Wolf Mountain Moon: The Battle of the Butte, 1877

Chapter 32

8 January 1877

“Captain Butler!” James Casey called out as the men of C Company struggled up behind their commander. “Good to have you pitch in with us!”

Edmond Butler saluted. “Looks like we’ve been handed the yeoman’s work of it today, Major.”

“I’ll say,” Casey replied, turning back to watch the last company approaching. “C’mon, Mr. McDonald—bring your doughboys up here so mine won’t get all the fun!”

“Your … orders … Major?” Robert McDonald huffed as he lumbered to a halt a good twenty yards ahead of his D Company.

Casey slapped a hand against McDonald’s shoulder, sending up a small eruption of dry snow collected on the buffalo fur. “Lieutenant, deploy your men in light skirmish order on my right.”

“Yes, sir,” McDonald responded. “How far to the right do you need us to deploy, Major?”

For a moment Casey studied the tall volcanic butte. “Hang your right flank in the air opposite that highest point.”

“The bastards are spreading out clean across the high ground,” Butler grumbled thick as peat as they watched McDonald move off, waving and ordering his men to the right of the increasingly rugged slope.

Donegan’s ears immediately perked at the sound of that voice clearly come from the Emerald Isle. He started to inch his way over toward the ground where the two officers stood—getting himself a good, close look at the forty-nine-year-old Butler.

“And that means they’re spreading us too damned thin to boot,” Casey replied, turning back to Butler. Then he spoke quietly, almost in confidence. “Look, Captain—I’ve saved the toughest job for you. I know what you’re capable of doing in the field. You see, if those reds keep massing on our left, they could damn well roll right around us.”

“You want me on the left flank, Major?”

Casey nodded.

Butler straightened, his lips grim with determination as he said, “They won’t get around us, sir. Count on that.”

Casey stepped back, saluted. “Good to have your men in this with me.”

“Very good, Major,” Butler replied. “We all want a piece of it today.”

“I’ve waited long enough myself,” Casey declared. “Deploy your company, then send word back to me should you find any in your outfit running low on ammunition.”

Edmond Butler turned away to shout his orders, commands echoed down the line through the lieutenant, and finally to the old noncoms, who did their best to keep the trembling soldiers lined up as they started across the broken ground, old files struggling to keep every man’s spirits up despite the cold, despite the bulky clothing that hampered a man’s movements, despite the arrows that strayed far enough to land among them in the snow.

By the time McDonald was deployed on Casey’s right, and Butler had spread his men left toward the base of a high timbered knoll south of the steep volcanic butte, the entire front line of battle now extended for more than a thousand yards, a thin blue wall running from the Tongue River on the north, down along snowy ridges to the steep hillsides above Butler, where it seemed more and more of the warriors were beginning to flock.

From these heights the Cheyenne and Sioux could easily rush down and sweep around behind Casey’s entire battalion—all three companies—therein threatening the gun positions, the supply-wagon corral, even Nelson A. Miles’s escape route north … back to the Tongue River Cantonment.

You’re a bleeming fool! Seamus thought to himself as he started forward, easing over toward Butler’s company. Miles was far from even considering a retreat. No matter that the soldiers were facing odds better than three to one. No matter that they were all but out of rations. Why even worry that they were more than a hundred miles from their base?

Miles simply wasn’t the sort of man to tuck tail and run.

No matter that he might very well lose half his men, hurling them against these steep, icy slopes.

Back and forth the warriors danced in and out of the thickening snow along the ridgetops. Gray smoke hung heavy, sleepy, refusing to rise from the many fires the Indians fed. At times as the soldiers stumbled and trudged across the slowly rising ground from the meadow, the warriors would huddle around their fires for a few minutes, then return to the edge of the bluffs in rotation. But as soon as three companies reached the sharp-sided coulee cutting the base of the bluffs, all the warriors suddenly bristled atop the slopes together.

“How deep is that snow down there?” someone growled behind Donegan as the first of them reached the lip of the ravine.^*

“Can’t be much deeper’n any of this,” Seamus said as he started easing himself over the side.

The racket from the hilltops was growing, as if those heavy snow clouds rolling in amplified the shrieks and screeching from the warriors.

“There water down there?” one of the soldiers asked, down on his hands and knees at the lip of the ravine as Donegan slid, stumbled to the bottom.

“How deep is it?” Casey asked, suddenly appearing at the edge of the ravine.

Overhead more bullets whined. Once more Seamus was thankful that the Indians were shooting downhill—which caused most of their shots to sail harmlessly over the soldiers.

Hammering down one of his boots encased inside the thick buffalo-hide outer moccasin, Donegan found the snow deep enough to spread out the long tails of his buffalo coat as he sank up to his crotch.

“’Bout this deep, Major!”

“Any water?”

Wagging his head, Seamus answered, “None—it’s all froze. Bring ’em on!”

In a heartbeat Casey had turned his horse at the lip of the ravine above the Irishman, signaling, calling out, moving his men up through the sagebrush and tall grass that tripped the men, snagged the long tails of their heavy coats. As Donegan began to wade through the snow, inching across the narrow ravine bottom, then started to clamber his way up the far side, the soldiers dropped over the north side by the dozens. Sliding, slipping, spilling into the deep snow, standing once more to dust ice from their Long Tom Springfields, holding their rifles overhead to push ahead the way a man would wade through water in a waist-deep stream.

Hurtling themselves against the far side, most slipped more times than not against the ice-slickened, snowy side. Then Donegan was at the top, turning, crouching low as he barked down at those right below him.

“Use your rifle butts, fellas!” he called out to them, first to one side, then the other, along the ravine wall. “Jab yourself a foothold,” and he started to pantomime in the air with his own Winchester. “Jab yourself some handholds in the side.”

By the dozens they cocked their rifles back over their shoulders, lunging forward violently against the frozen ground, the rifle butts sinking into the hard, unforgiving Montana soil. Foot by foot by foot they carved tiny niches into the side of the ravine for their hands, for their frozen toes encased within the clumsy arctics they wore. Leaning down to offer an empty hand, Seamus pulled the first man over the top.

Then as the warriors above them screamed louder, that soldier turned round, his back to the enemy on the ridge, crouching down as bullets whined past them. He too pulled up another soldier. Two became four, and those four grew to eight, hands going down, men grunting, scrambling, slipping and falling, rising to climb again in those tiny footholds on the side of that dry-bottomed ravine. Sixteen became thirty-two.

Hands rose, gripped by hands coming down … hauling, straining, cursing their way out.

Then Casey and Butler were down in the snow, McDonald heaving himself over the side, tripping and sliding on his back to the bottom like a child on a wooden toboggan. A pair of soldiers helped the lieutenant to his feet, and together they wobbled to the far side—the last of the battalion to close the file.

Ten or more at a time these clambered up the side, pulled over the lip by their comrades as the shrieks from the hilltops grew more strident. The snow was growing thick as Casey snapped a look left and right.

“Form up! Form up!”

Officers and noncoms barked commands as the three companies deployed themselves once more. Every now and then a bullet sang among them, causing the soldiers to flinch, some to duck aside. A stray arrow might hiss into the snow and sage in front of them.

It made Seamus shudder as the battalion started forward again. Those arrows landing in front of them now meant one thing: in a matter of moments, in no more than a few steps, these soldiers would be within range of the enemy’s deadliest weapons. They had reached the foot of the slopes that would carry them right into the arms of the enemy.

To be hit with a bullet was one thing, Donegan brooded as he lunged and stumbled clumsily through the deep, drifted snow while the earth tilted slowly toward the sky. Quick and clean a bullet was—and if it hit a bone, that arm or leg was sure to come off. Although he did remember how Major Sandy Forsyth had refused amputation after nine long, hot days on a sandy scut of ground in a nameless fork of a high-plains river.

Oh, how the sawbones were kept busy in the Civil War, he remembered—for there was simply no repairing such a wound. Just take the goddamned arm or leg off and heave it aside, into the pile of arms and legs, feet and hands, outside the surgeons’ tent. Bloody butchers leaving all those poor men crippled.

But an arrow—how silent, how clean as it sank inside a man’s chest, his back, and all the worse yet: his soft gut. Blood and juices softening the sinew that held the long iron point to the painted shaft the warrior had grooved so that the victim bled internally. And once the sinew was soft enough, the shaft was easily yanked free of the deep wound, leaving the deadly chunk of iron deep inside. A man died slow, miserably, tortured.

Not the clean death of a bullet wound.

By the time he had stumbled and fallen, and somehow trudged another twenty yards toward a low clump of cedar, Donegan could almost begin to make out the painted faces above them. Close enough to see eyes, and the bright paints, close enough to tell feathers from hair as the wind came up and the thickening snow began to dance.

This suddenly had the makings of no ordinary snowfall. Now the heady gusts were whipping the falling flakes sideways, spinning devilishly every which way at a man, blinding him for a moment as the wind slipped past the eyeholes he had cut himself in a scrap of wool blanket. Snow crusted on his eyelashes, hardening with the frost of his breath suddenly freezing in the supercold air.

All around him Butler’s soldiers would kneel, aim, and fire up the slope at the blurring figures cavorting along the ridgetops. After a shot or two the soldiers reluctantly rose from the deepening snow, reloading and lunging forward another five yards until they would halt again, take aim, and fire at the enemy.

The bullets, the screeching curses, the arrows arcing down in wave after wave, were all coming thicker now. Just like the snow. Off to the far right McDonald was leading his men against the first of the sharp slopes at the base of the tall cone itself. That part of the hillside rose more than twenty feet, then flattened out onto a narrow shelf where there wasn’t a single cedar or oakbrush to conceal them from the enemy once they made it that far.

If any of them reached that shelf, Donegan thought, McDonald’s men would be in the open, right below the warriors.

Hell, Seamus thought as he watched Butler’s men huff and lunge coming up behind him, angling off to the left. None of them had any cover worth a shit anyway. And every last one of them stood out against the snow like a black-backed dung beetle scurrying away from an overturned buffalo chip.

Halting to blow like a winded packhorse, Donegan dropped to one knee and drank in the cold, dry air, watching the last of Butler’s men move off to the south in a scattered, ragged skirmish line as he yanked off his mitten and plunged his right hand through the slit in the side of his buffalo-hide coat. There, in the side pocket of his canvas mackinaw coat, he had stuffed the short brass cartridges. Bringing out a handful into the numbing cold, Seamus shook and shuddered as he fed the bullets one at a time into the cold receiver….

… Remembering the seventeen-shot Henry rifles he and Sam Marr had purchased at Fort Laramie ten winters gone. One chambered and sixteen down the loading tube. A rifle he first used against the Sioux that boiling hot July day beside the Crazy Woman Crossing.

Right now July seemed as if it would take forever to reach these rugged mountains and high plains. Right now … it seemed as if forever itself might well separate him from Fort Laramie, from the boy and Samantha.

Stuffing his stiff, frozen hand back into his mitten, Donegan found the tiny slit he had cut for his trigger finger so he could fire the Winchester without taking off the mitten and gauntlet. He rolled onto his other knee, then went to his belly, flattening the snow as he peered up the slope at the enemy. Three dozen or more stood up there right in front of him. And out before them all pranced a tall one wearing a long war shirt, a bright-red blanket tied at his waist to keep his legs warm, and on his head a beautiful full headdress, its long tail slurring the snow behind his heels.

“He must be some big medicine,” Seamus said under his breath. “Look at that bleeming bastard go to town—all that cock-struttin’.”

On either side of the war chief were arrayed more than three dozen others, all of them shouting, screeching, some singing along with the one in the showy warbonnet. Didn’t take much to figure out that was a war chief up there, doing his best to keep his men worked up into a fighting lather.

Nuzzling his left elbow down into the snow, Seamus slowly settled his chest onto the ground and spread his legs for a surer stance, bringing the Winchester into his shoulder.

Cocky son of a bitch, isn’t he? Wailing and dancing, preening, prancing, and strutting … just daring one of us to knock him down.

Uphill … aiming up that slope—Seamus realized he would have to hold high. How much? He calculated and cocked the hammer back … drawing a sight picture on the warrior’s head. If he had figured right, Donegan thought as he let half the air out of his lungs, then the .44-caliber bullet should smack the war chief right in the chest.

After all—he began to squeeze the trigger—someone had to get rid of that noisy bastard.

The wagon guns had been quiet for so long that the next belching roar from the knoll below Crazy Horse surprised him. The mouth of the big gun spewed a heavy cloud of smoke as it belched the big round ball into air with a hissing whistle.

Up, up, up into the air, over the first lines of warriors arrayed along the lower slopes.

It floated overhead long enough that the warriors assembled across the end of the ridge had time to scurry out of the way, scampering this way and that as the whistling, tumbling ball careened out of the sky in a lazy arc. When it finally crashed to earth in a spot where no warriors tarried, the ball exploded in a mighty gush of noise, snow, and splintered sandstone.

As the scattered puffs of dirty gray snow and red-rock shards and black clods of dirt began to rain down from the sky, the warriors immediately danced back into view of the wasicu soldiers—yelling at them once more, taunting the white men, laughing at the enemy because their noisy wagon gun had done harm to nothing but some rocks and crusty snow.

The sight caused Crazy Horse to recall the wagon gun Grattan’s soldiers had pulled out to Conquering Bear’s village the day after a visiting Miniconjou had killed that stray Mormon cow. The haughty soldier chief came demanding the warrior who had stolen and butchered that skinny old cow. It was a shame that so many soldiers had to die over one decrepit animal. A far greater shame that so many Lakota had to die on the Blue Water when soldier chief Harney had come marching on the revenge trail.

Crazy Horse had been just a youngster back then. Many, many winters long gone now. Summers of fighting, autumns of hunting, winters of waiting for spring when young men thought of little else but getting themselves nestled between the downy thighs of a pretty girl.

For Crazy Horse these noisy wagon guns aroused many memories of a lifetime spent fighting to hold the wasicu back. Was there a place where he could go for the winter without the soldiers following? Would there ever be again a hunting ground where he could ride after the buffalo, skin and butcher it, build his fire and eat his meal, sleep out the night in peace—without worrying when the soldiers would come?

Painfully he squeezed those hard thoughts out of his mind the way a man would chew the gristle loose from the good meat, swallowing the soft red loin and tossing the rest into the fire.

For a time it was amusing to watch the frantic activity around the wagon guns with those knots of soldiers looking very much like tiny black ants swarming around a prairie anthill—the creatures crawling over one another, then suddenly leaping back as one of the wasicus leaned in to fire the big gun.

It roared again.

The ball came whistling from the great throat in a belch of blackish smoke, sent ever higher, climbing into the snowy clouds, where it pierced the thick veils, disappearing for a moment as it reached the top of its arc to begin its fall back to earth.

Crazy Horse’s warriors scattered, some of them pulling their ponies out of the way now, for this ball had managed to sail right on over the top of the ridge. Men stumbled against one another and fell in the snow, getting out of the ball’s path, ponies rearing and whinnying.

The whistling was suddenly silenced as the black iron sphere splooshed into the crusty snow and all but disappeared against a drift trampled by many moccasins and hooves. For a moment every mouth was hushed—only the frightened ponies snorted and pranced, eyes still saucered with horror and fear. Men stared at the ball. Watching. Waiting. Expectant.

Then Spotted Blackbird slowly crawled to his knees, rose to his feet, and circled the fire where he had been warming his hands. Dusting off the knees of his blanket leggings, the young warrior took a few tentative steps toward the half-buried ball. He stopped, then took a few more steps. Closer he went to the white man’s whistling weapon-ball as the rest watched in stunned silence.

When he was finally no more than an arm’s length from it, Spotted Blackbird pulled his bow from the quiver strapped at his back. Gently he tapped the ball and leaped back as if stung by a rattlesnake.

Many of the others gathered around him at a safe distance gasped, leaping back too.

But nothing happened.

Spotted Blackbird stepped closer once more. Then tapped the black ball again—harder than ever—and immediately dropped into a protective crouch.

When no explosion shook the ground, the warrior walked right up. to the object and smacked it solidly with the end of his elkhorn bow.

Then he began to strike it repeatedly, shouting in glee, dancing around and around it as he hammered the ball with blows. The other warriors came up to touch it too—counting coup on it as Spotted Blackbird had been the first to do.

It was great fun … until they heard the next whistle above their laughter, that warning cry of the black balls coming from the far side of the ridge. Warriors scattered, dashing to the top of the bluff, watching the ball sail up through the lowering clouds, in and out of the dancing white of the wind-driven snowstorm. Again every one of them scattered, yanking ponies and pushing one another out of the way. Only a fool would think that all the white man’s exploding balls would land harmlessly in the snow like so much sandstone or a river boulder.

With a hissing rush the ball sailed down, down—exploding in a blinding profusion of meteoric light, splintering rock and scattering red earth over those huddling nearby behind sandstone breastworks. The clatter of falling earth ended, and the warriors leaped to their feet, dusting the snow and dirt and rock chips from their clothing, shouting again to the wasicu, holding their genitals, pulling aside their breechclouts to wag their rumps at the soldiers.

“Hit me here!” one of the Shahiyela yelled at the white men below, patting the crack in his ample rear end.

Back and forth it would go like this, Crazy Horse believed. The warriors would not budge, and the big whistling balls would not drive them from this ridge.

But over to his right … now, that was a different matter.

Over there the soldiers were climbing out of the ravine that for a time had slowed their advance considerably. They wore too many clothes, he thought. The soldiers looked as if they had no legs as they struggled through the deep snow. Just the tops of their bodies, draped with those big buffalo-hide coats, the tails of which spread out like a whorl of prairie-flower petals come spring to this rolling country. Almost like tiny lodge men. Soldiers who looked like lodges. No legs had they, but still the wasicu pushed on.

After so many summers of fighting, after all those battles, Crazy Horse could tell the leaders, the soldier war chiefs, gesturing and waving and shouting to the others, urging them on—marching even into the face of the withering fire from the Shahiyela on that far end of the ridge.

Quickly he glanced at the knoll to the north to be sure. No, the Bear Coat was still there with the wagon guns. Then Crazy Horse looked back to the south where the soldier chiefs led their men lumbering to the bottom of the steep slope. It was there that Big Crow and his Shahiyela fired bullets and arrows down at the white men.

These were very, very stupid soldiers, Crazy Horse thought as the wasicu shot their rifles up the far slope at the Shahiyela warriors, then reloaded to advance another few steps before shooting again. Like the crawl of black ants up the steep side of a prairie anthill.

Yes, he thought: these are very, very stupid soldiers.

That … or very, very brave men.

^*Present-day Battle Butte Creek.