“The one the chief surrendered to the general?” Seamus asked.
“Yeah.”
“How’d the poet end up with it?”
“Don’t really know for sure,” Finerty replied. “But I figure he talked Crook out of it with one of his silver- tongued rhymes, eh?”
“It would have to be a mighty pretty poem to be worth the value of that rifle, Johnny.”
“Seems Crawford’s got him an eye for collectibles too,” Finerty went on. “From the camp’s spoils the poet ended up with another rifle—a Spencer repeater—and a Colt revolver.”
“Likely one what belonged to Custer’s dead,” Donegan replied sourly.
Meanwhile Crook composed his dispatch to Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan back at Chicago headquarters.There wasn’t much to gloat about—but it was a victory. After Powder River, Rosebud Creek, and the disaster at the Little Bighorn … after traipsing around for more than a month looking for a fresh trail, any trail … why, surely Sheridan would have reason to celebrate now.
Surely Little Phil’s trumpet had been heard upon the land.
Slim Buttes was the first victory of what had turned out to be a very long and costly Sioux war.
WYOMING
From the Black Hills.
CHEYENNE, September 11—Advices from the telegraph camp near Hat creek, this morning, say that the Indians drove back a government courier who left Fort Laramie with dispatches for General Crook. He was to make another start from Hat creek this morning.
From Red Cloud.
RED CLOUD AGENCY, NEB., September 11—This morning a supply train of about thirty wagons left this agency escorted by three companies of the Fourth ??trtillery, equipped as infantry, for Custer City. The supplies are for Crook’s command which it is reported is to be there the 14th.
The night before, when General Crook had asked Frank Grouard to carry his report on to Fort Laramie or to the nearest point where a telegraph key might be found, the half-breed had refused—then refused again, even when Lieutenant Bubb volunteered to go with him through that unknown and dangerous country to the south.
But when Crook asked him to guide a second relief column under Captain Anson Mills, Grouard agreed. This time the general’s order was not only more specific, it was explicit.
“You have one mission and one mission only,” Crook explained. “To return from the Black Hills settlements with provisions.”
It would mean no less than saving the Uves of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition.
“And if you can,” the general added, “find out what threat the hostiles have presented to Deadwood and the other mining communities.”
This time the general was hurrying forward a special detail that would not be big enough to strike the enemy. Instead Mills’s force—comprising the best of his very own M Company, Third Cavalry, as well as fifty handpicked troopers from Carr’s Fifth Cavalry—was half the size of that detail he had led away from Crook’s column on the seventh. And again the general chose Lieutenant John W. Bubb as commissary officer charged with the purchase of the needed supplies. Along with Second Lieutenant George F. Chase acting as subaltern, Mills would be joined by reporters Reuben Davenport and Robert Strahorn. Frank Grouard, bearing Crook’s report for General Sheridan, would accompany the detail at least as far as the Black Hills on the first leg of his journey to Fort Laramie. Upon reaching the mining settlements, Jack Crawford, who was the one scout most familiar with the Black Hills and was carrying reporters’ dispatches, and Seamus Donegan would both serve as guides to bring the wagons back to the general’s desperate men.
None of Tom Moore’s mules were taken south when those seventy-five men pulled out just before dawn that Monday morning, the eleventh of September. Instead of the broken-down army horses, each man rode one of the captive Sioux ponies.
After so many days of rain without letup, no one much noticed that the sun did not put in an appearance that morning as the men and ponies snorted frostily in their climb up the slopes of the terraced buttes. Again the clouds hovered close, fog shrouded the land for as far as a man could see with field glasses, and it began to rain.
Seamus pulled the big collar on his canvas mackinaw up around his neck and prayed the little grass-fed Indian pony beneath him had the bottom to carry him all the way to Deadwood.
Chapter 45
11 September 1876
Crook Heard From.
CHEYENNE, September 11—General Crook has been heard from under date of the 2nd. He has followed- the trail to the Little Missouri without finding any Indians. The trail was found to split in several directions. Crook thinks the southern band may have moved backward toward the mountains, and he is somewhat apprehensive for his wagon train. It is expected that he will move in that direction.
When Baptiste Pourier led Crook and the rest of the column away from that miserable bivouac on the morning of the eleventh, John Finerty climbed stiffly into the saddle and shivered almost uncontrollably, not knowing if he could ever again count on being warm and dry.
In the early light of dawn Lieutenant Von Leuttwitz had awakened from a feverish nightmare that convinced him his leg had been exhumed from its grave by the hostiles, who desecrated it. Crook dispatched Captain Julius Mason with a small battalion of Carr’s Fifth Cavalry to take their backtrail to the destroyed village.
As the rest of the command began to climb south by west up the muddy slopes, the cavalrymen mounted on their horses began fo press at the rear of the infantry, where a good-natured banter began to fly back and forth between the men.
Upon passing some of the foot soldiers, a trooper turned and leaned down from his saddle, asking one of the infantrymen, “Casey, old man! How are your corns this fine morning? Tell me, now—is it fine walking? Wouldn’t you rather be riding a fine horse like this one?”
With a snort of derision the old soldier answered in his peatiest brogue, “To hell wid your harse, I say! And g’won wid you too, you weak-brained idjit! Why, we’re gonna walk your harse off his four legs and then we’ll eat him!”
Above them that dawn the very heights of the chalk-colored buttes blocking their path remained shrouded in a thick fog that rained a cold and constant drizzle down on the men and animals. Up, up they climbed, most of the cavalry forced to dismount and drag their horses behind them, inching back and forth to switchback their way upward into the numbing mist, strung out in a long single column snaking its way into the clouds across the face of the pine-dotted escarpment.
Finally at midmorning they stood on the southern edge of the jagged cliffs and looked down upon the great endless prairie as barren as the surface of the moon. Finerty could see nothing on the foggy horizon that would inspire hope. Nothing like the dark and jagged outline of the Black Hills. Down, down Big Bat led them, Crook’s men dropping once more into the muddy wilderness. Their only choice was to push on, or lie down and die right there.
By noon the drizzle had ballooned into sheets of rain as the head of the column reached a formation called Clay Ridge. Again there was no way to detour east or west. As they climbed into the badlands and skirted what they could of the narrow ravines and coulees cut by centuries of erosion, the horses and mules slipped and stumbled crossing the naked, muddy slopes with men on their backs. And when the soldiers climbed down from the saddles, they found their boots sinking in the sticky gumbo that refused to release them, tiring out the weary men as they continued to plod forward lugging up more than a pound of prairie with every step—climbing and descending, climbing and descending all the more, marching ever southward, following what had to be an old Indian
