Reap the Whirlwind (29 page)

“Back and forth,” Donegan went on to explain, moving his entire body to the left slowly, then slowly to the right. “Back and forth again … and still again he rode on that ridge while them foot-sloggers fired lead balls his way.”

“That’s when I figured we should have some fun with him!” Closter interrupted.

“And what fun it was, Uncle Dick!”

“First that red bastard rode this way,” Closter said, leaning to the right. “So I run that same way too, hollering out to the savage son of a bitch, a’waving like mad! Then he rode this’a way, so I run back to the left with him. Still yelling for to get his attention.”

“It didn’t take long before Uncle Dick had him a dozen or more packers running with him, all scampering back and forth along the bank of the river just like that tin Injin,” Donegan explained.

“‘Head ’im off!’ one of the boys shouts to me!” Closter went on to say.

“‘Nosebag ’im!’ hollers another’n,” Donegan said.

“‘Hobble the red son of a bitch!’ put in another one of the fellas.”

Seamus was close to sputtering, pounding his knee in glee as he said, “Pretty soon, I tell you—there was more’n two dozen packers running around on the bank as the lead flies over their heads, everyone bumping into one another, rolling on the ground, sprawled out laughing till they couldn’t get up, John!”

“I should say, Johnny,” Closter agreed. “We did get our money’s worth of fun out of that tin Injun and his puny attack on this camp!”

Knowing George Crook was often one to hide his innermost thoughts and doubts, John Bourke believed the general was concealing some serious misgivings about the expedition to that point. No little wonder. For more than ten days his half-breed scouts had been gone, with no word of their whereabouts or their progress. On top of that, Crook himself had made a wrong turn and been locked on the Tongue instead of being camped at the forks of Goose Creek as he had promised the Crow. Besides, there had been no couriers come down from either Gibbon or Terry to the north, although Crook had undoubtedly wrestled with the thought of sending his own couriers through to either the Montana or Dakota columns, to establish contact, hoping to operate in concert.

Whereas before he might have hoped to have this all his own show—a chance for the Bighorn and Yellowstone Expedition of George Crook to do it all on its own—that dream had gone up in gunsmoke the evening of June 9.

Most disturbing of all, now Crook was certain the enemy knew of his column and the direction of their march. All chance of surprising the hostile encampment had disappeared before his eyes.

The commanding general expressed some of his concerns
for his three scouts, as well as his anxiety of never having the Crow show up, all of it given voice in his dispatch to Philip Sheridan, sent by courier to Fetterman following the skirmish of the ninth. In that wire the general stated his belief that the attack served no better purpose than to cover the movement of the enemy camp, which, he figured, they would find on either the lower Tongue or the Little Rosebud.

Crook told Bourke late that night of 10 June that he had decided to push on, despite the handicaps he knew his expedition would face in bringing the enemy to battle.

On the morning of the eleventh, after giving his men and animals one last day to recoup themselves, the general ordered the command back on the trail, moving south by west this time: eleven miles of retreat back up the Prairie Dog before they struck cross-country for seven miles to the forks of Goose Creek, where Crook informed his officers he would establish his supply base.

From that station, the general told them, he would seek to strike out immediately against the hostile encampment.

Despite that frightening, frantic hour John Finerty had spent with the soldiers who went tromping after the hostiles who fired into their camp on the ninth, the reporter could still say Crook’s campaign more resembled a summer outing than a military operation.

Few of the soldiers who had reached this Goose Creek encampment were mindful of their regulation uniform. All in all, the general was perhaps the worst of them all. The Chicago correspondent characterized Crook as a man who appeared to be more brigand than brigadier. What with that pith helmet he had put to good use down in Arizona Territory, and those two strawberry braids of his as Crook went loping through the hills and coulees in pursuit of new genus and species of birds, collecting nests and eggs with a zoologist’s fervor.

Still, Crook was far from the only one. Both Andrew Burt and William L. Carpenter of the Ninth Infantry used all their free time to indulge their passion: collecting specimens from the butterflies that bobbed and weaved over the tall grass surrounding the exquisitely green campsite here
at the forks of Goose Creek. As the earth warmed, the gramma grass reached for the sky for as far as a man’s eye could see. Tall enough that not one of those spring days passed without its share of rattlesnake scares—poor soldiers shaken to their boots with the unexpected surprise of that warning that sounds like no other in all of the animal kingdom.

The cavalry camp itself lay along the Little Goose, running to the southeast. To the southwest along Big Goose Creek sprawled the infantry’s bivouac. Between them the soldiers staged their daily horse races, an event made a little dimmer now by the deaths of Captain Burt’s white gelding and Lieutenant Edgar Robertson’s fleet-footed bay. Yet as the days crawled past, the boredom continued and the betting grew more furious on the races: cans of food or even the haunch of a doe taken in the surrounding hills as the coveted wager.

Not to be outdone, the packers organized their own betting events, mostly foot-races. While some soldiers played euchre and poker, checkers or whist, others fished in the clear, fast waters, and still more hunted daily to add variety to their army rations. Still, a majority of Crook’s army enjoyed doing nothing much at all as they awaited the return of the three scouts. Lieutenant James Foster drew constantly, his sketches commissioned by
Harper’s Weekly
, as did one of the packers named Stanley, both men capturing on paper life in that camp as well as the wildlife and verdant hills at the foot of the Big Horns. Anything that could be read, letters as well as old newspapers sent up from Fetterman, were passed around to kill time, until they disintegrated. Some of the newspaper correspondents fell to daily discussions of a Shakespearean play or an essay by one of the famous pundits back east as a means of keeping their minds occupied. And without fail every morning the sixty-five miners spread out along the creek banks, putting their pans to work rather than have the time go to naught.

Finerty grew as bored as the rest while they waited for the half-breeds to return, even bored enough to beg John Bourke to let him read some of the lieutenant’s copies of reports written by those government explorers who had
traversed that very area: Hayden, Raynolds, Warren, Forsyth, and Jones.

By the thirteenth even Crook could not conceal his anxiety over the long wait. He summoned Lieutenant Samuel M. Swigert to headquarters and dispatched him with a small detail of his D Company, Second Cavalry, to backtrack to Fort Phil Kearny in search of the long overdue Shoshone. Everyone knew the tribal leaders had sent word they were coming. So the question on every lip was, Where were they?

When Swigert returned to Goose Creek empty-handed that Tuesday evening, the thirteenth, Crook turned without a word and disappeared into his tent. He did not reemerge for the rest of the night, preferring to brood in private. Finerty imagined the general was nursing the same fear most everyone shared: each new day dimmed their hopes for the safe return of Frank Grouard’s party.

By midafternoon the following day, Finerty was dozing, listening to the drone of mosquitoes and deer flies, his hat pulled over his face, stretched out on his back in a tall carpet of buffalo grass. At first the distant noise did not register, more than halfway to sleep as he was. Then something yanked on a cord of his consciousness, the way he would yank on a bell rope outside a brownstone house in Chicago. Men were shouting, laughing in joy and glee. Cheering something.

Likely another foot race, he thought, and allowed himself to drift back toward sleep once more. But only momentarily.

With the first cry of that word, Finerty bolted upright as if the earth had trembled beneath him.

“Injuns!”

Men were running for the banks, most of them stripped to the waist, every one snatching up his weapon. More and more soldiers flooded toward the far side of camp, joined by many of the civilians, who dashed to the edge of the creek, many pointing to the west.

Immediately on his feet, Finerty rubbed his eyes, clearing them to see the riders coming at a lope. But no great cavalcade. Only three—coming on there in the distance. Not at a charge. There was no shrieking as there had been
the evening of the ninth. Most of all—there was no gunfire to announce an attack.

Three? he asked himself. Then it sank in. “By Jesus—it’s Grouard!”

Dashing toward the creek, Finerty sensed a pang of regret for Crook. He had to find the general in that crowd gathering at the creekbank. Had to be there to see for himself Crook’s reaction when the three half-breeds rode in … empty-handed.

As the trio of riders splashed across Big Goose Creek, Finerty’s eyes opened wide, his jaw went slack in surprise. The crowd fell just shy of silent as near every man’s attention was riveted on the middle horseman.

“What is he?” many were whispering hoarsely.

“Bet he’s Crow,” Finerty said. “After all, boys—Grouard went after the Crow.”

Heads bobbed as the three riders splashed out of the creek and came to a halt on the bank. Crook emerged from the crowd already parting for the horses flinging water on those gathered nearby.

“Frank Grouard!” Crook called out, shading his eyes with both hands. He started to smile, then it disappeared, as if the general didn’t know what emotion to express first. Happiness … or disappointment. “Damn—but I’d just about given up on ever seeing you again.”

“That’s no way to talk, General!” Grouard hollered back above the renewed clamor, a grin on his face. “Don’t you never give up on me.”

The general craned his neck, asking, “Why, where’s Bat?”

Louis Reshaw answered, pointing back across the creek, north by west toward the end of the mountains near. “Bat stayed behind with the Crow.”

Now at long last Crook smiled widely, rocking back on his heels and clapping his hands once in a little expression of victory. “The Crow! Why that’s damn fine news to my ears, boys! Who’s this we have here?”

Reshaw quietly said something to the middle rider before they both slid from their horses together. The half-breed walked up to Crook to make the introductions.

“General, this here is a powerful war chief of his people.
He’s called Old Crow.” Reshaw turned to the warrior, saying something in the man’s tongue. The warrior promptly held out his hand to Crook. “Old Crow, I want you to meet Lone Star Crook, soldier chief of the army that will drive the Sioux and Cheyenne far from this hunting ground.”

After he shook the chief’s hand, Crook asked, “Where’s Bat?”

Grouard answered, “About ten miles back. The Crow didn’t want to come at first. But Old Crow here talked the rest into it.”

“Then you tell the chief I’m real grateful for that,” Crook declared. He clapped his hands once and ground them eagerly. “So how many are waiting back yonder with Bat?”

“More than a hundred and fifty,” Grouard answered. “They’re still afraid of the Sioux. Mostly afraid that we might be in cahoots with the Sioux to decoy them all in here and kill them in a trap.”

Crook turned, scanning the crowd. “Major Burt?”

The infantry captain stepped out of the crowd. “General?”

“Major, I want you to get mounted up.”

“Mounted, sir?”

“I recall that you spent some time among the Crow.”

“Yes, General. During my time up at Fort C. F. Smith.”

“Exactly, Major. Ride back with Louie Reshaw here to meet up with the warriors hanging back with Pourier. Convince them that all is well, that their chief Old Crow has been well received.”

“Certainly, General!”

“And, Major,” Crook continued, “tell them we will have a proper military reception awaiting their arrival here.”

Burt saluted smartly and said, “Yes,
sir!
”

As the infantry captain hurried off on foot to secure a horse, Grouard went on to explain. “There for a while I was afraid everything had gone up in smoke on you, General.”

“What do you mean?”

“We was just about to head back from the Crow camp
that had just moved to the banks of the Big Horn—when a scouting party come in. Said they had run onto your soldier camp one night and called out to it.”

Crook wagged his head dolefully. “Damn—then it was the Crow. I knew it! That son of a bitch Ben Arnold tried talking to someone who hailed our camp across the Prairie Dog.”

“Except that the son of a bitch called back to the scouts in Sioux,” Grouard grumbled. “Because of that it took a lot of talk from me and Bat to convince ’em that wasn’t a big war camp of Sioux come to raid their villages. On top of that we had to convince the Crow you wasn’t camping with the Sioux on the Prairie Dog. After we already told ’em we was to join up with you on Goose Creek.”

Crook’s eyes narrowed as he replied. “Only thing I can do about that mistake now is to make sure Arnold never works for the army again—and see that our chief here is made comfortable until Louie and Major Burt bring in Bat with the rest of the warriors.”

Grouard rubbed his belly, as did the war chief. “How ’bout some food for us, General?”

Instantly Crook turned, pointing back toward his bivouac. “Frank, you bring the chief. Let’s go back to my tent, where we can offer him something for his belly, something to drink while we’re waiting. Now that you’ve got Old Crow here—I don’t want to take the chance of running him off!”

14 June 1876