Reap the Whirlwind (57 page)

Mills had them hurrying now—the lope increased into an easy gallop behind the tiny, swallowtail American flags flapping and snapping in the breeze as those dusty, tired horse soldiers came to the sound of the guns.

Crossing the last two miles to reach the ridge where George Crook’s men were holding on.

Running desperately low on ammunition, but holding on.

When the first alarm was raised, Crazy Horse and the other war chiefs were noisily forming the horsemen for still another charge on the walk-a-heap soldiers and those white men huddled down among the rocks.

“Hopo! Look to the north!”

As more and more of the milling horsemen turned, the excitement growing, Wooden Leg found he had to rise to his knees on the barebacked spine of his pony just to see over the crowd. At first all he saw was the faint cloud of dust along the skyline. Then, as he waited, concentrating on the distance, the young warrior saw what the distant scouts had spotted.

A wide, dark line snaking out of the northeast.

Someone panicked and shouted, “They’re attacking us from the rear!”

Others immediately took up the cry.

Those first few who chose to flee reined their ponies away toward the hillsides at the northwestern edge of the valley, where the women cared for the wounded and prepared the dead for burial, a few busy in constructing travois. Most important, Wooden Leg understood, now some
of the warriors would have to flee with the wounded while the rest held off this surprise attack from the north. It was so like soldiers to sneak around and jump their backs in just this way.

Why should it come as a surprise, Wooden Leg chided himself—these are the same sort of white men who attack sleeping villages of women and children, the old and the sick. Of course these soldiers would prefer to attack from behind rather than having to face a superior enemy.

There was no honor in that.

As if drawn magically, Wooden Leg turned, sensing something of the great war chief who sat atop his painted pony on the side of the slope, studying the approaching column. Crazy Horse was completely immobile, as if transfixed, more so a prisoner—locked there between the soldiers and white men they had been charging and attacking, and those horse soldiers riding quickly out of the north. The war chief wore nothing but his breechclout and moccasins, his only ornament the small stone behind his ear and that calfskin lashed over his shoulders, as if forced to consider the souring of his medicine after so long a fight.

A cruel twist of events it must be for the Hunkpatila war chief—for here, just as they were preparing to charge in to crush the soldiers and white riflemen on the ridgetop, knowing the white men had to be running low on bullets, knowing his horsemen had been successful in dividing the soldiers into smaller groups, effectively attacking, robbing the white man of their warrior spirit, their will to fight … to discover that his fight might now be over.

As Wooden Leg watched, other Lakota and many of the Shahiyena chiefs rode up to join Crazy Horse, to argue over just what to do. But in less time than takes for a man to light his pipe, the chiefs were dispersing, waving, shouting their news throughout the hundreds upon hundreds of horsemen and those who had been forced to fight on foot.

“There has been enough fighting for one day!”

“Yes!” another war chief shouted. “The white man is beaten: he will not dare attack our villages now!”

“Let us carry our wounded back to our camps,” a third
commanded. “We must bring our dead to bury and mourn over, for these have fought their greatest battle!”

And like the powerful and swift whirlwind that sweeps across the open ground in warming days of early summer, twirling and twisting with such magnificent speed and force, the copper-skinned horsemen turned their war ponies away from the north crest of Crook’s hill, away from the muzzles of the white man’s guns, showing the enemy their backsides.

Joining the others who loped past the conical hill, Wooden Leg looked back at the white men over his shoulder from time to time. Those pony soldiers coming out of the northeast would have no one to fight now. Come too late. It made him want to laugh. If not sing.

Maybe another day these soldiers would get their fight, he thought as he turned back to face the northwest where the women had the wounded and dead laid out on the travois they were leading away toward the camp circles raised in the foothills of the Wolf Mountains.

After all, he suddenly remembered—there was still this matter of Sitting Bull’s vision: the soldiers falling into camp.

So … maybe there would come another day, another good day like this.

A day when these soldiers would come again to fight.

“Damn! But I don’t believe these ol’ eyes of mine!” the old packer exclaimed.

Seamus Donegan had to agree with Uncle Dick Closter. It was simply too good to believe—that sight of all those legions of warriors turning away, filing out from behind the rocks and trees, up from the ravines and coulees, streaming toward the northwest behind their war chiefs in a long and loping procession as that column of fours appeared along the distant northern skyline.

No sooner had the first Montana miner seen the narrow blue snake than he bellowed his news to all among those rocks forming the spur atop the northernmost part of Crook’s ridge. And as the packers and miners all watched, the distant column of fours split left and right, going into a wide front once they reached more open,
gently rolling ground as they raced after the fleeing brown-skinned horsemen.

“They’ll never catch ’em, will they, Irishman?” asked Tom Moore.

He shrugged. “No telling. Likely depends how tired those mounts are.”

“Don’t matter. I’ll lay money on the Injuns,” Closter said.

“Now, don’t be so quick now to lose your pay,” Donegan advised. “Them Injun ponies may be wiry and strong and grass fed, but they been run hard all day.”

With a grin the old man replied, “That’s just my point, you stupid young’un. Them Injun ponies got their second wind already, and they’ll leave them soldiers to eat nothing but hoof dust.”

Seamus snorted and replied, “Uncle Dick does make sense once in a while, you know, Tom?”

“That mean you won’t bet me, Donegan?” Closter growled with disappointment.

“That’s right, old man. But I still aim to buy you a drink or two we get back to Fetterman.”

“
If
we get back to Fetterman,” Moore declared.

Seamus turned on him. “What do you mean,
if
we get back to Fetterman?”

“I don’t have an idea one what makes you say you think we’re going back to Fetterman,” Moore began to explain. “This is George Crook’s outfit, Donegan. And as long as I been working for that man—I’ll be the first to tell you George Crook ain’t the sort about to turn around and head back in to Fetterman.”

“He did last winter!”

“That was the goddamned winter, Irishman!”

Donegan felt the frustration coming. “But this army’s nearly run out of ammunition!”

“Got more back at the wagon train,” Moore declared.

“Tom’s right. General said he come to fight this time out,” Closter agreed with his boss. “That’s for certain.”

In the space of mere moments, Seamus had allowed himself to go from feeling the desperation of men surrounded and with death staring them in the face, to sensing some rekindled glow of relief as the warriors withdrew
and began their massed retreat, thinking that now he might return to Fetterman, from there back to Sam waiting with child down at Fort Laramie.

But suddenly, that glow was as surely snuffed as if Moore and Closter had rolled down the wick on Donegan’s lamp—leaving him nothing more than fleeting hope and a lonely burned cinder of regret.

A rattle of gunfire interrupted his reverie, quickly dispelling that vision of Samantha he had cherished there atop the ridge. Behind their rocks, on the south and west sides of the bluff, the gunfire grew. Along with several others, Donegan trotted over with the big, heavy Sharps at the end of his arm, finding some of the infantry firing on a last party of warriors who were sweeping east along the creek bottom below the slope.

“Lookit those gamecocks,” Closter grumbled.

“I’ll be damned—riding right around us like it was a Sunday-go-to-meeting picnic,” Moore said.

“A final, and most fitting, farewell tribute, don’t you think?” Donegan replied sourly, kicking at a clump of grass with disgust. “So you boys still think Crook won this fight, eh?”

Closter turned on the Irishman. “And you don’t think he did, is that it, Seamus? Just bercause some Injun horsemen ride off in retreat down there along the creek, showing us their red backsides?”

“No,” Donegan answered the old packer. “Because even though the Sioux are retreating—they just showed you what they thought of the general’s army, showing you that even in pulling back, they was still able to ride completely around Crook’s army before they took off back to their village.”

“Goddamn you, Donegan,” Closter said, wagging his head. “Maybe you’re due being right every now and again too.”

“Yeah,” Moore said, sounding his agreement. “Maybe Crook was fought to a standstill.”

“No, Tom. Not fought to a standstill,” Seamus said quietly as he watched nearly a hundred of the enemy horsemen ride out of sight, disappearing to the east around
the big bend of the Rosebud where they galloped north, away to their village to celebrate their six-hour battle with Three Stars.

“Maybe, fellas,” Donegan continued, “maybe—we was all pretty lucky we didn’t lose our scalps here this day.”

17 June 1876

J
ust past two-thirty P.M. Anson Mills leapt to the ground
, dismounting before his horse had come to a complete halt, hitting the ground at a sprint that took him across the last few yards of ridgetop and right up to George Crook.

“General—I want you to tell me why you recalled me.” Crook turned slowly, bringing his right hand to the brim of his crumpled black hat, eyes squinting. “Colonel Mills?”

The volatile captain quickly saluted, pressing on. “I had the village almost in my grasp—and I could have held it.”

Looking away as if he could not bear to hold Mills’s appraising gaze, Crook instead peered to the north. To not only the captain, but to many of those around him, the general appeared more sullen than they had ever seen him.

Quietly, Crook replied, “Colonel—we got ourselves into a more serious engagement than I thought. We have lost about fifty killed and wounded, and the surgeons refused to remain with the wounded unless I left the infantry and one of the cavalry squadrons with them.”

“But you dispatched me with your promise of support if I attacked—”

Crooked wheeled on Mills, his voice sharp, metallic as new-rolled brass. “Dammit—if I left the infantry and some
of my cavalry here, I knew I could not keep my promise to support you with what remained of my force.”

Mills sighed. “And your plans now, General?”

Crook shook his head. “I have several ideas at the moment.”

“The village?” Mills asked.

“Perhaps, Colonel. This has been a most dissatisfactory encounter. We’ve been stymied by an enemy who has clearly accomplished what he set out to do: hold us at bay while he effects the safe retreat of his village. So, yes—if I can, I still have every intention of marching on the enemy’s camp.”

The captain was weary of it all, the useless exercise of all the coming and the going. The wasting of time, and the infernal waiting. The final straw had been that fruitless charge after the retreating hostiles. It hadn’t taken very long, nor all that many miles, before Anson Mills decided his men and stock had their fill of chasing the backsides of Indian ponies. After a pursuit of five miles, he had called a halt, turned his eight companies around, and led them back to Crook’s battlefield, empty-handed.

With a sigh of fatigue and impatience, Mills inquired, “While you are considering what path to take next, I request permission to visit my wounded, General. Trumpeter Snow.”

“Of course, Colonel. By all means.”

Mills saluted and turned away, glad to be gone and hurrying down the slope to the field hospital nearby, where most of the dead and all of the wounded had been gathered during the six-hour battle. He moved among the men, recognizing those of the Third Cavalry who had served with Royall and had fallen in the disastrous retreat. Kneeling beside each trooper, Mills gently laid his hand on theirs if a man could not shake, sure to thank them for their heroic service, asking if their fellows could bring anything at all to make them more comfortable, trying to spread what cheer he could—remembering as he did the horrors suffered by all those wounded during the Civil War. Bad enough that a man earned himself a piece of enemy lead in support of his country. Perhaps the worst of all ignominy was his country
failing to recognize the precious price of that man’s sacrifice.

Such simple gestures these might appear—kind words and the touch of a hand, the expression of a superior’s appreciation for the courage, sacrifice, and selflessness evidenced by only a bloody wound—yet these acts of kindness, courtesy, and respect were nonetheless lost on far too many commanding officers in the frontier army.