In a matter of minutes these pitiful, starving wretches reduced to the utter brink of savagery, these crude, uncivilized captives of the wilderness, were soldiers once more. No longer did they stand teetering at the threshold of death’s door. Once again these were men who joked, and laughed, and talked at long last of the future.
For now there was a future.
“Seamus.”
Donegan turned to find Lieutenant Bourke at his shoulder. Taking the beef rib from his greasy lips, he said, “Johnny! Come—share some of our feast with us!”
Patting his stomach, Bourke smiled and replied, “Thanks, but no. I’ve had quite enough for now. I’m come to fetch you. The general would like to talk with you.”
He rose while sucking the juices from his fingers, then licked the ends of his mustache with a flick of his tongue. “What’s Crook want with me now?”
“Now that Grouard and Crawford are both gone on south carrying dispatches and reporters’ stories, you’re the only one he can ask.”
Suspicious, Seamus came to an abrupt halt. “I don’t like the sound of this, Johnny boy. Give me the whole of it, and now.”
“Crook is frightened about all that ammunition we had to abandon off the mules and horses.”
“Yes?”
“He’s sending back a detail of the Fifth Cavalry to retrieve it.”
He nodded warily. “So he figures to send a scout with those troops, eh?”
Crook had devised his plan: Seamus, an officer, and thirty picked troopers on the regiment’s strongest horses. A journey of more than seventy miles in all, round trip. Sure as hell didn’t sound like a Sunday walk in the park— what with the certain likelihood of hundreds of warriors still dogging the army’s backtrail, hoping to pick up all the horses and plunder Three Stars’s soldiers had abandoned.
“When does the old boy want us to leave?” Donegan asked.
“The general inquires to see if you could be ready to go inside an hour.”
Chapter 49
13-15 September 1876
THE INDIANS
End of the Sioux Campaign.
CHICAGO, September 15—The Times’ special correspondent with Terry telegraphs under date of Fort Bufordf mouth of the Yellowstone, the 8th, via Bismarck, the 14th, that the final breaking up of Terry’s command occurred yesterday morning, and all the troops are now en route home, with the exception of two regiments of infantry, which will winter at the mouth of Tongue river … By the 15th all the troops will have been withdrawn from the northern country except the Fifth and Twenty-second infantry, containing 400 men. A dispatch just received from Gen. Sheridan countermands the order to winter a regiment of cavalry on the Yellowstone, which renders winter campaigning impossible, and indefinitely postpones the subjection of the Sioux.
Terry leaves the field, having accomplished no purpose of the expedition, and with one-quarter of his troops killed by bullets or exposure.
As the clouds finally abandoned the sky above the banks of the Belle Fourche that night of the thirteenth, a nearly full moon rose in the southeast beyond Bear Butte.
For the longest time Seamus stood watching it ease itself up off the horizon, yellow as the cream that rose to the surface of buttermilk, and he thought on that most sacred place the hostiles wanted to protect from the white man. How the Lakota and Cheyenne wanted nothing more than to drive these miners and merchants and settlers entirely from the Black Hills.
At headquarters was gathered a happy congregation of citizens—shop owners and merchants of all strata, politicians and the power hungry of every stripe—every last one of them eager to shake hands with General George Crook and those officers who had rescued them from the recent terror and likely annihilation by the Sioux and Cheyenne.
“Four hundred of our citizens have been murdered by the savages since June,” one local wag declared at Crook’s fire that evening. “And at last the government has made up its mind to protect its citizens!”
Around the group of officers they distributed those luxuries they had carted out from Whitewood, Crook City, and Deadwood in their wagons and buggies: canned meats and candied fruits, fish eggs and cheeses, wines and a better age of whiskey, along with molasses-cured cigars as big around as a cane fishing pole.
For the rest of camp it was a merry night, filled with song and dance and laughter. Warm food and rich coffee, tobacco for a farmboy to chew, for a German to stuff into his briars or an Irishman into the unbroken stump of his clay pipe, then gaze overhead at the stars.
After so, so many nights, just to see the stars again in this sky! So sing they did, every last song they knew, sang with lusty joy.
Down to the bivouac of Carr’s Fighting Fifth Cavalry,Seamus led his Indian pony, figuring he might just as well sleep there among those troopers until dawn arrived and the handpicked detail would march north to retrieve those boxes of abandoned ammunition. It was as merry a camp as he could ever remember being in since that April night back in sixty-five, there in the leafy coolness of the Appomattox Woods surrounding the McLean farmhouse where the Virginia gentleman Lee had just surrendered to old Sam Grant. Yes, indeed—Sheridan’s cavalry had done all that had been asked of it, so those gallant horse soldiers had good cause to celebrate the end of a long, bloody, terrible war.
And again tonight the soldiers who had marched this time with George Crook celebrated the fact that Phil Sheridan’s mighty trumpet had been heard upon the land. It was plain that they were driving the hostiles back to their agencies. The soldiers had survived their wilderness ordeal.
So it came as no surprise to the Irishman to find that the regiment’s prodigious rhymesters were already at work composing new verses for the popular song of the era, “The Regular Army O.”
We were sent to Arizona,
For to fight the Indians there;
We were almost snatched bald-headed,
But they didn’t get our hair.
We lay among the canyons and the dirty yellow mud,
But we seldom saw an onion, or a turnip, or a spud.
Till we were taken prisoners
And brought forninst the chief;
Says he, “We’ll have an Irish stew”— The dirty Indian thief.
On Price’s telegraphic wire we slid to Mexico,
And we blessed the day we skipped away
