Wolf Mountain Moon: The Battle of the Butte, 1877

Chapter 38

Tioheynuka Wi 1877

BY TELEGRAPH

Raiding Redskins Again Rampant in Wyoming.

Terrible Snow-Storm all Over the West

WYOMING

Another Indian Skirmish

CHEYENNE, January 15.—The continued interruption in telegraph communications between Forts Laramie and Fetterman induced an escort of the Sixth cavalry, commanded by Sergeant Bessy, in returning from Hat creek to strike across the country, and come in on the Fetterman line last night. On the Elk Horn, thirty miles north of Fort Laramie, fresh traces of Indians were discovered, and to avoid a surprise in camp, the sergeant, with three men, made a reconnaissance, and about midnight collided with a party of fifteen Indians. In the fight which ensued, Bessy and Toggart were slightly wounded and Featherall badly wounded. They also lost three horses killed, when the Indians were forced to retire. A company of cavalry left Laramie to-day to endeavor to intercept the Indians.

CHICAGO

One to Three Feet of Snow.

CHICAGO, January 15.—Early this forenoon a heavy snow-storm, accompanied with a violent northeast wind, set in and has continued up to midnight tonight without abatement…. Advices from several states in the west show that the storm is very great and that from one to three feet of snow are on the ground.

Tioheynuka Wi. Moon of Frost in the Lodge.

They had barely survived the Moon of Hard Times. With no buffalo to be found and very little game, and with the way one winter storm followed on the heels of the last … the Crazy Horse village had been limping from one place to another after packing up and leaving the Buffalo Tongue River country in a hurry.

He Dog reined up his pony, turning to look down the slope into the valley where the long procession trudged through the snow and wind. Warriors dotted the hillsides along their route toward the White Mountains,^* keeping a wary eye trained on the distance for any army columns prowling through this broken country. At each camp it seemed there were fewer lodges to come down and start away on that day’s journey toward the foot of the mountains, where they hoped to find buffalo for meat and hides. And hope.

To find buffalo for hope.

So many had already given up all hope of living in the old way with the Hunkpatila of Crazy Horse. Most often they slipped away late at night, taking down their lodge if they had one, gathering their few belongings, leading their skinny ponies away from the camp circle in the dark and the rain or snow, sneaking off toward the agencies.

The village was not a grand cavalcade any longer.

The Shahiyela had buried their war chief, Big Crow, in the rocks. The Crazy Horse people had left behind two bodies upon the scaffolds they had erected high in the forks of the great old cottonwoods. He Dog knew one of them well—a friend named Runs-the-Bear. A brave Oglalla who had stayed to fight until the last. Both of the dead were very brave men who gave their lives in that fight at Belly Butte, their bones now resting high in the trees, resting for the ages—for the wild animals to pick apart, for the sun to bleach, for the winds to sigh over for all seasons to come.

And there were the wounded. Many wounded. How they must be suffering with the cold, with this journey the chiefs ordered. Then two more died. Two more high scaffolds. More women and children left without a man to protect them. Yet the others healed. For the rest of their days they would carry scars of their fight in the winter blizzard, but they had healed.

Like the pony belonging to the young Shahiyela named Medicine Bear. Struck by one of the big iron balls fired from one of the wagon guns, the hair along one flank had been completely scraped off in a long streak, right down to the bare hide. But now, as the raw abrasion healed, the track of the iron ball on its flank began to grow white hair. A white as brilliant as sun-struck snow.

The Great Mystery had protected both horse and rider during the battle and had gone on to mark that pony with a sign.

The warriors of the Hunkpatila and the Shahiyela could do no less than protect the shrinking village.

After watching from the hills He Dog hesitated returning to the camp at the end of each day’s march. The children would be crying from empty bellies. Women would be wailing for their dead, their faces tracked with tears and ashes, their arms and legs gashed in mourning. There was little hope left in the people.

Even in the eyes of Crazy Horse.

This strange man, He Dog’s good friend, no longer had the special light behind his eyes. No longer seemed to carry a fire in his belly. Crazy Horse surely heard the same sad crying, the same wails, He Dog thought—the same mourning all the rest of us hear.

Eight suns after the soldiers had started north with their prisoners, scouts for the village finally ran across a small herd of buffalo high up on the headwaters of the Buffalo Tongue River, near the foothills to the White Mountains draped in a thick winter white. Hunters killed all they could before the rest ran so far away, the tired ponies could not fight the deep snow to follow.

Wearily the women and children had stumbled through the icy drifts, doing their best to follow on foot in those paths beaten by the warriors’ ponies to reach the fallen beasts. There were not many—but enough that the people ate well that night. There was more talk around the fires too, and even a little laughter. Laughter! For once in a long, long time the faces showed more than the shadows of death-approaching.

They all saw that the most seriously wounded warriors got the choice cuts, sucked at slivers of the heart dipped in gall to build their strength, thicken their blood. Next to be fed were the old ones and the children. And finally the strong women and warriors ate their fill. What was left they wrapped in the green hides and tied to the travois when the village moved on the next day.

Would they ever find a place where they could rest in peace? He Dog wondered. Or would they have to keep on moving, endlessly moving? Attempting to stay one step ahead, a half day ahead, of the soldiers?

Those people who had slipped away to sneak off to the agencies—he wondered how they were faring now. Was there ever enough pig meat, enough moldy flour, to fill all the bellies, ever enough of the paper-thin trader blankets to keep all the bodies warm against the cruel bite of the wolfish wind?

And for the first time He Dog truly hoped there was enough at the agencies to take care of his people who had given up and gone in. Because there wasn’t enough buffalo left anymore. And what blankets the village had not been forced to abandon, what blankets the army had not captured and burned, surely those were not near enough to keep the little ones, the sick ones, the women warm as they trudged on through the winter snows beside the skinny ponies pulling the near-empty travois.

More and more he found himself praying there would be enough at the reservations for all who fled there.

Much of the rest of each day He Dog brooded about his friend. Was Crazy Horse like the rest of the Titunwan and Tse-Tsehese warriors? Was he finally tired of all the fleeing, the fighting, the running and the killing … enough to take his own family in to the agency?

Was Crazy Horse ready to surrender?

Would their battle with the Bear Coat at Belly Butte really be the last fight for Crazy Horse?

Was it to be the last fight of the once-mighty Lakota warrior bands?

The thought caused He Dog to shudder. How could any fighting man ever turn over his guns, give away his ponies, sit in the shade of agency buildings, and wait for the wasicu to hand out the rations?

He Dog hung his head as the people below went into camp along a little treeless creek. There would not be much shelter from the snarl of the wind this night.

He felt like a plum that had its juices squeezed from it: hollow, dry. Dying.

Oh, how he wanted to hope, wanted desperately to believe that Crazy Horse would never be anything less than a warrior.

BY TELEGRAPH

General Miles’ Men Bull-Dozing Sitting Bull.

THE INDIANS

Sitting Bull Again Defeated

ST. PAUL, January 16.—To Adjutant General of the Division of the Missouri:—A dispatch received from Colonel Miles states that the 18th of December, three companies of the Fifth Infantry, under Lieutenant Baldwin, struck Sitting Bull’s camp on Red Water and defeated him, with a loss of all the property in the camp and sixty mules and ponies. The Indians escaped with little besides what they had on their persons.

(Signed,)

ALFRED H. TERRY, Brigadier General

Luther Kelly and his scouts got the soldiers no more than seven miles north along the Tongue River that tenth day of January. After more than a day of rain the soggy ground began to freeze in the afternoon, the sky clouded up, and it began to snow all over again.

For the next two days it was much of the same: cold, snow, half rations, slogging back and forth across the Tongue time and again, the drenched soldiers shivering around smoky fires each evening, complaining of frostbitten toes and fingers, ears and noses.

Bernard McCann died quietly on the afternoon of the twelfth as the regiment was going into camp. Surgeon Tilton had never expected the young private to recover from his terrible leg wound but in the last four days had done all he could to put McCann at peace. Like Corporal Rothman, the other soldier killed at Battle Butte, McCann was wrapped securely in a tent half, bound by rope, and laid among the cargo in a wagon.

The following morning the Fifth Infantry marched on, covering no more than fifteen miles on the thirteenth, making their bivouac in one of their southbound camps. Once again the mercury in Tilton’s thermometer froze at forty degrees below zero.

One day they were able to cross the Tongue River on the ice, though the following would find the ice softening and splintering, drenching soldiers, wagons, and mules—all hands called out to throw ropes to those who floundered in the ice floes, to pitch in and haul their fellows from the icy dangers. Not a mile went by that at least a dozen soldiers didn’t fall out, some shuffling to one side of the trail and some to the other, tearing off their boots and socks, rubbing cold snow on their frostbitten toes or fingertips.

At one point Kelly spotted an old soldier scooping up a handful of the crusty ice from the ground, massaging the end of his nose with it.

“Goddamn it! Goddamn it!” the old file muttered.

“What’s the matter?” Kelly inquired. “Nipped your nose?”

“Yeah—my nose and fingers and bloody well everything else—goddammit!”

Each night the men lumbered into bivouac with wet boots. The unlucky ones were ordered right on out to guard duty and did not get a chance to dry their footwear properly. But for all the complaints about the leaking overshoes and the frozen screws barely holding the boot soles in place, Tilton and Tesson did not have to amputate a single toe among that hardy regiment of foot soldiers.

A stalwart bunch they were, trudging toward home mile after mile, no man immune from the bouts of coughing that plagued them all day long, fevers and aches that kept many of the soldiers from getting any real rest at night. In the cold and the darkness the restless insomniacs huddled close to the fires, so close that many of the soldiers scorched their clothing—singeing the skirts of their long buffalo coats, leggings, and even their overshoes.

On Sunday the fourteenth the command reached the site where they had buried Private William Batty on their chase after the village. Although they hadn’t seen any Indians since the ninth, Miles ordered pickets put out to guard against a surprise attack while relays began chipping away at the frozen earth until they recovered Batty’s corpse. After the surgeons rewrapped the body, it was placed in the back of a wagon with the other two soldiers, and the march was resumed for the rest of the afternoon until they reached the site of their fifth southbound camp about the time a new blizzard swept down upon them.

Icy, frozen snow hurtled out of the north into their faces, accompanying their struggles for the next three days. So terrible had the weather become once more, so miserable were the men trudging half-bent at the waist into the gales, that Luther Kelly was reminded of Napoleon’s army trudging through the snowy, wind-hewn steppes of Russia.

Just past two o’clock on Thursday, the eighteenth of January, the van of the column hoved into sight of the cantonment. In the near distance garrison guards cried out their news to others at the post. Men burst from the log cabins, pulling on coats and hats and mittens. As Miles and his weary winter warriors approached, the regimental band came loping out, formed a square, and began their rendition of “Marching Through Georgia.”

“Just look at the men, will you, Kelly?” Miles suggested, having turned in the saddle to watch the faces of those trail-hardened soldiers behind them as they drew step by step ever closer to Tongue River Cantonment. “Grinning from ear to ear!”

“How could any of them be unhappy, General?” Luther asked. “They’ve marched more than two hundred miles through the roughest conditions, crossed the Tongue River more than a hundred fifty times going and coming—and now they see their barracks again at long last, where they can take shelter out of the winds and eat warm food after weeks of cold bacon and frozen hardtack—”

“Not to mention a good scrubbing!” Miles roared, giving himself a sniff. “Whew! I do believe I’m fit only to bunk in with my horse, Kelly!”

Without another word Luther reined his horse slowly to the side and let the colonel and his staff continue toward the cantonment’s crude log buildings. Garrison soldiers waved their hats. Those returning warriors all raised their muskrat and sealskin caps, some pitched high in the raw air as cheers and huzzahs scared birds from the bare branches of surrounding trees. They were home, these men who had endured more over the last two months than most humans could ever imagine.

They were home. Home.

And so that sentiment made Luther rein up there on the low rise, turning to gaze south … south by east … wondering, now that eight days had passed, just how much ground the Irishman had been able to cover—alone as he was in hostile country, plunging through the same icy sleet and driving blizzards.

Was he halfway there? Kelly wondered. Had he bumped into any hunting bands or war parties? Had he managed to stay out of sight and keep his hair?

Would he make it home to his family?

As the wind knifed cruelly across the side of his face, Luther adjusted the wool muffler over his cheek, tugging it over his nose. And then he thought he knew.

A man like Seamus Donegan simply didn’t know the meaning of the word “failure.” No “can’t.” No “won’t.”

“Fare you well, friend,” Kelly said in a whisper on that hilltop near Tongue River Cantonment, his words whipped from his lips and carried south on that brutal wind blustering out of the arctic regions. “Fare you well … until we meet again.”

^*Bighorn Mountains.