Trumpet on the Land (67 page)

“Her mother,” Pourier whispered to Mills and Donegan.

The captain wagged his head. “Why … why the women?”

Crook had his men drag the battered bodies from the coulee, where they lay for close to an hour while soldiers looked over the enemy dead. It struck Donegan as a pagan ritual, this satisfying the curiosity of the soldiers who had lost their own comrades in battle. While most only stared at the bodies before moving on, some chose to spit on the corpses.

Yet no soldier defiled the dead like Ute John, also known among the column as “Captain Jack.”

Chattering in his garbled pidgin English, the civilian member of Stanton's Montana Volunteers made quite a show of it for a crowd of curious soldiers as he knelt over each of the squaws and scalped them with elaborate ceremony, demonstrating to the white men just how it was done.

“Injun style,” he explained, his mouth half-filled with rotted teeth.

Having joined the troops in May when a band of miners had affixed themselves to Crook's column, John was in reality only half-Northern or Weber Ute, the other half
Shoshone. Called Nicaagat by his own people on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming Territory, he had acquired a desperate thirst for the white man's whiskey. That thirst took him to Salt Lake City for a six-month sojourn, during which time he claimed he'd been Christianized by Brigham Young's Mormons.

“Ute John's a Klischun,” he proudly reminded the onlookers, perhaps to convince them that what he was doing to the dead was not so barbaric an act as it might appear. “A Mo'mon Klischun.”

A loving Mormon family had given him shelter and taught him the rudiments of the English language. He had been “heap washed” of his sins, as many as three times in one year, and got a “heap b'iled shirt” of his very own to wear when he attended Sunday meetings to hear Prophet Brigham preach for hours on end.

While most of the soldiers turned away from the grisly spectacle, a few clamored to have a try at the scalping themselves. Donegan grumbled and started to turn aside, disgusted that none of the officers attempted to stop this savage depravity of tearing the hair from women's skulls.

“What's the matter with you, Irishman?” one of the old files asked Donegan. “You seen a lot worse before, I'd care to wager.”

“I have,” Seamus replied bitterly.

“So where the hell you get off being so goddamned righteous about it?” the veteran snarled. “Them prisoners the general took sure as hell getting treated good, ain't they? Just think how things'd be for a bunch of us white men if we was took prisoner by a village of these sonsabitches. What fun they'd have killing us off real slow! So you just think about that, Irishman—before you go off being so goddamned high and mighty and looking down your nose at the likes of us gonna take a little revenge for what we seen done to our friends in the last ten years.”

Looking over that sullen group of angry soldiers who had turned to glare at him, Donegan finally said, “When I rode for the Army of the Potomac, and served Sheridan's
Army of the Shenandoah—I never once killed a woman or
a
child. And I'll be damned if I've got to stand here and watch a coward take his revenge on women.”

“Just shut your mouth and go 'way,” Ute John grumbled, wagging his knife where he knelt on the ground to slice apart one of the women's scalps so that each of the sympathetic soldiers could have a small lock.

“You best go, Irishman,” the old veteran suggested caustically. “Since you can't seem to remember that these Injun bitches fight just as hard as the bucks.”

“Goddamned right,” one of the other soldiers chimed in.

The veteran continued sourly. “I seen enough of my friends cut down by red bitches—it don't make me no never mind to kill all the squaws I can.”

Another soldier cried out, “Just means there's fewer wombs for these red devils to make papooses!”

Seamus straightened, the words smacking him like grapeshot. Back there at Laramie, his woman carried his child in her womb.

Looking squarely in the old Apache-fighter's eye, he quietly said, “An old file like you what seen so much killing during the war, so much killing since—never took you to be a man what fancied butchering children and babes.”

For a moment the veteran stood there in utter silence, haughtily glaring back at the Irishman. Then Donegan thought he saw an almost imperceptible quake shoot through the man, a quiver crossing his big shoulders that visibly shook the two small and faded chevrons sewn on his muddy sleeves. When he finally spoke, his mighty jaw trembled, but his gaze was steady.

“I had me a family once. So don't you ever again say O'Reilly's not a man to protect the little ones what can't protect themselves.”

The old soldier turned on his heel and crossed the five yards to where Ute John was holding court, shoving his way into the midst of those reveling soldiers, and picked up the body of the dead infant off the soggy ground, all to the
stunned silence of everyone, even Seamus Donegan. Like a great white oak sheltering a tiny seedling, the veteran cradled the dead infant within his arms as he elbowed his way from the angry, cursing mob and strode past Donegan, his eyes brimming with tears.

“Cawpril,” Seamus said quietly just as the man passed him.

The soldier stopped. His shoulders heaving once, he finally turned round as Donegan walked up and touched the man's arm. “This morning when we was going through the lodges, I remember seeing a small piece of blanket what might work nicely.”

With a nod the soldier followed Seamus to a lodge where they found not only a blanket to wrap around the infant's bloody body, but a basket large enough to serve as a coffin. Only then did the two take the child across the hillside to that small fire where the prisoners sat within a ring of guards. The old soldier laid the basket at the feet of the young women. No one moved. Not American Horse, not Charging Bear, not any of the women. They only stared at the two white men, perhaps unable to comprehend this surprising act of kindness in the midst of the cruelty, barbarity, the utter savagery of both sides of this great Sioux War.

It wasn't long afterward that Seamus and the corporal went to sit on a grassy hillside above the ravine, there to talk about wives and children and all that the loss of family could destroy in a man—when the attack the captives had promised came to pass.

Chapter 42
9 September 1876

J
ust past four o'clock surgeons Bennett Clements and Valentine McGillycuddy ordered a quartet of troopers to lock down the limbs of a heavily sedated Lieutenant Adolphus Von Leuttwitz. Because the bullet was still lodged in the bone, this grisly, open-air amputation could be put off no longer.

It amazed those who watched just how much fight was still left in the officer, rambling with fever and groggy by virtue of heavy doses of morphine administered throughout the afternoon, as the huge, serrated knife began to bite into that torn flesh above the wounded right knee. Completely around the limb Clements drew his knife in a long circular motion, the blade sinking through the thick muscles, where it scraped along the femur. Then at just the moment the knife was withdrawn from that deep incision, McGillycuddy was already pushing his handsaw's blade through the bloody gash, working feverishly to hack through that largest bone in the human body.

Unlike those Civil War surgeons who after a short time became so proficient in amputations that they could remove an arm in eight seconds, a leg in no more than eleven, these two had approached their surgery as a last
resort—praying that by sacrificing the limb, they could save their patient's life.

In moments Clements yelled for the infantry bayonet he had buried in the coals of a nearby fire. With it the surgeon cauterized the severed stump as a steward dragged away the useless limb and wrapped it in a small piece of greasy blanket taken from one of the captured lodges about to undergo destruction. As the lieutenant thrashed and fought, both surgeons sealed off the bleeding vessels and daubed the great open wound with iodine, wrapping it in clean surgical dressings before moving on to perform the same task on Private Edward Kennedy, who had been wounded in both legs during the siege at the ravine.

About the same time, just minutes past four
P.M.
, Sergeant Von Moll's men from A Troop were turning the damp sod with Lieutenant Bubb's spades, carving out two graves west of the ravine for scout White and Private Wenzel—when the sudden war cries and the gunfire reverberated from the bluffs to signal the attack.

“Injuns firing into the herds on the front of the Third Cavalry!” came the alarm.

That moment found many of the cavalrymen who had been put afoot during the march taking part in the auction Mills's men were holding just north of the Third Cavalry camp at the northwest corner of the village. One by one they were selling off the ponies Crook had awarded them for attacking the enemy village. It had become a rowdy and raucous affair, with a lot of good-natured disputes as to the value of various animals from the other regiments, as well as arguments concerning just how the troopers from the Fifth and Second could be trusted to pay their debt when the expedition finally reached their duty stations.

But all that was forgotten when the Sioux rode down on Rabbit Lip Creek to continue the Battle of Slim Buttes.

“This has to be them three hundred lodges of Oglalla the prisoners told us about!” Baptiste Pourier huffed as he rushed up, joining Donegan.

They dashed past Captain William H. Powell and his
G Company, Fourth Infantry, under Crook's orders to begin the burning of the lodges, and of everything else not already salvaged for food or souvenirs. In the midst of the growing battle, towers of oily black smoke began to rise into the leaden, heavy air.

“This bunch won't have no problem turning back a few warriors,” Seamus replied in the noisy clamor of dogs barking, men shouting orders, the keening of women prisoners mingled with the cries of their children.

All around them men scampered up from their blankets where they had been napping, or snatched up their weapons as they leaped to their feet beside cookfires where they had been feasting on the spoils of the captured village. At long last Chambers's infantry and the rest of Merritt's cavalry would get a crack at the enemy. For the moment all hunger and fatigue were forgotten. This was, after all, exactly what they had marched and starved and frozen for.

“Them prisoners said there was other camps nearby too,” Bat added. “Not just the camps of Crazy Horse, He Dog, and Kicking Bear.”

Above them mirrors flashed in the hills that surrounded the natural amphitheater. To the south some among the milling horsemen signaled their answer. In a matter of minutes the entire southern perimeter seemed to crawl with hostiles as the warriors swarmed over the rolling hillside, intent on retaking the village in one fell swoop. Just beyond the soldier lines atop a trio of low ridges that stood southwest of the camp, many warriors dismounted and began a long-range duel with soldiers of the Ninth and Fourth infantries.

Crook's first orders to his battalion commanders was to protect their stock. For days they had abandoned or shot their horses, forced to go afoot. There wasn't a cavalryman on the battle lines now who wanted to give up what ponies they had just captured, much less lose any more of their own horses and mules to the screaming horsemen pressing in from nearly all points of the compass.

“Sound to arms, Bradley!” Lieutenant Colonel Eugene
Carr bellowed to his chief trumpeter. “I won't let the red bastards have a one of my animals!”

But just as some of Carr's troopers reached what was left of their herd, a half-dozen Sioux horsemen on fresh, well-fed ponies rushed through their midst, stampeding more than half of the big, bone-lean, and leg-weary American horses. Reacting quickly, Corporal J. S. Clanton of Captain Montgomery's B Troop snagged a halter and flung himself bareback aboard one of the grays, kicking furiously to catch up to the lead horse as a half-dozen other men followed in the corporal's wake to lend a hand.