Reap the whirlwind, p.4
Reap the Whirlwind, page 4
“There—that should do you, Mr. Finerty,” Sheridan said a half hour later as he handed the reporter a signed letter of introduction. “I’ve addressed that to General Crook. As a matter of fact, my signature on that will serve you well with any officer you should encounter on your way to Fetterman.”
Finerty rose, slipping the letter into an inside pocket. “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice, General.”
“Mr. Storey and I go back a ways,” Sheridan replied.
“Thank you too for your help, sir.”
“If I may,” Sheridan replied. “A word of advice. Perhaps a word of caution.”
“Caution?” Finerty asked, then he grinned, sensing an inside joke. “You’re going to warn me to watch out for my hair with all those scalping knives around, General.”
A quick smile crossed Sheridan’s face, but faded as quickly. “No. This has to do with General Crook. You will find him a hard campaigner.”
“I’m ready for the march, sir. Whatever Crook’s soldiers can take, I can handle.”
This time Sheridan chuckled, seeming to measure the reporter a bit more closely. “Perhaps you can. Very well. Then I won’t feel obligated to say any more.”
“A hard campaigner, this General Crook.”
“Yes. He spares himself no deprivation, Mr. Finerty. He wants the enemy bad enough, he will spare no deprivation to bring the quarry to bay.”
“For the first time, General—I think I just might enjoy this chase going after Sitting Bull’s savages.”
“Then have at them, Mr. Finerty,” Sheridan replied with a full grin, extending his hand.
“I will, sir. Believe me, if General Crook can find them for me, I will have a go at the red bastards myself!”
John Finerty departed Chicago a little before dawn on that Saturday morning, two days later, in the darkness of 6 May with Wilbur Storey’s words reverberating in his thoughts.
“You are now a war correspondent for the Times. You’re working for me, Mr. Finerty. You are to spare no expense in getting your story, and by all means use the wires as freely as you deem necessary. Whenever practicable. No matter what it costs—just get me the full, unvarnished story from Crook’s forthcoming march. I want you there at his side when the old braided beard goes in for the kill.”
“Yes, sir,” he had answered on that platform, a gust of lake wind blowing his coat collar against the side of his face as he shook hands with Clint Snowden and Wilbur Storey. “I swear to you I’ll be front and center when the general rides in for the kill.”
Mid-May 1876
Ever since that Tuesday morning, the ninth of May, when he had boarded the train that inched west from Omaha in the company of George C. Crook, John Bourke knew he was not going to enjoy campaigning with the general’s other aide.
Azor H. Nickerson was simply everything that Bourke was not: mean-spirited, carping as a New England spinster, a nagging shrew of an officer who derived more pleasure in the security of four walls around him, happier to bed down when clean sheets were to be found beneath his weary head. From the moment Crook informed Nickerson that he was going to accompany the general this time out, Captain Nickerson began his wheedling and niggling, his whining cant raised with most every detail of their pending trip west into the land of the Sioux and Cheyenne.
Unable to help himself, Bourke chuckled about that again, remembering how Nickerson’s face went white, almost apoplectic with consternation, perhaps some downright fear, to learn that he was going to have to suffer the privations, the toil, the outright danger Bourke himself had endured during the Powder River Campaign that had fizzled to an inconclusive finale only that previous March.
It wasn’t that Nickerson was a coward. No man could ever accuse him of that—what with his record serving the Eighth Ohio Volunteers with commendable bravery during the Battle of Antietam, as well as his extended frontier service with the Twenty-third Infantry. It was just that the captain had put in his time as a stoic and long-suffering soldier and believed he had therefore earned his position in Crook’s Omaha headquarters by judiciously climbing one ladder rung at a time. So it was that he lost no opportunity telling any and all that he deserved to be treated better than to be ordered back into the field. Once more against the goddamned Indians, no less!
As much as he was an accomplished horseman, Azor Nickerson had come to hate being in the saddle. Maybe it was something to do with age, Bourke thought. Old bones and old butts don’t sit well for hours in a McClellan.
Yet Bourke had to hand it to the older Nickerson. At least the captain was savvy enough to understand he was wasn’t plopping down into the same set of circumstances he had encountered when commissioned into the Twenty-third Infantry back to sixty-eight. Now the tribes were much better armed than right after the Civil War, and they even appeared to be acting in some crude congress with one another, and above all else it seemed that with the passing of winter an unusually large migration from the agencies into the unceded territory had left the reservations practically empty this spring. Why, even as late as 27 April, the army had received intelligence that the young warriors at Standing Rock were buying weapons and ammunition, mounting up and heading west in weighty numbers. West to join what the army called the wild tribes. The winter roamers.
That same date saw another report telegraphed to Crook from Captain W. H. Jordan of the Ninth Infantry. As commander of Camp Robinson located at Red Cloud Agency, Jordan requested relief for the agency’s Indians, who were starving after a terribly long and hard winter, their third in a row. If they did not receive their longoverdue beef ration soon, the captain warned, he predicted they would be compelled to jump the reservation and join the free-roaming hostiles where they would unleash their raids on white ranches and settlements.
On more than one occasion this past few weeks Bourke had watched Crook’s face as the general studied the reports. And more than once the lieutenant found himself realizing that Crook was giving that intelligence nothing more than passing consideration.
“With all the doomsayers,” Crook often said, “there’s one agent among the many who denies that his Indians are in a bad way of it.”
On 5 May James S. Hastings contradicted Captain Jordan’s assertions and informed his superiors at the Indian Bureau that his wards at the Red Cloud Agency “had never been more peaceful.”
“It’s not the number of warriors we’ll encounter at all, John,” Crook had told him repeatedly. “You remember what they tried to tell us before we marched to Powder River last March?”
“But what Reynolds ran into wasn’t anywhere near the number of warriors we are supposed to encounter off the reservations this summer, General.”
“Exactly my point, John. The problem we’ll have this summer will not be the number of warriors. That’s always been a matter of conjecture and even some outright rumor. Instead, it will be the tactical problem we’ve always had with Indians: the red sons of bitches just won’t stand and fight.”
“Always running—to fight another day,” John replied.
“And if the warriors are fleeing the reservations this spring because they intend to gather in great numbers for some hunt they have planned … why, mark my words, those bands won’t stay together for more than a few days of hunting at the most. Out there, on the Tongue and Powder and the Rosebud—there’s not enough goddamned game and grass to support a massive village like that for very long at all.”
“They have to break up again,” Bourke echoed.
“Exactly,” Crook confirmed. “We’ll once more be forced to defeat them in detail, piecemeal. Band by band. If I can ever get them to stop and fight at all.”
While the general feared only that the enemy would flee before his column, spring had renewed the frontier, bringing new grass to the plains. As the winter snows retreated, that road the miners took north into the Black Hills was reopened—making the blood course hot in the veins of the young Lakota. As the weather mellowed along that route to the gold camps, reports of the inevitable clashes began to drift into headquarters at Omaha.
Things were heating up to the point that even John M. Thayer, governor of Wyoming Territory, petitioned Crook for relief for civilians harassed and murdered, set upon and robbed by the lawless warriors roaming beyond the boundaries of their assigned reservations. When Crook did nothing beyond ordering Captain James Egan’s K Company of the Second Cavalry to patrol the Black Hills Road, Thayer hurried to the White House personally, begging for troops to protect the civilians. Grant smiled benignly and informed the governor he had been promised by both Sherman and Sheridan that with summer the coming expedition would remedy the “Indian problem” for all time.
Of late Crook had wind of the complaints but took them in stride as he threw himself into preparations for the campaign. For some unexplained reason early on, he chose to rehire only three of the original thirty-two quartermaster’s scouts he had used on the march to Powder River. Perhaps bristling under the criticism leveled at him from various nonmilitary quarters, the general became convinced using civilians in such a capacity was a mistake. Instead he determined to repeat his success in Arizona Territory. It was there he had hired Apache auxiliaries to stalk Apache hostiles for his troops.
“You’re going to hire Sioux to hunt down Sioux, General?” Bourke had asked on that train ride west from Omaha to Cheyenne.
“Damn right I am. This is one soldier who believes in Indian allies,” Crook growled, pulling the stub of the unlit cigar from his mouth. “Remember, John, what we proved to the doubting Nellies down there: nothing so demoralizes our enemy as having his brother warriors defecting to fight on the side of the army.”
Three days after leaving Omaha, Crook’s entourage reached Cheyenne and proceeded immediately to the outskirts of town to Fort D. A. Russell, where the general was again embroiled in the quarrels and politics of the Third Cavalry. Emotions were strung taut as a cat-gut fiddle string, morale sunk as low as a latrine pit, here where dissension still reigned following Colonel Reynolds’s disaster on Powder River. Delays in the courts-martial ordered by Crook had left two of the regiment’s top officers hanging in limbo. So it was a chilly reception Lieutenant Colonel William B. Royall of the Third Cavalry, acting in the absence of Colonel Joseph Reynolds, provided for the general’s staff. Crook did what he could in that roughened way of his for which John Bourke had a warm affection, the general trying his best to ease the ruffled feathers of the officers who, like Royall, had taken great offense at the insult Crook’s charges brought to the regiment as a whole.
“Tell me, John,” Crook began thoughtfully early the morning after their arrival as he and Bourke were preparing to ride out from Fort Russell with their escort for Camp Robinson, “does it seem Colonel Royall is chafing at having to serve under an expedition commander who brought both a superior and a subordinate officer up on charges?”
Bourke patted the neck of the mount he would ride south toward the Red Cloud Agency. “I suppose he’s got his grounds to be a bit icy with you, General.”
“Does he now?”
“Yes, sir. Speaking frankly?”
“Of course, John. I’ve always wanted you to speak your mind.”
“I can’t say as I blame him. Thinking of a man in his position. Now in charge of the Third—a regiment officered with fighting men the likes of Anson Mills and Guy Henry who you can always count on to do their job and then some, men who have unquestioned careers of gallantry and bravery before the enemy—to have these sorts of charges leveled against two of their highest officers must make them believe the whole world considers them to be poor soldiers at best, cowards at the worst.”
Crook’s eyes narrowed, two deep furrows carved between the bushy blondish brows. “Beginning to sound like you’ve changed your mind on what you saw Reynolds and Moore do or not do at that hostile village on St. Patrick’s Day, John.”*
“No, sir,” he answered quickly. “They were both wrong and I’ll never change my mind on that. I was there to see it with my own eyes. It’s just: I know how the fighting men must feel. So I feel for them. No man out here, asked to do what the army has asked of these soldiers, wants to have his fighting ability ever questioned, much less his courage.”
Crook rose to the saddle, and the lieutenant in charge of escort detail ordered his soldiers to mount as one. Nearby, Robert Strahorn, correspondent for Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, settled atop his saddle.
Pulling the brim of his slouch hat down to shade his eyes, the general spoke quietly to his young aide. “It’s precisely because of those fine soldiers in the Third Cavalry that I brought their superior up on charges, John. You let the rest of them know that. You let those soldiers know that George Crook did it for them—so that the world will know that the Third is a fighting outfit. To know that the ranks of the Third Cavalry are filled with brave soldiers not afraid to take on the likes of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. It’s just some of their officers who have smudged their fine reputation. You tell them that, John.”
He watched Crook wheel his horse sharply and give heels as the escort sergeant quickly ordered his detail to move out. It was left up to Bourke to bring up the rear, his belly cold and unsettled that the general had taken offense. How he chastised himself across those first few miles heading southeast, on into the afternoon and that evening as well. He hadn’t said what he had meant to say, and now felt miserable for the unintentional insult.
Yes, he decided, vowing again not to make this mistake in the future. John Bourke promised himself he would tell the men of the Third Cavalry that George Crook had brought Reynolds and Moore up on charges for one reason and one reason only: to protect the courageous fighting reputation of their beloved regiment.
* * *
Things had gone to hell with the army in Wyoming Territory.
Since their return from the fight on Powder River, men in the Second and Third Cavalry had been deserting, slipping off the post, disappearing into the crush of civilians flooding toward the Black Hills. It was next to impossible for anyone to catch a deserter if a man truly wanted to disappear. He could sell his uniform, his rig, and even trade his weapons for a grubstake outfit that would get him to Deadwood Creek or one of the many streams feeding the Belle Fourche.
But there wasn’t a soul could look at Seamus Donegan with suspicion. Weren’t many men who looked less “army” than the tall Irishman. He had allowed Samantha to trim the full beard he had cultivated during the winter campaign to the Powder River to a neat Vandyke below his shaggy mustache. That was all she wanted to take the scissors to—adoring the long, wavy hair that hung well past his shoulders like a bushy shawl. Down in the Panhandle country of Texas he had first begun to grow it, at Sam’s gentle nudging, then came to like it himself as he moved in the company of the hide men, those buffalo hunters of the Staked Plain who took great pride in their distinctive and singular appearance. The buffalo men stood out in any crowd.
So no one was ever going to mistake Seamus Donegan for a soldier.
“Here, Seamus—listen to your son.”
He remembered her words now as he reined up below the bluff where Fort Fetterman sprawled beneath the sunny May skies. How Samantha had taken his hand and laid it upon her belly for what they both knew was to be another long absence. Perhaps so long that the great swell of life within her would be born by the time he returned: the infant son she had promised him. A son they had created together.
From the pleasure they had taken in one another’s bodies, they had created this pure wonder of new life. A son!
“Say farewell to him too,” she had whispered into his ear back at Laramie. “There are two of us you part from today. From now on you have family.”
He couldn’t remember holding her any tighter than he had yesterday morning at dawn in the long shadows of officers’ quarters near the parade. How she had shuddered with the spring cold, perhaps trembling in remembrance of how he had held her, caressed her, coupled with her so fiercely in those predawn moments that still gave a blush to her cheeks.
“I’ve never made love to a pregnant woman before,” he had told Samantha.
“Well, I’ve never allowed a man who was a father such liberties with me, Seamus Donegan,” she had replied, wearing that special grin that cast an angelic light across her face. It was all she wore as she lay with him amid the tangle of sheets and comforter on the small bed in that tiny attic room above the quarters peopled by officers’ families.
“Even though you have no promise of work, you still believe you must go?” Samantha had asked him as he held her there beside the big piebald gelding he had saddled, ready for the hundred-mile ride to the northwest.
“There’ll be work,” he had whispered into her hair. “Always plenty of work when the army marches off to make war. Don’t worry—I’ll find something to do to feed my family.”
He recalled how she had choked down a sob before answering. “Family. I suppose we are already, aren’t we now, Seamus? No longer are we just Seamus and Sam. No more are we only a couple. From now on—we’ll be family.”
He had held her out at arm’s length, studying her redrimmed, moist eyes, gazing at the way the salty tears had brightened the blush of her full lips. Even now as he peered over the prairie below Fetterman, blooming with the white of regimental tents, Seamus remembered how looking at her that last time had excited him again, though they had torn themselves from one another’s bare flesh only minutes before he had saddled and prepared to go.
“I’ll find something.” He repeated now the words he had used to promise her. “Don’t you worry—I’ll find something to do when Crook marches north again.”
If not scouting with Grouard, Big Bat, and Reshaw, then he would see if the wagon master could use a strong man willing to learn to handle the teams. Willing to do what it would take to feed his family.
As he urged the gelding up the dusty, rutted trail toward the top of the bluff overlooking the North Platte, Seamus gazed across the river at the Hog Ranch: three adobe, wattle, and clapboard shanties squatted not far from the mouth of LaPrele Creek. A saloon and dance hall in one, a small hotel with canvas walls in another, and a sizable restaurant in the last of the buildings, all owned by Kid Slaymaker, who had made the Hog Ranch famous for hundreds and hundreds of miles around. It was the first good place east of Fort Bridger in Wyoming Territory, south of Fort Ellis in Montana Territory, and the last place north of Laramie where a man could count on finding those things most dear to a plainsman’s heart.
