Bill Dugan (15 page)

But Carrington was far too cautious to agree. Instead, he loosened the reins a little, and allowed both Fetterman and Brown to lead details out to relieve beleaguered work details. Beginning in the second week of December, the wood detail was attacked daily. There were never more than a few Sioux, enough to require reinforcements from the stockade, but not enough to frighten the troops.

Crazy Horse was walking a fine line. If he sent too many warriors, the troops would not leave the security of the fort. If he sent too few, they would be defeated handily, and it would cost lives. He was ready now to initiate the major engagement he had been planning for weeks.

On the morning of December 21, a small party of
Sioux attacked the wood train as it had every day in the previous two weeks. At the same time, Crazy Horse led another moderate-size band to a point within shouting distance of the fort. Carrington, apprised of the raid on the wood train, ordered a relief column to make ready. At the same time, Crazy Horse and his warriors taunted the troopers on the ramparts, shouting insults in English. “Come on out and fight us, you sons of bitches,” they yelled, parading back and forth, sprinting their ponies and daring the troopers to come after them.

As the relief column was about to leave, Captain Fetterman demanded, by right of seniority, that he be allowed to lead the column. Spoiling for a fight, he was anxious to turn some of his words into action. Carrington agreed, but gave him strict orders to be careful. “Follow Piney Creek. When you reach the wood train, make certain that you don’t go past the ridge. I don’t care how many times the Sioux challenge you, let them go. Don’t get out of sight of the stockade. Do you understand me, Captain?”

Fetterman nodded. “I understand, Colonel. I’ll be careful. But it’s about time we teach them a lesson. I have a feeling this is the day.”

“Remember what I said, Captain.”

Fetterman nodded again, swung into the saddle, and ordered the column out of the fort. The Sioux across the creek were still there, and Fetterman led his men that way, instead of taking the wood road. The troopers descended to the creek bed as the Sioux scattered. Carrington climbed to the rampart walkway where he could keep an eye on his soldiers.
He saw Fetterman’s men come back toward the road, and left the platform, satisfied that his orders were being obeyed.

Captain Fetterman saw the Sioux suspend their attack on the wood train and head toward the creek themselves. In the meantime, Crazy Horse and his warriors fell back out of range of the soldiers’ long guns, exchanging sporadic fire but not pressing the attack.

The war party from the wood train had too big a lead for Fetterman to catch them, so he shifted his attention back to Crazy Horse and his band, wheeling his column back toward the trees on the north bank. Crazy Horse took off, following the tree line, and Fetterman ordered his cavalry to take up the chase.

The Sioux were following the Bozeman Trail to the east of Lodge Trail Ridge, and Fetterman was coming on hard. His cavalry was widening the gap between itself and the infantry even as it closed on the Sioux war party. The trail led through a shallow saddle, then swung to the northwest. Following in the wake of the Sioux, Fetterman’s cavalry were now out of sight of the sentry platform at the fort. Scattered gunshots suggested to the troops still in the stockade that Fetterman was engaged in one more of those frustrating chases that had punctuated the last several months.

The road then edged up the crest of a smaller ridge parallel to Lodge Trail Ridge, and reached the north end. Below, on either side of the slope, the trap was waiting to be sprung. The decoys pushed on past the north end of the ridge and down the slope at its north end. The troopers followed.

Just as Fetterman’s cavalry reached the northernmost end of the ridge, Crazy Horse looked back and, seeing that the entire party of bluecoats was within the gaping jaws of his trap, had his decoys ride back and forth, crisscrossing one another’s trails, the signal for the trap to be sprung. The waiting warriors swarmed up both slopes of the small ridge. Cheyenne and Arapaho climbed up the grassy western slope while the Sioux broke like a tidal wave up and over the eastern slope. Fetterman was at the head of the infantry, almost a mile behind the cavalry troop. The two units were separated by a slight depression two-thirds of the way along the crest of the ridge itself. But there were so many warriors lying in wait on either side of the ridge that their sheer numbers swallowed both units.

As the attack commenced, the infantrymen ran for the nearest rocks and arrayed themselves in a circle, trying to fend off the assault and counting on their rapid-fire weapons to compensate for the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Sioux.

The cavalry, realizing it was cut off, did the only reasonable thing. The men dismounted and took up firing positions, facing the advancing horde head-on. Their repeating weapons repulsed the first assault, and the warriors were forced to fall back and regroup. After the first attack, the men ran for their horses again, but this opened them up to a murderous fire as thousands of arrows rained down on them like hailstones.

Trying desperately to reach the trapped infantry, the horsemen had opened themselves up to fire from all sides. Fewer than twenty of them reached
the dug-in infantry, and now there was no way out. The infantry, unlike the horse troopers, were armed only with single-fire muzzle-loading Springfield muskets. The repeaters of the cavalry were strewn across the top of the ridge with the bodies of the cavalrymen.

Back at the fort, Carrington heard the thunderous fire and knew something was wrong. From the sentry box, he searched in every direction with his telescope, but could see nothing because Lodge Trail Ridge hid the battle site. Crazy Horse led charge after charge up the slopes, sometimes falling back when the fire was too heavy, sometimes thundering up and over the ridge, charging right through the rattled soldiers and down the opposite slope of the ridge.

Colonel Carrington, aware that Fetterman and his men were short on ammunition, hastily organized two relief units. Within minutes, he sent a detachment of thirty cavalrymen out to find Fetterman’s command to reinforce them, followed a short while later by forty more men with wagons and additional ammunition.

The beleaguered troopers, in the meantime, were compressed into a tight mass by the relentless pressure from the waves of warriors. The closer they drew together, the easier they made it for the Indians, who launched arrows in clouds that fell among the soldiers in sheets.

One by one the guns fell silent. In some cases the men ran out of ammunition, in others they were too badly wounded to continue firing. The crest of the ridge grew deathly still. With bloodcurdling war whoops, the warriors swarmed up the slopes
and overran the survivors, smashing their skulls with war clubs and slashing them with lances. When it was over, not a single man was left alive.

Capt. Tenodor Ten Eyck, at the head of the relief unit of cavalry, stopped in his tracks when he saw the milling masses of Indians. He estimated later that there were close to two thousand warriors in the attacking force. Ten Eyck could see that the Sioux were in total command. There was no sign of Fetterman or his men, and he knew that to move ahead could mean certain death for his men, many of whom were also short on ammunition.

When the wagons of the second relief unit rumbled in behind Ten Eyck, the Sioux, thinking they were howitzers, dispersed. By the time Ten Eyck reached the ridge, there was not an Indian in sight.

And eighty-one soldiers lay dead.

T
HE COUNCIL WAS GETTING ROUGH
. They had been arguing for the better part of a week, and still there was nothing near a consensus. Instead of reaching some sort of agreement, the Sioux were finding themselves torn in two. The Big Bellies, largely compelled by the oratorical skill and the persuasive logic of Old Man Afraid of His Horses, were convinced that peace was the only viable option open to the Sioux.

“Every year,” Old Man Afraid argued, “there are more and more whites. Every year there are more and more bluecoats. Every year there are fewer and fewer buffalo. Every year more of our warriors die, more of our children freeze to death, more of our women starve. That is no way to live.”

“And would you have us hang around the forts like the Laramie Loafers? Would you want to depend on the white man for everything we need to live? Is it right that our land should be taken from us, and in exchange the white man gives us empty promises?” Red Cloud was angry, and his anger was fueled by the passion of the young warriors, stiffened by the resolve of Crazy Horse and the other shirt-wearers.

“Red Cloud makes big words, but what has war accomplished?”

“We won the fight at the bridge over the Platte River. We killed eighty-one bluecoats just last summer at the fort they call Phil Kearny. We cut their talking wire. We took their horses, burned their haystacks.”

“And are there eighty-one fewer bluecoats now? Or more? Are the haystacks all gone? Where are the forts? Are they just ashes now, blowing away on the wind, covered over with spring grass? Or are they still there?”

Red Cloud shook his head angrily. “They are still there. You know that.”

“Yes,” Old Man Afraid said. “They are still there. They will always be there, because when we go to fight the bluecoats, they stay inside. They have their repeating rifles and their wagon guns. They have all the powder and balls they need. They have the new guns that shoot many times before they have to be reloaded. Their bullets go through our warriors the way a hot knife goes through buffalo fat. But our arrows do not go through their forts. We fire so many arrows that their stockade fences look as if they were made from the skins of porcupines. But when we run out of arrows, the stockade fences still stand, and the bluecoats still stand behind them, firing their repeating rifles.”

“Perhaps if Man Afraid were more helpful, we would do better.”

“Look at you, all of you,” Old Man Afraid said, letting his gaze sweep around the council circle, pausing at each face, letting his eyes linger until
the men, one by one, young and old alike, looked away. “You sit here and talk big words, and your deeds are paltry things, a handful of sand in a strong wind. We should make peace now, while we still have the strength to get something in return.”

“The white man has nothing we want, nothing to give us.”

Man Afraid clapped his hands together. In the sudden silence, the echo of the clap sounded like that of a gunshot far away. “The white man has our land. You said it yourself. Our land. And we are not strong enough to take it back from him. But we
are
strong enough to go to him and say, give us this land, and this and this, and we will make no more war. And he will listen because it is easier for him, because he wants his talking wire to be left alone, and the settlers to be unmolested on their way through the Powder River country. If we don’t make peace now, soon we will have no food and we will have to crawl to the forts on our bellies and beg for food. Or we will die. All of us will die. We cannot eat words, no matter how brave. We cannot hunt buffalo that don’t exist.”

“If we ask for peace now, it is the same thing as crawling on our bellies. We are winning,” Red Cloud insisted.

“We are
not
winning. All we are doing is hanging on by the tips of our fingers. Count the Sioux lodges. Count the people in them. Then think of the numbers of white men we have seen. You have heard the same stories I have heard, of armies with a hundred thousand men on each side, fighting for
three or four days, until the dead were stacked like wood for a fire. I told you this before and you did not listen. But I say it again now. There are not enough of us to fight that kind of war.”

Crazy Horse asked to be heard. The others leaned forward, knowing that he had the hearts and minds of most of the warriors. Red Cloud was the war leader, but it was Crazy Horse who knew what they felt inside, and he was not afraid to speak his mind.

“Man Afraid of His Horses says that we cannot win. But it is the warriors who decide that. It is the warriors who fight the bluecoats, and it is the warriors who hunt the buffalo. If we fight, we cannot hunt. If we hunt, we cannot fight. There are not enough of us to do both. But I think that if we fight the way the white man fights, we can win. If we let the bluecoats stay, next year there will be more, and more the year after that. One day there will be too many for us to fight. But not yet.”

“They will come by the hundreds, more white soldiers than buffalo will cover the plains in swarms like the grasshoppers in summer. The great war they fought among themselves is over. They have the soldiers. All they have to do is bring them here,” Old Man Afraid argued.

“But if we drive away the ones who are here, and burn the forts, there will be no place where they are safe. Our mistake was to let them come in the first place. We made things worse by letting them build the forts, where they could be safe. We let them bring ammunition and food to the forts, so that they always have enough.”

“And how would you stop them, Crazy Horse?
You cannot go to them and ask them. But all your raids have not stopped them. Time after time we burn wagons, and still more wagons come.”

“They come because we do not stop them.”

“We
cannot
stop them. They are too many.”

“We can, and we will. We said this before, but we did not do it. Always, when we beat the bluecoats, we ride away and dance the victory dance. We sing songs about each other, how brave this one is, how many coups that one counted. And while we sing and dance, new soldiers come to take the place of those we have killed. That is our mistake. When we fight, everyone fights and no one hunts. When we hunt, everyone hunts, and the war stops. We should do like the white man does. Some of us should fight, and some of us should hunt for food for themselves and for those who fight and their families. Then there will not be rest for the bluecoats. Wagons with supplies will not get through to the forts. They have many guns, but those guns cannot hurt us if they have no bullets. I say, stop the bullets and the guns fall silent. When the guns are silent, we burn the forts. Let the bluecoats leave peacefully if they will go.”

“And if they will not?”

“Then we fight until there are no more bluecoats.” Crazy Horse paused to look around the council fire as Man Afraid had done, looking at his comrades one by one.

Then, his head nodding a little to emphasize what he was saying, he went on. “If we don’t do this, then soon there will be so many wagons on the Bozeman trail, it will be like the Holy Road, and the hunting will be ruined.”

Old Man Afraid said, “I know Crazy Horse speaks for the shirt-wearers. I know he speaks for the warriors. And I know, too, that it is the warriors who hunt the buffalo. If they will not hunt for us, then … we have no choice but to try what Crazy Horse suggests. But I do not think it will work. I do not think we can win.”

“Let us try,” Crazy Horse said. “If we cannot win, we will know soon. And then we can do as you say. We will still be strong enough to do as you want. But if we give up without a fight, the white man will think us weak, and he will make promises to us and break them, just as he has always done, but it will be too late for us to fight then. And we will have lost everything we have and gotten nothing in return.”

“Crazy Horse is stubborn,” Old Man Afraid said. “But Crazy Horse is a great warrior.” He looked at the other Big Bellies, and they whispered the “Hou!” of assent.

“We will make plans,” Red Cloud said. “We will do as Crazy Horse suggests, and we will try to fight like the white man fights. But when we begin this time, we will not stop until the bluecoats are gone or the Sioux have been beaten.”

And so Crazy Horse organized surveillance of Fort Phil Kearny once again. It seemed to him to be the key to the puzzle, the single most important piece, as Fort Laramie had been years before, when it was the westernmost installation the bluecoats had in Sioux land.

With Hump and Little Hawk along, he rode close to the fort, a spyglass looped over his shoulder on a buckskin thong. It was the middle of the
summer, and there were many wagons on the Bozeman Trail, but Crazy Horse was not interested in wagons. Chase away the soldiers and the wagons would go with them, this much he knew for certain.

Watching the bluecoats through the spyglass, he saw that things were not much changed from the previous summer. The wood detail went out as always, but now the soldiers had made a little fence near a stand of pines. It would give them some protection from the marauding bands of Sioux and Cheyenne that sporadically hit the fort. And a mile away was something new. The beds of several wagons were arranged in an oval on the ground, open at each end. There were even tents inside. It was like a small fort itself. For two days, he watched, not knowing why the wagon boxes were there, or why they were arranged the way they were.

On the third day, a band of Cheyenne swept down out of the hills and attacked the wood detail. The bluecoats were surprised, but they didn’t panic. They mounted their horses and rode quickly to the wagon boxes, and took cover behind them. They brought their horses inside, too. The Cheyenne left off the attack quickly, but it was a help to know about the wagon boxes.

The fort was too strong to be attacked head-on. It was important to get the troopers outside the stockade fence, where the Sioux arrows would have a chance. They could surround the fort and ride around and around the stockade until their ponies dropped in the dust and never get a shot at a single bluecoat. Only when the bluecoats were outside
was it possible to do some real damage. Maybe then, with some trapped outside, if they could be killed or pinned down, the fort could be overrun. But the bluecoats had to be divided, so that even their guns would not be enough to repel the thousand or more warriors he would lead.

Crazy Horse came away knowing that fewer than thirty men lived in the tents inside the small fort of wagon boxes. And knowing, too, that even that frail thing might be enough if the soldiers had enough guns and enough bullets. But if he could decoy the troopers outside of the wagon box fort, then his advantage in numbers would be enough.

On the morning of August 2, Crazy Horse led the small decoy party, with Hump, Little Hawk, Little Big Man, and two other warriors. The plan was to wait until the woodcutters reached the pine trees. Then the decoys would attack, hoping to lure the men out of the wagon box fort. Timing would be critical. A thousand warriors would lie in wait on the far side of the hill between the pine trees and the wagon boxes. But if the bluecoats came too quickly, the decoy party would be badly outnumbered. If the warriors moved too quickly, the troopers would have time to get back to the protection of the wagon boxes.

Discipline was the key, and as often as Crazy Horse had tried to drive the point home, he had seen the warriors nod in agreement, only to lose their patience at a critical moment. Only in the Fetterman fight had the discipline been there. He hoped that it had not been forgotten.

The woodcutters reached the trees just after dawn. As soon as they started their work, the
decoys made their move. Sweeping down off the hill, their war cries competing with the rasp of the workers’ saws, they opened fire on the work detail.

One of the soldiers grabbed a rifle and fired at Crazy Horse as he led the raid. As if it had been a signal, the shot set off an avalanche of Sioux warriors rolling over the hill and down. In desperation, Crazy Horse looked back at the wagon boxes, and saw that the men inside had not even had time to get on their horses. And now, with the warriors thundering toward them, they would not leave the protection at all.

In order to salvage the moment, Crazy Horse turned his attention back to the woodcutters. More warriors joined the decoys, and after a short but furious fight, the work detail took to its heels. Crazy Horse plunged on after them. Behind him, he saw some of the warriors driving off the mule herd, while others milled around the wagon boxes.

Fifteen minutes later, he was alone. The woodcutters were still running, but Crazy Horse was the only Sioux still in pursuit. Angrily, he jerked his pony to a halt then wheeled around and raced back the way he had come.

Some of the warriors were sitting in the shade, eating food the woodcutters had left behind. Yanking one of the miscreants to his feet, Crazy Horse smacked him across the face once, then again, until Hump grabbed him by the arm. “You fools,” Crazy Horse shouted. “You were supposed to wait. You were not supposed to move until the soldiers moved, and now look! They are behind the wagons.”

Hump took him aside and tried to calm him down. “They cannot help themselves,” Hump said. “You want them to fight in a new way. But it is difficult for them to understand. They have never fought this way before. You have to be patient.”

“There is no time to be patient. There is no time to waste. Every day the bluecoats are here is a day less we have to drive them away. You understand that. Why can’t they?”

“Because,” Hump said, “we are fighting to save the old way. And for many of these men, it is the only way they know. They cannot see that new ways are necessary to save the old.”

Crazy Horse shook his head in exasperation. He wanted to scream, or punch something, but he knew that his
kola
was right. He
was
asking a hard thing. But he had to ask and, if that did not work, then he had to insist. Old or new didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was the only way.

“We will have to make them fire all their bullets,” Crazy Horse said. He called the other shirt-wearers together, and explained that the warriors should circle the wagons, but not get too close, only close enough to draw fire. Then, when all the bullets were gone, they could sweep down on the small corral.