Long Winter Gone

slipped through the tent flaps. His brother sat hunched over a lap desk. “Orders? Or another letter home to Libbie?”

That smile flashed again. Custer could keep nothing from his little brother.

“Orders first, Tom. Then, yes, I’ll get another letter off to Libbie tonight.”

“All work and no play. You’ve heard me say it many a time.”

“You! Preferring the cards or the bottle—even the ladies—to your soldier’s work.”

“By the heavens, Autie! Your brother? Wouldst that I prefer the feel of a perfumed breast beneath my hands or the sting of strong whiskey upon my tongue to drilling and target practice?”

Laughter came easily to them both, laughter rooted in a bond nurtured from childhood, a closeness now mellowed like aged Kentucky whiskey.

“Be gone with you, then.” Custer shooed with his left hand, the right bringing the nub of a pencil to his tongue once more. “I’ve too much work to be done and so little time to do it. Go off and play then while your poor brother works his fingers and his pencil to the bone!”

Tom’s easy laughter rang through the tent flaps as Custer returned to his sheet of foolscap atop the small lap desk. So bloody much to do, he thought. All of it riding on a perfect execution of Philip’s plans for this winter campaign.

First, fresh horses had to be purchased. Not an easy task on the western plains of Kansas along the Arkansas River. But once accomplished, those horses had to be wrangled in and drilled with their new riders. And through the ordeal the regimental blacksmiths had been pushed beyond all endurance, beginning their hot work before dawn every morning, toiling into the dripping black of twilight, fitting each and every new mount for its journey into Indian country.

Infantry marched on the feet of its men while cavalry depended on the hooves of its horses. For every mount headed into Indian Territory he had ordered an extra fore and hind shoe fitted and carried in the trooper’s saddle pocket. An unshod horse would be worse than useless on this campaign through ice and snow.

Every clear day Custer had his men practice signaling cross-country with small mirrors from the top of nearby hills—”nature having formed admirable signal stations over this part of the country,” he explained, writing to Libbie.

At the same time he held a competition among his troops to determine the best marksmen in the regiment. With the dual promise of a separately marched unit of sharpshooters along with his order that the marksmen be exempted from mess details and picket duty, the competition grew stiff for those forty slots placed under the leadership of young Canadian Lieutenant W. W. Cooke. With the best selected,an intensive regimen of target practice with repeating Spencer rifles began for this elite corps.

Custer sat the lap desk on his crude bunk and rose, stretching the knots from the muscles along his back. So much riding on the success of this venture, Libbie. He would write her later when the camp quieted and his only companion would be the night wind bringing with it a promise of early snow.

If this winter operation fails, Sheridan alone might take the blame. And, if the operation smacks of a massacre, why, Philip alone might stand court-martial … considering the nasty mood of those Quakers in power at the Indian Bureau back in Washington City.

Rubbing his palms together eagerly, he stared out at the glowing fire points of red-orange, cooking fires along company rows allowed to burn themselves out in the blackness of night. But, if the winter offensive proves even a moderate success there’ll be a hungry mob of army brass clamoring to claim paternity for Sheridan’s brainchild.

He turned back into the chill of his tent. The smoky heat of two coal-oil lamps held some of the prairie cold at bay. Somewhere close a horse snorted and stomped. Custer smiled again. Things were going well. In the waning days of October he had instituted another innovation of his own: “coloring the horses” by troops, in which every man in a company rode a similarly colored animal. Each company would ride a different color horse into Indian country.

A few hours later, with his long, sentimental letter to his wife finished, Custer blew out the smoky lamps. Only then did the silence around him grow suffocating. Almost as if he couldn’t breathe … then the weight of it disappeared, as quickly as it had smothered him. In the overpowering silence, he barely heard the first smattering of hard, icy flakes against the side of his canvas tent.

The cold settled along the valley of the Washita like old ash settling under a persistent rain.

Monaseetah, daughter of Cheyenne chief Little Rock, second only to Black Kettle himself, moved back to her father’s lodge, leaving her cruel and abusive husband.

In the cold chill of her father’s lodge she awoke each night, staring at the dull red glow of the dying coals, feverish in the frosty air as the sweat of fear rolled from her copper flesh. The brute she had married had treated her no better than a camp dog. No better than some piece of property he could abuse and discard … until she shot him.

His pride wounded more than his bleeding leg, the shamed husband had divorced this fiery girl of seventeen summers—in the Cheyenne way, sending her back to the lodge of her father.

Trembling now as she remembered his shaming her, Monaseetah caught her breath, then slowly calmed, listening to the reassuring snore of her father. They were without others, alone. It had been four winters now since the terrible day of black cannon smoke in the air and red smearing the snow. In a place the Southern Cheyenne knew as Little Dry River—a terrible day along the white man’s Sand Creek where Monaseetah saw her mother fall beneath a slashing cavalry saber. No more than a cowering child, she watched young soldiers defile her mother’s bloody body.

Monaseetah knew the remembering would always be with her, bringing the all-time pain. There would be no losing of that pain the way she had rid herself of the beast-man.

Her eyes stinging with tears, Monaseetah blinked and blinked again. There had been no blood-that-comes- with-the-moon since the shortgrass time. Now she could believe only one thing. She carried the beast-man’s child in her belly. Monaseetah clenched her eyes shut with fierce resolution. Though she carried his child, she knew she could not return to the cruel one who had bought her away from Little Rock.

Eventually she lay back against her father’s curly buffalo robes once more. Let him find another wife, she consoled herself. Another woman to rut and abuse. Perhaps a wife like that pale white woman they hold prisoner in the Kiowa camp downstream.

Why anyone would want such a pale-skinned creature, with hair so thin, and the color of winter-dead grass?

General Hazen’s negotiations for the release of the captive white mother and her son dragged on through the fall, getting nowhere with the Kiowas down at Fort Cobb during the Moon of Leaves Falling and into the Deer Rutting Moon.

Monaseetah herself was visiting the Kiowa camp that first day Hazen’s half-breed scout, Cheyenne Jack, rode into the center of camp to declare he came from Army Chief Hazen with a plea for the release of Clara and Willie Blinn.

Cautiously, Jack dismounted and sidled over to the terrified, beaten prisoner. “Listen to me, lady,” he whispered harshly when the others weren’t looking. “These Injuns don’t know no English. Take what I got in my hand. Write your name for the general at Fort Cobb. So he’ll know who you are. He can tell your people.”

“You have to—”

“Shut up!” he growled. “Not a word, or your life ain’t worth the time it takes for one of these bucks to spit! Now, take what’s in my hand.”

Clara Blinn pulled a scrap of paper and a pencil stub from the scout’s dirty palm. As Jack conferred with the tribal leaders, she hunkered in the shadow of a nearby lodge and scribbled her hasty note to the outside world:

KIND FRIEND—

Whoever you may be, I thank you for your kindness to me and my child. They tell me, as near as I can understand, they expect traders to come and they will sell us to them. If it is Mexicans, I am afraid they would sell us into slavery in Mexico. If you can do nothing for me write to W. T. Harrington, Ottawa, Franklin County, Kansas