Trumpet on the Land (57 page)

As far as Seamus Donegan was concerned, Crook had to be given credit. Unlike most of those armchair generals who had commanded the Union's armies during the early years of the war, George C. Crook had always suffered no less than the greenest recruit in his command.

As much as other, lesser men might snipe and find fault in the general's decisions, for the most part the Irishman believed Crook had done what he thought best. The general had marched and countermarched his expeditionary force on just about every trail he came across after the fleeing hostiles.

He had put his men on half rations, then reluctantly approved of butchering the horses.

And without fail Crook had always deployed his scouts to prowl in all directions to scare up a fresh trail for his men to pursue.

But now, to look at the man, Seamus knew even Crook was close to the end of his string. This was no longer
an army campaign. This was no longer a matter of catching the enemy and driving them back to the agencies.

This had become nothing less than pure survival.

S
T.
P
AUL
, September 4—A special dated bank of the Yellowstone, August 27, via Bismarck, 4th inst., says: The latest intelligence received concerning the movements of the Indians lead to the belief that Sitting Bull's band of Unkpapas are trying to cross the Yellowstone and reach their proper hunting ground on the dry fork of the Missouri. Acting upon this belief General Terry directed General Crook, with his column, to move eastward to the Little Missouri, following the trail leading from the Rosebud, while General Terry with the Dakota column has crossed the Yellowstone and marched north and east to cut off any parties moving toward Fort Peck. You will hear no end of extravagant stories about the attack on the steamer
Yellowstone
on her late trip up the river. She was fired on by a few Indians, and one man was killed, but beyond this no harm was done, and the affair is quite destitute of significance.

Just past nine o'clock that night of September 7, Crook emerged from the dark to grip the bridle to Anson Mills's horse as the captain rose to the saddle. For a moment the general peered into the rain, then turned back to the captain, saying, “Should you encounter a village, Colonel— you are to attack and hold it. But if you can successfully cut around their village, do so—for you must remember your primary mission is to secure supplies for this column.”

Atop his saddle, Mills saluted. “Very good, General.”

Crook replied, “We'll be watching for your guidon, Colonel Mills. Praying. Until then.”

Donegan watched the old man back away, his shoulders rounded almost like a man who had been beaten, a man close to his last wick. Then the general slowly raised those shoulders, straightened his back, and squared the shapeless hat on his head before touching the fingers of his right hand to his brow.

“I know you'll do us proud, men,” Crook told those 150 gathered behind Mills and his scouts. “We're counting on you.”

The captain saluted, then tugged down the brim of his hat, cocking his head to the side to ward off the drizzle as he raised an arm in signal.

“At a walk!” Schwatka gave the order. “For-rad!”

Tom Moore's packers ended up whipping sixty-one mules out of that misery-ridden bivouac on a small, northern branch of the North Fork of the Grand River. Desiring his party to travel in the lightest of marching orders, Mills had commanded his men to strip even more—they were to carry no more than fifty cartridges each for their Springfield carbines—half of what they had been carrying a month ago when they had marched out of Camp Cloud Peak on Goose Creek. Seamus worried: with all they had seen over the past few days, the chances were good the captain's outfit would run into a sizable war party. That very afternoon, in fact, they had stumbled across the wide trail of a big village moving south for the Black Hills.

So if the soldiers did have a scrap of it, would they have enough ammunition? Crook had made it clear that he intended to lay over a day right where the column was. Scary thing was that should Mills run into the enemy, the general's decision to give the column a day's rest meant the captain could expect neither reinforcements nor resupply of ammunition in time to do any real good.

As Donegan rode to the front with Frank Grouard to pierce the utter gloom and darkness of that muddy wilderness, leading Mills and 150 troopers into the unknown, the Irishman felt all but crushed by the sudden realization.

From here on out, they were on their own.

Chapter 36
8-9 September 1876

CHICAGO
, September 4—The Inter-Ocean's Bismarck special says the latest by couriers arriving to-day from the expedition is as follows: the general feeling among both officers and men is that the campaign has been and is likely to prove an immense wild goose chase. No Indians have been seen of late, with the exception of occasional small bands making their appearance for the purpose of stealing or harassing small parties engaged in the movement of supplies on the Yellowstone. The main column has not succeeded in overtaking slippery Sitting Bull, and is not likely to this season …

August 27 the Seventh cavalry were on Ofalens creek, and Crook had started the day before with his command for Glendive creek … Crook strikes down the south bank, and by this continued movement they expect to bring about a collision
with the Indians who are along the banks of the river.

T
he dark and the rain were as suffocating as being inside a pair of these leather gloves he wore.

Like the lid to a well-scorched cast-iron Dutch oven, the sky seemed to hang above them, right overhead, all but a few inches beyond a man's reach.

This endless wilderness swallowed every fragment of sound but his own. The jingle of the big curb bit. The squishy squeak of the saddle beneath him, the bobbing, plodding heave of the horse as it struggled on step by step with the rest that followed, and that peculiar sucking, wet-putty pop each time the animal pulled a hoof out of the muddy gumbo and plopped it down onto the prairie again, and again. And again over the next three hours.

Off to their left a little, the prairie sounds changed near midnight. If a man listened just right, he could tell that something out there was different. Not the same monotonous rhythm of the rain hammering the sodden prairie. Frank had Donegan signal back to Mills, stopping the long column. Then Grouard slipped down into the mud and knelt. A moment later a bright corona around the half-breed flared with sudden light as the head scout struck a match, holding it cupped in both hands.

In the halo of that light glittered the reflection of a large pond of water. It was the patter of the heavy rain striking its surface that had been just that much different from the sound of rain hammering the prairie's sodden surface. Frank crabbed left, then right, until he flicked the burned match into the pond and the whole world was dark once more.

“You saw something,” Donegan said as Grouard emerged from the drizzle.

Climbing into the saddle, Frank said, “Tracks, Irishman. Lots of tracks.”

“What's that you say, Grouard?”

They turned back to find Mills inching forward. The
half-breed said, “Tracks, Colonel. Travois. Ponies. Lots of fresh tracks.” He pointed. “Going south.”

“Won't be good to bump right into them in this dark. Damnable rain,” Mills grumped.

“No good, we go and do that,” Frank replied.

“Grouard—I want you to ride farther ahead of us. I need you to give us plenty of time to react if you bump into anything. Put Crawford and Donegan out a little wider on both flanks.”

Donegan said, “Hard for us to see the column, Colonel.”

“You'll just have to do the best you can,” Mills argued. “I don't want to be surprised by a bloody thing.”

Grouard watched Crawford and Donegan move off into the gloom, then turned about to take up the front of the march. “Wait five minutes, then lead them out, Colonel.”

“Very well,” Mills replied.

Grouard disappeared into the midnight rain and darkness.

For another two hours they probed ahead. And for all their trouble the rain only fell harder and the night grew darker. After eighteen grueling miles feeling their way to the south along the Indian trail, Mills called a halt at the edge of a shallow ravine.

“Stay with your mounts,” was the order passed back through the command. “Sleep if you can on your lariats— until daylight.”

The sergeants nudged them awake at four
A.M.
on the eighth, rousting them from the cold, muddy ground, driving the men from their soggy blankets. After tightening cinches, shoving the huge curb bits back into the horses' jaws, and pulling up the picket pins to be stowed in a saddlebag with the lariat, Mills had his patrol on the march again—without a thing to put in their bellies.

No matter, there wasn't that much to eat, anyway.

On they tramped into the gray coming of that overcast morning as the rain slackened, then drifted off to the east.
The sky was gray and black above them. The prairie beneath the bellies of their horses was pretty much the same color, and what small pools of water had collected here and there reflected the monotonous color of the dreary sky overhead.

From the horizon far beyond them emerged some high ground, pale in color, easily visible from a distance. Those buttes were like a beacon in what dim light the jealous clouds permitted the sun to cast upon this rolling land.

It wasn't long before the fog rolled in, first forming in the low places, down in the coulees. Then like a growing thing it crawled up to take over the prairie itself. Becoming thicker all the time, like Mother Donegan's blood soup coming to a boil on the trivet she would swing over the hearth in their tiny stone house back on that miserable and humble plot of ground where his father had died trying to grow enough to feed à family.

By seven o'clock Grouard had the soldiers skirting to the east of the northern end of a long and narrow landform that would one day soon be known as Slim Buttes. When he found a brushy ravine filled with plum trees, their branches heavy with fruit, the half-breed suggested a halt. Eagerly the men attacked the brush, stuffing the shiny, rain-washed plums into their mouths with one hand as the other hand pulled more off the branches.

An hour later Mills had them back in the saddle and inching off again through the soupy fog. Uneasily they probed south until noon, when the captain called another halt. This time Grouard brought them into the lee of a low bluff, protected from view to the east, from the prairie. On some good grass the horses were allowed to graze at the end of their picket pins and lassos. Then Mills allowed the men to gather some wood, dig fire pits, and boil some coffee in their tin cups. By one o'clock they were back in the saddle, Lieutenant Emmet Crawford's battalion taking the lead, something warm now in all their bellies to go with the wild plums they had enjoyed for breakfast earlier.

Having had nothing to eat since leaving Crook's
col
umn,
the men knew the plums and coffee were better than nothing at all. Fear is always a poor feast for an empty stomach.

Just past three o'clock, not long after the thickest of the fog lifted, Seamus watched Frank Grouard reappear at the top of a rise more than a mile ahead of the column. Expecting Frank once more to do as he had been doing most of the day, checking on the column's advance as he kept far in the lead, turning around after a moment to disappear again over the hilltop, Donegan was surprised this time when the half-breed rode back toward the column, at a gallop.

Off on the far left flank Jack Crawford had seen Grouard too and was loping back toward the van of Mills's column.

“C'mon, ol' boy. Time to find out what's got Frank so spooked he's willing to kill his horse to tell about it.”