blouses, tender portions saved for a distant supper to be cooked at some unknown, distant bivouac.
Throughout the long, desperate afternoon and into that momentary brilliant flare of sunset the officers were forced to call brief halts with growing frequency. But as Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka said to King during one, “A halt like this is nothing more than suffering at a standstill.”
Finally just past dusk Crook and the head of the command spotted a fringe of cottonwood rising among some willow and alder. There they went into bivouac on Willow Creek after thirty-five grueling miles of wilderness. They had been struggling long past the point on their maps where they believed they should have reached the Bell Fourche, which wrapped itself closely along the northern edge of the Black Huls. But their maps were wrong. What they had expected that morning, upon leaving Owl Creek, to be a march of only twenty miles to reach the foothills was instead twice that far.
As darkness settled over the land, the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition was still six miles from the Belle Fourche. And Crook’s pitiful column was at that moment strung out for more than ten miles to the rear.
Stragglers limped and crawled in throughout the evening. It was nine-thirty before Captain Andrews’s men stumbled to the bank of Willow Creek, escorting the surgeons and their train of wounded. After their exhausting ordeal dragging the litters and travois across every ravine, creek, stream, and piece of broken ground, most of Andrews’s troopers could not be induced to help with the wounded by unloading the litters or erecting the captured buffalo-hide lodge. At last a few foot soldiers trudged over to volunteer their help. Eventually the wounded were out of the rain and served a steaming cup from the last of Clements’s secret cache of coffee.
Some of those stronger men cheered up their wounded, sick, and worn-out fellows, saying, “We’re only five or six miles from the Belle Fourche, the scouts tell us. And that means we can’t be far from civilization!”
Smoky, muddy, raucous, and profane mining camps—to these ragged men clinging to hope and life itself, the Black Hills settlements had suddenly, somehow, become “civilization.”
So it was that the last of the exhausted infantry showed up at half-past ten o’clock while the first of the dismounted cavalry did not begin to limp in until long after midnight. Worse yet, it would not be until the first light of false dawn etched the eastern horizon in gray that the last of those troopers who were put afoot the day before finally stumbled in.
Through the night the hardiest of those skeletal, despairing soldiers realized the rest would rely on someone else to keep them alive. So the few trudged off to scare up enough wood along the banks of the Willow to start their roaring bonfires at the foot of a low ridge in hopes that the lights dancing through the sheets of never-ending rain might serve as beacons to those still lost in the jaws of that terrifying wilderness. Beckoning them onward. Giving the faintest of them hope.
Throughout that long, terrible night many of those men straggling in had plainly used up the last shred of their strength, collapsing within sight of the bivouac’s bonfires, unable to make another step, and fell into an exhausted sleep right there in the mud, not even taking the trouble to unroll their wet and crusted blankets before they closed their eyes and began to snore.
Those who still had the strength were asked to report to the commissary, where they helped butcher what few ponies they had left to cook for the rest who kept straggling in all night long.
Additionally Crook had his commanders ask for volunteers, men who would willingly return to the dark and the mud, to venture back into the maze of prairie, where they called out and searched the backtrail for anyone who no longer had the will to keep coming on his own.
That black day had been nothing more than raw survival—grown uglier as each succeeding hour continued to strip Crook’s men of their last vestige of humanity.
As Dr. Clements said that night, “These men have reached the limit of human endurance.”
It was long past midnight when King himself saw the first flickers of that long line of bonfires shimmering and dancing behind the curtains of hard rain. His shoulder hurt so much, he could think of little else. It helped when the arm did not swing, so some time ago he had stuffed his left hand inside his belt as a crude sling. And on he marched, stumbling forward, faster and faster now with the line of beacon fires drawing him nearer and nearer. Ahead there were voices, and he heard the snorts of horses.
Dear God! he prayed. Let it be camp!
As he plunged onward through the sheets of swirling mist, he made out not that far ahead the form of a half-dozen soldiers and a single horse they surrounded, moving in the same direction—toward the beacon fires. All five or six of the men clung to the animal that occasionally heaved to one side or the other. And then Charles made out the travois lashed to the animal, the crude poles bumping over the stubby cactus that with each jolt caused its passenger to groan.
“Dr. McGillycuddy?”
The horse careened to a stop, and the human forms turned slowly. One of them came back a few steps and stopped, wearily weaving, almost dead on his feet.
“I’m … Surgeon McGillycuddy.”
“Lieutenant King.”
“Lieutenant,” the surgeon exclaimed, beckoning the officer on. “Join us—we’re almost there.” He turned, his arm expressive. “See? The fires.”
“Who goes there?” came the demand from out of the darkness, and a dozen to fifteen men appeared a heartbeat later, backlit with the distant bonfires.
King tried to find his voice, but all that came up was the sob he had struggled to hold down throughout that long, terrible day in hell. It was McGillycuddy who finally replied, the only one among them not so weary that he could not speak.
The doctor’s voice audibly cracked as he hollered out to the darkness. “The w-wounded t-train.”
“Good God, Doctor!” an officer exclaimed as his wet, shiny face came close, looking over them all.
“Lieutenant Rawolle?” King asked, his voice harsh as it emerged from a raw throat.
“Charles King?” Rawolle lunged closer, his teeth bright in the dark shagginess of his mustache and beard. “It is you! Why, we’d all but given up every last one of you for dead.”
Chapter 47
11-12 September 1876
To the Irishman those jagged peaks on the near horizon were like a lodestone, mysteriously pulling Mills’s men ever toward them like iron fillings.
Magnetically.
Irresistibly.
They had reached the Black Hills.
But it hadn’t been all that easy.
After leaving the main column behind on Owl Creek that Monday morning of the eleventh, Captain Anson Mills had insisted that the scouts follow the dictates of his compass as they headed a little west of south. From time to time as the fog and mist lifted, they were able to spot Inyan Kara Mountain rising in the distance, its summit and most of its slopes shrouded in a tumble of gray thunderheads. After no more than a few moments the mountain disappeared once more, and they were again swallowed by the vastness of that monotonous, monochrome inland sea.
Just before nine, Frank Grouard signaled a halt and dropped off his horse to examine the fresh trail they had crossed. Then he squinted into the sky, as if he were trying to get his bearings. Turning now to his right, he asked Mills, “What direction is that?”
Seeing where the half-breed pointed, the officer consulted the compass he held in his rain-soaked glove and pronounced, “South. It’s south, where we’re headed.”
Grouard shook his head and turned back to stand beside the captain’s mount. “No. It’s north. You’ve got us marching north.”
