War Cry

by Charles G. West

  Their horses watered, they prepared to leave, pausing to wait while one of them walked over toward the thicket where Will lay. Will tightened his finger on the trigger guard of his rifle and held his breath while the hunter relieved himself, knowing that if the man had chosen to aim his stream upwind, there would have been a fifty-fifty chance he would have seen the barrel of a Henry rifle partially covered with dead leaves. Finished, the man returned to jump on his pony and lope after his friends. Will released a sigh of relief and got to his feet. Knowing the hunters were going back to their village, he would simply follow them. As he retreated to fetch his horse, he couldn’t help but smile when he thought of a discussion he once had with Kincaid. The corporal maintained that Cheyenne men squatted to pee, like women, while Will had argued that it was not always the case. It depended upon the situation and whether they were wearing a simple breechcloth or leggings. When he got back, he would tell Kincaid that he knew one Cheyenne who did his business standing up.

  He waited in the trees until the four hunters were almost out of sight before he fell in behind them. It didn’t take much time to reach the Cheyenne village, no more than an hour. Much to his surprise, they had not decided to move from the camp he had scouted before. Although locating the camp was all he had been sent to do, he decided to take a closer look if possible, intent upon seeing any signs that would tell him they were preparing to move the camp. He had heard the muscular hunter say they would hunt tomorrow, which would indicate no plans to move the village. Still, he decided to confirm it. Moving along the river bluffs as he had done the last time, with Spades tied in the willows, he approached as close as he dared in the bright daylight. From where he stopped, he could not see a great deal of the village, but the drying racks for skins still staked in the ground near the tipis he could see told him that they weren’t planning to move anytime soon. Their chiefs and elders must have decided the village was not in danger of sudden attack, since the soldiers had shown no interest in pursuing them, turning for home instead. This was a poor assumption on the part of the Cheyenne, Will thought, in mind of the full regiment of troops already marching upon them. I better get back and tell the colonel, he thought, after moving up as close as he dared to the camp.

  He met the forward scouts of the column after a ride of two hours, approximately twenty- five miles from the Cheyenne village. When Colonel Arnold learned how close he was, he ordered the column to go into camp to rest the men and horses in preparation for an early march in the predawn hours of the morning, timed to hit the Cheyenne while they were sleeping. Will was present when the colonel gave his company officers their orders, and he was pleased to see that the man had some compassion for his enemy. His officers were told that it was inevitable that women and children would be killed, but he made it clear that his intention was not wholesale slaughter of the band. Their targets were the warriors, the pony herd, the food stores, and the lodges. “The purpose of our mission is to punish the renegade warriors who defy the government’s order to return to the reservation,” he said. “We must destroy their means to survive, as well as their will to fight.”

  Being a free spirit of sorts himself, Will was not entirely apathetic about the Indians’ resistance to giving up their ancient way of life. He was certain that he wouldn’t like living on a reservation if he were in their shoes, especially the area selected for them—an area between the Kansas line and the Cimarron River. The land there was in a gypsum belt. The streams were bitter and there was little game to hunt. The only thing that made the planned attack tolerable for him was the fact that this particular band of Cheyenne had been killing settlers, attacking towns and army patrols. They needed to be stopped.

  The column moved out approximately four hours before dawn on a chilly late-summer morning with the moon still above the distant hills. All loose equipment, coffee cups, and mess kits were muffled, and only the creaking leather of the saddles and occasional clinking of the bit chains disturbed the silence, along with an occasional snort from the horses. Under instructions to select a suitable staging point for the attack, Will was in his usual place far in advance of the column. His choice was a long open expanse of prairie running up to the bluffs of the river, about two miles shy of the village. That settled, he continued on to the edge of the sleeping camp, just to have a final look. All seemed peaceful, so he returned to the staging point and waited for the column.

  When Colonel Arnold and his officers arrived to look over the area, he gave his approval and immediately laid out his plans for the assault. He decided to split the column into three attack forces, one on each side of the river, and the third to march beyond the village before crossing the river to be in a position to cut off escape in that direction. F Company was assigned that responsibility. Having fulfilled his part of the attack, Will was free to join any group in the battle. As usual, he chose to ride with Lieutenant Bordeaux’s troop in C Company. When all was ready, F Company was given a head start of forty- five minutes to get into position beyond the camp. The colonel figured this would make the time of the attack right at sunrise.

  Chapter 10

  Bloody Hand awoke with a start. At first confused, he paused to listen. There was some cause for trouble in the huge pony herd grazing by the river. He leaped from his blanket, waking his wife, Lark, in the process. “What is it?” she exclaimed.

  “I don’t know,” Bloody Hand replied as he grabbed his rifle and slipped through the flap of the tipi. In that moment, the first shots were fired, and within minutes, he saw a wave of cavalry descending upon the village from the eastern end of the camp. “Get up!” he yelled to Lark. “Hurry!” he commanded as warriors, women, and children were now pouring out of the lodges. “Run to the river,” he directed and pointed toward the west. Ducking back inside the tipi, he quickly snatched up all the ammunition he could carry and followed his wife, who was running away from the line of soldiers already burning lodges on the lower end of the camp.

  Soon the air was filled with the sound of rifles, bullets zipping in all directions amid the screams of the women and the crying of the children trying to gain protection in the streambed. Before he got very far, he was forced to steer away from the river, for another line of soldiers crossed over from the other side to close off that line of escape. Filled with anger at having been caught so unaware, he dropped to his knee and emptied his Spencer carbine at the charging soldiers. Then, with no choice but to seek cover, he sprang up and ran to the west, only to find another line of soldiers in position to stop any escape in that direction. There were many others who had sought the same escape route as he, and in the flood of terrified people, he lost sight of his wife.

  He turned to find Brave Elk running toward him. “Come!” his friend called out. “We must break through or they will kill us all!” With no hesitation, Bloody Hand followed him. With bullets snapping all around them, they made it safely into the trees by the river, where they found a dozen or more warriors already hiding under the five-foot-high banks. Some were armed, but about half the number had run out of their lodges without their weapons and now it was too late to retrieve them, for the soldiers were already moving among the tipis in the lower part of the village. Those with rifles were frantically digging rifle pits, preparing to fight the soldiers.

  “This is no good,” Bloody Hand told them. “Our warriors are scattered, running for their lives. There are too many soldiers. They have come to destroy us. They will soon search the riverbanks, and we are too few to fight them. We must find a way to break through the line of soldiers at the upper end of the village.” He got to his feet and paused a moment to say, “Come with me if you want to live to have your revenge.” Accustomed to following him in war, there was no hesitation on the part of the other warriors. Running in a crouch to avoid being spotted above the bank, they successfully made their way to a point just short of the advancing line of soldiers from F Company. Bloody Hand halted his warriors there while he searched for a possible escape route. The converging
cavalry troops formed a solid line of fire as they closed in on the upper end of the village. “We cannot pass without being seen,” he said. “We must let them pass us instead.” Spotting two good-sized gullies behind him, he pointed to them and said, “There! They are big enough to hide all of us. Cover yourselves with brush.”

  The warriors split up and took cover in the two gullies, with barely enough time to pull brush and dead branches over them before the line of cavalry moved even with them. Luck was with them due to the many gullies that reached down from the bluffs. It caused the terrain to be too rough for the soldiers to maintain a tight line, resulting in only two troopers able to urge their mounts along that stretch of the riverbank. As the two exhorted their horses to hurry over the gullies and cracks, they began to fall behind their comrades, resulting in carelessness on their part. Consequently, when the first trooper noticed the Indians hiding in one of the gullies, he was not quick enough to avoid the bullet from Bloody Hand’s rifle. With no time to react, the other soldier was pulled from his saddle by the Cheyenne warriors in the other gully and stabbed repeatedly.

  The way clear before them now, the warriors broke from the gullies and entered the dark water. With no soldiers close to them, they were safely across before they were discovered. In possession of the two cavalry mounts, they left the burning village behind them and headed for the nearby hills—Bloody Hand and Brave Elk on one of the horses, two of the other warriors on the second. The rest ran after them on foot.

  Across the river, Captain Richard Evans, company commander, F Company, turned in time to see what had happened behind his line of cavalry. “Damn!” he cursed, cognizant of his orders to let no warriors escape. “Bradley,” he ordered, “take a squad and run those men down.”

  Lieutenant Bradley was quick with a snappy, “Yes, sir” and picked a detail of fifteen men to immediately give chase. “Hurry, men, let’s overtake the devils before they reach those hills and scatter.”

  “Ride with caution, Braxton,” Evans warned, “and don’t pursue them beyond those hills.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bradley replied, thinking to himself that he was capable of estimating the risk as to how far to follow a frightened bunch of hostiles.

  Looking back and seeing the detachment of soldiers break away to come after him, Bloody Hand kicked the army mount hard, heading the horse toward a narrow ravine that separated two hills. He signaled the warriors on the other horse, and they followed his lead. Behind them, the other Indians had no choice but to run as best they could. Eager to seize upon the chase as an opportunity to exact revenge, he told Brave Elk what he intended to do. As usual, his friend was ready to follow him. As soon as they entered the ravine, and were far enough in to be out of sight of the charging cavalry detail, Bloody Hand pulled his horse to a stop and he and Brave Elk leaped to the ground. One of the other two warriors was instructed to lead the horses over the ridge of the ravine and hide them. “Get back as quickly as you can,” Bloody Hand said. With the horses out of sight, the four warriors hid themselves in the rocky sides of the ravine, two on each side, and waited for the soldiers.

  With his saber drawn and extended toward the fleeing Indians, Braxton Bradley led his troops as they bore down on the desperate hostiles. The four on horseback had apparently escaped into the hills, but there were nine on foot, running like rabbits before the hounds. Hoping to overtake them before they reached the ravine, he urged his men on. Only twenty yards or so behind them, he galloped into the ravine. With carbines blazing, his men shot at the hostiles as they tried to zigzag into the rocks to seek cover, when suddenly the sides of the ravine opened up with gunfire and his horse collapsed under him. In a matter of seconds, the ravine turned into a valley of death as his troopers were cut down before they knew where the shots were coming from. Dazed by his fall, Braxton lay still beside his dying horse. Around him lay the bodies of his men, most of them dead. The hostiles he had been chasing were now going among the dying to finish them off with their knives. Knowing it would be his turn any second, he drew his pistol and aimed it at one of the bushwhackers coming down from the side of the hill. Before he could pull the trigger, a bullet from a rifle slammed into his shoulder, causing him to misfire and drop his pistol. As he fumbled to pick it up again, a warrior kicked it out of his reach and grabbed him by his hair. Yanking his hair back, the warrior shrieked a war cry of vengeance and started to scalp him.

  “Wait!” Bloody Hand shouted. “He is an officer, a chief. He is one who tells the soldiers to kill us and our families. I say we should take him with us and let him know how it is to die slowly.”

  The warrior paused, his knife still threatening to split the skin on Bradley’s forehead. It was obvious that he wanted the scalp, but he respected Bloody Hand’s standing as a war chief. In a state of terrified shock, the lieutenant was helpless to resist and made no effort to defend himself. Finally the warrior released Bradley’s hair, and delivered a consolation blow across his cheek with the butt of his knife. Bradley sank to the ground with a raw cut across his face; the blood from his shoulder wound had now soaked his tunic. While he slumped there, several of the other warriors descended upon him to rain blows across his back and head until he lay almost unconscious in the long grass of the prairie.

  “We cannot linger here,” Bloody Hand cautioned. “We must find the others who have escaped.” They were all thinking about their families, unsure if their wives and children had managed to hide from the soldiers. “Those who escaped will try to run to the village of Lame Fox.” The others agreed, but it would mean a trek of about thirty-five miles to the Arapaho camp on the Saline River, a difficult journey with no food or water. With horses and weapons now from the slain soldiers, the Cheyenne warriors rode off to the north, hoping to find some of their people making their way through the hills to their Arapaho friends. A leash was fashioned with the reins of Bradley’s horse—the loop tied around the lieutenant’s neck and the other end around the saddle horn of Bloody Hand’s horse. There were extra horses, but Bloody Hand did not see fit to let the soldier ride. Barely able to stand, Braxton struggled to keep from falling, knowing he would be dragged to death.

  Back in the village, Colonel Arnold surveyed the scene of destruction his soldiers had wrought, with every lodge burning and the clearing strewn with bodies, most of them warriors, but also many women, children, and old men. He felt gratified, and pronounced the attack a success. The village was destroyed. Most of the large pony herd were captured and there appeared to be only a small number of military casualties. His intention now was to leave the area right away, armed with the knowledge that there were other Cheyenne villages farther along the river. He was mindful of George Custer’s quick retreat after the battle on the Washita after finding himself in like circumstances. Arnold’s objective had been accomplished. This band of hostile Indians had been severely punished, and at no great loss of his men. In the next few minutes, however, he was to learn of the loss of an entire squad of men and their lieutenant when Captain Evans reported that Lieutenant Bradley and fifteen men had chased a group of Cheyenne warriors and had not returned. “Dammit, man!” the colonel swore, having already congratulated himself on the success of the raid. “Find them!” Again thinking of Custer at the Washita, who left Major Joel Elliott and his detachment behind to be slaughtered, he did not want the same stigma on his victory. “Send a detachment to look for them,” Arnold ordered. “And do it fast. I don’t intend to remain here long.” Eager to get it done quickly, he added, “Take Cason with you.”

  Sitting on Spades off to one side of the burning village, Will reloaded his rifle. He had not fired very many times during the attack—only when he had to in order to keep from being shot himself. He couldn’t bring himself to shoot at the backs of women and children, in spite of a general feeling among many army officers that, “Any Indian is a worthy target.” In fact, he had not fired the rifle enough to heat the barrel up, a negative point with the Henry. In a sustained gun battle, the barrel w
ould get too hot to hold in your bare hand. He had considered trying to buy one of the new Winchesters that featured a wooden forearm and a loading port beside the breech. But his Henry had been so reliable as to become almost a part of him, and he couldn’t bring himself to trade.

  His loading complete—fifteen .44 cartridges in the magazine, and one more in the chamber—he glanced up to see Lieutenant Collins from F Company riding toward him. “Colonel Arnold says you’re to come with me,” Collins declared upon pulling up beside Will.

  “Is that so?” Will replied. “Where we goin’?”

  Collins explained that a detachment of troopers had chased after a group of Indians and had not returned. “We know where they were last seen, and Colonel Arnold wanted you to track them. He wants to pull outta here.” Will nodded and turned Spades to fall in beside the lieutenant’s horse, and they rode to the upper end of the camp, where a detachment of twenty men waited. It was not until the detail moved out and crossed the river that Will learned the identity of the officer leading the missing squad. Like the jolt from a gunshot, he was stunned into silence for a few moments—Braxton Bradley, Sarah’s betrothed! A multitude of thoughts ran swiftly through his brain. Among them, one that had to be said, Good riddance. He couldn’t help but think it, although he knew it was a terrible reaction to the news.