Trumpet on the Land (72 page)

But when Crook asked him to guide a second relief column under Captain Anson Mills, Grouard agreed. This time the general's order was not only more specific, it was explicit.

“You have one mission and one mission only,” Crook explained. “To return from the Black Hills settlements with provisions.”

It would mean no less than saving the Uves of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition.

“And if you can,” the general added, “find out what threat the hostiles have presented to Deadwood and the other mining communities.”

This time the general was hurrying forward a special detail that would not be big enough to strike the enemy. Instead Mills's force—comprising the best of his very own M Company, Third Cavalry, as well as fifty handpicked troopers from Carr's Fifth Cavalry—was half the size of that detail he had led away from Crook's column on the seventh. And again the general chose Lieutenant John W. Bubb as commissary officer charged with the purchase of the needed supplies. Along with Second Lieutenant George F. Chase acting as subaltern, Mills would be joined by reporters Reuben Davenport and Robert Strahorn. Frank Grouard, bearing Crook's report for General Sheridan, would accompany the detail at least as far as the Black Hills on the first leg of his journey to Fort Laramie. Upon reaching the mining settlements, Jack Crawford, who was the one scout most familiar with the Black Hills and was carrying reporters' dispatches, and Seamus Donegan would both serve as guides to bring the wagons back to the general's desperate men.

None of Tom Moore's mules were taken south when those seventy-five men pulled out just before dawn that Monday morning, the eleventh of September. Instead of the broken-down army horses, each man rode one of the captive Sioux ponies.

After so many days of rain without letup, no one much noticed that the sun did not put in an appearance that morning as the men and ponies snorted frostily in their climb up the slopes of the terraced buttes. Again the clouds hovered close, fog shrouded the land for as
far as a man could see with field glasses, and it began to rain.

Seamus pulled the big collar on his canvas mackinaw up around his neck and prayed the little grass-fed Indian pony beneath him had the bottom to carry him all the way to Deadwood.

Chapter 45
11 September 1876

C
HEYENNE
, September 11—General Crook has been heard from under date of the 2nd. He has followed- the trail to the Little Missouri without finding any Indians. The trail was found to split in several directions. Crook thinks the southern band may have moved backward toward the mountains, and he is somewhat apprehensive for his wagon train. It is expected that he will move in that direction.

W
hen Baptiste Pourier led Crook and the rest of the column away from that miserable bivouac on the morning of the eleventh, John Finerty climbed stiffly into the saddle and shivered almost uncontrollably, not knowing if he could ever again count on being warm and dry.

In the early light of dawn Lieutenant Von Leuttwitz had awakened from a feverish nightmare that convinced him his leg had been exhumed from its grave by the hostiles, who desecrated it. Crook dispatched Captain Julius
Mason with a small battalion of Carr's Fifth Cavalry to take their backtrail to the destroyed village.

As the rest of the command began to climb south by west up the muddy slopes, the cavalrymen mounted on their horses began fo press at the rear of the infantry, where a good-natured banter began to fly back and forth between the men.

Upon passing some of the foot soldiers, a trooper turned and leaned down from his saddle, asking one of the infantrymen, “Casey, old man! How are your corns this fine morning? Tell me, now—is it fine walking? Wouldn't you rather be riding a fine horse like this one?”

With a snort of derision the old soldier answered in his peatiest brogue, “To hell wid your harse, I say! And g'won wid you too, you weak-brained idjit! Why, we're gonna walk your harse off his four legs and then we'll eat him!”

Above them that dawn the very heights of the chalk-colored buttes blocking their path remained shrouded in a thick fog that rained a cold and constant drizzle down on the men and animals. Up, up they climbed, most of the cavalry forced to dismount and drag their horses behind them, inching back and forth to switchback their way upward into the numbing mist, strung out in a long single column snaking its way into the clouds across the face of the pine-dotted escarpment.

Finally at midmorning they stood on the southern edge of the jagged cliffs and looked down upon the great endless prairie as barren as the surface of the moon. Finerty could see nothing on the foggy horizon that would inspire hope. Nothing like the dark and jagged outline of the Black Hills. Down, down Big Bat led them, Crook's men dropping once more into the muddy wilderness. Their only choice was to push on, or lie down and die right there.

By noon the drizzle had ballooned into sheets of rain as the head of the column reached a formation called Clay Ridge. Again there was no way to detour east or west. As they climbed into the badlands and skirted what they could
of the narrow ravines and coulees cut by centuries of erosion, the horses and mules slipped and stumbled crossing the naked, muddy slopes with men on their backs. And when the soldiers climbed down from the saddles, they found their boots sinking in the sticky gumbo that refused to release them, tiring out the weary men as they continued to plod forward lugging up more than a pound of prairie with every step—climbing and descending, climbing and descending all the more, marching ever southward, following what had to be an old Indian trail, if nothing more than a game trail.

Just when Finerty felt his lungs could take no more, just when he was certain the burning muscles in his legs would not last another step, those foot soldiers marching in the vanguard of the cavalry reached a sheer ledge. By the time the newsman got to the ledge, he looked out and feared for the worst—unable to see a thing. Peering into the mists and dancing sheets of rain that obscured the prairie below them, it appeared the whole world had been swallowed up by the sky. Then John caught a glimpse of the faint blue column a hundred yards below and to the left. The infantry at the head of the column was descending slowly, disappearing into the maw of a gray cloud bank.

All around them on those bluffs rose rocky spires that resembled the sharp pinnacles on houses of worship as they scraped the underbellies of the gray clouds that continued to rain down on them, a geographical formation that prompted Finerty to propose they should rechristen the place Church Spire Range. But such sacred thoughts did not last, pushed aside by the temporal, earthly necessity of putting one foot in front of the other.

Throughout that day more of the army's mounts gave out, pushed just about as far as they could go without forage. While some of the horses and mules were abandoned, most were shot. At one difficult ravine Finerty watched a trooper ahead of him pull and drag his horse as far as it would go. It shuddered at last and sank to its knees, head lolling to the side as it rolled, its ribby sides heaving.
The grim-faced soldier removed the saddle, then knelt beside his mount, yanking up the mule ear on his holster as he patted the horse's foam-flecked muzzle. After a few moments he finally worked up the courage to fire a single bullet into his old companion's brain.

Rising from the mud, the trooper gathered kindling and struck a fire before returning to his horse, this time to kneel beside the rear flank, where he cut out a tender steak he then began to roast over the yellow flames in that cold and dreary mist. In the space of a half hour the soldier got to his feet once more, shouldering his carbine to march on, joining the other stragglers at the rear of the column.

It wasn't long before Crook ordered a short halt, telling Tom Moore to lighten the loads on his pack-mules by burying hundreds of pounds of heavy ammunition. After that they struggled on in desperation across that rugged ground, the wounded in their litters and travois suffering more than any others. All through the day Von Leuttwitz had grumbled in pain, begging his stewards to stop, again pleading with those men from Captain Williams H. Andrews's I Troop of the Third Cavalry for a pistol he could use to shoot himself. And at every crossing of a tiny stream, at every jolting descent over a narrow ravine, the lieutenant cursed the mules, cursed the nearby troops, cursed the skies and all of creation in two languages.

At midafternoon Baptiste Pourier crossed a fresh and sizable trail of lodgepoles and unshod pony hooves pointing south for the agencies.

“They might be some of them what come back to help American Horse's people by attacking us,” Bat declared. “Looks like we're moving them and other camps in for the winter. You wanna follow, General?”

Crook wagged his head, as weary and worn down as any one of his soldiers. “No. We're going where I can feed these men, where I can recruit more horses—and only then can I continue this campaign.”

As the day wore on, the watchfulness of the rear guard and the flankers on both sides of the column waned, and
these weary, starving men lost all fear of attack. It was nothing more than an ordeal, a crucible of survival.

Major Alexander Chambers's infantry continued to set the pace, and it wasn't long before they were again outdoing the cavalry that struggled to keep up with their failing mounts. Farther and farther behind, the stragglers strung out in the rear. More and more often one would hear the pop of pistols as the troopers put their horses out of their misery. Then in the midst of all the grumbling and the complaints, Finerty heard a bit of rousing belly laughter erupt among the last of the foot soldiers slogging just ahead of him. He lumbered up to find out what could be so amusing.

“Oh, and for sure,” replied one of the Irish among those infantrymen to Finerty's inquiry, “we were just laughing at a new joke making its way back along the column.”

John sighed. “Good. I'd be willing to hear anything that could give me a smile right about now.”

The soldier grinned and replied, “This evening we're going to tell all those big, strong cav'rymen with their big, strong mounts that if Gen'ral Crook marches this expedition long enough and far enough, why—the infantry will eat all their damned harses!”

Farther and farther the column stretched itself out as more and more animals gave out and weary men collapsed by the side of the trail, gasping and begging for a chance to rest. Ahead of them lay a seemingly limitless stretch of wasteland that made the strongest man among them groan with despair. In his mind Finerty fought to describe the scene, to arrange his adjectives just so for his eastern readers. “A ghastly compound of spongy ashes, yielding sand, and soilless, soulless earth, on which even greasewood cannot grow, and sagebrush sickens and dies,” he composed. “The meanest country under the sun.”

But, he laughed to himself—there simply wasn't any sun.

Late in the afternoon the fog thinned as they reached
the southern edge of the buttes, and as the mist lifted, there lay the dark-blue wall far to their front. Through the mud and the fog and the mist and the misery, they had struggled another twenty-one miles that day.

“Bear Butte,” Pourier said, pointing to the singular prominence off to the southeast. “Where the Lakota and Shahiyena go to seek their visions and pray.”

As the half-breed described it, Finerty stood hunched over his small tablet, shielding it from the drops spilling from the brim of his hat as he scribbled down notes with a lead pencil.

“And there,” Bat said, indicating the lofty peak rising to the southwest, “that is the peak the Lakota call Inyan Kara.”

At long last. The Black Hills. Relief. Food. Four walls and a roof, a place where Finerty could get out of the rain and the cold. Many times had he enjoyed the best nightlife Chicago had to offer—all the whiskey and willing women a young man about town could ever desire.