Just past midmorning the long-awaited order for the advance blared through the valley, echoing down the columns of two. A dark snake of cavalry bundled in buffalo coats and mittens uncoiled itself, stretching across the dazzling snow, slowly worming its way southward once more. In two hundred wagons cloaked in winter’s frost creaking atop cold hubs, the army freighted its forage for the horses and mules, in addition to rations sufficient to last Custer’s troopers a full thirty days.
Just ahead of the eleven companies of Custer’s pride rode Lieutenant Silas Pepoon’s civilian scouts, including some fifteen Osage and Kaw trackers who had proven themselves during the recent Washita campaign. The Osages had led Custer to the winter village of their old enemy, the Southern Cheyenne of Black Kettle, nestled like a sow bug in the valley of the Washita River. Now the trackers hungered for more Cheyenne scalps.
Behind Custer rode better than seventeen hundred men thrusting once again into the heart of Indian Territory on this bloody mission.
His dark bay kicking up sprays of new snow, Custer tore back to the head of the columns to join his commander, Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan, new Commander of the Department of the Missouri, who brought along his entire staff for this winter foray south into hostile country.
“General!” Custer saluted smartly. “If you’d have a look behind you, I think you’ll find the most glorious sight to greet an old warrior’s eyes!”
Twisting in his cold saddle, Sheridan gazed back at the long lines of mounted cavalry and quartermaster wagons,scouts, trackers, and interpreters. As grand a sight as the hero of the Shenandoah campaign had ever laid his eyes on, stretched out as they were across the snow beneath this low-bellied sky gathering cold and angry overhead. He couldn’t help but smile. “Does an old horse soldier’s heart good.”
“I know just how you feel, sir. Once a man’s ridden at the head of a cavalry column, it’s not an easy task for him to slide from his saddle—forced to ride nothing more than an overstuffed horsehair chair stuck behind some desk.”
“Goddamn right!” Sheridan growled. “I’ll see to things personally now. Why, if we can get in one or two more good licks, we’ll put an end to the Indian troubles in my department!”
“I’d stake my commission on it, sir. What’s more, you’ll be in on those very strikes yourself. You can watch my Seventh humble the pride of the southern tribes, bringing peace to this wilderness.”
The dark little Irishman flashed a smile. “Glad we see things my way, Custer.”
Not knowing why, Custer turned, looking for her back in the long, winding columns behind him. Circled by Pepoon’s scouts, she rode beside her two older companions, Mahwissa, the old sister of Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, and Mahwissa’s favorite friend, the ancient Sioux Stingy Woman.
Drawing her bright red blanket across her cold cheeks, Monaseetah’s beautiful eyes were all there was left for him to see. All he needed to see to feel touched once more by her animal warmth.
Custer kicked Dandy into a lope, speeding to the head of the columns. Headed into history.
CHAPTER 14
NEVER before had De Benneville Keim laid eyes on such a wild and desolate sight as the winter valley of the Washita into which Custer’s troops had descended yesterday afternoon. Pale, milky light slanted eastward, nudging skeletons of winter-robed hackberry and blackjack oaks in an area known as “the shinnery.” It was as if all the bare and lifeless vegetation foreshadowed this as a valley of death, beckoning and luring the soldiers down the trail. Keim shuddered, trying to convince himself a corpse couldn’t be any colder six feet under the icy crust of the wind-scoured snow. At twilight Moylan’s thermometer stood at eighteen degrees below zero.
The fires had helped little this morning as the shivering troops rolled out of their tents and robes into the bitter winter dawn. To defrost his limbs and working parts, a soldier was forced to broil one side while freezing the other. Most gathered hunchbacked around the roaring fires, slowly turning themselves as if they were themselves dripping hump roasts browning before the dancing yellow-blue flames.
As the sun broke a frosty saffron over the hills to the east, brass trumpets sounded “The General,” a call requiring the grumbling soldiers to break from their warm fires and strike their tents. When the wagons were loaded, Custer lost no time in ordering “Boots and Saddles” sounded. Kicking snow and pouring the remains of coffee from the battered pots over the coals, the last details clambered aboard their wagons.
“Advance! Column of twos!”
Lieutenant Myles Moylan, Custer’s adjutant, passed the command down the columns, his shouts startling flock after flock of black-feathered scavengers from their communal roosts in the bare-boned trees. Across the snow those last few miles due east to the site of what once had been the winter camp of Black Kettle’s Cheyenne, last November’s trail lay plain enough for any shavetail recruit to read.
Wide and deep—like a saber slashing into the still beating heart of Indian Territory.
South across the icy river Custer led Sheridan and his staff into the devastated village, followed by the scouts, Osage and civilian alike, before the troops themselves were allowed to cross the Washita. All around them erupted the ear-splitting clatter of a thousand crows and wrinkled-neck buzzards taking to the wing, scavengers protesting this disturbance of their free meals. Some of the birds were so gorged with flesh they had difficulty taking flight to escape the men and horses.
Within the ruins of the village, snarling, howling, barking wolves and coyotes confronted the soldiers, four-legged predators drawn to this place by the potent stench of death. Some of the men pulled bandannas over their noses or hid their faces behind tall coat collars. A handful grew sick enough to throw up what remained of the hardtack and salt pork they had wolfed down hours ago.
The charred lodge poles Custer’s men had burned the day of the battle lay like black monuments poking from the new snow.
As far as the eye could see, the ground was littered with grotesque, frozen corpses. But as plain as the cold nipping any soldier’s cheeks, a man could see moccasined feet had visited the village after Custer had pulled out. While some of the bloodied bodies had been wrapped in blankets and bound up with rawhide cords by now, very few had actually been hoisted into the forks of the skeletal trees, as was the Indians’ custom. Plainly, Black Kettle’s village had not camped alone along the Washita this winter.
Once man had abandoned the valley, gangs of buzzards, crows, wolves, and coyotes had begun their grisly work. Every corpse was partially eaten.
“General—” Custer turned to address Sheridan, “if you’d come with mc, I’ll show you a vantage point where you can see the entire battlefield. From there I can describe the process of our fight for you, Lieutenant Colonel Crosby, and your staff.”
“Very good, Custer.” Sheridan coughed, gagging on the stench. “Lead on.”
“You’ll come with us, Mr. Keim?” Custer asked.
Keim nodded eagerly. “Wouldn’t miss it, General Custer.” During the war, Keim had become a favorite of U. S. Grant, extolling Union victories as a field correspondent. Sherman had grown to hate reporters during the war, and they returned his hatred in kind. Sheridan stood somewhere in the middle, wary of the press, yet recognizing their political importance.
Custer led Sheridan to the knoll just south of the village where he had watched most of the battle action that morning his Seventh Cavalry crossed the Washita. On their climb they passed more dead Cheyenne stuffed back in the thick brush to conceal them from predators until a more proper burial could be arranged.
“Moylan,” Custer said, “have Lieutenant Custer and Captain Keogh each take a squad to search south and east of here. Scour the area for any sign of Major Elliott’s command. I suggest they begin at a two-mile radius, where we had to leave off the day of the battle. Work out to a three-mile radius in a sweeping arc. If nothing’s found, proceed five miles out from camp, but no farther. I don’t want my men strung o
ut from our support should the need arise.”
Moylan saluted, wheeling downhill toward the rest of the command.
“You have reason to fear the hostiles might still be in the area?” Sheridan asked.
“I’d be afraid to gamble. It’s certain the Indians have returned to care for their dead.”
“That’d be another stroke of Custer’s Luck, wouldn’t it?”
“I can’t imagine being lucky enough to catch another village napping.”
The wind shifted, carrying to the hilltop a heavy stench from southeast of camp. Sheridan requested his field glasses. With them he pinpointed the odor. Some two hundred yards beyond the camp perimenter lay the bloated, stiffened carcasses—better than eight hundred Indian ponies Lieutenant Godfrey’s troopers had slaughtered. Among the remains of what had once been the pride of the Cheyenne now roamed a pack of fat, sated wolves and their coyote cousins, joined by some Indian dogs.
Each animal bristled, snarling its anger as Lieutenant Thomas W. Custer’s search detail skirted the deathly meadow, pushing a little south of east from the Indian camp.
Following a trail not difficult to read, the lieutenant’s men climbed a low wooded ridge, then descended toward a dry tributary of the Washita. Several yards west of that ravine, Tom Custer signaled a halt. On the ground ahead huddled a mass of crows, ravens, and turkey buzzards, all busy over something … or someone.
A foul, sweetish odor intensified as the soldiers warily approached on foot, leading their mounts. The solitary body had been left for the birds of prey to work over. Enough flesh still clung on the torso to show bullets fired into the carcass after the soldier had been killed.
“Turn him over,” Tom Custer ordered. “I wanna see who this was.”
One green recruit scuffed through the snow, holding a bandanna over his mouth and nose. His stomach revolted and the boy coughed away the sting of bile in his mouth.
“Grimes,” Tom Custer growled at his veteran sergeant. “Help the boy.”
Grimes yanked his collar up to his nose, scowling and mumbling a curse. Everyone understood, including Custer. There wasn’t a single man among them who relished getting any closer to the half-eaten corpse than he absolutely had to.
A few of the men gasped as Grimes rolled the mutilated body onto its back. The soldier’s entire skull was black with old blood from the eyebrows clear back to the nape of the neck—completely scalped. No quick job here. Though his features had become distorted in mutilation and weeks of severe cold, no man could mistake the long, dark dundrearies bristling along the dead man’s cheeks—sideburns allowed to stretch down along the jawline, all the fashion rage in the East at the time.
“Sergeant Major Kennedy,” Tom Custer snarled. “Attached to Elliott, wasn’t he?”
The lieutenant knew the answer to his own question. Kennedy had been a seasoned veteran of the Civil War, riding with Major Joel Elliott’s company.
“Yes, he was,” answered Corporal Harper. “But why’d he be out here … alone, sir? You figure it?”
“Only a guess, Harper. Man like Kennedy had a real good reason to let himself get caught alone by the Indians way he was. This far from the village.”
“Bloody butchers! Wasn’t a damned thing Kennedy was afraid of, Lieutenant,” Grimes cursed.
At last Tom Custer’s eyes rose from the naked corpse to peer into those snowy meadows rolling away to the east in gentle swells. “Boys, I don’t like to think about what I figure we’re gonna find up ahead, across this wash here. Seems, though, we got the lieutenant colonel’s orders.” He stuffed a boot in his stirrup. “Let’s find out what happened to the rest of Elliott’s men.”
“Lieutenant?”
“You got something to say, Grimes?”
“I’d like have this stream named Sergeant Major Creek.” He wiped a mitten on the end of his dripping nose.
Custer slewed his eyes around the men. “Sergeant, don’t think there’s a man here gonna kick about naming it in honor of Kennedy. Well done, Grimes. Let’s go find the rest of ’em.”
There was hardly a man following Tom Custer up the other side of that dry ravine into the snowy meadows who wouldn’t remember the bloody, precision handiwork someone had practiced on Sergeant Major Kennedy.
“Eyes front!” Tom Custer barked his sudden, raspy interruption.
They watched the great flocks of ravens and crows blacken the skies as the birds clattered into flight. That noise of their flapping wings rushed over the soldiers like a thunderous tide upon the sands, echoed in its ebbing by snarling wolves and coyotes scattering before the approaching horsemen.
Barely two hundred yards east of the dry tributary lay sixteen bodies, each frozen in death as solid as timberline granite. The chalk-white corpses lay in a ragged circle, face down, feet toward the center. Each man defending his piece of the perimeter.
Skirmish formation?
Hardly, Tom Custer thought. Perhaps they did the best they could, caught where they were.
He had fought enough during the final months of the war to know of its horrors. As the Union armies tightened their noose around Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, Tom Custer himself had won first one, then a second Medal of Honor, dashing single-handedly against Confederate artillery, snatching the Rebel colors from a flag bearer before returning to the Union line. So it didn’t take a vivid imagination for the lieutenant to gaze across the meadow, watching the horror of it happening right before his eyes—Major Joel H. Elliott wheeling that snorting, frightened mount of his. Finding his war-seasoned sergeant major. Orders given for a desperate ride … a plea for reinforcements …
Tom Custer spit dryly into the old snow near his feet. Kennedy never made it.
Knowing Kennedy, Tom Custer brooded, he must have taken some of the red bastards with him on his howling journey into death. No doubt he sold his life at a dear cost to his killers. Those goddamned Cheyenne can take pride in killing a mighty enemy.
What no man in the Seventh Cavalry had known back on that cold November day of the battle, what Elliott himself could not have known until it was too late, was simply that there were hundreds upon hundreds of warriors boiling out of other winter camps farther east down the Washita, as if someone had overturned a dried buffalo chip on the prairie to watch the grub beetles scurry this way and that.
By now the soldiers had some idea there had been other camps strung out along the icy river. Many warriors. Just how many, no soldier could have known for certain on that day Black Kettle sang his death song. Custer and his troops had simply been too eager to attack the solitary Cheyenne camp the Osage scouts had found for them, so eager that no one really saw need for further intelligence. No man realized some five thousand Indians lay sleeping in those other Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche villages downriver. Combined, they were one huge, snaking village spread some twelve to fifteen miles along the meandering Washita. On the morning of the battle those other camps had awakened to the endless rifle fire long before any of Black Kettle’s escapees had straggled to their villages carrying the shocking news. Unbelievable, frightening news: Pony soldiers!
Elliott’s men pursued some of those very same Cheyenne fleeing from the slaughter of Black Kettle’s camp right after the old chief and his woman had been cut down by Lieutenant Cooke’s sharpshooters stationed in the trees across the river.
When the small band of Cheyenne escapees split into two groups, each heading in a different direction, Elliott divided his men. The old and very young Indians, sick or already wounded, all darted to the left, scurrying among the thick brush. Quickly surrounded, the soldiers herded this group back to the village.
At the same time, Elliott’s squad of some eighteen blue-coats mounted on gray horses continued after the warriors and young women dashing to the right, those stout of leg and able to lead the pony soldiers on a chase among the oak and cottonwood, through the hack berry brush.
It was but moments before the horsemen overtook the slowest warrior and b
rought him down. Then a second was left bleeding a slow death farther on. The rest sprinted ahead, scattering like jackrabbits before their pursuers. A third, then a fourth Indian fell beneath slashing army hooves.
Too late Elliott had his attention drawn to the timber looming before them. Only then did his men notice the trees to their left. And right. Of a sudden it seemed as if the trees belched warriors—each one brandishing a bow or rifle, lance or war ax.
Frantic, the pony soldiers reined up, savagely haunch-sliding their lathered mounts into a snow-blinding halt. They wheeled, clattering, bumping against each other, their horses rearing in fright. The noise of warrior screams, the high-pitched death song of eagle-wingbone whistles drowned all sound. The tide of this nasty little battle had suddenly swung out of reach for Elliott’s desperate band of blue-coats.
The narrow gap through which they had just confidently galloped suddenly closed like a puckered strip of sun-dried rawhide. No way out now; they found themselves surrounded by angry, blood-eyed Arapahos led by Powder Face and that battle-famous war chief, Left Hand.
For most of the eighteen, it would be their first, and last, experience of bowel-puckering terror as hundreds of warriors rode in, surrounding them, tightening their deadly gauntlet like a feathered noose … no escape. A screeching horde swept around the frantic, wild-eyed army mounts. Everywhere! Firing their iron-tipped arrows into the horses, aiming their old rifles at the soldiers. Biting. Stinging. Whistling like a thousand wasps.
“Kennedy!” Elliott barked, releasing the reins as his horse dropped, thrashing. “Ride, goddammit! We’re not far from the Cheyenne camp!”
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