Cry of the Hawk

2

Early Spring, 1865

IT HADN’T ALWAYS been this cold. Nor had it always taken so long for the morning sun to drive the chill from his marrow.

But for a man with fifty-four winters behind him, come morning Shadrach Sweete moved a touch bit slower, shedding himself of the thick buffalo-hide sleeping robes, than he had when first he came to the mountains with General William H. Ashley back in 1825.

A big bull-sized kid whose immense size belied his youth back then, Shad Sweete had parlayed that muscle into a spot among Ashley’s One Hundred. Across the next few years that quickly wore the green off his novice hide, Sweete trapped elbow to elbow in the mountain streams with the likes of Jim Bridger, Davey Jackson, mulattos Jim Beckwith and Edward Rose, Billy Sublette, Joe Meek, and all the rest who went on to have their names given to rivers, creeks, passes, and mountain peaks.

Yet among them in those early years Shad Sweete had stood out, and stood out did he still. Six and one-half feet tall and nudging something shy of three hundred pounds, he was the sort who more readily blocked out the sun than moved with nothing more than the whisper of wind beneath his huge moccasins. Times were when he had been faced with riding a short-backed Indian pony, his buckskin-clad toes almost dragging the ground when he did.

Shad glanced now over at the big Morgan mare he had purchased years ago off a Mormon emigrant along the Holy Road, up near Devil’s Gate. He had never been sorry for the handsome price paid, nor the years shared since.

He stretched within his warm cocoon of buffalo robes and wool blankets, sensing the first far-off hint of coffee on the wind. Rubbing sleep from his gritty eyes, Shad sat up, his nose leading him now as it had across all the years past to find food or avoid brownskins. But this morning it was Indian coffee he’d drink, with a heap of army sugar to sweeten it.

Standing to shake out the kinks from those ropy muscles slower to respond these years on the downside of fifty, he pulled on his moccasins, then slipped over them another, larger pair sewn from the neck-hide of an old bull by his Cheyenne wife. How he missed Shell Woman at times like these, pulling on the clothing she had fashioned for him, or smelling in the wind a certain whiff of sage and wildflower—any of it too easily put him in remembrance of her.

And her so far away to the south now, where he hoped she would remain safe from the flames of all-out war threatening to engulf the central plains.

His toes dug into the sandy soil as he skirted through the gray sage, heading for the nearby lodges of loafers, those Brule Sioux who camped in the shadow of Fort Laramie rather than follow the herds back and forth across the plains in their seasonal migrations. The white man had come first to take the beaver from the streams, next to lead others west through the mountains to Oregon and California, and finally to plant himself here and there with his farming and his settlements. So by now there were a number of Indians who hugged the fringes of forts such as these, where flour and sugar and coffee and bolts of calico or gingham could be had—rather than chasing after the buffalo season after season.

Winters were dull here with the soldiers, but they were damned well more secure for the loafers as well.

He had tried loafing himself of a time, when the price of beaver fell through the floor and what traders took in plew didn’t know prime from stinkum. When the end came to those glorious, shining times, after following the beaver in their retreat farther and farther into the recesses of the cold mountains, some of Shad Sweete’s companions as well retreated back east to make a living at one endeavor or another. Fewer still of those veterans of the heyday of the twenties and thirties moseyed on west themselves, some to the valleys of California. Most to timber-shrouded hills of old Oregon.

Sweete himself had followed the elephant to the Northwest, where many former employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company, as well as American Fur and Rocky Mountain Fur, all attempted to put down what roots they could, now that there wasn’t all that much for a rootless man to make a decent living at.

“Coffee,” he said in Lakota, handing the Brule woman his battered tin cup with the rawhide-wrapped handle. He broke off a chunk of the tobacco twist and dropped it into the cup before she took the huge tin from him.

She flicked her tired, red-rimmed eyes at him, then dug the tobacco wad from the cup with two fingers. The others were stubby, chopped off in some past mourning. The woman plopped the tobacco quid in her mouth and began chewing noisily.

After she had poured him coffee from the small kettle on the smoky fire and disappeared into her lodge, Shad settled to the ground beside the tiny flames, and grunted his own prayer to the Everywhere Spirit for this blessing of coffee on cold spring mornings such as this one.

The woman was back, carrying a small burlap sack at the end of her arm. She stood over him, opening it for the white man’s inspection. From it he scooped a fistful of sugar and poured it into the steamy coffee with a smile for her. She disappeared again. He pulled one of the two knives from his belt and stirred while he drank in the heady aroma that did so much to arouse his senses of a morning. Quickly he dragged both sides of the blade across his leather britches long ago turned a rich brown patina with seasons of grease and smoke, then stuffed the skinner home in its colorful porcupine-quilled scabbard.

After the first few sips, Sweete pulled free a tiny clay pipe from the pouch ever present beneath the left arm and crumbled some tobacco leaf into the bowl. With a twig from the Brule woman’s fire, he sat back and drank deep of the heady smoke, drawing it far into his lungs as an elixir stirring the cobwebs from his mind.

Coffee and tobacco and the cool, clean air of these plains of a spring morning … If he could not have his wife with him, at least a man like Shad Sweete had everything else worthwhile in life.

First one winter, then a second, he and his wife had survived in Oregon—then the trapper had no choice left but to admit that Oregon was not for him. He hungered for the far places, the wide stretches of the mountain west where the purple peaks hugged the far horizon in one direction, and in turning in almost any direction, a man found more peaks raking the undersides of the fluffy clouds. Such was the land more to the liking of Shad Sweete.

While some of his kind, former trappers all, were content to drag a plow behind a mule through the rich soil of Oregon, others were content to do nothing at all—hunting a little, loafing a lot. Staying as long as they wanted in one valley before moving on.

He was not cut out to do either, neither a homesteader nor a layabout could he be.

In remembering that morning he had announced they were returning to the high lonesome of the Shining Mountains, going home to the great stretch of endless, rolling plains her people knew so well, Shad recalled the joy welling in the eyes of his Cheyenne wife.

“I no more belong here in this Oregon country than Gabe Bridger belongs eating at the same table with Brigham Young himself!” he had cried out as wife and young children scurried about their camp, packing what they owned in parfleche and rawhide pouch, loading everything on a groaning travois inside of twenty minutes, the time it took for the sun to travel from one lodgepole to the next.

They moved east and south, until the ground beneath their moccasins felt more akin to home. But in the traveling itself, Shad Sweete once more felt the peace that came from the tonic of wandering. While most men wandered in search of a place to set down roots, Sweete was himself a born nomad.

In joy they had returned to the central plains, where years before he had found, fallen for, and purchased his Southern Cheyenne wife, Shell Woman, whom he promptly named “Toote” Sweete, commemorating a fragment of the French language he had learned from bandy-legged Canadian voyageurs in the north country. He thought the name fit her nicely, what with the way she could whistle him in for supper or their handful of ponies out of the village herd. Toote loved him every bit as fiercely as he loved her, and gave Shad a son back in the summer of forty-five, then a daughter one terrible winter night in forty-six when something tore inside her belly with the birthing.

Toote had cried in those first days to follow, telling him of her certainty she could never give him any more children. And each time he had always cradled the infant’s tiny frame within the shelter of his huge arms and rocked his daughter, telling his wife that their healthy son, High-Backed Bull, and now this daughter with the wide eyes and the mouth always curved in a smile, would be all any man could ask for. Shad Sweete could ask for no more than them.

Pipe Woman grew up doting on her father, and he made her in turn his special pet—teaching her everything he taught High-Backed Bull. Toote taught Pipe Woman everything a Cheyenne woman should know.

During those early years on the plains, Shad hired out to the Bent brothers, who traded from that huge mud fort of theirs down on the Arkansas River in Colorado Territory. But more and more he yearned to be wandering once again. He soon gave in to that siren of the plains and hunted buffalo on his own; his wife, son, and daughter helped him skin the hides that bought bangles and foofarraw enough to make the dark Cheyenne eyes shine.

“You’re Sweete, ain’t you?” asked the soldier with the well-seamed face.

Shad had watched him approaching on horseback, plodding slowly all the way from the cluster of buildings that was Fort Laramie. Sweete gazed up into the early light, finished his swallow of sweetened coffee, and answered.

“I am.”

“Colonel Moonlight sent me to fetch you.”

“He did, did he? Why? We’re supposed to be waiting.”

“Don’t know nothing about your waiting, Sweete. Colonel just sent me to fetch you to his office.”

“Say what for?”

“Said to tell you Bridger come in late last night.”

He could not deny the old tingle that made his every muscle sing at that news. “Gabe?”

Shad stood, throwing back the last of the coffee and strapping the tin cup at his wide belt decorated with dull brass tacks.

“By God! Let’s go soldier-boy!” he hollered as he took off on an easy lope, leaving the horseman behind.

It was a thing Shad Sweete could do; once he hit this easy stride, he was able to keep it up for distances and time beyond most men.

But especially this morning, hearing that his old friend Jim Bridger had finally come in.

Now they would palaver of old times shared in the high lonesome, and do a little scouting for the army once more.

As stirred up as the Cheyenne and Sioux were in these parts, he figured it just might prove to be a real bloody time for these poor soldier-boys before the last dance of the night was called and played through.

At Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Jonah Hook heard some of the first whispers of what they were headed into.

From the lips of wagon teamsters, scouts, and soldiers just in off the prairie came the word that anything west of Fort Riley, Kansas, or west of Fort Kearney, Nebraska Territory, was a trip into hell itself. The plains were afire, lit for sure by that Methodist minister turned Injun killer, John M. Chivington himself, down at Sand Creek. The Cheyenne broke loose, headed north after Chivington had tried to exterminate them all, and in their dash for freedom the Cheyenne were spreading the flames of war among the Arapaho and Sioux.

“This ain’t no Injun scare,” said the men gathered at the sutler’s place each sundown. “This is a goddanged Injun war.”

General Grenville M. Dodge had ordered the Second Regiment of Volunteers out of Leavenworth on 1 March. The Third wasn’t ready to march west until the twenty-sixth. On muddy, rutted roads, accompanied by a few mule-drawn wagons, they trudged on foot, bound to the northwest for Fort Kearney across the wide, rolling plains that threatened to swallow Jonah wherever he cared to cast his eyes.

The stinking, hulking cottonwood-plank barracks like forgotten monuments on that Nebraska prairie beckoned the footsore Confederates turned Indian fighters after 350 miles of bone-numbing march.

“You Johnnies’re now under the command of General Patrick E. Connor, Department of the Plains!” hollered a mouthy lieutenant the next morning at assembly on the Fort Kearney parade. “General telegraphed us his wire last night when he learned you boys’d made it in. Two companies will be assigned to stay here,” the officer started to explain.

Hook glanced at others up and down the line, not knowing if the Fort Kearney assignment was blessing, or curse.

The officer went on, “Two more companies assigned to garrison each of the following: Cottonwood Station, Fort Rankin, Junction … and the last companies to report on to Fort Laramie. General Connor is establishing Fort Rankin as regimental headquarters. You Confederates—inside of a month, you’ll be guarding six hundred miles of road.”

Leaving companies A and B at Fort Kearney, then depositing companies C and D at Cottonwood Station, the rest of the regiment marched on into the northeastern corner of Colorado Territory, arriving at Julesburg on 25 April.

Without delaying, two days later companies I and K were formed up and marched north, leaving the rest behind to garrison the South Platte stations and to build the new Fort Sedgwick to replace the aging Fort Rankin. Captains Henry Leefeldt and A. Smith Lybe had their orders minutes after arriving at the sprawling Fort Laramie, like a beacon on those far plains.

“We’re to push on west,” explained Captain Lybe to his I Company that night as the men sopped up the last of their white beans with hardtack, supper in bivouac in the shadow of the Laramie barracks. “K Company will drop off at Camp Marshall, sixty-five miles west of here.”

“So where we going?” asked one of the Mississippi boys Jonah had been captured with at the battle of Corinth.

Lybe turned slowly on the speaker, pursing his lips for a moment in concentration. “We been handed the toughest row of all, boys.”

Some of the Confederates muttered among themselves. Others just stirred their fires with sticks or stared at the coffee going cold in their cups.

“I won’t bullshit you none. We’re all gonna count on each other out there—so I don’t want to start by telling you this is going to be a cakewalk. You all have those down south at Sunday socials, don’t you?”

Lybe smiled, trying to drive home his joke as some of the Confederates laughed self-consciously.

“Those of us what lived close enough to a church!” hollered someone behind Jonah.

The rest of them laughed now. Lybe too. Hook liked the Yankee for trying. The captain just might make this company of ragtag Confederates work, and keep them alive to boot.

“Well, now—we’ve got our orders.”

“Going where, Cap’n?”

Lybe cleared his throat. “We’ll push on to Three Crossings, where we’ll build our post.”

“We all gonna stay there?”

“No such luck, boys. We’re being spread thin along the telegraph. To keep it open.”

“How thin is thin?”

“This company’s got us three hundred miles to watch,” Lybe answered, wiping his palms on the tails of his tunic.

“Jesus God!” someone exclaimed.

“We’ll be spread out from Sweetwater Station, St. Mary’s, and clear up to South Pass itself.”

“The mountains? We going clear up into those goddamned mountains?” squeaked a questioner.

“No. South Pass isn’t in the mountains. You wouldn’t know you had crossed the Rockies if you didn’t pay attention and see the creeks and streams flowing west, instead of east.”

“Don’t say,” muttered the fellow beside Jonah. He smiled at Hook and went back to licking coffee off his finger.

“We won’t be alone though.”

“Hell, no. We’ll have all kinds of redskin company I bet.”

Lybe laughed easily at that. “No, boys. The Eleventh Ohio is out there, waiting for us to come on west.”

“Ohio boys?”

“Yes. I hear they’ve already got a few galvanized Rebs of their own on their rosters. Mostly Kentuckians who served under General John Morgan.”

“Kentucky boys are all right,” Jonah said. His voice carried loudly in the sudden stillness.

“Yes, soldier. I think Kentucky boys are all right. Just like the rest of you: Mississippi and Georgia, Virginia and Tennessee.”

“Don’t forget Ala-by-God-bama!” shouted one of them.

The rest hooted, singing out their home states.

Jonah watched Lybe drag a fist under his nose, not knowing if the man was touched by the homey kinship of these Southerners suddenly getting used to the ill-fitting blue uniforms and these far-flung, wide-open plains dotted with high purple mountains, or if the captain might truly be worried for what he was leading them into.