“That’s bullshit and we both know it, Custer. He wanted to hand that flag to the one man who had repeatedly stymied the cream of his Reb cavalry under Stuart.”
“I learned from the best, sir. Philip H. Sheridan.”
“Perhaps I am the only one better than you, goddammit.” Sheridan knocked his boots together to shock some warmth into his frozen feet, “Still, I’m having some second thoughts about campaigning in the jaws of winter. Perhaps that old scout Bridger was right after all. I’m not so sure we won’t suffer casualties to the goddamned weather you’ll encounter on your march.”
“On the contrary, sir—begging your pardon.” Custer stuffed his hands in his coat pockets and glanced down at the squared toes of his tall black boots. “This deep snow is exactly what I had in mind. It could not come at a more opportune moment. My men are ready, capable of marching through that snow. By the same token, the hostile warriors we seek won’t even consider moving out of their villages for days to come.”
“You are one of a kind, Armstrong.”
“Shall I take that as a compliment, sir?”
“Of course, my eager young friend.” Sheridan rose to his feet and clapped his hands on Custer’s broad shoulders. “I’ll buy your optimistic estimate on this weather … and your men.”
Sheridan shook Custer’s hand. “I made you what you are, Armstrong. I can’t ever forget that.”
“General!” Custer saluted and wheeled toward the tent flaps.
“Custer?”
The young officer turned, one of the canvas flaps still clutched in his buffalo mitten, admitting a cold slash of winter into the tent. “Sir?”
“Take good care of your troops, my friend. They are your backbone.”
“Understood, sir. They’ve never let me down.”
Custer saluted smartly before he tugged the buffalo cap down on his forehead and plunged into the cold. To his side leapt his beloved Blucher and Maida, the two splendid Scottish staghounds he had brought from Monroe. At the Bluff Creek Camp south of Fort Dodge, Blucher had run down and killed a young wolf during one of his master’s frequent hunts.
Custer knelt to pull at their ears playfully. Lieutenant Myles Moylan stomped up through the calf-deep snow.
“How will this do for a winter campaign, General?”
“Just what we want, Moylan,” came Custer’s swift reply. “Exactly what the gods ordered for me.” Custer stood, squared his shoulders, then stomped off, stiff-legged.
With Custer’s words fading into the darkness, other voices hung just beyond Sheridan’s tent, strong voices come stinging to his ears. Familiar voices, some of them, familiar to an old soldier. Other wars, other battles, other campaigns … different names but soldiers just the same.
Sergeants ordered their men to “Prepare to mount!” followed by a rustle of frozen, squeaky harness, jangling bit chains, and cold black leather as the officers called out, “Mount!”
The coughing and wheezing of a few of the troopers slithered through the oiled canvas of his tent as Sheridan stood framed in the cold flickering light of his single hurricane lamp, eyes fixed on that patch of ground where snow threw itself beneath the tent flaps.
Rhythmically plodding with the creak and swish of cold harness and frozen buckles, two columns of shivering pony soldiers lumbered past, their broad shoulders smeared upon the taut canvas wall of his wind-whipped tent. Sheridan recognized the shrill voice of handsome Major Joel H. Elliott as Custer’s headquarters staff rode by.
“Goddammit all, but I wish I was home right now!” Elliott’s was a voice full of youth and mirth and a soldier’s camaraderie.
“I’ll bet you do, Major!” Sergeant Major Kennedy replied. “And we know just what the hell you’d be doing at home right now with that pretty wife of yours you’ve kept tucked away back at Leavenworth!”
A cruel gust of wind flung open the flaps of his tent, shoving Philip Sheridan back against his cot. Snuffing out the oil lamp with its icy breath. The solitary gust brought with it such a blast of cold that the general scurried beneath his blankets, pulling them just below his eyes.
“Get a goddamned hold on yourself, Philip.”
Shuddering with more than the cold of that icy gust, the commander of this Department of the Missouri glanced anxiously at the extinguished lamp. A ghostly wisp of purple smoke climbed out of the glass chimney in that pale light of predawn gray seeping into his tent.
Outside in the snow and darkness the regimental band began to pump out that Seventh Cavalry favorite, “The Girl I Left Behind Me”:
The hour was sad I left the maid,
A ling’ring farewell taking;
Her sighs and tears my steps delay’d—
I thought her heart was breaking.
In hurried words her name I bless’d;
I breathed the vows that bind me,
And to my heart in anguish press’d
The girl I left behind me.
Once more Sheridan’s mind replayed those orders he had written for Custer like some broken telegraph key:
You are hereby ordered to proceed south, in the direction of the Antelope Hills, thence toward the Washita River, the supposed winter seat of the hostile tribes; to destroy their villages and ponies; to kill or hang all warriors, and bring back all women and children.
It was the coldest time of day on the prairie, now when night was undecided in yielding it’s place—harsher still with the cruel battering winter gave the defenseless plains each year.
Sheridan closed his eyes, shut out the gray light awakening the frozen world outside. The band continued to play.
Full many a name our banners bore
Of former deeds of daring,
But they were of the days of yore
In which we had no sharing.
But now our laurel freshly won
With the old ones shall entwin’d be;
Still worthy of our sires each son,
Sweet girl I left behind me.
A somber Black Kettle returned to his Washita camp two days after the great snow had buried the land.
The sun finally broke through the gloomy overcast and shone over his little village. The news their chief brought from General Hazen at Fort Cobb was nowhere near as bright and warm.
“Black Kettle, I wish I could find something to say or do to persuade you to stay here at the fort,” Hazen had told him. “I’m sticking my neck out to offer you personal sanctuary.”
Silent for a long time, a bewildered Black Kettle finally said, “Why would I need sanctuary, Soldier Chief, if my people are camped far south of the Arkansas River, deep in Indian Territory where we are supposed to live according to the very words of the talking paper I put my mark to for the white Grandfather back east beyond the rivers?”
Again and again Hazen had attempted to tell this old Cheyenne that because of the young warriors raiding into the Kansas settlements, his tribe might still be in danger of some wandering patrol of mounted cavalry. Problem was, how to warn Black Kettle without directly informing him of Sheridan’s winter campaign plans?
Seemed nothing got through to Black Kettle.
The aged Cheyenne nodded sadly. “It would be a dishonorable thing to stay here at your fort for my own personal safety. Black Kettle belongs with his people.”
Those words were the last he had spoken before beginning his cold, melancholy return trip northwest along the Washita’s icy course.
