Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876

Chapter 4

22-24 June 1876

“Samantha!”

She heard her name called out and leaped to peer down from the tiny window in her upstairs room. Across the Fort Laramie parade hurried Elizabeth Burt, wife of Captain Andrew S. Burt of the Ninth Infantry, waving a sheaf of yellow papers in the breeze like a bright clutch of radiant sunflowers as she dashed over the green lawn, her skirts and petticoats maddeningly a’swirl at her ankles like sea foam.

“Oh, dear God,” Sam prayed aloud, “don’t let this be … bad news,” then cradled her hands atop her swelling belly.

“Samantha!”

Sam turned back to the window, looking down on Elizabeth again, flagging the handful of yellow telegraph flimsies at the end of her arm. And she calmed herself, thinking that Mrs. Burt wouldn’t be hurrying so, shouting out at her, if it was bad news she carried.

With a swallow Samantha turned and gazed down at her belly, patting her bulk reassuringly a moment before she dashed from the room and lumbered ungainly down the narrow stairs to the landing, where more than a dozen women poured through the front door onto the porch in an eager crush of skirts and bodices, all swishing below a cacophony of voices excited yet etched with dread.

For a moment Sam held at the last step, gripping the newel in her right hand, wishing him back here with all her might. She licked her lip as the others flooded onto the porch, where Elizabeth Burt began passing out the telegram pages on which the key operator had scrawled each message.

Word from the war.

They already knew there had been a big fight—something on the order of a week ago now. By the time word of that battle reached Fort Fetterman and was relayed down the telegraph wire to Fort Laramie, already the Indians camped all about the post spoke of hearing on the moccasin telegraph of a great fight wherein the army was bested. Those rumors were only whispered, conveyed in hushed tones, until Crook’s official report of the fight reached Laramie, disproving the worst fears that the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition had suffered a massacre. From that moment on it was only a matter of waiting out the agonizing days until each wife learned if her husband would be among the cold, sterile numbers Crook listed for Sheridan’s headquarters: was a loved one among the dead or wounded, a casualty of that great fight?

Taking a moment at the landing to tug down her bodice, Samantha straightened the apron over her belly and quartered through the open doorway as if she were bigger than she really was. More and more every week it seemed she was having to learn all over again how to move around in a body that always seemed to conspire against her.

“Here’s yours, Samantha,” Elizabeth said, rattling the yellow page aloft over others’ shoulders. “Oh, dear,” she said, sudden worry in her voice as she moved through the crush toward Samantha. “It’s good news! Trust me—he’s all right.”

Sam crumpled the flimsy telegram to her breast, daring not to read it just yet. Wanting to trust in Elizabeth’s eyes, those eyes that peered into Sam’s at this moment. “He’s … Seamus is all right?”

“Read it yourself. They can’t say much. None of them, not even my Andrew, an officer, dear Lord—not a single one is allowed to say much to us. But Seamus says there’s a letter coming, Sam,” she reassured, her finger tapping that flimsy that Sam held against her breast. “Read it and see he’s fine. Just fine.”

“F-fine?”

“He’ll be coming back here before your little one makes his debut at Fort Laramie. You can count on that, Sam.”

“Yes, I want to count on that,” she murmured softly as she turned away into the crush of women and Elizabeth was once more swallowed by anxious wives and clamoring voices.

At the edge of the porch Samantha stopped, pulled the yellow page from her breast, and smoothed it in her hands, then held the paper up to the sunlight, squinting at the telegrapher’s crude scrawl. In the open space that comprised nearly two thirds of the telegraph.

As Sam’s eyes misted, she brought the crumpled page to her breast and finally breathed one long sigh. She didn’t think she had breathed since she first heard Elizabeth call out from parade ground below her window. But now, at last, she could breathe again. As she did, Samantha felt the baby turn, a foot, a hand, or an elbow jabbing up beneath her ribs. And that sudden blow took her breath away a moment. She had to smile at that.

“Yes, little boy—your father is unharmed. And he says he’ll be coming home to us both real soon.”

Smoothing that pale-yellow paper again, instead of looking at the telegrapher’s handwriting, this time she peered at the printed form.

The rules of the Company require that all messages received for transmission shall be written on the message blanks of the Company, under and subject to the conditions printed thereon, which conditions have been agreed to by the sender of the following message.

Date Bank of South Fork Tongue River, 20th inst 1876

Received of Via Foit Fetterman 23^rd

To Mrs. Seamus Donegan, Fort Laramie

I am not hurt. Casualties light.

Be coming home when this business is done. Letter to follow.

S. Donegan

Then she read a third, and finally a fourth time before finding she could really trust the words. After all, it wasn’t Seamus’s handwriting. And he was so very far away. So scared was she that she discovered she couldn’t overcome the doubt. She feared the worst—a dreadful hoax played on them all … yet she began to fight down the sob growing in her chest just in reading the terse message over and over again. She mentally replayed Elizabeth Burt’s assertion that the men of Crook’s command were never allowed to say too much in their brief telegrams to loved ones waiting back home.

Home.

This wasn’t home. Home was up there on the South Fork of the Tongue River. Or wherever in hell Seamus was at this moment. Home was with him. Whether it was in that barn of Sharp Grover’s down in the Texas Panhandle country, perhaps in some Denver or Cheyenne hotel, or only beneath a few yards of canvas he had stretched inelegantly over some willow or plum brush to give her some shade on their trip north through Kansas and Colorado and now to Sioux country … home was with Seamus Donegan.

For some time she had known home wasn’t four walls and a roof over her head to keep out the snow and rain, wind and sun. Home was his arms, the security and shelter and sanctuary of that embrace.

So now the two of them would wait for his letter to come down from Fort Fetterman by courier, brought there by another courier riding south out of the land of the Sioux and the Cheyenne, where Seamus was risking his Ufe.

“Dear God, dear God, dear God,” Sam whispered, turning again to the commotion on the porch as women screeched and giggled, hugged and patted one another on the back, congratulating one another on the good fortune of their husbands to this date in this summer of the Sioux.

“Watch over that man for me,” Sam whispered, dabbing the corners of her wet eyes with that yellow flimsy that meant more to her at that moment than all the gold they could dig out of the Black Hills.

“Just—bring—him—home—to—us.”

At four A.M. on Thursday, 22 June, buglers raised the shrill notes of reveille up and down that camp the Fifth Cavalry had pitched about a mile from Fort Laramie near the confluence of the North Platte and Laramie rivers.

By first light Lieutenant Charles King heard the throaty sergeants bawl, “Prepare to mount!” Then came that long-anticipated order, “Mount!” and seven companies crossed the river on a new iron bridge and were setting off on the chase. They were ordered due north toward Custer City in Dakota to intercept the trail being used by hundreds of warriors riding north to join the summer roamers known to be in the unceded hunting grounds of the Powder River-Rosebud country. For the time being Captain Robert H. Montgomery’s B Company would remain behind in post, with orders to catch up with the main column in four days.

After only two miles the column passed the charred ruins of Rawhide Station, telegraph link between Fort Fetterman and Fort Laramie, burned by hostiles as little as ten days before. The Fifth pushed on with that vivid reminder seared into their consciousness, marching into an austere land carved with majestic buttes and dry coulees, covered by only sage and cactus.

Before he had left Laramie on an inspection trip to Captain William H. Jordan’s Camp Robinson and its nearby agency at Red Cloud, District Commander Philip Sheridan had ordered Lieutenant Colonel Carr to take his Fifth and close down that trail. But at the same time, Sheridan had drafted Bill Cody to ride along eastward as guide for his own escort, which included a Beecher Island veteran, now a member of Sheridan’s personal staff, Lieutenant Colonel James W. “Sandy” Forsyth. Left behind to guide temporarily for Carr’s Fifth Cavalry were Cody’s friend, Charles “Buffalo Chips” White, and Baptiste “Little Bat” Garnier, the half-breed interpreter Crook had assigned to Fort Laramie after Colonel Joseph Reynolds’s disastrous Powder River campaign.

After a march of something on the order of thirty miles that Thursday, the regiment went into camp on the South Fork of Rawhide Creek, where water and grass could be found in abundance, but firewood was in short supply.

With another day’s march behind them, the third morning the regiment pulled away from its camp at the Cardinal’s Chair,^* a well-known geographical rock formation situated on the headwaters of the Niobrara River, at daylight on the twenty-fourth. By noon Lieutenant King, riding with Carr’s staff at the head of the column, entered the valley of what frontiersmen lovingly called the “Old Woman’s Fork” of the South Cheyenne River. There were shouts, voices leapfrogging from behind them, farther back along the column until the call reached the front.

“Rider approaching!”

Squinting his eyes into the bright summer’s light, King turned to watch the lone courier, still better than a quarter mile back along the dusty column, sprinting up on his lathered horse, his mount raising rooster tails of golden spray that shimmered with the waves of heat rising off the land.

“Colonel Carr?”

“You found him,” the lieutenant colonel answered.

The young courier saluted, licking his dry lips. Alkali dust caked his face, and foam at the horse’s bit, tail-root and at the edges of the blanket. “Dispatches from Fort Laramie, sir. General Sheridan.”

“Give ’em over.”

King watched the man’s impassive face as he read over the three pages of handwritten documents.

Carr asked, “Sheridan’s returned to Laramie?”

“No, sir. He telegraphed these from Camp Robinson.”

The lieutenant colonel nodded, saying nothing more, then read over the dispatches one more time. When he looked up, he blinked, pursed his lips a long moment, then asked the courier, “You’ve been ordered to return, Private?”

“Yes, sir. As soon as I’ve delivered those to you, General.”

Carr saluted. “Back there a couple of miles, you passed a spring. Get that mount watered, then rest him an hour before you ride back. Is that understood, soldier?”

“Yes, General.”

“And—one other thing, Private. By God, keep your eyes moving all the time.”

The youngster grinned, cracking the sweat-plastered powder caking his face, swiping his hand across the sweat and grime on his chin. With a salute he turned and was pushing his mount back down the column.

“Gentlemen, we’ve had a small change in our plans.”

King asked, “We’re not going to unite with Crook, General Carr?”

“No. At least not for the time being, Lieutenant.”

King felt disappointment, curiosity mixed. “Where to?”

“We’re to continue on north along the Custer City Road, but once we hit the Powder River trail the war bands are reported using, instead of following it into their hunting grounds—we’re supposed to halt there and await further orders.”

“Further orders?” squealed Major Julius W. Mason nearby. “Are we ever going to get into this war or not?”

“I don’t know about you fellas,” Carr told them as he reined his mount around so its nose once more pointed north, “but something tells this old horse soldier that we might just bump into some action before we even join up with Crook.”

Then he pointed into the distance. “How far to that line of trees would you gauge, Mr. King?”

“Less than a mile, General.”

“Very good,” Carr replied. “Inform the company commanders we’re going to take a short rest there, and tell the officers I expect to have a conference with them in some of that shade up there.”

King raised his face into the heat of the noonday sun. The tender flesh along the inner sides of his thighs chafed with sweat, rubbed against the rough wool and unforgiving saddle tree of his McClellan until they felt as if they were on fire. “Yes, sir.”

“Damn right, King. If I know what you’re thinking. But trust me—it’s even hotter to an old soldier like me. Now, you ride on ahead and bring those two scouts in. I want their latest report on the ground ahead at the officers’ meeting.”

Minutes later Little Bat and Buffalo Chips were back in what shade the stubby, rustling cottonwoods offered, joining that ring of officers. Carr listened to what the halfbreed scout had to tell them about the country to the north, and what Indian sign the two of them had crossed since daybreak. The regiment’s commander didn’t take long in deciding his course of action.

“Major Stanton,” Carr said, addressing the department’s paymaster, “I’ve decided to send you ahead on our trail with a company in reconnaissance.”

“Which one, sir?” asked Captain Thaddeus Stanton, Sheridan’s own emissary riding with the Fifth.

“C. That’d be yours, Lieutenant Keyes.”

Edward L. Keyes straightened. “Yes, General.”

Stanton turned to Carr. “General, I’d like to request that you send King with me.”

Carr looked at his young adjutant. “Lieutenant? How’s that sound to a veteran Apache fighter like you?”

King grinned, glancing at Stanton. “By all means, sir!”

Stanton stood, dusting the back of his wool britches. “When do you want us to detach, General?”

Carr turned to Keyes. “When can you have C Troop ready, Lieutenant?”

“Half an hour, sir.”

“Make it fifteen minutes, Lieutenant.”

Keyes saluted and was gone, trotting off toward the horses tethered nearby.

Carr turned back to Stanton, but for a moment his eyes connected with King’s meaningfully. “I’m giving you Little Bat as guide. White will stay with me. Gentlemen, it is crucial that you reach the Cheyenne River as quickly as possible. Sheridan wired down from Red Cloud that the warrior bands are abandoning the agency en masse. I need you on the Cheyenne, and I need you there as fast as you can cover that ground.”

“Understood, General,” Stanton said, tapping the sawed-off blunderbuss of a rifle he carried on a sling looped over his left shoulder.

Minutes later, as King stood in a narrow patch of noonday shade tightening his cinch, Carr strode over. The lieutenant colonel spoke softly, almost fatherly.

“Lieutenant—I feel I must warn you: these Indians of the plains aren’t like those Apache we fought down in Arizona.”

“Yes, sir.”

“These are horse warriors. Nothing against the Apache, but those renegade Chiricahua could move faster on foot in those rugged mountains of theirs than a man on horseback.”

“How well I remember.”

“Yes, of course you do,” Carr replied, glancing at King’s shoulder. “But these Sioux and Cheyenne, Lieutenant—never underestimate them when they climb on the back of a pony. Watch yourself.”

King slipped the big curb bit back into his horse’s mouth. “I will, General.”

“See that Keyes doesn’t get rattled, either.”

“No, sir.”

“And by all means—keep the company together. If these horse warriors get the troops scattered in a running fight of it—they’ll eat you alive.”

Swallowing hard, the lieutenant saluted. “I’ll remember, sir.”

“Have at them, Mr. King. Have at them.”

Two hours later, having crossed one wide valley after another in that unforgiving country, reaching ridge after naked ridge, Baptiste Garnier finally signaled to halt the column of forty men. King, Stanton, and Keyes came forward on foot to see what the scout had discovered.

“That’s the first war trail of the campaign,” Thaddeus Stanton cheered, pulling his hat from his head to swipe a damp bandanna across his broad forehead.

“Lead on, Mr. Garnier,” Keyes ordered as the group got to their feet there above the troubled, flaky earth where more than a hundred unshod ponies had crossed the bare ground.

The tracks led straight down the valley. Heading north for the Mini Pusa, the Cheyenne River. C Troop rode on into the afternoon’s waning light. Every hour it seemed more and more small groups of Indian ponies joined up, uniting with the main band as it continued north.

While the sun settled off to their left, the lone company noticed a single column of signal smoke climbing into the clear summer sky far to the north in the direction of Pumpkin Buttes. In less than ten minutes another signal column rose off to the west.

“If that ain’t the damnedest luck,” Stanton growled. “Looks like they know we’re coming.”

“I don’t think it will do them a bit of good to try hitting us, Major,” King advised. He pointed off into the distance. “We’re in open country. Not a tree or bush to hide them sneaking in on us.”

“You’re right, Lieutenant,” the old workhorse replied. “Absolutely right. Besides—we’re not stopping until we’re at the Cheyenne, fellas.”

In the lengthening, indigo shadows of twilight, as the breezes stiffened and cooled, King caught sight of Little Bat five hundred yards in the lead, circling his horse to the left.

“Mr. King,” Stanton said, “go see what he’s found this time.”

Charles knelt alongside the scout over the newer tracks—even more warriors crossing the wide valley, their trail disappearing to the northwest. “How many more?” he asked.

“Maybe this many,” Garnier said, opening and closing both hands five times. “Going the shortcut to the Big Horns.”

King stared off to the north. “How far till we reach the Cheyenne?”

Little Bat shrugged. “Two. No, three hours, maybe.”

“You keep on, Little Bat,” the lieutenant said. “I’m going back to the column so they can put out flankers.”

“Tell every one of them keep his eyes open,” Garnier advised before he turned away and was gone.

Stanton and Keyes quickly dispatched outriders to cover the side and rear flanks of the company—choosing old soldiers who were veterans to this country, and to this sort of Indian chasing. On and on the company column moved as quickly as their jaded horses allowed them, shadows creeping longer and longer until the whole land was eventually swallowed up by dusk and the first stars began to wink into sight overhead.

At last in the distance King saw Little Bat loping his mount back toward them. As he came up, the scout shouted.

“Over that ridge! We done it. Mini Pusa over that ridge!”

“You heard him, fellas,” Stanton rasped, his throat sounding as dry as a file drawn across rusty iron. “We made it to the Cheyenne River. And that’s where Sheridan figures we’ll make contact with the red sons of a buck.”

At twilight atop the ridge Garnier pointed out the darker line of trees and willows and thick vegetation that indicated the banks of the Cheyenne below them, meandering its way across a wide valley where the troopers found water only in scanty pools trapped among the smooth rocks in the streambed. They paused only long enough to fill their canteens, then let the horses drink, the iron shoes clattering and scraping the rounded stones. This sorely parched country hadn’t received the blessing of rain for more than a month.

A mile beyond the Cheyenne, at the base of some low bluffs to the north, King and Garnier found a basin where enough grass grew to please the animals they picketed and hobbled for the night. There was ample wood for the coffee fires they buried in the ground as these veteran horse soldiers stretched their legs and lit their pipes in this stolen moment of relaxation in a horse soldier’s day. Keyes deployed a dozen men as pickets to surround the camp, assigning a rotation throughout the moonlit night. As darkness squeezed on down upon the Cheyenne River patrol, in the distance they couldn’t help but see the faraway glow of signal fires at five different points.

“They’re talking about us, aren’t they, Major?” King asked Stanton.

“Damn right they are. And those red-bellies’d jump us if they had the nerve.”

“They won’t: we’ve got pickets out,” Keyes said.

“It’s not us they’re afraid of particularly, Lieutenant,” Stanton replied. “Trust me—them sonsabitches know Carr and the rest aren’t far behind us. No sense in making the jump on us since they figure we can hold ’em off till the rest of the boys make it up.”

The lieutenant’s eyes began to droop, what with a bellyful of coffee, hardtack, and fried bacon, as well as his aching muscles screaming for rest after the long day’s march. A grin cracked his bristling, dust-caked face as his head sank back onto his McClellan, tugged the saddle blanket over his shoulders, and listened to the quiet, rinsedcrystal-clear tenor of one of the cavalrymen singing nearby at one of the tiny fires.

“The ring of a bridle, the stamp of a hoof,

Stars above and the wind in the tree;

A bush for a billet, a rock for a roof,

Outpost duty’s the duty for me.

Listen! A stir in the valley below—

The valley below is with riflemen crammed,

Cov’ring the column and watching the foe;

Trumpet-Major! Sound and be damned!”

King was just sliding down into that warm place where the exhausted can flee when the nearby gunshot cracked his sleeping shell.

In a heartbeat the entire bivouac came alive, men thrashing out of their blankets, others kicking sprays of dirt into the deep fire pits, some scurrying toward the patch of grass where they had their horses picketed. Above the rumble of curses and warnings, Keyes and Stanton barked orders and hollered their anxious questions at the perplexed sergeant of the guard.

Down in a crouch the old file halted halfway between bivouac and his outlying pickets, grumbling loudly from his hands and knees. “What chucklehead fired that goddamned shot?”

“I-I did sir,” piped the youthful answer from the darkness.

The sergeant asked, “That you, Sullivan?”

“Yes … yes,…. sir.”

“What’d you see, soldier?” Keyes demanded.

“Something … something was crawling right up out of that holler over there, Lieutenant,” the soldier answered his company commander. “So I challenged—and he didn’t answer—that’s when I fired.”

“Did you hit him, by damned?” the sergeant asked.

“I think so … ah, hell! I don’t know, Sarge.”

“There!” King said suddenly, rising off his knees.

The others studied the moonlit nearness of the hollow the hapless picket had been watching. There for one and all to see a four-legged intruder loped up the side of the coulee to the top of the plain, where he halted to survey the men below him with no little disdain. After a moment the night visitor turned away in indignation and disappeared over the hill, rump, tail, and all.

Climbing out of the dirt, the sergeant bawled at his picket, “You walleyed guttersnipe! Your own grandmother would have known that was nothing but a goddamned coyote!”

With that loud and definitive declaration, the bivouac erupted with laughter and good-natured backslapping that accompanied the crude jokes at picket Sullivan’s expense.

“Hey, Sully,” bawled a voice out of the darkness, “if it was two coyotes, would you advance the senior or the junior with the countersign, eh?”

On and on, back and forth the joking went for close to half an hour before the troopers settled back in for their night beside the Cheyenne River.

No more coyotes were to visit the company’s bivouac as the sky lights whirled overhead.

Then just past moonset—three o’clock, as King noted on his turnip pocket watch when the alarm went up— pickets on the lieutenant’s side of camp heard the distant passing of many hoofbeats as they faded into the distance.

That eerie echo of unshod pony hooves galloping north in the dark—headed safely around C Troop and making for the last great hunting ground of the Sioux and the Cheyenne.

*Near present-day Lusk, Wyoming.