The whole command was close to scurvy. The fort’s vegetables had run out, and it was too soon in the growing season to raise more. The army had no practical way to supply greens to its far-flung posts, so it sent seed instead, and the various companies vied with one another to grow the best beans and carrots and peas and corn and squash.
The command traversed southward across broken, silent grassland, the short grasses verdant now in June but they would soon brown. The turbid river flowed slowly north, supporting a thin band of vegetation, pale green willows, lime-tinted cottonwood, and chokecherry along its banks, and sometimes whole mazes of impenetrable silvery sagebrush, which slowed the Gatling limber. About the time the river turned the color of pewter in the late June twilight, Reno called a halt on a grassy flat that offered good fodder for the mounts: they had made eight miles, a good piece after leaving the Yellowstone late in the afternoon. There was nothing around them but aching emptiness.
“Company commanders, set up your guard mount,” he ordered. “Double the horse guard. No bugles this entire scout. No shots, no hunting.”
His officers would choose men for a horse guard and sentry duty, impose a veil of silence on this large command and hope for an invisible passage through a land the Indians knew far better than themselves.
The cooks busied themselves with the beans while the scouts drifted down from the hills. Troopers on stable duty grained and watered the mounts, brushed them, examined hooves, looked for heat in pasterns and forelegs, and picketed them on good grass. A coyote howled at the rising moon and another replied.
Reno restlessly patrolled the bivouac, paying particular attention to the disposition and care of the horses. He studied the nearby gulches, wondering whether any would permit a raiding party to come close, and decided he had chosen well. A half mile of flat country without cover stretched back from the river.
Bouyer rode in and slid off his spotted Indian pony and led it to Reno’s tent. The guide had an odd lumbering gait that matched his heavy features.
“Nothing here,” the scout said. “No village recently.”
“What about old ones?”
“Few encampments on some creeks, month old, half a dozen lodges.”
“Where are they going?”
“Too old to know. Some travois marks westward.”
“Can you identify the bands?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Are the Ree scouts saying anything?”
“Big damn village around somewheres,” Bouyer said.
“In other words, nothing.”
Bouyer nodded.
“All right, get them in and feed them. There’s beans with some salt pork.” He saw black kettles suspended over a dozen cookfires. Each company had its own mess and the packers had theirs and the officers had theirs. Bitter-smelling cottonwood smoke drifted across the flat and hung over the coiling and uncoiling river.
Reno scanned the heavens anxiously, hoping it wouldn’t rain, and was rewarded by a sprinkle of stars emerging from the twilight. He enjoyed this lonely place, so far removed from the habitations of civilization. He enjoyed the company of armed men, who together were an armed force that could sting an enemy.
And yet he was restless and distant from his officers and even more so from his enlisted men. He wasn’t taciturn, but he had no patience with small talk or gossip, or the run of conversation that made other men companionable, and so he retreated into himself and pushed aside his constant loneliness.
Even before dawn, company commanders were quietly awakening their men. There would be no hot breakfast this day; no fires, no smoke to reveal the whereabouts of his men. By the time the sun had cleared the eastern horizon, his men were riding by twos up the Powder, across an aching alkali-whitened wasteland unfit for habitation. The men yawned, sat passively in their McClellan saddles, let their horses pick their way through the silent morning. Scouts rode ahead; vedettes covered the flanks. Bouyer had vanished forward. The man appeared and disappeared like a conjurer.
No sign, no sign. They may as well have been traversing the Sahara. They walked, trotted, cantered briefly, and settled back again to a walk. Every hour or so Reno dismounted them and had them walk their horses, which was a form of rest for both man and beast.
That day they traversed twenty-six miles and found nothing. Reno again bivouacked on the Powder River, choosing a grassy flat that offered few opportunities to war parties bent on stealing horses. The mounts were holding up well. Reno knew horses better than he knew his men; and his command did not suffer as many lamed or broken-down nags as others did.
He permitted cookfires that night. There was little high ground to hide observers so the fires would not be seen, and his scouts had spread far and wide looking for hostiles. But again they were alone in a sea of grass, hearing only the soughing of the wind as it sucked the moisture out of their skins and chapped and chafed their faces and hands.
The men had individualized their attire. Some wore straw hats, some wore buckskins, a few wore gloves. Reno didn’t mind, so long as his men wore their blue blouses and were instantly identifiable as soldiers. He wore a straw panama himself, preferring its cool ventilation and broad brim to the sweatiness of a forage cap. That night he asked his company commanders to inspect arms. The Springfields seemed vulnerable to dirt, so they would by God be kept clean, and every copper cartridge would be kept shiny too.
The next day, the twelfth, the command marched another twenty-four miles through punishing heat. Reno’s scouts pushed to the junction of the Powder and Little Powder and found nothing while the command wrestled with long gulches and steep slopes that proved to be too much for the condemned horses pulling the Gatling gun. The troopers had to unlimber the gun and drag it upslope by brute manhandling.
The easy flats had vanished, and the arid land shaped itself into coulees and hills, and required careful scouting by Reno’s Arikaras. In the middle of the afternoon the scouts found evidence of a recent village and Reno decided to bivouac then and there, resting his sun-blasted men and heatexhausted horses.
There were no comforts. No place to hide from the murderous sun or escape the chafing wind. No relief from the monotony of beans and bacon, hardtack and the murky water of the Powder, an aptly named stream carrying a load of brown silt toward the Yellowstone. And no relief from prairie rattlesnakes, which lurked everywhere.
The next day Reno turned west, having explored as directed as far as the confluence of the Powder and Little Powder, and when the command reached the Mizpah, Reno headed downstream while his scouts headed upstream to check on Indian encampments. Somewhere in that vast land, which stretched beyond the horizons, beyond the white haze, beyond the rim of the world, known only to the whispering wind, several thousand irreconcilable Sioux and Cheyenne had hidden themselves from the blue-shirts and were singing songs of war.
Mitch Bouyer made Reno’s next decision for him.
“Nothing up the Mizpah,” he said, wiping dust-stained sweat off his heavy brown brow. “This drainage is no-how where they’re camped. You might head west toward the Little Pumpkin, major. Do some good that way.”
Reno consulted his map—and General Terry’s orders, which commanded him to descend Mizpah Creek to its junction with the Powder River before turning toward the drainage of the Tongue. It would be more fruitful, he concluded, to cross the prairie divide then and there, and head for Pumpkin Creek. Maybe he would pick up some sign off to the west.
So, on a sun-scorched June thirteenth, he took his command over the parched and treeless slopes toward another river, and another fate. He would have to explain the disobedience to General Terry. But he was out here to find Indians and by God he would do it.
CHAPTER NINE
RENO SUMMONED HIS STAFF. CALHOUN, HARRINGTON, SMITH, AND the rest collected around a makeshift field table which bore Reno’s map and a lantern that cast pale yellow light into bronzed and sun-baked faces.
“Mitch Bouyer’s scouts have explored up and down the
Mizpah, and there’s nothing there. General Terry wants us to descend to the Powder again, completing the loop, here,” he said, tracing river systems with his finger. “We’re wasting time. I’m proposing that we cross to Pumpkin Creek, here, and start looking in the Tongue River basin. This would depart from … instructions.”
He waited for a response but no one hazarded any.
“I want results and so does the general.”
Calhoun nodded. That was some sort of concession if not agreement, Reno supposed. Commanders in the field had a little leeway to deal with unforeseen circumstances or exigencies. Calhoun was Custer’s brother-in-law, and Reno didn’t doubt that every detail of this scout would soon reach the lieutenant colonel’s ears. Reno not only didn’t mind that, he suspected it was a good thing.
“What do our Ree scouts think?” Harrington asked.
“Big village west of here. But not around the Powder, and probably not the Tongue, either. Rosebud, maybe. I want to find the trail.”
Reno was met with silence and understood it. His staff agreed with this deviation from orders but didn’t want to go on record. That was all right.
“All right, we’ll head over the divide,” he said.
The next dawn, June fourteenth, the major led his footsore command southwest over the gullied brow of an obscure divide and into the basin of the Tongue, and struck shimmering alkaline Pumpkin Creek a mile below its junction with the Little Pumpkin. Then he directed the command up the intimate valley of the Little Pumpkin for a mile or so and bivouacked there in a good grassy basin that would conceal cookfires. This was hillier country, with high points that could be used for observation, so he chose his site carefully. He was tired of plains. Nothing but empty flats that could drive a man mad.
On the fifteenth, he led his command over jackpine ridges toward the Tongue. The gnarled, long-needled pines made travel difficult, especially for the Gatling gun, and it turned out to be a hard, hot, thirsty day for the troopers. The tongue of the Gatling limber snapped at a gully and the company lost time while a new one was hewn and bolted in.
The Arikaras scouted ahead and reported only empty grass country. One of them, Young Hawk, shot an elk, which annoyed Reno but he let it pass. They reached the Tongue, a substantial river cutting through hill and canyon country that could have hidden a dozen armies. But here was firewood, shade, clear water, and endless grass.
He took them down the Tongue eight miles until Bouyer called a halt. They had reached the site of a vast village, abandoned a month or so earlier, numbering some four hundred lodges. The travois trail led west. The Arikara scouts studied the tepee rings, the kitchen debris, the way the camp had been laid out, and reported through Bouyer that at last they were on the trail.
Reno was on the horns of a dilemma. There was no point in following the Tongue back to the Yellowstone as his orders required. He could return to the rendezvous point and tell General Terry he had found nothing but an old village, or he could follow the clear trail into the Rosebud valley left by hundreds of burdened travois. He could return with no more news for all his traveling than that the Indians were farther west. He would be held blameless. He had executed Terry’s orders, with only a minor deviation, and come up with nothing. Or he could try to give the general some intelligence of value.
Faint heart never won fair maid, he thought, remembering Custer’s taunt. Command seemed oddly heavy that evening. He wanted to test his decision on his officers, but couldn’t manage it. He slid into his tent, pulled his silver pint flask from his kit, and took a hard swallow of hundred-proof bourbon. It tore at his throat and quieted his soul.
The men devoured beans and a little elk that night and talked a great deal. Some intangible excitement brewed in the camp. Just how soldiers knew, or sensed portents Reno never knew, but they did, and their spirits were sharp. The horses were in need of shoes and gaunted in spite of good grass and two gallons of grain a day; the troopers were worn with riding, the teamsters footsore from walking, and all had endured alkali dust and blinding June light.
The alkali water had loosened their bowels and their complaints reached Reno’s ears. Some were saddle sore, especially the recruits, and a few had boils on their backsides, making every minute in the saddle an ordeal. Some were sun-blinded, and half the command was sore-eyed from squinting through the shadeless glare, day upon day. That was the army: loose stools, boredom, sickness, tedium, dull hours from before dawn to darkness.
His order the next morning was simple: “Follow it,” he said.
His officers stared until Reno pointed, and only then did they trot to their companies and tell their sergeants to line them out, again by twos.
The Right Wing of the Seventh Cavalry turned west, trotting silently along an Indian trail. Now they were cutting overland, riding on top of a broad trail that furrowed the prairie, trampled sagebrush, and made each rider alert and cautious and watchful. Reno knew what they were thinking: was this Old Man going to pitch caution to the winds and lead this modest force against the bitterest elements of the entire Sioux nation? Was this Old Man Reno another glory hound who would lay them all in their graves? Was this man another Custer?
They called Custer Hard Ass, but not when officers were around. They knew his history as an Indian fighter; knew he would shoot deserters without a trial, abandon wounded, neglect to bury the dead, and in the heat of battle leave the besieged to their fate, as he had Major Joel Elliott and nineteen men in the battle of the Washita.
They knew he would break down men and horses when he felt the need, and sometimes that need had nothing to do with military necessity. They knew some of his officers despised him, and that he had collected his relatives around him to strengthen his grip on the Seventh. They knew he had been court-martialed and convicted of being absent without leave from his command, and of conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline, and had been suspended without pay for a year.
They knew less about Reno, and he wanted it that way. He was simply distant, evoking no hatreds or enthusiasm in his men. He didn’t want their approval, which meant less discipline or hardship, but neither did he ignore their feelings, and kept a sharp eye out for demoralization or discouragement. He had led men through the Civil War with honor and courage by that means, and he would lead them in the same fashion now.
And they knew one thing more about him: he would not needlessly or recklessly risk their lives, especially for vainglorious reasons. He knew he wasn’t a favorite among officers of the regiment, but he knew as well that none of them except perhaps Custer and Benteen and Tom Weir found him wanting.
He had struck Benteen once in an altercation, and thought that blowhard of a man deserved worse; he had brought charges against Weir for drunkenness on duty, and from that moment had made Weir an enemy. And Custer’s studied disapproval was probably little more than rivalry; Custer distrusted the older Reno.
But if there was serious trouble in the regiment, it lay between Custer and Benteen, not Custer and Reno. After the battle of the Washita, and before Reno had joined the regiment, Benteen had written anonymously to the St. Louis Democrat claiming that Custer had failed to go to the rescue of Major Elliott, and had fled the scene after only a minimal search for the missing major and his men.
Custer had gathered his officers in a wrath-charged meeting and told them he would horsewhip the one who wrote that letter. Benteen stepped forward and announced that he had written the letter. Custer had glared at him and walked out.
Reno thought maybe Benteen should have been horsewhipped. The press wasn’t the court to try officers of the United States Army, no matter that Custer failed to account for all of his command before ordering a retreat from that perilous field.
Now Reno led this mass of men closer and closer toward the hostile encampment. It was not a force to lead into a fight; he knew it and didn’t intend to get sucked into one if he could help it. And Terry didn’t want him to give away the army’s presence, either.
/> By two o’clock that hot afternoon of June sixteenth, Reno’s command had crossed the pine-covered divide and reached the grassy valley of Rosebud Creek. He dismounted them there. The rank smell of sweat filled the air. Men’s shirts had soaked black under the armpits; horses had lathered around the saddles and withers.
It was more than heat that had wrought all that sweat as men peered fearfully at the ridges, down the silent valley, at every crow and magpie and hawk. They had come nineteen miles along the trail of that vast village. Somewhere ahead were hundreds, maybe a thousand, well-armed warriors seething with hatred of the government’s edicts and itching to fight.
Reno sent scouts up and down the creek while the men rested, and a few hours later the scouts reported the sites of abandoned villages up the Rosebud, along with a heavy travois trail in that direction. Reno mounted his command and rode up the Rosebud three miles to the abandoned village site, and camped there for the night. There would be some intelligence to gather from examining that place.
He knew now where the hostiles were headed. Follow further, and risk being discovered, or head for the Yellowstone and report what he found. He decided to explore further, and led his command up the Rosebud another few miles to another Indian campground, riding in deep silence, with all bugles and noise forbidden. It was clear that the hostiles were progressing southwest, and in great numbers, and were not far away.
Through Bouyer, who interpreted, Reno asked the senior Arikara scout, Forked Horn, what he thought of that enormous trail.
“If the Dakotas see us, the sun will not move very far before we are all killed,” the scout replied.
Reno knew he had found the right trail. He had discovered what Terry needed to know, the information that would justify Reno’s departure from orders. Somewhere not far ahead, in that sullen heat, were the object of three columns of soldiers: Crook’s up from the south, Gibbon’s from Fort Ellis in the west, and Terry’s, out of Dakota Territory.
Satisfied that he had made a valuable reconnaissance, the disobedient Major Reno turned his men north, and headed for the Yellowstone River and a stormy meeting with General Terry.
An Obituary for Major Reno Page 5
