Long Winter Gone

“Sell your lives dearly, boys! A hundred of ’em for every one of us!”

They did indeed sell their lives dearly. One by one, for dying is a one-man job at best. From the start the fight could not have lasted very long at all. Ridges to the south and east afforded good positions where the Indians fired down into Elliott’s grim circle. A desperate scrap lasting less time than it takes for the winter sun to travel from one lodge pole to the next. Less than fifteen white man minutes.

Perhaps long enough for a man to shave with a straight razor. Surely the fight lasted no longer than it took for the victorious warriors to perform their bloody work on the soldiers’ bodies afterward, before they pulled out to chase after those troopers Custer had left behind earlier that morning with the regiment’s coats and haversacks.

That many warriors simply didn’t need much time to complete their butchery of Elliott’s lost command.

*    *    *

As his men drew closer, Tom Custer saw that more than frozen stalks of winter grass rose tall in the hallowed air around each corpse. The back of every soldier bristled with a score or more arrows.

The search detail slid from their horses in grim, tight-lipped shock at what greeted their eyes. An unmasked revulsion was written plain as paint around every soldier’s eyes, in the set of every trooper’s jaw, as each man stumbled through the tangle of mutilated bodies, trying vainly to recognize a familiar face.

Hoping he would not.

Major Joel H. Elliott and his fifteen men had all been butchered in the most gruesome manner possible. Every torso bullet-riddled. Pinned with arrows. Backs, buttocks, and legs gashed. The hostiles had slashed most every throat, and at least four heads lay beside their frozen bodies.

“There were eighteen men still unaccounted for when we left the Washita, boys.” The younger Custer swallowed deep against the gall rising in his throat. “With Sergeant Major Kennedy, Elliott, and his fifteen men here, that still leaves one man unaccounted for on the day of the battle. One soldier to find.”

“Never gonna find that boy, sir,” Grimes growled.

“My detail ain’t leaving until we find a body, Grimes.”

“Better yet, Lieutenant—I say we find the Injuns did this to our boys!” said one of the sour-faced troopers.

“Time enough for that!” Tom Custer snapped. “Time now to see these men get a fitting burial.”

He turned, searching the whitened, bitter faces for a man to count on. “Schmidt?”

“Yessir?”

“Head back to General Custer.” he ordered. “Tell him what we found. Request a wagon—no, make that two. Bring the wagons here to recover the bodies of these poor soldiers.”

“Understood, sir.” Schmidt leapt to the saddle, wheeled his prancing horse in a circle, galloped off toward the destroyed camp of Black Kettle’s Cheyenne.

“Damn them all!” Tom Custer drove one gloved fist down into the open palm of his other hand.

“There’ll come a time when Autie and I will make these goddamned bastards pay for what they’ve done here!”

CHAPTER 15

LIKE any morsel of gossip, the discovery of Elliott’s command spread through the regiment like wildfire. Barely controlling his own rage, Custer ordered three of Bell’s wagons emptied and dispatched with another squad to follow Sergeant Nels Schmidt, with orders to bring in the bodies of Elliott’s men. At the same time, Sheridan and Custer determined to take two companies of troops with them as they marched downstream toward the nearby camps deserted following Black Kettle’s defeat.

“From the lay of the land, Custer, I get an idea why you didn’t learn of the other villages until it was almost too late.”

“Not just the rolling countryside, sir. Bloody poor scouting on our part. Should’ve known more of what I was going into before I attacked that Cheyenne village.”

“You feel lucky you rode out of this valley with your hair?”

“It’d never come to that, General! Not like poor Elliott.”

“Perhaps it was fortuitous that you retreated from the Washita when you did. Appears you would’ve had your hands full finding time to scratch your ass with thousands of hostiles breathing down your neck.”

“I’ve learned my lesson. Too late for Major Elliott to learn his. Have to rely more on my scouts. Pay a bit more attention to their advice.”

“Haven’t learned it all yet, eh, Custer?”

Custer flashed a nervous slash of a grin at Sheridan. “No. Seems life has a way of dealing me a surprising card every now and then.”

Both chuckled at Custer’s easy joke on himself, until a small group of civilian and Osage scouts, clustered in a loose knot up the trail, drew their attention. The guides sat sullen and silent atop their horses, waiting for Custer to ride up.

Corbin spoke first. “Joe’s downstream, searching a village. This’un here appears to be where the Arapaho pitched camp.”

“Very well. Lead on, Jack. Show me what you’ve learned.”

By late afternoon, Custer had scoured every camp. The best estimates by trackers and scouts alike put the number of Indians who had been camped in the valley of the Washita the morning the Seventh Cavalry thundered into Black Kettle’s camp as somewhere between five thousand and sixty-five hundred. What could quickly raise the hackles on the back of any trooper’s neck was that of this number, at least a third could be counted as warriors of fighting age, each one of them carrying government-issue weapons, each warrior spoiling for a good scrap with the U.S. Cavalry.

The Osages informed Custer they believed the small camp had been Arapaho under Little Raven; the largest, Cheyennes under Medicine Arrow; and in addition, two bands of Kiowas under Satanta and Lone Wolf. They had found enough signs in the abandoned camps to know the Washita had been visited at the time of the battle by some small bands of Apache and Comanche.

“When I said you’d struck a nest of yellow jackets, General”—Moses Milner paused to spit a stream of brown juice into the trampled snow, “was I far wrong?”

“No, you weren’t, Joe,” Custer admitted. “Appears there was plenty enough of ’em to fight that day.”

“Them Cheyenne can give a fella all the fight you want—if’n you plan on running onto ’em again sometime down the line.”

“Soon, Joe,” Custer growled. “I want to find out what these Kiowa and Cheyenne are made of.”

In every camp lay signs of a hasty retreat. Stuffed in the forks of the winter-bare trees stood hundreds of peeled lodge poles the tribes planned to use as replacements come spring and breakup of the Washita camps. As the cavalry officers rode into the last abandoned village, identified by the Osages as a Kiowa camp, they noticed hundreds of buffalo robes and old, vermin-infested blankets scattered across the grounds. Kettles and other cast- iron cooking utensils had been abandoned in a hurried and disorderly flight, along with adzes, knives, even an ancient coffee mill.

“Near as the scouts can determine it, General,” Custer said to Sheridan, “this was Satanta’s crowd—camped right here.”

“General Custer!”

They wheeled at the sound of the familiar voice. Ben Clark jogged up to the cluster of officers.

“Begging pardon, General Sheridan. Should be calling the lieutenant colonel by his proper rank.”

“That’s quite all right, son.” Sheridan smiled genuinely.

“You act as if you’ve got the jitters bad, Ben. Seen a ghost?” Custer inquired.

“Kiowas—the ones raiding Kansas, sir.”

“How’re you so sure of that?” Sheridan demanded.

“We finally have some evidence, General. No mistaking it now.”