Trumpet on the Land (78 page)

Terry leaves the field, having accomplished no
purpose of the expedition, and with one-quarter of his troops killed by bullets or exposure.

A
s the clouds finally abandoned the sky above the banks of the Belle Fourche that night of the thirteenth, a nearly full moon rose in the southeast beyond Bear Butte.

For the longest time Seamus stood watching it ease itself up off the horizon, yellow as the cream that rose to the surface of buttermilk, and he thought on that most sacred place the hostiles wanted to protect from the white man. How the Lakota and Cheyenne wanted nothing more than to drive these miners and merchants and settlers entirely from the Black Hills.

At headquarters was gathered a happy congregation of citizens—shop owners and merchants of all strata, politicians and the power hungry of every stripe—every last one of them eager to shake hands with General George Crook and those officers who had rescued them from the recent terror and likely annihilation by the Sioux and Cheyenne.

“Four hundred of our citizens have been murdered by the savages since June,” one local wag declared at Crook's fire that evening. “And at last the government has made up its mind to protect its citizens!”

Around the group of officers they distributed those luxuries they had carted out from Whitewood, Crook City, and Deadwood in their wagons and buggies: canned meats and candied fruits, fish eggs and cheeses, wines and a better age of whiskey, along with molasses-cured cigars as big around as a cane fishing pole.

For the rest of camp it was a merry night, filled with song and dance and laughter. Warm food and rich coffee, tobacco for a farmboy to chew, for a German to stuff into his briars or an Irishman into the unbroken stump of his clay pipe, then gaze overhead at the stars.

After so, so many nights, just to see the stars again in this sky! So sing they did, every last song they knew, sang with lusty joy.

Down to the bivouac of Carr's Fighting Fifth Cavalry,
Seamus led his Indian pony, figuring he might just as well sleep there among those troopers until dawn arrived and the handpicked detail would march north to retrieve those boxes of abandoned ammunition. It was as merry a camp as he could ever remember being in since that April night back in sixty-five, there in the leafy coolness of the Appomattox Woods surrounding the McLean farmhouse where the Virginia gentleman Lee had just surrendered to old Sam Grant. Yes, indeed—Sheridan's cavalry had done all that had been asked of it, so those gallant horse soldiers had good cause to celebrate the end of a long, bloody, terrible war.

And again tonight the soldiers who had marched this time with George Crook celebrated the fact that Phil Sheridan's mighty trumpet had been heard upon the land. It was plain that they were driving the hostiles back to their agencies. The soldiers had survived their wilderness ordeal.

So it came as no surprise to the Irishman to find that the regiment's prodigious rhymesters were already at work composing new verses for the popular song of the era, “The Regular Army O.”

Every officer in the army knew George Crook had received his promotion to brigadier due to his leadership
during the Apache campaign down in Arizona. In fact, the Fifth Cavalry had long boasted that they themselves had won that star for him. So it was with fond affection that the regiment gave a new nickname to the general following his fight with Crazy Horse in Montana Territory—“Rosebud George” he was called. And during their escape from General Terry and the ordeal of their horse-meat march, it was common knowledge that Tom Moore's packers somehow always seemed to have better food to eat, and more of it, while Carr's horse soldiers grew hungrier with each new day.

So went another new verse to the old song:

A rousing night for men drunk not on beer or liquor but on relief, giddy with a full belly of something far more filling than broken-down horseflesh. They had emerged from the wilderness alive but not unscathed. Every last one of them not quite whole. Their terrible ordeal had indelibly scarred them. They would never quite be the same men any of them had been when they had marched north at the
beginning of that hopeful summer, which was to be the last of freedom for the nomadic Sioux.

“Look! Look there!” Charles King shouted above some of the singing and laughter and pandemonium.

As more and more of the other officers and soldiers turned to look where the lieutenant was pointing at the top of a hill, the singing grew hushed and a prayerful murmur began.

In the shelter of a rocky promontory Colonel Wesley Merritt and his staff had pitched their bivouac of blankets and tent halves just below the crest among a sparse clump of stunted pine and cedar. Extending from that collection of crude shelters all the way down the slope to the banks of the Belle Fourche was a sight that made even the most hardened and skeptical of them all feel suddenly touched by the hand of God in their deliverance.

With its rising in those clearing skies that evening, the moon had projected its shimmering, silvery light behind a narrow cleft in those boulders above the regiment's camp—enlarging to heroic size a wind-bared, leafless branch no taller than two feet in height, crossed at a perfect angle by a somewhat smaller twig.

As the moon inched from the horizon, the image slowly crawled across that bivouac of the Fighting Fifth— until the banks of the Belle Fourche were touched by that mystical symbol of death and rebirth.

From the midst of those stunned hundreds burst one doubting Thomas, a young infantryman who had been celebrating with his friends among the cavalry regiment. Up the side of the hill he bounded until reaching the crest, where he discovered the tiny natural cross thus created by the rising of that full moon. In the splendid brilliance of that evening he turned around at the crest and with outflung arms shouted his declaration that what they all were witnessing was no divine manifestation.

But an old soldier—one of those scarred in a long, bloody war against the south, a trooper who had followed Eugene Carr's Fifth across the arid plains of western Ne
braska until they had caught Tall Bull at Summit Springs, one who had stood with Royall to fight the Apache down among the blisteringly cruel mountains of Arizona, one who had cajoled and cheered and herded before him stragglers all along the muddy route of that terrible horse-meat march—now that old file finally spoke to the Irishman beside him.

“I damn well don't need no green shavetail telling me what is or ain't a sign from God.” He raised his gray-bristled face to the starry sky. “A man only has to stand here now, and remember what we come through, to know for certain that God Himself put that cross there for us to see—just like it was God Himself what brung us out of the desert.”

“Amen,” Donegan said quietly as he stared at the moonlit phenomenon, then crossed himself again. “Thy will be done.”

Once more he felt in the presence of something much greater than he, something much greater than all of them, white and red. And though Seamus could not bring himself to say that his God was the same as the Indians' God—he knew he would never again believe that his God was any better than the Great Mystery or Everywhere Spirit worshiped by the hostiles he had tracked and fought and killed for more than a decade now.

This year as the powerful in Washington City sent their emissaries west to sweet-talk and bully the tribes into selling their beloved Black Hills, it was enough to give him pause as he stood within the heart of those hills, knowing the hostiles wanted only to drive off from this most mystical of places all white men, to expel every last one of those restless spirits who had been drawn to these streams from all corners of the earth and in the end- stayed on for the very same reasons the Indian came here to pray.

The inevitability of the nation's course would eventually crush all resistance, of that he had no doubt. But for the moment Seamus knew that all who came to realize just
what treasure was at stake shared in common something quite holy, be they white or red.

Humbled in the magnificent beauty of this place, realizing that every last one of them had been given life when once so close to death—this heavenly light, this cross, this presence of something so great it was beyond understanding—was at this moment enough to bring tears to a big man's eyes, able to utter only one word.

“Amen.”

By the morning of the fourteenth a plague of diarrhea struck the camp. Men gone so long on nothing but lean and stringy horse meat had suddenly gorged themselves with all sorts of vegetables and fruits, beef and pork, as well as all varieties of breads. Some men grumbled in spite as they hurried into the brush, but for most their affliction was a small price to pay for deliverance.

Besides, the sun actually came up at down. Without a cloud in the sky.

To lead the patrol Crook sent back to retrieve the abandoned ammunition, the rotation of duty among the subalterns in the Fifth Cavalry fell to young Lieutenant Edward L. Keyes, C Troop. Following Donegan that dawn were some thirty-five men, hardly enough to hold off any united force of warriors seeking to harass, kill, and scalp any stragglers not already come to the army's camp on the Belle Fourche.

But in that Thursday's march, and the anxious return trip of the fifteenth, none of them saw a single feather, not one hostile horseman, as they hurried south again along their backtrail.

Besides the fourteen pitiful abandoned horses they were able to drive south with them, on the backs of a dozen of Tom Moore's pack-mules Keyes's men lashed every last box of ammunition the column had cached during its ordeal. Not one cartridge was lost.

When Seamus led the lieutenant's patrol back to Crook's camp, which had been moved in those last two
days from the Belle Fourche up Whitewood Creek, John Finerty trotted up in those deformed brogans of his and, before Donegan could even climb out of the saddle, declared, “Upham's patrol came in without finding a single Injun.”

“Same was it with us: we saw trails, but no warriors,” Seamus replied.

“But that doesn't mean the Sioux didn't see Upham's men,” Finerty said gravely.

“What do you mean?”

“Upham had a private named Milner, Company A— riding out ahead of the rest, maybe no more than a half mile. They said he was following an antelope.”

“And the Sioux jumped him?”

“Right. The rest came on his body five minutes after those red bastards did their craftiest work. Found Milner stripped, his whole scalp gone, throat slit from ear to ear, and his chest slashed with two large X*s. What would such a thing mean, Seamus?”

“Those two mean the Indians found the soldier was a brave man.”

“I should say,” Finerty agreed. “Upham's men found a lot of cartridge cases around the body. Stone dead—but his flesh still warm as could be.”

“Those h'athens can work fast. Believe me, I've seen it with my own eyes,” Donegan said.

“Sergeant Major Humme was damned mad. Still mad enough to chew on nails when he came riding in here not long after the Sioux killed his man that he went storming right up to Crook, frothing at the bit and demanding a chance to even the score by killing one of the captives, that Charging Bear fella, with his own hands. Crook sent him away, with a warning that he'd put Humme under arrest if he caused any more trouble.”

Seamus said, “Things quieted down after that?”

With a nod Finerty replied, “At night they have—but during the day there's a photographer come up from Dead
wood. Rolled in with his wagon yesterday. Ever since, he's been posing the soldiers for photographs.”

“I'll bet he's making the money,” Donegan grumbled.

“Oh, he's not making cabinet photos for the soldiers to send back to their families,” the newsman corrected. “He heard all about the hardships the men suffered on the march—eating the horse meat, slogging through the mud, and all the rest—that he's been posing the soldiers in what I'd call little scenes or vignettes.”

“What's his name?”

“Stanley J. Morrow. Told me he had posed the soldiers fighting over horse meat, posed them pretending they're cutting steaks from the flanks of a dead horse, had some of the mules and horses with soldiers in their litters and on their travois—saying he was going to let the folks back east know just how cruel this campaign and the Sioux War really was. Morrow's not a bad fellow, Seamus. He's doing all this at his own expense.”

“Then God bless 'im: someone needs to record for history what we all went through on Crook's march.”

“Won't be long until we're no longer forced to live off the white scalpers.”

“White scalpers?” Seamus asked.

“Those drummers and merchants who ride out here with their wagons loaded with goods priced four, five times the going rate on the frontier,” the newsman continued.