From the Regular Army O!
Every officer in the army knew George Crook had received his promotion to brigadier due to his leadership during the Apache campaign down in Arizona. In fact, the Fifth Cavalry had long boasted that they themselves had won that star for him. So it was with fond affection that the regiment gave a new nickname to the general following his fight with Crazy Horse in Montana Territory—“Rosebud George” he was called. And during their escape from General Terry and the ordeal of their horse-meat march, it was common knowledge that Tom Moore’s packers somehow always seemed to have better food to eat, and more of it, while Carr’s horse soldiers grew hungrier with each new day.
So went another new verse to the old song:
But t’was out upon the Yellowstone
We had the damndest time.
Faith! We made the trip with Rosebud George,
Six months without a dime!
Some eighteen hundred miles we went
Through hunger, mud, and rain,
Wid backs all bare, and rations rare,
No chance for grass or grain;
Wid bunkies shtarving by our side,
No rations was the rule;
Sure t’was, “Eat your boots and saddles, you brutes,
But feed the packer and mule!”
But you know full well that in your fights
No soldier lad was slow.
But it wasn’t the packer that won you a star
In the Regular Army O!
A rousing night for men drunk not on beer or liquor but on relief, giddy with a full belly of something far more filling than broken-down horseflesh. They had emerged from the wilderness alive but not unscathed. Every last one of them not quite whole. Their terrible ordeal had indelibly scarred them. They would never quite be the same men any of them had been when they had marched north at the beginning of that hopeful summer, which was to be the last of freedom for the nomadic Sioux.
“Look! Look there!” Charles King shouted above some of the singing and laughter and pandemonium.
As more and more of the other officers and soldiers turned to look where the lieutenant was pointing at the top of a hill, the singing grew hushed and a prayerful murmur began.
In the shelter of a rocky promontory Colonel Wesley Merritt and his staff had pitched their bivouac of blankets and tent halves just below the crest among a sparse clump of stunted pine and cedar. Extending from that collection of crude shelters all the way down the slope to the banks of the Belle Fourche was a sight that made even the most hardened and skeptical of them all feel suddenly touched by the hand of God in their deliverance.
With its rising in those clearing skies that evening, the moon had projected its shimmering, silvery light behind a narrow cleft in those boulders above the regiment’s camp—enlarging to heroic size a wind-bared, leafless branch no taller than two feet in height, crossed at a perfect angle by a somewhat smaller twig.
As the moon inched from the horizon, the image slowly crawled across that bivouac of the Fighting Fifth— until the banks of the Belle Fourche were touched by that mystical symbol of death and rebirth.
From the midst of those stunned hundreds burst one doubting Thomas, a young infantryman who had been celebrating with his friends among the cavalry regiment. Up the side of the hill he bounded until reaching the crest, where he discovered the tiny natural cross thus created by the rising of that full moon. In the splendid brilliance of that evening he turned around at the crest and with outflung arms shouted his declaration that what they all were witnessing was no divine manifestation.
But an old soldier—one of those scarred in a long, bloody war against the south, a trooper who had followed Eugene Carr’s Fifth across the arid plains of western Ne braska until they had caught Tall Bull at Summit Springs, one who had stood with Royall to fight the Apache down among the blisteringly cruel mountains of Arizona, one who had cajoled and cheered and herded before him stragglers all along the muddy route of that terrible horse- meat march—now that old file finally spoke to the Irishman beside him.
“I damn well don’t need no green shavetail telling me what is or ain’t a sign from God.” He raised his gray- bristled face to the starry sky. “A man only has to stand here now, and remember what we come through, to know for certain that God Himself put that cross there for us to see—just like it was God Himself what brung us out of the desert.”
“Amen,” Donegan said quietly as he stared at the moonlit phenomenon, then crossed himself again. “Thy will be done.”
Once more he felt in the presence of something much greater than he, something much greater than all of them, white and red. And though Seamus could not bring himself to say that his God was the same as the Indians’ God—he knew he would never again believe that his God was any better than the Great Mystery or Everywhere Spirit worshiped by the hostiles he had tracked and fought and killed for more than a decade now.
This year as the powerful in Washington City sent their emissaries west to sweet-talk and bully the tribes into selling their beloved Black Hills, it was enough to give him pause as he stood within the heart of those hills, knowing the hostiles wanted only to drive off from this most mystical of places all white men, to expel every last one of those restless spirits who had been drawn to these streams from all corners of the earth and in the end- stayed on for the very same reasons the Indian came here to pray.
The inevitability of the nation’s course would eventually crush all resistance, of that he had no doubt. But for the moment Seamus knew that all who came to realize just what treasure was at stake shared in common something quite holy, be they white or red.
Humbled in the magnificent beauty of this place, realizing that every last one of them had been given life when once so close to death—this heavenly light, this cross, this presence of something so great it was beyond understanding—was at this moment enough to bring tears to a big man’s eyes, able to utter only one word.
“Amen.”
By the morning of the fourteenth a plague of diarrhea struck the camp. Men gone so long on nothing but lean and stringy horse meat had suddenly gorged themselves with all sorts of vegetables and fruits, beef and pork, as well as all varieties of breads. Some men grumbled in spite as they hurried into the brush, but for most their affliction was a small price to pay for deliverance.
Besides, the sun actually came up at down. Without a cloud in the sky.
To lead the patrol Crook sent back to retrieve the abandoned ammunition, the rotation of duty among the subalterns in the Fifth Cavalry fell to young Lieutenant Edward L. Keyes, C Troop. Following Donegan that dawn were some thirty-five men, hardly enough to hold off any united force of warriors seeking to harass, kill, and scalp
