by Tim Champlin
“Nothing will make the general hotter than that. He can deal with savages a lot more stoically than he can with criticism in the press.” He grinned. “I wonder if those editors are actually reflecting the feelings of their readers or are just trying to keep some controversy going to help circulation. You can bet it would be a different story if they were doing the fighting.
“Seriously no one can fault the man’s personal courage. His record proves that. But these Indians are not like the Apaches, or the tribes of the Pacific Northwest. I honestly believe he has his men’s welfare at heart—unlike men like Zimmer and Custer. I know for a fact he’s itching to move out and was planning to as soon as our infantry got here, but then he found out that General Merritt’s cavalry was on the way to join us. Now Merritt’s overdue, and General Buck is really in a stew that the Indians are going to disperse if he doesn’t move soon. Yet, he’s afraid he’ll miss Merritt. And he feels it will strengthen our force if we wait.”
Shanahan finished eating, excused himself, and gathered up his clothes to go do his washing. I stretched out comfortably on the edge of the canvas that formed our mess table on the ground. “Whatever the general decides is okay with me. Personally, I could stand a little more of this. As long as my newspaper is paying me, this sure beats working.”
"Well, if this isn't an ambitious crew!"
I squinted up into a shaft of sunlight that was streaming through the overhead trees. Wiley Jenkins was standing there, one of his slim Mexican cigars in his teeth.
"Join us," Wilder invited, "we've still got a little trout and cornbread left."
"No, thanks. Just ate. I'm here on business."
"Business?"
"Yea. On a little mission for Cupid. Cathy wants to see you, Curt."
"What?" He started, reddening slightly.
"Seems you haven't been around to see her lately."
"S'cuse me, gentlemen." Wilder got to his feet, looking a little discomfited, and dusted himself off. "I'll see you later."
Wiley and I looked at each other significantly. "I'm sure glad she finally took the initiative," I remarked when Curt was out of earshot. "He's been mooning around ever since we got back from that 'scout.'"
"So that's what's been wrong with him." Wiley sat down and picked at a cold piece of fish. "I don't pretend to know what's in my sister's mind, but I'd rather she'd be attracted to Curt than to anybody else around here I've met."
"But I thought she was taking up with Major Zimmer."
He shrugged, stubbing out his cigar in the dirt. "Don't know. I don't pay much attention to what she does or who she sees. Unless she asks for my help, I let her alone. She's a big girl now. I'm just repeating the message she asked me to deliver."
We cleaned up the leftovers, washed the dishes and loafed and smoked our pipes for over an hour while the camp slipped into its usual midday lethargy. As we talked and laughed, I was gradually struck by the strange fact that this young man—so much a mixture of the idealist and the realist—could have so much in common with Curt Wilder, who was about eight years older, a military academy graduate, a man trained to take orders, trained in strategy and tactics and discipline. What was it that made them similar? They were both single, both well educated, albeit one in the humanities and one in the sciences, both had a sense of humor and a sense of history. Wiley was drifting, trying desperately to find himself, while Curt was already a veteran of the war and several Indian campaigns and unless his own feelings got in the way, would advance steadily down the road of a distinguished military career. Yet in Curt there was an echo of the restless dissatisfaction so evident in Wiley—for different reasons, to be sure, but that, it seemed to me, was where their personalities seemed to mesh.
Our conversation began to flag after a time and Wiley and I stretched out in the grassy shade, our stomachs full and the heat making us drowsy.
"Hey, Matt! Wake up!"
A toe in my ribs brought me awake and instantly alert.
"What's wrong?"
Curt Wilder was standing over me, hands on hips and grinning broadly. Wiley had rolled over sleepily and was flicking an ant off his shirtsleeve.
"Nothing's wrong. Everything's right." Curt stood there grinning and I glanced around, suddenly alarmed. "Damn, Curt, you haven't been into that whiskey, have you?"
"No, but I wouldn't mind a little drink right now to celebrate. Everything's fine between Cathy and me now."
"Great!"
"Turned out she was playing up to Zimmer so that he wouldn't be offended. She knew we'd been clashing and was afraid that if she rejected him he'd take it out on me. But he was getting pretty aggressive at the least encouragement, so she finally quit seeing him altogether. The bastard! Cathy said se's been in a pretty foul mood since she's refused to see him socially."
"How can you tell when that man's in a foul mood?" I asked.
"When it comes to matters of the heart, you're about as much of an amateur as I am as a soldier, but put 'er there," Wiley said, thrusting out his hand. "I don't know where it's going from here, but congratulations, anyway. Cathy's good sense impresses me more every day."
The three of us stood there, grinning at each other.
"I tell you what," Wiley said finally, with an air of conspiracy, "if you'll meet me about a quarter mile south of camp on the creek in a few minutes, I might be able to find us a little nip of something to commemorate this occasion."
"Done!"
Chapter Seventeen
"Would you look at that!"
"Whew! Like the gates of hell just opened up," Wilder replied as the five of us turned our faces toward the west. A line of forest fire had just burst over the top of a ridge several miles away and begun stabbing fingers of flickering red light into the moonless darkness.
It was a week later, August 7, and Wiley, Cathy, Curt, Brad Shanahan, and I were sitting together outside our tent, where we had just gone in to camp after dark. Curt had invited Cathy and Wiley to supper. We had seen smoke all day as we rode the twenty-five miles from our base camp on Goose Creek to our present rendezvous with General Merritt's cavalry here on the Tongue. The fire in the foothills of the Big Horns, whether accidentally or purposely started, was having the same effect—burning off much-needed forage for our hundreds of animals. But it was still an awe-inspiring sight as it spread down onto the prairie grass, fanned by a rising west wind.
"Do you reckon the Sioux fired that grass to starve out our animals?" I asked. "Most of the horses look like candidates for the boneyard already."
"Don't know," Wilder replied. "It's one of their favorite tactics. And if they're retreating somewhere up ahead, they could’ve done it to slow us up. And they wouldn’t care if it temporarily ran out most of the game. But then, it could've been started by lightning, too."
"The animals haven't had any grain since May," Wiley added. "And our mules and horses can't subsist indefinitely on grass like Indian ponies can."
"Isn't it pretty?" Cathy remarked, her features softened by the rosy hue from the western sky. And the fires did look harmless from this distance, winking and flickering on the far hillsides. But I knew they were actually a crackling line of flames, leaping forward through the trees and grass as fast as a man could run. As we turned back to our own tiny cooking fire, the faces around me took on a harsher look, all of them sharply etched in light and shadow.
"All that smoke is gonna make it tough on the scouts," Brad observed, handing a tin plate of beans and bacon to Cathy.
"You think it'll really make much difference?" Wiley asked. "With the size of the force we have now, we won't be catching up with any Indians, unless they want us to."
"Well, if you remember the Rosebud, they picked the time and place," I said.
"That's what I mean. They'll be the ones with the initiative again."
"They'll always be the ones with the initiative," Brad Shanahan broke in. "Much as I hate to admit it, they are the best cavalry in the world, they live off the land, and they have
the best motivation—to defend their way of life. A deadly combination. But the American soldier whipped the British with the odds even greater."
"With Merritt's troops," Wilder said, "we now have about two thousand fighting men and a hundred and sixty wagons. I think General Buck sent a civilian courier through to Terry to try to make some definite arrangement for his moving south to meet us."
Sitting cross-legged on the ground, I tried to soften up some hardtack by dunking it in my coffee and wiping up some bean juice. I was so hungry, I’d eaten the thick bacon half-raw. We had eaten nothing on the trail, so I hadn't eaten since dawn, even though I had lost my appetite during the heat of the day.
"But we'll be moving faster than you think," Wilder continued. We looked at him curiously. "General Buck and General Merritt have agreed to send all the wagons back to Fort Fetterman and Fort Laramie and go on with the pack train. We can't take anything but the clothes on our backs and a hundred rounds of ammunition. No tents; no stoves."
"Oh, no. Not again."
"Do you get the feeling we've been here before?" Wiley asked, grinning at me.
"Sure do. Have you got a good poncho?"
"No. But I'll see if I can round one up before we head out tomorrow. But Cathy and I are a little better off than you three in that regard. We've been living off the backs of our pack animals, anyway, instead of out of wagons."
"I understand some of the miners are going back with the train," Wilder said to Cathy. "It might be safer if you went with them to Fetterman."
"I'm safer right here in a camp of two thousand armed fighting men, than anywhere else. And even if I'm not," she continued, "I'm where I want to be." She gave Curt a look there was no mistaking.
Wilder glanced down, slightly embarrassed, but pleased.
"Besides," Cathy continued, "Wiley's the only family I have out here now since Dad's death. And I intend to stick close by him until this campaign's over. Then we'll decide what to do."
The conversation ran on, with everyone reasonably content. It was a relief just to be on the move again, with something positive to do, and some goal, however vague. Later, Cathy and Wiley returned to their own tents, and the three of us rolled into our blankets, knowing this would be the last night we'd be sleeping under canvas for some time to come.
But it wasn’t to be. Sometime past midnight, the wind increased to gale force and flattened most of the several hundred tents in camp, including ours. I woke up to a roaring, popping noise, with the wind flogging the canvas. Before I could come fully awake, the guy ropes were wrenched out and the white shelter came billowing down on our heads. We crawled out to find the air full of blowing smoke from the forest fire. Rabbits and small deer were bounding through camp, terrified by the flames a little over two miles away. Everyone else seemed to be struggling to stake down the flapping tents or to calm the frightened horses that were rearing and plunging at their picket lines.
A group of the Shoshones had gone out several hundred yards windward of camp and were setting a backfire in the grass to halt the approaching flames. Between the stifling smoke, the gusting wind, and the general uproar, sleep was impossible for the rest of the night.
The backfire worked, but at dawn we didn't see the sun rise. Only a bloody red glow showed through the smoky pall that shrouded the countryside. The wind had died away to a gentle breeze from the southwest. The fire had gone on past us, burning away somewhere to the north. We ate breakfast, our eyes stinging and noses running from the irritating fog that surrounded us. Shortly after, the wagon train began to move out, amid a creaking and groaning of wheels, cracking of whips and shouting.
I watched them go with more of a sense of loss than I had experienced the first time we left the wagons on Goose Creek in June. Maybe it was because I could anticipate this time what hardships lay ahead. General Buck didn't need to detail any troops to protect the withdrawing train since there were enough discharged soldiers, civilian miners, and hangers-on—about two hundred of them—to form an adequate force. The last of the wagons had not even cleared the bivouac area before we got the order to move out in the opposite direction. And the powdery ashes from the blackened grass were being churned up with the dust by the horses, choking us and sticking to our sweaty skins. It was much worse than the gray dust alone.
General Buck called a halt after the scouts rode back in about noon to report they were having no luck seeing anything. Rather than risk an ambush, the general ordered us into camp immediately, using some choice language to describe his luck and the murky atmosphere. We lay in camp until about six when the evening wind sprang up again and cleared the air beautifully. We grabbed a hasty supper, anticipating a night march to make up for lost time. And, sure enough, the orderlies passed the word down the line to saddle up.
Dusk came about eight, as we struck the Rosebud valley again about six miles above our battlefield of June 17th. We turned north up the valley without stopping to rest or graze the horses. We stumbled along, our horses nose to tail in the sooty blackness, until about two A.M. Then we were called to halt in order to snatch a few hour's sleep under our single blankets. At least we slept on deep, green grass that bordered the river; it had not been burned. But the trees and grass on the rocky ridges around us were ablaze. As I lay on my back with my head on my borrowed saddle, the fires looked like a dozen or more small volcanoes.
The next thing I knew, it was daylight—a chill, overcast daylight with a northwest wind. The scouts had been out since before first light. They rode back to meet us, after scouting about fifteen miles up the valley, to report they had cut a large, fresh Indian trail heading from the Big Horn valley toward the Yellowstone. We halted as the scouts conferred with Generals Buck and Merritt. Our horses put their heads down to graze.
Then the rains started.
Gently at first. But they increased quickly into a cold, steady drizzle that was whipped into our faces under our hat brims by a gusting north wind. Dreary and uncomfortable as it was, I thought at least it would put out the grass and timber fires and leave some good grass for our starving horses. And it would also settle the dust.
I untied my poncho from the saddle, unrolled it and slipped it over my head, letting it fall over my shoulders and cover the saddle as well. The borrowed cavalry horse I rode was about average compared to what the rest of the command was riding, but he was sorry specimen compared to my bay. When the command started again, I rode back to find Cathy. She had taken to riding with her brother alongside the mule train, rather than with the few remaining miners. They were hunched down under their ponchos, looking as miserable as I felt.
"Still glad you decided not to go back with the wagon train?" I asked Cathy. She made a face at me and Wiley laughed. We rode along for a mile or two in silence, the cold drizzle increasing gradually to a steady downpour.
It rained the rest of the day and all night. And a more miserable night I had never spent. With no shelter, we were all soaked through by morning. The small fires we managed to start were only sufficient to steam our clothes—not dry them—before the fires fizzled out and we were drenched even more thoroughly.
The next day we made twenty more miles, still following the Rosebud valley. But the beautiful, grassy valley now looked like the bottom of an extinct volcano. The rain had started too late to prevent the retreating Indians from burning off all the grass. Late in the afternoon the scouts rode in to report that a large body of horsemen had been spotted in the distance. The column came to a halt, and a ripple of excitement went back through the command as the men looked to their arms.
But it was a false alarm. The approaching horsemen turned out to be General Terry's force moving south to meet us. It was nearly dark when our commands finally met and went into camp together. General Alfred Terry was a tall, distinguished-looking man with sad, basset hound eyes and a black mustache and goatee. Astride his black horse and wearing his regulation uniform, hat, and cape, he looked every inch the military man. I couldn't help but notice the contr
ast as General Buck rode up to him and the two men saluted each other. General Buck epitomized our down-at-the-heels, scruffy soldiers, who wore all kinds of nondescript clothing. Fighting men we may have been, but we looked -more like a group of underground rebels than we did United States Cavalry and Infantry. General Terry's men, on the other hand, were mostly in regulation uniforms, riding well-fed horses, and sported neatly trimmed whiskers or were clean-shaven. And the reason was obvious—they were traveling with a train of wagons to supply all their needs, including, I guessed, grain for their horses.
Even from a distance of almost a hundred yards. I fancied I could read the disgust and disappointment on General Buck's face. I'm sure he intended to operate alone and had just met Terry more or less by chance, even though the broad, general strategy was to form a pincer and trap the savages between us. The fact that we had come together without meeting any opposition meant that the Indians had avoided us.
"Slipped through our so-called net like water," was the way Wilder put it, dismounting and handing his reins to an orderly. The rest of the command had broken ranks and gone about the organized confusion of setting up camp. The men of the two commands mingled and greeted each other, but no one made any great show of rejoicing.
"Whoooeee! If this isn't a raggedy-ass bunch o' hoss soldiers, I ain't never seen any!" one of Terry's men shouted near me, as he gripped hands with a former barracks mate from our command. But we were all too tired, cold, and wet for any general socializing. Bivouacking for our men meant finding a spot on the ground that was a little higher than the surrounding ground and had the least amount of mud and standing water. Wilder and I sat down near each other and looked around gloomily at the scene. I noticed with interest the regimental guidon of the 7th Cavalry—or what remained of the 7th. They were under the command of Major Reno, a short, stocky, dark-haired officer, who had survived the recent massacre.
We had stopped in a sort of amphitheater, almost surrounded by rocky ridges and spires of fantastic shapes and varying heights. The quickly fading daylight still revealed columns of stone that looked like tall stacks of thick flapjacks and sharp spires of rock that looked like church steeples splintered off. Some of these contained stunted pine trees clinging at angles to small crevices in the rocks.
