—my father. Tell him we are with the Cheyennes and they say when the white men make peace we can go home. For our sakes, do all you can, and God will bless you. If you can let me hear from you again let me know what you think about it. Write my father; send him this. Goodby.
MRS. F. R. BLINN
I am as well as can be expected, but my baby is very weak.
Little could Mrs. Blinn know at that time what fury would soon be released in securing her freedom from the hostiles. Little could she know that even as she wrote her plea for help, General Philip H. Sheridan had ordered Hazen to break off his negotiations, reasoning that his winter campaign would secure the results every white man desired: an end to Indian raids along the Kansas frontier and a return of those captives held by the savages. Negotiation, Sheridan informed Hazen, accomplished nothing.
“Don’t need me to hang around the post no longer?” the half-breed scout and interpreter asked before he took another long pull on the cheroot General Hazen had given him, filling Hazen’s tiny Fort Cobb office with blue smoke.
“Sorry, Jack. Can’t use you anymore.” Hazen turned so that the half-breed could not read the worry etched along the thin features of his well-defined face. “Sheridan doesn’t want us trying to make peace anymore.”
“He got something else in mind?”
“Guess so.” Hazen used his words sparingly.
The commander of Fort Cobb knew he would have to send for Black Kettle. He watched Cheyenne Jack rise from the creaky, straight-backed chair, then cleared his throat as the half-breed reached the door.
“Jack,” Hazen said, “there is one last thing you can do for me. If you would. I’ll pay you regular wages. Per day.”
“Yeah?” Jack answered, something in Hazen’s tone snagging his interest.
“Want you to find Black Kettle. I’m told he’s wintering his band on the Washita with Satanta, Medicine Arrow, and the others.”
“Just Black Kettle?”
“Just Black Kettle. Tell him it’s very important that he come see me.”
“General, you know that ol’ boy. He won’t come without you giving him good reason to see you.”
“Tell him we need to have an important council.”
“Council?”
“Just tell Black Kettle he’s in danger.”
“In danger from what?”
Hazen’s eyes leveled on the scout. As a soldier he could say no more. “That’s what I will discuss with Black Kettle myself.”
Cheyenne Jack opened his mouth to protest, but then thought better of it. Instead, he said, “General, I figure since you don’t need me after this, I’ll winter with the Kiowa. But I’ll see you get to talk with Black Kettle. Start tonight, you want me to.”
“Daylight will be soon enough for me, Jack.”
The half-breed swung the door open wide and stepped into the night, his buckskinned form swallowed completely by darkness.
On 12 November the Seventh Cavalry pulled out of their training camp south of Fort Dodge, marching toward Indian Territory at last. Time and again on that long march Major Joel Elliott turned beneath a glaring winter sun to behold those troops arranged by color: companies of chestnuts, blacks, bays, sorrels and grays, browns and tans— every man trained and ready. Not a raw recruit among them.
And rumbling right behind them came better than four hundred wagons loaded to their bulging sidewalk with forage, rations, tents, blankets, and winter campaign clothing.
“By glory,” Elliott whispered under his breath, “I ride at the head of the finest mounted cavalry in the entire world!” A Civil War veteran with an impressive record of victories, the major’s chest swelled with pride.
By the fifteenth the weather turned on the glorious Seventh. A blue-norther swept down on the regiment, a storm so bitter it could only have come straight out of the maw of the Arctic itself. That prairie blizzard persisted all night and right into the next day before it gave out. Three more difficult days followed, the cavalry breaking trail through snowdrifts left in the storm’s wake.
But by noon on 18 November, Custer’s command stopped a mile above the confluence of Wolf Creek and the Beaver River, some hundred miles almost due south of Fort Dodge.
“We’ll establish our base for winter operations here, Major,” Custer informed Elliott. “Have the company captains establish pickets and pitch their tents across the prairie. We’ll meet at my tent at sixteen hundred. Dismissed.”
Custer watched Elliott trudge away before he turned to the civilian scout beside him.
“Smith, you’ve done well. Found us an admirable spot.”
“Knowed you’d like it, General,” the scarred old trapper answered.
“Where you off to now, if I might inquire?”
John Simpson Smith tore a corner off the tabacco twist before he stuffed it back into the pouch on his belt. “Aim to track my family, General. Least what’s left of ’em after Chivington butchered a bunch down to Sand Creek.”
“You married a Cheyenne?”
Smith spit into the snow at his feet before answering. “Many robe seasons ago. Time was, I was trapping the headwaters of the Arkansas long afore you and the gray-backs got into your big argument back east. Best damned woman I ever knowed, that one. Cheyenne, she is.”
“Children?”
“Only two now. Both growed, I s’pose. Rest killed at Sand Creek. I aim to find those two, and their mama.”
“You heading south?”
“Likeliest place, seems to me.”
“You aim to warn the hostiles I’m coming?” Unconsciously, Custer shifted his pistol belt, a move not lost on the old mountain man.
“Tribe my wife runs with ain’t causing no trouble in Kansas. They’re real peaceable. Not the sort you army boys’re hankerin’ for.”
Custer cleared his throat. “Your wife’s people won’t have a thing to worry about.”
“That’s what the agents and army both said when the tribe went to camp on Sand Creek.”
“By God, I’ll not be compared with the likes of that butcher Chivington!” Custer barked. “He and his Colorado militia … amateur soldiers. Why, this regiment is hunting warriors, and warriors only.”
“S’long, General.” Smith stuffed a moccasin in his stirrup, lifting himself to the saddle.
“Smith.” Custer suddenly snagged the reins to prevent the old scout from pulling away. “What band is your family with?”
“Why, ol’ Black Kettle’s. He’s always been a peace Injun. Always will be. That ol’ buck’s a smart one. He sees the writing on the ground clear as I read trail sign. Figures it won’t do him no good to make war.”
“Black Kettle, eh?” Custer released the scout’s reins. He watched Smith lope off, pointing his pony north, back toward Kansas rather than steering south into the Territories.
CHAPTER 3
EVERYWHERE he looked he saw the activity of men preparing for a wilderness winter, men preparing for war.
Correspondent De Benneville Randolph Keim recorded each scene with a journalist’s eye. His boss, publisher James Gordon Bennett of the New York
