Ashes of Heaven (50 page)

Too many times this war had been waged against the helpless, against those who had committed no wrong, while time and again the guilty, bloody-handed warriors escaped.

Captain Ball was loping up behind Wheelan's company in that next moment, bringing Norwood's L sweeping behind him. In a matter of seconds, Ball had them all on their way in a broad front, making for the hillsides where the women and children shrieked as they whirled about, fleeing over the top of the ridge, making for the Rosebud. Behind them came that thin line of warriors to do what they could to slow the cavalry's advance up the hill, to cover the retreat of their loved ones.

Back, back, back the Sioux men fell as the horsemen thundered toward them.

Of a sudden it grew stunningly quiet as the cavalry swept over the crest and was gone from sight. Down the hill he could hear a soldier groan as one of the doctors worked over him, likely jabbing his probe into a bullet wound. The man begged for whiskey, laudanum, anything to put him past the point of caring.

Seamus sank on the hillside, the carbine erect between his knees as his head collapsed atop his forearms.

After more than a decade of fighting Sioux, the Irishman prayed for God Himself to give Seamus Donegan anything that would put him past the point of caring.

Chapter 41

7 May 1877

His horse soldiers had the village on the run.

And he had the pony herd intact.

Nelson A. Miles hadn't felt this good in a long, long time.

It made no difference to him that the warriors made off with a few horses, the ponies they kept close at hand in the village.

And it really was of little consequence that the village didn't stand and fight when he had hoped they would—just as Crazy Horse had tried to do at Battle Butte.

What really mattered is that the gunfire was fading over the ridge as Ball's battalion ran the escapees down, and that Miles could now begin the destruction of nearly everything these Sioux owned. Just as Mackenzie had destroyed the Northern Cheyenne in the Bighorns last winter.

Miles was overjoyed—he had just crushed the last of the hostile Sioux bands still roaming the Northern Plains. He was closing the book on the Great Sioux War. None other than Nelson A. Miles!

Sherman had to give him his star now. That, or Miles might well carve himself out an important chunk of territory in Washington City one day real soon.

“You wanted to see me, General?”

Miles turned at the voice, finding young Lieutenant Jerome rigid, saluting.

“Mr. Jerome,” he sang out, flush with excitement, standing here where he had established his headquarters close by the site of that fateful encounter with Lame Deer. “First of all, my compliments on your splendid work capturing the herd. Commendable!”

“Thank you, General.”

“While some of your men continue to maintain a corral around those Indian ponies, I want the rest to begin preparing the village for destruction.”

“We're going to burn what belongs to the enemy, sir?”

“Everything,” he replied, wiping one palm quickly over the other. “But first, I want your men to stack everything so my adjutant can make an accounting for the record: weapons and ammunition, meat and robes, along with anything else that might be of interest to our government officials.”

“I'm not sure I understand you, General.”

“I want to know if your men come across anything like feed sacks, flour bags, or the like. Anything that might indicate some of these people recently fled their reservations.”

“Understood, sir.”

He returned Jerome's salute. “Very good, Lieutenant. You have your orders.”

While some ten of H Company joined Casey's Cheyenne scouts in keeping herd on more than 450 Sioux ponies, the rest split up to start rummaging through more than sixty abandoned lodges. From them the soldiers pulled a wealth of buffalo robes, at least thirty tons of dried meat, along with some two hundred saddles and other horse equipment. Besides some powder, lead, and fixed ammunition, the troopers discovered a number of Springfield carbines. In addition, they ran across quite a few Henry repeaters—seven in one lodge alone. Still, it was plain that the warriors managed to flee with most of their firearms.

Then the scalps began to show up—brown, blond, and red, a few long enough, curly enough, that they might even belong to women. And with each new discovery, Jerome's men cursed and Miles boiled. How it reminded him of the atrocities committed against the German family down on the Southern Plains in '74. While his own men, led by Frank Baldwin, had managed to recapture the two youngest sisters in a daring wagon-charge on one camp, it was some time before Mackenzie's Fourth accomplished the release of the older two.

White prisoners, white scalps.

“General Miles, I have a report on the number of enemy dead abandoned on the battlefield.”

Nelson set his jaw. “Very well, Mr. Baird.”

“Besides Lame Deer and his nephew, Iron Star, there are twelve bodies accounted for.”

“That's all?”

“As you yourself have taught me, they probably dragged off most of their dead.”

“Of course,” Miles replied bitterly, struggling with the immense dissatisfaction. “Fourteen dead warriors.”

Baird cleared his throat. “Not exactly sir. Th-they weren't all men.”

“Women too.” The colonel wagged his head. “I hate hearing that. It always makes the warriors fight harder, makes it tougher for those in the village who want to surrender, to make peace.”

At that moment, Jerome brought his horse out of the creek, bounding onto the bank with a rush of water. “General Miles? I've got some things I thought you might want to see.”

“You brought them with you?”

The lieutenant pointed. “Across the creek, sir.”

Miles remounted and with his headquarters staff, followed Jerome back to the village where soldiers came and went in frenzied activity. Stopping near a small pile of goods outside a cluster of hide lodges, the lieutenant slid to the ground. He picked up a pair of leather gloves, clearly of eastern manufacture. Inside the gauntlet, their owner had scratched a large letter
C,
and beneath it,
7th.

“And these watches, sir.” Jerome's men held up more than half-a-dozen pocket watches.

Next came the small cabinet photos, and pocket diaries of those men who fell with Custer, the blank pages of which showed the talents of a few fledgling Sioux artists transcribing their battle exploits in crude ledger drawings. In addition, Jerome's men discovered a few items made from the leg portion of black cavalry boots, along with various pieces of army clothing, some stained with blackened, crusty blood that had never washed out, no matter how hard a squaw had tried. In the end, the troopers came across curry combs and brushes bearing regimental markings too.

“And we've counted more than a dozen of Custer's horses among the herd,” Jerome declared. “They're all branded, sir.”

“Captain Ball's returning, General!”

At the sentry's call, Miles turned with the others, gazing to the south to find the first of the battalion coming over the ridge.

“I want half of Captain Norwood's men to report to Lieutenant Casey to act as guards for the herd,” he explained minutes later as the officers gathered about him. “And half of Lieutenant Wheelan's men will join Lieutenant Jerome's in preparing to burn the village. The rest will take up positions there and there, to the east and west of camp—to protect those high points from being regained and used by the enemy.”

“Do we have our dead accounted for?” Ball inquired.

“Five so far, Captain. Perhaps as many as nine more wounded. They're being cared for right over there,” and the colonel pointed out the field hospital established nearby in that tight loop of the stream.

Wheelan asked, “Will we bury our dead on the field?”

“Yes,” Miles replied. “I think it would be a fitting tribute for those who gave their lives in this fight to rest here for all of eternity.” Then he pointed to a spot about two hundred yards away to the southwest. “Captain Ball, you'll see that a burial detail begins digging those five graves over there, against the bottom of the slope.”

*   *   *

It was some time before the horse soldiers reappeared on the top of the ridge. A number of them whooped and cheered when they came in sight of the village once again after returning from that hot running fight, chasing the fleeing warriors.

As things had turned out that morning, the attack came at just the right moment for seizing the pony herd.

Rowland explained, “The Cheyenne, they said they could tell the herder boys just brung out the ponies to graze up in that meadow by the stream, 'cause them herder boys was headed back to camp.”

“So if we'd attacked a few minutes earlier,” Donegan commented, “the ponies would've still been in camp.”

The squawman nodded. “And if we'd come a few minutes later than we did, the herder boys would've been in camp to warn the village.”

Shortly after noon that Monday, Dickey and Poole arrived with their infantry battalion and Private William Leonard in tow. That reunion was no small cause for celebration as Lieutenant Jerome held the first firebrand against a pile of robes, blankets, and clothing. Everything the soldiers did not rescue for personal souvenirs—beadwork, tomahawks, and knives—now went into the bonfires. By early afternoon there were more than a dozen greasy black spires climbing into the damp spring sky.

From time to time in the distance, the Irishman believed he could hear the wails of the dispossessed, the keening, anguished cries of those who had lost everything but their own skins, moaning in torment and fury. As the sun began to fall off mid-sky, knots of warriors took up positions among the hills, staying in one location long enough to fire a harassing volley at the soldiers in camp before fleeing in the face of a squad sent to drive them off. A while later, the warriors would return to fire into camp again, having set up shop atop another ridge.

“That coffee of yours any good?”

Seamus looked up to find Joe Culbertson coming up, soot-stained and mud-caked from the trail. “Does it really have to be that good for you to drink it?”

“Nawww. Only hot, Irishman.”

“Sit down, young man, and pour yourself a cup.”

The half-breed was doing just that when a new series of gunshots rattled into camp. While many of the soldiers dived this way and that with each new volley from the snipers, most did not. For one unlucky private, Thomas B. Gilmore of Jerome's H Company—a man determined to cook his bacon no matter the danger—that midday meal came at a high cost.

At a fire near Donegan's, Gilmore continued to squat beside the flames as others scattered, persevering with his chores until a bullet clipped his elbow, causing him to drop his frying pan and spill his meat into the ashes as he tumbled backward.

“Goddammit,” the soldier cursed as he gripped the elbow in a hand, dark ooze seeping between his fingers. “There goes my breakfast!”

“You're a tough old hide, aren't you now?” Seamus asked as he leaped over to help the soldier scoot back from the fire, where he had made a good target of himself in the dancing light. “Someone needs to get one of the docs over here.”

“Shit—it's gonna be tougher to kill me'n it was to kill that ol' chief of theirs,” Gilmore grumbled as Donegan leaned him back behind some saddles.

“Saw that for myself,” Seamus replied as he squeezed down on the wound, doing his best to stop the bleeding, knowing that arm would have to come off before morning. “Took some shooting to bring Lame Deer down.”

Wagging his head, the soldier grumbled, “I counted seventeen holes in him, my own self. You know that? Seven-goddamned-teen!”

Donegan slid aside as Dr. Eman knelt beside the soldier. “You're tougher, by the saints.”

In small groups, the curious had gone up to view the bodies of both Lame Deer and Iron Star. A few laughed profanely but most were struck silent as they viewed the corpses of the men who had almost killed their commander. As soon as White Bull could safely get up the hillside, he scalped both the dead Sioux himself. He explained that although he wasn't claiming the kills for himself, he nonetheless was counting coup on these defeated enemies.

Close to twilight that evening, Robert Jackson moved about the camp showing off his trophy: Iron Star's feathered bonnet. He was especially proud of running the tip of his finger through the bloody notch at the base of the brow-band to boast on the accuracy of the head shot he made to finish Lame Deer's nephew.

While the random sniping slowed some after dark, the warriors nonetheless persisted in one place or another right on until dawn.
Perhaps they're hoping to find a weak spot in our lines,
Seamus thought as he fitfully tried to doze through the infrequent rattle of rifle fire from the hillsides, each outbreak accompanied by the curses of frightened, angry men and always answered by the nervous bawl of army mules. Perhaps those warriors would dare to slip in and recapture some of their ponies from Casey's Cheyenne scouts. Maybe the Sioux were even attempting to hasten the army's departure so the warriors would rush in from the hills and salvage what they could from the smoldering ash heaps of what had once been their wealth.

A long time after dark, Miles summoned White Bull, Rowland, and Donegan to visit with him. It was clear the colonel was a happy man, satisfied with the job his men had done that day, relieved that he had been spared the fate of Private Shrenger.

“There's an old soldiers' saying I'm sure you've heard of, Mr. Donegan,” Miles began as the men settled in the fire's light. “It has to do with a soldier's destiny, and the bullet that may one day find him.”

Donegan scratched at his chin, then said, “I think I heard that saying a long time back, General. The belief that every bullet has its billet.”