Trumpet on the Land (54 page)

Still, there were rare moments of relief, if not moments of small joy. In addition to clearing weather, the general had approved of hunting details to be allowed to work the forward flanks of the column as it continued its march, to bring in deer and antelope and even curious jackrabbits that haunted the countryside—a change of diet the surgeons begged for as they saw a swelling number of
patients at sick call every morning. Not just the usual aches and pains, the blisters and the twisted ankles. Now it seemed the cold had begun its sinister ravaging of the command through more and more cases of rheumatism, various neuralgic complaints, and the more serious malarial fevers, not to mention the explosion in cases of scurvy and a debilitating diarrhea, which the whole command suffered, caused by the poor, mineral-laden water.

Even Charles King hadn't been immune to bouts with despair as he hung his cold rump over the damp sagebrush and cursed these streams laced with the foulest salts imaginable. But upon reaching the clear, cold water of the Beaver, all but about fifty cases of diarrhea disappeared during their wait for the return of Grouard's scouts.

Then on the last night of August the playful, capricious weather turned downright cruel. Shifting itself out of the north, the wind gusted through their bivouac as the soldiers tried to hunker down in the coulees and gulches beneath what poor shelter they could find, even if it was their sole blanket, every single blanket beaten to a sodden mess by the wailing storm. Few men slept that night, and everyone moved about stiffly on the first day of September as sergeants passed among the outfits issuing a verbal reveille in the cold coming of dawn.

All the command had left them in their haversacks and saddlebags that morning was four days' rations.

Late in the afternoon, while going into camp along the Beaver, one of Chambers's infantrymen was pulling up sagebrush to make himself a field mattress when he cried out and leaped back, shaking one of his hands as if he were beating a snare drum to a marching tune. Dangling at the end of his thumb clung a young rattlesnake.

A throng of soldiers immediately descended on the hapless victim, some wrestling him down into the sage, others yanking at the snake that had its jaws savagely locked around the end of the man's thumb. With his folding knife one soldier slashed the body from its head and flung it
writhing to the ground, then went on to use the blade to pry open the clamped jaws.

Screaming in pain through it all, swearing he was sure to die, the victim was carried between four of his companions across the sage, making for the surgeons' camp. Among the limbs of the fire Julius H. Patzki had just kindled to heat himself some coffee, the doctor laid the blade to his own belt knife, deciding to use the superheated metal to cauterize the puncture wounds. As others held up the unconscious victim, Patzki administered ammonia to rouse the soldier, then held a stiff draught of whiskey beneath his nose. The soldier drank, then drank a second dose of that universal medication for snakebite.

“Whiskey,” King groaned at his mess fire that evening. “What I wouldn't give to have the whiskey that man got for his bite.”

Eugene Carr snorted, pounding the young lieutenant on the back. “Just as long as you could have your whiskey without having the snakebite to earn it, eh?”

“General,” King said, suddenly going serious in that gathering of officers around Carr, “if only you would take the Fifth and go on our own march, we would find and whip the Indians.”

“Hear! Hear!” cheered many of the others.

The lieutenant colonel wagged his head dolefully. “To the heart of the truth you've gone, Lieutenant. I'm afraid it's going to be as hard for Crook to find the enemy as it is for Mr. King here to find his whiskey!”

Two days later Grouard brought in four Indian ponies, telling Crook they must have been abandoned by the fleeing camp the general could now be certain knew of the column's presence.

“The closer we come on their backtrail,” the scout advised during officers' meeting that evening of 3 September, “we can figure on finding lodgepoles and all kinds of abandoned truck. Like them ponies they left behind.”

“And,” the Irishman named Donegan added, “when we get close enough—we'll know all of that for certain.”

“Would you care to explain, Mr. Donegan?” asked George Crook.

“We'll know because we can figure on having ourselves a little fight with their rear guard as they hurry the women and children off.”

Crook grinned, stroking at half of that braided beard of his, his eyes twinkling as he looked about that assembly of officers. “Indeed, nothing would please me more, gentlemen—than to get close enough to have a little scrap of it.”

Chapter 34
3-7 September 1876

S
T.
P
AUL
,
August 18—Captain Collins, of the Seventeenth infantry, arrived at Bismarck from Fort Buford last night. He fails to confirm the squaw reports of a recent battle between the Indians and Terry's force. Scouts from Terry's column, two days out, arrived at Buford on Monday evening. A courier who arrived at the supply depot at the mouth of the Rosebud on the 11th inst., report that Terry's command met the head of General Crook's command early on the 10th.

Crook's men were following a large Indian trail in the direction of the Powder river. On a short consultation of Generals Terry and Crook, the commands were united and proceeded on the trail Crook was following. The Fifth Infantry was detached from Terry's column and ordered back to the stockade … In the meantime Terry will come down upon them with the combined commands,
and force a battle. It is not positively known whether the Indians are on Tongue river or Powder river.

T
rue to his word, Crook swung the column directly to the east on the third of September after spending the night in bivouac directly opposite Sentinel Buttes.

Some of the Ree had come in at dusk the night before to report finding a sizable trail heading south from the Yellowstone, which showed the hostiles angling off to the east, all the more proof to convince Crook that his quarry wasn't running north for Canada. But what was most important was the trackers' news that the big trail was splitting again. This time the freshest sign in the country showed that the enemy was heading east.

On that very trail Grouard kept the column marching throughout the third, a Sunday. Later that morning the soldiers passed two burning coal ledges, in all probability ignited by the recent lightning storms. Officers kept their commands moving along quickly through those rugged uplands as Crook grew anxious to reach the Little Missouri, where he was certain the hostiles were heading. Late in the afternoon the general ordered a halt along the clear and narrow Andrews Creek.

Near dusk a handful of the Ree scouts who had been perusing the next day's trail halted two miles from the column to have their supper. They had no sooner started to eat when a dozen horsemen appeared on a nearby ridge and hailed them—asking if they were Sioux. The Ree answered with their army-issue rifles, driving off the war party.

Later that evening, long after moonset, the pickets on the east side of camp fired at a handful of warriors spying on the soldiers, but there was no general alarm. The Sioux had not attempted to run off the hobbled and sidelined stock. Instead of rolling out at the first shots, most of the men stayed huddled beneath their wool coats and thin
blankets on the cold ground right on through the rest of that miserable night.

In the morning they awoke to find a thick layer of frost covering those blankets, the sage, and the ground.

At two o'clock on that afternoon of the fourth the column entered a region where the hills continued to rise higher on either side of them until the men eventually emerged from a long and tortuous canyon to reach the Little Missouri, a sullen and muddy river like its larger namesake, near the point Terry and Custer had encamped in May on their way west to the Yellowstone. The grain Terry's soldiers spilled while feeding their horses had already taken volunteer root in the damp soil and, nourished by the constant rains, the cornstalks had grown some ten to twelve feet high, each with four or five ears still in the milk. Since Crook already had the men on half rations, the crop was quickly harvested, the off-yellow ears distributed among the men as far as it would stretch, adding a brief taste of something different to their dwindling food supply.

On that riverbank the infantry once again stripped off everything below their belts, lashing it up in their blankets, which they carried over their shoulders, and marched by units across the ford Grouard's scouts had located for a crossing. On the far side Chambers's shivering foot soldiers needed no urging to fall out and scamper back into their warm clothing.

Once everyone was across and into the timber on the east side, Crook called a halt, allowing the men a chance to pick some of the profusion of bright-red buffalo berries, ripening plums, and crimson-tinged wild cherries that grew up and down both sides of the river. Even the fruit of the ever-present cactus was tried, requiring a man to burn off the spines before peeling back the thick skin so that he could roast the inner pulp. Compared to the berries and half-ripe plums, the men found the cactus fruit tasted like a slimy glue. In the midst of all that eating and celebration,
simple joys for a soldier, it began to rain again just before the column resumed its march.

Later that afternoon Donegan heard sporadic gunfire coming from the south of east. It lasted for less than ten minutes. A half hour later the Ree rode in to inform Crook they had themselves a long-range duel with a Sioux war party, claiming they had wounded one warrior and unhorsed another by killing his pony before the enemy scattered.

“The next time I come with Crook,” John Finerty complained that evening in camp as he held his cracked brogans near the flames dancing in a chill north wind, “I'll know better to bring along more soap and a couple extra pair of stockings. The general would do well to allow the same for his men.”

That night the wind brought on its back another spate of sleet to pelt Crook's encampment. The men sat beneath what brush they could find along the banks of the Little Missouri, huddled out of the storm doing its best to rip their blankets from them. Despite the discovery of the corn and the wild fruit earlier in the afternoon, gloom once more descended over the command. They found themselves with less than two days' rations in the middle of a virtual desert. No one, not even the officers, knew for certain just where they were heading, because Crook kept to his own counsel.

On the following frosty, drizzly morning of the fifth, to the maddening confusion and utter bewilderment of his men, Crook had the scouts take them east from the Little Missouri along Terry's road, away from the Indian trail that pointed south. Out of the canyon they climbed along Davis Creek to reach the divide that led them toward the headwaters of the Heart River, where, after passing between Rosebud Butte and the Camel's Hump, they went into bivouac for the night.

It was dusk when Baptiste Pourier and some of Major Thaddeus Stanton's Ree came in from a day of riding along
the column's right flank with a report that they had bumped into a southbound war party and had had themselves a short running fight of it. When Big Bat's horse had given out during their retreat, he'd dismounted and prepared to sell his life dearly. Discovering that Pourier was not among their retreat, Baptiste Garnier had wheeled around with a white scout, “Buckskin Jack” Russell, and both had galloped back to make a stand with Pourier. In a brief but hot skirmish Big Bat spilled one of the Sioux, whose body was plucked from the prairie by his companions before they all disappeared into the thickening fog as the sun fell.