Ashes of Heaven

by Terry C. Johnston

  No Neck and Sitting Bull planned to use those pack-mules they had taken from the soldiers and hunt buffalo come spring. Sitting Bull declared that once they had made meat and the women had robes, they would wander up to Fort Peck to trade with the Yanktonnais before marching across the Medicine Line. They were giving up. There were too many Americans pouring into Lakota land.

  Their abandoning the war only served to make Crazy Horse angry. He had been arguing with himself on the best course to take, but now that the others were turning to flee to the Land of the Grandmother, did nothing but stiffen his resolve as winter continued to assault the land. Upon their arrival, the Hunkpapa had found the Crazy Horse people and Shahiyela terribly divided on whether to continue the war or sue for peace. Back and forth the headmen argued.

  Back in the Mid-Winter Moon most of the chiefs had become convinced they should talk peace with the Bear Coat. But when the treaty-makers had gone to the mouth of the Buffalo Tongue River, the Psa* had brazenly burst out of the trees and murdered five of the Lakota peace-talkers.*

  After those killings, Crazy Horse, Little Big Man, and others whipped the people into a war fury once again. As the Bear Coat’s soldiers marched upriver toward the village, the warriors harassed and skirmished with the column time and again until they suffered their humiliating stalemate at Belly Butte.

  Now with the torment of hunger and a gnawing despair gripping their hearts, the people again began to think more and more of making peace.

  In those first few days after Sitting Bull’s people departed for the north, a few lodges had attempted to slip away from the Crazy Horse encampment, desiring to sneak south to the agencies.

  But his camp police, the akicita, saw that no one limped back to the reservations. The warriors went after those who disobeyed Crazy Horse’s orders, chopping up their lodgepoles, slashing their poor lodgeskins, even confiscating weapons and horses so that those who wanted to flee now had no choice but to return to the camp in shame and humiliation. The Horse was determined that the white man would not succeed in dividing his people against one another … against him. They would stand united.

  If the white man were truly as strong as some said, if there were truly as many soldiers as some had reported, then Crazy Horse knew he had to hold his people together at all costs. Even if his people did not want to stand and fight to the end.

  He let them grumble and talk behind his back. The Sans Arcs wanted to go. So did all the Mnikowoju—except for Lame Deer’s band. But at least the Shahiyela of Little Wolf and Morning Star, Black Moccasin and Old Bear all remained strong. They, along with the Oglalla, understood what surrendering would mean.

  What good was a fighting man who had given up his pony, who had turned over his weapons to the soldiers? What good was a man to his people then?

  These cold days slid past slowly as the people plodded through the endless snows, the sun as pale as frozen mare’s milk in a pewter sky. Beneath the new snow lay a layer of icy crust. Under that lay the breast of the earth blackened with the fires of the previous summer.* There was little grass for the ponies. Little feed for any game they might hope to find. Without enough new hides, the women did what they could to patch the lodgeskins and keep out the wolfish winds. Men wore holes in their moccasins, then boiled them with bones for a soup that made Crazy Horse’s belly revolt.

  Perhaps things would get better if they left the valley of the Buffalo Tongue. Little Big Man had suggested they take the village west over the divide to the upper Greasy Grass. If not buffalo, at least they might find antelope.

  Should they fail to find game there, Crazy Horse knew, they could always push on downriver. If the hunting wasn’t very good there they would keep searching. His people needed meat to keep up their strength. If they had no strength, they could not fight. And if they could not fight, then the white men would overrun this country.

  But how could a man expect to find game to eat when he could not find a single track among the endless snows? Not a buffalo hoofprint. No sign of elk or antelope.

  Not so much as the tiny tracks of a snowshoe hare.

  * * *

  “You deserve this, General!” Frank Baldwin exclaimed. “To have your department enlarged to encompass the hunting ground of the hostile Sioux, and to have Lieutenant General Sheridan provide you with the men and supplies you’re due!”

  Colonel Nelson A. Miles nodded, his eyes crinkling in proud agreement. “That’s just the reason I’m sending you to see Terry in Minneapolis, Lieutenant.”

  The commanding officer of the Fifth U.S. Infantry was just getting underway his campaign to wheedle and pry what he most desired out of Philip H. Sheridan in Chicago and Sheridan’s superior, William Tecumseh Sherman, in Washington City. After all, Sherman was his wife’s uncle.

  “With the success you had against Sitting Bull last December,† twice driving his village into the wilderness with only what they could carry on their backs,” Miles slammed a fist into the palm of his other hand, “and our similar victory over Crazy Horse up Tongue River—why is it taking so long for my superiors to act?”

  “They’ve dealt with Hazen and Gibbon, Terry and Crook too long, sir,” Baldwin groaned as he pulled his pipe from his blouse pocket.

  The strikingly handsome Miles shuddered as if struck with a blast of cold. But this was a wave of genuine physical revulsion held for Crook and Terry. Plain as paint, General Alfred H. Terry back in St. Paul failed to support Miles throughout the previous autumn and winter campaigns. Why, Nelson had even gone so far as to write to Sherman accusing Terry and his Department of Dakota offices of making a determined effort to see that Miles accomplished nothing in his campaigns at best, and of criminal neglect of duty at worst.

  Still, the colonel’s most intense hatred was reserved for George C. Crook—a soldier who had turned in an even sorrier effort than that of Terry! To Nelson’s way of thinking, Crook’s bumbling and thumb-sitting, while Custer’s killers moseyed off to the four winds, had accomplished nothing but give the hostiles renewed confidence! And now there were rumors that Crook was sneaking around down at Red Cloud’s Agency, attempting to enlist Spotted Tail himself to search for Crazy Horse. Why, the conniving blackguard! If Crook thought such puny efforts would undermine Miles’s campaign to force the tribes to surrender, then Crook was more of an incompetent dullard than he could have ever imagined!

  Miles was the only one who could lay claim to fighting this war, by God! Those hostile chiefs and warrior bands belonged to Nelson A. Miles. No two ways about it. They were his Indians. Miles had been the one to fight them right from the moment of his arrival in the Yellowstone country last summer, his thirty-seventh, fighting the hostiles right on through the fall and into this interminable winter. He had tracked them, stalked, and harried them. Hell, the only fight Crook had with the enemy was when the Sioux caught him eating breakfast and playing whist!

  No, indeed, Miles thought: the Sioux and Cheyenne belong to me. And by the heavens, Nelson A. Miles should be the one to whom those warrior bands surrendered!

  “Perhaps all of my superiors being cronies of Sherman and Sheridan does explain it,” Miles considered, his disgust rising like sour, bubbling acid. “There is no other logical reason for my commanders to ignore the worst management of the rear I’ve ever seen! If those four worthless popinjays were out of the way, why, Pope could be packed off to New York and Terry could be sent down to replace him at Leavenworth.”

  “But that still leaves Hazen and Gibbon here in the north, General,” Baldwin reminded him.

  Miles snorted and rubbed the end of his nose, brooding on the two colonels who still outranked him in seniority. “Both of them have been out here so long they’d doubtless jump at the chance to go east!” He slapped a palm down on his cluttered desk. “I promised Sherman that if he would give me this command and just half the troops now in this department, I would end this Sioux war once and forever in four months!”

  “What did General Sherman say to that?” />
  “I’m ignored! No goddamned answer at all!” he shrieked in torment. “Why do Sherman and Sheridan ignore my reports, my requests, my exposing the utter criminality in the quartermaster corps, if not to protect their old cronies, like Crook and the others?”

  “Nothing short of criminal, General!”

  “If Major Benjamin Card wasn’t such a thief disposed to ignore my department’s needs, then my men would have what we need to pursue this campaign!” Miles growled as he sank into his desk chair. “As it is, I had to turn around and return to our base instead of chasing after that fleeing village.”

  “But for the want of forage and rations,” Baldwin grumped in sympathy, “we could have dogged Crazy Horse until we caught him again, staying right on his tail till we whipped him once and for all.”

  Scratching at his heavy, black beard, Miles wagged his head. “We’ve got less than five months to get the job done, Lieutenant.”

  “Why only five months?”

  “That’s when Congress’s new legislation goes into effect,” he explained. “They’ve reduced the size of the frontier army by 2,500 soldiers.”

  His voice rising in disbelief, Baldwin cried, “Just a year after they approved the appropriations for all the new recruits they were calling ‘Custer’s Avengers’?”

  “The whole nation was up in arms after Custer got himself butchered by the Sioux and Cheyenne,” Miles said. “And now with that contested presidential election causing the possibility of another revolt in the south finally put to rest—”

  “Revolt, General?”

  Miles waved a hand, casually discounting just how serious the problem had been back east for the past few months. “That situation with Hayes, and the way the southern states contested his election so they could put an end to reconstruction. Seems the wounds still run deep down in the south, and those wounds are still a might tender.”

  “So Congress will proceed with cutting our troop strength now that we’re just beginning to show some success with the hostiles?”

  “We’ve got till July 1, Mr. Baldwin,” Miles said as he ran his fingers through his thick hair. “So we must strike while the opportunity is at hand.”

  “As soon as Bruguier returns, you’ll have an idea just what the sentiments are in those camps, General.”

  “Damn right,” Miles agreed. “As I wrote Sherman, my perfect spy system has enabled me to know the strength and design of the enemy, to find, follow, and defeat him—wherever he may flee.”

  “What will it take to make Washington realize what you’ve accomplished out here?”

  “Your trip to see General Terry will be my first step in securing all that I am due, Lieutenant.”

  “Enlarging your department—”

  “As I explained, I’ve written both Sheridan and Sherman telling them that there ought to be but one department over this whole country the hostiles claim. One department, and one department commander.”

  “You, General.”

  “Absolutely. But I need more good officers.” He wagged his head like a grumpy bear. “If Terry would only replace Otis down at Glendive Cantonment, I wouldn’t have to worry about the door on my eastern flank.”

  “Not to mention our supply problem.”

  “That’s the quartermaster again! Criminal neglect from those scheming bureaucrats!” Miles roared. “I threatened Sheridan that I would go to the press if I didn’t get what I ordered for my campaigns from those crooks in the quartermaster department!”

  “Sheridan hates the papers.”

  “Damn right he does. And he always advises against taking any correspondents along so I’m sure he knows how bad this whole thing would look if I talked to the papers. I told him squarely that only a full department command would defend me against those who are conspiring against my success.”

  “A success no other officer can match in this war, General.”

  “The Fifth can be very proud,” Miles said. “We have fought and defeated larger and better armed bodies of hostile Indians than any other officer since the history of Indian warfare commenced! And at the same time I’ve gained a more extended knowledge of this northern frontier than any living man.”

  “They have no one better for the job, sir.”

  Miles turned to the large map he had tacked behind his chair. Tracing a finger around the extent of country between the Canadian border and Fort Fetterman to the south, the colonel said, “I told Sherman I would make the following recommendations: As the bad lands of the Little Missouri and that near the headwaters of the Tongue River afford the hostile tribes their strongholds of refuge, I would recommend that they be occupied by supply camps, where a movable command can obtain supplies; also the mouths of the Little Horn and the Musselshell, and at Fort Peck. These points, with two exceptions, can be supplied by steamboat transportation, while the others can be supplied by ox-trains.”

  “Not a word from the commanding general on your ideas?”

  “Not a peep,” he said, glowering at his desk. “I even asked Sheridan and Sherman for an appropriation to furnish wire for a military telegraph connecting Bismarck, Dakota with Bozeman, Montana. And another wire connecting the Yellowstone Valley with Fort Fetterman, Wyoming. Why, similar appropriations have been made with good results down south in Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and Indian Territory.”

  Baldwin stood and stretched. “Tomorrow morning is going to come early, General. I believe I’ll be off to bed before I depart.”

  “Yes, by all means, Lieutenant,” Miles replied. “I want you rested before you ride east to sit on Terry’s desk for me.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll do everything I can for us so that the July 1 deadline won’t mean that all we’ve accomplished comes undone.”

  Miles came around the desk and stopped almost toe to toe with Baldwin. Placing a hand on the shoulder of his trusted lieutenant, the colonel said, “I want you back here before the end of April.”

  “You can count on it, General. The end of April.”

  “There’s only so much you can accomplish fighting those at Terry’s headquarters,” Miles growled. “And I want you here when spring comes … when I march the Fifth to finish what we began this winter.”

  Chapter 5

  Early February 1877

  BY TELEGRAPH

  MISSOURI.

  Breaking Up of a Hard Winter.

  ST. LOUIS, February 2.—After being ice bound for fifty-six days, the river finally burst its bonds between 10 and 11 o’clock this morning, and ice has been passing the city but not in great quantities, ever since. Navigation southward is resumed and steamers will prepare for business to-morrow. Ice on the western side of Arsenal Island still holds fast, but it will no doubt break up and run out very soon, but in the meantime there is a sufficient channel on the east side for all practical purposes.

  Johnny Bruguier was a wanted man.

  But in jumping out of the skillet, he just might have pitched himself right into the fire.

  Now Johnny figured he was a wanted man in two cultures. By attempting to slip the wasicu hangman’s noose from around his neck, he might well have put the Lakota knife at his throat.

  Day after long, cold day, Johnny brooded beneath the turned-down brim of his hat, squinting into the distance, his eyes constantly moving. Fear made a man a good hunter, he reminded himself. He might just have a chance if the warrior bands did not catch Old Wool Woman and him out in the open on their way to find the village, and if Johnny could get to the sanctuary of that sacred lodge …

  If he didn’t, well, to hell with the hangman’s rope waiting for him back at the Standing Rock Reservation. The Lakota warriors would accomplish what those white law dogs wanted, anyway.

  Johnny turned a moment, looking behind him at the old woman hunched in her blanket against the slashing wind which drove wispy streamers of icy snow along the ground. They had them a bargain, these two. He had promised her he would find the village and return Old Wool Woman to her people. And she had vowe
d to do everything she could to give him his chance to talk to the tribal leaders. To do that, she would have to get him into the village alive.

  She looked up at him momentarily beneath the hooded flap of her thin, gray army blanket. The wind tormented the pony’s mane as it struggled sideways against the brutal gale. Tugging on the rein, she kept the animal moving. She adjusted the heavy buffalo robe she clutched around the blanket at her shoulders. Then buried her head once more, hiding her face from the wind.

  For but a flicker of time, as a gauzy strip of icy snow swept across the ground between them, Johnny thought she looked much like his own Lakota mother. It made his heart yearn. Knowing how hard her life had been on the Standing Rock with that drunken French-Canadian trader for a husband. But every time Johnny’s heart ached for this old Shahiyela woman, he scolded himself for that softness.

  It was something that just might get him killed by that woman’s people. Wouldn’t the Crazy Horse people consider him a traitor?

  Of course they would.

  He quartered in the saddle, trying to turn his right shoulder into the wind, tugging up the side of his collar. But there was really little he could do about the wind now that they had climbed out of the valley of the Tongue and crossed toward the Rosebud, following the village’s westward migration toward the Chetish Mountains.* There the trail turned south by west, striking for the White Mountains, what the soldiers called the Bighorns. For generations the Lakota had been going to those slopes to cut lodgepoles at the end of every summer. But with the constant harassment and the destruction of their lodges through the previous autumn and winter, the warrior bands needed poles now. It made sense to him that they would strike out for those foothills. Even more sense when he considered how the camps must be on the verge of starvation.

  A man had only to look at the prisoners. Those captives Miles had taken the day before his battle with the Crazy Horse village were all skinny, their eyes sunken, cheekbones sharp beneath the skin, as if chiseled out of red sandstone. This was a harsh winter to begin with. It had begun early and remained relentless. With the soldiers on their heels, the village couldn’t have had much time to hunt, dry meat, cure hides—to provide for the little ones, and for the old.