The Veteran (28 page)

“Travois,” he said, “or she’ll die.”

There were several travels on the ground near the smouldering ashes of the teepees. Composed of two long, springy lodgepole pines, crossed over the back of a pony, with trailing ends spread wide and a stretched buffalo hide to carry the burden, the travois was a remarkably comfortable way of travelling, much easier on an injured person than the white man’s cart, which bucked savagely at every rut.

The scout rounded up one of the straying ponies. There were only two left; five had stampeded into the distance. The animal reared and shied as he took its tethering rein. It had already caught the odour of white men and this smell could drive a pinto pony half-wild. The reverse was also true: US cavalry horses could become almost unmanageable if they scented the body smell of Plains Indians.

The scout breathed gently into the animal’s nostrils until it calmed down and accepted him. Ten minutes later he had the travois in place and the injured girl wrapped in a blanket on the buffalo hide. The patrol set off back up the trail to find Custer and the main body of the Seventh Cavalry. It was the 24th of June, year of grace 1876.

The seeds of the campaign of that summer across the plains of southern Montana dated back several years. Gold had been discovered at last in the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota and the prospectors poured in. But the Black Hills had already been accorded to the Sioux nation in perpetuity. Angered by what they saw as treachery, the Plains Indians responded by raids on prospectors and wagon trains.

The whites reacted with rage to such violence; tales of hideous barbarity, often fictitious or hugely exaggerated, fuelled the anger to boiling point, and the white communities appealed to Washington. The government responded by casually revoking the Treaty of Laramie and confining the Plains Indians to a series of meagre reservations, a fraction of what they had been solemnly promised. The reservations were in North and South Dakota territories.

But Washington also conceded the creation of a block known as the Unceded Territories. These were the traditional hunting grounds of the Sioux, still teeming with buffalo and deer. The block had its eastern border down the vertical line created by the western perimeters of North and South Dakota. Its western border was an imaginary line north-south, 145 miles further west, a line the Indians had never seen and could not imagine.

To the north the Unceded block was bounded by the Yellowstone river, running through the land called Montana and into the Dakotas; to the south by the North Platte river in Wyoming. Here, at first, the Indians were allowed to hunt. But the westward march of the white man did not stop.

In 1875 the Sioux began to drift off the Dakota reservations and head west into the Unceded hunting grounds. Late that year the Bureau of Indian Affairs gave them a deadline: move back to the reservations by 1 January.

The Sioux and their allies did not contest the ultimatum; they simply ignored it. Most of them never even heard of it.

They continued to hunt, and as winter gave way to spring they sought their traditional staples, the munificent buffalo and the gentle deer and antelope. In early spring the Bureau handed the matter over to the army. Its task: to find them, round them up and escort them back to the Dakota reservations.

The army did not know two things: how many there really were off reservation, and where they were. On the first matter, the army was simply lied to. The reservations were run by Indian agents, all white and many of them crooks.

From Washington they received allotments of cattle, corn, flour, blankets and money to distribute among their charges. Many swindled the Indians grossly, leading to hunger among the women and children, and thus the decision to return to the hunting plains.

The agents also had another reason for lying. If they declared that one hundred per cent of those supposed to be on reservation were indeed there, they received one hundred per cent allowance. As the percentage of those Indians accounted for dropped, so did the allocations and thus the agents’ personal profits. In the spring of 1876 the agents told the army there were only a few handfuls of warriors missing. They lied. There were thousands and thousands of them missing, all gone west across the border to hunt the Unceded Lands.

As to where they were, there was only one way to find out. Troops would have to be sent into southern Montana to find them. So a plan was formulated. There would be three columns of mixed infantry and cavalry.

From Fort Lincoln in northern Dakota General Alfred Terry would march west along the course of the Yellowstone river, the northern border of the hunting grounds. From Fort Shaw in Montana General John Gibbon would march south to Fort Ellis, then veer east along the Yellowstone until he met up with Terry’s column coming the other way.

From Fort Fetterman, far to the south in Wyoming, General George Crook would march north, cross the headwaters of Crazy Woman Creek, cross the Tongue river and head up the valley of the Big Horn until he made rendezvous with the other two columns. Somewhere, between them, it was figured, one of them would find the main body of the Sioux. They all set off in March.

In early June Gibbon and Terry met up where the Tongue, flowing north, empties into the Yellowstone. They had not seen a single war bonnet. All they knew was that at least the Plains Indians were somewhere to the south of them. Gibbon and Terry agreed that Terry would march on westward and Gibbon, now united with him, would retrace his steps back to the west. This they did.

On 20 June the combined column reached the point where the Rosebud flows into the Yellowstone. Here it was decided that in case the Indians were up that particular watercourse, the Seventh Cavalry, which had accompanied Terry all the way from Fort Lincoln, should peel off and head up the Rosebud to the headwaters. Custer might find Indians, he might find General Crook.

No-one knew that on the 17th Crook had chanced into a very large concentration of mixed Sioux and Cheyenne and taken a beating. He had turned round, headed back south and was even then happily hunting game. He did not send any riders north to find and warn his colleagues, so they did not know there would be no relief coming up from the south. They were on their own.

It was on the fourth day of forced march up the valley of the Rosebud that one of the forward patrols returned with a tale of victory over a small village of Cheyenne, and one prisoner.

General George Armstrong Custer, riding proudly at the head of his column of cavalry, was in a hurry. He did not wish to halt the entire unit for one prisoner. He nodded in response to Sergeant Braddock’s appearance and ordered him to report to his own company commander. Information, if any, from the squaw could wait until they made camp that night.

The Cheyenne girl remained on the travois for the rest of that day. The scout took the pony to the rear and tethered its lead rein to one of the wagons of the baggage train. The pony pulling the travois trotted along behind the wagon. As no scouting was now needed, the scout remained nearby. In the short time he had been with the Seventh he had decided he did not like what he was doing, he did not like either the company commander to whom he was attached or the company sergeant; and he thought the famous General Custer a bombastic ass. He did not have the vocabulary to phrase it that way, and in any case he kept his thoughts to himself. His name was Ben Craig.

His father, John Knox Craig, had been an immigrant from Scotland, ousted from his small farm by a greedy laird. This hardy man had emigrated to the United States in the early 1840s. Somewhere in the east he had met and married a girl of Scottish Presbyterian stock like himself, and, finding few opportunities in the cities, had headed west to the frontier. By 1850 he had reached southern Montana and decided to try for his fortune by panning for gold in the wilderness around the foothills of the Pryor Range.

He was one of the first in those days. Life had been bleak and hard, with bitter winters in a timber shack by a stream at the edge of the forest. Only the summers had been idyllic, the forest teeming with game, trout brimming in the streams and the prairie a carpet of wild flowers. In 1852 Jennie Craig bore her first and only son. Two years later a small daughter died in infancy.

Ben Craig was ten, a child of the forest and the frontier, when both his parents were killed by a Crow war party. Two days later a mountain trapper called Donaldson had come across the boy, hungry and grieving amid the ashes of the burnt-out cabin.

Together they had buried John and Jennie Craig beneath two crosses by the water’s edge. Whether Craig Senior had ever put together a stash of gold dust would never be known, for if the Crow warriors had found it they would have scattered the yellow powder, thinking it to be sand.

Donaldson was older, a mountain man who trapped the wolf and beaver, bear and fox, and yearly took the pelts to the nearest trading post. Out of pity for the orphan, the old bachelor took him in and raised him as his own.

In his mother’s charge Ben had only had access to one book, the Bible, and she had read him long passages from it. Though he was no dab hand at reading and writing he had retained tracts from what she called the Good Book in his head. His father had taught him to pan for gold, but it was Donaldson who taught him the ways of the wild, the call of the birds by name, the tracking of an animal by its spoor and how to ride and shoot.

It was with the trapper that he met the Cheyenne, who also trapped, and with whom Donaldson traded his store goods from the trading post. It was they who taught him their ways and their language.

Two years before the summer campaign of 1876 the old man was claimed by the same wilderness in which he had lived. He missed his mark while shooting an old cinnamon bear and the crazed animal clawed and mauled him to death. Ben buried his adoptive father near the cabin in the forest, took what he needed and torched the rest.

Old Donaldson had always said, “When I’m gone, boy, take what you need. It will all be yours.” So he took the razor-sharp bowie knife and its sheath decorated in the Cheyenne manner, and the 1852 Sharps rifle; the two horses, saddles, blankets and some pemmican and hard tack for the ride. He needed no more. Then he came down from the mountains to the plain and rode north to Fort Ellis.

He was working there as hunter, trapper and horse-breaker in April 1876 when General Gibbon rode by. The general needed scouts who knew the land south of the Yellowstone.

The pay offered was good, so Ben Craig signed on.

He was present when they reached the mouth of the river Tongue and met up with General Terry; he rode back with the combined column until they found again the mouth of the Rosebud. Here the Seventh Cavalry under Custer was detailed to go south up the course of the creek, and the call went out for anyone who could speak Cheyenne.

Custer already had at least two Sioux-speaking scouts. One was a black soldier, the only one in the Seventh, Isaiah Dorman, who had lived with the Sioux. The other was the Chief Scout, Mitch Bouyer, a half blood, part French, part Sioux. But although the Cheyenne have always been regarded as first cousins and traditional allies of the Sioux, the languages are different. Craig put up his hand and was detailed by General Gibbon to join the Seventh.

Gibbon also offered Custer three extra companies of cavalry under Major Brisbin, but was turned down. Terry offered him Gatling machine guns, but he turned these down as well. When they set off up the Rosebud the Seventh was twelve companies of troops, six white scouts, over thirty Indian scouts, a wagon train, and three civilians, in all 675 men. These also included farriers, smiths and muleteers.

Custer had left his regimental band behind with Terry, so when he made his final charge it would not be to the sound of his favourite march, ‘Garryowen’. But as they moved down the river course, kettles, pots, cauldrons and ladles banging together from the sides of the chuck wagons, Craig wondered which band of Indians Custer hoped to catch by surprise. With the noise and the column of dust raised by three thousand hooves, he knew they could be seen and heard several miles off.

Craig had had two weeks between the Tongue and the Rosebud to look at the famed Seventh and its iconic commander, and the more he saw the more his heart sank. He hoped they would not meet a large body of Sioux and Cheyenne prepared to fight, but feared they might.

All day the column rode south, following the course of the Rosebud, but saw no more Indians. Yet several times, when the wind blew off the prairie to the west, the cavalry horses became skittish, even panicky, and Craig was sure they had smelt something on the breeze. The burning teepees could not have gone unnoticed for very long. A high-rising column of smoke over the prairie could be seen for miles. The element of surprise was gone.

Just after four in the afternoon General Custer called a halt and made camp. The sun began to drop towards the distant and invisible Rockies. Tents for the officers were quickly established. Custer and his intimates always used the ambulance tent, the biggest and most spacious. Folding camp chairs and tables were set up, the horses watered in the stream, food prepared, campfires lit.

The Cheyenne girl lay silent on the travois and stared at the darkening sky. She was prepared to die. Craig took a canteen of fresh water from the creek and offered her a drink. She stared at him with huge dark eyes.

“Drink,” he said in Cheyenne.

She made no move. He poured a small stream of the cool liquid onto her mouth. The lips parted. She swallowed. He left the pannikin beside her.

As dusk deepened a rider from B Company came down the camp looking for him.

When he was found the trooper rode back to report. Ten minutes later Captain Acton rode up. He was accompanied by Sergeant Braddock, a corporal and two troopers. They all dismounted and surrounded the travois.

All the frontier scouts attached to the Seventh, the six whites, the small group of Crows and the thirty or so Arikaras, known as the Rees, formed a group with a common interest. They all knew the frontier and the way of life.