering the horses.
And without fail Crook had always deployed his scouts to prowl in all directions to scare up a fresh trail for his men to pursue.
But now, to look at the man, Seamus knew even Crook was close to the end of his string. This was no longer an army campaign. This was no longer a matter of catching the enemy and driving them back to the agencies.
This had become nothing less than pure survival.
Another Trail Discovered.
ST. PAUL, September 4—A special dated bank of the Yellowstone, August 27, via Bismarck, 4th inst., says: The latest intelligence received concerning the movements of the Indians lead to the belief that Sitting Bull’s band of Unkpapas are trying to cross the Yellowstone and reach their proper hunting ground on the dry fork of the Missouri. Acting upon this belief General Terry directed General Crook, with his column, to move eastward to the Little Missouri, following the trail leading from the Rosebud, while General Terry with the Dakota column has crossed the Yellowstone and marched north and east to cut off any parties moving toward Fort Peck. You will hear no end of extravagant stories about the attack on the steamer Yellowstone on her late trip up the river. She was fired on by a few Indians, and one man was killed, but beyond this no harm was done, and the affair is quite destitute of significance.
Just past nine o’clock that night of September 7, Crook emerged from the dark to grip the bridle to Anson Mills’s horse as the captain rose to the saddle. For a moment the general peered into the rain, then turned back to the captain, saying, “Should you encounter a village, Colonel— you are to attack and hold it. But if you can successfully cut around their village, do so—for you must remember your primary mission is to secure supplies for this column.”
Atop his saddle, Mills saluted. “Very good, General.”
Crook replied, “We’ll be watching for your guidon, Colonel Mills. Praying. Until then.”
Donegan watched the old man back away, his shoulders rounded almost like a man who had been beaten, a man close to his last wick. Then the general slowly raised those shoulders, straightened his back, and squared the shapeless hat on his head before touching the fingers of his right hand to his brow.
“I know you’ll do us proud, men,” Crook told those 150 gathered behind Mills and his scouts. “We’re counting on you.”
The captain saluted, then tugged down the brim of his hat, cocking his head to the side to ward off the drizzle as he raised an arm in signal.
“At a walk!” Schwatka gave the order. “For-rad!”
Tom Moore’s packers ended up whipping sixty-one mules out of that misery-ridden bivouac on a small, northern branch of the North Fork of the Grand River. Desiring his party to travel in the lightest of marching orders, Mills had commanded his men to strip even more—they were to carry no more than fifty cartridges each for their Springfield carbines—half of what they had been carrying a month ago when they had marched out of Camp Cloud Peak on Goose Creek. Seamus worried: with all they had seen over the past few days, the chances were good the captain’s outfit would run into a sizable war party. That very afternoon, in fact, they had stumbled across the wide trail of a big village moving south for the Black Hills.
So if the soldiers did have a scrap of it, would they have enough ammunition? Crook had made it clear that he intended to lay over a day right where the column was. Scary thing was that should Mills run into the enemy, the general’s decision to give the column a day’s rest meant the captain could expect neither reinforcements nor resupply of ammunition in time to do any real good.
As Donegan rode to the front with Frank Grouard to pierce the utter gloom and darkness of that muddy wilderness, leading Mills and 150 troopers into the unknown, the Irishman felt all but crushed by the sudden realization.
From here on out, they were on their own.
Chapter 36
8-9 September 1876
The Inter-Ocean Special.
CHICAGO, September 4—The Inter-Ocean’s Bismarck special says the latest by couriers arriving to-day from the expedition is as follows: the general feeling among both officers and men is that the campaign has been and is likely to prove an immense wild goose chase. No Indians have been seen of late, with the exception of occasional small bands making their appearance for the purpose of stealing or harassing small parties engaged in the movement of supplies on the Yellowstone. The main column has not succeeded in overtaking slippery Sitting Bull, and is not likely to this season …
August 27 the Seventh cavalry were on Ofalens creek, and Crook had started the day before with his command for Glendive creek … Crook strikes down the south bank, and by this continued movement they expect to bring about a collision with the Indians who are along the banks of the river.
The dark and the rain were as suffocating as being inside a pair of these leather gloves he wore.
Like the lid to a well-scorched cast-iron Dutch oven, the sky seemed to hang above them, right overhead, all but a few inches beyond a man’s reach.
This endless wilderness swallowed every fragment of sound but his own. The jingle of the big curb bit. The squishy squeak of the saddle beneath him, the bobbing, plodding heave of the horse as it struggled on step by step with the rest that followed, and that peculiar sucking, wet-putty pop each time the animal pulled a hoof out of the muddy gumbo and plopped it down onto the prairie again, and again. And again over the next three hours.
Off to their left a little, the prairie sounds changed near midnight. If a man listened just right, he could tell that something out there was different. Not the same monotonous rhythm of the rain hammering the sodden prairie. Frank had Donegan signal back to Mills, stopping the long column. Then Grouard slipped down into the mud and knelt. A moment later a bright corona around the half-breed flared with sudden light as the head scout struck a match, holding it cupped in both hands.
In the halo of that light glittered the reflection of a large pond of water. It was the patter of the heavy rain striking its surface that had been just that much different from the sound of rain hammering the prairie’s sodden surface. Frank crabbed left, then right, until he flicked the burned match into the pond and the whole world was dark once more.
“You saw something,” Donegan said as Grouard emerged from the drizzle.
Climbing into the saddle, Frank said, “Tracks, Irishman. Lots of tracks.”
“What’s that you say, Grouard?”
They turned back to find Mills inching forward. The half-breed said, “Tracks, Colonel. Travois. Ponies. Lots of fresh tracks.” He pointed. “Going south.”
“Won’t be good to bump right into them in this dark. Damnable rain,” Mills grumped.
“No good, we go and do that,” Frank replied.
“Grouard—I want you to ride farther ahead of us. I need you to give us plenty of time to react if you bump into anything. Put Crawford and Donegan out a little wider on both flanks.”
Donegan said, “Hard for us to see the column, Colonel.”
“You’ll just have to do the best you can,” Mills argued. “I don’t want to be surprised by a bloody thing.”
Grouard watched Crawford and Donegan move off into the gloom, then turned about to take up the front of the march. “Wait five minutes, then lead them out, Colonel.”
“Very well,” Mills replied.
Grouard disappeared into the midnight rain and darkness.
For another two hours they probed ahead. And for all their trouble the rain only fell harder and the night grew darker. After eighteen grueling miles feeling their way to the south along the Indian trail, Mills called a halt at the edge of a shallow ravine.
“Stay with your mounts,” was the order passed back through the command. “Sleep if you can on your lariats— until daylight.”
The sergeants nudged them awake at four A.M. on the eighth, rousting them from the cold, muddy ground, driving the men from their soggy blankets. After tightening cinches, shoving the huge curb bits back into the hors
es’ jaws, and pulling up the picket pins to be stowed in a saddlebag with the lariat, Mills had his patrol on the march again—without a thing to put in their bellies.
No matter, there wasn’t that much to eat, anyway.
On they tramped into the gray coming of that overcast morning as the rain slackened, then drifted off to the east.The sky was gray and black above them. The prairie beneath the bellies of their horses was pretty much the same color, and what small pools of water had collected here and there reflected the monotonous color of the dreary sky overhead.
From the horizon far beyond them emerged some high ground, pale in color, easily visible from a distance. Those buttes were like a beacon in what dim light the jealous clouds permitted the sun to cast upon this rolling land.
It wasn’t long before the fog rolled in, first forming in the low places, down in the coulees. Then like a growing thing it crawled up to take over the prairie itself. Becoming thicker all the time, like Mother Donegan’s blood soup coming to a boil on the trivet she would swing over the hearth in their tiny stone house back on that miserable and humble plot of ground where his father had died trying to grow enough to feed à family.
By seven o’clock Grouard had the soldiers skirting to the east of the northern end of a long and narrow landform that would one day soon be known as Slim Buttes. When he found a brushy ravine filled with plum trees, their branches heavy with fruit, the half-breed suggested a halt. Eagerly the men attacked the brush, stuffing the shiny, rain-washed plums into their mouths with one hand as the other hand pulled more off the branches.
An hour later Mills had them back in the saddle and inching off again through the soupy fog. Uneasily they probed south until noon, when the captain called another halt. This time Grouard brought them into the lee of a low bluff, protected from view to the east, from the prairie. On some good grass the horses were allowed to graze at the end of their picket pins and lassos. Then Mills allowed the men to gather some wood, dig fire pits, and boil some coffee in their tin cups. By one o’clock they were back in the saddle, Lieutenant Emmet Crawford’s battalion taking the lead, something warm now in all their bellies to go with the wild plums they had enjoyed for breakfast earlier.
Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876 tp-10 Page 39
