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

Chapter 24

3 August 1876

Crook’s Plan of Operations

WASHINGTON, July 24—The following dispatch has been received by General Sherman: “The following dispatch from Gen. Crook is transmitted for your information. Gen. Merritt will reach Gen. Crook’s camp on August 1, with ten companies instead of eight as at first contemplated. Gen. Terry has moved his depot from north of Powder river to Big Horn, on the Rosebud, and has notified me of his intention to form a junction with Crook.

P. H. SHERIDAN

Lieut. General.

HEADQUARTERS, BIG HORN AND YELLOWSTONE EXPEDITION, CAMP ON GOOSE CREEK, WYOMING, July 18, via Fort Fetterman—To General Sheridan, Chicago: I send in a courier to-day to carry in duplicates of my dispatch to Gen. Merritt, for fear the originals may not have reached their destinations. I send a courier to General Terry to-night to inform him that I will cooperate with him, and where to find me; also, giving him what information I have in regard to the Indians. It is my intention to move out after the hostile tribes as soon as Merritt gets here with the Fifth. I shall not probably send in another courier until something special shall require me to do so. I am getting anxious about Merritt’s not reaching here, and the grass is getting very dry …

GEO. CROOK

Brigadier General

The plan of the campaign is to make a combined movement of three columns with Fort Ellis as a base. Two of the columns will move directly against the Indians, and one against their villages. General Sheridan will, according to the present plan, establish his headquarters in the field at some advantageous point on Goose creek, about forty miles northwest of Fort Phil Kearny, and near the scene of Crook’s battle on Rosebud. The force of these three columns will amount in the aggregate to between 4,000 and 5,000.

Two days after marching away from Laramie and crossing the North Platte River on the army’s new iron span, Bill Cody led the Fifth Cavalry to the mouth of LaPrele Creek, the site of Fort Fetterman, on the afternoon of 25 July.

Waiting there for Merritt was a mixture of strays and civilians, along with a handful of unattached officers who had been on leave or assigned duty at other posts when the news of the Custer disaster reached the outside world. Now they had raced to Wyoming Territory, eager to attach their fates with Crook’s column. Even a naval officer, Lieutenant William C. Hunter, presented himself to Colonel Merritt and, like the others, was allowed to accompany the Fifth Cavalry as a “volunteer.”

To Lieutenant Colonel Carr’s disgust, the regiment found a few newspapermen hanging about the post, waiting to march off to the Sioux War. A New York Times reporter named Talbot, along with an unlikely looking stringer for the Associated Press, and Barbour Lathrop writing for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, all had been waiting at Fetterman for Merritt’s reinforcements to arrive so they could complete their trip to join Crook’s Wyoming column.

Immediately crossing the Platte below the fort, Merritt and Carr established bivouac on the north side of the river, checked the post commander for any last-minute dispatches from Chicago, Omaha, or Laramie, then went about drawing any last-minute supplies depleted since leaving Fort Laramie two days before.

At eight o’clock the next morning, a Wednesday, those eight companies of the Fighting Fifth were pushing past Kid Slaymaker’s Hog Ranch, marching into the badlands of central Wyoming Territory, a country ablaze with sunlit clouds of alkali dust and sagebrush flats.

It was well past midnight two days later when Cody had the regiment camped and asleep in the rainy darkness beneath the bluffs along the North Fork of the Cheyenne. As if it were a dream, he thought he heard a distant bugle calling out of the cold, drizzling mist.

“Charlie!”

White strode over as Cody put the pistol he had been oiling back in its holster. “What you need, Bill?”

“Listen.”

For a few seconds they both strained to hear beyond the noise of camp, the whickering of their nearby mounts cropping at the good grass.

White asked, “That a bugle, Bill?”

“What I thought,” Cody replied. “Best you go alert Merritt.”

The colonel promptly had one of the company buglers go with Lieutenant Charles King and Cody to the high ground above the riverside camp, with orders to begin playing “Officers’ Call,” then wait a minute or two for a response, then play it again, repeatedly in that fashion until Cody could determine if it was an Indian ruse or not.

Even as he, White, the lieutenant, and the trumpeter were reaching the top of the bluff … there, faintly in the distance, Cody heard it again.

“Blow your horn,” he quietly ordered, his soft words adding all the more drama to the ominous moment.

A few heartbeats after the bugler’s last note had drifted out into the rainy darkness, Bill again made out the dim, sodden call from afar.

King said, “Sounds like it’s coming from the south.”

“It sure does. Give ’em another blow on that horn.”

Back and forth the trumpeters played the song that would summon all cavalry officers, while closer and closer that other horn came—until Cody thought he could just make out the dull glimmer of brass and bit and carbine below him in the rain-soaked darkness. He lumbered down the gummy slope to the sodden prairie below, stopping a few yards away from a group of officers at the head of a column of weary, wet troops.

“Is that you, Buffalo Bill?”

“It is!” he cheered back, relieved to hear a voice of someone who evidently knew who he was. “Who goes there?”

“By Jehovah—don’t you remember me, Bill? It’s George Price.”

“Captain Price? That really you?” Bill asked as he strode out of the gloom and right up to the men gathered beneath their rain-drenched guidon. “Damn, but it’s good to see you, Captain. Who the hell you got with you?”

“A battalion: my own E Troop, and I brought along Captain Payne’s F Company with me. Both of us racing all the way up from Cheyenne in a lightning march.”

“Seven days’ worth of march!” J. Scott Payne added.

“Whooo! That’s getting high-behind, fellas. We was hoping you’d reach us by Laramie. Then Merritt hoped you’d come in by the time we reached Fetterman.”

“Hell, Bill,” Payne replied, “the way you’ve had the boys covering ground, we’re lucky we caught up with you before you went and captured Sitting Bull!”

Price agreed, saying, “We’ve been pushing these men and horses pretty hard for a solid week just to get here— forced marches and all.”

“Merritt’s gonna be plumb happy to see you both, fellas!” Cody cheered. “C’mon—let’s get your men into camp where they can gather round a fire and get a hot cup of coffee down ’em.”

Two days and two long marches later the Fifth camped near the ruins of old Fort Reno on the Powder River. In the heat of the following day the snowcaps on those distant mountain peaks proved to be a seductive lure for the men. That first day of August, Cody led the ten companies of the Fifth Cavalry across Crazy Woman’s Fork and was closing on the Clear Fork just past one P.M. In the distance he sighted a few small herds of dark, shaggy buffalo, plain as paint against the verdant green of the nearby hills. Along with a small cadre of eager officers, Bill secured Merritt’s permission to make meat for the hungry column. As the buffalo were shot, skinned, and butchered by a detail of men selected from each company, the main body of the command marched on past the mirrored surface of Lake DeSmet, which lay in the midst of a basin of near-naked hills. That night in their bivouac made just south of the ruins of old Fort Phil Kearny, the men ate better than they had in weeks, and their stock had one of its last opportunities to take advantage of unequaled grazing.

“We ought to be getting near Crook’s camp, aren’t we, Bill?” Merritt asked after they had stuffed themselves on buffalo tenderloin.

“Real close, General. I could take a ride out tomorrow and likely reach the forks of Goose Creek by afternoon.”

Merritt shook his head. “I want to keep you with me, so we’ll choose someone else.” He looked over at White. “How about him, Bül?”

“Chips?” and he grinned. “Sure. He’ll find Crook’s camp with no problem.”

White stood, eager to please. “You want me to carry a message, maybeso a dispatch to Crook, General?”

“Yes. I’ll write it first thing in the morning and send it with you right after you’ve had breakfast. We’re going to let General Crook know to expect the Fifth for supper day after tomorrow.”

The general had been so excited when White had delivered Merritt’s note, absolutely buoyant to learn that the Fifth was only hours away, that on the following morning of August 3 he had his Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition strike camp and countermarch eighteen miles to the south along the foothills of the Big Horns so that they might unite with Merritt’s 535 officers and men that much sooner.

So it was that something on the order of a mile off Cody spotted horsemen, perhaps a dozen, no more. They weren’t Indians, that much was for sure, not the way they rode in a column of twos, with a couple of spare fellows off to the side. Scouts, he thought to himself. Behind them, as far as the eye could see, the horizon lay smudged with smoke. At times the smudge to the air was enough to sting the back of his tongue.

Halting at the top of the next rise, Bill turned in the saddle and took his hat from his head to wave to Merritt and Carr still a quarter mile behind him at the head of the column. Then he sat and waited. This would be as good a place as any, he decided. He stretched his back, pulling at some stiff muscles, and watched the riders move out of a walk into a ragged lope. They had spotted him. Some pointed in his direction.

God, is this ever pretty country, he thought to himself. Look at them peaks up there. Bet they never lose their snow, either. He felt thirsty immediately, hungering for a cup of that water straight out of those glacier fields, water so cold he remembered how it could set his teeth on edge.

Looking back at the riders, he could make out Charlie White now, riding off to the left of that bunch of soldiers with another civilian. A big man. A fella who rode his horse damned fine. One of Crook’s half-breeds, no doubt. Most white men simply couldn’t ride a horse that good. A few Bill had known in the past could, men like himself, born to the saddle. Friends like White and Texas Jack, like Bill Hickok and that Irishman he and Wild Bill had scouted with for Carr back in the winter of sixty-eight and sixtynine.

The remembrance made him think of Samantha and her letter, then made him squint his eyes and study the distant figures. Maybeso.

The officer up front tore the hat from his head and waved it at Cody. It was Royall. By damn, that was Royall! Smiling, Bill sat up straighter in the saddle. The major who had been with the Fifth when it defeated Tall Bull at Summit Springs was now a lieutenant colonel with the Third. How grand it would be to see him again in a few more minutes.

One last time he turned in the saddle and saw the headquarters group coming on at a gallop, Merritt and Carr beneath the snapping of their regimental standard and the general’s own flag. They had seen the riders coming out to greet them.

By the time Cody turned back around, he saw the two civilians suddenly kick their horses in the flanks, watched as White put his quirt to work front and back to squeeze more speed out of his dapple. Both of the horsemen leaned forward like men accustomed to wrenching every last drop of effort out of those magnificent animals.

Yes, that man racing White up the slope was one of a kind. The tall boots and loose, grimy, collarless shirt, with long hair spilling over his shoulders, hair streaming out with the wind beneath his wide-brimmed hat. White’s was blond, every bit as light as Custer’s before he lost his on the Little Bighorn. But that stranger’s—now that was brown, pretty much like Cody’s. But the way it caught the light, maybeso it had some blond in it. That, or the man was starting to gray.

From here he simply couldn’t tell for sure, not the way the two riders sprinted up that last long grassy slope toward him, closing on the last fifty yards. Not the way the horse men laid so low along the lunging necks of their animals, hunkered down on the withers and whipping manes.

They both shot past Cody, swooping by on either side of him with a rush of wind and hammer of hooves, yelling out to him, to one another, to their horses, laughing as they sawed their mounts around in that belly-high grass. In that grand circle the stranger whipped his hat off his head and slapped White on the back with it.

“By the blood of the Virgin Mary!” the big man bellowed with a voice that made Cody’s heart seize in his throat. “It sure is good to see you’ve fared well, Buffalo Bill!”

“Seamus,” he whispered, able to get nothing more past his tongue for the moment.

Then Cody kicked his right leg over his saddle and dropped to the ground, bolting off at a dead run to meet the tall gray-eyed Irishman there on that hilltop as the sun began its fall toward the purple bulk of the Big Horns.

“Seamus Donegan! Damn, it is you!”

He dropped to the ground, yelling, “Come here and give your old partner a big hug, Bill Cody!”

They embraced and jumped, slapped and cried, then hugged some more, both of them babbling like schoolgirls on the annual spring picnic.

“Charlie, you know that Buffalo Bill here,” Seamus said, his arm looped over Cody’s shoulders as he turned to speak to White, who held the reins to their three horses, “he saved my life once.”

“In a goddamned shitter, it was!” Cody choked, laughing so hard.

“In a sh-shitter?” White asked, wagging his head in disbelief.

“Damn right,” Donegan said, nearly lifting Cody off the ground with that arm he had locked around Bill’s shoulder like a singletree.

Cody gazed at his old friend, saying, “Never have I regretted a minute of the time we had together, Seamus.”

“Listen,” Donegan said to White, his voice thick with emotion, “we’ll have to tell Chips here about the time we tracked some horse thieves all the way to the Elephant Corral in Denver City for Major Carr.”

“Major Carr?” Cody snorted. “I’ll have you know he’s our lieutenant colonel now!”

Donegan turned to face Cody, securing Bill’s shoulders in both his hands. “And just look at you, Bill—damn, but there’s nothing like seeing old friends again.”

The Irishman drew him into a sudden and fierce embrace that Bill was sure was going to crush his ribs, and when Donegan let him go, he remembered.

“Damn you! Don’t go and squash my surprise! Here I brought something for you all the way from Laramie—”

“Laramie?”

“—carrying it careful as a fudge pie so I could hand it over to you just like it was handed to me,” Bill said, reaching inside the flap of his shirt, where he had carried that perfumed letter between it and his longhandle underwear for the last dozen days.

“For me?” Donegan asked in a whisper as Cody brought out the folded pages.

“You know someone at Fort Laramie, don’t you?”

“Sam? Samantha?”

Bill nodded as White leaned forward to get a look for himself. Cody handed the letter over to the misty-eyed Irishman.

“You met … Sam?”

“Ah, a lovely one you’ve got there, Seamus! And she’s carrying your first, she tells me.”

He watched Donegan swallow hard and swipe at a tear that just began to track down his dusty cheek. “Yes,” he said so quietly Bill knew it was really a sob. “Our f-firstborn.”

“She says it’s going to be a boy, Seamus.”

Donegan nodded. “Sam told me the same thing.”

Bill leaned in as if confiding a secret. “Listen, I’ve had experience with these things, you know—what with Lulu and me having three of our own … and, well—you just better learn to trust them women when it comes to such things.”

“Ah, damn!” Donegan said after dragging the letter under his nose. “I was hoping she had perfumed it with some of that lilac water she uses.”

Confused, Bill’s brow crinkled. “She did. Don’t it smell like her good perfume now?”

“The bloody hell it doesn’t!” Donegan roared. “Smells just like Bill Cody smeared his mule sweat all over my wife’s love letter to me!”