Yet not more than a handful of hours later North’s Pawnee scouts rode in with news not in the least welcomed by any of Connor’s command. The trackers had run across a large recent encampment of white men. The ground was littered with hundreds of dead horses, some of which had been shot. Most, however, had evidently frozen to death on their picket lines, their carcasses lying as orderly as they were.
North gravely informed Connor, “General, each of those dead horses looked like it had been damned near starved to death before that blizzard came in to finish them off. Animals run hard and not given time to graze or forage. When that norther hit—wasn’t a owl hoot of a chance any one of those mounts had enough fat on its ribs to keep from freezing.”
12
“SOME OF THOSE men offered me five dollars for a single tack,” Jonah Hook said in wonder to Shad Sweete. “Even up at Rock Island where most of us was rotting away—never saw a man in that bad a shape.”
“More’n just hunger, Jonah. That bunch of raggedy beggars was lucky to get out of Injun country with their hair.”
“All had to walk out—some of ’em in boots falling apart.”
“Never knew a boot anywhere as good as a Cheyenne moccasin, son.”
For days before the Pawnee scouts had finally discovered the location of the desperate columns, the Walker and Cole battalions had been under a constant state of siege, able to move very little on foot, able to do nothing more than hold back the thousands of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors by judicious use of their mountain howitzers.
“Injuns hate those big wagon-guns,” Shad had explained. “They call them the guns that shoot twice: once when they are fired and a second time when the shell explodes.”
Once he had the demoralized, ragged remnants of the two lost wings rejoined with his own command, General Patrick Connor had turned his force south and returned to Fort Connor on the Powder River to recuperate the men, arriving the last week of September. But the second day of that much-needed recuperation brought an early end to the Powder River Expedition.
“Connor’s madder’n a wet hornet.” Bridger settled in the riverbank shade where Sweete and Hook had been watching the lazy ripples of the murky river.
“Why’s that redheaded Irishman mad now?”
“Got dispatches up from Laramie, Shad.” Bridger sighed. “You remember hearing that wolf-howl days back.”
Hook watched the two old mountain men exchange a mysterious, knowing look.
“Howl like that always means some bad medicine coming, Gabe. Sure didn’t think it’d hit this soon.”
“What’s this you two are saying about a wolf-howl means bad medicine?” Jonah asked.
Sweete looked at Bridger. “We aren’t exactly talking about a real wolf-howl, Jonah.”
“Go ’head and tell the lad,” Bridger prodded.
“It’s downright ghosty, Jonah. A cry of a wolf like what me and Gabe heard few nights back—means only one thing. Spirits. Bad medicine. And a man in his right mind best be getting clear of these parts. Something fearsome always happens after a man hears that ghosty howl. Always has. Always will.”
“Whoa, Shad. You saying that wolf call you two heard some time back meant to tell you those soldiers were starving?”
Sweete shook his head. “I can’t say. Just that as long as we been out here in these mountains and plains, both Gabe and me learned to trust to what the critters tell us. Animal spirits can smell a lot more’n what any of us can.”
“That wolf smelled something bad coming?”
“Like death on the wind,” Sweete replied matter-of-factly. He turned back to Bridger to ask, “What’s doing with Connor?”
The old trapper sighed. “The stiff-necks back in Washington City putting an end to all Injun fighting for a while.”
They both sat upright, but Sweete spoke first. “The devil, you say? What’s the army supposed to do—sit on its thumbs? Dumb idjits, expecting they can talk peace to these war-loving, free-roaming bucks.”
“None of them back east understands the one simple rul—that the only thing a warrior understands is blood and brute force.” Bridger shrugged. “Connor says that bunch of politicians back east is cutting the army down to size now that the war back east is done with.”
“’Bout time, it is too,” grumbled Hook. “Cut it down far enough for this boy to go on back home to his family and farm.”
“Shame of it is, Connor’s been relieved of command and this expedition is done,” Bridger confided. “General’s heading back to Utah.”
“Utah?” Hook asked. “Ain’t that where all the Mormons went to settle?”
Sweete nodded. “Some of these boys marching with Connor been serving out to Camp Douglas in Utah. Hell, the general himself served as military commander out there till the army called him up for this expedition.”
That enviable western post, Camp Douglas, stood on a bluff above the City of the Saints in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. A paradise duty is what the soldiers called the place, for well-groomed plots of grass and flower beds surrounded the huge parade of packed, stream-washed gravel taken from the mountain stream diverted for irrigating the post’s own fields. Connor himself had seen the post raised as his first duty upon arriving in the land of Brigham Young back in October 1862.
While the general publicly told Young and his elders that the post was being built to protect the Overland Stage route and the Pacific Telegraph line from Indian depredations, the Mormon suspicion was that the army had been sent into the heart of their State of Deseret to keep an eye on them. Because most Mormons rankled at the recent bevy of laws Congress had been passing to outlaw polygamy in the states and its territories, Utah declared itself neutral once hostilities broke out between North and South in 1861.
“As far as Patrick E. Connor was concerned, in the Civil War, if you weren’t with him, you were against him,” Bridger went on. “The general took a special interest in keeping a close watch on the Mormons. And the dealings of that Mormon chief, the one called Brigham Young.”
“Shad’s told me about how he sent his private army out to get you of a time, Gabe.”
Bridger grinned, but with a coldness that made a drop of sweat slip down Hook’s spine.
“That’s right. One of these days, Jim Bridger would like to have him a chance to look that puffed-up prairie cock eye to eye and see just what he’s made of without standing behind his hired killers.”
“You never will, Gabe,” said Shad. “Young’s the kind who’ll never be a big enough man to stand on his own.”
Both he and Sweete chuckled when they went on to tell Hook how Connor marched into the land of the Mormons and never once worried about ruffling Mormon feathers. He was the chief political and military officer representing his government in the territory, and as such he took his job serious.
“From the first day his men started building that post up on the bluff, Connor ordered a cannon pointed down the hill at Brigham’s pride and joy—his tabernacle.”
From the walls of Camp Douglas, soldiers could look down not only on the lake itself, but the neatly platted streets and outlying farms of the Mormons where crops flourished and livestock abounded in the narrow valley. In excess of twenty thousand Latter-day Saints called it home, with more arriving every year.
“When the general started to replace his wooden buildings with stone from nearby quarries, just like the stone the Mormons had used for their own tabernacle, Brigham howled!” Sweete continued. “He came stomping up to the camp to protest to Connor that his fort was looking a mite too permanent for his liking, that the soldiers were harassing honest, God-fearing citizens, and that the army’s horses and mules were fouling the city’s water supply.”
“After the way he’s now been treated by the politicians and peace-loving turncoats back east, I’ll bet Connor will damn well welcome getting back to the land of the Saints,” Bridger said.
