Reap the Whirlwind (20 page)

“I
  fought enough Injuns already,” Finn Burnett said as he
stood in the yard outside his small log home, squinting up into the early sunlight at the three horsemen. “Eight, nine years ago I fought enough Sioux to last me a whole lifetime, Tom. You take care of yourself. All you boys.”

Tom Cosgrove held down his big, hardened hand and shook with Burnett, the first agricultural agent the Eastern Shoshone had on their Wind River Reservation. “When the great war ended, Finn—I thought I’d fought enough to last the rest of my life too. But now General Crook is marching out to fight the enemies of the Shoshone. Years back I married into the tribe, so I figure that makes it my fight too.”

“Just be sure you come back, Tom,” Burnett echoed, turned and stepped back to the narrow porch on the front of the log house where he had lived for two years.

“We’re coming back, Finn. You can make a mark on that!” roared Nelson Yarnell, another Texan, and Cosgrove’s lieutenant. “And we’ll have us a little cheer when we finally got them Sioux run out of this country for good!”

The third man had always been a taciturn sort not much given to talk, so the most Yancy Eckles did now in
taking his leave was to touch the brim of his worn hat and tip his head in Burnett’s direction.

“Let’s go fetch up our warriors, boys,” Cosgrove said, reining his mount around in a tight circle and putting heels to its flanks. Make no mistake, this aging Confederate was a horse soldier. A Civil War veteran. Rode with no less than the famous Texas Thirty-second, C. S. of A. One of R. P. Crump’s glorious and rowdy fighters. Most of all, Tom Cosgrove had been a Texan who had crossed the great river to hold the Yankees back.

In one battle after another, he had been shot at and unhorsed. He had felt the sting of Union steel and watched men go down, tumbling from their mounts with their heads lopped off, or completely cleaved in two like the bloody halves of a melon lying on the dead man’s shoulders. It was a nasty, dirty way to make war—but it was war. And Tom had fought it, wounded and blackened by spent powder, following General R. P. Crump across the Mississippi to fight in one battle after another until the afternoon he was captured.

With the retreat blown by the twelve-year-old bugler of Crump’s, Tom had instead turned back to try reaching a fallen friend, only to fall into the hands of the Yankees who were surging out of the brush and timber, hot on the heels of the withdrawing Confederate cavalry. Cosgrove never did make it back to that fallen friend.

But he did reach Camp Douglas in Illinois, up near Chicago. And there never was no place more Yankee than Chicago.

It was there Tom and the others were offered a way to get out of prison and go on fighting—but not for the Confederacy.

Seemed the Union was running out of men to put in Yankee uniform, and that made perfect sense to Cosgrove—what with the way he had seen the Union armies send ten, fifteen thousand or more to their deaths in one goddamned day. So the North was having to siphon off its manpower from the posts and forts out on the western frontier. But to keep the freight roads open, to maintain the telegraph link with California, the army needed manpower in the west. So the Yankees came up with a plan. An
offer to those Confederate prisoners slowly dying of typhus and dysentery and scurvy in those prisons up north: “Volunteer to fight Indians out west; put on a Union uniform and we won’t make you fight your former brethren; and when the war is over and your time is up—you can go back home.”

Reluctantly, Tom Cosgrove finally took the oath, and with the hundreds of others boarded the boxcars that would take them west to a place in Kansas called Leavenworth. It was there they began their march across the plains to Indian country. A high, wild wilderness where those Confederate volunteers, those “galvanized Yankees” fought beside the Iowa and Kansas units to keep a lid on the warfare exploding across the Central Plains in the wake of Colonel John M. Chivington and his Colorado Militia marching down to massacre Chief Black Kettle’s camp on Sand Creek in November of 1864.

It had been something altogether different, this fighting Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. Oh, Tom Cosgrove had charged into Union cavalry more times than he might remember—but those brown-skinned warriors mounted on their fleet ponies were a different sort of enemy altogether.

Besides finding he truly liked this Injun fighting, Cosgrove came to love that Wyoming country, in many ways like that country of Central Texas, where he had been born and whelped. Yet more than anything, the reason Tom came to stay on after he was mustered out of the U.S. Volunteers was his liking of the Shoshone tribe, who were in close contact with the army in those opening days of the great Indian Wars of the Plains.

Tom found him some Injuns he could like instead of hate, as he hated the Kiowa and Comanche who raided out of West Texas. Naturally enough, it wasn’t long before Cosgrove ran onto a young Shoshone gal, as well as finding a place to give his restless heart some long-overdue sanctuary. R. P. Crump’s old Confederate horse soldier had found himself a new home at long, long last among the Wind River Shoshone.

Down the road that would take him and the other squaw men to Camp Brown this morning, Cosgrove saw
them waiting. Even at this distance Tom knew who the horseman sitting out in front of the others was.

“My, don’t they look pretty, Tom?” asked Nelson Yarnell.

From here Cosgrove could see there were more than a hundred, all arrayed in their finery. That made his heart swell a little bit, knowing more had shown up for this journey after all—more than chief Washakie had first stated he would guarantee the soldier chief at Camp Brown.

Tom had been there when Washakie was called in to the soldier post, to hear that General Crook had wired his request for some Shoshone allies to meet him heading north on the Montana Road. The army was asking the Shoshone to join the general’s soldiers who drive the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne back to their agencies.

“This is not just our fight,” Tom had told Washakie. “The Sioux and Cheyenne are your enemies too.” But in the end Cosgrove knew he had no need to remind the Shoshone chief.

Washakie had been a friend of the white man’s ever since the white man had come to these northern Rockies. The first fur trappers had come to respect and count on the Shoshone, in large part because of this young warrior. Jim Bridger said he could rely on few men to cover his backside—and Washakie was one of them. Now the warrior was an old man, more than seventy-odd winters behind him, his hair streaked with the iron of those many snows.

Tom came to a halt with Yarnell and Eckles, in silence before the chief, waiting for Washakie to speak first out of respect for the venerable chief’s reputation.

Washakie took a deep breath of that morning air, made all the more glorious by the rose-tinted streaks of early sunlight streaming into the valley of the Wind River. His entire face painted with narrow, vertical white streaks of earth pigment, a necklace of two shriveled Sioux fingers suspended at his chest, the chieftain peered about at the surrounding hills as if studying them, then finally approving of this place.

“It is a good fight you go to, Cosgrove,” the chief finally
said quietly as some of the ponies pawed and snorted behind him.

The feathers and scalp locks of the Shoshone braves lifted on the morning breeze in a radiant burst of color and motion. Tom felt himself damned proud to be going along to whip the Sioux with Washakie and Crook, that old Union warrior. They would be fighting side by side now: Crook, and most of them other Yankee officers the general would have marching north with him. Good to be fighting shoulder to shoulder with proven soldiers now, not agin ’em.

“We are ready to go with you now,” Tom said.

Washakie wagged his head sorrowfully. “I’m not going with you today, Cosgrove.”

That caught Tom by surprise. “Are you feeling your many winters?”

With a smile the old Shoshone replied, “No, more than anything I want to have a good fight with the Lakota and those Shahiyena. No matter my many winters—I want nothing more than to die in battle. Washakie will not die in bed.” He turned to the younger warrior on the pony beside him. “For now, I am sending my son, Dick—to go on with you.”

Tom’s eyes went to Dick Washakie, then back to the chief. “You will come soon?”

Nodding, the old Shoshone answered, “When the Utes and Bannocks come. When Crook sent me word he wanted the Shoshone to join him, I sent runners to tell the Bannocks of this war on the Lakota. It would not be good for me to leave before they got here.”

Cosgrove looked over the warriors behind the chief. “These others, they are coming with me now?”

“Yes. But because the Bannocks have sent a runner to tell me they will be putting warriors on the road to join us, I will wait. When they get here, I will bring them to follow Crook’s trail. Until then, Luishaw will be the leader of my tribesmen.”

With a nod Cosgrove acknowledged the middle-aged interpreter and famous warrior. Also known as Louissant in a French-inspired spelling of his name, Luishaw sat atop his spotted pony just behind Washakie with the other
headmen who would be in charge of the warriors the ex-Confederate estimated to be at least a hundred in number. Norkuk and Rota, Aguina and Toahshur, along with Wanapitz and Weshaw, even Tigee, the one whites called Yute John. They had all counted coup on Blackfoot and Lakota, fought Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho over their many summers of raiding and pony stealing, defending their families and homeland along the Wind River.

“It makes my heart glad to see so many brave warriors coming with me to fight our enemies,” Cosgrove said. “Each day I will look to the west where the sun sets … until I can look upon the face of my old friend Washakie.”

The aging chief smiled broadly at that, his old eyes misting a bit as he nudged his horse forward, laying his hand over his heart as he did, then bringing the arm out so that it pointed to Cosgrove. The feathers tied to his scalp lock tussled in the rising breeze. It was still cold here as the bright yellow globe sneaked over the hills to paint the bluffs red-hued to the west.

“Do not fear: I will join you soon,” Washakie said in bidding Cosgrove farewell, “to stand at your shoulder when we ride into battle against our enemies.”

He had a pretty good idea where he would find the Crow.

Although Frank Grouard had raided the Apsaalooke several times in the years he spent among the Lakota, “The Grabber” had never gone as far west into the land of the enemy as he would have to go now.

Even though they had been outnumbered by their enemies on the north, south, and east for many generations, the Crow had time and again proved themselves as fierce and worthy adversaries. They would make good allies for Crook, Grouard knew in his heart. But as much as Three Stars, and even the Crow tribe, all wanted to defeat the Lakota—“The Grabber” himself wanted to crush Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull all the more, nourished by his own unrequited hate.

Three hundred miles lay before the three of them now, a long, long way to go through enemy country before he would reach the Stillwater River. Perhaps they would find the villages of Old Crow and Medicine Crow there. If not at
the Stillwater, the three half-breeds would have to press on west, Reshaw and Big Bat had reminded Grouard. Likely to find the Apsaalooke bands camped at the mouth of Mission Creek. Pourier had traded among the tribe, working out of the Bozeman country from ’65 to ’68 when the army abandoned the Montana Road. Reshaw had spent some time among the tribe too. Ten winters or so before—in those years Louie came of age, when he came to know Mitch Bouyer.

Reshaw was talking about the man a lot now. How this Bouyer might be off scouting for the soldiers marching east from Fort Ellis across Bozeman’s Pass with the officer Louie knew only as the Limping Soldier. Reshaw claimed this Sioux and French half-breed Bouyer would likely join any of the Crow who would guide the Limping Soldier’s troops assigned to keeping the Lakota south of the Yellowstone.

No longer did Grouard call it the Elk River. After all, he had left the blanket, and was again among the white man.

Frank had suggested to Crook that it would be a good idea for the general to march his troops on to the northwest along the Montana Road, past the old Piney Creek fort
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until he had reached the forks of Goose Creek. There, Frank said, with good pasture for the horses, timber for their cookfires, and plenty of water flowing down from the Big Horn Mountains, the soldier column could await his return from Crow country.

But first he and Reshaw and Big Bat would have to ride across three hundred miles of country haunted and hunted by the Lakota and Shahiyena. Frank prayed the enemy would not be out hunting for the three half-breeds. Prayed no wandering scouts had the slightest hint the trio had moved out after dark, leading their six strong horses, stripped of everything they would not use to save strength and to go the distance.

To bring the Crow back to Crook.

As the sky had seeped night-black to go a murky morning gray that dawn after slipping away from Fort Reno, the
three scouts went into camp near the Crazy Woman crossing. Hiding down in the timber, they waited out the rising of the sun. Then after the sun had reached midsky, they decided to chance killing one of the buffalo that grazed the nearby slopes. Since the shaggy beasts weren’t in any hurry, it seemed doubtful there were any hostiles in the area to chivy the easily spooked animals. Bat went out alone and dropped a young cow, then immediately headed back for the shelter at the crossing. The three holed up for a long time until they were sure no one was coming to investigate the gunshot. Only then did they venture from the brush along the creek with their extra animals and butcher the cow.

Over a fire they kept as smokeless as they could beneath a leafy cottonwood to disperse any rising tongues of gray that would smudge the summer sky, the half-breeds hung the rich meat they had cut into thin strips. They had to jerk enough meat to last them for the rest of their long journey. None of them wanted to chance firing any more shots to bring down game, and no one wanted to risk making another fire. This was it, and it had to last for the dangerous ride yet to come that would take them into the land of the Crow.