Reap the Whirlwind (56 page)

“’Cause it looks like Crazy Horse has opened the ball again!” Tom Moore interrupted.

Warriors furiously drove their little ponies across the open ground, firing and chanting as they charged the civilians ensconced behind their ramparts. Seamus began crabbing away toward the nearby mules, staying as low as possible, when the old packer hollered out above the growing clamor of gunfire and cursing mule-skinners.

“Don’t make me no never mind who opens the god-blame-ed ball, Tom,” Closter growled, “long as I get to call the last dance!”

“
A
man would be hard pressed to convince me that I haven’t this day met the entire Sioux nation, Major!” George Crook growled, watching the fray from his headquarters near the southern end of the top of the ridge.

Captain Andrew Burt had no reason to disagree as he peered at the unkempt general beneath the battered and
dusty black hat. The confident, even at times mischievous, look was gone from George Crook’s eye. No little wonder. All any man had to do was look across more than three miles of battlefield for it all to sink in.

Looking at the turnip watch he dragged out of his pocket, Burt saw it was past one-thirty P.M. They had been fighting now for more than five hours, without much of a lull on any part of the battlefield. To put this many warriors into the fight, to have them here and there and just about everywhere all at the same time—why, a man would have to be crazy not to think the exact same thing General Crook had decided.

They must surely have stumbled onto the fighting might of the entire Sioux nation.

A regular hornets’ nest of hellish, buzzing fury they had unleashed. The slopes were spotted with the carcasses of their dead and dying horses lying here and there among some of the enemy’s war ponies. Other animals, wounded and in pain, wandered aimlessly along the hillsides. Ammunition had to be running low on all fronts—what with the long hours and fevered intensity of this battle while these men had been fighting for their very lives. The wounded, and those of their dead who had been dragged away to prevent capture, were stacking up in the field hospital a few yards away from where Crook and Burt now stood. Hartsuff, Patszki, and Stevens had their hands full with those in agony who were forced to lie on the ground beneath the blazing one-eyed summer sun now ascended to its most ferocious height. At the same time, the Crow and Shoshone had erected small brush and blanket shelters over their own casualties, keeping out the sun and leaving one of their own to fan the torment of biting green-backed horseflies from the crusting wounds.

It was enough to give pause to that infantry captain, already himself a veteran of some ten years on the frontier. Enough to make Burt reconsider the confusing and paradoxical savagery of these copper-skinned people. Here on one hand he was witness to a certain civility, with a good measure of nobility, both of which dictated these stone-age people minister to their own with greater care than the soldiers could to their own comrades.

Yet—Burt mused—such a thing was really nothing more than a skill born of a culture where daily struggles of life and death were the rule, and not the exception. Besides, he had seen firsthand just what savage, brutal, obscenely cruel torturers these people could become when given the opportunity of propitiating some ancient blood debt on a captured enemy.

Especially hard to take was the sight of that man Henry, captain with the Third Cavalry. Nobody who got a look at the horse soldier’s bloody, battered face could walk away not believing that Henry had received a mortal wound.

Burt knew with just as much certainty that, had it not been for the allies as well as most of the infantry who held off the Sioux long enough for Royall’s cavalry to regroup and retreat, George Crook might well have gone down in history as the leader of a Wyoming column that was massacred by Crazy Horse’s minions from hell. As things stood this late in the fight, Anson Mills seemed to be the only commander on this field who had been able to move off the defensive and take any initiative.

The rest of them—Burt brooded angrily here atop Crook’s hill—had been fighting hours and hours of a holding action, nothing more than survival. It was hard to look over at the general with the braided beard now and not think George Crook had made some tactical mistakes.

Hard not to believe that, down inside, Crook himself knew it.

Yet, throughout much of the waning morning and into the early afternoon, the general had openly complained about others—more content to point his accusatory finger at subordinates who he felt had robbed him of the victory that was easily within his grasp and should have been his.

“If Royall had brought his battalion when I first summoned him,” Crook had said time and again during the heat of the colonel’s bloody retreats from the west, “I would not have been forced to recall Mills from charging the village.”

It made Andrew Burt almost feel sorry for George Crook. After the humiliating and public debacle that was Reynolds’s fight on the Powder River only three months
before to the day, this proud, taciturn man had now to swallow more pride and eat more crow. And do everything he could to keep as many of his troops alive as he possibly could.

No longer was this an expedition to defeat the wild, free warriors of the northern plains, an expedition to drive the wandering nomads back to their reservations.

Instead, Burt worried, this had all the appearance of becoming General George Crook’s Waterloo.

If the Sioux stayed the fight as long as the British …

If Crook’s soldiers ran out of ammunition …

If Mills had been cut off and destroyed somewhere beyond the far hills, somewhere down the Rosebud—then this George Crook might well go down in the annals of military history as another tragic and unfortunate Napoleon.

17 June 1876

“Y
ou’re sure you want to take the long way, Colonel
Mills?” Frank Grouard asked.

The officer turned to face south, asking, “The way we came—”

“The long way.”

Mills was growing short. “Then by all means—we’ll go over the hills.”

There was no magical way out of the canyon and back to the battlefield. Either they took the long haul back, the way they got here by following the Rosebud, or they hurried just like Crook wanted them to—on the double—right up and over the hills to pop up behind the hostiles. So unlike the night-long march to the Powder River last winter, this summer afternoon the half-breed had no magic for Crook’s soldiers.

Instead, nothing but a hard climb, and one hell of a ride.

On the west bank of the creek, Mills quickly formed up his troops, then gave Frank the order to lead them up the piney slopes.

He shook his head, slowly coming out of the saddle. “It’s better if your men lead their horses.”

Whirling angrily, Anson Mills peered south down the
creek the way they had come from the battlefield, as if reconsidering. As he did, the warm breezes brought the renewed boom and echo of distant gunfire. Things must surely be growing hot for those troops left behind to occupy the warriors.

“You hear the straits Royall is in?” Azor Nickerson asked, pressing his case.

“I can hear! I can hear!” Mills snapped, turning on his heel to study the steep hills to the west.

“If nothing else—that should convince you why Crook’s recalled your battalions, Colonel,” Nickerson said, using Mills’s brevet rank earned during the Civil War.

Mills glared at Crook’s aide. “I never had any intention of disobeying the general’s order.”

“Then we should be turning about—”

“No,” Mills interrupted Crook’s aide. “There”—and he pointed up the rugged slopes. “We’ll take the route suggested by Grouard. Dismount!”

“Good God, Colonel!”

Shoving past Nickerson, Mills began shouting his orders to the rest of his company commanders. “My company will lead out. We’ll proceed in a column of twos where practicable, by led horses.”

“Up there?” Noyes asked.

“If Crook needs us back on the double—by the saints, he’ll have us back on the double … by the shortest route possible.” Mills glanced at the half-breed, then back to Noyes. “I’m trusting Grouard to get us there.”

Noyes saluted and replied, “Yes, sir, Colonel!”

In that next moment they were all bellowing orders to their companies. Those troopers who had not tightened cinches hurriedly did so as Mills gave the command to his own M Company, pointing up the shady slope strewn with deadfall and boulders.

“Move us out, Mr. Grouard,” the captain said, turning immediately to fling his voice back along the long column of dusty twos. “Move out—rout order! Rout order!”

Without another word, the half-breed tugged on the reins and got his horse moving behind him. The Crow trackers filled in the gap immediately behind him as Mills’s
troops moved away from the creekbank, defiling almost due west toward the distant, steady sound of the guns.

Frank had learned that was exactly the sort of talk a man could hear if he hung around the army long: soldiers always rode to the sound of the guns. And if Mills hurried his soldiers the way it appeared the captain would, then two fortuitous things just might happen for Lone Star Crook: when these eight companies of horse soldiers came riding to the sound of the guns, they should be able to lift the siege Nickerson said the general was suffering back at the ridge; and, as well, getting out of this valley should save the lives of these eight companies by escaping the ambush Grouard was dead certain lay among the narrowing, shadowy twists of the Rosebud, not all that far ahead.

After crossing the gently sloping bottomland that took him through the narrowing bottleneck of easy ground, Frank finally led his reluctant horse up the beginning of that craggy, uneven slope, pocked with all sorts of loose rock that tumbled backward so that those coming behind had to scramble out of the way. Back and forth he clawed his way up, picking the best path for those who followed, forced to lead his horse, so it seemed, over every fallen tree strewn on the river bluff. If that climb had actually been nothing more than a hundred feet straight up, Grouard and the soldiers who followed in his tracks had to travel three hundred feet or more, as if climbing in switchbacks to avoid the loosest of the rock fields, the thickest of the deadfall.

After a half hour of knee-wrenching, lung-searing work, Grouard reached the top of what proved to be a fairly level plateau. As he stood there catching his breath, wiping the sweat from his face with the greasy bandanna he wore around his neck, the half-breed realized why he was a horseman, instead of one of Lone Star’s poor foot soldiers. Glancing back down the slope at the long, jagged line of troopers struggling up the hill, Frank knew why man was not meant to walk through country like this, knew why any man worth his grit here on the northern plains cared for his horse with as much attention as he gave to his weapons.

“Good Lord!” Mills exclaimed in an audible gush as he came to a stop near Grouard and removed his hat.

“Good climb, Colonel?”

“No—listen: the sound of the gunfire.”

He did listen a moment. “Hear it real good from up here now, can’t you?”

Mills nodded as he pulled the hat back on his damp brow. “Let’s get these scouts of yours moving out in the advance, Grouard. I don’t want any surprises as my men are formed up.”

They both scanned the slopes of the nearby hills. Frank remained suspicious that they had been watched all along and were still under observation by the Lakota. If Crazy Horse had planned an ambush, then he would likely have his spies out watching the progress of the soldiers’ march. As the half-breed signaled the Crow trackers to follow, pointing for a handful to go in one direction while the others were to take the opposite flank, Mills began to shout his orders to the officers and troops reaching the plateau behind him.

“Prepare to mount!”

On back the words echoed out of the canyon they had left below, each time augmented by another company commander as he brought his horse soldiers to the top of the ridge to join Mills’s troops.

“Mount!”

When Mills gave the order, the hundreds went into the saddle, shifting the cumbersome carbines on slings, adjusting reins in their sweaty hands creased with red dirt, stuffing dusty boots into the hooded stirrups, and tugging hats back down on damp foreheads.

“Left front, by column of fours!”

As Grouard turned in the saddle to look back that last time as he led them down the slope, west toward the sound of the guns, he saw row upon row of horse soldiers reforming beneath their swallowtail guidons, those little patches of multicolored fabric: red and white stripes along with that field of blue ablaze with its white stars, each with a company letter.

Then he heard the colonel’s voice call out a last order across that plateau. “We’ll be moving out at double-time!”

“You heard the colonel! Double-time!”

Going into a lope as they came off the top of the plateau, those horse soldiers did look pretty, the half-breed had to admit. All those eight companies, each troop riding horses of the same colors: Mills’s on bays, the duns coming behind Noyes, Sutorious’s men on the grays, Wells leading the band-box troop, Noyes’s chestnuts, and on and on. They were something to behold, coming along now at a lope, their column of fours heaving down that gentle slope as Frank led them in a circuit from the north across the ground more suitable to cavalry moving out at the gallop.