Drawing her bright red blanket across her cold cheeks, Monaseetah’s beautiful eyes were all there was left for him to see. All he needed to see to feel touched once more by her animal warmth.
Custer kicked Dandy into a lope, speeding to the head of the columns. Headed into history.
CHAPTER 14
NEVER before had De Benneville Keim laid eyes on such a wild and desolate sight as the winter valley of the Washita into which Custer’s troops had descended yesterday afternoon. Pale, milky light slanted eastward, nudging skeletons of winter-robed hackberry and blackjack oaks in an area known as “the shinnery.” It was as if all the bare and lifeless vegetation foreshadowed this as a valley of death, beckoning and luring the soldiers down the trail. Keim shuddered, trying to convince himself a corpse couldn’t be any colder six feet under the icy crust of the wind- scoured snow. At twilight Moylan’s thermometer stood at eighteen degrees below zero.
The fires had helped little this morning as the shivering troops rolled out of their tents and robes into the bitter winter dawn. To defrost his limbs and working parts, a soldier was forced to broil one side while freezing the other. Most gathered hunchbacked around the roaring fires, slowly turning themselves as if they were themselves dripping hump roasts browning before the dancing yellow-blue flames.
As the sun broke a frosty saffron over the hills to the east, brass trumpets sounded “The General,” a call requiring the grumbling soldiers to break from their warm fires and strike their tents. When the wagons were loaded, Custer lost no time in ordering “Boots and Saddles” sounded. Kicking snow and pouring the remains of coffee from the battered pots over the coals, the last details clambered aboard their wagons.
“Advance! Column of twos!”
Lieutenant Myles Moylan, Custer’s adjutant, passed the command down the columns, his shouts startling flock after flock of black-feathered scavengers from their communal roosts in the bare-boned trees. Across the snow those last few miles due east to the site of what once had been the winter camp of Black Kettle’s Cheyenne, last November’s trail lay plain enough for any shavetail recruit to read.
Wide and deep—like a saber slashing into the still beating heart of Indian Territory.
South across the icy river Custer led Sheridan and his staff into the devastated village, followed by the scouts, Osage and civilian alike, before the troops themselves were allowed to cross the Washita. All around them erupted the ear-splitting clatter of a thousand crows and wrinkled-neck buzzards taking to the wing, scavengers protesting this disturbance of their free meals. Some of the birds were so gorged with flesh they had difficulty taking flight to escape the men and horses.
Within the ruins of the village, snarling, howling, barking wolves and coyotes confronted the soldiers, four- legged predators drawn to this place by the potent stench of death. Some of the men pulled bandannas over their noses or hid their faces behind tall coat collars. A handful grew sick enough to throw up what remained of the hardtack and salt pork they had wolfed down hours ago.
The charred lodge poles Custer’s men had burned the day of the battle lay like black monuments poking from the new snow.
As far as the eye could see, the ground was littered with grotesque, frozen corpses. But as plain as the cold nipping any soldier’s cheeks, a man could see moccasined feet had visited the village after Custer had pulled out. While some of the bloodied bodies had been wrapped in blankets and bound up with rawhide cords by now, very few had actually been hoisted into the forks of the skeletal trees, as was the Indians’ custom. Plainly, Black Kettle’s village had not camped alone along the Washita this winter.
Once man had abandoned the valley, gangs of buzzards, crows, wolves, and coyotes had begun their grisly work. Every corpse was partially eaten.
“General—” Custer turned to address Sheridan, “if you’d come with mc, I’ll show you a vantage point where you can see the entire battlefield. From there I can describe the process of our fight for you, Lieutenant Colonel Crosby, and your staff.”
“Very good, Custer.” Sheridan coughed, gagging on the stench. “Lead on.”
“You’ll come with us, Mr. Keim?” Custer asked.
Keim nodded eagerly. “Wouldn’t miss it, General Custer.” During the war, Keim had become a favorite of U. S. Grant, extolling Union victories as a field correspondent. Sherman had grown to hate reporters during the war, and they returned his hatred in kind. Sheridan stood somewhere in the middle, wary of the press, yet recognizing their political importance.
Custer led Sheridan to the knoll just south of the village where he had watched most of the battle action that morning his Seventh Cavalry crossed the Washita. On their climb they passed more dead Cheyenne stuffed back in the thick brush to conceal them from predators until a more proper burial could be arranged.
“Moylan,” Custer said, “have Lieutenant Custer and Captain Keogh each take a squad to search south and east of here. Scour the area for any sign of Major Elliott’s command. I suggest they begin at a two-mile radius, where we had to leave off the day of the battle. Work out to a three-mile radius in a sweeping arc. If nothing’s found, proceed five miles out from camp, but no farther. I don’t want my men strung out from our support should the need arise.”
Moylan saluted, wheeling downhill toward the rest of the command.
“You have reason to fear the hostiles might still be in the area?” Sheridan asked.
“I’d be afraid to gamble. It’s certain the Indians have returned to care for their dead.”
“That’d be another stroke of Custer’s Luck, wouldn’t it?”
“I can’t imagine being lucky enough to catch another village napping.”
The wind shifted, carrying to the hilltop a heavy stench from southeast of camp. Sheridan requested his field glasses. With them he pinpointed the odor. Some two hundred yards beyond the camp perimenter lay the bloated, stiffened carcasses—better than eight hundred Indian ponies Lieutenant Godfrey’s troopers had slaughtered. Among the remains of what had once been the pride of the Cheyenne now roamed a pack of fat, sated wolves and their coyote cousins, joined by some Indian dogs.
Each animal bristled, snarling its anger as Lieutenant Thomas W. Custer’s search detail skirted the deathly meadow, pushing a little south of east from the Indian camp.
Following a trail not difficult to read, the lieutenant’s men climbed a low wooded ridge, then descended toward a dry tributary of the Washita. Several yards west of that ravine, Tom Custer signaled a halt. On the ground ahead huddled a mass of crows, ravens, and turkey buzzards, all busy over something … or someone.
A foul, sweetish odor intensified as the soldiers warily approached on foot, leading their mounts. The solitary body had been left for the birds of prey to work over. Enough flesh still clung on the torso to show bullets fired into the carcass after the soldier had been killed.
“Turn him over,” Tom Custer ordered. “I wanna see who this was.”
One green recruit scuffed through the snow, holding a bandanna over his mouth and nose. His stomach revolted and the boy coughed away the sting of bile in his mouth.
“Grimes,” Tom Custer growled at his veteran sergeant. “Help the boy.”
Grimes yanked his collar up to his nose, scowling and mumbling a curse. Everyone understood, including Custer. There wasn’t a single man among them who relished getting any closer to the half-eaten corpse than he absolutely had to.
A few of the men gasped as Grimes rolled the mutilated body onto its back. The soldier’s entire skull was black with old blood from the eyebrows clear back to the nape of the neck—completely scalped. No quick job here. Though his features had become distorted in mutilation and weeks of severe cold, no man could mistake the long, dark dundrearies bristling along the dead man’s cheeks—sideburns allowed to stretch down along the jawline, all the fashion rage in the East at the time.
“Sergeant Major Kennedy,” Tom Custer snarled. “Attached to Elliott, wasn’t he?”
The lieutenant knew the answer to his own question. Kennedy had been a seasoned veteran of the Civil War, riding with Major Joel Elliott’s company.
“Yes, he was,” answered Corporal Harper. “But why’d he be out here … alone, sir? You figure it?”
“Only a guess, Harper. Man like Kennedy had a real good reason to let himself get caught alone by the Indians way he was. This far from the village.”
