A Cold Day in Hell

by Terry C. Johnston

  With Lieutenant Conway and his soldiers off to punch their way against the warriors at their front, Sharpe remained with the rest of his H Company as well as G Company to hold back the extreme pressure of those warriors reinforced on their left flank. It took the better part of an hour before the wagons were once more able to move down the road. By that time the smoke became even more suffocating from the grass fires that raged around them on all sides—some of the wagons and mule teams forced to frantically dash through the leaping flames, men hollering in panic and mules braying in fear … when within moments the winds shifted around from the west and for the most part raised that thick, choking pall—preventing the gray, stinging blanket from completely swallowing the movement of the soldier column.

  Someone cried out on Sharpe’s far right. He whirled to watch a soldier from G Company spin to the ground, clutching his knee. The man’s bunkie was on him in an instant, ripping off his belt and tightening it above the wound. It wasn’t but a minute before Surgeon Charles T. Gibson was there to lend a hand.

  At that very moment Sharpe realized just how cut off they were: on all sides the rolling prairie lay blackened, smoldering, a great gray shroud blotting out the midafternoon sun hung like a red ball above them in the autumn sky. It reminded the lieutenant of the waste Napoleon had laid to the steppes of Russia in his disastrous retreat more than half a century before. Then he chided himself—to think that his little struggle was of any consequence compared to the great European campaigns he had studied at the Academy.

  Then almost immediately he decided theirs was a worthy struggle. While Napoleon battled against a civilized enemy—Otis’s column found itself surrounded by a fiendish enemy who fought not only with bullets, but with smoke and fire and devilish noise. In addition, they each struggled privately against the twin demons of a soldier’s nightmare: hunger and thirst.

  From this high ground they had struggled so hard to reach and to hold against terrible odds, the lieutenant now dared look back at the narrow valley where the Indians swarmed against the rear guard. Now the Sioux held the valley behind them. The enemy had possession of water and wood while the soldiers had only what they hurriedly had taken on in crossing the creek. To attempt to run that gauntlet back to the creek for water would be nothing short of sheer suicide.

  Up here on the high ground there was little to no firewood. What there had been was now all but burned to ash as every footstep and every hoof raised the stifling black dust into the air. As a biting wind came up, the sun continued its rapid fall, closing on the far horizon.

  Out there to the west … where Miles and his Fifth Infantry knew nothing of their predicament.

  Chapter 5

  15 October 1876

  “We are not done yet, brother,” William Jackson said as he sat down beside Robert at the small fire they had dug into the prairie so that its low flames would not show.

  There wasn’t much wood to speak of in that cold bivouac the soldier column made on a broad depression that dominated the high ground that night. But at least they had plenty of food to eat—if a man could call hard bread and pig meat real food. And water. At least they had taken on enough water to see to the mules, enough for each man to refill his canteen for the night.

  William’s stomach rumbled. He stared at the tiny fire and remembered the meals his mother had set before them when they had been boys on the high Missouri: the boiled buffalo boss ribs, pemmican sweetened with chokecherries, stewed pommes blanche, and his favorite—dried camas. It made his mouth water, made his stomach feel all the more pinched to think on such feasting. Here at least, he told himself, they were warm.

  The Jackson brothers and Bear Plume had scoured the scorched campground, pulling up the twisted branches and limbs of the scrub oak and cedar with their hands, gathering the charred wood within the flaps of their coats while the nameless Ree scout used his belt knife to dig a fire hole in the blackened earth. Now the four of them sat huddled around the low flames, talking in whispers.

  From the best estimation of the soldiers, Otis’s column had made all of fifteen miles during their day-long running fight before making camp at five o’clock, close to sundown. The Lakota continued to flit around on all sides of the soldiers as the wagons were formed into a large corral, and shots were exchanged between pickets and the daring horsemen until darkness fell just past seven P.M. From time to time one of the infantrymen made his shot count, so that by the time night sank over that bivouac, Otis’s men could claim to have knocked at least half a dozen warriors from their ponies.

  No soldiers had been killed during the day’s skirmishing, but three men had been slightly wounded by spent bullets—the infantry’s Long Toms had simply held the Lakota too far out of range to make effective use of their charges and whirling attacks. These foot-sloggers had, by and large, kept the maddening dash of those hundreds of horsemen at bay, holding them back at least a thousand yards, just beyond the range of their Springfield rifles. Otis had begun this journey with ten thousand rounds for his rifles. This evening his men reported they were down to less than half of that. Many miles yet to go, and surrounded by the enemy who outnumbered them as many as four to one.

  “Tomorrow come,” Robert agreed. “That will be a new day for Sitting Bull.”

  “Sitting Bull?” Bear Plume asked, recognizing the sound of the Lakota shaman’s name in English.

  “Yes,” William answered as he held his hands over the glowing fire pit to warm them with the other men. “These are Sitting Bull’s warriors. They cross the Yellowstone. Come to hunt all these buffalo we see after leaving Tongue River. Good hunting—always means lots of Lakota around.”

  Bear Plume grunted and fell silent.

  Occasionally they would hear the clink of a tin cup against a rifle barrel, or the bray of a mule, a gust of muffled laughter, or the sneeze of some man down with a cold. It was that season of the year on the high plains. Even for men who spent most of their lives outdoors. With warm, sunny days and the sort of nights that could chill a man to his narrow—most folks out here simply put up with a seasonal cough or sniffle.

  Tonight Otis’s men were all on alert, out there in the rifle pits the soldiers had hastily dug on a perimeter five hundred yards out from the corral where they huddled, quiet and sleepless, watchful through the cold autumn night.

  As the high plains awaited the coming of another winter.

  William Jackson had seen twenty-one winters since his Blackfoot mother had given birth to him at Fort Benton, far, far up the Missouri River at the head of navigation, just downstream from the Great Falls. At that time the American Fur Company was in the buffalo-robe trade with the western tribes. He had to do no more than close his eyes these days to remember the great adobe and picket walls, the two-story buildings enclosed within—a great place to be a child.

  His grandfather, Hugh Monroe, had been an employee of the great Hudson’s Bay Company, first coming to its Mountain Fort on the Saskatchewan in 1816, where he married Fox Woman, daughter of a Blackfoot chief. He held the position of post hunter, and together they had two sons and two daughters. One of them, Amelia, would marry Thomas Jackson, the member of an old Virginia family who had joined American Fur in 1835. Unlike the rest of the company employees who followed the custom of marrying Pikuni women, a tribe of the Blackfoot Confederacy, Thomas had fallen in love with Amelia.

  Robert was their firstborn. Two years later William came along. They were inseparable. What a life they shared! As children they learned the three languages spoken at the fort: English, French Creole, and Pikuni. The Blackfoot tongue dominated most trade talk. By the time the boys were six or seven, they could speak all three languages with equal ease. In addition, on those long winter nights huddled before their fires in the fort’s quarters, father Thomas had taken pains to teach his two sons to read and write.

  “You will learn never to shame the noble blood that runs in your veins,” he instructed his boys. “Your mother comes from Pikuni royalty. And my own
family goes back a long, long way in the Old Dominion.”

  Every year with the summer steamer their father made sure he brought up toys and games and storybooks from the company’s offices in St. Louis. As boyhood slowly passed away, the boys learned to ride and shoot, use a knife and tomahawk from their mother’s people. Such training was vital, for any man who carried Indian blood in his veins, the northern Rockies meant he would have friends, and he would suffer enemies. In their youth William and Robert narrowly escaped an Assiniboine war party. Not long afterward the first settlers came and threw up their log huts in the shadow of Fort Benton.

  “That marks the beginning of the end for us!” grandfather cried, shaking a fist at the newcomers.

  “What does this mean?” young William had asked, frightened.

  “It means the whites are invading our country,” the old white-head explained angrily. “They will build a town, right here! They will begin to swarm all over our plains and along the foot of our mountains. They will kill off our meat animals, trap out our fur animals. My young ones—they are the kind that will desolate our country with their cattle and make beggars of us!”

  Occasionally the boys would go out for days and camp with “woodhawks”—those men who, at great risk to their lives, would cut the immense cords of wood they sold to river steamboats plying the northern rivers each summer. During those seasons of their lives, not a year went by without raids by the Northern Cheyenne or Lakota—taking the lives of many of these daring, hearty woodhawks who would move their camp every day, eat supper around a fire, then always float downstream a mile or so before making a fireless camp for the night.

  In the early spring the ice began to break up in those northern rivers. Every day they watched the passing carcasses of buffalo, some of the beasts becoming lodged at the upper end of the islands or pinned against piles of driftwood. Some were creatures that had drowned, having broken through the river’s icy crust the previous winter. Even more had been captured by the quicksands, slowly sinking to their death. Buzzards and magpies, coyotes and wolves, even grizzlies feasted upon such rich carrion tangled with the trash-wood snarled along the banks each spring.

  Together with their father and others, the Jackson boys had trapped the Milk, Deep Creek, the Judith, and the Musselshell both spring and fall, returning to the post for the winter. By the time they were in their teens, American soldiers had begun to occupy the old fort, making their presence known among the tribes of the northern plains. One by one a long line of stores, hotels, and saloons went up nearby, almost overnight, after gold was discovered in the nearby country. Their father decided it was time to move downriver, away from the goldfields.

  At Fort Buford, Thomas became a clerk for Charles Larpenteur’s Northwest Company. Here they traded with the Yanktonais and some of the Lakota bands. The Sioux bands were a haughty, standoffish people who wanted nothing to do with the Jackson boys. Yet there were a few Arikara who camped near the fort. In fact, William and Robert became best friends with an older boy who was, like them, a half-breed. While his father was Sioux, his mother was Arikara—the two of them had married years before when the two tribes were enjoying a rare period of peace between them. With the coming of the white man, hostilities resumed between the tribes, so the woman returned to her own people and taught her son the Ankara’s hatred of the Lakota.

  This night at his tiny fire, with the cold stars like pinpricks in the black curtain overhead, William remembered his good friend, the Arikara named Bloody Knife. Remembered how for three summers he boasted of being Custer’s favorite scout. So this night William thought on how Bloody Knife had died with Custer at the hands of his father’s people—the Lakota—there in the valley of the Greasy Grass. Killed not that many months ago by these same warriors who followed Sitting Bull north in search of the buffalo herds.

  Bloody Knife had been a good friend, warning them almost from that first day about the Lakota—how the Lakota made enemies all too easily and would never get along with the white man. From him and other Rees, the brothers learned the Arikara language that summer of 1871.

  Two summers later at Fort Buford they learned that the railroad would be coming west.

  “This will be the beginning of a real war,” Bloody Knife had warned them. “The Lakota, the Cheyenne—now they will do everything they can to keep the white man out of their last buffalo ground.”

  No matter, both Robert and William were eager to become army scouts. When they told their parents they had enlisted, Thomas frowned and bellowed that he would not have it.

  “Thomas,” their mother intervened in that gentle way of hers, “the wild blood that is in these boys—the blood of Hugh Monroe and his fighting Scotch ancestors, the blood of many generations of Pikuni warriors—that blood cannot be denied. They are warriors. They must follow their hearts.”

  “Well, then,” Thomas replied after some thought, “you always have your way.”

  Tonight William fondly remembered that afternoon three years before. How they had left their quarters with their father so that he could give his blessing before the post commander. He remembered how his mother’s voice had risen plaintively as soon as they left the room: that high-pitched, mournful song, calling on the spirits, calling on the power of the Ancient Coyote, the sacred helper to watch over her sons as they rode into battle. As they chose to face death.

  That summer they went downriver on a steamer for the first time with Bloody Knife and other Ree scouts. At Fort Lincoln they joined Custer’s cavalry and the men who were mapping the route for the new railroad that would follow the Yellowstone west. The Sioux found them, harassed them time and again that summer before the soldiers finally turned back. William knew it would not be the last time he would face and fight Lakota warriors.

  Nor would Custer shrink from returning—to fight them again, and eventually fall at the Greasy Grass.

  Then the next summer—1874—the Jackson boys joined Custer once more, this time on a scout into the Black Hills.

  Bloody Knife told them, “You know this is sacred ground to the Lakota. They watch us every day, wanting our scalps, but we are too strong for them. They will wait—and one day they will be too strong for Custer.”

  William remembered the look on Bloody Knife’s face, remembered how they knew it would come to pass one day: this big fight when many of the scouts, and many soldiers, would be killed. And Custer would fall.

  The past spring as the Jackson boys prepared to leave Fort Abraham Lincoln with General Alfred Terry’s column, bound for the Sioux country, Bloody Knife came to speak to the Arikara.

  “I have just come from a talk with the Long Hair Custer. He says that his woman is terribly low of heart, and that the women of the other officers are also. So when we leave in the morning, Long Hair wants us to parade past the fort, to show the women that we are many and strong, to quiet their fears. We, my friends—we Indian scouts—are to lead this parade. It is truly a great honor.”

  As Bloody Knife and Charlie Reynolds led them away from the fort the next morning, the Ree women sang a sad song that chilled William’s heart. Tonight he remembered the day he rode into the valley of the Greasy Grass with Reno’s men. He watched as Bloody Knife and Charlie Reynolds fell to the Lakota. He would always remember how the scouts had warned Long Hair that the Sioux were too many.

  Tonight William wondered if there were too many for them to fight tomorrow.

  Johnny Bruguier stared into the darkness and tried to imagine how those soldiers felt—knowing they were surrounded by more than the night. He wondered if any of them had been with Reno’s men months ago: surrounded, bleeding, chewed up, and thirsty as they waited for the rising of the summer’s sun. If there were any of Reno’s men with these soldiers, their hearts would be small and frightened this dark night.

  Knowing that the warriors of Sitting Bull and Gall had them encircled once more.

  Out of the darkness, where the fire’s light did not reach, emerged a warrior who came up
to touch Johnny on the shoulder.

  “The Bull wants to speak with you,” the man said quietly before he pointed off in a certain direction and sat down at Johnny’s fire, joining the other men, who talked in low tones of the day’s fighting.

  Bruguier rose and went briefly to stroke the neck of his pony. The bay was a gift from Sitting Bull, who had named it Hohe Horse. In return Johnny had given the chief a Winchester rifle.

  As he set off, he knew where he would find Sitting Bull and the rest of the war chiefs. But what would they want of him, Johnny wondered as he moved through the darkness, between patches of firelight where the hundreds of warriors sat through the night, waiting for the coming of the sun when they could renew their attack on the soldiers’ wagon train. Why had they called him?

  If they ask me to help them figure out the heart of these soldiers, what am I to say?

  Surely these Lakota can see the soldiers are not about to give in, to turn back the way the others did five days before. When Sitting Bull had led the bands across the Elk River a day before discovering that first train of soldier wagons, they had been looking for buffalo. The herds were great, and the beasts were fat. It was to be a good hunt—allowing the women to put away more than enough meat to last the winter as they did their best to avoid the white man.

  “You have come, Big Leggings,” said the Bull as he motioned for Johnny to come join the group ringing the cheery fire where women passed pots of coffee among them all. The great chief’s most important advisers were all there in their blankets and robes: No Neck, Bull Eagle, Red Skirt, and Pretty Bear.

  “What does Sitting Bull want of me this cold night?”

  “Sit. Have some coffee to warm you. Then we will talk.”

  Bruguier took his cup of coffee, holding it beneath his chin to feel the steam, enjoying the warmth of it between his two hands. He took a sip, then asked, “How is White Bull’s wound?”