Reap the Whirlwind (62 page)

First to the captain’s side was Assistant Surgeon Julius Patzki, who quickly yanked his bandanna out to wipe dirt and fresh blood from the officer’s crusted wounds, asking, “How—how do you feel?”

“Bully!” answered the redoubtable horse soldier in a hoarse whisper, spitting dirt from his swollen lips and blinking the dust from the slits that were his eyes. “N-never felt better in my life.”

“Get me some water!” Patzki hollered at the stewards.

With a brave, gritty smile Henry continued, “Every … everyone is so kind.”

Then he turned painfully to peer over at the pair of mules with the one eye left him after his horrid wounding. “Don’t know what’s better conduct from those beasts—throwing me off my litter or kicking me in the face.”

“Kicked you in the face?” asked Patzki as a canteen was presented him. He pulled the stopper and slipped an arm under the officer’s head before gently pouring a dribble of water into the waiting lips.

“Two or three ravines back,” Henry explained after the
drink and licking his dusty mouth. “Climbing up. A long slope. The beast in front gave me quite a good kick in the head.”

“Good God!” exclaimed William Royall, who came up.

“Nay, Colonel,” the courageous Henry said, trying out a grin as he blinked into the bright sunlight. “If Crazy Horse can’t do me in with his best … don’t worry yourself over what these mules will try.”

Some time in the early afternoon the column finally reached a piece of country where the terrain no longer heaved and broke itself apart. At last the landscape rolled gently, pocked with smooth-topped knolls. To the west and north stood the heights of the Wolf Mountains.

Almost due west of here stands Fort C. F. Smith, Seamus thought. More than likely the
ruins
of the post, put to the torch and plundered after the army abandoned the place in 1868 and the Sioux came in to revel in their victory.

With the first rattle of shots from the rear of their march, Donegan turned with a start, yanked out of his reverie. Gunfire had erupted from some of the five companies of the Second Cavalry closing the column that was strung out for more than a mile across the rolling grassland. It was sporadic but unchecked gunfire that continued unabated, the rattling working itself up the ranks, coming closer and closer as more and more horse soldiers got in their shots.

Then the Irishman spotted the target.

A single antelope had been spooked from its brushy cover near the tail of the march, bounding directly along the length of the column. Nearly half of the soldiers, more than five hundred, tried a shot at the skittish, but charmed, animal. Nimbly darting back and forth, the fleet antelope successfully ran the noisy gauntlet for practically the entire length of Crook’s command, until it finally took refuge among some willow and alder along a narrow stream the column was then about to cross.

“More ammunition wasted,” Richard Closter growled in that grumpy bullfrog tone of his.

“Don’t go on like that,” Donegan tried to cheer. “I figure from all the bullets these soldiers fired yesterday, and
what with so few Indians killed—Crook’s men can use all the target practice that antelope can give them!”

Just past midafternoon the column approached the summit of the gentle divide separating the Rosebud from an affluent of the Little Bighorn, which the Crow tribe called the Rotten Grass.
^*
As the day had worn on, the six-man squads assigned to care for the wounded were having to lag farther and farther behind with the slow going of their travois or mule litters as the terrain grew rougher. It was here west of the Rosebud Gap that Crook ordered the head of the march to halt while those rear echelons caught up.

Rather than stretching out in the grass under the warm sun like so many of the others, Donegan picketed his horse, then climbed the slope of a solitary butte at the base of which the command was taking its rest. From the wide plateau at the top he could see miles in all directions, a magnificent panorama laid out at his feet.

“The Crow fought a battle here summers ago.”

Seamus turned to find Baptiste Pourier approaching. He offered Donegan his canteen.

After taking a drink, Seamus asked, “Who they fight?”

“Blackfoot,” Bat replied. “Not the Blackfoot Lakota. The big tribe. Ones come out of Canada, what the Injuns call the land of the Grandmother. Three tribes in the Blackfoot: called Piegans, some called Bloods. The rest are known as Gros Ventres. French for Big Bellies.”

“S’pose they wandered into this country from up north to hunt buffalo, eh? Feed their big bellies?”

Pourier grinned, gazing into the glorious sinking of the summer sun, the fiery globe descending toward the northernmost reaches of the Big Horn Mountains off to the west. “No, they came for Crow scalps, most like. Crow and Blackfoot been bitter enemies for longer’n any man now alive can remember.”

Seamus turned at the sound of many feet, the snorts of horses and the rattle of equipage scratching up the sides of the butte, finding more than a hundred of the Crow scouts
arriving. They passed on by the Irishman and half-breed to begin picketing their ponies.

“Ho, Left Hand!” hailed Bull Snake, the warrior who was shot in the leg during the early minutes of the battle but nonetheless dragged himself to a nearby tree, where he kept up a constant verbal assault on the Sioux, cheering his brother warriors on.

The day before, his fellow scouts had splinted his leg with limbs and strips of green horsehide. Once they had hoisted him onto the back of his pony that morning, others had lashed the busted leg to the neck of his pony so that Bull Snake’s splint was kept as level as possible during the day’s rugged overland journey.

A half dozen came over to the pony now, untied the leg’s sling, and helped the wounded warrior hobble to the ground. In addition, there were nine more warriors nursing one sort of wound or another.

The rest spread blankets on the ground in a great circle across the plateau that stretched some fifty feet in diameter. At the center settled some of the older warriors, who promptly began to invoke the power of the heavens, beating their hand-drums or shaking their rattles. Out came the ten scalps taken from the bodies of their Lakota enemies, ten Apsaalooke warriors holding them aloft at the end of long willow wands where the long black hair danced on the breeze over the heads of the others. Most began immediately to yelp, keen, or wail, chanting their war songs and dancing around the drummers and singers sitting at the center.

Donegan finally asked, “You was going to tell me what happened here.”

“Crow drove the Blackfoot here to this butte where you’re standing now. And wiped every last one of ’em out.”

Then Bat pointed to the west into the valley below them cut with sandstone ledges, grassy bluffs, and hills dotted with stands of scrub pine. “This is a piece of country the Crow been fighting over for a long, long time. Off yonder is the Rotten Grass, where the Crow met the Lakota a few winters ago when the Sioux first started coming into
this country, making a strong show of it. It was a time the Apsaalooke say the icy creek ran red with Lakota blood.”

“Crow may be a small tribe,” Donegan agreed. “But sounds to me like they stand strong against any who come to take this land from them.”

“That’s why they put the faith of their hearts into Lone Star … into Crook,” Bat explained. “They counted on this army of his to drive their enemies out of this prime hunting ground for good, for all time.”

“But instead,” Donegan replied sadly, “the Crow are forced to watch Lone Star’s soldiers retreat.”

Once the wounded and the Second Cavalry at the rear guard caught up an hour later, the general remounted his column and resumed the trail south.

That evening, after having endured a torturous march of some twenty-two miles across rugged terrain, Crook’s command finally received the order to halt and bivouac for the night in a narrow valley. The soldiers and civilians set up their camp beside the headwaters of the Little Tongue River, spooking deer and elk, as well as a small herd of buffalo from the bountiful pasturage. Pickets were thrown out, and the horses and mules were turned out to graze in the tall, luxuriant grasses.

That evening, after holding their scalp dance, the warriors of Old Crow, Plenty Coups, and Medicine Crow took their leave of Crook’s expedition.

They asked Big Bat to give Lone Star their regrets in leaving so abruptly but wanted the half-breed scout to explain to the soldier chief the reason why, as well as tell Crook of their promise.

By the time the warriors were on their way out of camp after sunset Pourier was at headquarters explaining to Crook that during the preparations to march that very morning one of the Crow warriors had come across a pony on the battlefield, an animal apparently left behind by the fleeing Sioux. The import of this discovery was that the abandoned animal just happened to belong to one of the Crow war chiefs—but was a pony he had left behind in the village when the warriors followed Pourier, Grouard, and Reshaw back to join up with the soldiers.

The Crow were hurrying home now, Big Bat declared,
anxious and convinced that the Lakota and Shahiyena had attacked and pillaged their village with their overwhelming strength witnessed firsthand only the day before. So concerned were they for their women and families, and the old chiefs they had left behind to protect the village, that Old Crow’s young warriors planned to travel right on through the night until they reached the Big Horn River, where they would be able once more to protect their people and defend their homes from their ancient enemies. To soften their departure, the chiefs vowed to return in fifteen suns, promising to rejoin Lone Star at Goose Creek or somewhere on the upper Tongue if the general went in pursuit of Crazy Horse.

It was a vow the fleeing Crow never intended to keep.

Frank Grouard slept better that Sunday night than he had the first night after the battle. At least until around one a.m. when some of the pickets posted on the perimeter of the camp square opened fire with their carbines.

Shooting at sounds and shadows, seeing ghosts, spooked by something out there in the darkness.

Crook quickly ordered a reconnaissance from the Second Cavalry, but they returned after more than an hour, having discovered no sign of intruders or enemy scouts, no evidence of anything or anybody skulking around their encampment.

While the half-breed quickly fell back to sleep in his blanket, many of the soldiers and civilians were not so lucky. More than half of the expedition had been so frightened, grown so anxious at the threat of a night attack, that they were unable to close their eyes in peace. They stayed awake for the rest of the night: restoking fires, making coffee, smoking their pipes, and talking again of the battle. Brooding on the Crazy Horse warriors still out there.

First light was welcomed by the red-eyed and frightened among them.

The column was back on the trail, moving east, at dawn. An uneventful march on the nineteenth of no more than five miles that morning brought George Crook’s expedition back to the forks of Goose Creek, where they found Quartermaster John Furey’s wagon corral undisturbed,
its inhabitants eager for any and all news of the fight, ready to do whatever they could to make the returning warriors comfortable, to welcome back those who had pushed north to fight the bellicose Sioux. Out to wave and whoop and holler with the rest of the teamsters was George Crook’s prisoner—Calamity Jane herself—perhaps more excited than most to see old faces and hear the new stories of Injun fighting.

Those who had remained behind with the wagon train had not been without something to do in the three days Crook’s cavalry and mule brigade had been gone. While their location in the grassy streambed had provided the men with an ample supply of water on all sides in the event they were put under siege, their first morning Captain Furey had them string ropes and braking chains from wheel to wheel between wagons so that no horsemen could easily charge through their corral. As well the men had sweated digging rifle trenches, throwing the earth up into breastworks around some logs and deadfall they had dragged into place.

Grouard approved of such preparations. If a wandering band of Crazy Horse’s Lakota had stumbled onto the wagon corral, it looked as if these men would have made a hot time of it for the enemy, sharpshooting from behind their barricades.

Still, Furey had not worked his men nonstop. With a force consisting of no less than 80 mule-packers as well as 110 teamsters, the major assigned rotating details to go out daily in the hunt for fresh meat. The butchered carcasses of six buffalo and three elk on the nearby banks attested to the industry of those who had stayed behind with the wagon master.

Crook now chose to push his entire command on an additional two miles to a new campsite he selected where the stock would have sufficient pasturage. Pickets were dispatched to the bluffs overlooking the encampment, and the stock was unsaddled and put out to graze. At the same time some of the soldiers dispersed to scare up firewood or bring water up from the nearby stream.

A detail was assigned the task of erecting the hospital tents where Surgeon Hartsuff’s wounded were soon made
comfortable. A half-dozen officers who had lemons left in their haversacks gladly turned them over to Assistant Surgeon Patzki, who prepared a small kettle of lemonade that was quickly finished off by the grateful wounded who now rested upon thin mattresses, out of the sun and under canvas at last. That afternoon the surgeons’ thermometer rose to 103 degrees.

Especially relieved was Guy Henry. The mules carrying his litter had again conspired against the captain, slipping and nearly going over so that the unlucky officer was swamped by the icy water and nearly washed off his crude cot as the command crossed to the east bank of the Tongue earlier that morning. Simply to be rid of his two favorite animals and allowed some real rest proved to be the greatest luxury to the horse soldier.

In the “heat of late afternoon, Frank Grouard went in search of some shade along the creekbank with Baptiste Pourier. He stopped suddenly, parting some of the willows when he spotted the Irishman.