Trumpet on the Land (3 page)

—Cyrus Townsend Brady
Indian Fights and Fighters

Slim Buttes was touted as a victory for the army, but it was a shabby victory at best and accomplished nothing beyond angering the Indians. The dawn attack had felled women and children, and when the tribesmen crept back into the village after the military withdrawal, they confronted heartrending scenes. Many of the groups in the vicinity of Slim Buttes, including the one struck by Mills, had intended to surrender at an agency. The sight of women and children maimed or slain by army bullets dampened that impulse.

—Robert M. Utley
The Lance and the Shield

Sitting Bull had warned his people not to take any spoils from the Little Big Horn battle[field], or the soldiers would crush them. The Slim Buttes battle was part of the prophecy which came true.

—Fred H. Werner
The Slim Buttes Battle

Foreword

A
t the beginning of some chapters and some scenes, you will read the same news stories devoured by the officers' wives and the civilians employed at the posts or those in adjacent frontier settlements—just what Samantha Donegan herself would have read—taken from the front page of the daily newspapers that arrived as much as a week late (and sometimes more), that delay due to the wilderness distances to be traveled by freight carriers.

These newspaper stories are copied verbatim from the headlines and graphic accounts of the day. Remember as you read, that this was the only news available for those people who had a most personal stake in the army's last great campaign—those people who had tearfully watched a loved one march off to war that summer of the Sioux in 1876.

What happened to George Armstrong Custer and five companies of his Seventh U.S. Cavalry on the afternoon of June 25—only eight days after George C. Crook was stalemated on Rosebud Creek—was to shock, stun, and ultimately outrage an entire nation. News of that disaster would all but eclipse every other event that summer, even the most wondrous advancements in science and industry at that moment on display at Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition.

By starting the chapters and scenes with an article taken right out of the day's headlines, I hope that you will be struck with the immediacy of each day's front page as you finish reading its news—just as Samantha Donegan would have been from the relative safety of Fort Laramie. But, unlike her, you will then find yourself thrust back into the action of an army on the march, an army intent on fulfilling General Philip Sheridan's prophecy that the hostiles of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse who had destroyed Custer on the Greasy Grass would soon hear a trumpet on the land.

Prologue
20 June 1876

“I
hear water's better when you mix it with whiskey.”

Upon hearing the quiet interruption of that familiar voice, the Irishman raised his head from the cool grass that flourished along the bank of Little Goose Creek to watch Frank Grouard slide out of his saddle.

“I wouldn't know,” Seamus Donegan replied, propped up on one elbow as he kicked his bare feet in the cold water. He had his canvas britches snugged in loose rolls all the way up to his knees to soak in the refreshing current. “You see, I never water down my whiskey.”

The half-breed with skin the hue of coffee-tanned leather tied off his army mount, then came over to settle in the shade of a huge cottonwood beside Donegan. “Much as you bellyache about missing your whiskey this trip out, you sure as hell done a lot of soaking in water.”

Seamus grinned, then nodded in agreement as he said, “This tends to take a man's mind off his real thirst.”

“The sort a man gets when he has a whiskey hunger, eh?”

“Or the kind of hunger what hits a man when he's gone without a woman for too long.” Donegan immediately felt bad for the thoughtless words that fell from his
tongue. “I'm sorry, Frank. Didn't mean nothing by it. Forgot, is all.”

Grouard waved it off with a lukewarm grin and a shrug of his shoulder. “Don't make nothing of it, Irishman. Women been nothing but trouble for me. Whiskey too. Now, a fella like you, he can handle both, I'd wager: all he wants of both. But a man like me gets all buried in a woman, and that makes for trouble with that woman's brother—so that's when I go and get all fall-down and underfoot with some cheap Red River trader's whiskey….”

He heard the head scout's voice fade away while watching the wistful look come over the half-breed's dusky, molasses-colored face. “I figure we ought to talk about what brung you to look me up—”

“It don't matter no more, Seamus,” Grouard interrupted. “Something I can talk about now. Hurt for a while. Not so much no more.”

“Damn, but you've had your share of dark days. First the trouble with Sitting Bull's Hunkpapas over them whiskey traders. Then you go and get yourself all but scalped and skewered over a woman with Crazy Horse's band.”

“Didn't mean for things to turn out so bad with He Dog, that woman's brother, bad with the rest of them Hunkpatila that way.”

As much as Crook's chief of scouts might protest otherwise, Seamus could still read the torment of that lost love carved into the lines around Grouard's eyes. Just the way it had to be cut into his very soul. “Never knew a man who lost a woman could honestly claim he was meaning for things to turn out that way, Frank.”

Grouard pulled free a long brilliant-green stem from the grass at his side, placed it between his lips, and sucked absently, gazing at the gurgling flow of Little Goose Creek at their feet. Moment by moment the midsummer sun continued its relentless climb toward midsky, easing back the cool, inviting shadows beneath the overhanging cotton
woods like a woman at her morning chores sweeping against a thickening line of dust across her hardwood floor.

“Crook's changed his mind, Irishman,” Grouard finally said, sliding the green grass blade from his lips.

“For sure this time?”

He nodded. “When he called off us going on our scout last night like he'd wanted original', I just figured the general wanted time to set his mind on something. But this morning he told me he didn't want to take the chance of losing me, losing any of us right now.”

“Don't blame him, do you? What with all but a handful of them Shoshone up and pulling out for home this morning? Why, just two days back even the Crow saw the elephant and left us on the trail so they could hurry back to their villages and have their scalp dances. So now, by God, with the Snakes gone too, the old man's been left stranded.” He wagged his head dolefully. “Ain't no wonder that Crook's afraid the enemy could be all around us, now that he ain't got his Injun scouts to be his eyes and ears. But there's no way to know for sure what's out there, all around us now, if we don't go out and scout.”

“Them war camps still ain't strong enough to jump us here,” Frank replied sourly.

“Maybe they won't jump us, but they sure been making a bunch of trouble for us while we sit and wait. Crook's gotta know that by now.”

“General knows.”

“So he wants us just to sit on our saddle galls?”

Grouard grinned. “Why the hell you complaining, white man? Looks like you're getting in all the feet soaking you want, Seamus.”

“Think about it. While Crook's army sits, what you suppose the Injun camps are doing?”

Grouard's eyes narrowed thoughtfully on the distance, as if he were attempting to measure somehow the sheer heft to all that danger out there. As if he might actually try to divine the enemy's intent across that great gulf in time and space.

“They're hunting.”

“Hunting meat?” Seamus replied. “Or hunting soldiers?”

“Both. While they'll hunt for hides and meat to put up for the winter—they damn sure gonna keep an eye on us here. Send scouts down to watch Crook's camp all the time so they'll know if we go to marching north again.”

“That has to be a big camp, Grouard. I can't figure 'em staying together for much longer.”

“Me neither,” Frank agreed, sweeping the grass aside with his fingers so that he could scoop up a palmful of dirt. “That many lodges, that many people, thousands and thousands of ponies—they'll need to break up.” With a flick of his wrist he sprayed the dust out from his hand in a wide arc.

Donegan said, “But Crook's got it set firm in his mind he's gonna have to tangle with the whole bunch again.”

“He does figure on that—so he don't fed much like moving till he's got more men and bullets.”

Donegan rocked off his elbow and eased his head back onto the grass. The sun felt as good as a man could ever want it to feel—every bit as good as he had dreamed the summer sun could feel on his skin while he struggled vainly to stay warm shuddering atop a cold saddle last winter on Reynolds's long march north to the fight on Powder River.
^*

Here in the heart of summer, Seamus sighed with contentment and said, “If Crook's waiting for men and bullets—then this army of his ain't gonna be marching anytime soon.”

“Don't mean you and me won't be working.”

At that moment he wanted to crack one of his eyes into a slit so he could weigh the look on the half-breed's face, to see if Grouard was trying to skin him or not. But Seamus fought the sudden impulse down like it were a real thing, not wanting to move at all from this warm, sundrenched
creekbank. “Little while back you said Crook's changed his mind.”

“He has.”

“But?”

Grouard answered, “But it don't mean Crook can't go and change his mind again.”

Thinking back on all the generals he had known since 1862, Seamus had to agree. “Seems like that sort of thing just naturally comes with those stars, don't it, Frank? Like it's their duty to up and change your mind. Mither of God! But that's the sole province of a general: this right to change one's mind.”

“Crook's the general hereabouts.”