How Few Remain (16 page)

He briefed Casper Crowninshield on the patrols he wanted set out while he was away. The regiment’s second-in-command looked horrified when he outlined what he would be doing, but said very little. Either Custer would come back trailing clouds of glory, or he wouldn’t come back at all. No matter which, carping wouldn’t matter.

Custer, his brother, a dozen picked cavalry troopers, and the two Gatling guns and their crews rode out of Fort Dodge before the sun was up. As the fort shrank behind him, Custer laughed for joy. “No need to worry about that blasted international border, not any more,” he said.

“That’s right,” his brother said exuberantly. “Only thing we need to worry about is running into a Rebel patrol coming to kick us in the slats before we can get down into Indian Territory.”

Custer and one of the troopers rode out ahead as scouts to make sure that didn’t happen. Without false modesty, Custer was sure he could outride any of his companions except perhaps his brother. When they thought he couldn’t hear, the men of the regiment called him Hard Ass. It didn’t anger him; it made him proud. He glanced back over his shoulder at the Gatling guns.
They were slowing the party, but not by much. Sergeant Buckley had had a good notion of what he was talking about.

On over the Kansas prairie he rode. Here and there, farmhouses poked up from the flat terrain. Some were dugouts, with only chimneys and stovepipes above ground. Some were of sod blocks, some of wood, some—the most prosperous—of brick. Sod or wood or brick, all had something of a fortress look to them—squat and low, with small windows. In country vulnerable to Indian raids, that was safe and smart.

They camped on the prairie that night, boiling coffee, frying salt pork, and then frying soaked hardtack biscuits sprinkled with brown sugar in the grease from the meat. An occasional firefly winked to light, then out. Off in the distance, an owl hooted. Custer rolled himself in his blanket, stared up at the stars sprinkled like powdered sugar across the sky, and fell asleep almost at once.

It was still dark when he woke, but twilight was turning the eastern horizon gray. He shook his brother. “Wake up, lazybones!” Tom groaned and thrashed. Custer laughed. He’d scored himself a point.

They passed into Indian Territory—into Confederate territory—a little before noon. Custer let Sergeant Buckley and the Gatling guns catch up to him. “You pick your spot,” he said. “You best know the requirements and capabilities of your weapons.” The artillery sergeant nodded. Custer hoped the Gatlings
were
capable.

Toward evening, Buckley chose a gently rising little hillock with a commanding view in all directions. The party camped there for the night. When morning came, the Gatling crews stayed behind. Custer, his brother, and the cavalry troopers went out looking for streams, and for the Kiowas’ villages they were likely to—were hoping to—find along such waterways.

They found cattle first. The Indians herded cattle these days, instead of hunting the nearly vanished buffalo. “At them!” Custer shouted. At them they went, whooping and waving their hats and shooting their carbines in the air. The cattle bellowed in terror and stampeded. Custer whooped again, in sheer small-boy delight at having made an enormous confused mess.

A bullet made dirt spurt up, not too far from him. It hadn’t come from any of his own men, but from one of the Kiowas who’d been tending the herd. Custer fired back, and missed—good shooting from horseback was next to impossible. He waved
his men forward against the Indian herders. The outnumbered Kiowas fled. Their ponies, tails bound up in bright cloth, bounded over the prairie.

Custer knew they were leading him and his cavalrymen toward more of their comrades. He followed as eagerly as the Indians could have wanted. If he didn’t stir up the hornets’ nest, he wasn’t doing his job.

His brother pointed off to the northwest. There, down by the bed of a creek, stood the big village to which the herders belonged. Tom Custer rode straight for it, hard as he could go. The rest of the cavalrymen, George Custer among them, pounded after him. “Stay away from the horses!” Custer shouted. “We don’t want to stampede the horses.” If they stampeded the horses, the Kiowas wouldn’t be able to come after them. That was the idea. Custer hoped it was a good idea. One way or the other, the Gatlings would answer that.

Tom Custer rode right down what did duty for the village’s main street, past dogs and children and squaws who all ran like the devil to get out of the way. Again, Custer followed his brother, past hide teepees painted with bears and bear tracks, past screaming women, past an old man who fired a pistol at him and missed from a range where he shouldn’t have missed a mouse, let alone a man.

Out the other side of the village galloped the cavalrymen. Custer knew they’d just done a very Indian sort of thing: a wild dash that couldn’t help but singe the Kiowas’ pride. Behind him, warriors were rushing to their ponies. He fired a couple of rounds at them so they wouldn’t get the idea they were doing exactly what he wanted.

He waved his little troop back to the east, toward the hill on which the Gatlings waited. If he couldn’t retrace his way across the plain, he and his men were dead. Somewhere between fifty and a hundred Kiowas were on their trail. The Indians had fresher horses and, thanks to the Confederates, rifles as good as his own.

“This is the one part of the business I don’t fancy,” Tom Custer said: “I don’t like running, even for pretend.”

In the chase, one of the cavalrymen slid out of the saddle. Another trooper’s horse went down, which meant the soldier was a dead man shortly thereafter. The cavalrymen, firing over their shoulders, hit two or three Indians and two or three horses.

After a couple of hours of hard riding one of the troopers
pointed northeast. “There, sir!” Sure enough, there atop the little hill waited the two Gatling guns and their crews. Custer spurred toward them. The Kiowas came on after his men, shouting in high excitement. They saw the soldiers on the low hillock, too, but they also saw they still greatly outnumbered their foes.

The artillerymen at the Gatlings waved the troopers on. “At the crest of the hill, dismount as if for a last stand,” Custer called to his riders. Maybe it would
be
a last stand. The Kiowas were close behind. Up the hill thundered the horses. Custer did his best to stay out of the Gatlings’ line of fire, in case they opened up too soon. He reined his blowing, lathered mount to a halt and sprang down. A bullet snapped past him. He shouted to the gunners: “It’s your show now, boys!”

Sergeant Buckley and the crew chief of the other Gatling, Sergeant Neufeld, swung the guns so they bore on the Kiowas. Then they began working the cranks at the rear of the weapons. The barrels revolved. As each one fired, it went around till another cartridge from the brass drum magazine atop the Gatling gun was chambered and discharged.

The noise was astonishing, like an enormous sheet of sailcloth being torn in two. The smoke from the black-powder rounds built a fogbank around the top of the hill. As a magazine went dry, the gun crews took it off and replaced it with a full one. When a barrel jammed, that gun went silent for a moment to clear a cartridge or clean away the worst of the fouling. But, for the most part, Buckley and Neufeld cranked and cranked and cranked.

Custer peered through the drifted smoke. The Kiowas might have run headlong into a stone fence. They’d been in easy range before the Gatlings opened up, and they hadn’t had a prayer. More than half their band, more than half the horses, lay still and dead in front of the two guns. The rest were riding off as fast as they could go. They were brave, but they hadn’t been ready for what they’d just come up against. “God bless my soul,” Custer said softly.

Sergeant Neufeld was also looking out through the smoke, but to the east. “Sir,” he called to Custer, “more riders. They look like Rebs, not Indians.”

“Let ’em come, Sergeant.” Custer’s voice was gay. From no confidence in the Gatlings, he’d swung to the other extreme. “Plenty for everyone, isn’t there?”

And the Confederates came. In their shoes, Custer would have
done likewise. They had a company’s worth of men. A couple of dozen Yankees on a no-account hilltop? Get rid of ’em and start the war in style. If the Rebels noticed the dead Kiowas, they paid them no heed.

They should have. As they came galloping toward Custer’s little detachment, the Gatlings began their deadly ripping noise again. Troopers and horses went down as if scythed. Custer and his companions added the fire of their carbines to the mechanical murder the Gatling guns dealt out. Like the Kiowas, the Confederates, meeting weapons they hadn’t imagined, broke and ran.

Custer walked over to Neufeld and slapped him on the back. Then he did the same with Buckley. “This may not be sporting,” he said, “but it’s no humbug.”

IV

Alfred von Schlieffen rode toward the Long Bridge, the most important bridge from Washington, D.C., down into Confederate Virginia. He had no trouble making his way south from the German ministry: many, though far from all, of Washington’s civilians had fled north when war broke out, and so traffic was less oppressive than it would have been before the crisis.

Boys still hawked newspapers on the street. From their frantic shouts, some U.S. officer named Custard—Schlieffen didn’t think that could be right, but it was what he kept hearing—had single-handedly massacred a division of Confederates and a whole tribe of Indians somewhere out beyond the Mississippi. In a leap of logic that escaped the German military attaché, the war was as a result supposed to be as good as won.

As yet, the war had not made an appearance around Washington. The Confederate States could have pounded the capital of the United States to bits, but had not fired a shot hereabouts. Neither had local U.S. forces; despite big talk, President Blaine was proving more circumspect when it came to action.

But the Confederates had let it be known they were sending an officer across the Long Bridge under flag of truce at noon today. Schlieffen noticed he was not the only military attaché heading toward the bridge. He nodded to Major Ferdinand Foch, his French opposite number. The Frenchman coolly returned the courtesy; like Schlieffen, he had fought in the Franco-Prussian War. Schlieffen wondered how long Foch would be welcome here.

The British military attaché was not in evidence, but before long his assistant, a captain still on the eager side of thirty, rode up alongside Major Foch and began trying to converse with him in French. Unfortunately, the Englishman knew less of the language
than he thought. The pauses in the conversation grew longer and longer.

“Get out of our country, you damned redcoat!” somebody shouted at the assistant military attaché, who was indeed decked out in his dress reds. He tipped his hat to the heckler. Schlieffen nodded slightly, admiring his panache if not his skill with languages.

Almost but not quite in a group—Schlieffen hung back—the three foreign officers rode south through the Agricultural Grounds west of the Smithsonian Institute, then west along Maryland Avenue toward the Long Bridge. Now Schlieffen could see the positions of the Confederate guns trained on the capital of the United States. He had also seen, in amongst the trees, U.S. guns ready to reply. More U.S. guns were positioned on the high ground north and west of the city, and elsewhere around it. If the Confederates tried to seize Washington, those guns could make it an expensive business.

At the U.S. end of the Long Bridge waited Captain Saul Berryman—General Rosecrans’ adjutant—a few soldiers, and Hannibal Hamlin, the U.S. secretary of state. In his black suit, the jacket unbuttoned in the humid heat to expose a large expanse of white shirtfront, Hamlin resembled nothing so much as a roly-poly old penguin.

Captain Berryman nodded to Schlieffen as he dismounted. He did his best to pretend the British and French military representatives, servants of unfriendly powers, did not exist. They took up positions where they could see and remain inconspicuous.

Church bells on both sides of the Potomac began announcing noon. As they did so, a Confederate officer on a black horse rode north over the Long Bridge carrying a small white flag. As he drew near, Schlieffen saw by the red trim on his uniform that he was an artilleryman. “I am Colonel William Elliott,” he announced, “and I bear a proposal from President Longstreet and General Jackson seeking to avoid the needless effusion of blood.”