Ashes of Heaven (7 page)

Still, the colonel's most intense hatred was reserved for George C. Crook—a soldier who had turned in an even sorrier effort than that of Terry! To Nelson's way of thinking, Crook's bumbling and thumb-sitting, while Custer's killers moseyed off to the four winds, had accomplished nothing but give the hostiles renewed confidence! And now there were rumors that Crook was sneaking around down at Red Cloud's Agency, attempting to enlist Spotted Tail himself to search for Crazy Horse. Why, the conniving blackguard! If Crook thought such puny efforts would undermine Miles's campaign to force the tribes to surrender, then Crook was more of an incompetent dullard than he could have ever imagined!

Miles was the only one who could lay claim to fighting this war, by God! Those hostile chiefs and warrior bands belonged to Nelson A. Miles. No two ways about it. They were
his
Indians. Miles had been the one to fight them right from the moment of his arrival in the Yellowstone country last summer, his thirty-seventh, fighting the hostiles right on through the fall and into this interminable winter. He had tracked them, stalked, and harried them. Hell, the only fight Crook had with the enemy was when the Sioux caught him eating breakfast and playing whist!

No, indeed, Miles thought: the Sioux and Cheyenne belong to me. And by the heavens, Nelson A. Miles should be the one to whom those warrior bands surrendered!

“Perhaps all of my superiors being cronies of Sherman and Sheridan does explain it,” Miles considered, his disgust rising like sour, bubbling acid. “There is no other logical reason for my commanders to ignore the worst management of the rear I've ever seen! If those four worthless popinjays were out of the way, why, Pope could be packed off to New York and Terry could be sent down to replace him at Leavenworth.”

“But that still leaves Hazen and Gibbon here in the north, General,” Baldwin reminded him.

Miles snorted and rubbed the end of his nose, brooding on the two colonels who still outranked him in seniority. “Both of them have been out here so long they'd doubtless jump at the chance to go east!” He slapped a palm down on his cluttered desk. “I promised Sherman that if he would give me this command and just half the troops now in this department, I would end this Sioux war once and forever in four months!”

“What did General Sherman say to that?”

“I'm ignored! No goddamned answer at all!” he shrieked in torment. “Why do Sherman and Sheridan ignore my reports, my requests, my exposing the utter criminality in the quartermaster corps, if not to protect their old cronies, like Crook and the others?”

“Nothing short of criminal, General!”

“If Major Benjamin Card wasn't such a thief disposed to ignore my department's needs, then my men would have what we need to pursue this campaign!” Miles growled as he sank into his desk chair. “As it is, I had to turn around and return to our base instead of chasing after that fleeing village.”

“But for the want of forage and rations,” Baldwin grumped in sympathy, “we could have dogged Crazy Horse until we caught him again, staying right on his tail till we whipped him once and for all.”

Scratching at his heavy, black beard, Miles wagged his head. “We've got less than five months to get the job done, Lieutenant.”

“Why only five months?”

“That's when Congress's new legislation goes into effect,” he explained. “They've reduced the size of the frontier army by 2,500 soldiers.”

His voice rising in disbelief, Baldwin cried, “Just a year after they approved the appropriations for all the new recruits they were calling ‘Custer's Avengers'?”

“The whole nation was up in arms after Custer got himself butchered by the Sioux and Cheyenne,” Miles said. “And now with that contested presidential election causing the possibility of another revolt in the south finally put to rest—”

“Revolt, General?”

Miles waved a hand, casually discounting just how serious the problem had been back east for the past few months. “That situation with Hayes, and the way the southern states contested his election so they could put an end to reconstruction. Seems the wounds still run deep down in the south, and those wounds are still a might tender.”

“So Congress will proceed with cutting our troop strength now that we're just beginning to show some success with the hostiles?”

“We've got till July 1, Mr. Baldwin,” Miles said as he ran his fingers through his thick hair. “So we must strike while the opportunity is at hand.”

“As soon as Bruguier returns, you'll have an idea just what the sentiments are in those camps, General.”

“Damn right,” Miles agreed. “As I wrote Sherman, my perfect spy system has enabled me to know the strength and design of the enemy, to find, follow, and defeat him—wherever he may flee.”

“What will it take to make Washington realize what you've accomplished out here?”

“Your trip to see General Terry will be my first step in securing all that I am due, Lieutenant.”

“Enlarging your department—”

“As I explained, I've written both Sheridan and Sherman telling them that there ought to be but one department over this whole country the hostiles claim. One department, and one department commander.”

“You, General.”

“Absolutely. But I need more good officers.” He wagged his head like a grumpy bear. “If Terry would only replace Otis down at Glendive Cantonment, I wouldn't have to worry about the door on my eastern flank.”

“Not to mention our supply problem.”

“That's the quartermaster again! Criminal neglect from those scheming bureaucrats!” Miles roared. “I threatened Sheridan that I would go to the press if I didn't get what I ordered for my campaigns from those crooks in the quartermaster department!”

“Sheridan hates the papers.”

“Damn right he does. And he always advises against taking any correspondents along so I'm sure he knows how bad this whole thing would look if I talked to the papers. I told him squarely that only a full department command would defend me against those who are conspiring against my success.”

“A success no other officer can match in this war, General.”

“The Fifth can be very proud,” Miles said. “We have fought and defeated larger and better armed bodies of hostile Indians than any other officer since the history of Indian warfare commenced! And at the same time I've gained a more extended knowledge of this northern frontier than any living man.”

“They have no one better for the job, sir.”

Miles turned to the large map he had tacked behind his chair. Tracing a finger around the extent of country between the Canadian border and Fort Fetterman to the south, the colonel said, “I told Sherman I would make the following recommendations: As the bad lands of the Little Missouri and that near the headwaters of the Tongue River afford the hostile tribes their strongholds of refuge, I would recommend that they be occupied by supply camps, where a movable command can obtain supplies; also the mouths of the Little Horn and the Musselshell, and at Fort Peck. These points, with two exceptions, can be supplied by steamboat transportation, while the others can be supplied by ox-trains.”

“Not a word from the commanding general on your ideas?”

“Not a peep,” he said, glowering at his desk. “I even asked Sheridan and Sherman for an appropriation to furnish wire for a military telegraph connecting Bismarck, Dakota with Bozeman, Montana. And another wire connecting the Yellowstone Valley with Fort Fetterman, Wyoming. Why, similar appropriations have been made with good results down south in Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and Indian Territory.”

Baldwin stood and stretched. “Tomorrow morning is going to come early, General. I believe I'll be off to bed before I depart.”

“Yes, by all means, Lieutenant,” Miles replied. “I want you rested before you ride east to sit on Terry's desk for me.”

“Yes, sir. I'll do everything I can for us so that the July 1 deadline won't mean that all we've accomplished comes undone.”

Miles came around the desk and stopped almost toe to toe with Baldwin. Placing a hand on the shoulder of his trusted lieutenant, the colonel said, “I want you back here before the end of April.”

“You can count on it, General. The end of April.”

“There's only so much you can accomplish fighting those at Terry's headquarters,” Miles growled. “And I want you here when spring comes … when I march the Fifth to finish what we began this winter.”

Chapter 5

Early February 1877

BY TELEGRAPH

MISSOURI.

Breaking Up of a Hard Winter.

ST. LOUIS, February 2.—After being ice bound for fifty-six days, the river finally burst its bonds between 10 and 11 o'clock this morning, and ice has been passing the city but not in great quantities, ever since. Navigation southward is resumed and steamers will prepare for business to-morrow. Ice on the western side of Arsenal Island still holds fast, but it will no doubt break up and run out very soon, but in the meantime there is a sufficient channel on the east side for all practical purposes.

Johnny Bruguier was a wanted man.

But in jumping out of the skillet, he just might have pitched himself right into the fire.

Now Johnny figured he was a wanted man in two cultures. By attempting to slip the
wasicu
hangman's noose from around his neck, he might well have put the Lakota knife at his throat.

Day after long, cold day, Johnny brooded beneath the turned-down brim of his hat, squinting into the distance, his eyes constantly moving. Fear made a man a good hunter, he reminded himself. He might just have a chance if the warrior bands did not catch Old Wool Woman and him out in the open on their way to find the village, and if Johnny could get to the sanctuary of that sacred lodge …

If he didn't, well, to hell with the hangman's rope waiting for him back at the Standing Rock Reservation. The Lakota warriors would accomplish what those white law dogs wanted, anyway.

Johnny turned a moment, looking behind him at the old woman hunched in her blanket against the slashing wind which drove wispy streamers of icy snow along the ground. They had them a bargain, these two. He had promised her he would find the village and return Old Wool Woman to her people. And she had vowed to do everything she could to give him his chance to talk to the tribal leaders. To do that, she would have to get him into the village alive.

She looked up at him momentarily beneath the hooded flap of her thin, gray army blanket. The wind tormented the pony's mane as it struggled sideways against the brutal gale. Tugging on the rein, she kept the animal moving. She adjusted the heavy buffalo robe she clutched around the blanket at her shoulders. Then buried her head once more, hiding her face from the wind.

For but a flicker of time, as a gauzy strip of icy snow swept across the ground between them, Johnny thought she looked much like his own Lakota mother. It made his heart yearn. Knowing how hard her life had been on the Standing Rock with that drunken French-Canadian trader for a husband. But every time Johnny's heart ached for this old Shahiyela woman, he scolded himself for that softness.

It was something that just might get him killed by that woman's people. Wouldn't the Crazy Horse people consider him a traitor?

Of course they would.

He quartered in the saddle, trying to turn his right shoulder into the wind, tugging up the side of his collar. But there was really little he could do about the wind now that they had climbed out of the valley of the Tongue and crossed toward the Rosebud, following the village's westward migration toward the Chetish Mountains.
*
There the trail turned south by west, striking for the White Mountains, what the soldiers called the Bighorns. For generations the Lakota had been going to those slopes to cut lodgepoles at the end of every summer. But with the constant harassment and the destruction of their lodges through the previous autumn and winter, the warrior bands needed poles now. It made sense to him that they would strike out for those foothills. Even more sense when he considered how the camps must be on the verge of starvation.

A man had only to look at the prisoners. Those captives Miles had taken the day before his battle with the Crazy Horse village were all skinny, their eyes sunken, cheekbones sharp beneath the skin, as if chiseled out of red sandstone. This was a harsh winter to begin with. It had begun early and remained relentless. With the soldiers on their heels, the village couldn't have had much time to hunt, dry meat, cure hides—to provide for the little ones, and for the old.

In the past handful of days, Johnny himself hadn't seen much game to speak of. It was a good thing the soldiers brought along their army food, in packs lashed to the backs of those dozen mules.

Perhaps closer to the mountains, the village would find buffalo and the hunting would be good. That had to be where they were headed. West, right into the teeth of this wind coming off the slopes of those icy granite peaks.

Every day or so he came across signs of their passing: a patch of bottomground where it was plain to see they had camped, the hundreds leaving the frozen snow trampled, pocked with small, round, black scars marking every fire pit. Trees were left gnawed by the ponies, unable to find anything to eat when they pawed down through the trampled crust to the blackened cinders of the scorched earth the warrior bands left behind last autumn. Besides the bark of the cottonwood and the slender branches of the alder and chokecherry, there was nothing for the starving ponies to eat.

Johnny grew thirsty in the dry, wolfish wind, so he sucked on his tongue to stimulate some saliva. How this cold made him all the more thirsty than a hot summer day. The shocking cold sucked all the juices right out of a man. He tucked the loose, flyaway flap of the buffalo coat around his right chap and pressed it against the horse's ribs to clamp it down against the strengthening wind.