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

Chapter 47

11-12 September 1876

To the Irishman those jagged peaks on the near horizon were like a lodestone, mysteriously pulling Mills’s men ever toward them like iron fillings.

Magnetically.

Irresistibly.

They had reached the Black Hills.

But it hadn’t been all that easy.

After leaving the main column behind on Owl Creek that Monday morning of the eleventh, Captain Anson Mills had insisted that the scouts follow the dictates of his compass as they headed a little west of south. From time to time as the fog and mist lifted, they were able to spot Inyan Kara Mountain rising in the distance, its summit and most of its slopes shrouded in a tumble of gray thunderheads. After no more than a few moments the mountain disappeared once more, and they were again swallowed by the vastness of that monotonous, monochrome inland sea.

Just before nine, Frank Grouard signaled a halt and dropped off his horse to examine the fresh trail they had crossed. Then he squinted into the sky, as if he were trying to get his bearings. Turning now to his right, he asked Mills, “What direction is that?”

Seeing where the half-breed pointed, the officer consulted the compass he held in his rain-soaked glove and pronounced, “South. It’s south, where we’re headed.”

Grouard shook his head and turned back to stand beside the captain’s mount. “No. It’s north. You’ve got us marching north.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” Mills screeched.

“I got a bad feeling Frank’s right,” Donegan agreed.

The captain glared at Seamus. “One of your gut hunches again, Irishman?”

“Might say.”

Mills whirled back to stare at Grouard. “Just what makes you so certain that my compass is wrong?”

“This trail,” and Frank pointed down at the muddy tracks. “That ain’t no Injun trail. It’s ours.”

“W-why … in heaven’s name it can’t be our trail,” Mills exclaimed, his eyes darkening with suspicion.

“It is. I’m certain. I just spotted the tracks of that cow-hocked pony Lieutenant Bubb there is riding.”

With his compass held out before him in a trembling hand, Mills declared, “There’s no way this compass can be wrong. Without landmarks to go by in this nasty weather, Grouard—I think you’re proving yourself of little use. So this command will stick by the compass. It will take us to Crook City and Deadwood.” Turning to Lieutenant George F. Chase, Mills ordered, “Let’s move them out.”

Wagging his head, Grouard mounted up and eased his pony to the side so that he rode by Donegan at the end of the column. This was something new for the two of them. Usually they were in the front, far in the lead. But now Mills had his compass doing the scouting, doing the guiding for them all.

Both of them shook their heads as the compass took them circling back to the north a second time.

It was nigh onto midmorning when Grouard wanted to stop again. “Colonel!” he shouted, halting and dropping onto the flooded prairie. “You better come take a look at this.”

“Halt!” Mills growled as his patrol stopped and he wrenched his horse around savagely to approach the half-breed and Irishman. “What is it now, Grouard!”

Lieutenant Chase took out his big turnip watch and held it out of the rain as he opened it. “Colonel—it’s ten-thirty. If we’re going to cover more than forty miles today, we can’t keep stopping.”

Mills rose in his stirrups, glaring at the two scouts. “Why have you stopped us this time?”

“We just crossed our trail again, Colonel,” Donegan said, his arm pointing off to the southeast.

“Dammit! Are you and Grouard here disputing this compass again?”

With a nod Seamus said, “I suppose that’s it.”

Now Jack Crawford spoke up. “We should have crossed Willow creek by now, Cap’n. I know the country where we’re heading, but this ground just don’t feel right.”

“It’s merely the weather,” the captain argued impatiently, “and none of you can pick out the normal landmarks. That’s why it pays to rely on a compass.”

Dropping into the mud, Seamus slogged off about twenty feet while the soldiers grumbled behind him. At a small outcropping of red-hued rock, he kicked again and again with the heel of his battered boot, careful not to tear the buckskin he had used in a field repair to lash the sole to the upper vamp. Eventually he knocked loose a chunk of the blood-tinged stone and slogged back to Mills.

“Hold your compass out, Colonel,” Seamus demanded.

“Why, what for?”

“Just hold it out, and I’ll prove something to all of you.”

Bewildered, Mills held out the compass in the palm of his wet gauntlet as the rain continued to patter on its glassy face.

“Now,” Donegan instructed, “watch what happens.”

As Seamus slowly moved the red stone around the compass in a clockwise motion, the needle followed as obediently as a child’s pull toy on a string.

“In heaven’s name!” gasped Lieutenant Chase.

Incredulous, Mills asked, “W-what does this mean, Irishman?”

Seamus lowered his stone. “It means Frank and me been right all along. We ain’t been headed where we need to go. South ain’t there,” and he pointed. “Crook City and Deadwood and all the rest of them settlements are over that way.”

As a whole those seventy-odd men turned in their saddles.

“Behind us?” Mills asked, still not believing.

“Absolutely right, Colonel,” Crawford exclaimed.

“How?” Mills demanded testily.

“These rocks, Colonel,” Seamus explained. “This ground’s filthy with ’em. They been pulling your compass off all morning. Making us go in circles.”

“Two big circles already,” Grouard repeated.

“That’s right,” Donegan added. “Just what I suspected: we’ve gone and crossed our own trail for a second time.”

Mills could only stare at his compass, slowly wagging his head. “I don’t believe it. Why, we’ll be lost without this compass.”

Donegan stepped right up to the officer’s horse. “Colonel, we’ve damn well been lost by using it! Now, why don’t you just put that compass back in your saddlebags and let this patrol get on down the trail to the settlements?”

Disgustedly, the captain yanked up on the flap behind his McClellan saddle and dropped the brass compass into its depths. “Lead on, gentlemen. Now it’s your turn to show us how you’re better than a compass.”

As Donegan swung into the saddle atop that buckskin pony, he reminded the officer, “Colonel Mills, don’t you remember who led our attack column through the dark and a howling blizzard one miserable cold night last winter? Don’t you remember who was it led us to a spot right over that enemy village on the Powder River, just before daylight—doing all of his guiding in the slap-dark of a snowstorm?”*

For a moment Mills looked at the half-breed, then nodded as he turned to Lieutenant Chase. “It was Grouard here. Very well, Mr. Donegan. You’ve made your point. Mr. Chase, lead the men out.”

It was pushing noon when Frank, Donegan, and Crawford stopped the patrol again and dropped to the ground. Leading their horses off to the left about twenty yards, they knelt. Seamus stuffed his right hand into his left armpit to tear off his leather glove. With his bare hand he picked up the pony dung.

“Still warm and steamy, Frank.”

They arose together as Seamus wiped the hand off on his wet britches and jammed it back into the glove.

“Can’t be ahead,” Grouard explained to Captain Mills moments later.

“Headed east?” he asked.

“More a little east of south,” Donegan replied. “Almost the same direction we’re aiming to go.”

“Damn,” Mills growled. He sighed, looked back over his short column of twos, then waved Chase close. “Lieutenant—you’re to divide off half of the men.”

“Separate sir?”

“Yes, I believe it’s best that we split up here. Take Crawford with you. He says he knows the Hills.”

Mills then went on to explain that if they should encounter a sizable war party, he wanted one group or the other to be sure to reach the settlements and secure aid for Crook’s ailing column.

Minutes later Donegan watched the lieutenant lead some thirty men away, pointing their noses for Bear Butte as the wind came up and the rain washed over them in gusting sheets.

“Pay heed where you see them going,” Mills instructed Seamus.

He turned to the officer to ask, “Why, Colonel?”

“There may come a time when I will need to have Chase rejoin us. And I’ll need one of my scouts to have a damned good idea where he can find them.”

Through the afternoon and into the murky light of dusk, Mills pushed them relentlessly as the ground below them slowly changed from grass and cactus to grass and sage, becoming grass and cedar just before hillsides loomed out of the fog before them, gentle slopes carpeted with the dark, verdant stands of pine and fir.

They had crossed the wide, clear waters of the Belle Fourche.

Was it only his imagination? Seamus wondered as he shivered with cold, with excitement, with anticipation. Or had they really reached the Black Hills? Drawn by some unseen force, were they really there? How he wanted to believe they had been plucked out of the wilderness perhaps by nothing less than the hand of God itself.

“That’s the Whitewood!” Grouard cheered to the soldiers as he halted them at the northern bank of a narrow creek.

“Where will it take us?” Mills asked.

The half-breed turned on the captain, grinning, “Why—to Crook City. Crawford said once we get here, it can’t be more’n a handful of miles now. And Deadwood’s only ten miles beyond it.”

A couple of hours after dark they reached Crook City, a ragged column of miserable men on captured Sioux ponies. Except for the disciplined order Mills kept in his ranks as they plodded slowly down the center of that stinking, mud-daubed mining settlement, the patrol would have looked like any band of brigands, freebooters, or borderland raiders. One by one and in small knots, miners and bummers pressed against the grimy windowpanes to peer at the column passing by, or poured from the doorways of saloons and watering holes, from the clapboard and falsefronted shops and hotels, pushing aside tent flaps and stepping out into the rainy night to take themselves a good, long gander at what had just marched out of the Dakota wilderness.

“Who the hell are you fellas?” someone asked from a shadow as the captain halted his rough lot of men in a cordon on both sides of the rutted thoroughfare and prepared to dismount.

“Colonel Anson Mills, Third U.S. Cavalry. Attached to the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition under Brigadier General George C. Crook. I’ve brought the general’s commissary officer with me to secure provisions for his troops.”

Another voice from the far side of the street demanded, “Where’s Crook?”

“Yeah,” someone said, stepping into dim lamplight. “Crook hisself with ya?”

“No. Forty miles, maybe less behind us now,” Mills replied, exhaustion written on every word. “Two thousand men with him. We’ve been eating horse and mule for two weeks now.”

“Well, now,” a new voice called out, and a large, rotund man stepped out of the shadows of an awning and clomped through the mud to reach the captain’s side. “I figure you’ve come to the right place, Colonel Mills. This here town is named after the general. And we’re pleased as hell to have the army’s protection, we are.”

Then the first one of them bellowed out a cheer. And suddenly from both sides of the street the civilians pressed in, tearing their hats from their heads, throwing them into the air, shouting, screaming, whistling, and hooting in sheer joy. The Indian ponies fought their bits, and some attempted to rear, but the crowds latched on to them and held them in the center of that muddy, rutted street while everyone shook hands and laughed, and many of the soldiers couldn’t help but cry.

Finally Seamus thought to ask those who stood as close to him as ticks on a buffalo’s hide, “Does any man here know where I might get myself a good beefsteak? And a baked potato? And a bottle of whiskey what won’t soap my tonsils when I pour it down?”

The Irishman was finishing his fifth cup of steaming coffee and was just about ready to pour his first double shot of whiskey when Anson Mills came up and settled in the rickety chair at Donegan’s table in a saloon still fragrant with freshly-sawed lumber. The captain put his hand over the top of the shot glass.

“I’ll leave you to have off at one drink, Irishman.”

“Why, Colonel—I’ve waited a long time to drink my fill. Ever since Fetterman, it’s been.”

“I know you have. But you’ve filled your belly with just what it should have for the work at hand: warm food, good food, and strong, rich coffee too. So, now, before you drink any more than that one glass I’ll leave you have—I want you to remember I’ve still got men out there. Soldiers in that wilderness.”

“Lieutenant Chase,” Donegan replied, suddenly realizing as he stared at the whiskey in the glass held underneath the captain’s open palm.

“I fear they might have been chewed up by some war party, Irishman.”

Donegan nodded, then licked his lips and let his eyes climb up to the officer’s face. “My one drink of this blessed piss-hole whiskey, Captain?”

Reluctantly, Mills removed his hand, gently pushing the glass toward the scout. “Surely. If that’s what you choose to do is drink the rest of the night while I and Lieutenant Bubb procure Crook’s supplies—I can’t stop you. We’ve all been under extreme privation … so I will try to understand.”

Sweeping the two sides of his unkempt, bushy mustache aside with a grimy finger, Donegan licked his lips, staring at the delicate amber color in the smoky glass. Then as he closed his eyes, he gently poured the whiskey on his tongue and slowly tilted his head back, savoring the sweet sting it brought to his throat as the whiskey coursed its warm track all the way down his gullet.

Then he lowered his chin and opened his eyes, licking the last drops of whiskey from his lips and mustache. Rising from the table, he swept his shapeless sombrero from the empty chair beside him and planted it on his head, snugging up the wind-string below his beard.

Gazing down at the captain, Seamus pulled on his heavy coat, still damp. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cigar, would you, Colonel?”

“Why … no, I wouldn’t.”

“Here, mister,” said a civilian who rushed forward with a half dozen clutched in his hand. “Take what you want and I’ll put it on your tab.”

Seizing the long, fragrant, rum-soaked cheroots, each one as thick as his own thumb, Donegan replied, “Thank you, sir. You do that.”

Gently inserting the precious smokes within the security of an inside pocket, Donegan dragged his leather gloves from the coat’s pockets and turned back to Mills, saying, “If you’ll be good enough to pay the six bits I owe the proprietor here, Colonel—and whatever else he’s gonna charge for these cigars, I’d be grateful, I.surely would. You see”—he leaned forward and whispered then—“I’m a little short for the moment.”

“S-short?”

Grinning, he pulled on his gloves and said, “It’s been some months since the army’s paid me, which means I ain’t had me any army scrip in my pocket for quite some time. So, Colonel—I’ll let you pay for the meal, my cigars, and that one drink of whiskey. It appears I’ve still got some more scouting to do for you tonight.”

Long after Robert Strahorn left with Mills that morning, the fog remained so thick the captain repeatedly put his compass to use, keeping Grouard leading them a little west of south.

Near late morning they stumbled across a trail of lodgepoles and pony tracks in the mud so fresh that Donegan and the half-breed found horse droppings still steaming in the frosty air. At once Mills grew alarmed.

“Lieutenant Chase,” the captain called. “You’re to divide off half the men.”

“Separate, sir?”

“Yes,” Mills replied, looking off into the murky distance where the enemy’s muddy trail led. “I want to be sure some of us reach the mining towns—someone brings supplies back to the column.”

Chase straightened in the saddle. “Where do you want me to go, Colonel?”

“You’re going to be my ace in the hole, Mr. Chase. I want you to take half of the men with you and ride south by east, ready to keep on moving around the foot of the Black Hills if I’m attacked and can’t complete my mission.”

“East of the Black Hills,” Chase repeated. “And then where?”

“On to Camp Robinson. Get word there that … that the rest of us have been overwhelmed by the Sioux.”

In minutes Mills had his men split in half and Chase was on his way, accompanied by scout Jack Crawford and Denver’s Rocky Mountain News correspondent. Reuben Davenport would remain with Mills and Lieutenant Bubb, their patrol led by Grouard and Donegan.

Chase led them away from Mills late that morning, and by dark his patrol had nowhere better than the lee of some rocks to take shelter in for the long, miserable night.

The following morning they were up and moving before dawn, crossing many small trails of bands headed in to the agencies. That second afternoon dragged on as the compass led Chase and thirty men through the rainy mist that lifted only when dusk began to settle upon the endless prairie. A quarter mile behind them a suckling colt gamely followed a brood mare one of the troopers was riding. Even when darkness fell quickly, the lieutenant refused to give up the march until the night became so black that they could no longer use the compass and landmarks, much less any stars in the overcast sky above. Finally running across a secluded stand of trees nestled at the base of a hill, with a nearby patch of grass, where they picketed their horses to graze, Chase relented to the complaints of his shivering and hungry men—allowing them to build a small fire they kindled at the bottom of a shallow pit.

As the soldiers chewed on a few scanty strips of dried pony meat they had packed along in their saddlebags since morning, the lieutenant and Crawford discussed what they would do if a wandering war party should discover and attack their patrol. Each of the troopers was to have a specific place to go in order for the outfit to make its best defense. Then out of the darkness appeared the suckling colt, which scared the devil out of the men, and elicited a maternal nicker from the mare.

An old sergeant said, “Cap’n, I sure do think that colt’d taste a lot better’n this here cold jerky.”

Chase shook his head. “No. I want you all to understand I’m against killing the animal—better for us to let him tag along in case we need him for a real emergency.”

Back and forth they debated it while chewing on their dried meat until the idea became a bit more reasonable to the lieutenant, and he relented to having their fresh meat then and there. No sooner had Chase agreed when a tall, strapping soldier leaped to his feet, seized the young colt around the neck, and slashed its throat in that ring of firelight.

A quarter of an hour later the men were roasting thin slivers of the meat and wolfing it down all but raw.

Supper was gone when they heard a horse coming through the trees and nearby brush.

“God-damtt,” one of them rasped in a whisper as they all rushed for their chosen positions.

On his belly Crawford quickly scooped some muddy soil into the pit, extinguishing their fire. Nearby Strahorn’s heart pounded just the way it had last winter when they had found themselves pinned down in that Powder River village. Once more he had thrown in with men ready to sell their lives at a great cost that cold night.

“You boys aren’t going to shoot a white man, now, will you?”

Strahorn’s ears pricked. Rising to one knee, he hollered out to the darkness, “That you, Irishman?”

“Bob Strahorn? You bet it’s me, Seamus!” the voice called back from the gloom. “Call off the guards and ease them hammers back down.”

In less than two minutes Donegan was dismounted and stood in their midst, telling them, “Mills sent me to fetch you and your men, Lieutenant.”

Chase asked anxiously, “Where is he now, Irishman?”

“Why, just past seven this evening—we rode into Crook City.”

Strahorn leaned in close to the scout’s face and sniffed for himself. He was smiling when he leaned back. “Is that what I think it is on your breath, Irishman?”

“If you mean whiskey—by the saints it sure as hell is!”

Bob almost wanted to cry as he wrapped his arms around the tall Irishman and hugged. Then he drew back and looked into Donegan’s merry eyes.

“All right, you big goddamned leprechaun—how ’bout you taking me to the closest place you know where I can buy you a drink!”

^* The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 8, Blood Song.