A Cold Day in Hell (13 page)

“Food, colonel?”

“Certainly. Two sides of bacon and three boxes of that hard bread.”

“Three boxes—yes, sir.”

“I think one hundred fifty pounds of hardtack is sufficient,” Otis replied, looking back at Jackson. “Lieutenant Kell, let’s get this wagon train moving to Tongue River!”

William watched the Standing Rock Hunkpapa step aside with Sitting Bull’s trio of lieutenants as the wagon train jangled back into motion, leaving the five sullen warriors behind with their gifts of bacon and hard bread.

As a disgusted Elwell S. Otis pulled his wagon train away, the masses of Sioux horsemen hung farther and farther to the rear of the slow-moving column, then eventually disappeared altogether. Throughout the rest of that Monday afternoon, the sixteenth, the column sighted increasing numbers of buffalo and small herds of antelope north of their line of march. With every new mile they put behind them before sundown, William Jackson came to understand all the more why the Lakota were willing to fight to hold on to the rich bounty of these high Montana plains.

By nightfall he knew with a bedrock certainty that Otis’s officers were fooling themselves.

Not for a moment did he believe Sitting Bull would give up
so easily—backing off, perhaps eventually coming in to talk with Miles at Tongue River.

Not for a moment did Jackson think Sitting Bull would stop anywhere short of driving the Bear Coat’s soldiers right out of the Yellowstone country.

“S
ee there, Seamus Donegan,” post trader Collins retorted, stabbing a bony finger against the front page of Denver’s Rocky Mountain
News
with a rustle of newsprint. “We aren’t the only ones with war falling down about our heads, now are we?”

The gray-eyed Irishman dragged the pipe from his mouth, regarding it as he blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling, then took a sip of Collins’s heady coffee the sutler kept hot in a shiny pot atop that iron stove warming his trading post there at Fort Laramie.

“But don’t you see? At least there’s talk of peace in the world’s other wars,” Donegan reminded those men gathered there this early-winter morning.

They could only agree with him grudgingly.

Outside the air sparkled with hoar frost. Almost too cold to snow. But in there, squatting around the stove with their pipes
and their tins of steaming coffee, these men—civilian and soldier alike—basked in the glow of male fellowship and camaraderie. This was exactly what Seamus had been seeking when he’d crept from the tiny upstairs room at the peep o’ day—leaving behind Sam and their son, both of them asleep: Sam’s head deep within the valley of a goose-down pillow, the babe still latched on to mother’s breast. It had been a long haul of it—both worried, frazzled mother and bawling child up and down for most all the night. Then as the first gray fingers of dawn began to creep out of the east, they both fell asleep at long last. And Seamus crept out, quietly pulled the door to, and creaked down the noisy stairs into the cold of that mid-October morning.

“I’ll bet their war is a big’un,” Collins continued enthusiastically as he pried open the stove door and tossed in some more split kindling. “All cannon and cavalry!”

Donegan gazed out the window frosted with the pattern of the coming cold, caressing the new Winchester repeater he had just purchased from Collins with an oiled rag. “Aye, and in the bloody meantime, trader—right here ours is just a nasty little war, ain’t it all? Nothing more’n a man here … a poor sojur there.”

With the half-breed tracker riding at his side, Luther Sage Kelly probed east across Sunday Creek north of the Yellowstone, the river that had given him his nickname. Out of the eight-foot-high willows and icy bogs where the horses had slow going, yanking one hoof after another out of the sucking mud, they slowly clambered to higher ground. In that moonless darkness,
Kelly knew the soldiers would be crossing farther upstream: where the banks were corduroyed for supply wagons from Glendive and the bottom wasn’t such a maze of sinkholes as it was here.

Miles’s infantry could afford to take the time to stay with the Tongue River Road right now—but Yellowstone Kelly could not. He had the colonel’s orders to feel ahead of the column: to see if the Indians might have made their crossing of the river; and, perhaps even more important, to find out just what the hell had happened to that supply train long overdue from Glendive Cantonment.

Otis’s wagons were long overdue. With rumors that the Sioux were closing on the south bank of the Yellowstone, in all likelihood intent on crossing to the north, it did not bode well for any supply train that might happen upon a massed war party. Luther, along with fellow scouts Victor Smith, an old friend, and half-breed Billy Cross, had accompanied Lieutenant Frank S. Hinkle and six soldiers on a dangerous scout to the upper reaches of the Tongue and Mizpah Creek, hoping to find the Indian encampment rumored to be in the area. They found nothing. Which could only mean the Sioux had to be farther to the east.

All the more worrisome, the party of Arikara trackers Kelly had sent out with William Jackson more than two days back hadn’t returned. Miles feared they had been discovered by a hostile war party and rubbed out.

So at two-thirty this cold Tuesday morning Miles had the entire Tongue River encampment up to receive fourteen days’ rations. Leaving behind two companies of the Twenty-second U.S. Infantry to protect their cantonment, in that first inky seep of dawn the colonel was ferrying his ordinance rifle and ten full companies of his Fifth Infantry to the north side of the Yellowstone. By eleven-thirty
A.M
. the other 10 scouts, 15 officers, and 434 soldiers formed up and moved into the cold gray light beneath the low clouds scudding along the Glendive Road.

“Not since the government’s operations against the Mormons in fifty-seven has the Fifth marched as a regiment,” Miles had said with undisguised pride earlier that morning as he’d stood on the north bank of the Yellowstone with Kelly, watching his men ferry over twelve at a time. Then the officer sighed, saying, “There’s trouble out there, and Otis is right in the thick of it. I can smell it.”

“We’ll find out soon enough, General,” Luther replied, slipping
his boot into a stirrup. “We’ll be back when I’ve got something to report.”

This was to be Kelly’s twenty-eighth winter—born in the village of Geneva, right in the heart of the Finger Lake region of central New York State, long before made famous by the notorious Red Jacket of the Iroquois Confederation. Many were the times over the years that Luther would claim as an ancestor none other than Hannah Dustin, the courageous backwoods woman who’d been captured by hostiles and conveyed north through the formidable wilderness, eventually making her miraculous and daring escape during the French and Indian War.

He pulled his hat down now, nodding to Miles, and reined his horse around to the east, kicking it in the flanks.

A hell of a lot of water had passed beneath his boots since that day long ago when he had stood gape-mouthed, watching the line of young drummer boys—every last one of them decked out in patriotic bunting festooned with rosettes made from red, white, and blue cloth—marching at the vanguard of the column of volunteers who were stepping off to make war on the rebellious South. Because he was only fifteen when his mother finally consented to his enlistment near the end of the war, Luther had to lie to recruiters about his age. And, in his youthful ignorance as well as exuberant zeal, promptly made the mistake of joining the regular army instead of the New York volunteers.

Before he knew it, he had taken his oath to the Tenth U.S. Infantry for a three-year hitch.

After some duty guarding Confederate prisoners, Kelly’s unit was finally ordered to Fort Ripley on the upper reaches of the Mississippi River. After a few months his company was sent on to Fort Wadsworth, near Big Stone Lake in the Dakota Territory. By the spring of sixty-seven Kelly’s company was ordered to establish Fort Ransome—a small station at the forks of the Cheyenne River, near Bear’s Den Hill, far to the north near the Canadian line. It was the first time Luther had ever seen a buffalo.

“How ’bout it, Kelly?” his sergeant prodded him one of those last nights before his hitch would draw to a close. “You game to sign up for another?”

The handsome Luther smiled, showing his big, bright teeth. “No, sir, Sergeant. Now, don’t misunderstand me, sir: there’s nothing finer for a young fellow than a three-year term in the United States Army, for it teaches him method, manliness, physical
welfare, and obedience to authority. But, in all truthfulness, Sergeant—one enlistment is quite enough—”

“Quite enough?” roared the old file.

“Yes, sir,” Kelly replied steadfastly, “unless that man has decided to make soldiering his profession.”

The sergeant looked upon the young man gravely. “And you won’t?”

With a gesture Luther had waved an arm out there to the prairies and the mountains that fine spring day in 1868. “No, sir—I’ll be saying good-bye to soldier life. There’s too damn much I want to see right out there as a free man.”

Back in St. Paul briefly to cash his last pay voucher, Luther quickly turned his face once more to the west, pointing his nose for the Canadian settlement of Fort Garry on his way toward the wild, open country that lay at the headwaters of the Missouri River. By the time he’d reached the Canadian settlements along the Red River, Kelly had run onto several miners escaping north out of Montana. Despite their warnings about roaming war parties on the American side of the line, Luther journeyed on—youth’s bravado running hot in his veins.

At the crossing of the Assiniboine River he ran into some métis with their Red River carts, making their way to the buffalo country. He accepted their invitation to throw in with them. It wasn’t long before he adopted much of their colorful dress, including the hooded capote constructed from a thick blue Hudson’s Bay blanket. With a red sash to hold it closed about him, Kelly felt all the more the part of a high prairie prince.

While moseying south and west with the half-breed traders, he had a chance meeting with a band of Hunkpapa warriors led by Sitting Bull. When the haughty Lakota inquired who the lone white man was among them, the métis said he was their American friend—therefore under their protection. Although they stomped about a bit and made a fierce show of it, Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapa soon departed.

In those weeks before he parted ways with the half-breed métis, Luther hunted buffalo, helping the men shoot and skin their kills, watching the women dry strips of the meat, which they eventually put up into rawhide sacks as pemmican they would use in trade at the many wilderness posts dotting that formidable land. Then came the day the old man led him to a nearby rise and pointed into the beckoning distance.

“This is where your adventure continues,” the wrinkled métis said, pointing.

“That means we are to part” Kelly replied sadly.

“There lies the country you seek. Look out for the Sioux, boy.”

Moving south, Kelly reached Fort Berthold, where he met the Gerard brothers who were the post traders. The story went that the Gerards had acquired their initial capital after a party of Montana miners, descending the river in a small bateau with their gold, was attacked by a war party and killed. Having no knowledge of gold, the Indians had emptied the sacks into the boat, which they set adrift, later to be discovered downstream by the fortunate brothers. From Fred Gerard, Lather had purchased a Henry carbine and a supply of cartridges. Just this past summer Fred had been employed as an interpreter and tracker with Custer’s column, assigned to Reno’s battalion when the Lakota had badly mauled the Seventh Cavalry.