Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 (11 page)

Letters to family back in the States. Long, rambling, promising letters to sweethearts … pretty faces that stared out at a young, frightened man in blue from a little tintype he guarded in his hand as he scribbled some last words to that special someone back in Ohio or Michigan, New York or South Carolina. A tintype he would eventually slip inside his blouse and wear against his skin over the next few days as they stalked the mighty Lakota bands.

It would never change, no matter what war a man found himself marching off to. There was always someone he could write and tell of the secret fears he didn’t dare share with his fellow soldiers. Private words of longing and loneliness scratched across endless pages of foolscap that last night at the Yellowstone beneath a flickering of oil lamps and torches and firelight.

Small clusters of officers huddled in those late hours to pen their wills, then have those solemn testaments witnessed by friends. Grim instructions given, agreed to, and sworn over for the dispersal of personal effects to family members back east should the unthinkable happen in the coming days as they followed Custer up the Rosebud in search of Sioux. What to be done with the few trinkets each man had accumulated during his time in the army—whether he carried his possessions on his back or in his pockets, or they simply lay waiting back at Fort Abraham Lincoln at the bottom of a near-empty trunk.

On the eve of battle every man wanted to know he would have something that could go back to his family to show that he had indeed been of some worth during his short time on this earth … each man wanting to pass
something on to show for his brief service in the army of the west.

Like some cold fingers slipping around a tin cup at Coleman’s tent on that north bank of the Yellowstone, the mood in camp slowly changed as more and more of those men of the Seventh left the whiskey and returned to a somber camp to scratch at their letters, write their wills, swear death pacts with bunkies to see that an old watch made it back to Cape Girardeau, Missouri … or a special wedding band made it back to a little cabin near Cold Springs, Arkansas … or that neck chain he wore was delivered to a widowed mother somewhere down a holler outside Cross Plains, Tennessee.

As the clock crept into the wee hours, fewer men stood drinking at the trader’s kegs. This late only the old, fire-hardened veterans still drank, staring up the Rosebud, wondering what awaited them as they rode in Custer’s wake come morning.

Custer scratched a metal nib across sheets of foolscap at his field desk, while striker Burkman polished bridle and crupper, saddle, holsters, and belt, with a nervous energy. With a peculiar flair for understatement, the general was penning his last, long letter to Libbie, though he promised her he would dash off a few lines in the morning before departure.

For the longest time after he had laid his pen aside and stepped to the tent flaps, Custer stared out at the cloudy, starless night, soaking in that somber mood cloaking the camp. It was no stranger to him, this blackness. Veteran of all but one of those battles of the Army of the Potomac.
Veteran of campaigns along the Platte River Road and successful strikes into the heart of Indian Territory itself. Campaigns along the Yellowstone and an exploration of the Black Hills—that most sacred place of the northern plains tribes.

He sighed deeply and turned back to his desk, where he took pen in hand.

“There!” he whispered to himself. He had admitted it to himself and to Libbie at last.

If by a twist of fate he found himself cast as one of the hostile chiefs he would be hunting down come morning, Custer admitted he would have to elect to go on living the free, unfettered nomadic life of old rather than suffer the stifling stagnation of the squalid reservations. To live as wild and free warriors always had, or to die a warrior.

His pen fell silent above the page as he grew pensive again. Listening to the wolf howl … seeing her dark eyes conjured up before him on the tent wall once more. He clenched his eyes, trying to block out the vision. Still they haunted him. Dark black-cherry eyes gleaming out at him from the back of that wagon as it rumbled out of Fort Hays, heading south and out of his life.

Less than fifty yards downstream stood Mark Kellogg’s tent where the late-night oil burned just as brightly as Custer’s lamps.

Although both Sherman and Sheridan had warned him against taking any reporters along, Custer found it impossible to refuse that fervent request from the former telegraph operator working for the summer in a Bismarck law office and writing an occasional article printed in the Bismarck paper, even the New York
Herald
, under his pen name, Frontier.

After all, Custer had reasoned, the
Herald
was owned by his good and politically powerful friend, James Gordon Bennett, Jr. Without much time given over to wrestling with the problem, Custer had decided to allow Kellogg to accompany the campaign. Besides, why shouldn’t Bennett’s paper get the scoop on everyone else when he defeated the Sioux and became the darling of the Democractic convention about to meet in St. Louis?

Kellogg was a likable fellow, sharing much in common with Custer anyway. He favored a get-tough policy with the “noncompliers,” those Indians refusing to come in to their reservations. Custer was sure Kellogg would write a favorable account of the coming battle, since there had been so much concern after the Washita debacle and how aspects of that winter’s campaign had been manhandled in the press. After all, Kellogg had stated publicly, “I say turn the dogs
of war loose and drive the savages off the face of the earth, if they do not behave themselves.”

A widower with two girls, who smoked Bull Durham, and enjoyed a rare game of chess, the reporter had once preached a temperance lecture at the graveside interment of a drunk who died of consumption. Since he shared Custer’s teetotaling habits when it came to whiskey and other spirits, Kellogg was not among those who bolstered trader Coleman’s profits that cloudy night of 21 June.

Instead, Mark Kellogg spent the evening rattling off dispatches to be sent back east in the morning in addition to letters to his daughters. The remainder of his time he spent in getting rations and supplies squared away and stuffed securely in his canvas saddlebags, along with an adequate supply of lined paper and pencils he would require up the Rosebud with Custer.

At forty Kellogg was nonetheless youthful in appearance, with but a few small crows’-feet worrying his eyes in addition to the steel-rimmed glasses, and some flecks of gray in his hair that betrayed his age.

Mark brooded needlessly past midnight, concerned that he would have enough bacon and sugar and coffee for the fifteen days, as well as enough paper. More important than food was paper. Kellogg wanted to write the war story to end all war stories. And by riding with an Indian fighter of Custer’s caliber and reputation, Kellogg was certain he would see action worth description. Never before had he written anything worthy of much notice, since most of his prose plodded along in a pedestrian manner.

This time, however, Mark Kellogg was certain the drama of the coming chase and the thrill of battle with Custer’s cornered quarry would inspire him to lofty prose.

This small, unassuming widower would ride an army mule south along the Rosebud behind Custer, certain this was to be his moment in the spotlight. No longer would he merely report the actions of others. At long last Mark Kellogg, reporter and campaign correspondent for no less than the New York
Herald
, would participate in the
making
of history—a destiny he had waited forty long years to enjoy.

That old mule picketed outside his tent just might carry him farther than the Rosebud and any Sioux camp Custer would assure they would run across.

Well past midnight John Burkman left Custer at his field desk, perched on his cot, finished with his letter to Libbie, and now working on his journal. Always the journal.

The striker headed next door to his small A-tent, with a stop to relieve his bladder swollen from all the coffee he had shared with his commander.

As he watered the ground, Burkman gazed at the lights glittering on board the
Far West
moored against the far shore and remembered that some of the officers from Terry’s command had rowed across to join Gibbon’s men for a late-night game of monte. For a moment he sensed those soldiers were the lucky ones, not having to suffer this unexplained dread for the coming of day, not having to worry over the noose of despair that his own private premonitions tightened around his heavy heart.

Burkman stuffed himself back in his britches and wiped his hand off on army wool before he nudged the buttons back through their holes. Here in the chill wee hours, all he heard was the sound of Custer’s two horses munching dried grass at their picket pins.

That, and the steady beat of the Crow and Ree drums. Burkman was sure it was the distant beat of those drums that helped him fall asleep that last night at the Yellowstone.

The distant beat of Indian drums.

Colonel:

The brigadier general commanding directs that as soon as your regiment can be made ready for the march, you proceed up the Rosebud in pursuit of the Indians whose trail was discovered by Major Reno, a few days since. It is, of course, impossible to give you any definite instructions in regard to this movement; and were it not impossible to do so, the department commander places too much confidence in your zeal, energy, and ability to wish to impose upon you precise orders, which might hamper your action when nearly in contact with the enemy. He will, however, indicate to you his own views of what your action should be, and he desires that you should conform to them unless you
shall see sufficient reason for departing from them. He thinks that you should proceed up the Rosebud until you ascertain definitely the direction in which the trail above spoken of leads. Should it be found (as it appears to be almost certain that it will be found) to turn toward the Little Horn, he thinks that you should still proceed southward, perhaps as far as the headwaters of the Tongue, and then turn toward the Little Horn, feeling constantly, however, to your left, so as to preclude the possibility of the escape of the Indians to the south or southeast by passing around your left flank.