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

Chapter 48

13 September 1876

It came as a real blessing when Crook didn’t prod them out of their blankets early that Wednesday morning. In fact, they languished in camp until noon as those boneweary men who had any strength left helped the engineering officers corduroy the north and south banks of Willow Creek in preparation of fording the stream.

But while the soldiers labored, even as those who had collapsed up and down the creekbank finally straggled in to join the others around the smoky fires—every man kept his eager, expectant, hopeful eyes trained on that country to the south.

“I will look unto the hills,” Charles King murmured as he waded in the chilling, waist-deep water of the creek and dropped another log near those soldiers who were filling in the corduroy of steps. “Yes, I will look unto the hills from whence my help comes.”

He closed his eyes and blinked away the tears, remembering that little church back home, and how he and the rest of the children had sat on the floor around one of the lay people each Sunday morning and learned scripture by rote. Psalm by psalm. Hope by hope. Prayer by prayer.

How many times had he asked God to end the rain? And still it fell. Even until this morning. If the Lord kept this up, Crook’s army would have to be about building an ark instead of laying down a corduroy to cross swollen streams.

Merritt himself had asked King to take charge of the work. “Go down to the creek and put the ford into shape,” the colonel had requested. “You will find some fifty infantrymen reporting for duty.”

The men were there—all fifty of them—but no more than a dozen of them were fit to do anything other than sit on the banks of that muddy stream. Those who did have any strength left would have to complete their job without tools. They had been hewing down the saplings and trimming branches with their belt knives. Each man lugged armloads of these into the rushing current, then plunged them under the water, attempting to anchor them any way they could to the shifting stream bottom.

Finally at noon King reported to Merritt and Crook.

“I’ve done my best, General. We’ve done our best.”

Merritt nodded. “I’m sure you have. All of you.”

Crook stood to bellow at his officers. “Let’s get this column across the creek!”

The general was the very first to try the ford. Twice his weary horse slipped, almost spilling Crook into the water. But in a moment more the old soldier was across the stream and on the south bank, waving the rest on as his mount stood there shivering, dripping, head hung in exhaustion.

It took more than two hours for the expedition to clamber across that shifting ford—down one corduroy, into the deep water, then up the far bank. First infantry, followed by the travois and litters, with several handlers posted on either side of every wounded man. Then came the dismounted troopers, and finally what was left of Crook’s cavalry brought up the rear. Just past two P.M. they marched away from the Willow, making for the Belle Fourche little more than a handful of miles away.

Nonetheless, it took them another two hours to reach that wide, clear-running stream fed by the snows of the nearby Black Hills. Although the banks were muddy, they weren’t steep, and the bottom appeared rocky and solid. No engineering required here. Crook waved his hat to spur them on and was the first into the Belle Fourche. Again the infantry formed an escort for Clements’s wounded in crossing the rapid stream. Then the dismounted cavalry clustered around their own mounted companies, moving into the water clinging to a horse’s tail or latching on to a comrade’s stirrup as the animals pulled them to the south bank.

And when they reached the far shore, emerging from the icy cold, the saddles were taken off and the horses picketed on the lush green grass of these prairie highlands. Great fires were started. As some men stood warming themselves right there in their steamy clothing, others stripped off everything and rubbed their purple flesh until it turned rosy.

They had reached the Belle Fourche. Here, if not before, Mills was to meet them. Just gazing at that southern bank of the river made King proud: these two thousand ragged men who appeared to be more a great motley band of ruffians and unkempt scoundrels than what had once been the greatest army ever to take the field on the frontier—they had torn horse meat raw from the bone, and every one of them had a mouthful of teeth loosened with scurvy—they hadn’t shaved or bathed in weeks—and not one of them had enjoyed a change of clothing in months. What they had on their bony frames hung in faded tatters. While their faces might be liver-colored with weeks of unending fatigue, their eyes nonetheless glowed with hope.

As if in answer to that hope, a lone trooper rode in from the south not much more than an hour after their arrival on the Belle Fourche—carrying word from Mills that he and Bubb were on their way back! With a herd of beef and thirteen wagons!

For the ancient Hebrews crossing the wilderness who had their prayers answered when the stones turned to manna—it could be no greater an expectation than this!

So it was that many of the soldiers moved up the slopes of the surrounding hills, where they would keep watch to the south and speculate on what Lieutenant Bubb might bring them to break their horse-meat fast.

“There!”

A hundred men turned, followed in an instant by five hundred more leaping to their feet along the riverbank below. Then another thousand. Those who could wearily trudged up the slopes as fast as their played-out legs could carry them, their sunken, skeletal eyes wide with expectation as they strained to peer into the distance.

Yes! There! Coming out of the mouth of that canyon!

Cattle?

Dear God! Fifty head of them!

Lumbering down the slopes of the grassy hills, urged on by Mills’s wranglers. Charles could almost hear those far-off cavalrymen whistle and shout as they drove the beeves down to that camp beside the Belle Fourche.

And—look there! What’s that coming no more than a mile behind them?

Wagons!

Clean white canvas stretched taut over the swell of those wrought-iron bows.

Merciful Lord in heaven—wagons!

“Rations coming!” someone shouted.

Then they were all shouting, throwing their hats into the air with abandon. Embracing and dancing, around and around and around, arm in arm. Hugging and crying, laughing and pounding one another on the back like schoolboys at Mayday recess.

Charles rubbed that old Arizona arrow wound, wondering if Bubb might just have some horse liniment or a drawing salve. Knowing once more the power of prayer. Sensing again the presence of his God.

A God who hadn’t lifted him from the jaws of death in Apache country only to let him die in the rain, and the cold, and the mud of this Sioux wilderness.

Then, as if to give a benediction to all their most fervent prayers, patches of blue suddenly appeared overhead as the rain clouds rumbled on past, leaving the sun behind to shine for those last two hours of a grand, grand day.

They had been delivered.

Since leaving Camp Cloud Peak on Goose Creek, Crook’s army had suffered twenty-two days of rain, storms of great severity. In the three weeks since leaving General Alfred Terry on the Yellowstone, they had suffered seven days of a “horse-meat march.”

But now Seamus was riding down that last long, grassy slope toward the Belle Fourche beside the lead wagon. Twelve more followed, all double-teamed because of the immense weight Lieutenant Bubb had packed in each one, provisions piled right up past the sidewalls, straining against the tailgates.

He had never seen anything like it: the way these men rushed up the slopes toward the beef herd, scattering the cattle. Every trooper yanked out his pistol, every foot soldier pulled free his belt knife, ready to do in those fifty frightened cows right there and then. For a moment Donegan thought a half-dozen soldiers were going to tackle one of the beeves, hamstring the animal, and butcher it right there on the hillside what with the way they all clung to its horns and back and tail, dragging it on down, as it snorted and protested, toward the flashing blue waters of that pretty, pretty river while the sun fell out of the clouds at long, long last.

“Hurrah for old Crook!” they raised the cheer.

Days before—even as little as hours, so it seemed— these soldiers had been clamoring to hang the general. A mutinous rabble ready to string up the man who had brought them such ruin.

But now these same men exalted some two thousand strong as they poured out of that bivouac like a mighty throng, suddenly rejuvenated—willing once more to follow their leader into the jaws of hell.

Seamus couldn’t have scraped the grin off his face if he’d wanted to. Especially when the soldiers clambered onto the first wagon even before it could come to a halt. Then the second and all the rest, men leaping beneath the canvas covers, cheering and drowning out the shouts of warning and orders from their officers. Against the sturdy sidewalls of all thirteen of those wagons the men shoved and jostled, nearly tipping over a few of the freighters in the melee while those soldiers inside began tossing out crates of hard bread, cookies and crackers, chests of salt pork along with tins of vegetables and fruits the men stabbed open with their field knives, drinking the juices before bending back the metal lids to spear out the precious fruit or sweet tomatoes.

“Huzzah for Colonel Mills! Huzzah! Huzzah!”

But Captain Anson Mills wasn’t there to take his bow.

Instead of returning with the wagons, he had elected to stay behind in Crook City, begging off from making the return trip due to his severe fatigue and the privations suffered in one long battle with the Sioux, and in both punishing journeys to the Black Hills settlements. This afternoon Lieutenant Bubb led the rescue back from Deadwood.

From wagon to wagon the quartermaster pushed his weary horse through the shoving, elbowing, senseless crowd, hollering out his orders on how he wanted the food dispersed. Seamus had to laugh—for not one of them was listening to any courteous order from their commissary officer now. No longer were they forced to take only what he dispersed among them in the way of the butchered horses, mules, or ponies.

Now they were only eating. Eating everything in sight.

Near the tailgate of the third wagon he saw Charles King shoved side to side in the melee as soldiers hurled boxes and cases and tins of food high into the air, where the crowd lunged and scrambled for it all. Fistfights broke out as men struggled over every morsel.

Then suddenly King dropped into the mud, and when Seamus saw him come up, the lieutenant had three muddy ginger snaps he hurriedly brushed off with his dirty hands, then stuffed right into his mouth. He chewed that dirty treat with no less relish than James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald would in dining on fine caviar at Delmonico’s.

Every last one of those men were eating as if there were no tomorrow, as if they might not see another meal. After what they had been through, Seamus thought, who could blame them for not giving a damn about that next meal, that next day, that next march and campaign!

“Tobacco!” a soldier announced from a wagon back down the line.

For a moment it appeared all two thousand of the men were going to swamp that single freighter.

“Lordee! We got tobacco at last!”

Already half of the beeves were down in the grass, their throats slit, the precious, thick crimson pouring out in glistening puddles over that lush carpet of green as the men put their knives to work in quickly butchering before they would waddle over to the roaring bonfires laden with great gobs of warm meat spilling across their bloody arms.

Damn, even the worst cut of beefsteak had to taste better than the very best scab-backed, worn-down, bone-rack, and worm-bait horse!

Within minutes some of the men who had snatched eighty-pound sacks of flour had begun mixing up sugar and eggs into batter when they realized they had no skillets. In a heartbeat an enterprising soldier cried out that they could melt the solder joints securing the two halves of their canteens and use them both for small skillets. It was quickly done by hundreds, and soon they brought their roasting pans to a sizzle and were turning flapjacks to a golden brown as men crowded and shoved, snatching the fluffy cakes from the iron spatulas as soon as they were pulled from the coals.

At every fire sat a ring of huge gallon coffeepots, and around them sat an ever bigger ring of expectant men, soldiers and civilians alike waiting for their first cup of real coffee in more long, cold days and nights than any man should have to remember.

Only the surgeons ate sparingly, advising all within hearing distance to do the same—but no one listened. So Clements and Patzki and McGillycuddy just shook their heads, knowing that come morning they would be crushed beneath the weight of a thousand gastric complaints.

And when the hundreds had eaten their fill and were drinking what had to be the best cup of coffee in their lives, the pipes were lit and cigarettes rolled, maybe even an extra quid or two stuffed back into their cheeks, once more given the luxury of wrapping themselves in warm dry blankets for the first time in more than a week while the sun settled beyond the far side of Inyan Kara Mountain.

In a matter of minutes these pitiful, starving wretches reduced to the utter brink of savagery, these crude, uncivilized captives of the wilderness, were soldiers once more. No longer did they stand teetering at the threshold of death’s door. Once again these were men who joked, and laughed, and talked at long last of the future.

For now there was a future.

“Seamus.”

Donegan turned to find Lieutenant Bourke at his shoulder. Taking the beef rib from his greasy lips, he said, “Johnny! Come—share some of our feast with us!”

Patting his stomach, Bourke smiled and replied, “Thanks, but no. I’ve had quite enough for now. I’m come to fetch you. The general would like to talk with you.”

He rose while sucking the juices from his fingers, then licked the ends of his mustache with a flick of his tongue. “What’s Crook want with me now?”

“Now that Grouard and Crawford are both gone on south carrying dispatches and reporters’ stories, you’re the only one he can ask.”

Suspicious, Seamus came to an abrupt halt. “I don’t like the sound of this, Johnny boy. Give me the whole of it, and now.”

“Crook is frightened about all that ammunition we had to abandon off the mules and horses.”

“Yes?”

“He’s sending back a detail of the Fifth Cavalry to retrieve it.”

He nodded warily. “So he figures to send a scout with those troops, eh?”

Crook had devised his plan: Seamus, an officer, and thirty picked troopers on the regiment’s strongest horses. A journey of more than seventy miles in all, round trip. Sure as hell didn’t sound like a Sunday walk in the park—what with the certain likelihood of hundreds of warriors still dogging the army’s backtrail, hoping to pick up all the horses and plunder Three Stars’s soldiers had abandoned.

“When does the old boy want us to leave?” Donegan asked.

“The general inquires to see if you could be ready to go inside an hour.”