bring a true peace to this southern frontier, it would prove more than a mere feather in my cap, Libbie. Our friend Philip is seeing to promotion and a regiment of my own with President Grant himself!
Lt. Moylan calls me now for some duty, so I scribble as fast as possible. As always, my prayers are with you, sweet Libbie. May God Himself watch over you. Please remember me in your prayers too, Dear Heart. Perhaps I am in all the more need of your prayers.
Pray you forgive me of my past indiscretions, to forever hold your Bo dearest in your heart.
This wilderness lures me as seductively as any siren.
I will not fail you, dear one.
By midmorning of 22 March, Custer marched his troops north, following the Sweetwater.
After but three miles, they reached the meadow where the Cheyenne villages had stood until evacuated in fear of attack. Another scene of frantic, hasty departure. Stuffed in the forks of the skeletal trees stood enough lodge poles to outfit more than two hundred lodges. These the soldiers set afire, feeding the blazes with the other property left behind—bows, axes, robes, and blankets abandoned in the rush.
Climbing into the hills north of the Sweetwater, Custer turned to watch the leaden, oily smoke claw at the leaden sky. Once again, Yellow Hair left behind only the charred, smoking ruins of a village, and the scattered, bloody carcasses of those ponies abandoned by the fleeing Cheyenne.
As the jangle of saddle gear and wagon harness faded to the north, a wilderness silence returned to the Sweetwater. The stream’s happy chatter mingled with the drone of green bottle flies buzzing over the bloating carcasses abandoned by both races of escaping warriors.
Two days later, Custer’s advance guard rounded a point of timber in a wide bend of the Washita, bumping into a sprawling camp of horses, wagons, and soldiers. Assigned by Sheridan to await the Seventh’s return, these two companies had fared far better than those who had marched into the wilderness behind Custer.
To Custer’s weary cavalry, these commissary troops appeared strange to the eye. Their bodies looked puffy, even swollen. Rosy cheeks chubby. Eyes bulging in clean faces. To top if off, Captain Henry Inman’s troops even wore bright blue uniforms.
Custer’s cavalry finally realized the strange malady afflicting the Washita troops: Inman’s soldiers hadn’t been starved and used to the quick.
Since leaving Camp Supply last December, the men of the Seventh Cavalry had undergone subtle changes that no man among them had noticed. Months of busting trails through the wilderness, poor rations, and medical infirmities had taken their toll. Faces gone skeletal. Uniforms now greasy rags.
While some of Custer’s troops ran, most limped painfully into that Washita campground. What a sight were those rows of cheery mess fires, each banked by clean utensils and sides of bacon. Everywhere lay half-empty hardtack boxes, each one surrounded by Custer’s men. Ravenous soldiers ripped at half-cooked sides of bacon, grease dripping down their dirty, bearded chins.
“General Custer!”
Custer turned slowly. Striding his way came the stout quartermaster corps’ captain. Custer presented his hand.
“Inman! Dear God, it’s good to see you!”
“From the looks of it, you’ve had a deuce of a time!” Inman rattled Custer’s arm like a water pump handle.
“Nowhere near what it might’ve been,” Custer replied, “had the Cheyenne decided to run, forcing us to pursue. I see you’ve fared well.”
“Most of us, General.”
“Most?”
“Yes,” Inman answered, sighting his duty sergeant. “Lewis! Coffee here, quick!”
“Sit here, sir,” Inman directed, indicating a downed cottonwood trunk. “We’ll have your animal watered and fed. Oats.”
“Oats?” Custer moaned. “It’s been so long since our stock had grain.”
“You’ve been through the grinder, sir.”
“Yes,” Custer murmured. “This does feel good. Getting out of that blasted saddle. Feels like I’ve lost most of my natural padding the last few months!”
“I’m amazed you still have your spirits about you, General. We’ll put some meat on those bones of yours soon enough. Ah, here comes your coffee. Drink it while I have some hardtack and salt pork brought over.”
Custer watched the sergeant scurry off to a mess fire while he sipped at the scalding, heady potion an army man generously called coffee.
“I lost four couriers,” Inman explained. “Two were civilian scouts Sheridan left here on his way north. The other two were our enlisted.”
Custer squinted into the middle distance. “Couriers?”
“Not sure what happened to three of them. Found only one body.”
“Assume the worst.”
“One of my patrols found a pair of ripped pantaloons. Civilian pants covered with blood. Savages had themselves quite a field day with that boy. My patrol searched the area, coming up with a bullet-riddled mackinaw, a coat one of our riders wore.”
“That’s all you found?”
Inman shook his head. “Wasn’t long before the men spotted a flock of crows and turkey buzzards squawking over their bloody meal and half a dozen wolves.”
Custer stared at him vacantly. “The bodies?”
“By following a line of spent cartridges, we figured the scout had his horse shot out from under him. Made a dash for it on foot, into the thick timber, where he made a stand. Found his courier pouch riddled with holes. Blood on everything. Letters scattered through the buckbrush. Even scraps of the reporter’s stories.”
“Did you save those?”
“Saved everything we found.”
“Good. We’ll take the letters back to Hays. And Keim’s stories will reach the New York
Inman coughed, rising, “I suggest you and your men rest here for a few days. Eat decent meals. Sleep in tents again, beneath clean blankets. Before we push on to Camp Supply, then the final leg of our return.”
“Fort Hays. Perhaps you’re right.”
To Custer, all that seemed so far away, Kansas and the new headquarters for his Seventh Cavalry.
And … Libbie.
“What say you, General? Rest for the men, sir?”
“Of course, Captain. Two days—then back on the trail.” Custer rose unsteadily from the cottonwood stump. “Two days should prove about right.”
Inman watched Custer wander off, stopping here and there to shake hands with his bony troops, joking now of their endurance and privation, congratulating all for a job well done in the wilderness. Thanking them for those sacrifices and burdens borne as cheerfully as any soldier in any war had ever marched through a winter of hell, and returned.
On he walked, talking to all, teasing those who would laugh, consoling those who couldn’t.
And at every fire, he reminded his men exactly how he felt to ride at the head of the best horse soldiers the world had ever known, or was likely to know—the U.S. Seventh Cavalry.
On the morning of the twenty-seventh, Custer led his troops out of the valley of the Washita for the last time, on their way home.
Five days later, when the columns were still a few miles from Camp Supply, Custer was greeted by a courier dispatched by Sheridan, with word that Grant and Sherman had summoned the general to Washington City, and
