Wolf Mountain Moon

by Terry C. Johnston

  Morning Star’s heart leaped in his chest—like a pink-bellied fish breaking the surface of a high-country stream. How he hoped for succor, for relief …

  At the head of that sad procession of the Ohmeseheso@ lurched the two Old-Man Chiefs, Morning Star and Little Wolf, coming to a clumsy halt on their frozen legs, the new snow nearly reaching their knees.

  “There! Beyond that hill!” one of the three young riders cried joyfully as he came galloping up to the old men. “We have seen the Crazy Horse people!”

  As that news shot back through the cold stragglers, many of the old warriors began to sing once more those strong-heart songs that had sustained them during the recent battle with the pony soldiers. Even though they had few robes and blankets among them, everywhere now the women joined in celebration, trilling their tongues in joy. Once more Ma-heo-o had delivered His people from the hand of disaster.

  Trudging stiff-legged to the crest of that low hill, where he caught his first whiff of woodsmoke on the knife-edged breeze that made his eyes seep, Morning Star peered down, his limbs gone wooden with the terrible cold. There … below … along a bend on the east side of the upper waters of Box Elder Creek,^ among the leafless cottonwoods where the Lakota sought shelter from much of the winter’s cruel wind, sat the hide and canvas lodges—smoke rising from each blackened crown of poles. Headed their way already was a handful of young Oglalla warriors and camp sentries, their strong ponies plowing through the deep snow, while behind and below them dark antlike forms of the Crazy Horse people emerged from their lodges, coming out to see for themselves what was causing all the excitement among the camp guards.

  “Come, Morning Star,” Little Wolf said quietly as he reached his old friend’s side and tugged on an elbow. “Let us go tell Crazy Horse that the ve-ho-e soldiers have attacked us again.”

  For the longest time that winter afternoon the Tse-Tsehese leaders sat with Crazy Horse and the other Hunkpatila headmen, discussing Three Finger Kenzie’s attack on their Red Fork village. As the sun began to set on that cold land, they talked over the why and asked the Oglalla to consider just what they could do for their close cousins, the Ohmeseheso—just as the Crazy Horse people had done last winter before eventually deciding to go in search of Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa.

  But this time Morning Star believed he heard a different sound come from the throat of Crazy Horse. This time the Oglalla Shirt Wearer did not speak with the same voice as he had when the pony soldiers attacked Old Bear’s village beside the Powder last winter.

  This time there was a chiseled hardness on the face of Crazy Horse. And nothing soft in the eyes of the Oglalla war chief.

  “We have little,” the Lakota leader explained icily to his people as well as to their Tse-Tsehese guests. “After soldiers have chased us from camp to camp to camp since summer—forcing us to stay on the run all the time—there aren’t many hides to give you to replace your lodges. And we do not have enough meat to feed your people.”

  For a long time Morning Star was stunned into silence. Then he finally asked, “What can your people give us?”

  Wagging his head icily, Crazy Horse said, “I do not have enough to feed my own people … so how can I feed the Ohmeseheso as well?”

  “What would you have us do?” demanded an angry Little Wolf, the Northern People’s Sweet Medicine Chief, a warrior wounded six times in their recent battle with the pony soldiers.

  Drawing himself up, Crazy Horse explained to his old comrades in war, “I will give you what my people can spare … for three days we can take you in and feed you, shelter you. But no more.”

  “For three days,” Morning Star repeated. “After that, where will we find Sitting Bull?”

  “Yes,” Little Wolf said, his dark face suddenly beaming with hope. “Sitting Bull will help us again if you cannot. Tell us where we can find him!”

  As the Oglalla leader’s eyes crimped into resolute slits, he replied, “Sitting Bull is no longer in this country.”

  Morning Star asked, “Where can we find him?”

  “You will not,” the Lakota mystic answered. “For he is long gone—many days’ ride from here.”

  “Where?” Little Wolf demanded sharply, hope replaced by suspicion.

  “Far to the north of the Elk River*—where my scouts tell me he is running away from the Bear Coat’s soldiers … fleeing for the Land of the Grandmother.”

  So the Tse-Tsehese rested for those three days, sleeping in the crowded lodges among their close relatives, the Oglalla, eating what the Crazy Horse people had to spare. Once more the two peoples shared the same despair.

  In those moons come and gone since the big fight at the Greasy Grass last summer, some of the Hunkpatila had journeyed in to visit friends and relations at the White River Agency, where they learned the soldier chief they had wiped off the earth was none other than Yellow Hair, known to the Tse-Tsehese as Hietzi—the very same ve-ho-e who had destroyed Black Kettle and driven Rock Forehead’s band in to their cramped reservation on the southern lands.

  Then, on the fourth day, when Crazy Horse said the Ohmeseheso were to be on their own, the Oglalla chief suddenly called another council, his face no longer as hard as chert.

  “Our people are like two streams that run down the same mountain,” he told the refugees from the Red Fork Valley. “We have always looked to one another’s welfare.”

  “Do your words mean we can stay on with you?” Little Wolf demanded, the iron edge of a warrior to his voice.

  Finally Crazy Horse answered, “We no longer have much food to share with you—but my hunters tell me there are buffalo to the south, along the Buffalo Tongue. Your men can make meat and gather robes—”

  Morning Star put out his hand to quiet Little Wolf and the angry warriors the moment they interrupted the Oglalla Shirt Wearer. “We will take our people there, Crazy Horse—and hunt for ourselves.”

  Little Wolf growled angrily, “We cannot go south! It would be sheer lunacy! Three Stars is marching north from the Powder to look for us!”

  Then, as Morning Star opened his mouth to explain to his embittered chiefs that they had no choice but to look to their own safety, Crazy Horse spoke again.

  “My village will go with you,” he explained to the Tse-Tsehese. “We too must hunt for meat and hides. Like you, the soldiers have not given us much rest this autumn so that we could hunt for the winter. My warriors are almost as desperate as yours to feed our people. Unless our hunters make meat, I am afraid many of the Hunkpatila will be forced to go in to the White River Agency to fill the bellies of their children.”

  “But what of Three Stars’s soldiers?” Wooden Leg demanded. “What of Three Finger Kenzie’s prowling pony soldiers?”

  Crazy Horse turned to the young warrior, saying, “My wolves who have been keeping an eye on those soldiers tell me they have turned around and are going south again, back to their warm forts. Once more the Great Mystery has watched over us and the soldiers haven’t found us here in this country.”

  “But don’t you believe that once the soldiers have new supplies,” Morning Star asked, “they will return to search for us?”

  “No,” Crazy Horse asserted. “Together we will go hunt buffalo on the Tongue. Our women will scrape hides for new lodges to replace those the soldiers have destroyed. We will dry meat so that our people will not want for food this winter. No, my Ohmeseheso friends—I don’t believe the army will march against us again this winter.”

  Fully a quarter of Baldwin’s men lumbered into Fort Peck suffering from frostbite: ears, noses, or cheeks blackened with dead, rotted flesh. Little wonder, Frank thought, what with the mercury in his thermometer having frozen at the bottom: forty-two degrees below zero. And that was without the wind.

  What was more, every soldier in that battalion suffered from want of sleep. In the past two days the hardy foot soldiers had marched more than seventy-three miles through snowdrifts and a howling blizzard, grabbing five minutes of sleep here, ten minu
tes of rest there. In fact, many of the battalion were so fatigued that they had suffered hallucinations on that brutal march that had meant the difference between survival or death. In his report to General Alfred Terry at department headquarters, Frank wrote:

  Some thought they were riding in steam cars … others thought they saw parks, lakes and cities when there was nothing but the vast snow-covered prairie before them.

  In that dispatch Baldwin even confided, “I never experienced such suffering. … I myself got to sleep and fell off my horse.” One of the men had to use his bayonet to prod the lieutenant out of a snowbank—an act for which Baldwin said he would recommend the soldier for a medal.

  But it had been an excruciating ordeal that he had not mentioned that night when he quickly penned a letter to Alice. Instead, he had chosen to boast to his wife: “Just think your old man whipping Sitting Bull & driving him across the river when he has set at defiance 2 Brig Genls all summer.”

  From some of Mitchell’s friendly Yanktonais camping the winter near the agency, Baldwin learned that afternoon of 8 December that Sitting Bull had stopped long enough to send a threat to the soldier chief that his Hunkpapa warriors would attack the walk-a-heaps once they started south for the Tongue River, then would turn about and destroy Fort Peck itself. Quickly composing a report that would be carried by one of his mounted soldiers ordered to locate Miles somewhere between their backtrail and the cantonment, Baldwin suggested that the colonel’s battalion march east immediately for Bark Creek, and together they might just capture the elusive Sioux between them. If for some reason the colonel was unable to act in concert with him, Frank requested that supplies be forwarded down the Yellowstone to meet him.

  Then he told his commander that in another three days—with his men rested and reoutfitted with rations—he planned to start again for Fort Buford as originally ordered. Frank disclosed that he planned on hiring a number of Indian scouts from the Fort Peck Agency, men who would provide a great service because they knew the surrounding area intimately.

  But first there was the matter of empty soldier bellies and bone-numbing fatigue to be reckoned with. Frank’s battalion immediately consumed one whole buffalo brought in by the Yanktonais; then the men promptly fell asleep. They awoke later in the afternoon to eat even more. Never had a warm meal and a place out of the winter wind meant so much to the men of the Fifth Infantry. Baldwin himself finished his first reports, ate every bite he could get his hands on, then collapsed into a deep slumber.

  Not stirring until the following day, 9 December, Frank called his company commanders together to begin planning their next moves to trail, surround, and capture Sitting Bull’s village. Their first item of business was to learn where the Hunkpapa had gone. From the direction taken by the fleeing Sioux, their best guess had the enemy moving south by east toward the timbered bottoms along the Redwater. To determine with more certainty, the lieutenant sent out Left Hand, an agency Assiniboine mustered onto the rolls the previous day.

  “Mr. Baldwin, I’m sure that I speak for more than just myself when I say that some of the men are concerned that we might again run into the same situation with the Sioux attacking us in force,” said I Company’s Second Lieutenant, James H. Whitten.

  “If we only had some artillery,” grumbled David Rousseau.

  Slowly, the grin came across Baldwin’s face. “Why, gentlemen—we might just come up with something that will work.”

  “You can get your hands on a c-cannon?” asked Whitten.

  Frank nodded. “I bet I can show you something we can put to good use.”

  “Jumping Jesus, sir! Show us!” exclaimed Frank Hinkle. “If we had a cannon—then those redskins never would get the upper hand on us!”

  Frank immediately led the other officers to the north side of one of the agency buildings, where under a partial pile of firewood and a battered sheet of canvas rested an old mountain howitzer.

  “But, Mr. Baldwin!” Whitten griped. “One of the wheels is broken beyond repair.”

  Rousseau joined in, “And the goddamned thing’s got no limber, Lieutenant!”

  “Hell, if I listened to you two, I might well never got our battalion back to the agency night before last!” Baldwin snapped. “Mark my words, and heed them, gentlemen: nothing was ever done by a man who said it couldn’t be done!”

  After he sent Lieutenant Hinkle to chase down the agency carpenter, Baldwin and the others tore off the canvas shroud and dug the howitzer out of the snow. The first step was to assign a work detail to detach one of their wagon boxes from its running gear. The next stage saw the soldiers unhooking the front truck of the wagon’s running gear so that it could be pulled along by a team of mules much like a cannon’s caisson or “limber”—that detachable front part of a gun carriage that usually serves to transport a large chest of ammunition for the twelve-pounder going into the field.

  At the same time, a detail of soldiers laid in a store of dried buffalo meat while others repaired their own thirteen creaky wagons and readied another nine from the agency so that the six-mule teams could transport the foot soldiers this trip out.

  At midday on Sunday, the tenth, agent Mitchell returned from Wolf Point with fifty Assiniboine he had enlisted, having learned that, once again on the south side of the Missouri, Sitting Bull had again taken his village east to the Redwater country.

  The enemy was clearly moving farther and farther away. And very well might be headed for the Yellowstone country. If the victory was to belong to his battalion, Frank knew he had to act.

  In his anxiousness to be on Sitting Bull’s trail, the lieutenant decided he would have to overlook his battalion’s need for replacement clothing, as well as the additional rest he’d planned for the men after what he’d put them through in the last few days. To replace the bootees and shoes that were falling apart—stitching coming loose and soles peeling off—many of Baldwin’s men fashioned some crude but serviceable footwear from the green hides of those buffalo recently killed near the fort to feed them.

  That afternoon Frank wrote another letter to Miles, this time explaining what he was about to embark upon, stating that though he apologized for not pursuing his attack upon the overwhelming numbers of Hunkpapa at Bark Creek, he nonetheless had every intention of herding Sitting Bull’s village south toward the Yellowstone, where Miles himself might have a crack at them.

  Having solved his problem of fatigued men by loading them onto his wagons, Baldwin put Fort Peck behind him on the eleventh. In addition to Mitchell’s fifty Assiniboine, and those two new scouts hired to help Vic Smith—a young Joseph Culbertson and half-breed Edward Lambert—Frank had even convinced Second Lieutenant William H. Wheeler of the Eleventh Infantry, stationed at the agency, to join in their chase. Pushing east through the snowdrifts crusted along the ice-rutted Fort Buford Road, no more than a half mile beyond the site of the Sioux crossing and their fight of the seventh, the battalion went into camp for the night.

  Overnight a Chinook wind blew in and, with the “snow-eater,” temperatures moderated enough to turn the frozen, snowy road into a muddy quagmire. Late the afternoon of the twelfth Baldwin’s wagons rumbled into Wolf Point, where the battalion acquired some sacks of oats for the stock, as well as some flour and hams for their own rations. While they were taking on supplies, the Assiniboine went off to visit their families camped nearby, but a local Assiniboine war chief named White Dog promised Baldwin that his fifty warriors would indeed continue in the search for Sitting Bull. However, by the time the battalion was crawling into their blankets that night, the Assiniboine had not yet shown up.

  Nonetheless, later that night White Dog returned to give the lieutenant a report that the Hunkpapa had left the Redwater and were pushing south across the high divide toward the Yellowstone—just what Baldwin had already figured Sitting Bull would do. But the Assiniboine war chief went on to explain that news from the Lakota camps indicated the Hunkpapa intended on rallying and uniting other Indians to their caus
e on their way south … south toward the Powder River country, to reunite with Crazy Horse.

  On the morning of the fourteenth, with no more than three sacks of grain for 150 animals and a paltry three days’ rations for his men, Baldwin’s battalion began moving across to the south bank of the Missouri—without White Dog’s fifty Assiniboine warriors. Because of the warming weather Baldwin could no longer trust the ice beneath the heavy wagons. Instead, he unhitched the teams and sent the mules across first. That done, he had teams of men station themselves on the south shore to drag the wagons across by rope in the event their weight broke through the softening crust. Successfully reaching the far side, the mules were rehitched and the battalion was again on its way for that Thursday, marching up the boggy bottoms to the headwaters of Sand Creek, where they ascended the low divide that eventually took them over to Wolf Creek and finally down to the drainage of the Redwater.

  Here the weather began to turn again, forcing the weary, shivering men time and again to cut passage for the teams and wagons through the snowdrifts still untouched by the recent thaw. By their Herculean efforts the battalion managed to put more than sixteen difficult miles behind them before they went into bivouac, built fires, and huddled beneath a frightening wind for the night.

  By dawn on the fifteenth the wind of the previous night brought with it a thickening blanket of snow. With heads bowed the determined battalion marched another fourteen miles, yard by yard by yard at a time through a barren, high, exposed piece of country. At last, near sunset, Baldwin located some sparse vegetation, where his men squared their wagons, brought the mules within the corral, and struggled to build their pitiful greasewood fires in the keening winds that again buffeted them while they tried vainly to sleep.