Frontier

by Salzer, S. K.

  They watched as the men began forming in companies for afternoon drill.

  “I know you miss the world, Harry,” Margaret said, “food, books, the company of people your own age—girls, for heaven’s sake—the stimulation that comes with a good education. Already you’re well beyond what I can teach you.”

  Harry thought he did not like the turn this conversation was taking.

  “Your father and I have decided to send you east in the spring,” Margaret said. “We’re considering a preparatory school in Philadelphia. After that, we’re thinking you can study for your West Point entrance examinations at Bragdon School in New York. Highland Falls, it’s lovely there. Your father will have no trouble arranging this. He’s already written some letters.”

  “I don’t want to go to prep school in Philadelphia,” Harry said. “I don’t want to go to West Point.”

  Margaret looked at him with raised eyebrows. “What’s this?” she said. “That’s the plan. That’s always been the plan.”

  “It’s always been his plan,” Harry said. He felt his blood rising. “Father wants me to go to West Point because he couldn’t get in himself. But I don’t want to be a soldier. I want to be a surgeon, or an engineer. I want to build things, try to make the world better. I don’t want to spend my life killing Indians.”

  He had never spoken like this to his mother before, never openly opposed his parents’ plans for him. But the violence he had seen on this journey, coupled with the months of watching his father struggle to please superior officers who ignored or scolded him, plus his inability to manage disrespectful subordinates and sullen troops, all these things had convinced Harry the military life was not for him. Most of all, he knew he did not want to spend his time on Earth oppressing other people be they red, black, or yellow. Racial injustice had a face now, the face of French Pete Cazeau’s children.

  “Do you honestly believe that’s what your father is about?” Margaret said with a frown. “Killing Indians?”

  Harry dropped his eyes. He had gone too far.

  “We expect you to respect the family tradition of service to the country,” Margaret said. “Consider what it would do to your father if you, his eldest son, turned away from that. It would be the same as turning away from him. Is that what you want, Harry? Do you really want to hurt him that way?”

  Harry shook his head, keeping his eyes lowered. He did not want to see the disappointment on his mother’s face.

  “The truth is, I’m starting to think all three of us should go home—you, Jimmy, and I,” Margaret said. “We made a mistake bringing you boys out here. It’s more difficult, and so much more dangerous, than anyone anticipated. I’m worried, Harry. I’m very worried.”

  To Harry’s horror she started to cry. He got up and put his arm around her shaking shoulders. Her bones felt sharp and breakable as twigs beneath her shawl. “Don’t cry, Mother,” he said. “Please, don’t. I’ll do it, I’ll do what you and Father want, just please don’t cry.” Even as he said these things he was thinking spring was a long way off. A lot could happen before then.

  “You’re a good boy, Harry.” Margaret wiped her tears away with the back of her hand. “You’ve always been a good boy.”

  The family spent the afternoon together in their quarters. Harry and his father played chess, Margaret wrote to friends in Columbus, and Jimmy played with his tin soldiers. The peaceful quiet was broken when Fetterman and Brown knocked on the door. Carrington asked them in, though he usually discouraged officers from interrupting his family time. They were careful to clean their muddy boots on a jack before entering.

  “Colonel,” Fetterman said, “Captain Brown and I propose an attack on the Indian villages along the Tongue River. He and I will lead it. Give us fifty mounted men and fifty civilians and we’ll clean them out, once and for all.”

  Carrington frowned. He had passed the morning writing dispatches to Omaha, seeking troops and supplies. “Couldn’t this wait until I’m in the office?” he said. “I have little enough time with my family as it is.”

  “No, Colonel,” Fetterman said. “It can’t wait. The men are sick to death of waiting.”

  Carrington moved a pawn before answering. Harry saw his ink-stained hand tremble. “Gentlemen, we mustn’t let ambition override prudence in these matters.” He kept his eyes on the chessboard. “By all accounts, the villages along the Tongue are huge, harboring thousands of warriors. One hundred men—no matter how brave or well led—are simply too few to take them on. Furthermore, the terrain in those parts is difficult and the men do not know it. Only Brown, Ten Eyck, and I have been there.”

  He raised his eyes to Fetterman. “The other officers, including yourself, Captain Fetterman, if you’ll forgive me, are ignorant of the challenges it presents. Must I remind you of what happened earlier this month? The men are unschooled in the tactics of Indian warfare.”

  Fetterman’s face darkened.

  “And, if you’ll forgive me, Colonel, do you include yourself among the unschooled? Since you mention the previous action, how do you defend your behavior that day? Why did you hang back on the ridge instead of closing in when we had the Indians flanked between us?”

  Carrington’s eyes blazed. Do it! Harry said to himself. Take him down. Don’t let him talk to you like that, in your own home and in front of your family. But his father’s response, when at last it came, was tepid.

  “I concede we all have much to learn,” he said. “But this is irrelevant. I couldn’t agree to what you propose even if I wanted to.” He went to his desk and picked up some papers, then handed them to Fetterman. “Morning report,” he said. “As you see, I don’t have horses for fifty men. Even if I were to abandon the mails and pickets, which I will not do, I would still be eight animals short.”

  They were interrupted by the shrill blast of the sawmill’s steam whistle. Harry jumped up, knocking the chessboard to the floor, and ran to the window. The Pilot Hill sentry was waving a white flag above his head. Indians were attacking the wood train. Fetterman and Brown rushed out the door as the bugler sounded assembly.

  The day was still warm with full sun and a strong wind from the west. Harry heard scattered gunfire as he followed his father to headquarters and up the stairs to the lookout platform. Private Archie Sample, Carrington’s orderly, Ten Eyck, and Grummond were already there. Carrington trained his field glasses to the northwest, where the wood road skirted the base of the Sullivant Hills. He leaned over the waist-high rail and called down to Captain Powell, on the parade lawn below.

  “Take C Company and the mounted infantry. Relieve the train and escort it back to the post. Heed the lessons of the sixth! Do not pursue the Indians across Lodge Trail Ridge!” Powell saluted with his usual grin.

  Ten Eyck looked at Carrington in surprise. “Are you sure you want to send Powell, sir?” he said. “Do you trust him?”

  On the day Bingham and Bowers were killed, Carrington sent a messenger to the post with orders for Powell to join him with troops and an ambulance. But Powell, complaining of a toothache, had stayed in his quarters with a heated, flannel-wrapped stone to his jaw, sending a junior officer in his place.

  “It must be Powell,” Carrington said. “He used to be a competent officer. I need to know if he’s to be any use to me.”

  Within minutes Powell and his troops were riding toward the sound of the gunfire, now thin and sporadic. Even without field glasses, Harry could see the Sioux retreating over Lodge Trail Ridge with one Indian, on a spotted pony, trailing the others. The warrior flogged the pony with his quirt until it rebelled, rearing up on its hind legs and throwing the rider to the ground.

  Harry studied this fallen Indian more closely. He was slight with fair skin and light, unbound hair. He was naked except for a breechcloth and moccasins, and his entire body was covered with spots of white paint. His headpiece was of a kind Harry had never seen before. It appeared to be a bird, bound to the warrior’s head with a strap under his chin. He remembere
d a sketch Glover had shown him shortly before his death, a drawing of a slight, fair-skinned Indian who traveled with a giant companion. Was this the same man?

  Four troopers broke from Powell’s column to pursue the warrior, who had remounted and was now kicking his pony forward in a seemingly desperate attempt to rejoin the others on the far side of the ridge. Powell called his men back, then stopped his column and rode alone to the top of the ridge to survey the valley below. Immediately he wheeled his horse and ordered his troops back to the wood train. Soon they were all riding back to the post at a brisk pace. When he reported to Carrington, Powell was red-faced and sweating.

  “The valley is swarming with Indians, Colonel. Thousands of them—I’ve never seen anything like it. That one Indian was a decoy, meant to draw us over the ridge and into the valley. Clearly, that was their intention.”

  “Thousands, you say?”

  “No question, Colonel. Two thousand at least.”

  Carrington walked to the window. The sun was sinking, bathing the post in a salmon light. “We have one building left to finish,” he said, “and sufficient fuel to last us till spring.” A giant pile of sawmill slab and scrap lumber towered above the stockade walls. “One or two more trips to the Pinery should provide us enough lumber to finish the hospital. Then I will shut down the wood camps and devote the command full-time to drill and battle preparation. We will attack the Tongue River villages. We will make the Powder River Road safe again for civilian traffic in the spring.”

  He turned from the window. “Tomorrow I will lead the wood train personally. Ten Eyck, I want eighty men—sixty infantry, twenty cavalry. We’ll build a bridge across the Big Piney, there at the place where the Indians attack the loaded wagons returning to the post.”

  “What’s the point, Colonel?” Powell said, “if one more wood train is all we need?”

  “I want to test them,” Carrington said. “And we need a bridge there regardless. It’s something I should have done months ago. Powell, you’ll come with me.”

  A dry, powdery snow fell during the night but the sun was bright and the snow gone by the time the wood train and Carrington’s bridge-builders rode away from the post. Harry watched, wishing he could go with them, Indians or no Indians. He had not been outside the stockade for weeks. Instead, he went to the stables, where Calico greeted him as he did every morning.

  “Not today,” Harry said, stroking the pinto’s muscular neck. “We’ll go for a run soon, but not today.”

  After grooming the pony, Harry joined the men splitting slab wood in the quartermaster’s yard. Full of frustrated energy, Harry swung a heavy ax, sweating in the warm winter sun and singing along as the soldiers worked their way through their favorite working songs: “Babah of the Regiment,” “Tenting Tonight,” and the cavalryman’s standard, “Bucking and Gagging”:

  Come all Yankee soldiers give ear to my song;

  It is a short ditty, t’will not keep you long;

  It’s of no use to fret on account of your luck,

  We can laugh, drink, and sing yet in spite of the

  buck.

  Dary down, dary down, dary down, down, down,

  down.

  Sergeant, buck him and gag him, our officers cry,

  For such trifling offenses they happen to spy;

  Till with bucking and gagging of Dick, Tom,

  and Bill,

  Faith! The Mexican ranks they have so helped to

  fill.

  Dary down, dary down, dary down, down, down,

  down.

  The treatment they give us as all of us know

  is bucking and gagging for whipping the foe;

  They buck us and they gag us for malice or for spite,

  But they are glad to release us when going to fight.

  Dary down, dary down, dary down, down, down,

  down.

  A poor soldier’s tied up in the sun or the rain

  With a gag in his mouth till he’s tortured with

  pain;

  Why I’m blest! If the eagle we wear on our flag

  In its claws shouldn’t carry a buck and a gag.

  Dary down, dary down, dary down, down, down,

  down.

  The wood train and Carrington’s team returned at six o’clock in high spirits, having completed the bridge in one day. They had seen not a single Indian. That night after tattoo, Captain Brown called on Carrington at his home. The colonel sat in Margaret’s cushioned rocker before the brick fireplace, reading his Hebrew Bible as he did most evenings. Margaret and Jimmy played dominoes and Harry, sunburned and muscle-sore, lay on the floor watching the flames.

  Brown brought a strong animal smell into the room, as if he had come directly from the stables. His greatcoat was open, his spurs fastened through the buttonholes. Although Carrington expected his officers to remove their guns before entering his home, Brown wore two revolvers at his waist and forgot, or neglected, to wipe his boots. Margaret frowned as Brown tracked red mud onto her floor.

  “I’ve got Wands squared away, Colonel,” Brown said. Wands would succeed Brown as regimental quartermaster. “He knows the stock and properties and he’s up to date on the paperwork.”

  “Good,” Carrington said. “So when do you leave for Fort Laramie?”

  “The day after Christmas, sir. Six days from now.”

  “Well, our loss is their gain,” Carrington said. Harry knew his father would be glad to see Brown’s backside. Once Brown had been an efficient quartermaster, but since coming to Fort Phil Kearny his desire to hunt and kill Indians had trumped all other concerns. Even worse, the cabal he had formed with Fetterman and Grummond had been a serious threat to his father’s authority.

  “Thank you, sir,” Brown said. “Though I wish I could stay until spring. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for one more chance at those murdering sons of Satan, for one more chance at Red Cloud himself.” He balled his fist. “I’d give anything to leave his bleeding scalp on Gid Bowers’s grave—a remembrance from Baldy Brown.”

  Carrington cleared his throat. “Captain, my wife is present.”

  Brown inclined his head toward Margaret. “I apologize, Mrs. Carrington. I was carried away.”

  The room was quiet but for the loud tick of the Federal clock on the mantel and the pop of the fire. Brown turned to go, touching his hand to his head in a casual salute. “I’m just sorry to miss the fun,” he said. His animal smell lingered long after he was gone.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Harry’s orders were to keep Jimmy away from the house for at least two hours while Margaret and Private O’Reilly set up the Christmas tree. O’Reilly had chopped down a small Douglas fir on the wood train’s last run and kept it hidden in the quartermaster’s warehouse, standing in a bucket of water. For weeks, Margaret had been secretly stringing ropes of dried red berries late at night while George made dozens of tiny tallow candles.

  “We’ll need time to trim the tree and decorate the house,” Margaret said quietly. “Keep him away even longer, if you can.” Her eyes softened as they fell on her younger son squatting on his heels and digging in the soft wet earth of the parade lawn. “He deserves a nice Christmas, poor fellow. He’s unhappy here, not like you. Does he ever say anything about wanting to go home?”

  “No,” Harry said. In fact, Jimmy had said just that many times since learning of the death of his friend, Charley Thomas.

  “The carpenter is building him a wagon,” Margaret said, “and I’m making a pair of corduroy trousers with hide patches in the seat and the knees, like those cattle drovers wore. Jimmy was quite taken with them.”

  Harry nodded, feeling glum. He tried to get out of nursemaid duty when he learned Rose Reynolds would be coming to help his mother decorate. He rarely saw her now that she was cloistered away with her ailing husband and soon she would be gone. His father was sending Lieutenant Reynolds east to recover and she was going with him. But Margaret would not let Harry off the hook.

  “Kee
p him busy,” she said, raising a warning finger. “I’ll be angry if Christmas is spoiled for him!”

  Harry sighed and walked over to Jimmy, who was scratching around in the dirt. “Get up,” Harry said. “We’re going to the stables.” Jimmy kept on digging. “What are you doing?” Harry said.

  Jimmy had buried five tin soldiers up to their necks. “It’s what Indians do to white people when they catch them. They bury them and leave them to die.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Mr. Grummond. He said they stand by and wait for birds and ants to come eat out their eyes.”

  Nice thing to tell a six-year-old boy, Harry thought. “Well, it’s not true,” he said. “Now get up. We’re going to go see Calico.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  Harry grabbed Jimmy’s arm and jerked him to his feet. “You’re coming whether you want to or not!”

  Jimmy wore a sour expression as Harry led him by the arm toward the stables. It was a sunny morning, another warm day for late December. As they passed the quartermaster’s warehouse, a great slab of snow slid from the steeply pitched roof and landed on the ground with a thud. Jimmy pulled his arm free and ran to the snow. Harry watched absently as his brother packed a handful into an icy ball. Jimmy stood, turned quickly, and threw it, catching Harry smack on the ear.

  “You little shit!” Harry yelled.

  Jimmy took off running but Harry easily chased him down, grabbed him by the collar and drove his head into a dirty pile of banked snow. Jimmy kicked and hollered but his muffled screams were barely audible.

  “That’s hardly a fair fight.”

  Harry looked up to see William Fetterman standing behind him on the walkway. “He hit me in the ear with a snowball,” Harry said. “It hurt.” He released his hold and Jimmy emerged red-faced and spluttering. He lunged at Harry, head-butting him in the stomach and knocking him down. He was about to kick him but Fetterman caught Jimmy up in his arms and held him tightly.