too much already. Pray, how could I ever claim innocence?” Custer was startled by a voice.
“General?”
The commander turned, finding Moylan at his side.
“For a moment there I figured you nodded off with your eyes open … as you often do. Seems you were gone somewhere in a dream perhaps.”
“What is it, Lieutenant?”
“Corbin’s riding in.”
Custer glanced at the bone-yellow sun nailed against a pale, winter-blue sky. Late morning.
“Maybe he’s spotted camp, Lieutenant.”
Custer kept his men at a march as the scout charged up at a full gallop. Wheeling his mount in a knee-sliding circle, Corbin brought the snorting, sidestepping animal alongside the Seventh’s commander.
“Quite a show, Jack.”
“I been on into camp. They’re waiting for you.”
“Much farther?”
“Ain’t but a stone’s throw now. Less than two miles. They got every man-jack called out—seems Sheridan fixes to welcome you home in real style.”
“He does, eh? Then I suppose there isn’t a better spot than here and no better time than the present to shape up our columns. Moylan, pass the word that we’ll halt on that bench up ahead. I want the men prepared for review before General Sheridan!”
“Hurry, goddammit, Perkins! You’re gonna miss the best show of your miserable life!”
“I’m coming, Hinkle. Damned boots rubbed a blister on the back of my heel. Governor Crawford showed no mercy on us Kansas boys.”
“Lucky any of us survived that snowstorm. C’mon! I hear this General Custer puts on a show no man can forget! Pick up your feet. I don’t wanna miss a minute of his ride-through. Custer’s the man who not only whipped J.E.B. Stuart’s ‘Invincibles’ and turned the tide at Gettysburg—but he’s the one who forced ol’ Robert E. Lee himself to throw in the towel at Appomattox!”
Beneath a glorious winter sun warming this first day of December, the air more vibrant than it had been for weeks, General Philip H. Sheridan formed the men to review Custer’s regiment. Flanked by his officer staff and joined by every infantryman not otherwise on duty in camp, along with the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteers who had failed to march through the snows of Indian Territory in time to join with the Seventh Cavalry before the attack on Black Kettle’s camp, Sheridan awaited his dashing young protege.
“Custer won’t dare disappoint any audience, Perkins,” Hinkle said. “Someday you’ll tell all your grandchildren about this day—seeing the Boy General hisself marching home in victory after his Seventh Cavalry crushed the Cheyenne nation!”
First into view rode the Osage trackers, led by Little Beaver, the aging, stoic warrior who had painted himself for this grand march. Right behind him pranced Hard Rope and the younger trackers, each singing his personal war chant—songs of victory and glory, accompanied by frequent whoops of joy punctuated by firing their army-issued rifles into the air.
Up and down the column galloped a young warrior named Trotter who brandished aloft the long scalp of a Cheyenne he flaunted for all to see—a scalp he bragged belonged to none other than Chief Black Kettle himself. Other Osage trackers waved captured lances they had decorated with dangling, blood-encrusted Cheyenne scalps. Some beat on small hand drums while others shook their bows and rawhide shields, all astride their prancing mounts, every mane and tail resplendent with red and blue, green and white strips cut from captured Cheyenne blankets.
Directly behind these joyful warriors who had just secured a victory over a longtime enemy rode Lieutenant Silas Pepoon’s civilian scouts. Ben Clark and Jack Corbin rode in tandem, Moses Milner and courier Ed Guerrier on their heels. Only Milner had refused to clean up for Custer’s show. His well-matted beard still bore bits of fluff and lint, scraps of many a meal. On his head the long-tangled hair was in much the same disheveled condition, and everything about him remained coated with a well-cured patina of red dirt and mud.
Right behind the scouts marched the regimental band,piping that airy, raucous theme song of the Seventh Cavalry, “GarryOwen”:
Let Bacchus’s sons be not dismayed,
But join with me each jovial blade;
Come booze and sing, and lend your aid
To help me with the Chorus.
In place of Spa we’ll drink brown ale,
And pay no reckoning on the nail,
No man for debt shall go to jail
From GarryOwen in glory!
No man for debt shall go to jail
From GarryOwen in glory!
We are the boys that take delight in
Smashing the Limerick lights when lighting,
Through the streets like sporters fighting,
And tearing all before us.
Let no man mistake that jaunty Irish quickstep now firmly identified with the gallant Seventh Cavalry and its dashing young commander. A hundred years before, this regimental march was named for “Garry Owen,” Gaelic for Owen’s Garden, a suburb of Limerick, Ireland, which throughout the eighteenth century was noted for its rowdy melees of drunken soldiers. While the merry tune had been associated with such groups as the Queen’s Fifth Royal Lancers, it was later adopted by some units of the Union Army of the Potomac during the Civil War.
But by 1868 this rousing, heart-pounding Irish melody firmly belonged to one regiment and one regiment only—the Seventh Cavalry.
To the stirring call of trumpets, Custer pranced into view astride Dandy, curried and gleaming for the triumphant entry. Custer’s buckskin leggings had been brushed clean for the occasion, their long fringe fluttering on the breeze, topped by a hip-length sack coat trimmed with fur collar and cuffs. He had combed his red-blond beard, letting his shoulder-length curls stream over his collar. Atop his head sat a pillbox otter cap.
“What a figure he cuts, Hinkle!”
“I’d say! See how firmly he’s in control of that sidestepping stallion, waving to spectators like they was paying him court!”
“That they are, Hinkle!”
Directly behind Custer plodded the captives. He had expressly wanted the Cheyenne to witness the grand spectacle first-hand, to experience how the soldiers revered their Boy General. Scores of widows and orphans trudged past Sheridan, their dark eyes averted, many hiding their faces. They feared torture and death now that they had come to the pony soldier camp. Some older women keened their death songs.
The enlisted men of the Seventh Cavalry followed the prisoners, while behind them rumbled the wagons of Lieutenant Bell’s quartermaster corps. In some of the slat-beds rode the wide-eyed and fearful wounded captives. In another lay Custer’s resplendent Cheyenne lodge. As the last wagons rattled into view, Custer pranced around in a tight circle, then nudged Dandy forward with his golden spurs.
“General Sheridan!” Custer called out, saluting.
“Custer, my friend!” Sheridan saluted, then presented a bare hand to the young officer. “How glad I am to see you.”
“No more happy than I!”
“You’ve done it, by damn! Showed ’em all, haven’t you?”
“I hope now to get on with my career—what needs doing here on the plains.”
“There’s not a goddamned thing to stop us now, Custer. You’ve seen to that with this stunning victory. Like the Shenandoah, you haven’t let me down!”
