Stamping Ground (3 page)

The Indian they called Ghost Shirt might have died a minor sub-chief of the Cheyenne nation had not George Custer's 7th Cavalry discovered gold in the Black Hills of southern Dakota in 1874.

The following year, frustrated by its consistent failure to reach a treaty with the resident Casts No Shadow and his Cheyenne followers, the federal government opened the hills to gold-seekers in an attempt to force the Indians out. Casts No Shadow, a provincial brave who had never ventured east of the Red River of the North, struck back by attacking and slaughtering the first wagon trainload of prospectors that rolled into his stamping ground. Then the army came, and after the chief's two sons were killed in a skirmish with the cavalry, he lost heart, surrendered himself, and was hanged six weeks later for his part in the massacre. His brother, Kills Bear, who had departed with half the tribe for Montana at the time of the surrender, threw in his lot with Sitting Bull at the Little Big Horn and, in the charged aftermath of Custer's slaughter, fled to Canada in '77 to
escape the vengeance of the new administration in Washington City.

With him was Ghost Shirt, a young nephew filled with an all-consuming hatred for the white man nurtured throughout the three years he had spent in the East learning the ways of the enemy. During the trek north he grew restless and peeled forty braves off the main shaft for his own foray into the Black Hills. The immediate result was the Dry Hole Massacre.

Dry Hole was a tent city erected near the gold strikes fifteen miles from Deadwood, where some seventy miners had settled with their families while they eked out a bare living chipping away at an anemic vein above a tributary of the Belle Fourche River. Ghost Shirt and his warriors came upon the settlement one morning soon after the men had left to work their claims. Without warning the Indians swept down on the women and children who remained behind. The few miners who heard the commotion in time to go back and do something about it ran straight into an ambush. By the time the others returned in force, they found their tents and wagons in flames and the camp a litter of corpses. The Indians had salvaged everything of value and fled.

That was the first. Others were to follow. Names like Teamstrike and Crooked Creek and Blind Man's Hollow conjured up images of smoldering bodies and babies dashed against trees and women in the final stages of pregnancy writhing at the ends of lances skewering them to the ground. The newspapers back East were crammed with wild-eyed descriptions of how the renegades ate the hearts and livers of their victims and wore leggings made of human flesh. These last were fabrications, but the troopers sent out to investigate the disturbances knew that the reality was far worse.

The near eradication of a large cavalry patrol from Fort Abraham Lincoln by the diminutive band of braves at Elk Creek in December of '77 opened the floodgates. With Sitting Bull and Kills Bear in Canada, Ghost Shirt became the
Red Man's Great Hope. From all over the Northwest they flocked to his standard—Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, and even a disgruntled few of the despised Crow, all united for the first time in living memory. Rumor had it that the battle-wise Cheyenne who had accompanied the old chief into exile were trickling south to join the “loinclothed Messiah,” as General of the Army Sherman referred to him bitterly during an unguarded moment at a press conference. The War Department made hurried preparations for a stepped-up Indian war. New forts were planned, while existing ones as far away from the seat of trouble as Fort Buford near the border of northern Montana were reinforced to capacity, and a massive recruitment campaign was launched throughout the eastern states in an effort to bring the peacetime army up to its Civil War strength. Within two months of Ghost Shirt's return, all of Dakota had become an armed camp.

On New Year's Day, 1878, four hundred troopers under the command of General Baldur Scott descended on a Cheyenne camp south of Castle Rock and slaughtered everything that moved. When the carnage was over, it developed that Ghost Shirt was not present and that most of those killed were old men, women, and children. Never one to let slip an opportunity, Scott ordered everything burned so that the warriors would have nothing to come back to and then took off in pursuit.

Ghost Shirt now was on the run for the second time in his young life. At the head of his band of homeless braves, he struck out across the Badlands toward Canada, but was forced to turn east when two cavalry regiments from Fort Yates opened fire on them at Thunder Creek, and crossed the Missouri River below Mobridge. A forced march followed, with pursuers and pursued covering a hundred miles in two days. The Indians were nearly overtaken at Napoleon and again at Jamestown, only to escape with bullets singing about their ears. Outnumbered two to one, they made a stand, aptly enough, at the Sheyenne River and were all but annihilated at the cost of one hundred and
twenty-six troopers. Ghost Shirt was wounded in the leg and taken prisoner along with three warriors. The rest fell in battle. The survivors were incarcerated at Fort Ransom and tried within the week for the Black Hills massacres. The verdict was guilty. At the age of twenty-two, the nephew of the last chief of the Cheyenne nation was sentenced to hang.

He and his trio of condemned followers were kept in the guardhouse under close watch while work progressed on a special gallows designed to accommodate four men at once. Shortly after the changing of the guard on a starless night in March, an argument broke out among the prisoners, blows were exchanged, and Ghost Shirt collapsed. The guards thrust bayoneted rifles between the bars and held the others at bay while the door was unlocked and a delegation entered to examine the stricken man. Suddenly a strangled cry rang out. A sergeant who had been stooping over Ghost Shirt reeled back, clawing at a bloody shard of wood protruding from the socket where his right eye had been. In the confusion that followed, one of the Indians snatched the rifle out of the hands of a guard and placed the bayonet point against a paralyzed trooper's throat. Then Ghost Shirt, who had sprung to his feet after attacking the sergeant, relieved the private of his side arm and got the drop on the remaining trooper in the guardhouse. It was all over within seconds.

With one of their comrades in his death agonies and two more in the hands of the prisoners, the troopers outside the cell were forced to stand and watch while Ghost Shirt and his companions prodded their hostages before them through the opening and backed across the compound into the shadows along the east wall with them in tow. Not until they were out of sight did the soldiers act. They ran for the wall, raising the alarm as they went, and snapped off shots at gray figures spotted scaling the ladder to the battlements. One brave, Standing Calf, fell at the foot of the ladder when a bullet crashed through his brain. Another, identified later as Ghost Shirt's cousin Bad Antelope, was struck twice in
the back as he teetered atop the wall, and toppled into the Sheyenne River on the other side. A third, a Crow called Silent Dog because his tongue had been cut out when as a youth he had been captured by the Iroquois, was taken prisoner before he could reach the ladder but was killed later under mysterious circumstances which the army was still investigating. Ghost Shirt was nowhere in sight.

The bodies of the two troopers who had been taken hostage were found lying in pools of blood at the bottom of the ladder, their throats slashed by the captured bayonet.

The next day, a search party discovered Bad Antelope's corpse bobbing against a rock at a bend in the river a mile south of the fort. When a week of searching failed to turn up either Ghost Shirt or his tracks, it was decided that he had perished while trying to swim the rapid waters of the Sheyenne at spring thaw, and that his body was already halfway to Minnesota, if it hadn't snaggled on a fallen limb in some uninhabited part of the territory. The search was called off after ten days, and Washington began processing new orders for the now unnecessary reinforcement troops in Dakota.

Then, two weeks after the escape, a Swedish farmer was found murdered in his cabin two miles east of Fort Ransom. A neighbor who called on him from time to time became alarmed when the immigrant, an aged widower, failed to answer his knock, and entered through the unlocked front door. The house was a shambles. Someone had gone through the cupboards, scattered their contents over the floor, overturned flour barrels, dumped out the woodbox, torn out drawers, and pawed through the linens and clothing inside. Amid this confusion lay the elderly Swede, naked except for a nightshirt, the latter stained where he had been disemboweled with some sharp instrument the moment he stepped out of his bedroom.

Further investigation revealed that there was not a scrap of food left in the house. Missing also was the dead man's only weapon, a pre-Civil War Colt pistol which he was known to have kept next to his bed. That he had been
carrying it when he went out to investigate the strange noises in the other room seemed a reasonable assumption. His buggy horse was gone as well. The hasp on the barn door had been forced with great difficulty and the animal removed by a man wearing moccasins—as shown by the tracks left in the soft earth inside. The considerable effort that had gone into breaking the hasp was borne out by the shattered half of a bayonet blade found in the grass beside the door.

The discovery sparked panic among settlers throughout the territory. The commanding officer at Fort Ransom issued a hasty statement to the press declaring the evidence inconclusive, but as no other explanation was forthcoming his words went unheeded. Washington was bombarded with telegrams demanding protection from the Antichrist in the settlers' midst. Congress, still involved with its investigation into the more interesting legacies of the Grant Administration, sent a terse directive to the General of the Army: Either deal with Ghost Shirt once and for all or learn to get along without allocations from next year's budget. Sherman's immediate reaction to this ultimatum went unrecorded, as this time no reporters were present. Nevertheless the laborious process of reassigning men who were already enroute to their new posts was begun.

The turnaround was too slow. In mid-April, while the troop strength at Fort Ransom was still at low ebb, Ghost Shirt, accompanied by twenty renegades believed to have been recruited from among the disgruntled Sioux south of the Red River Valley, raided the post armory and made off with a wagonload of rifles and ammunition, enough to equip a force five times as large. They struck while the troopers were busy fighting a fire the braves had set at the north wall, and, in a bloodless battle—the first such since the trouble had begun—shot their way out through the gate, wagon, horses, and all. The weapons stolen were part of a new shipment of unissued .56-caliber Spencer repeating rifles, which made the outlaw braves among the best-armed Indians in the West. The average cavalryman was still
carrying the single-shot Springfield that had helped lose the Civil War for the Confederates. A pursuit patrol dispatched within minutes of the raid came upon the wagon half a mile west of the fort, its bed a jumble of empty crates. After that the fates appeared to be on Ghost Shirt's side, as at that moment one of those sudden downpours for which the region surrounding the Red River of the North was notorious opened up and washed out all traces of the Indians' escape route.

Nothing more was heard of the renegades or their activities after that. Repeated forays by the U.S. Cavalry between the Black Hills and the Minnesota border failed to turn up the slightest hint as to their whereabouts. This time, however, no one was optimistic enough to advance any theories regarding the death of Ghost Shirt. It was believed that he was busy raising a brand new army with which he would launch a series of massacres that would make those in the hills pale by comparison. If the current land boom was any indication, Easterners were confident of the Indians' imminent capture or destruction, but as far as those already in residence were concerned, the entire territory was a powder charge primed and ready to blow as soon as Ghost Shirt lit the fuse.

I was aware of all this, but as it gave me time to study the angles, I let Judge Flood prattle on until his thunderous voice grew raspy at the edges. Then I broke in.

“What's Fargo got to do with it?”

The fat judge cleared his throat, a sound that reminded me of coal sliding down a chute. “A people who call themselves the métis keep a small camp a couple of miles south of there,” he said. “They're part Algonquin, part French, and they know more about the territory than any other friendly Indians you're likely to find. You'll want to engage one or two of them as guides. Also, Fort Ransom is only three days' ride to the southwest. The commanding officer, Colonel Broderick, is an acquaintance of mine. I'll give you a letter of introduction and he'll fill you in on the latest details. Any other questions?”

“Several hundred. To begin with, what am I supposed to do that the army can't?”

“The reason that bunch has been so hard to find up until now is that the cavalry can't move without being heard for miles. Too many men, too much equipment. But one man or a small band, provided they know what they're doing, can penetrate that region unobserved. Since half the problem is locating them, you'll have a head start.”

“What do I do once I've located them? Surround them?”

“You won't be alone. I'm sending Marshal Hudspeth with you.”

“Dandy. That makes the odds only ten to one.”

“That's why time is of the essence. Army intelligence has reported a general exodus from Sioux and Cheyenne reservations throughout Montana and Dakota over the last few weeks. It's no mystery why they're leaving. Your job will be to capture Ghost Shirt and bring him here for hanging before they can join up with him. Otherwise there'll be hell to pay.”

“I thought he was scheduled to hang at Fort Ransom.”

“He was.” All this time Flood had been polishing his spectacles. Now he stopped and held them up to the light. Apparently satisfied with their sparkle, he placed them in a hinged leather case, snapped it shut, and slid it into his breast pocket along with the handkerchief, neatly folded. “I've rescheduled it for Bismarck because I feel it's imperative that the citizens of Dakota witness the execution. The present situation hasn't affected the land rush so far, but if Ghost Shirt is captured and hanged in some remote place like Fort Ransom there's going to be talk that he wasn't apprehended at all, that the army's covering up, and accusations like that have a habit of sticking. Right now our sole advantage is that Bismarck is the end of the line. By this time next year that will no longer be true. The Northern Pacific plans to resume operations next spring. Let one suspicious rumor get started and the settlers will keep going as far as the rails will take them. The only way to
prevent such a situation is to make this a civil matter and invite the public to the hanging.”