Wolf Mountain Moon

by Terry C. Johnston

  For all that they held dear! For this land where the bones of their people were buried!

  Hoka hey! Come dawn it would be a great day to die!

  *Red Cloud Agency.

  *Seize the Sky, vol. 2, Son of the Plains Trilogy.

  *Battle of the Rosebud, Reap the Whirlwind.

  † Known as Battle Butte after 8 January 1877.

  # Fort Phil Kearny, Fetterman Massacre, 21 December 1866, Sioux Dawn, vol. 1, The Plainsmen Series.

  *The Crow, or Absaraka, People,

  † The Wolf People, or Pawnee.

  # The Shoshone People.

  Chapter 29

  8 January 1877

  The gray, cheerless sky was just beginning to pale when the soldiers were ordered to roll out of their blankets. The sun was not yet up. As they greeted a temperature of fourteen degrees, most had to shake fresh snow off their bedrolls. Several new inches lay atop what had been in the valley the afternoon of the seventh. Off to the west the sky appeared all the more forbidding. Dark, snow-laden clouds obscured all but the foothills of the distant mountains.

  Worse yet, it was still snowing in the valley of the Tongue.

  In the predawn darkness men lumbered slowly among the cottonwood trees along that sweeping horseshoe of the river, going about their toilet while others built up the fires on the ground scraped clear of snow and started breakfast preparations: chopping at the frozen salt pork, cracking open wooden crates of hardtack crackers the men would soak in the spewing grease or dunk in their coffee until soft enough to chew.

  Stepping away from the fire for a moment, Seamus looked over at the front flap of the surgeon’s tent, finding the old woman seated there, right where she had been last night when he had closed his eyes. Her lined, cherrywood face gazed here and there impassively at all the activity among the soldiers. For a moment their eyes met—but in hers there shone no light of friendly recognition. He walked over, holding out a steaming cup, which she readily took from him and drank.

  Once he had poured himself another cup, Donegan trudged to the nearby south side of camp. As the night reluctantly gave way to a snowy dawn, he peered beyond at the terrain surrounding them. To the north and east stood a series of low hills covered with cedar and stunted pine, which blended into red-tinged bluffs and ridges rising farther still.

  More striking still, some four hundred yards southwest of him lay another long ridge, at the middle of which stood an abrupt, rounded knob covered with shale and talus. At the northern foot of that ridge ran a deep, snow-drifted coulee stretching all the way to the Tongue River itself.*

  In the dim, graying light Donegan could make out what he thought might be the hint of movement along the top of the low knoll where last night Miles had ordered a detachment of his men to erect breastworks and hold that flat-topped piece of strategic ground. The wind was blowing hard enough, cruel enough, that Seamus could see how it tormented those soldiers who had to stand up there, exposed and out in the open on picket duty.

  Some three hundred yards farther southeast from the knoll arose the most prominent feature of the entire landscape: the volcanic-shaped cone decked out in its stark red-earth and snow colors thrust up against the pale horizon.†

  Beyond the butte the ridgeline meandered all the way into the eastern bluffs and hills, standing at least three hundred feet high, dotted with cedar and oakbrush and sage, the entire landscape buried in some eight to twelve inches of snow as dawn presumed to awaken this frozen land.

  “Would you care to go with us, Mr. Donegan?”

  Seamus turned, finding Miles and Kelly, along with a handful of the colonel’s headquarters staff.

  “Where are you off to?”

  “There,” and Miles pointed with a two-foot shaft of peeled cottonwood he had been carrying since arriving yesterday. “I want to be up there to those breastworks by the time it grows light enough to see.”

  “Yeah—I’ll come along, General.”

  They trudged through the deep snow on foot, through the last of the bivouac tents and breakfast fires, on past a dozen or more mules pawing at the snow for their own morning meal, on up the long slope to the top of the flat-topped knoll. Stopping there, Miles stuffed the peeled staff under his armpit and put out his hand. Lieutenant Baird, his adjutant, pulled the field glasses from a scratched and weathered leather campaign case.

  Along the gray horizon to the southeast a man could gaze into the distance, following the path of the Tongue as it flowed out of a stretch of broken country, around the far end of the Wolf Mountains from its birthplace in the Bighorns. At the eastern edge of the earth the snowy sky was quickly becoming all the brighter with the first hint of the sun’s rising behind those low, ominous snow clouds. A cold, icy mist clung eerily to everything in the valley just below them. Most of the time the wind caused the flakes to swirl, collecting, then dispersing among the old cottonwood that lined the river.

  “Great Jupiter!” Miles exclaimed quietly as he peered into the distance.

  “What is it?” Frank Baldwin asked.

  “They’re coming this way,” the colonel explained. “Here, Kelly—take a look for yourself.”

  Kelly stepped up and peered through the field glasses at the scene below them to the southwest. Then he handed the glasses to Donegan. “Have yourself a look.”

  From what he could estimate, Seamus figured there had to be more than six hundred horsemen quickly approaching from up the valley, advancing on both sides of the river toward the soldier bivouac. Quickly again he tried to calculate their numbers—just to goad himself with the odds. Then Donegan remembered. Only once before had he ever seen such a disciplined formation of Indian horsemen: when Roman Nose had led his Northern Cheyenne and Pawnee Killer’s Sioux down on the twenty-eight men still able to fire their rifles from that nameless sandbar on the high plains of Colorado.*

  As Donegan handed the glasses back to the colonel, Miles asked them both, “How many you make of it?”

  Kelly shrugged. “Six hundred, maybe more.”

  “I’d say that’s about right,” Seamus agreed.

  “And that’s only the ones we can see,” Miles reminded them. “No telling how many we can’t count because of the fog behind them.” The colonel waved his peeled wand in the air. “No telling how many are already somewhere in these hills.”

  “They easily have us two to one, General,” Kelly said quietly. “Maybe worse than that.”

  For the next half hour the warriors pushed their ponies up from the river valley, on up the slopes of that ridgeline south of the soldier bivouac, emerging like black insects from the cottony, swirling fog that nestled among the trees and brush along the river. In addition to those horsemen gathering in clusters along the hills immediately across the river, the western end of the heights bristled with horsemen who gathered to look down at the soldiers on the flat-topped knob.

  They began to call out to the soldiers in Lakota.

  “You know any of that tongue?” Seamus asked Kelly.

  Luther nodded, stepping out to the edge of the knoll with Miles and Donegan. “Listen.”

  They did listen for a few moments more; then Kelly turned to the others and said, “From what I can make of it—they’re telling us that we’re not going to eat any more fat meat.”

  “Fat meat?” Miles said, wagging his head in confusion. “I don’t get it.”

  “Bacon,” Donegan declared. “They mean bacon, General. Don’t you see? What they’re trying to tell us white men is that we’ve eaten our last breakfast.”

  Miles turned to Seamus, asking, “Eaten our last breakfast, have we?”

  “That’s their strongest call to battle, General,” Kelly explained. “Those bucks are saying your men won’t live to have another meal.”

  “You know their tongue,” Donegan said to Kelly, “so why don’t you go ahead and tell that bunch what we think of them as warriors?”

  A smile crept across Kelly’s mouth there in the early light as the snow whipped arou
nd them in a whirling fury. “Not a thing to lose if I do.”

  Seamus watched the chief of scouts take a step away from them to unbutton the bottom of his heavy buffalo-hide coat. Then Kelly grabbed his crotch and gyrated his hips forward, calling out in Lakota.

  “I will have many breakfasts, for I am strong,” he hollered across the snowy heights. “But you will cower before me because you are women! None of you are men like me—for you are all women!”

  They watched how that taunting challenge struck the warriors gathered on the heights to their left and across the river—angering the Sioux and Cheyenne beyond reason, working them into a fighting lather. It was just then seven A.M. as a few of the warriors began their first slow advance from the ridgeline down toward the open bowl where the soldier camp lay.

  “I think you done just what you wanted to do,” Seamus told Kelly. “Looks like they’re ready to fight, General.”

  “Then let’s be at them!” Miles roared enthusiastically, clapping his mittens together.

  His first order sent back to camp directed First Lieutenant Mason Carter to take his ? Company across the ice on the Tongue River and establish a defensive line at the base of the hills should the warriors threaten to make a daring sweep right into the army’s bivouac. Next he ordered Captain Charles Dickey and First Lieutenant Cornelius Cusick to bring up companies ? and F of the Twenty-second to form a skirmish line at the base of the low plateau just north of the knoll where Miles stood. Then the colonel had Second Lieutenant William Bowen bring up the supply train and station it at the edge of the timber skirting the base of the plateau where the wagons and animals might be better protected in the event Crazy Horse made a cavalry sweep from across the river, seeking to surround the soldier camp.

  “Bring Pope up with the artillery!” the colonel ordered. “I want him to support Carter’s company when those warriors charge his position.”

  Within minutes mules were hauling the two carriages into position at the base of the oblong plateau where the canvas tops were stripped back from the iron bows, scattering a flurry of accumulated snow over the gun crews working feverishly under Lieutenant James W. Pope’s direction. First the twelve-pounder, under the command of Second Lieutenant Edward W. Casey, was rolled into position and its wheels chocked. Next came the men struggling with the Rodman gun, which would be under Pope’s personal command. Both crews took elevation grades for the first time, charting distance and targets on those ridges and ravines across the frozen river where hundreds of warriors were beginning to gather in angry knots as ? Company began its crossing of the ice.

  Miles called out, “Major Casey!”

  The captain hurried up and saluted. “General?”

  “Station your company on either flank of our guns.”

  “Very good, sir!”

  Arrayed on either side of Pope’s and Casey’s gun crews was Captain James Casey’s A Company to act in support and defense of the artillery position. Then on the far left flank Miles called up Captain Ezra P. Ewers’s ? Company to position itself on the southwest side of the ridge, extending from the knoll below the artillery position, its own right flank suspended in the air.

  Donegan stepped up into the midst of the frantic activity boiling around Nelson A. Miles. “They might cross below you, General.”

  “Yes, I’ve thought of that,” Miles confided with a brooding squint of his eyes. “You were cavalry in the war, I take it?”

  “The Second, sir.”

  “A good outfit, Donegan.” Miles had a wry grin on his face as he continued. “So you would be the sort to think about horse troops sweeping around to take our rear, wouldn’t you?”

  “Damn right.”

  “Damn right indeed!” Miles agreed. “Mr. Baird, bring up Butler and McDonald. Place them down there, and there, flank to flank to protect against encirclement on our rear.”

  “Very good, General,” and the adjutant hurried off toward the base of the knoll to convey his orders.

  Within a matter of minutes the last of the troops in bivouac were trudging out through the snow already halfway to their knees, more falling around them. Captain Edmond Butler quickly arrayed his men, stretching C Company to the east as far as he dared so that its formation roughly paralleled the northern base of the plateau that Captain Casey, along with Lieutenants Pope and Casey, would be defending with the artillery. On Butler’s right flank Lieutenant Robert McDonald attached the left flank of his D Company in another dangerously thin skirmish line. Both companies were told to watch the trees and riverbank to the northwest where the entire outfit had just abandoned its bivouac. It was there the enemy horsemen were expected to sweep across the frozen Tongue.

  With McDonald riding beside him Captain Butler slowly urged his horse down that skirmish line of cold, shivering men as the snow continued to fall and the cruel north wind slashed straight into their faces. Butler would not want any of them to think about, much less realize, just how short a line a few score of soldiers made on that rugged, snowy landscape when it came to facing down the coming assault.

  “Every man must be a hero today!” Butler told them with hints of his Irish homeland still evident in his peaty brogue. “For when this fight begins, there will be no reassuring touch of a comrade’s elbow beside you! When the red bastards come for us, there will be no rear guard! This fight will be won or lost not by our regiment! Not even by our battalion—much less by a single company! No, men … today this fight will be won or lost by each and every man here, fighting alone!”

  The cheer that Seamus heard erupt along that painfully thin line of infantry brought a mist of remembered camaraderie to his eyes, a tug at the sentimental strings of his heart—recalling how the officers of the Second Cavalry had worked up their horse soldiers before troop after troop would emerge slowly from the woods and halt, forming up company by company, knee to knee, stirrup to stirrup. Every man’s heart in his throat, his saber clutched in a sweaty hand, knowing that in a few seconds the order would be given and they would spur their mounts with a deafening roar—racing toward row upon row of infantry and uncounted cannon that would be shredding their ranks, tearing man from horse, soldier from formation, limbs from body, while the grapeshot and canister slashed through them as if the gates of Hades itself had opened.

  Still, those left in the saddle would ride on.

  Looking at these shivering men now, Donegan hoped these soldiers would fight every bit as bravely this day as he knew Crazy Horse’s cavalry was sure to—knowing that the Lakota and Cheyenne were once more protecting their homes, their families, their dying way of life.

  “Mother of God, watch over each one of these boys … these men,” he whispered, his words whisked away by the wind.

  In those anxious moments for the soldiers and their officers, the Indians began to mill and circle across the river. But instead of making any charge on Carter’s ? Company, which took up a tight position on the west bank after stepping clear of the trees and willow, the horsemen slowly melted back into the ravines and the cedars, remaining out of sight for the most part and not making any show of force against Carter’s lone company.

  “By Jupiter!” Miles bellowed with his field glasses at his eyes. “Maybe we’ve got them cowed! Doesn’t look like they’ll try to cross and sweep us after all!”

  “General, there’s our real problem now,” Donegan declared, pointing into the valley south of the long ridge.

  Many, many more horsemen were appearing out of the cold fog, coming downstream on the east bank of the river behind the line of rugged bluffs.

  “Just look at them,” Miles marveled as hundreds of ponies carried warriors up the back slopes, where the Indians began dismounting in the snow, brandishing their weapons, shouting and yelling at the soldiers below.

  Gunfire suddenly crackled west of the river. Those men gathered beside Miles atop the knoll spun on their heels to watch small knots of Indians down among the cedars and clumps of leafless willow open up a sporadic fire upon Carter
’s K Company. Within moments close to a hundred warriors burst out of hiding, all of them sprinting on foot, waving their weapons and screaming—headed straight for those fifty infantrymen.

  Carter held them, held them in the face of that charge, ordering his first platoon to advance three paces, where they dropped to one knee to return fire, when the lieutenant coolly ordered up his second platoon to advance and fire three paces farther on. The Indians were no farther than fifty yards from the lone company, inching forward on both sides, threatening to sweep Carter’s men on one flank or another. Still, ? Company held their ground as Carter barked his orders, rallied his men, steadied them in their advance platoon by platoon, turning back every attempt the warriors made to sweep past him to the river.

  No more than fifty scared soldiers, alone and by themselves, all but cut off across the frozen Tongue—as Carter moved among them on horseback: assuring them, shouting his orders, keeping them together, preventing them from having time to think of the danger, so busy did he keep them that they could think only of loading, firing, advancing. Loading, firing, advancing. Loading, firing, advancing—

  “Mr. Pope!” the colonel hollered down to the gun position, “Put that Napoleon to work on those Indians across the river and take the pressure off Carter’s outfit!”

  “Very good, General!” the lieutenant replied, turning immediately to the officer assisting him with the mountain howitzer.

  As Lieutenant Edward W. Casey barked his orders and elevation, the gun crew quickly snapped to, adjusted the caisson, rechocked the wheels, cranked the elevation, then stepped back in a flurry.

  Young Casey cried, “Fire!”

  The first twelve-pound shot was on its way across the foggy Tongue.

  But Casey was already giving the order: “Reload! Be quick about it! Reload!”

  Frantically his men shuffled in and out of position, first to jam the swab home down the howitzer’s huge brass muzzle; then a second soldier jumped forward to ram home the pouch of coarse black powder. Then a third soldier hobbled forward with the ball clutched in both hands as another spiked the powder pouch through the touchhole, preparing the ignition of that second shot.