Long Winter Gone

CHAPTER 2

“THE buffalo are plenty,” Chief Black Kettle said with satisfaction. “Here we will stay the winter.” His band of Southern Cheyenne spread out along the Washita River just east of the Texas Panhandle. One by one their browned, buffalo-hide lodges yearned toward the autumn-blue skies. Smoke from many fires rose to join the clouds dancing across the blue dome, pushed by the eager fall winds that foretold a taste of winter.

Black Kettle’s people did not camp alone this robe season. His village of fifty Cheyenne lodges had been joined by one lodge of visiting Arapaho and two Sioux lodges desiring to winter a little farther south than they normally did. Small as it was, Black Kettle’s village stood on the western border of a grander encampment spreading itself some twelve to fifteen miles along the looping river. Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche, along with other bands of Southern Cheyenne and even a small village of Apache—in all, some six thousand strong—had erected their winter lodges in that ancient valley.

“Here to this valley dotted with hills that will break up winter’s icy blasts has the Earth Mother herself invited us. Here we will laugh and sleep, hunt and dance—safe for the winter.”

He smiled in that gentle way of his, watching his wife waddle off to unload the single travois of their simple possessions. Medicine Woman Later, his lifelong partner, gurgled in the back of her throat, a sound she used whenever she wanted to tell him he should do less talking about the trees and the land. A little less talking and a little more work.

It gave his heart a fierce pride to watch this raising of the few lodges left to his small band, smaller now after the slaughter at Sand Creek four winters ago. These few had survived, clung to life like ticks on summer buffalo. They had moved across the plains and along the river valleys with the seasons, persisting in life as The People had lived it for centuries already. They knew nothing else but to go on as they had lived for time beyond any one man’s memory.

In the heart of this river basin the southern tribes had long visited, the Washita wound its lazy trail in tight twists before it finally looped northward to form a large horseshoe. Black Kettle’s tribe selected that same bend in the river for their winter home. Here they were protected by the sandy red bluffs to the north across the river and the shaded knolls rising behind them. Here they would find no end to fresh water and abundant grazing for their pony herd of nearly a thousand animals. For fires to ward off the chill of autumn mornings and the numbing cold of winter nights, timber grew thick along the bottoms choked with plant life of all description ablaze in color.

One clear, frosty morning, the Cheyenne awoke to find a thin slick of ice coating the water kettles. It was a magical time of year along the Washita. The buffalo hunted by the young men who left camp each day had already grown fat from a long summer grazing on the rich grasses carpeting the southern plains, their curly coats grown thick—a sign of an early and cold winter.

Chief Black Kettle sighed as he bent to retrieve a bundle his wife expected him to bring to her in their lodge. His heart swelled with happiness.

The Cheyenne will sleep here for the Time of Deep Snows.

“Good to have you here with us,” Major Joel Elliott said, dropping his salute. “You belong here, sir. At the head of your men.”

“Thank you, Major.” Custer flashed that famous peg-toothed smile and shook Elliott’s hand.

“Damn good to have you back!” First Lieutenant Thomas W. Custer shouldered his way through the crowd clustered about his older brother.

“Tom!”

“Can’t begin to tell you what it means to us having you leading us into this one, Autie.”

“Trouble?” Custer asked.

“Nothing we can’t handle now! Right, boys?”

Custer waited until the cheering died. “So, tell me. Something’s afoot. I can smell it.” His eyes moved from man to man, watching each of his old friends and fellow officers avoid his look.

“Tom?”

“It ain’t been a pretty sight here,” Tom replied. “Under siege practically every day … small bands of warriors wandering past here heading north out of the Territories. Some bands not so small.”

“That’s trouble?” Custer rocked back on his heels and smiled beneath the corn-straw mustache. “You worried about a handful of roving warriors?”

“They’ve proved us idiots so far,” Elliott answered grimly.

“Buck up, gentlemen!” Custer said. “A new day is coming. We’ll soon show them a force to be reckoned with—our own beloved Seventh!”

“Hear, hear! To the Seventh!” Tom roared, slapping his brother on the back. “To the regiment that will pacify the plains!”

On the morning of 30 September, George Armstrong Custer had arrived at Fort Hays, Kansas, new duty station of the Seventh Cavalry. There he reported to General Sheridan, who had moved his departmental headquarters farther west to station himself closer to the main theater of hostilities.

After less than a day of rest and some final instructions, the young lieutenant colonel pushed west with a small escort, arriving at Fort Dodge on 4 October. There he had learned his regiment was encamped some thirty miles southeast of the fort along Bluff Creek, a small tributary of the Arkansas River. Into this besieged camp the regimental commander had galloped on the afternoon of the fifth to find brother Tom, Major Elliott and the others relieved that he had arrived at last to lead the regiment into the winter campaign.

Along with orders to reorganize the Seventh, Custer brought new ideas for some specialized training he and General Sheridan had designed for troops unaccustomed to winter warfare. Although General Alfred Sully commanded this District of the Arkansas, Sheridan had devised an operational force of eleven companies of the Seventh Cavalry to ride under Custer, along with five companies of infantry and twelve companies of the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry that had yet to march south from Topeka. This massive force would then push out of Kansas Territory due south a hundred miles from Fort Dodge to establish a supply base from which Sheridan would begin his strikes against the hostiles.….

“You haven’t wasted any time getting the regiment shaped up, Autie,” Tom said one cold evening as he slipped through the tent flaps. His brother sat hunched over a lap desk. “Orders? Or another letter home to Libbie?”

That smile flashed again. Custer could keep nothing from his little brother.

“Orders first, Tom. Then, yes, I’ll get another letter off to Libbie tonight.”

“All work and no play. You’ve heard me say it many a time.”

“You! Preferring the cards or the bottle—even the ladies—to your soldier’s work.”

“By the heavens, Autie! Your brother? Wouldst that I prefer the feel of a perfumed breast beneath my hands or the sting of strong whiskey upon my tongue to drilling and target practice?”

Laughter came easily to them both, laughter rooted in a bond nurtured from childhood, a closeness now mellowed like aged Kentucky whiskey.

“Be gone with you, then.” Custer shooed with his left hand, the right bringing the nub of a pencil to his tongue once more. “I’ve too much work to be done and so little time to do it. Go off and play then while your poor brother works his fingers and his pencil to the bone!”

Tom’s easy laughter rang through the tent flaps as Custer returned to his sheet of foolscap atop the small lap desk. So bloody much to do, he thought. All of it riding on a perfect execution of Philip’s plans for this winter campaign.

First, fresh horses had to be purchased. Not an easy task on the western plains of Kansas along the Arkansas River. But once accomplished, those horses had to be wrangled in and drilled with their new riders. And through the ordeal the regimental blacksmiths had been pushed beyond all endurance, beginning their hot work before dawn every morning, toiling into the dripping black of twilight, fitting each and every new mount for its journey into Indian country.

Infantry marched on the feet of its men while cavalry depended on the hooves of its horses. For every mount headed into Indian Territory he had ordered an extra fore and hind shoe fitted and carried in the trooper’s saddle pocket. An unshod horse would be worse than useless on this campaign through ice and snow.

Every clear day Custer had his men practice signaling cross-country with small mirrors from the top of nearby hills—”nature having formed admirable signal stations over this part of the country,” he explained, writing to Libbie.

At the same time he held a competition among his troops to determine the best marksmen in the regiment. With the dual promise of a separately marched unit of sharpshooters along with his order that the marksmen be exempted from mess details and picket duty, the competition grew stiff for those forty slots placed under the leadership of young Canadian Lieutenant W. W. Cooke. With the best selected,an intensive regimen of target practice with repeating Spencer rifles began for this elite corps.

Custer sat the lap desk on his crude bunk and rose, stretching the knots from the muscles along his back. So much riding on the success of this venture, Libbie. He would write her later when the camp quieted and his only companion would be the night wind bringing with it a promise of early snow.

If this winter operation fails, Sheridan alone might take the blame. And, if the operation smacks of a massacre, why, Philip alone might stand court-martial … considering the nasty mood of those Quakers in power at the Indian Bureau back in Washington City.

Rubbing his palms together eagerly, he stared out at the glowing fire points of red-orange, cooking fires along company rows allowed to burn themselves out in the blackness of night. But, if the winter offensive proves even a moderate success there’ll be a hungry mob of army brass clamoring to claim paternity for Sheridan’s brainchild.

He turned back into the chill of his tent. The smoky heat of two coal-oil lamps held some of the prairie cold at bay. Somewhere close a horse snorted and stomped. Custer smiled again. Things were going well. In the waning days of October he had instituted another innovation of his own: “coloring the horses” by troops, in which every man in a company rode a similarly colored animal. Each company would ride a different color horse into Indian country.

A few hours later, with his long, sentimental letter to his wife finished, Custer blew out the smoky lamps. Only then did the silence around him grow suffocating. Almost as if he couldn’t breathe … then the weight of it disappeared, as quickly as it had smothered him. In the overpowering silence, he barely heard the first smattering of hard, icy flakes against the side of his canvas tent.

The cold settled along the valley of the Washita like old ash settling under a persistent rain.

Monaseetah, daughter of Cheyenne chief Little Rock, second only to Black Kettle himself, moved back to her father’s lodge, leaving her cruel and abusive husband.

In the cold chill of her father’s lodge she awoke each night, staring at the dull red glow of the dying coals, feverish in the frosty air as the sweat of fear rolled from her copper flesh. The brute she had married had treated her no better than a camp dog. No better than some piece of property he could abuse and discard … until she shot him.

His pride wounded more than his bleeding leg, the shamed husband had divorced this fiery girl of seventeen summers—in the Cheyenne way, sending her back to the lodge of her father.

Trembling now as she remembered his shaming her, Monaseetah caught her breath, then slowly calmed, listening to the reassuring snore of her father. They were without others, alone. It had been four winters now since the terrible day of black cannon smoke in the air and red smearing the snow. In a place the Southern Cheyenne knew as Little Dry River—a terrible day along the white man’s Sand Creek where Monaseetah saw her mother fall beneath a slashing cavalry saber. No more than a cowering child, she watched young soldiers defile her mother’s bloody body.

Monaseetah knew the remembering would always be with her, bringing the all-time pain. There would be no losing of that pain the way she had rid herself of the beast-man.

Her eyes stinging with tears, Monaseetah blinked and blinked again. There had been no blood-that-comes-with-the-moon since the shortgrass time. Now she could believe only one thing. She carried the beast-man’s child in her belly. Monaseetah clenched her eyes shut with fierce resolution. Though she carried his child, she knew she could not return to the cruel one who had bought her away from Little Rock.

Eventually she lay back against her father’s curly buffalo robes once more. Let him find another wife, she consoled herself. Another woman to rut and abuse. Perhaps a wife like that pale white woman they hold prisoner in the Kiowa camp downstream.

Why anyone would want such a pale-skinned creature, with hair so thin, and the color of winter-dead grass?

General Hazen’s negotiations for the release of the captive white mother and her son dragged on through the fall, getting nowhere with the Kiowas down at Fort Cobb during the Moon of Leaves Falling and into the Deer Rutting Moon.

Monaseetah herself was visiting the Kiowa camp that first day Hazen’s half-breed scout, Cheyenne Jack, rode into the center of camp to declare he came from Army Chief Hazen with a plea for the release of Clara and Willie Blinn.

Cautiously, Jack dismounted and sidled over to the terrified, beaten prisoner. “Listen to me, lady,” he whispered harshly when the others weren’t looking. “These Injuns don’t know no English. Take what I got in my hand. Write your name for the general at Fort Cobb. So he’ll know who you are. He can tell your people.”

“You have to—”

“Shut up!” he growled. “Not a word, or your life ain’t worth the time it takes for one of these bucks to spit! Now, take what’s in my hand.”

Clara Blinn pulled a scrap of paper and a pencil stub from the scout’s dirty palm. As Jack conferred with the tribal leaders, she hunkered in the shadow of a nearby lodge and scribbled her hasty note to the outside world:

KIND FRIEND—

Whoever you may be, I thank you for your kindness to me and my child. They tell me, as near as I can understand, they expect traders to come and they will sell us to them. If it is Mexicans, I am afraid they would sell us into slavery in Mexico. If you can do nothing for me write to W. T. Harrington, Ottawa, Franklin County, Kansas—my father. Tell him we are with the Cheyennes and they say when the white men make peace we can go home. For our sakes, do all you can, and God will bless you. If you can let me hear from you again let me know what you think about it. Write my father; send him this. Goodby.

MRS. F. R. BLINN

I am as well as can be expected, but my baby is very weak.

Little could Mrs. Blinn know at that time what fury would soon be released in securing her freedom from the hostiles. Little could she know that even as she wrote her plea for help, General Philip H. Sheridan had ordered Hazen to break off his negotiations, reasoning that his winter campaign would secure the results every white man desired: an end to Indian raids along the Kansas frontier and a return of those captives held by the savages. Negotiation, Sheridan informed Hazen, accomplished nothing.

“Don’t need me to hang around the post no longer?” the half-breed scout and interpreter asked before he took another long pull on the cheroot General Hazen had given him, filling Hazen’s tiny Fort Cobb office with blue smoke.

“Sorry, Jack. Can’t use you anymore.” Hazen turned so that the half-breed could not read the worry etched along the thin features of his well-defined face. “Sheridan doesn’t want us trying to make peace anymore.”

“He got something else in mind?”

“Guess so.” Hazen used his words sparingly.

The commander of Fort Cobb knew he would have to send for Black Kettle. He watched Cheyenne Jack rise from the creaky, straight-backed chair, then cleared his throat as the half-breed reached the door.

“Jack,” Hazen said, “there is one last thing you can do for me. If you would. I’ll pay you regular wages. Per day.”

“Yeah?” Jack answered, something in Hazen’s tone snagging his interest.

“Want you to find Black Kettle. I’m told he’s wintering his band on the Washita with Satanta, Medicine Arrow, and the others.”

“Just Black Kettle?”

“Just Black Kettle. Tell him it’s very important that he come see me.”

“General, you know that ol’ boy. He won’t come without you giving him good reason to see you.”

“Tell him we need to have an important council.”

“Council?”

“Just tell Black Kettle he’s in danger.”

“In danger from what?”

Hazen’s eyes leveled on the scout. As a soldier he could say no more. “That’s what I will discuss with Black Kettle myself.”

Cheyenne Jack opened his mouth to protest, but then thought better of it. Instead, he said, “General, I figure since you don’t need me after this, I’ll winter with the Kiowa. But I’ll see you get to talk with Black Kettle. Start tonight, you want me to.”

“Daylight will be soon enough for me, Jack.”

The half-breed swung the door open wide and stepped into the night, his buckskinned form swallowed completely by darkness.

On 12 November the Seventh Cavalry pulled out of their training camp south of Fort Dodge, marching toward Indian Territory at last. Time and again on that long march Major Joel Elliott turned beneath a glaring winter sun to behold those troops arranged by color: companies of chestnuts, blacks, bays, sorrels and grays, browns and tans—every man trained and ready. Not a raw recruit among them.

And rumbling right behind them came better than four hundred wagons loaded to their bulging sidewalk with forage, rations, tents, blankets, and winter campaign clothing.

“By glory,” Elliott whispered under his breath, “I ride at the head of the finest mounted cavalry in the entire world!” A Civil War veteran with an impressive record of victories, the major’s chest swelled with pride.

By the fifteenth the weather turned on the glorious Seventh. A blue-norther swept down on the regiment, a storm so bitter it could only have come straight out of the maw of the Arctic itself. That prairie blizzard persisted all night and right into the next day before it gave out. Three more difficult days followed, the cavalry breaking trail through snowdrifts left in the storm’s wake.

But by noon on 18 November, Custer’s command stopped a mile above the confluence of Wolf Creek and the Beaver River, some hundred miles almost due south of Fort Dodge.

“We’ll establish our base for winter operations here, Major,” Custer informed Elliott. “Have the company captains establish pickets and pitch their tents across the prairie. We’ll meet at my tent at sixteen hundred. Dismissed.”

Custer watched Elliott trudge away before he turned to the civilian scout beside him.

“Smith, you’ve done well. Found us an admirable spot.”

“Knowed you’d like it, General,” the scarred old trapper answered.

“Where you off to now, if I might inquire?”

John Simpson Smith tore a corner off the tabacco twist before he stuffed it back into the pouch on his belt. “Aim to track my family, General. Least what’s left of ’em after Chivington butchered a bunch down to Sand Creek.”

“You married a Cheyenne?”

Smith spit into the snow at his feet before answering. “Many robe seasons ago. Time was, I was trapping the headwaters of the Arkansas long afore you and the gray-backs got into your big argument back east. Best damned woman I ever knowed, that one. Cheyenne, she is.”

“Children?”

“Only two now. Both growed, I s’pose. Rest killed at Sand Creek. I aim to find those two, and their mama.”

“You heading south?”

“Likeliest place, seems to me.”

“You aim to warn the hostiles I’m coming?” Unconsciously, Custer shifted his pistol belt, a move not lost on the old mountain man.

“Tribe my wife runs with ain’t causing no trouble in Kansas. They’re real peaceable. Not the sort you army boys’re hankerin’ for.”

Custer cleared his throat. “Your wife’s people won’t have a thing to worry about.”

“That’s what the agents and army both said when the tribe went to camp on Sand Creek.”

“By God, I’ll not be compared with the likes of that butcher Chivington!” Custer barked. “He and his Colorado militia … amateur soldiers. Why, this regiment is hunting warriors, and warriors only.”

“S’long, General.” Smith stuffed a moccasin in his stirrup, lifting himself to the saddle.

“Smith.” Custer suddenly snagged the reins to prevent the old scout from pulling away. “What band is your family with?”

“Why, ol’ Black Kettle’s. He’s always been a peace Injun. Always will be. That ol’ buck’s a smart one. He sees the writing on the ground clear as I read trail sign. Figures it won’t do him no good to make war.”

“Black Kettle, eh?” Custer released the scout’s reins. He watched Smith lope off, pointing his pony north, back toward Kansas rather than steering south into the Territories.