Trumpet on the Land (30 page)

It wouldn't be the last of William P. Hall's surprises.

Beneath the stars at three o'clock that Sunday morning the men were rousted from their blankets by sergeants growling commands up and down the rows of sleeping troopers. The men awoke to find breakfast waiting for them—although there would be nothing fancier than bacon and bread to wash down with their coffee. What they got was served in the chill predawn darkness with only a few minutes to spare for a man to relieve himself before he had to throw a saddle on the back of his weary horse and slip a bit into a set of reluctant jaws after the animals were fed their own good breakfast of oats from a nose bag, compliments of Hall's supply wagons.

By five o'clock the men were pressing their knees against horses' ribs, following Merritt upon his high-strutting gray, bidding farewell to the valley of the Niobrara, marching north. By midmorning they had crossed the rugged divide between the waters of the Niobrara and the Cheyenne, turning hard on to the east where an hour later, at 10:15
A.M.
, the head of the column once more hoved into sight of the palisaded walls of the Sage Creek stockade. Lieutenant Taylor of the Twenty-third Infantry and half his H Company came to stand at arms, welcoming back the cavalry. But the Fifth was to enjoy less than an hour out of the saddle while horses were watered and the troopers wolfed down rations from their haversacks.

About the time Hall rumbled in with his train, Carr was already preparing his men to move out. After every company replenished its ammunition supply from the freight wagons—each man ordered to carry every last cartridge he could in his thimble belt and belt kit, as well as filling every spare pocket—the troopers mounted up with three days' rations in their haversacks and marched away east by northeast as Merritt conferred with Hall. They decided to leave the lieutenant's large supply wagons behind at the stockade. After watering the thirsty stock only the
smaller company wagons rolled away from Sage Creek, emptied and stripped bare of everything. Within the gunwales of those bumpy, hard-ribbed wagons Merritt crammed two companies of infantry, belonging to the Twenty-third and the Ninth.

By noon Carr slowed the column's pace to four and a half miles per hour along that stretch of the Black Hills Road. Less chance of raising a telltale cloud of dust over the summer prairie that would betray the regiment's approach. At two-thirty the lieutenant colonel again called for a halt beside a dry creekbed. No watering the horses this time. From there they followed Cody and White due east, leaving the well-traveled road for the trackless prairie.

At five
P.M.
Merritt ordered a halt for watering their trail-weary stock, then pushed on into the lengthening shadows. More torturous miles across the treeless, rolling heave of undulating grassland. Far off to the south stood the tall, austere, striated Pine Ridge that sheltered the reservation from all but the most brutal of cold winter winds. Almost as far away to their left lay the dark, rumpled corduroy of the Black Hills.

Hours later at sundown King spotted a distant line of meandering green, far ahead on the pale prairieland. Cottonwood, willow, and alder, and another of those rare water courses that crisscrossed this arid country. Minutes later Cody and Buffalo Chips loped back to the head of the column, their long hair caught in the wind as they tore their hats from their heads and waved them for all to see.

“Trail's in sight!” Buffalo Bill shouted, bringing the big buckskin around in a tight circle; a cascade of dust sent in a rooster tail made a rosy gold in the sun's dying light.

Merritt stood in his stirrups, gazing into the distance like an old cavalryman. “Any hostiles in sight?”

“Not a goddamned one,” Buffalo Chips White replied.

Instantly nettled, Carr demanded, “We haven't missed them, have we? Are we too late?”

Cody wagged his head. “Trail's old. Nothing new's come this way.”

Carr and Merritt gazed at one another, their lips thin lines of determination, but their eyes twinkling with intense expectation, glittering with the satisfaction of an impossible task well-done.

Down to the timber the Fifth rode, the end clearly in sight. By nine o'clock and the coming of dark, the troopers had unsaddled and made camp close beneath the bluffs. Here the narrow creek swept around in nearly a complete circle, forming the high ridge that would protect the regiment's cooking fires the men buried deep in pits from discovery.

In thirty-one hours this group of weary animals and trail-hardened men had covered more than eighty-five miles.

“I couldn't be any prouder of you,” Merritt told his subordinates that night during officers' call.

“We're in their front,” Carr reminded the men. “The enemy will be here in the morning.”

“And we'll be ready for them,” Merritt vowed.

“General, sir?” King asked.

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“Do we know the name of this little creek?”

Merritt turned to his scouts with a gesture.

Cody stepped forward, loosening the colorful silk tie knotted around his neck. “It's a tributary of the South Cheyenne, Lieutenant.”

King pursued his answer, saying, “Do we have a name for it—for the record, I mean?”

With a nod Cody replied, “Only what the Indians call

it.”

“What is that, Mr. Cody?” he pressed. “What do the Indians call this creek?”

“Lieutenant King,” the famous scout answered in that hush surrounding them all, “it's called the Warbonnet.”

Chapter 18
13-17 July 1876

C
HEYENNE
, July 15—The following is from Crook's Camp Cloud Peak, July 12, via Fetterman tonight: Three soldiers from General Terry's command, at the mouth of the Big Horn, have just arrived. General Terry's dispatch to Crook confirms Custer's fate, and implies very plainly that had Custer waited one day longer Gibbon would have joined him. Terry is anxious for Crook to join forces, make plans and execute them, regardless of rank. The Indians are still hovering about the Little Big Horn, one day's march from here. They have fired into camp every night of late, and tried to burn us out by setting the grass on fire all around.

On the 6th, Lieutenant Sibley, of the Second cavalry, with twenty-five men and Frank Gruard and Babtiste Pouerier as scouts, went on a reconnaissance. They were discovered and surrounded and
followed into the timber of the Big Horn mountains, where, by hitching their horses to trees and abandoning them, the men were enabled to escape on foot by way of a ravine in the rear. They all got back alive, and probably this diversion saved the company from a grand attempt of stampede or capture.

The Snake Indians, two hundred strong, joined us here yesterday, but unless you come soon no offensive operations will be likely to take place until your arrival.

The Fifth cavalry, from Cheyenne Crossing, and a wagon train and additional infantry are due from Fetterman to-day. The health of the command is good. Gen. Gibbon's reserve forces were met by the victorious Sioux, dressed in Custer's men's clothes and mounted on their horses, firing into the soldiers. The Indian village passed gave evidence of white men's presence, kegs of whiskey, etc., being found. Signal fires supposed to be in reference to the incoming wagon train, are visible to the east of Crook's camp on the extreme south waters of Tongue river.

W
hen none of his civilian scouts would volunteer—no matter how much money was offered—those three hardy privates had stepped forward to carry General Terry's messages away from that camp along the Yellowstone on the morning of the ninth. With separate copies of the dispatches sewn into each man's clothing, the trio left the mouth of the Rosebud at sundown. It had taken them three nights of travel, lying in cover throughout each day, as they threaded their way through a wilderness overrun by the hostiles they knew had already devoured half of Custer's gallant Seventh.

From the Little Bighorn battlefield, the trio
simply
wandered south in the wake of the fleeing village. When the trail divided for the first time at Lodge Grass Creek, the
soldiers chose the left-hand trail, which led them over to the upper Rosebud where the Indian trail again divided. Many travois headed east, toward the Tongue. But a pony trail continued south, up the Rosebud toward the country in which, they'd been told, they might locate Crook's camp.

Although ragged and exhausted, Bell, Evans, and Stewart sat for hours before huge assemblies of Crook's troops relating horrific stories about the battle scene and the carnage Terry's men had discovered beside the Little Bighorn. There wasn't anyone more astonished that the trio had managed to poke their way through enemy country than George Crook himself. Off hunting eighteen miles from camp in the Bighorn Mountains that morning of the eleventh, he eagerly read Terry's letter in silence as soon as Mills brought it directly to him. Crook immediately called in his hunters and escort and hurried back to Goose Creek.

“Gentlemen,” the general addressed his subalterns after a bugler summoned them for officers' call, “I think we can all agree that there are too many in this army who have underrated the valor and the numbers of our enemy, along with their willingness to fight.”

“All we want is another crack at them, General,” Mills said.

Apparently he spoke for most of them, officers eagerly nodding their heads in agreement.

“But I want you all to listen to General Terry's letter— before we go galloping off into God only knows what,” Crook instructed.

Asked Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall, “Have you decided upon a course of action, General?”

“Only what it has been all along,” Crook replied, disappointing many of the most eager to get on with the campaign. “To await the arrival of the Fifth Cavalry before resuming the campaign.”

All that night there raged heated debates over what should be Crook's course of action, as well as many murmured complaints about the man more and more of them referred to sneeringly as “Rosebud George.” To many of the enlisted and some in the officer corps as well, it was beginning to appear irresponsible, if not downright criminal, to allow the enemy to withdraw from their front without doing a thing to find out when they'd left, and where they were headed.

Yet what was hardest to take was that after three defeats at the Powder, the Rosebud, and on the Little Bighorn in that many months, it appeared the army had lost its will to win the Sioux campaign, if not lost its nerve altogether.

The following day, a Thursday the thirteenth, Major Alexander Chambers returned from Fetterman, bringing a train of supply wagons stuffed to the sidewalk with food, ammunition, and news from home, escorted north to Camp Cloud Peak by seven companies of the Fourth Infantry. Official dispatches from Omaha told the general to expect a detachment of Ute coming up from Colorado Territory, hungry for a chance to get in some blows against their old enemies. Chambers personally handed over private letters to Crook from Sheridan, which informed him that Merritt's Fifth Cavalry was on its way back to Fort
Laramie, from there to Fetterman, with orders to hurry with all dispatch to reinforce Crook's impatient Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition.