by Peter Bowen
Even this considerable expenditure of taxpayer’s lead did not make it safe. The Injuns would wait until the cannon stopped, and then they’d come back into the trees silent as rising water, and wait. So Carrington lost a soldier, a woodcutter, a teamster every so often, a steady bleeding, and it played hell with the men’s minds.
They also knew what winters was like here when they came so they had to have that firewood.
The Injuns cropped off a few correspondents, too—one reporter from Harper’s got pounded full of his own pencils and slathered with fat and burned alive. Soldiers all over the world feel the same way about correspondents, you may depend upon it.
A couple days after we arrived I rolled out of a robe stiff with frost one morning and found Crazy Horse standing near, he’d been looking down at me.
He told me to ride with him. We went up a long ridge to the end, where it broke off into a sheer fall of gray rock. There was a flat spot there, and a big brass spyglass like the artillerymen use to spot their fall of shot. The fort was easy visible in the distance. Crazy Horse put his eye to the lens.
I heard a screeching above and looked up. It was a sparrow hawk, flapping his wings so as to stay right above us. Crazy Horse looked up and smiled.
“They come twenty-two times a day,” he said. He took a small medicine bundle from behind his ear and unfolded the blue leather. He had what looked to be a sapphire. I reached for it but he took the stone away. It does not do to have an enemy touch your magic.
“Ah,” said Crazy Horse, looking on the fort, “there he is, the fool who will come to kill me and die himself. Who is he?”
I couldn’t tell at this distance, even with the telescope.
“He is very stupid and has a terrible temper,” said Crazy Horse. “He beats the horse he rides with his saber. I cannot imagine that, to do that to the horse your life depends upon.”
Well, I thought, you’ll like Custer, too, he blows their brains out.
“Come,” said Crazy Horse. We walked back down the ridge to our horses and mounted and rode north, past the little camps of ten or twenty warriors, piled all together to war on the whiteman for the first time.
Another sparrow hawk fluttered overhead and then it shot away, and shortly another came, or perhaps it was the same bird. Crazy Horse whistled a harsh greeting each time.
“I cannot be killed save by a Oglala with steel,” he said. “When I fight the bird flies above and the stone behind my ear pushes the bullets away. Do your people ever keep any promise that they make?”
“Not to you they won’t,” I said.
“I thought so,” he said. “We are many and brave. We will teach them a lesson and then your people will stay out of our lands.”
Not much I could say to that, but I tried after a while.
“You are brave and when you got to fight what do you fight with?”
He patted the stock of his rifle.
“You cannot make them or the bullets. So when those are gone the whitemen will sweep you aside like a man sweeps a cloud of gnats from his face.”
Crazy Horse pulled his horse up, and I stopped mine, too.
“What you say is true,” he said, “but we cannot lie on the stones and die happily. We must fight.”
I looked up and there was another sparrow hawk.
“But we will win this time,” he said. “And perhaps a time or two again.”
Well, there wasn’t nothin’ I could add to that. We rode on and come to a couple striplings cleaning out a deer they’d caught in a snare. The deer’s front leg was scraped to the bone—they had used stolen telegraph wire—and the boys offered us fresh steaming raw liver with a dab of gall on it. I et mine hungry, I hadn’t paid any attention to food the last few days. The blood was sticky and I wiped it off on the yellow grass, then went to the creek to rinse my hands.
The blood went away in dark red threads.
“Bravery will be enough,” said Crazy Horse behind me. “It is all that we have.”
Well, that and enough rifles and ammunition should see them through, I thought, all the way to noble deaths. Their wives and children and old folks can starve to death, which takes longer and makes no songs.
When I looked to the west I could make the distant peaks out and each one had a gray line topping straight out off it. Sign of snow for sure. If the line is black, that’s a blizzard and a bad cold wind, and take cover. Just snow, but how much?
Crazy Horse stood at the edge of the trees looking west, with his hands held up and his eyes closed, praying, with the sparrow hawk skittering above. He prayed for a long time, and when he was through he nodded.
We rode back to where he was camped with Spotted Tail and Red Cloud, for the three of them were the war leaders. Even Red Cloud deferred to Crazy Horse.
That afternoon they held a war council, and each man recited the names of the enemies he had killed and numbered the horses he had stolen. It seemed childish to me, but they was happy with it and my opinion warn’t asked for.
“We fight tomorrow,” said Crazy Horse. “I have had a dream. I will lure the little angry soldier, and when he and his men come past the crest of Big Piney Ridge we rise and kill them. Rise and kill them. The snow will make them hungry for wood. No one has gone near them for days. Perhaps they will be foolish.”
Crazy Horse had been waiting for the dream. Even with all the men in the circle, outside the sparrow hawk fluttered above him. He moved like a cat, he flowed, and I think he really could see not only the victory tomorrow, but much other death, too, his tribe’s and his own.
The scouts had been pulled back and no one had taken a shot at a sentry in days. I thought them fools down there in the stockade was probably about thinking the Injuns was gone. If they did think that, they was about to pay a big mistake off in bloody coin.
The Injuns had been edgy, but now as I walked about the camp they all seemed tired and contented, sharpening their knives and cleaning their rifles, without any of the usual brag on what would happen tomorrow.
We et good of stew that night and I went to sleep early. I woke up when the first snowflakes touched my face. It was a light snowfall and would quicken and stop and quicken. It warmed up a little. My bladder was full, and I rolled out and folded the robe to keep the warm in and went off toward the bushes.
Crazy Horse was sitting in front of a low red fire, his eyes closed and motionless as stone. He seemed larger in that light, heavy, as though he might slowly sink into the earth.
I pissed and made my way back and went to sleep.
He was still there in the morning. A sparrow hawk shrieked over him, and his eyes flew open, and he stood up quickly and walked off toward the horse lines.
I saddled up and waited to go where I was told to.
11
THE DAY OF THE Fetterman massacre was a clear cold one in the morning, but the wind was still hard and steady from the west and it smelled of snow.
The warriors kept well back, and had been forbidden to peer over anything for fear they would alert the troopers who were in the corner block towers with binoculars.
We heard a few bars of reveille and maybe an hour later the gates swung open and some teamsters and their wagons come out, with the woodcutters and a few soldiers to guard them. I looked for cavalry and the artillerymen, teams, caissons, and cannons, but the gates swung shut and on the little party came, maybe all of twenty men.
It took the teamsters well over an hour to come up on the trees that had been girdled in the summer to dry them up for winter firewood. The woodcutters moved off with their saws and axes and the guards lounged around the wagons.
Crazy Horse was standing by me. He had his hand out, palm up, making pulling motions toward the wood party. When the men went to the trees, Crazy Horse shut his hand and raised the fist and tapped his left shoulder with it.
He swung up on his war horse and raised his rifle, one of them brass and steel lever-actions, and his picked men, just twenty of them, come riding to him
. They took off and when the guards saw them they threw up their guns and fired to no effect.
Crazy Horse’s men were after the horses pulling the wagons, three teams of four, and they come on fast and shot down some in each team, panicking the others who went purely crazy from fear and broke themselves up on the traces and crosstrees. The cutters and teamsters and soldiers took such cover as they could find. Crazy Horse’s men came back. Other Indians on foot kept up a steady sniping at the men pinned in the wagons.
I could see some of it, and it warn’t long before I figured out that the Indians wasn’t trying to hit anyone. Keep the bait alive, I thought, and the fish will be along presently.
In half an hour the post gates swung open and two double lines of troopers come out. The soldiers was followed by a few civilians on their own mounts, coming along for the fun. All I could do was nod. Fun, indeed.
I walked forward so I could see better. The aimed fire at the wagons picked up, and this time in earnest, and men was falling or seemingly slammed down by a big fist. The cavalry was coming on, and just as it crested the rise and could see the wagons Crazy Horse and his little party flashed in front of them. The troopers halted and then the man leading them pointed his saber at the retreating Injuns and on they came, going right past the woodcutters and straight up toward the ridge that I stood on.
Suddenly I was grabbed from behind by several pairs of hands and hustled off to a dead snag of fir had a fine view of the bowl behind the ridge. They tied me to it hand and foot.
Spotted Tail’s striped face hung grinning in front of mine for a moment.
“Just remember,” he said. “So you can tell the others.” He was gone as quick as he come.
Crazy Horse’s band went by far to the right of me, and they broke up and took their ponies dodging through the boulders all scattered through the bowl, and right behind them come the cavalry with that ass and his saber out front.
Crazy Horse stood up across the bowl, on a big gray rock, and I could see that strange hawk above him. The troopers were making right for him when every boulder in the bowl had an Injun resting his rifle on it, and the fire sounded like cloth ripping. A huge mass of mounted Injuns come in from my left—easy a thousand of them, and several hundred more cut across the open country on my right that the soldiers had just rode through. They was all caught and to die.
Hard to tell how long it was from the time the troopers came over the ridgetop to the silence after the battle—I’d say no more than five minutes. The warriors checked the dead to see if any was shamming and I heard a couple shrieks cut off in gurgles, and then the Indians just melted away, leaving only me to tell the tale. The silence after a fight isn’t like any other, it has an emptiness that’s black.
The Injuns were in such a hurry to go they didn’t even take the sound horses. The animals jingled when they walked, of the tack on them, and they nosed the bodies looking for their riders.
I was trussed real tight to the snag and the chill was coming on fast. If someone didn’t cut me loose quick I thought I might lose my hands to frostbite. I strained away at the rawhide but I had no luck.
I saw a trooper way off, riding real careful. Of course, they would have heard the firing at the stockade. I hollered and yelled till he looked my way. He went back to where I couldn’t see him.
Perhaps twenty minutes later an officer suddenly appeared in front of me, and he was looking at me mighty hard.
“Who are you,” he said. His eyes was mistrustful. He looked at my worn clothes, which was a mixture of Injun and white.
“Luther Kelly,” I said. “I was captured four days ago. They wanted me to see so I could describe it. I don’t know why.”
“We wondered what happened to you,” he said. He took out a Barlow knife and cut the rawhide thongs. I chafed my wrists. My hands was just cold. I thought upon how low my stock must be in the scouting business, and I thought of other possible lines of work.
The officer was looking at his troopers who were riding in and out among the boulders.
“There ain’t going to be anyone alive,” I said.
“How big was the war party?” he asked, civil enough.
“Near on to three thousand.”
“Jesus,” said the officer. He turned to me. “Fetterman said to give him eighty men and he’d ride through the whole Sioux nation. Guess he didn’t make it too far, now did he?”
I hear a nicker behind me. My horse had been tied to a scrub pine. All my gear was on him. I walked slowly back to him and rubbed his nose. We’d just been riding up the trail and been taken past where we were going. I looked back at the bowl where the battle had taken place. Soldiers lay here and there, loose-limbed, like a kid’s doll after they’d gotten angry over something and stomped on it.
Hours later we come to the fort and the big gates swung open to us. We were bringing back thirty of the bodies. The others would have to wait until light tomorrow.
The officer was a captain named Tenedore Ten Eyck, a tall feller with a black beard and a slight limp from some wound he’d got long ago. He beckoned to me and we went to see Colonel Carrington.
Carrington was drawn and white. Fetterman had got himself killed, and Fetterman had fallen and torn Carrington’s career down with him. (He was to spend the rest of his life defending himself about those ten minutes at Big Piney.)
Ten Eyck saluted and gave a brief report. The men he’d been sent to rescue was all dead, so there wasn’t much to say.
Carrington was a civil gentleman for all his worry, and he motioned me to a chair and got one himself for Ten Eyck and then he asked calmly if I would mind telling him what happened.
Fetterman run after Crazy Horse and hauled everything and everyone along with him, I said, and it was over in five minutes. There was eighty soldiers and civilians, and three thousand warriors.
Carrington was slamming his fist into his palm and he was growing angrier by the minute.
“I ordered that bastard not to go beyond the ridge,” he said,
“and that was all of it right there. But I can’t bring it up strongly even in my official report. It would look like I was blaming everything on a dead subordinate.”
But the blame, I thought, is yours. Fetterman was an idiot, and you must have known that.
“And how did you come to be there, and the only living witness?” Carrington said, angrily.
So I described how I’d been captured, and the killing of the soldier.
“Sergeant Price, a courier,” snapped Carrington. He got up and paced back and forth behind his desk.
I went on to describe the battle, though there wasn’t much at all to say, with them odds.
“I thought that they would all be off hunting buffalo,” said Carrington. “If you had been here perhaps my intelligence would have been better.”
I doubted that but stayed silent, and I wasn’t thinking on the numbers of Injuns.
“And how did you come to be spared?” Carrington snarled.
“Injuns is unpredictable,” I said. I thought it a poor time to claim Spotted Tail for an uncle.
“And what will they do now?” he asked.
“Go home, sing songs, tell the story of the battle a hundred times, and winter out of the wind.”
There was a knock on the door and Carrington said come in and his adjutant opened the door and stomped across the puncheon floor. He handed me a bag, a leather one worked with quills. There was a tag of thin leather on it and “Luther Kelly” printed in flowing, copperplate script.
“This was just thrown over the gate,” said the adjutant. “It is snowing so hard no one saw whoever threw it.” The wind suddenly rose and rattled the windowpanes, and snow struck them like shovelfuls of sand.
I undid the thongs and dumped out the contents of the bag between my feet. There were two blond scalps complete with ears, a worn volume of the writings of Plotinus, a catlinite pipe with a six-section red alder stem—slotted to line them up right—and a photograph of Spotted
Tail in full war regalia wearing his I-just-ate-my-fill-of-live-baby-bluebirds smile. The photo had been taken by the F. Jay Haynes Studio of Mankato, Minnesota.
“Are those yours?” Carrington hissed, pointing at the scalps.
“Nope,” I says, tossing them on his desk. “You can have them.”
Ten Eyck got up and picked up the scalps and walked out with them. He wasn’t gone long, and by the time he got back Carrington had gone from white to purple, which I took to mean better health.
“You know who this is?” said Ten Eyck, pointing at the photograph.
“Spotted Tail,” I said, “Brule Sioux. He was there.” Oh, my beloved uncle, no doubt skinning someone alive at this very moment. I was going to say virtually nothing about him, by God, I liked my balls hanging right where they was.
“I still don’t understand why you were spared.” Carrington snorted.
Not anything left to say, so I went out of the office, leaving Carrington and Ten Eyck to mourn the late Captain Fetterman and by the by figure out a way to break the news gently to General Sherman, who was nobody’s fool.
I have never seen a harder blizzard than the one that was roaring out of the Bighorn Mountains. There was a lot of snow falling and a hard wind behind it, and drifts was building ten feet deep in no time at all. On a hunch, I climbed the sentry ladder and walked round the guardwalk. On the north and west sides the snow was building by the minute. If the Injuns were to attack on snowshoes they could walk right up the drifts and have the further advantage of the soldiers firing into the wind while their eyes was stung by the windborne snow, and that wouldn’t help their aim much.
Back down I went and across the parade ground to Carrington’s quarters. I told his adjutant about the drifts and left. Little did I know this would panic Carrington utterly and cause much discomfort, especially those dependents who had lost a husband or father at Big Piney Creek.
Not ten minutes after I had told the adjutant of the danger Carrington ordered all of the women and children put in the post magazine and left a detail to blow it and them up if the Injuns should scale the walls. Now, them savages hadn’t been killing women and children except for them “accidents of war,” which was a term used to describe mistakes in which many lives were lost. We, the whitemen, had been slaughtering Injun women and children anytime we could find them, which was another reason the tribes was so fond of us.
