Reap the whirlwind, p.6
Reap the Whirlwind, page 6
He cleared his throat, smoothing his palms down the length of his thighs before he spoke. “Your official report of action on the Powder River enumerated quite a list of goods confiscated from the enemy’s lodges.”
“Most of it ammunition my soldiers destroyed.”
“In your official report, which made its way not only across all the circles in Washington City, but into the press as well—you stated that ammunition came from my Red Cloud Agency.”
“It was so marked, clearly,” Bourke broke in, feeling the heat of anger burn his neck. “I saw much of it for myself. Bullets and powder that killed my fellow soldiers.”
Hastings wasted no time in looking at the lieutenant. Instead he kept his eyes on Crook. “I told you that you could meet with these chiefs when you asked for permission.”
“But you’ve gone on record with them advising Red Cloud and the rest that they shouldn’t accompany the expedition?” Bourke asked.
“Exactly.”
All the while, Grouard had been leaning to the side, his head near Red Cloud as he busily translated the heated words between the soldiers and the agent. At that moment Red Cloud held his eagle-wing fan out, a signal that brought silence from the white men.
Standing, the chief had stated, “Three Stars will understand that the Lakota—and especially the Hunkpatila Lakota who are known as the Crazy Horse people—have many warriors. Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa have many, many more. There are many guns, many ponies in those camps you are seeking. Each warrior is brave and ready to fight for their hunting ground, for the country given them in treaty, to fight for their families.”
Taking a step closer to Crook, Red Cloud continued, “Those warriors you seek are not afraid of Three Stars, not afraid of all the soldiers you can take against them. On the Powder, the Tongue, the Rosebud, and the Greasy Grass—every lodge will send its warriors against your soldiers. Every lodge cries out to you and the rest of the Great Father’s dogs: ‘Let the soldiers come!’”
Now back in their cramped quarters following that disastrous council with the chiefs, Bourke wagged his head. “I think I’m more angry with Hastings, General.”
Crook nodded. “As am I.”
“I can almost understand Red Cloud’s position.”
“Yes. It’s not the old chief I really blame,” Crook growled.
“But—what fails me is why Hastings won’t support his government on this. Why he won’t bring his influence to bear and get us some scouts for the job now at hand.”
“The real shame of it isn’t that now I have to enlist the Bannocks and Shoshone, and some of the Crow to make this campaign work. The pity is that for every Sioux I could hire to fight alongside my soldiers—it would have meant one less Sioux fighting against my soldiers.”
“With you in charge of the fighting this time out, General,” Bourke cheered, “we can still whip whatever the hostiles can put in the field against us.”
Crook turned away, toward the tiny desk near the small Sibley stove squatting in the corner of the smoky room. “Perhaps it is all for the best in the long run, John,” sighed the general as he sank to a chair with a creak. “I’m beginning to think these Lakota of Red Cloud and Spotted Tail couldn’t hold up anyway.”
“Hold up, General?”
Crook shook his head emphatically, staring at a spot on the floor. “I don’t think they have the fiber, the grit, the Apaches do. Now, those Apache—there was a worthy enemy, John.”
“Begging the general’s pardon,” Bourke replied, “but the enemy I met face-to-face on the Powder River was every bit as worthy a foe as those Apache we chased through the mountains down in Arizona.”
Crook smiled faintly, then it was gone like a clap of summer thunder. “Perhaps these Sioux are a worthy foe, John. But—by God—they have yet to prove it to me.”
* Yellowstone River
* The Black Hills
* Colonel John Gibbon, 3 May 1876
† Colonel John Gibbon, 13 May 1876
Late May 1876
“Hey, you, there—fella! C’mon over here an’ gimme a hand!”
She turned slowly, squaring her shoulders as she had learned to do over the years of traveling in the company of roughened, trail-worn men.
“Me?” she asked, her voice growling octaves lower than normal.
“Yeah, you. You got anything against work, fella?” the tall, homely teamster called out.
Another one appeared, about as tall, but much more stout. Now he, she decided, he was almost handsome enough for her.
“That’s right,” the newcomer said, heaving a pile of harness onto the ground before him. “In this outfit we all work together, or you don’t go north with Crook. Pull your weight, or clear out.”
“No man’s ever had to pull my weight for me,” she told them both as she strode their way, eating ground in long strides that made the mule ears on her tall boots slap their stovepipe tops. “And from the looks of things here, you boys need some help with that goddamned double-tree.”
“That’s more like it,” the skinny one said, smiling to reveal two missing teeth.
She decided it gave him a look that reminded her of the idiot she had seen years before at one of the tent shows back in northern Missouri when she was a young girl. The way that poor idiot-man’s eyes had stared out at the all the others staring in at him with wonder and pity and awe and downright disgust. She even recalled that silly, drooling look to the idiot’s mouth.
“You’ll do well to throw in with the rest every chance you can,” the bigger of the two teamsters grunted as he hefted up the tree, waiting for the others to back the teams into harness. “That way, they’ll accept you as one of the boys.”
“Thankee,” she replied in that practiced grumble of hers. “I’ll remember that. Ain’t got nothing against being one of the boys.”
Just like I’d have nothing against bedding down with a few of these boys from time to time, she thought—if I could drop my britches and have me some fun without getting caught for being a gal.
Martha Jane Cannary was a stout thing, born to run wild with her two younger brothers and their male friends. Just weeks ago on the first of May, she had passed her twenty-fourth birthday, an occasion for real celebration. In the company of males hurrying south from Deadwood after hearing that Crook was putting together a wagon train bound for the Injun country, Martha Jane had celebrated all the way in due and practiced form. In the back of a wagon she proceeded to paint her tonsils with a larruping good dose of bluegill and got gloriously drunk, wrassling with the best of the lot, then threw up and passed out.
Coming to with her head banging against the sidewall of a springless wagon on that rutted road heading south to the horizon where lay Laramie, and beyond that the end of the rainbow—Fort Fetterman itself—Janey’s head hurt with that heavy sogginess so different from the light airiness she usually felt when well into the cups. She was dead broke too. The last sutler back at Deadwood had taken what he felt he was due for the damages she had caused in the ruckus raised at his trading post, then ordered the rest of the drunk’s companions to promptly pack the shrill troublemaker right on out of there.
There was a time or two out here in recent years when she was almost to the point where she felt like owning up to being a woman with some man she met one place or t’other. As much as she tried to hide it, bury it, swallow it up with huge draughts of raw and raunchy living—Martha Jane still sensed that she would be forever troubled by that generous, giving, kindly hearted and womanly soul deep within her. Nonetheless, she kept her secret to herself for the most part, and carried on in this wild land every bit like those men most suited for it. Martha Jane Cannary had always been a wild-eyed, auburn-haired, fiery-tempered thing. Right from jump and scat.
The first thirteen years of her life Martha Jane had spent growing up in the hardwood hills outside Princeton, Missouri. She had loved adventure in the out-of-doors, learning to ride and handle stock at an early age. It was a talent that would hold her in good stead for the rest of her life. And something that had taught her much about the behavior expected of horsemen as well.
With their squeaky wagon, a two-horse team, three milk cows, and a brace of yellow Missouri hounds, in eighteen and sixty-five the Cannary family had joined the many hundreds of gold-seekers pressing west along the great Platte River Road, pushing over South Pass, then turning north to Virginia City by a route that skirted the worst of Indian country. Slow as he might have been, Bob Cannary was quick enough to realize he wasn’t going to keep his wife Charlotte anchored to the land for the rest of her life. A woman of her nature desperately needed something more: fancy clothes and liquor, as well as music and dancing and horse races, and laughter above all. The finer things of a life he just might be able to provide if he staked himself out a good claim among the gold diggings in the Rocky Mountains.
Right from the start Martha Jane had not been one to join the other teenaged girls who each long day lagged behind with their mamas near the wagons along their route west. Instead, Martha Jane took her gun and joined her father and the rest of the men of the party in hunting to fill supper kettles. At every town and fort, post and way stop along their journey, the young girl heard the talk come from the lips of those painted women who were so outnumbered on the frontier—talk that confirmed the truth in the old saw that at each trailhead, every end-of-line camp where men laid rails, every mining claim and soldier outpost, a woman could make her fortune simply for having a woman’s body.
Strange talk to Martha Jane’s way of thinking. For her it was still far more fun being a boy, what with the travails of lowering wagons by rope over sharp ledges, crossing streams, and always being wary of bogs and quicksands that soon gave the girl an education in handling four- and six-hitched teams. Thirty-foot bullwhips cracking above the backs of snorting oxen and heaving horses, husky young men sweating beside their animals and turning the air blue with the profane glory of their profession.
Lord, but it was this raw life of the male on the frontier that still appealed to the girl! Barely in her teens by the time the emigrant party reached the diggings at Alder Gulch, young Martha Jane Cannary was already considered an astounding shot and a fearless rider, two remarkable feats for a woman of any age on the frontier.
What a grand place that bedlam of gold country had been! Row upon row of high mountain peaks had spilled twenty-some-thousand miners into a narrow river valley where practically every foot of the narrow meadows was covered by tent canvas or board shanty, where tarred torches smoked and yellow lanterns swung on the winds in front of precarious, hill-perched saloons, where dance halls and gambling houses both blared the same sour, off-key music of drunken laughter and too-loud talk, the shrieks of pain or pleasure or both at the same damned time. Where fistfights settled precious little in the mucky, bloody streets. Where long, wide blades flashed when two men laid claim to the same sluice, the same whore, or ill-happed to sing the battle song for the wrong side from that Civil War still raw in every man’s heart. Alder Gulch—where guns were drawn quickly and men died cheap.
Alone now, Martha Jane heaved against the draft horse and got it and the other three moving away from the Fort Fetterman loading dock. Lord, but there was enough work for every man putting an army into the field. Then she laughed right out loud. Enough work for every man? There was even enough work for her!
With a loud and unmistakable squish, the far lead horse shat and dropped its fragrant apples onto the raindamped ground where the pile steamed until flattened under the hooves of the animal coming along behind it. The earthy odor struck Martha’s nostrils as something familiar and good, even wholesome, not anything like the smells she remembered emanating from those mining camps. Stale whiskey breath and rotting teeth, tobacco stains on shirts not washed since the last rain, rotting sluice timbers and fresh-turned earth dug for new privy holes, rank meat and bones left for the wolves and coyotes that would slink down from the hills once the shadows grew long enough of every evening. The stench of punk sticks kept lit in every doorway, the sweetish fragrance of opium pipes the Chinese laborers preferred to the puke-bellied whiskey, the thick and oily perfumes the whores used hopelessly to cover up the forwardness of their sweat-slickened bodies.
She had watched her mother finally all but abandon her family, going off to pursue what a middle-aged woman could of that good life Alder Gulch offered. But right from the start Charlotte Cannary was unable to compete with the younger, firm-breasted, flat-bellied working girls. Besides that, Charlotte was simply too hot-tempered and quick-tongued to make her fortune flat on her back. Her dreams ended one night after Martha Jane had gone back to her father’s shanty to care for the younger ones. All there was the next morning were whispers of the argument, the rising voices, the threats and oaths over this man or that old insult, and finally the gunfire exchanged between the two whores.
Martha Jane had helped her pa wrap his unfaithful wife in a greasy blanket, helped dig the hole and bury her mama on the slope of a nearby hill near the end of that cruel winter of 1866. Come spring, Bob took his family away from Blackfoot, Montana Territory, and moved south to Salt Lake City. But a short year later he too died, leaving his three teenaged children to fend for themselves in the land of the Mormons.
With nary a shred of reluctance that following spring, Martha shuffled off for Wyoming Territory to find work for the army at Fort Bridger and Fort Steele in 1868. After a season hauling supplies over South Pass from Cheyenne City, she found employment with the construction gangs of the Union Pacific working out of Piedmont. And ran smack into Allegheny Dick—the frontier’s most noted card shark besides being the most handsomest man-type of creature that ever walked the earth. Without complaint, Janey allowed the pasteboard shuffler to take her heart in ransom—but suffered a cruel dash of love’s bitter gall when one gray morning after many weeks of using her soft, scented, moistened woman’s equipment to the best of her ability to trap and hold a man, she awoke to find Allegheny Dick gone. And gone for good.
A woman scorned, Martha Jane once more donned teamster’s clothing, a masquerade that allowed her to move about in the rough company of these men on the edge of this frontier. Besides, she told herself: the more layers of clothes, the better—all the better to hide her wounded, mourning heart.
Time is said to heal all things, she had heard. By the time another winter had come and gone, Janey knew some scar tissue lay weathering on the surface of her heart. A heart destined to be broken once more with the advent of spring, the warming of the prairie, and the blooming of wildflowers that carpeted the high prairie.
Throwing caution to the wind, Martha Jane once more left her masquerade long enough to don hoop dresses, brush her hair, and rouge her cheeks—all so she could give herself fully to a handsome and lonely soldier, a Lieutenant Somers—and promptly got herself with child.
To tell her lover of the coming event would have been a joy—only to find a few days later the gay blade of an officer was off to a new duty station, having requested the change of scenery himself. Only in his leaving did he finally fess up to the fact that he was already very much married.
Once more mending her broken heart and with her newborn babe turned over to an upright family, Martha Jane again donned men’s clothing and plunged back into the world of males on the rough frontier. Not a strange thing to do, to remember it now as she unloaded freight for Crook’s army. Not strange at all, for she was only carrying on what she had learned at no less than her own mother’s knee—this lunging, gasping chase after life’s rawest excesses.
Her pa, Bob Cannary, a young and innocent farm boy on a visit to Cincinnati, had become entranced with a young woman’s beauty and forwardness when he visited a “bawdy house” for the first, and last, time in his life. That very day he proposed to Charlotte, making the pretty one his wife just so that he could take her back to the farm with hopes of reforming the girl who had come north to escape a dismal existence in Kentucky. From there the couple moved across the Mississippi to Iowa and started raising crops and milk cows and kids.
Charlotte Cannary’s eldest child, Martha Jane, whelped on Missouri Methodist lawn socials, was not about to make herself another “good woman” in a long, long line of pioneer women who adhered to the virtue found in wearing themselves out with bone-wearying housework, long-suffering the chills, fevers, and tick-sicks of the frontier, the interminable childbearing and toddler-raising that destroyed a woman’s youth and made her a stooped and wrinkled hag in a handful of years after her twentieth birthday.
While her pa was best known as a listless man who likely wouldn’t amount to much of anything, Martha Jane had learned much more the ways of life from her own mother in those years on the family farm at the Collins Church settlement. Mother Cannary was a copper-haired, bright-eyed woman who smoked, drank, flirted brazenly, and publicly cursed when it damned well suited her. Charlotte’s bold ways suited her daughter just fine. Especially when Martha Jane was but a girl of eight or nine dashing about on dappled ponies, prancing like a gray squirrel through the virgin hardwood forests, chewing leaf tobacco and swearing with the best her male playmates could claim to know. Those had been days when no parent restrained the young, gangly girl from raiding the sugar bin or plunging naked into the swimming hole when the mood struck her. Very fitting indeed that Charlotte’s only daughter came to be known as the county’s wildcat.
What fitting training that had been, she so often thought in the years since Charlotte’s sudden death in Montana Territory: to be the daughter of a woman who was not about to raise her daughter like every other girl. Given free rein to hunt and ride, free to acquaint yourself with other hill folk in how to swaller down an occasional hooker of raw lightning without so much as a shudder quaking through your skinny frame. Mother Charlotte, God only knew, had come home drunk enough nights to Bob’s disapproving glare and her children’s muffled laughter as she let go with a long string of colorful, harumscarum bawdy talk, interspersed with mountain stomps that shook the timbers of the cabin floor.
