Seize the Sky

CHAPTER 6

AS Custer slipped back through the open flaps of his Sibley tent where striker John Burkman had three oil lamps glowing, their chimneys lightly smoking, Burkman rose anxiously. The three tufts of oily smudge were carried off on a strong, cool breeze as the general washed in, anxious. John watched the officers move off in pairs and small groups, crunching across what patches remained of the icy hail.

Custer sank on a canvas stool, studying the sounds of the camp whirling about him for the moment. The heer-haws of the mules. The whinnies and snorts of the horses. Among the tents there arose the sudden peal of some man’s high laughter followed by the loud blast of another soldier’s guttural guffaw. Above it all, here and there, Custer listened to the sweet sound of soft-sung melodies raised from one side of camp, while from the other direction came the faint strains of a banjo or some fiddle, perhaps even a squeezebox keening out a song popular to that particular breed of man who served his nation on the western plains.

“Doesn’t much sound like a camp of men marching out on campaign against the Sioux, does it, Mr. Burkman?”

John’s eyes darted to Custer, finding the general staring out the tent flaps into the night, apparently hypnotized by those night fires stretching endlessly west across the Yellowstone prairie.

“I wouldn’t know, sir.”

“Of course,” Custer replied softly. He rose, turned to Burkman. “You’ve never been on campaign before, have you?”

“No, sir. This is my first time against … the enemy, sir.”

“Enemy,” Custer repeated, stepping to the tent flaps, mesmerized still by the twinkling of so many camp fires, together like so many stars dusted across the indigo velvet of the summer prairie. “The enemy, John. Tomorrow we’ll tramp down the trail of those Sioux that Reno let slip by.”

He turned, a strange and haunting look in those wintercold eyes of his. Eyes gone tired, like rumpled, worn baggage to Burkman. John glanced down at Custer’s hands, held out before him as if clutching something, gripping it for all it was worth. As if he would never let it go. Burkman’s eyes crawled back to Custer’s face, to those sapphire eyes, which now seemed to peer right through the striker.

“We’ll find them, John,” he whispered. “Once I find them, I’ll have myself a place in history.”

Burkman swallowed hard, trembling as he clutched the cream-colored hat he had been brushing clean of dust for Custer’s outfit in the morning. “Yes, General. A place in history—”

“Autie!”

With the sound of Tom’s voice hailing him from beyond the fire, Custer whirled on his heel. Three forms loomed into the light, all arm in arm, the trio eating ground in huge strides as they marched up to Custer’s tent.

“We’re headed over to take ol’ Terry up on that whiskey!” Tom held up one hand carrying five canteens.

“Those all yours, Tom?”

“Not all,” he answered with a snort. “One of ’em belongs to Lieutenant Harrington!”

“Four for you, brother?”

“’At’s right, General!” Keogh blared, holding aloft his own four canteens. “Thomas here’s a good lad—stout drinking bunkie, if ever there was one. He is, he is. We’d made good bunkies of it, in the old days of the war of rebellion, that is!”

“James,” Custer said as he stepped from the tent flaps, looking squarely at Calhoun, “you’ll see these two don’t get themselves into any serious trouble tonight, will you?”

“Aye, sir!” He saluted. “We don’t plan on drinking all that much tonight anyway.”

“Glad to hear that, fellas. Save it to drink a little at a time on the march.”

“Little at a time?” Tom snorted. “Autie, you’ve just never learned how to live. You’ll be dying a wretched old man—wondering what it was to have lived!”

“I’ve had my bout with whiskey, Tom—back to Monroe. Sworn off it completely.”

“How well we know of that. I’d be the last to blame a man for not holding his liquor!” Tom chuckled along with Keogh and Calhoun. His smile faded as he studied his brother’s face. “But you’ve not truly enjoyed yourself ever since … sixty-nine, wasn’t it? Sixty-nine when you had to send that Cheyenne gal away. I don’t remember her name, Autie.”

Keogh found Custer’s eyes on him, as if seeking confirmation. “That be the gospel, ’tis, General. You ain’t the same man since that Cheyenne girl. Whatever she done to you, it made you a happy soul.”

Burkman saw Custer swallow. “Well,” he said selfconsciously, “you boys take care this evening.” He worried a palm over the stubby bristles of his thinning hair a few times, as if he wanted out of a fix but didn’t reckon on getting his bearings. “Don’t get drunk and scalped while over there round Gibbon’s boys. I’ll need you three this time out, you know.”

“That barber Sipes isn’t getting anywhere near us!” Tom roared, slapping Calhoun on the back.

The scene was happy once more. Every bit as happy as it had been somber a brief moment ago. No more talk of the past. Only talk of a future borne up the Rosebud.

“Let’s be walking, laddies!” Keogh howled, prodding the other two from Custer’s tent. “That bleeming shoneen of a trader’s got whiskey … and Myles Keogh’s got him a thirst to match!”

“See you to the morning, General!” Tom’s voice came back from the thickening darkness swallowing the trio.

That stopped Custer dead in his tracks. He turned to stare after the men, certain it was Tom’s voice he had heard. Dead certain. But brother Tom had never addressed him by rank before. Tom had never called him General.…

As he and his friends were rowed over to the Far West, moored snugly against the north bank of the Yellowstone, Tom Custer studied the brightly lit steamboat gently rocking atop the river like a glittering tree ornament. From the sounds of the hurrahs and laughter, coupled with the sights of shadowy forms darting across the yellow splash of lights on deck, Tom figured Coleman’s whiskey kegs would do a hard business of it tonight.

Not all that unusual, he thought to himself as Keogh laughed with Calhoun.

There had been whiskey sellers dogging the trail of the Dakota Column once it marched away from Fort Abraham Lincoln. Seemed that out in this lonely part of the world, once anyone who had a way to transport cheap whiskey heard of an army unit marching into the field, a whiskey trader of one color or another would be attending each night’s stop. Tonight beneath an overcast Yellowstone moon, it appeared the government-licensed trader aboard the Far West would make himself a small fortune from army coffers at Terry’s behest, as well as taking out of each soldier’s pockets whatever the man had left in the way of loose pay after all this time on the trail.

True enough, Tom realized that trader James Coleman had made out quite well along the column’s way west.

Coleman and his partner Sipes stayed busy tonight minding their whiskey kegs. For all but the most hardened of drinkers, the traders’ whiskey seemed the best bargain offered beneath that canvas awning. The troopers believed they could get more mileage out of a dollar pint of cheap grain alcohol than they could out of damned near anything else Coleman had for sale. The trader rightfully worried of running out of whiskey this last night at the mouth of the Rosebud, what with so many men from the Seventh filling their canteens with his cheap corn mash.

Growling, Coleman constantly reminded that rowdy, shoving crowd beneath his awning that they had to leave him with something in his whiskey kegs for the party he’d throw after the regiment marched back down the Bighorn—the victorious Seventh Calvary once more.

“The men what bring me Crazy Horse’s scalp along with Sitting Bull’s … I’ll let those men finish a keg all on their own!” Coleman promised down at the end of the crude plank bar Tom leaned against.

The tent rang with exuberant voices of hundreds of shoving, sweaty soldiers, each one cursed of an undying thirst yet to be quenched. Coleman’s was a promise that made every dry recruit think hard on searching out those two infamous chieftains all on one’s own.

“Shit!” a soldier near Tom joked among his friends in a fevered, drunken knot, “how the hell is this trader gonna know if a scalp I raise come from the head of Crazy Horse himself anyway?”

“Hell!” another soldier shouted to the trader pouring his cup full of amber liquid. “Maybe this whiskey of yours’ll even stop my damned knees from rattling like nails in a hollow keg!”

Very few Seventh Calvary officers ended up playing poker or monte that night aboard the Far West. Most of the gamblers turned out to be members of Gibbon’s or Terry’s staffs. Custer’s officers chose better things to do with their time.

This inky night that had slithered over the mouth of the Rosebud found most of the young men, and old alike penning a last letter home. Their officers had informed them some Rees were heading east in the morning with some of the last mail to be dispatched for a week or more, suggesting the men use the time wisely. Those who couldn’t write had those who could pen still more letters. And for a few hours, most minds and hearts were on home. Even those old files who didn’t have any other home but the army now still possessed some dim, foggy memory of that warm, secure place where a man’s mind will go before he’s pushed to think of nothing more basic than staying alive.

Letters to family back in the States. Long, rambling, promising letters to sweethearts … pretty faces that stared out at a young, frightened man in blue from a little tintype he guarded in his hand as he scribbled some last words to that special someone back in Ohio or Michigan, New York or South Carolina. A tintype he would eventually slip inside his blouse and wear against his skin over the next few days as they stalked the mighty Lakota bands.

It would never change, no matter what war a man found himself marching off to. There was always someone he could write and tell of the secret fears he didn’t dare share with his fellow soldiers. Private words of longing and loneliness scratched across endless pages of foolscap that last night at the Yellowstone beneath a flickering of oil lamps and torches and firelight.

Small clusters of officers huddled in those late hours to pen their wills, then have those solemn testaments witnessed by friends. Grim instructions given, agreed to, and sworn over for the dispersal of personal effects to family members back east should the unthinkable happen in the coming days as they followed Custer up the Rosebud in search of Sioux. What to be done with the few trinkets each man had accumulated during his time in the army—whether he carried his possessions on his back or in his pockets, or they simply lay waiting back at Fort Abraham Lincoln at the bottom of a near-empty trunk.

On the eve of battle every man wanted to know he would have something that could go back to his family to show that he had indeed been of some worth during his short time on this earth … each man wanting to pass something on to show for his brief service in the army of the west.

Like some cold fingers slipping around a tin cup at Coleman’s tent on that north bank of the Yellowstone, the mood in camp slowly changed as more and more of those men of the Seventh left the whiskey and returned to a somber camp to scratch at their letters, write their wills, swear death pacts with bunkies to see that an old watch made it back to Cape Girardeau, Missouri … or a special wedding band made it back to a little cabin near Cold Springs, Arkansas … or that neck chain he wore was delivered to a widowed mother somewhere down a holler outside Cross Plains, Tennessee.

As the clock crept into the wee hours, fewer men stood drinking at the trader’s kegs. This late only the old, fire-hardened veterans still drank, staring up the Rosebud, wondering what awaited them as they rode in Custer’s wake come morning.

Custer scratched a metal nib across sheets of foolscap at his field desk, while striker Burkman polished bridle and crupper, saddle, holsters, and belt, with a nervous energy. With a peculiar flair for understatement, the general was penning his last, long letter to Libbie, though he promised her he would dash off a few lines in the morning before departure.

Terry appears to retain the highest of confidence in me, holding up to others to emulate my zeal, energy, and ability. Yes, Dear Heart—Alfred knows all too well he is an administrator and that I am the Indian Fighter. He used his abilities as an administrator to assure that I will do what I do best … nay, better than any man in the army.

For the longest time after he had laid his pen aside and stepped to the tent flaps, Custer stared out at the cloudy, starless night, soaking in that somber mood cloaking the camp. It was no stranger to him, this blackness. Veteran of all but one of those battles of the Army of the Potomac. Veteran of campaigns along the Platte River Road and successful strikes into the heart of Indian Territory itself. Campaigns along the Yellowstone and an exploration of the Black Hills—that most sacred place of the northern plains tribes.

He sighed deeply and turned back to his desk, where he took pen in hand.

If I were an Indian, he wrote, I often think I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people adhered to the free, open plains rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation—there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with its vices thrown in without stint or measure.

“There!” he whispered to himself. He had admitted it to himself and to Libbie at last.

If by a twist of fate he found himself cast as one of the hostile chiefs he would be hunting down come morning, Custer admitted he would have to elect to go on living the free, unfettered nomadic life of old rather than suffer the stifling stagnation of the squalid reservations. To live as wild and free warriors always had, or to die a warrior.

There were times, Rosebud, when I so desperately hoped to find you aboard one of the steamboats plying the waters of the Yellowstone. To hold not only one of your sweet letters, but to once again hold you close. When the Josephine brought us the mail at the Tongue, I prayed you had stolen aboard to surprise me. You might just as well be here as not.…

I hope to begin another Galaxy article soon, if the spirit moves me. They seem thirsty for my words back east. Perhaps they’d enjoy my speeches? Look on my map and you will find our present location on the Yellowstone, about midway between Tongue River and the Big Horn.…

Reno’s scouting party has returned. They saw the trail and deserted camps of a village of three hundred and eighty lodges. The trail was about one week old. The scouts reported that they could have overtaken the village in one day and a half. I am now going to take up the trail where the scouting party turned back. I fear their failure to follow up the Indians has imperiled our plans by giving the village an intimation of our presence. Think of the valuable time lost!

But I feel hopeful of accomplishing great results. I will move directly up the valley of the Rosebud. General Gibbon’s command and General Terry, with steamer, will proceed up the Big Horn as far as the boat can go.

I will like campaigning with pack mules much better than with wagons, leaving out the question of luxuries. We take no tents and desire none.

I now have some Crow scouts with me, as they are familiar with the country. They are magnificent-looking men, so much handsomer and more Indian-like than any we have ever seen, and so jolly and sportive; nothing of the gloomy, silent red man about them. They have formally given themselves to me, after the usual talk. In their speech they said they had heard that I never abandoned a trail; that when my food gave out, I ate a mule. That was the kind of man they wanted to fight under; they are willing to eat mule too.

I am sending six Ree scouts to Powder River with the mail; from there it will go with other scouts to Fort Buford.

From here on out the men will sleep in overcoats and saddle blankets. I have arranged for the hounds to be left with the mules when battle is assured. At the very least John can care for them in my absence. Tuck is such a problem tonight. She is in and out, dashing out with a playful yip when a wolf howls, scurrying back in with her tail fast between her legs to cower at my knee. Let us hope the Sioux are as discerning as Tuck … to know when to stick their tails between their legs!

I also wanted you to share in the good news—I have seen that Boston and Autie were transferred from Quartermaster Corps for the next fifteen days so they can accompany us on our scout up the Rosebud. Along with Tom, Boston, Autie, James, and Fred Calhoun, I want all the Custer clan in on the fun! We have such a dear, dear family gathered round us, Libbie. We are indeed fortunate in this life to share that family together.…

To the end, Custers all!

His pen fell silent above the page as he grew pensive again. Listening to the wolf howl … seeing her dark eyes conjured up before him on the tent wall once more. He clenched his eyes, trying to block out the vision. Still they haunted him. Dark black-cherry eyes gleaming out at him from the back of that wagon as it rumbled out of Fort Hays, heading south and out of his life.

Less than fifty yards downstream stood Mark Kellogg’s tent where the late-night oil burned just as brightly as Custer’s lamps.

Although both Sherman and Sheridan had warned him against taking any reporters along, Custer found it impossible to refuse that fervent request from the former telegraph operator working for the summer in a Bismarck law office and writing an occasional article printed in the Bismarck paper, even the New York Herald, under his pen name, Frontier.

After all, Custer had reasoned, the Herald was owned by his good and politically powerful friend, James Gordon Bennett, Jr. Without much time given over to wrestling with the problem, Custer had decided to allow Kellogg to accompany the campaign. Besides, why shouldn’t Bennett’s paper get the scoop on everyone else when he defeated the Sioux and became the darling of the Democractic convention about to meet in St. Louis?

Kellogg was a likable fellow, sharing much in common with Custer anyway. He favored a get-tough policy with the “noncompliers,” those Indians refusing to come in to their reservations. Custer was sure Kellogg would write a favorable account of the coming battle, since there had been so much concern after the Washita debacle and how aspects of that winter’s campaign had been manhandled in the press. After all, Kellogg had stated publicly, “I say turn the dogs of war loose and drive the savages off the face of the earth, if they do not behave themselves.”

A widower with two girls, who smoked Bull Durham, and enjoyed a rare game of chess, the reporter had once preached a temperance lecture at the graveside interment of a drunk who died of consumption. Since he shared Custer’s teetotaling habits when it came to whiskey and other spirits, Kellogg was not among those who bolstered trader Coleman’s profits that cloudy night of 21 June.

Instead, Mark Kellogg spent the evening rattling off dispatches to be sent back east in the morning in addition to letters to his daughters. The remainder of his time he spent in getting rations and supplies squared away and stuffed securely in his canvas saddlebags, along with an adequate supply of lined paper and pencils he would require up the Rosebud with Custer.

At forty Kellogg was nonetheless youthful in appearance, with but a few small crows’-feet worrying his eyes in addition to the steel-rimmed glasses, and some flecks of gray in his hair that betrayed his age.

Mark brooded needlessly past midnight, concerned that he would have enough bacon and sugar and coffee for the fifteen days, as well as enough paper. More important than food was paper. Kellogg wanted to write the war story to end all war stories. And by riding with an Indian fighter of Custer’s caliber and reputation, Kellogg was certain he would see action worth description. Never before had he written anything worthy of much notice, since most of his prose plodded along in a pedestrian manner.

This time, however, Mark Kellogg was certain the drama of the coming chase and the thrill of battle with Custer’s cornered quarry would inspire him to lofty prose.

This small, unassuming widower would ride an army mule south along the Rosebud behind Custer, certain this was to be his moment in the spotlight. No longer would he merely report the actions of others. At long last Mark Kellogg, reporter and campaign correspondent for no less than the New York Herald, would participate in the making of history—a destiny he had waited forty long years to enjoy.

That old mule picketed outside his tent just might carry him farther than the Rosebud and any Sioux camp Custer would assure they would run across.

Well past midnight John Burkman left Custer at his field desk, perched on his cot, finished with his letter to Libbie, and now working on his journal. Always the journal.

The striker headed next door to his small A-tent, with a stop to relieve his bladder swollen from all the coffee he had shared with his commander.

As he watered the ground, Burkman gazed at the lights glittering on board the Far West moored against the far shore and remembered that some of the officers from Terry’s command had rowed across to join Gibbon’s men for a late-night game of monte. For a moment he sensed those soldiers were the lucky ones, not having to suffer this unexplained dread for the coming of day, not having to worry over the noose of despair that his own private premonitions tightened around his heavy heart.

Burkman stuffed himself back in his britches and wiped his hand off on army wool before he nudged the buttons back through their holes. Here in the chill wee hours, all he heard was the sound of Custer’s two horses munching dried grass at their picket pins.

That, and the steady beat of the Crow and Ree drums. Burkman was sure it was the distant beat of those drums that helped him fall asleep that last night at the Yellowstone.

The distant beat of Indian drums.