Trumpet on the Land

by Terry C. Johnston

  By starting the chapters and scenes with an article taken right out of the day’s headlines, I hope that you will be struck with the immediacy of each day’s front page as you finish reading its news—just as Samantha Donegan would have been from the relative safety of Fort Laramie. But, unlike her, you will then find yourself thrust back into the action of an army on the march, an army intent on fulfilling General Philip Sheridan’s prophecy that the hostiles of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse who had destroyed Custer on the Greasy Grass would soon hear a trumpet on the land.

  Prologue

  20 June 1876

  “I hear water’s better when you mix it with whiskey.”

  Upon hearing the quiet interruption of that familiar voice, the Irishman raised his head from the cool grass that flourished along the bank of Little Goose Creek to watch Frank Grouard slide out of his saddle.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Seamus Donegan replied, propped up on one elbow as he kicked his bare feet in the cold water. He had his canvas britches snugged in loose rolls all the way up to his knees to soak in the refreshing current. “You see, I never water down my whiskey.”

  The half-breed with skin the hue of coffee-tanned leather tied off his army mount, then came over to settle in the shade of a huge cottonwood beside Donegan. “Much as you bellyache about missing your whiskey this trip out, you sure as hell done a lot of soaking in water.”

  Seamus grinned, then nodded in agreement as he said, “This tends to take a man’s mind off his real thirst.”

  “The sort a man gets when he has a whiskey hunger, eh?”

  “Or the kind of hunger what hits a man when he’s gone without a woman for too long.” Donegan immediately felt bad for the thoughtless words that fell from his tongue. “I’m sorry, Frank. Didn’t mean nothing by it. Forgot, is all.”

  Grouard waved it off with a lukewarm grin and a shrug of his shoulder. “Don’t make nothing of it, Irishman. Women been nothing but trouble for me. Whiskey too. Now, a fella like you, he can handle both, I’d wager: all he wants of both. But a man like me gets all buried in a woman, and that makes for trouble with that woman’s brother—so that’s when I go and get all fall-down and underfoot with some cheap Red River trader’s whiskey….”

  He heard the head scout’s voice fade away while watching the wistful look come over the half-breed’s dusky, molasses-colored face. “I figure we ought to talk about what brung you to look me up—”

  “It don’t matter no more, Seamus,” Grouard interrupted. “Something I can talk about now. Hurt for a while. Not so much no more.”

  “Damn, but you’ve had your share of dark days. First the trouble with Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas over them whiskey traders. Then you go and get yourself all but scalped and skewered over a woman with Crazy Horse’s band.”

  “Didn’t mean for things to turn out so bad with He Dog, that woman’s brother, bad with the rest of them Hunkpatila that way.”

  As much as Crook’s chief of scouts might protest otherwise, Seamus could still read the torment of that lost love carved into the lines around Grouard’s eyes. Just the way it had to be cut into his very soul. “Never knew a man who lost a woman could honestly claim he was meaning for things to turn out that way, Frank.”

  Grouard pulled free a long brilliant-green stem from the grass at his side, placed it between his lips, and sucked absently, gazing at the gurgling flow of Little Goose Creek at their feet. Moment by moment the midsummer sun continued its relentless climb toward midsky, easing back the cool, inviting shadows beneath the overhanging cotton woods like a woman at her morning chores sweeping against a thickening line of dust across her hardwood floor.

  “Crook’s changed his mind, Irishman,” Grouard finally said, sliding the green grass blade from his lips.

  “For sure this time?”

  He nodded. “When he called off us going on our scout last night like he’d wanted original’, I just figured the general wanted time to set his mind on something. But this morning he told me he didn’t want to take the chance of losing me, losing any of us right now.”

  “Don’t blame him, do you? What with all but a handful of them Shoshone up and pulling out for home this morning? Why, just two days back even the Crow saw the elephant and left us on the trail so they could hurry back to their villages and have their scalp dances. So now, by God, with the Snakes gone too, the old man’s been left stranded.” He wagged his head dolefully. “Ain’t no wonder that Crook’s afraid the enemy could be all around us, now that he ain’t got his Injun scouts to be his eyes and ears. But there’s no way to know for sure what’s out there, all around us now, if we don’t go out and scout.”

  “Them war camps still ain’t strong enough to jump us here,” Frank replied sourly.

  “Maybe they won’t jump us, but they sure been making a bunch of trouble for us while we sit and wait. Crook’s gotta know that by now.”

  “General knows.”

  “So he wants us just to sit on our saddle galls?”

  Grouard grinned. “Why the hell you complaining, white man? Looks like you’re getting in all the feet soaking you want, Seamus.”

  “Think about it. While Crook’s army sits, what you suppose the Injun camps are doing?”

  Grouard’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully on the distance, as if he were attempting to measure somehow the sheer heft to all that danger out there. As if he might actually try to divine the enemy’s intent across that great gulf in time and space.

  “They’re hunting.”

  “Hunting meat?” Seamus replied. “Or hunting soldiers?”

  “Both. While they’ll hunt for hides and meat to put up for the winter—they damn sure gonna keep an eye on us here. Send scouts down to watch Crook’s camp all the time so they’ll know if we go to marching north again.”

  “That has to be a big camp, Grouard. I can’t figure ’em staying together for much longer.”

  “Me neither,” Frank agreed, sweeping the grass aside with his fingers so that he could scoop up a palmful of dirt. “That many lodges, that many people, thousands and thousands of ponies—they’ll need to break up.” With a flick of his wrist he sprayed the dust out from his hand in a wide arc.

  Donegan said, “But Crook’s got it set firm in his mind he’s gonna have to tangle with the whole bunch again.”

  “He does figure on that—so he don’t fed much like moving till he’s got more men and bullets.”

  Donegan rocked off his elbow and eased his head back onto the grass. The sun felt as good as a man could ever want it to feel—every bit as good as he had dreamed the summer sun could feel on his skin while he struggled vainly to stay warm shuddering atop a cold saddle last winter on Reynolds’s long march north to the fight on Powder River.*

  Here in the heart of summer, Seamus sighed with contentment and said, “If Crook’s waiting for men and bullets—then this army of his ain’t gonna be marching anytime soon.”

  “Don’t mean you and me won’t be working.”

  At that moment he wanted to crack one of his eyes into a slit so he could weigh the look on the half-breed’s face, to see if Grouard was trying to skin him or not. But Seamus fought the sudden impulse down like it were a real thing, not wanting to move at all from this warm, sundrenched creekbank. “Little while back you said Crook’s changed his mind.”

  “He has.”

  “But?”

  Grouard answered, “But it don’t mean Crook can’t go and change his mind again.”

  Thinking back on all the generals he had known since 1862, Seamus had to agree. “Seems like that sort of thing just naturally comes with those stars, don’t it, Frank? Like it’s their duty to up and change your mind. Mither of God! But that’s the sole province of a general: this right to change one’s mind.”

  “Crook’s the general hereabouts.”

  “What of those columns off to the north of us?”

  Grouard shrugged. “Lots of Injuns between us and them. Like I told you last night: there’s a
hundred miles stuffed right up to the bunghole with badass Lakota and Shahiyena warriors all wanting white scalps.”

  “And especially your hair—for you leading sojurs down on them twice now.” Donegan brooded a moment, then asked, “What all do you think the Lakota are up to, if them camps really are out to hunt like you say?”

  “Figure they have scouts keeping an eye on them other columns too.”

  “How is it Gibbon’s Montana sojurs, or Terry’s Dakota column from over at Fort Lincoln, haven’t run onto a village that size yet?”

  “You asking about Terry’s column—that bunch what Crook says is pushing this way with Custer’s cavalry riding right out front?”

  “Yeah, them. Why hasn’t Terry’s sojurs run up against that big camp what jumped us three days back?”

  Grouard shrugged. “Just lucky, I suppose.”

  “Naw. It ain’t just luck, Frank. Way I see it—them warriors will keep right on doing their best to keep their women and children out of the army’s way. Reason they rode south to jump us was they didn’t want Crook’s army getting anywhere near their village. They’ll go and do the same thing with that bunch up north: keep well out of the way of Gibbon and Terry.”

  He studied Donegan a moment. “Don’t think so, Irishman. Way it lays out to me is this: a village that big won’t be worried about a damned thing but finding enough grass to feed all their ponies.”

  “So—what about them sojurs up north of us? You’re saying that war camp hit us on the Rosebud just don’t give a damn about the three columns closing in on ’em?”

  His face a mask of disgust, Grouard slowly brought his two hands together. “Only two columns still closing in now, Irishman.”

  “So either of them other two expeditions. Why you figure neither of them bumped into that goddamned big village themselves yet?”

  With a slow wag of his head Grouard said, “Can’t say, Seamus. Only … I know one thing’s certain as rain: it’s just a matter of time before Custer and his men run smack up against more’n they can handle.”

  *The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 8, Blood Song

  Chapter 1

  21 June 1876

  [The Indian attack on our column] showed that they anticipated that they were strong enough to thoroughly defeat the command during the engagement. I tried to throw a strong force through the canyon, but I was obliged to use it elsewhere before it had gotten to the supposed location of the village. The command finally drove the Indians back in great confusion … We remained on the field that night, and having but what each man could carry himself, we were obliged to return to the train to properly care for the wounded … I expect to find those Indians in rough places all the time, and so have ordered five companies of infantry, and shall not probably make any extended movement until they arrive.

  George Crook

  Brig. Gen.

  John Bourke finished the second of two copies he had made that morning of Crook’s letter to General Philip Sheridan. While one would remain in Bourke’s records, as Crook’s longtime aide-de-camp, the original and the second copy would go with two civilian couriers who would ride south separately to Fort Fetterman on the North Platte. There this first report of the Battle of the Rosebud would soon be telegraphed by leapfrog down that string of tiny key stations connected by a thin strand of wire, southeast all the way to Fort Laramie.

  From there the electrifying news of Crook’s decision to wait at Goose Creek would cause the keys to click and the wires to hum all the way to department headquarters in Omaha, and beyond. Within hours of the letter’s arrival at Fetterman, Sheridan would be reading the scrawl of some private’s handwriting on the pages of yellow flimsy at Division HQ in Chicago. It wouldn’t take that much longer for William Tecumseh Sherman to be studying every one of Crook’s carefully chosen words at the War Department in Washington City.

  An Irishman himself like Sheridan, Bourke pictured how the bandy-legged hero of the Shenandoah campaign would flush and roar when he read that Crook was electing to sit tight. He would be angry. Nay, furious! After all, no less than Sheridan and Sherman themselves had developed the concept of “total war” waged against an enemy population in those final months of the Civil War.

  John had to agree with them. In what he had seen of man’s bloodiest sport, war was serious business. If the West was to be won, then he found himself in sympathy with Sherman’s views: “Let’s be about finishing this matter of the Indians.”

  While the Confederate officers had practiced a genteel combat against the Union armies, pitting only soldier against soldier, Sherman and Sheridan—as U. S. Grant’s right and left arms—refined the concept that mandated an army make war on the entire enemy population, women and children and noncombatants alike. Depriving the enemy of livestock, burning fields and destroying forage, laying waste not only to the enemy’s lines of supply, but by making total war on those loved ones the Confederate armies left behind at home, the Union could wreak great spiritual damage to the fighting men of the rebellious South.

  “This is taking too long,” Bourke said, agreeing with Sherman’s impatience over the progress of things out west.

  But, then again, that’s what this whole Sioux campaign was about, wasn’t it? To get the matter settled once and for all?

  But instead of clear victories, the army had instead two major engagements that were certainly less than defeats for the enemy. Reynolds had retreated from the Powder River, his men freezing, tormented by empty bellies. And now Crook and the rest had to content themselves with a hollow victory once Crazy Horse retreated with his warriors at the end of that long summer’s day of bloody and fierce hand-to-hand fighting across four miles of rolling, rocky hills bordering Rosebud Creek.*

  Crook’s army held the field at sunset. And buried its dead in the creek bottom that night under cover of darkness. Then started to limp back to Goose Creek the following morning. If the Battle of the Rosebud was ever to live on to Crook’s credit, John figured, then either the general would have to follow up with a more stunning victory somewhere in the weeks to come … or one of the other columns would have to suffer a more stunning defeat in this summer of the Sioux.

  Either way, it would serve to take the dim sheen off what was clearly a dubious victory for Crook’s Wyoming column.

  Already the newsmen were creating their own slant to that day-long battle. John knew each one of them wrote from his own narrow view of a horrendously complex battle that had raged along a four-mile front. For two days after the fight they had scratched out their stories, the rich ante climbing almost hourly as the reporters bartered for the services of any courier who would dare to carry word of the Rosebud Battle to the nearest telegraph, eventually to end up in the hands of expectant readers both east and west of this Wyoming wilderness.

  Along with the wounded loaded in wagons, and an infantry escort Crook was sending south to Fetterman tomorrow morning, would also go T. B. MacMillan, reporter for Chicago’s Inter-Ocean, a cross-town rival of John Finerty’s Tribune. Day by day, for weeks now, MacMillan’s health had slipped away beneath the onslaught of cold and heat, rain and privation, until even Surgeon Albert Hartsuff had ordered him out of Indian country. Try as the newsman might, valiantly dipping into what reserves the bravest could muster, MacMillan simply did not have what it took to stand up beneath the rigors of the campaign trail. Though he was taking his leave of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition, not one man dared make light of the reporter’s pluck and courage during the hottest of the fighting at the Rosebud. Bourke was one of those who had finally convinced “Mac” that he had no business staying on.

  “After all,” John Finerty said at this morning’s fire, “you heard Crook himself say he’s planning on sitting pretty right here till he gets him his reinforcements of infantry and cavalry.”

  “Finerty’s right,” Robert Strahorn of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News agreed. “We’re going to sit things out until we get more bullets and bacon before we can go chasing after Crazy
Horse and Sitting Bull again.”

  “The summer’s going to be all but gone before we move again, Mac,” Bourke tried cheering the sickly reporter over strong coffee.

  “I’ll envy you, I will,” Finerty replied with an impish grin. “Knowing you’re back in Chicago well ahead of me. While I’m still out here, sitting on my thumbs with nothing to do but fish these creeks, hunt the groves of timber, and eat my fill from the fruit of the land every day. Pretty boring stuff.”

  “The best place a man could be—Chicago,” Bourke chimed in to help nudge the newsman to relent and head home. “The Indian camps are surely breaking up after the whipping we gave them, so this campaign is all but over, Mac. Only thing left for us to do is eat, sleep, and chase some nonexistent warriors.”

  “You heard it from the mouth of the general’s aide,” Finerty said. “The war’s over: nothing to do but eat and sleep. Seriously, Mac—I doubt we’ll have any more chances to chase warriors.”

  It would take until the end of summer, but by then all that Bourke and Finerty and the rest of Crook’s crippled Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition would have to eat would be their broken-down, played-out horses as the animals dropped one by one by one into the mud of the northern plains.

  That, and Crook’s men could always eat their words.

  They had a great victory on their shoulders.

  So it was that Miniconjou war chief American Horse danced with all the rest in this Moon of Ripening Berries, Wipazuka Waste Wi. At times the Lakota called this the Moon of Making Fat.

  Truly, this was a time of great feasting, of living off the fat of the land for the people of American Horse.

  “Now the soldiers will stay away!” Dog Necklace growled every bit as tremulously as any grizzly boar as they gathered near one of the many leaping bonfires fed throughout that second night following the great battle against the soldiers, Snake, and Sparrowhawk People. “Surely they know we will never again wait for them to attack our camps of little ones and women.”